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This chapter critically examines the minority business development programs, arguing that their strategy of geographic targeting—aid flows into low-income, inner-city minority communities—is ineffective. The next program, the Specialized Small Business Investment Company (SSBIC) program is also examined in detail and also found to be largely ineffective.

This chapter presents a comparison between the Muslim minority community in 7th-century Mecca and the Muslim minority community in the United States, which brings to light some useful social elements that can serve as a helpful guide to American Muslim identity and behavior today. It identifies three significant points of comparison between the community of Mecca and that of the United States: the composition of the Muslim community, its relations with the majority, and its methods of coping with and promoting its identity as a minority. The chapter shows that amid American Muslims' appreciation for freedom of speech, and the American values of honesty and hard work, lies their dislike of what they regard as the social disintegration of the family, the community, and the society as a whole. Such a tension is very similar to that of the Meccan Muslim community, which on the one hand was against the rampant materialism and social decline of the society, but on the other hand benefited strongly from the city's position as a trade and religious center, both with regard to economic prosperity as well as the opportunity to interact with groups from around the peninsula.

This chapter examines several ways in which racism is denied and describes the implications. It explores the implications of acknowledging the presence of racism, the dangers of an acceptance of racism, and the usefulness of legal approaches to racial discrimination. It also suggests improvements in the methods used at the international level to combat racial discrimination. The denial of racism is fast becoming the most typical and widespread modern manifestation of racist attitudes, opinions, statements, actions, and policies. To challenge racism, acknowledgement is the first step, followed by a human rights offensive against racial discrimination. Additional strategies to combat racism include ‘special rights’ for individual members of minorities, as well as minority communities, and in some cases, the conceptual framework of group rights.

Housing policy is focused on increasing housing supply, improving existing neighbourhoods, managing community relations, and increasing consumer choice. For effective implementation of these policies, it is important to understand how people make choices about where they live, who makes these choices, and what those choices are for different groups of people. This chapter explores the extent to which local-governance actors understand these choices and meet the needs of citizens – in particular, women and minority ethnic communities. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with 94 white and south Asian (Bangladeshi and Pakistani) British women from three districts in the UK: Birmingham, Bradford, and Tower Hamlets. By focusing on women and second-generation migrants, it highlights the need for a broader perspective of householders and how they make decisions, and a more flexible understanding of ‘minority’ needs. The chapter discusses the findings of the research in relation to the policy context, and highlights several challenges for local-governance actors.

This chapter examines the limits of liberal democracies within the nation state in its contradictory attitude to minority representation. While the nation state is a monocultural device constitutive of the body of citizens, most contemporary liberal democratic nation states are far from homogenous. This chapter argues that the collective autocracy of the dominant nation endorses the celebration of individual rights, freedom of expression and individualism, and even the relative protection of minorities, but at the same time, severely limits minority communities’ political representation. Non-territorial autonomy (NTA) is one of the many democratic reactions to this imposition. It is a generic form of collective rights and collective representation which aims to share sovereignty between different communities. This links with the idea that democracy must have not one but many constituencies, and therefore become a ‘demoicracy’, a democracy of the demoi, a plural and diverse conglomerate of democratic communities and constituencies.

This chapter shows that migrant women in Darlington, England, who strive both for self-fulfilment and to maintain family responsibilities, face a values clash. This clash, however, is not specific to women from religious minorities, but is inherent in more general tensions between individual freedoms and family responsibilities. In practice, this very often means that the same individual holds contradictory values simultaneously. This mirrors the findings of the German study in the previous chapter. In both cases, therefore, the women from minority communities are reflecting a broader value conflict typical of late modernity in which the content and meaning of a good life is constantly renegotiated.

This chapter examines the uneasy relationship between policies designed to recognise diversity and the need to protect people from abuse carried out in the name of ‘traditional values’. The issue of so-called ‘honour killings’ of young women is used to examine policy responses to risk and gender-related violence in minority ethnic communities in Britain. The chapter argues that the risks which some young women face are heightened by multicultural policies, which can engender non-intervention when dealing with domestic violence that is seen as rooted in cultural and religious practices. It provides a critique of structural and institutional racism and sexism, which can lead, on the one hand, to sensationalising particular cases of violence, thus entrenching stereotypes of some cultures, particularly Muslim, as backward and oppressive, while on the other hand ignoring risk situations in the private sphere of the family.

This chapter challenges what might be called a ‘local history paradigm’, whereby immigration to Britain and the decline of industry are linked and local history is considered to ‘end’ in the 1980s. It explores representations of past and present in Rotherham, and draws on examples of heritage projects undertaken there by people from minority ethnic communities. This chapter emerged from the experience of many of the participants living in and researching the town during the child sexual exploitation scandal. Nonetheless, while about Rotherham, its interpretation might be applicable to a variety of post-industrial towns and cities in northern England and elsewhere. The chapter also considers ways in which the heritage projects add to the local history narrative of the town.

This chapter explores the dilemmas faced by southern lawmen in communities like Charleston, in order to understand better the ways the civil rights movement succeeded and failed in altering power relations in the South. It focuses in particular on the story of Reuben Greenberg, the first black and first Jewish police chief in Charleston's history. As the Charleston police chief for nearly a quarter of a century, Greenberg came to embody both the promise and the problems of policing the South in the post-civil rights era. Greenberg's professionalism and racial identity shielded him from the kinds of allegations that had historically plagued southern lawmen, but he worked in a political environment in which coded rhetoric linked “law and order” with control and containment of minority communities.

