After waiting over a year, the government yesterday revealed the 20 men who will make up its National Black Role Model Group. From a wide range of occupations, the chosen candidates include an army officer, a barrister, a TV weatherman, a fire fighter, business consultants and entrepreneurs, a teacher, local council leaders, accountants and finance experts, a civil servant and a TV presenter.

As officially appointed role models for the black community, the 20 men will deliver talks to young people at schools and community centres around the country, inspiring them with their own stories of overcoming poverty, a structurally discriminatory education system, or gang culture. As one member of the group’s selection panel put it, the role models are intended to “inspire young black men to be the best they can be.”

It is perhaps inevitable that a scheme that focuses on encouraging and stimulating achievement towards a particular group in society will face criticism. This particular initiative is no exception, with charges ranging from divisive racism to triviality. These claims may have some superficial appeal: it is true, for example, that for equality to be sustainable it must work for everybody, and that ultimately means catering for the ‘needs’ of any particular group can only ever get us so far.

However, to reach the point where we can have a ‘de-ethnicized’ approach to equality (that doesn’t focus on helping just one ethnic group) it may be necessary to have measures which, in the short term at least, work to combat the discrimination facing those groups that are worst off. For example, if the discrimination facing young black people in the education system is due in some part to institutional racism , it is important to tackle the specific prejudices, assumptions, and stereotypes that are blighting the lives of those young people.

“When will the government provide role models for white people?” is a typical accusation by those condemning the scheme for supposedly favouring a particular racial group over another. However, this claim misses the point that being ‘white’ is not a reliable determiner of people’s life chances in this country. A more apt analogy may be with white working class people. Earlier this year, the Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, argued that the white working class are facing the brunt of the current economic crisis and urged for more to be done to alleviate the joblessness this previously neglected group is facing.

Now, it may be the case that role models would be useful to help this group overcome the poverty of aspiration that stops so many people believing that they can achieve, flourish, and attain all that they want to in life. Indeed, some have argued that the negative portrayal of working class people on television is more acceptable and widespread than the stereotyping of black people, and that this can have the effect of reinforcing perceptions of what is expected of the working class (amongst poorer and better-off people alike).

Yet the fact remains that we have recognised as a society that poor white British people are part of a class system that privileges some over others – and that equality for this group requires a fairer infrastructure, including better schools, better skills training, more investment in health. We have been much less quick off the mark in recognising the same for many other excluded groups in this country.

Reach, the government-backed project behind the national black role model scheme, openly acknowledges that appointing role models will do little to combat this entrenched, structural discrimination impairing the lives of so many. It recognises that even with support from role models, there are still a lot more serious problems facing black young people, not least the double disadvantage of persistent discrimination in the labour market and inequality in the education system.

Until we recognise the way we as a society have used race to categorise people, and until we start treating people as human beings rather than representatives of a particular race, short-term measures like nationally appointed role models may be the best means we have to help our young people to deal with the effects of inevitable negative stereotyping and discrimination. Let us hope, though, that this strategy isn’t going to be as good as it gets. We owe all of our young people more than that.

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