Citizens Advice Slammed For ‘Horribly Racist’ Guidance On BAME Communities

An organisation which prides itself on offering impartial advice to the public has come under fire for producing “horribly racist” training materials.

Citizens Advice has been accused of generalising and reinforcing “terrible stereotypes” in guidance for working with black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities.

Labelled as “best practice guidance”, a presentation titled “Black Asian and minority ethnic Financial Capability Best Practice Guide” included a section highlighting the alleged “barriers” that exist within these communities.

It included the following claims about BAME people:

• An intrinsically cash-centric culture.

• A society that revolves around religious belief.

• A distrust of British authorities.

• Evidence of gender bias and discrimination.

• Isolated communities.

• Low levels of literacy
• Intradependence: very close-knit, extended families.

• Early marriage and large families
• A cultural focus on honour and shame.

Citizens Advice confirmed to HuffPost UK that the training material was aimed at supervisors delivering guidance. The training material was also made available to other organisations as part of their resource library on their website. The organisation confirmed that the content had now been removed.”

Fatima Iftikhar, an organiser with #POCIMPACT, a community run by and for people of colour in the social impact sector, was made aware of the Citizens Advice training materials and was appalled, drawing attention to the content on Twitter.

The 25-year-old told HuffPost UK: “What they have done is to conflate all non-white communities into one generalised idea of what BAME communities are like and reinforced horrible stereotypes.

“I don’t know what they were trying to achieve. It has made me feel very angry and frustrated that an organisation that receives so much public funding thinks these are the barriers in BAME communities.”