Advertisement

Racism isn’t just a US problem; to fight it in the UK we need to change how it’s taught in schools

 Lavinya Stennett  -  Lavinya Stennett 
Lavinya Stennett - Lavinya Stennett

The first time she was taught African history as anything other than a sidebar to European adventures, Lavinya Stennett was at university. Reflecting on how little she and her fellow students had been taught about black history at school – usually short references to the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King or the South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela – inspired her last year to set up The Black Curriculum, a campaign for black British history to be embedded into the UK curriculum rather than limited to Black History Month (if that). The proposal includes four modules: art history; migration; politics and the legal system; and land and the environment.

“[University] was the first time I had studied African history that incorporated a non-Eurocentric perspective,” she told me, speaking at the end of a long day in a week that has seen her campaign propelled into the spotlight as Britain reacted to the killing of George Floyd in the US by a police officer. “The school curriculum is very whitewashed, and black history is usually either omitted entirely, or taught only in terms of colonialism and slavery, rather than black people’s achievements.”

Social media is currently awash with demands (including a petition to the Secretary of State for Education, Gavin Williamson) for children to be taught about the reality of Britain’s racist, colonial past (exported, of course, to the US), and while Stennett agrees this is absolutely necessary, she stresses the importance of achieving “an equal balance between confronting the hard parts of black British history and [...] celebrating role models and the contributions black people have made to our society”.

Learning beyond slavery and colonialsim

Stennett’s mother used to buy books on black inventors as part of ensuring a more comprehensive education, but not all black children – and very few white children, though of course this is the best place for families to start – may receive this independent investment.

And this is not the only major omission on the curriculum. The Black Lives Matter movement has woken many (white) people up to the sentiment of a much-cited Angela Davis observation: that “In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.”

What it means to be anti-racist

The multicultural junior school I attended in the Nineties took a proactive approach to teaching pupils about racism – but my formal education did not make me aware of my own white privilege. It did not hold me accountable. It taught me, to borrow words from a 2014 blog post by US author and poet Scott Woods, that racism amounted to “conscious hate, when [it] is bigger than that. Racism is a complex system of social and political levers and pulleys set up generations ago to continue working on the behalf of whites at other people’s expense, whether whites know/like it or not. Racism is so insidious it doesn’t care if you are a white person who likes black people; it’s still going to find a way to infect how you deal with people who don’t look like you. There is no anti-racist certification class. It’s a set of socioeconomic traps and cultural values that are fired up every time we interact with the world.”

Stennett, now age 23, started school eight years after me, and agreed: “The teaching of racism individualises it and removes the structure. It’s very polarised, with no understanding of the complexity; of things like microaggressions and tokenism.”

I spoke to Ged Grebby, Chief Executive of Show Racism the Red Card, which works with schools to teach anti-racism, utilising the status of footballers and other high-profile individuals. The charity was established in 1996, and I remember it from my own youth. He confirms that “things haven’t moved on” since then – anti-racism and black British history are still not part of the curriculum (though the charity does help train every teacher in Wales).

This is against a backdrop of a rise in race hate crime: there has been an 11 per cent increase in England and Wales from 2018-19 alone. Black people are twice as likely to die in police custody in Britain. People from a Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) background are up to twice as likely to die from Covid-19, the government’s report on which Grebby described as “appalling”, with no conclusions.

Grebby told me the teaching of “Citizenship”, which includes lessons on politics, parliament and voting as well as human rights, justice, the law and the economy, offered some hope when it was made mandatory in 2001, but has ultimately failed to deliver as it is too vague. Asked what he thinks is the most important change we need in schools right now, Grebby said: “Anti-racism on the curriculum, and more time for teachers to teach it.”

What could the curriculum look like?

Primary school teachers tell me Black History Month in October may be consigned to a single assembly, if acknowledged at all. At secondary school the picture is just as troubling. One teacher I spoke to, Sophie Thomas, explained that in the south London school where she works, and where the majority of students come from a black African or Caribbean background, Black History Month is never acknowledged, and the lack of black faces extends beyond History and Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) into subjects such as English.

Changes made by Michael Gove in 2014 to the GCSE syllabus mean there is now a predominant focus on 19th-century literature and Shakespeare, with the modern texts available to choose from “pretty pale, male and stale, and then some tokenistic poetry written by black and brown people, and some women”. In many schools, this limited syllabus begins in Year 7 because of a desire to demonstrate a clear trajectory to Ofsted.

“Teachers are not trained or empowered to teach certain topics through an anti-racist lens – and school leaders do not understand this,” Thomas adds. Another petition doing the rounds currently calls for these texts to be updated with seminal contemporary works such as Why I’m no Longer Talking to White People about Race, by Reni Eddo-Lodge – but she suggests, chiming with Stennett’s approach, that even better outcomes are possible.

“I am mixed race black Caribbean and white, and I have [tried] as an English teacher to compile a reading list where black and brown writers are featured and it’s not constant stories of tragedy and oppression. It is important to teach those stories, but what is even more important is stories of success. Black kids don’t want to hear about a history of oppression every time a black person is mentioned in their lessons.”

Now is the moment to change

Everyone I spoke to agreed the potential for real change at the moment was unprecedented. Grebby described the momentum as “incredible”, while Stennett said: “I have not seen people mobilise like this in my lifetime. Everyone is shocked and outraged.

“It has to turn into something,” she concluded. “There is no better time to create a better society.”

Six things you can do now to diversify education:

  • Donate via theblackcurriculum.com and theredcard.org

  • Write to your MP, Gavin Williamson or John Swinney (Scotland) – The Black Curriculum website has templates

  • Sign petitions, such as this one to make white privilege and systemic racism taught in schools

  • Download The Black Curriculum’s learning resources and start educating your children – or yourself – at home: there are free materials, and licensing options for parents and schools on individual topics or the full curriculum. Ask your children’s school to work with them and/or Show Racism the Red Card

  • Look at your own bookshelf, and that of your children. How diverse are the protagonists and authors of the books you see there?

  • This Book is Anti-Racist by Tiffany Jewell, is a useful tool for discussing racism with children ages five to 15