Racial and ethnic diversity in Scotland’s arts audiences

21-03-16
Written by Ashley Smith-Hammond

The Culture Republic podcast is all about how Scottish arts and culture are engaging with different segments of the Scottish population. March’s episode looks at how the arts are connecting with Scotland’s racially and ethnically diverse communities.

This month we spoke with three people to learn about the Scottish organisations who are doing tremendous work making connections with ethnically diverse audiences:

Natasha Gilmore is the Artistic Director of Barrowland Ballet, a dance theatre company based in Glasgow. The company’s professional work is directly linked to its community involvement and the two are inter-dependent with one inspiring the other.
Adele Patrick is the Lifelong Learning and Creative Development Manager of Glasgow Women’s Library. She shared the library’s experience running a Black & Minority Ethnic (BME) Women’s Project, dedicated to providing creative lifelong learning opportunities for BME women in Glasgow.
Danny Boyle is the Parliamentary and Policy Officer for Bemis. It is the national Ethnic Minorities led umbrella body which supports the development of the Ethnic Minorities Voluntary Sector in Scotland and the communities that this sector represents.

Definitions

Defining race and ethnicity can be a bit slippery. Creative Scotland guidance states:

“Race/ethnicity Race, under the Equality Act 2010, includes colour, nationality, ethnic or national origins.

Ethnicity (or ethnic group) has been defined as “shared origins or social background; shared culture and traditions that are distinctive, maintained between generations, and lead to a sense of identity and group; and a common language or religious tradition”.

Racial and ethnicity categories are both institutional distinctions – boxes we tick when we fill out an equalities survey – as well as identity categories, something that helps us make sense of who we are in the world. The labels can be too simple and often not the ones people might choose for themselves.

According to a report from the Office of National Statistics collecting data on ethnic groups is complex because ethnic identifications are subjective – people can opt into or out of them. They can be made up of multiple layers. They alter over time in response to changes in society and politics. So, any ethnic group label is only valid for the period and context in which it is used.

Ethnic groups are diverse, encompassing common ancestry and elements of culture, identity, religion, language and physical appearance. These can be fluid – ethnic groupings tend to change over time as a person may record themselves as one group and then another at a subsequent time.

At Culture Republic we refer back to the census categories for Ethnic Groups rather than race as they are vetted and consistent. But since categories can change over time, the language around them can have a hard time keeping up.

The numbers on ethnic diversity in Scotland

The Census included 19 ethnicity categories, many of which were mixed, for example: White Scottish or White Irish; Indian, Indian Scottish, or Indian British; or Black, Black Scottish or Black British. People choose one based on their own perceived ethnic group and cultural background.

In Scotland’s 2011 census, ethnic groups (including Asian, African, Caribbean and other mixed backgrounds) made up 4% of Scotland’s national population. Scotland’s cities are the most ethnically diverse. In Glasgow City, 12 per cent of the population were from a minority ethnic group, in City of Edinburgh and Aberdeen City it was 8 per cent and Dundee City it was 6 per cent.

The Asian population was the largest minority ethnic group (3% of the total population or 141,000 people) and has seen an increase of one percentage point (69,000) since 2001.

From the 2001 census, most minority groups increased their population during the last decade. In 2001 Scotland’s minority ethnic population was around 2% of the population (or about 100,000 people) and in 2011 at 4% of the population it was over 200,000 people.

Researchers at the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity, co-hosted by the universities of Glasgow and Manchester, analysed recent censuses in Scotland. They found that one in six Scottish households, which contain two or more people, is now multi-ethnic.

This research reveals a picture of growing diversity within Scotland and more widely spread across different areas of the country. Indeed, in a recent blog for Fairer Scotland Danny Boyle, suggests that diverse global influences have been part of Scotland for hundreds of years.

Some of Scotland’s population change comes from migration. The 2011 census showed that 7% of Scotland’s total resident population (that’s equal to about 370,000 people) were born outside the UK. 63% of people in this group had arrived in Scotland in 2001 or after. Migrants tend to settle in Scotland’s cities and half of all migrants in Scotland lived in the Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen City council areas.

Immigrants come from all over the world for a range of reasons. Glasgow has a strong network of community level Integration Networks that support asylum seekers and refugees. They are a good place to start when you are looking to learn more about local ethnically diverse communities.

Barriers to participation

According to Scottish Government sources, when it comes to attending the arts, barriers for this group include: lack of time, interest, awareness, understanding, the cost, language, feeling out of place and social barrier and irrelevance.

However, according to Scottish Household Survey in 2013: The percentage of adults who said they’d engaged in culture in the previous 12 months varied little by the ethnicity of respondents (although results on ethnicity should be treated with some caution due to sample sizes). Cultural engagement for people identifying as ‘White’ was 91%, and it was 90% for people who identified with any other minority ethnic group. This similarity was also seen in the statistics around attendance and participation.

