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This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/17570980200800008. When citing the article, please cite: Joanna Bennett, Frank Keating, (2008), “Training to redress racial disadvantage in mental health care: race equality or cultural competence?”, Ethnicity and Inequalities in Health and Social Care, Vol. 1 Iss: 1, pp. 52 - 59.

The mental health field is viewed by some as reluctant to tackle the problem of abuse. While ‘adult protection’ offers one way forward, the authors of this paper caution against over‐enthusiastic borrowing from this paradigm. Instead they argue that mental health services will only become intolerant of abuse when there is widespread acceptance of the role of power abuse in psychological distress and disturbance.

It has been acknowledged that the disparities and inequalities for black and minority ethnic (BME) communities in mental health in the United Kingdom (UK) has reached such proportions that it is considered a public health issue. This paper reviews training as one of the strategies that have been employed to address these inequalities and draws on a historical review and a scoping exercise in England which mapped approaches to race equality training in mental health services. The historical review showed that the concept of race and racism has been replaced by culturalism as an explanation for all racial inequalities and is the central framework for race equality training. Whilst the survey showed that the majority of mental health services were providing training for their staff, there is much fragmentation and a lack of robust evaluation demonstrating effectiveness. While education and training have a key role to play in developing knowledge and skills to address racial inequality, current approaches are fundamentally flawed.

Discussion of the 2016 electorate has centered on two poles: results of public opinion and voter surveys that attempt to tease out whether racial, cultural, or economic grievances were the prime drivers behind the Trump vote and analyses that tie major shifts in the political economy to consequential shifts in the voting behavior of certain demographic and geographic groups. Both approaches render invisible a major development since the 1970s that has been transforming the political, social, and economic landscape of wide swaths of people who do not reside in major urban areas or their prosperous suburban rings: the emergence and consolidation of the carceral state. This chapter sketches out some key contours of the carceral state that have been transforming the polity and economy for poor and working-class people, with a particular focus on rural areas and the declining Rust Belt. It is meant as a correction to the stilted portrait of these groups that congealed in the aftermath of the 2016 election, thanks to their pivotal contribution to Trump's victory. This chapter is not an alternative causal explanation that identifies the carceral state as the key factor in the 2016 election. Rather, it is a call to aggressively widen the analytical lens of studies of the carceral state, which have tended to focus on communities of color in urban areas.