In May 2021, news broke that we had gained twenty-four more wealth-hoarding billionaires during the pandemic, bringing the total number in the UK to a staggering 171. Less than a year later, analysis by the Department for Work and Pensions data by the Labour Party, published in the Guardian, has unveiled the bleak reality facing communities at the other end of the wealth spectrum.

More than half of black children (53%) in the UK are now growing up below the poverty line. Black children are more than twice as likely to be growing up poor compared to their white counterparts. Bangladeshi children are even more at risk, with 61% percent growing up in poverty. That’s compared to an already too-high national average of thirty-one percent of all children growing up in a poor household—4.3 million across the UK.

The statistics are shocking, but groups based in local communities have been aware of the crisis brewing for a long time. Many have been working to palliate its worst effects.

‘Our community lives in extreme poverty, and we can only rely on each other,’ Marvin, a manager at Hackney-based youth organisation Rise 365, tells me. Since the start of the pandemic, Rise 365 has partnered with Made Up Kitchen to fund and distribute a weekly shop for those living in Hackney’s Kingsmead Estate—more than two hundred Black African and Caribbean families—every Saturday.

Marvin and I walked through Hackney Downs Park along with Razaq, one of Rise 365’s twenty young leaders. The skyline was dotted with newly built apartments widely known to be unaffordable for local people.

‘I don’t think the government does all it can, even though that’s what they tell us,’ Marvin continues. Razaq follows up: ‘Emotions and sympathy aren’t going to help in our case. We don’t see politicians in our community, we only see them on TV. We need action.’

That action, many feel, can only come alongside an acknowledgement of the extent to which the maintenance of our current capitalist system is dependent on centuries of racist exploitation. My conversation with Luke Billingham, a community worker at youth organisation Hackney Quest, comes around to the issue of racial capitalism.

‘The accumulation of wealth and power in this country is racialised,’ Luke explains. ‘While our political economy facilitates the continued hoarding of wealth and power by those with the most, those with the least are systematically disempowered, diminished, and belittled within the most precarious and insecure class positions. Those most exploited and marginalised disproportionately come from certain racialised groups.’

All too often, Luke continues, media coverage and political discourse gives cultural and biological pseudo-explanations for the extent of poverty among racialised groups. ‘Racist narratives suggest it’s all the fault of black single mums, or it’s because of a lack of a father figure, or there’s some genetic or cultural deficiency in black people,’ he says. ‘That plays a role in maintaining the status quo. Sometimes these ideas are transparently racist, but I think they’re also embedded in our culture.’

Maurice McLeod, Labour Councillor and Executive Director of Race on the Agenda (ROTA), describes how the structural components of racialised capitalism manifest in day-to-day life. ‘Some people sell their skills in this global system, and some sell their time. Those that give their time—black minorities, new migrants, poor people—are overrepresented,’ he explains.

‘I’ve come across workers on zero-hour contracts that are doing the same jobs as someone on an official agreement, but still have no access to sick pay and other benefits, and it’s hard to not see this as racialised. We can’t take the racialisation process out of this, and because of that, we at ROTA last year called for an end to zero-hour contracts because black people end up in insecure jobs, contributing to why black children are living in poverty.’

Joint research from the TUC and ROTA in June last year found that Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) women were almost twice as likely to be on zero-hour contracts compared to their white male counterparts. Around one in six zero-hours contract workers are BME, the research found, despite BME workers making up one in nine workers overall. The problems that impact all poor people, as Maurice puts it, impact poor black people even more.

So what does action on racialised poverty look like? For Maurice, it starts with breaking the country’s political reliance on market-oriented reforms, including the cutting of public services, which worst affects the poorest of the nation.

‘For the last couple decades, we’ve had a consensus in British politics—whether you’re Labour or Conservative—that the market is correct and that we need to have few restrictions on everything and allow the market to work freely,’ Maurice says. ‘But that consensus is wrong and damaging. Neoliberalism doesn’t care about the poorest, including Black children, just like it doesn’t care about the Global South. Neoliberalism has created a myth that you can make your way up to the top by working hard, but that doesn’t liberate the masses. We have people working hard for decades now and they still can’t make ends meet, while living expenses continue to rise.’

The current cost-of-living crisis, born of a combination of stagnating wages, spiralling energy bills and rising prices across the board, means life is only set to get harder for the black and Asian children growing up in poor households across the country. It’s proof that decades of neoliberal consensus topped with ten years of brutal austerity has left us with an economy dependent on the impoverishment of racialised communities to ensure its own survival.

But the organising work taking place in groups like Rise 365, Hackney Quest, and Race on the Agenda show there is an alternative—caring communities in which no child is subject to poverty or deprivation, backed by a politics that acknowledges the struggle faced by ethnic minorities in Britain. Our ruling class is keen to tell us that racism is over, denying its existence at an institutional level; in the meantime, it wrongly detains and deports dozens of ethnic minority people and leaves more and more disproportionately black and Asian children to go hungry. That means building resilience on the ground is just as important as ever.