What role does “Black history” play in community development? This chapter discusses how Black and Asian minority ethnic (BAME) communities have been excluded from contributing to national and local histories, depriving them of resources that would enable them to develop different futures in the context of a British historical narrative dominated by whiteness. It focuses on the intersection of history and community development and how community-based organisations have worked in collaboration with the University of Huddersfield (in West Yorkshire in the north of England). The chapter suggests that there are advantages in the co-production of historical knowledge, one of which is that a collaborative approach enables greater inclusion and diversity of views, especially as there is a lack of ethnic diversity amongst academic staff at British universities.

This chapter presents a comparative history of minority communities, in this case the impact of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (better known as the GI Bill of Rights). It addresses the reasons why Japanese American World War II veterans were able to make greater use of the benefits offered by the law to broker their group's postwar social advancement, while black veterans were restricted in their enjoyment of its advantages. In addition to more potent discrimination against blacks in areas such as housing, one salient distinction between the groups that the chapter points to is their differing educational preparation, which led to comparatively greater use by Japanese Americans of the college benefits available under the bill.

This chapter presents an account of the author's community development work with Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller (GRT) women in the East of England from 2010 to 2016. It summarises a range of observations, reflections, and questions gathered throughout this prolonged period of practice, with a view to informing the work of others working with GRT people, regarded as the most disadvantaged minority communities in the UK. Situated on the margins of a large urban settlement and nestled between motorways, an industrial estate, and sizeable swathes of unsightly marshland lies a 27-pitch local authority caravan site. Practically unnoticeable to passers-by in their cars, trucks, and lorries, it is home to families and individuals belonging to GRT communities in the region of East Anglia. In 2009, new Neighbourhood Management initiatives were developed in East Anglia, in one of which the author was employed as a community development worker.

This chapter sets out the context in which we have to understand the apparent increasing diversity of experiences of disadvantage by minority ethnic communities in Great Britain. It argues that experiences of ethnic difference have always been diverse, but that political priorities and analytic practices have frequently masked this diversity. The chapter suggests that the failure to recognise this diversity probably has a number of sources. These include the initially strikingly visible differences between the newcomers and those already resident in Britain, the adoption for both official and unofficial purposes of the designation immigrant, and a general ignorance about the countries and locations from which migrants had come.

This chapter investigates the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) practical and ideological motivations for creating Zeku County and Amdo's other autonomous nationality administrations, within which—Party leaders repeatedly promised—minority communities would at last become “masters of their own homes.” In 1950s Amdo, nationality autonomy was considered the key mechanism by which non-Han people would be both administratively and psychologically integrated into the new state and nation. It was a central component of the Maoist “high-modernist” project, its aim to reterritorialize ethnocultural frontiers into component parts of a unitary nation-state, a process referred to as “minoritization.” The chapter then traces efforts by Guo Min's County Work Group to build a consensus among the region's divided headmen for founding Zeku County. This almost certainly was to be the first time in its history that the region would be territorialized and administered as a whole and distinct entity. Party leaders were aware that this not only demanded drawing boundaries and building administrative organs where none had previously existed—it also necessitated creating a county-level constituency from the disparate interests and loyalties of the region's divided population.

This chapter examines the development of “order maintenance policing” in New York City. It studies the stop-and-frisk activities of New York City police officers by examining temporal and spatial patterns of stops from 1999, 2003, and 2006. Findings reveal that stop rates have increased by 500 percent since 1999 despite little change in crime rates Stop activity was greatest in poor and minority communities, and stop patterns were more closely tied to demographic and social conditions than to disorder or crime. The efficiency of stops, measured as “hit rates,” dropped considerably, with the sharpest declines occurring in minority neighborhoods. Overall, the findings illustrate that the racial-spatial concentration of excess stop activity threatens to undermine police legitimacy and diminish the social good of policing, while doing little to reduce crime or disorder.

This chapter emphasizes, that among the government, the hasidic activists, and the maskilic activists, the hasidim were clearly the most effective. Their astonishing success was due not only to the outstanding political talents of their leaders but also to their ability to identify and exploit the many significant weaknesses of the other players. It talks about the weaknesses of the government and the maskilic activists, which did not diminish the magnitude of the hasidic success but reminds of the nineteenth-century east European context in which it was achieved: a minority religious community of low social status and lacking civil rights facing a non-democratic state that determined the rules of the game. The state wielded a multitude of mechanisms of social control, ranging from what Pierre Bourdieu has called “symbolic violence” to legislative power to direct force, but always holding the trump card: political dominance. Hasidic politics had to adapt itself to the space created for it, consciously or not, by the state's own politics.

This chapter sets out how cities and governments responded to the challenge of industrial decline. The role of government, local, national and European, became even more important at this stage and strongly underpinned recovery. Citizens and private enterprise leaders became deeply involved in the rescue attempts. A big turnaround was under way driven by strong city leadership, government backing and the heavy involvement of citizens. Serious efforts were dedicated to restoring poorer neighbourhoods and integrating poorer, particularly minority, communities. By 2008, all the signs were that cities were improving. Chapter Four explores Phase Two of the framework – post-industrial recovery.