Racial equality

We’ve always worked to oppose racism in society, nationally and internationally. 

In 1911, we organised the world’s first ever global conference against racism. We campaigned for decolonisation and an end to imperialism and in the 20th and early 21st centuries, we supported civil liberties legislation such as the Race Relations Act, Human Rights Act, and Equality Act. 

Today, we continue to speak out against discrimination and hatred based on race, ethnicity, or national or cultural background.

In relation to schools policy, we have worked to shed light on how discriminatory faith school admissions policies have racist outcomes, and where they have been a key factor in promoting resentment between communities in parts of England.

Click here to learn more about our other recent and ongoing work for racial equality

• We worked extensively to improve race equality laws during the passage of the 2006 and 2010 Equality Acts.
• We were the only organisation to campaign against the removal of Windrush and the Race Relations Act from the History national curriculum in England in 2013.
• We undertake significant work to expose ethnic segregation caused by faith-based selection – the largest single cause of such segregation amongst state schools. This includes our response to the Government’s 2016 and 2024 proposals to lift the 50% cap on religious selection in faith schools. Our work showed that allowing free schools to choose all pupils on religious grounds will lead to increased ethnic and religious segregation across England. We have also actively campaigned against such discrimination, such as exposing false claims by the Church of England and Catholic Education Service that many of their schools take a majority of pupils from Muslim backgrounds.
• We continue to make significant public interventions on racial segregation in state schools, many of which involve publishing detailed research. We frequently collaborate with the Runnymede Trust towards this end. We have highlighted research such as a report by the Education Policy Institute which showed that the chances of parents getting a child into their first choice of school via the appeals process ‘varies considerably by family background, ethnicity, and pupil attainment at primary school,’ and research which revealed that schools that are more ethnically diverse lead to greater social cohesion between children of different ethnicities.
• We use our platform at the UN Human Rights Council to challenge racial injustices. For example, we called for an end to the persecution of the ethnic minority Uighur population in China We’ve made interventions in the Council calling for state actions on racism including a joint statement with British Muslims for a Secular Democracy (BMSD) and Arab Humanists, where we spoke out against rising hate crime in the UK, and the segregationist religious curriculum mandated by the Egyptian authorities, and the rise of nationalist and racist ideologies against refugees in Europe.
• In 2020, we coordinated efforts to defend equality and human rights laws in the face of then-imminent government attack, coordinating several race NGOs on this issue such as African Rainbow Family, the Equality Trust, the Race Equality Foundation, Race on the Agenda, and others such as Liberty.
• We’ve active advocates for community cohesion, including in our work towards to the last Government’s integrated communities strategy.
• Faith to Faithless, our apostate support network, works extensively with apostates from ethnic minority backgrounds who have left high-control or coercive religious groups.
• Our asylum programme almost exclusively supports humanists from ethnic minority backgrounds, as does most of our advocacy around international issues. 
• More generally, we seek to amplify the voices of black, Asian, and minority ethnic humanists throughout our work.