The Rubicon Review
Exposing the impact of ignoring class-race intersectionality in the charity sector
Are BAME voices in poverty being ignored in favour of BAME voices in privilege?
This question, more than any other, informed the Rubicon review.
Race has moved to the forefront of the national conversation in a way that it never has before. The desire to have open and inclusive conversations about race permeates every sphere of life: from the workplace to schools, to the home and to the political arena. Long overdue, there is a genuine appetite in the public consciousness to learn about the inequalities that have gone hidden for too long, and through the process of learning there is a desire to bring about change.
Of course, this is a difficult and tense journey. In a world where terms like privilege and racism are thrown around too easily, the complexity of unpicking an unintentional moral judgment from our thoughts and actions is daunting. Even harder is addressing stigma, and standing up for principles in the face of outrage.
The genesis of the Rubicon Review can be found long before 2019. For too long, members of our Group have been conscious of an increasing class-bias in national charity work. An increasing reluctance to address stigma and voice uncomfortable truths by members of BAME communities that are no longer representative of those communities. The democratising influence of technology has in many ways only served to give a platform to those with the means and privilege to use it. Yet it was hard to pin down this feeling that there is something increasingly wrong with our approach to diversity in the sector. It felt impossible to find a simple, clear example that demonstrates this discomfort we have felt, gnawing at our faith in the institutions that are mean to protect us.
Increasingly, the voices that the British public cede authority to – the voices of those we assume will work in our interests – are not the voices of those who represent us. They are not the voices of those who understand our lives, and have experienced our hardships. Increasingly they are voices of an isolated and privileged faction, with an agenda that only furthers their own goals. Increasingly, the academically illiterate are gifted with national voices not because of talent or knowledge, but by virtue of nothing other than volume and stridency.
If there is one overarching principle to which the third sector must hold itself, it is as the force which holds government accountable. It is as the force which speaks for those who are unable to speak for themselves. There is no room for fear or fragility from those privileged enough to have something to lose, because it is for those people who have already lost everything that we are obliged to speak.
This was the genesis of the Rubicon review and this work. The clock is ticking, and the UK is moving unwittingly towards a new era where only the BAME voices that corroborate with comfortable conversations about race are the ones that are listened to.
Instead, the 4F Group believes that all BAME voices need to be heard, from across the multiplicity of communities and experiences in the UK. This review found not just overwhelming evidence of a reluctance of key strategic voices in the third sector to boldly discuss race, it found evidence of a growing unwillingness and discomfort to do so under the lens of social media scrutiny. As such, there is only one principle that can guide us out of this growing darkness.
We need to listen to BAME voices, not silence them.
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The abridged review
In 2020, the 4F Group was formed from a deep concern that the BAME voices being listened to in the charity sector were increasingly not representative of the broad multiplicity of perspectives in the UK BAME community.
We believed the poor were being ignored. We believed that first generations were being ignored. We believed those who are not visibly ‘people of colour’ were being ignored.
To test this, we assessed what were then the recent actions of a major UK charity and an unregistered 'grass-roots' group. The review that resulted was a comprehensive evidence submission to the EHRC and Charities Commission: both declined to engage.
The abridged review is 120 pages long, summarising our findings.
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The expanded review
In order to provide a robustly researched outcome, the 4F Group conducted a literature review of 156 papers, reports and reviews published across multiple sectors over the last two decades. In doing so, we found 2,522 points of evidence that contradict the positions on race being held and promoted by both organisations - positions that were not supported by facts or evidence.
Collating over 10,000 pages of research, the expanded edition of the Rubicon Review contains every single example and piece of evidence, rather than the summaries enclosed in the abridged version.
The expanded review is 462 pages long.
TIMELINE OF EVENTS
Citizens Advice is the UK’s largest generalist advice charity, supporting over 2 million people a year with a wide range of issues. In 2016, the charity launched a huge online resource library which was provided publicly and free for all of their own staff and volunteers, as well as for all other charities and third-sector organisations across England and Wales. This resource library won several awards, and contained supporting materials for a wide range of vulnerable clients groups.