Some barriers to attendance may arise from economic barriers. (See Culture Republic’s podcast on engaging with socially excluded audiences.) The 2013 Annual Population Survey data for Scotland shows that people who identify as being a member of a minority ethnic group tend to have lower employment rates and higher economic inactivity than the general population.

The employment rate was 60% for people from a minority ethnic background compared to 71% for people identifying as ‘White’.
The economic inactivity rate was 33% for people from a minority ethnic background compared to 23% for people identifying as ‘White’.

However, economic barriers do not seem to be a result of lower educational attainment. The same survey showed that people identified as being from minority ethnic groups tended to have higher qualification levels than those who identified as part of the ‘White: Scottish’ group.

Other barriers may be linked to those seen for young people’s participation. Scotland’s population survey showed that people identifying as being from minority ethnic groups had a younger age profile than white UK groups. (See also Culture Republic’s podcast on engaging youth audiences.) For instance the 2011 Census showed:

All minority ethnic groups in Scotland had a younger age profile than white UK groups.
29 per cent of ‘White: Scottish’ people were aged 16 to 39 compared to over 50 per cent of ‘White: Polish’, ‘Asian’, ‘African’ or ‘Other’ ethnic groups.

The interviewees in this podcast suggested that other barriers included: providing child care or a crèche, providing transport or providing materials in languages other than English.

There are more than a hundred active languages spoken around Scotland in diverse communities. Rather than getting overwhelmed by the idea of translation, respondents suggested simply getting started doing the person to person work to build relationships and trust allowing your organisation to develop its language diversity organically in response to your audiences and participants.

Statutory responsibilities

Arts organisations have some statutory responsibility in regards to racial and ethnic diversity. The Race Relations Act 1976 and Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 gives public authorities a general duty to promote race equality. This is relevant to both audience engagement as well as employment.

Creative Scotland is working to mainstream equalities and has Equality Outcomes targets set through 2017. They have also published Equalities Monitoring Guidance for Regularly Funded Organisations, which includes good advice around monitoring for arts organisations.

Even though there are legal responsibilities, engaging with any kind of diverse audiences and participants means that you’re going to get a wider range of stories. The best engagement work links through to creative work and gives us new voices and new perspectives. These stories can have a tremendous impact when they are shared with an audience hungry to see their experience reflected.

Good practice

You can educate yourself by doing a bit of research about different communities and populations beforehand. There are a number of resources available at a local and national level. When you are monitoring your organisational and audience diversity consider what’s appropriate for your organisation and the work.

Barrowland Ballet used a simple and innovative approach to carrying out equalities research without simply ticking boxes – they took photos, which gave them a visual representation of an audience. Glasgow Women’s Library listened to the respondents in their #GWLhearsme consultation who wanted more and more flexible ethnicity categories in their monitoring form.

Arts organisations don’t need to go it alone when it comes to engaging with new audiences. There are almost certainly people out in the community doing good work if you seek them out. Bemis has also offered to act as a point of entry for any arts organisation who wants to get started working with ethnic communities in Scotland.

Good equalities practice and engagement with hard to reach groups is a long-term commitment. It is not something that you can parachute in deliver and walk away from. Arts organisations that are succeeding have made a long-term commitment to diversity at an institutional level.

Working on equalities is not a singular project. Although this podcast has been taking particular aspects of peoples’ experience in isolation, looking at deprivation, age or ethnicity – the truth is that things don’t line up into separate boxes neatly. There are lots of points of intersection so that these all combine in people’s experience differently.

Credits

Tremendous thanks to:

Natasha Gilmore, Artistic Director of Barrowland Ballet – on Twitter @Barrowlballet.
Adele Patrick, Lifelong Learning and Creative Development Manager, Glasgow Women’s Library – on Twitter @GWLkettle.
Danny Boyle, Parliamentary and Policy Officer, Bemis – on Twitter @bemis_scotland.

For giving their time to share their stories.

Audio production by studio engineer Barry Reid of SPAD – on Twitter @barryspad.

In and out music by Drew Hammond of Mesura Music – on Twitter @DrYouHammond.

Additional music in this episode (in order of use):

Jazz? by J. Blasco (CC BY SA 3.0)
Intersection by Citisyn (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
La chamber des nuages by Pompougnac Daniel (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Travelling without moving by Ironicbudda (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
Ruts by Sunny Sandals (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Find Culture Republic on Twitter @culture_public and presenter Ashley Smith Hammond on Twitter @AnAshleyAbroad. Use the hashtag #CRpodcast to let us know you’re listening.

Listen above on Soundcloud and subscribe, rate and review us on iTunes or Stitcher.

The Culture Republic Podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.