Beyond BAME: Rethinking the politics, construction, application, and efficacy of ethnic categorization.

This discussion paper seeks to do two things. First, it offers a critical commentary on the historical and contemporary politics of counting and categorisation, especially in the context of Empire, colonialism, and the development of the modern multicultural ethnic societies. And second, it examines the debate surrounding the efficacy of the BAME category and possible alternatives. Our aim is not to be prescriptive about alternatives to the BAME category, but to inform the ongoing debate and struggle for a suitable alternative mechanism for capturing the collective experiences of racism.