Black and Minority Ethnic - BME |
The term ‘BME’ is a widely used within the UK to describe minority community groups from different social, racial or religious groups. The acronym BME typically means those groups who do not define themselves as being White British.
BME can be taken to not only mean Black British and British Asian people, but can also be used to describe other minority groups like Gypsies or those of different religious beliefs.
This catch all phrase is mostly used within the voluntary community and also public sector, but not so much within the private sector. It can most commonly be seen on questionnaire forms in the section about a persons ethnic background.
A major disadvantage of using BME as a umbrella term to describe ‘everyone else’ is that it fails to describe the real cultural differences between different minority groups. For instance differences between Afro-Caribbean and Pakistani people.
Related topics:
Race Relations Act 1976
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