When, in 2003, after Peter Blake had handed me the cheque, I said “It’s about time a transvestite potter won the Turner Prize,” I was gently mocking the political correctness that hangs around any debate about who should get high-profile awards. If my photo didn’t appear sometimes at the top of this column you would probably assume I was white anyway – that is the default ethnicity in the art and the newspaper business. I’m privileged in being the accepted norm.

For the non-white 15 per cent of this country political correctness has been a more serious issue. Many of the measures put in place in the 1970s and 1980s to counter endemic racism at the time felt radical, and to some people daft. In 2007 they just seem like common sense. Now most cultural events, particularly in the large cities, are advertised and programmed with the regulation racial mix. This is progress, right?

I have always suspected that positive discrimination had a downside. My suspicions were confirmed by a fascinating new report from the campaigning network the Manifesto Club. The artist and arts consultant Sonya Dyer, assisted by Josie Appleton, J. J. Charlesworth and Munira Mirza, has published a report called Boxed In about how cultural-diversity policies constrict black artists. Racism is one of our greatest social evils. Boxed In outlines how in the art world it manifests itself in peculiarly convoluted and covert ways, often unnoticed by victim or perpetrator.

In the 1970s and 1980s black art projects and shows were seen as a temporary response to racism set up to highlight aspects of our culture that were felt to be excluded from the mainstream. Anish Kapoor, when invited to take part in The Other Story, a seminal exhibition of black British art, said: “Being an artist is more than being an Indian artist. I feel supportive of that kind of endeavour . . . it needs to happen once. I hope it is never necessary again.”

But the Department for Culture, Media and Sport obviously feels that these once-radical moves should become a permanent fixture of our cultural industry. The attempts by the previous generation of black artists to enter the mainstream have somehow been transformed into diversity policies that put great store in celebrating difference from the mainstream. There is now a whole well-established “diversity sector”. There seems to be a very new Labour idea that if we rigorously ensure a numerically fair proportion of BME (black or minority ethnic) practitioners, then that will automatically facilitate social justice in wider society. Hmm.

Initiatives such as the Decibel scheme and the Inspire fellowship programme were set up to facilitate BME artists and curators. This has led to black artists who put their ethnicity at the centre of their practice being favoured by these schemes as they emphasise the “community” representation within the institution. Dyer says it is still unusual for her to encounter a black person working in a public institution who is not in a diversity/ community role. One British Asian curator said he never felt “othered” until he worked in a public gallery. A well-known artist of Caribbean background said that nearly every spring he received calls from curators offering him opportunities to exhibit in October, Black History Month.

Some black artists are happy to nestle in the cosy safety net of diversity schemes, but ambitious BME culturati are becoming wary of being involved with them for they too easily equate blackness with disability. Diversity schemes have gained a reputation for poor quality because white middle-class guilt often means that less rigorous criteria are applied to BME applications. A younger generation of more confident black people is shunning the stigma of diversity schemes and launching into the mainstream to be judged on their merits. One young curator said that he felt not having studied at one of the top two art schools was much more of a handicap than coming from an ethnic minority.

Racism undoubtedly exists, but in the nice liberal middle-class world of the arts it probably plays a less significant role than a lot of complainants think it does. Black artists can too easily blame their failure on racism, but we need to filter out other reasons for discrimination before we can label bias as racist. Quite often what is interpreted as racism is in fact class prejudice. BME people are disproportionately represented in the working class, who have had fewer educational opportunities and less chance to develop the social and networking skills so necessary in the arts. Alternatively their work might simply be rubbish.

Dyer concludes, and I agree, that targeted diversity funding should be abandoned and the money used to help all talented artists and curators from poorer backgrounds, regardless of ethnicity. These students, who often lack a sense of cultural entitlement, should be supported in applying for place in top-flight art schools. This support is also necessary because students from an economically deprived background are less likely to opt for a financially precarious career in the fine arts. I have just agreed to become a patron of the National Arts Learning Network, which has been set up to do just that.

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