On Friday 9th August 2019, allegations that some of this training contained racist content were made on Twitter. These allegations were made by a self-described ‘grassroots’ social media group called ‘POC Impact’.
The allegations then gained social media traction on 14th August 2019, when the same allegations were reported by the Guardian newspaper. POC Impact took this opportunity to rebrand in line with the popular hashtag this was using on social media during this time, calling themselves ‘Charity So White’.
The issue received most exposure through social media – primarily Twitter – and the allegations related to the fourth presentation slide within a particular training pack which contained 9 short statements that ‘Charity So White’ believed were racist. This was reported widely through media outlets including the Guardian, the Independent, and the Huffington Post.
Citizens Advice immediately apologised for the materials on the same day, removed them from the website within hours, and opened an internal investigation into the process through which these materials were created and made public.
The results of the investigation were published on the public website on 30th August 2019. In this report, Citizens Advice stated that the materials were ‘unacceptable’ and that existing processes had been both unclear and insufficient. In addition, whilst the report acknowledged that the author of the materials was BAME, it also highlighted that this did not in and of itself constitute subject matter expertise. The report then stated that Citizens Advice felt ‘too much reliance was placed on the lived and other experience’ in its approach to supporting clients. No clarification was provided to explain this new position.
On 14th February 2020, in response to a small but vocal series of online queries by ‘Charity So White’, Gillian Guy – Chief Executive of national Citizens Advice – made a further statement to the Charity Times explicitly stating that the training materials contained racist stereotypes, and therefore were racist.
We decided to pull together all the existing information buried within hundreds of existing academic research papers, and produce one collated source for all this. Something you could find on Google easily enough. Something to defend the next BAME person who didn’t want to bow to the pressure of the gatekeepers trying to weaponise white fragility for their own cause of unequality.
Over the next six months, we read and reviewed 156 papers, reports and reviews published by the government, by charities, by the private sector and by the academic sector over the last twenty years. In total, this stacked up to over 10,000 printed pages. We found 2522 pieces of evidence agreeing with these nine statements, being used by all of these organisations.
We wrote an academic review of our findings that was 462 pages long in its expanded form, and 120 pages long in its more accessible version. We called it the Rubicon Review: we used the word Review rather than Report as this work involved absolutely no original research at all. Every single thing – every single thing – that we wrote was lifted from an existing publication by a known think-tank, charity or government department.
We named ourselves the 4F Group and – given that we’d seen the approach of gatekeeping used by ‘Charity So White’ – we decided to remain anonymous. Given this work was an independent study done totally without any funding and entirely in our own time, this didn’t feel misleading. In addition, our anonymity would allow the Review to stand on its own, without any passporting or accusations that the authors had an agenda.
We released it on 26th August 2020 as a comprehensive evidence submission to the EHRC and the Charities Commission, asking for a statutory inquiry into the actions of both Citizens Advice and ‘Charity So White’.
On the 27th August 2020 – the day after our report came out and our complaint was made - the Chief Executive of Citizens Advice stepped down without warning, with no replacement appointed or even advertised for at that point.
On the 28th August 2020, the Civil Society published an article on the Rubicon Review. They included the response from Citizens Advice that can be summarised as saying that they weren’t interested in the several thousand prices of evidence, and maintained the materials were racist. We also received a terse response from ‘Charity So White’, saying that they’re all just volunteers and were too busy to read it.
We were subsequently contacted by multiple individuals, including chief executives of other charities and leading politicians, to offer support to the Review.
We were cited in academic publications from university presses.
On 27th Nov 2020, the Charities Commission responded to the complaint to say that they were satisfied that Citizens Advice had done what they needed to do to protect their reputation. They also said the question of whether or not that was the right course of action – in other words, were the materials racist – was a question for the EHRC. Finally, they said they had no jurisdiction over ‘Charity So White’, as they were not part of the charity sector [complaint ref GF/279057/C-526253].
On 24th May 2021, the EHRC said that whilst an investigation could potentially look into whether the materials could be racist, it didn’t fit well with their priorities so they would not be doing an investigation ‘at this time’ [complaint ref 1741744].