Radicalism, Anti-Racism and Representation (Critical Studies in Racism and Migration)

Radicalism, anti-racism and representation This study is set within a wider political context for the discussion of ‘r...

Author: Alastai Bonnett

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Radicalism, anti-racism and representation

This study is set within a wider political context for the discussion of ‘racial’ representation and anti-racism (Part I). The remainder of the book (Parts I I and I I I) is devoted to interview-based exploration of the ambiguities and political characteristics of ‘race’ equality consciousness amongst public educators. It is shown that there is no one anti-racism. Different ideals and assumptions have been arrived at within different historical and geographical contexts (both ‘multiracial’ and ‘white’). It is suggested that this intellectual plurality provides a resource for those wishing to rethink antiracism in the light of its contemporary malaise. The study also explores and explains the development of self-critical, reflexive, antiracist and radical consciousness amongst educators. The book provides the first sociological study of anti-racism. Indeed it is the first to provide a substantive critique of anti-racism from outside the New Right. It is also the first to look at this phenomenon geographically and to compare anti-racism in ‘multiracial’ and ‘white’ areas. Alastair Bonnett is a lecturer in human geography at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He has undertaken doctoral and post-doctoral research at McMaster University, the University of London and, most recently, at the University of British Columbia. The author’s cross-disciplinary studies of the development of ‘race’ equality consciousness have been published in journals in both Britain and America.

Critical studies in racism and migration Edited by Robert Miles University of Glasgow


Alastair Bonnett

London and New York

First published 1993 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1993 Alastair Bonnett All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bonnett, Alastair, 1964– Radicalism, anti-racism and representation/Alastair Bonnett p.cm.—(Critical studies in racism and migration) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Race awareness. 2. Race relations. 3. Intercultural education. 4. Pluralism (Social sciences) 5. Radicalism. I. Title. II. Series. HT1523.B66 1993 305.8–dc20 ISBN 0-203-41631-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-72455-0 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-07203-4 (Print Edition)

93–7402 CIP

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction Part I

vi 1

Representations

1

Representing ‘racial’ difference and identity

13

2

Anti-racist dilemmas

47

Part II

Public professional perspectives

Introduction

67

3

The public professions and the ‘new radicalism’

69

4

Multiculturalism: a public educationalist ideology

82

Part III

Anti-racist formulations

Introduction

101

5

Radicalism, ideology and reflexivity: anti-racism in London

104

6

Anti-racism reformulated: Tyneside

134

7

The marginalization of radicalism: Devon

160

Conclusions Methodological appendix References Index

175 195 201 218 v

Acknowledgements

This book was written between January 1991 and November 1992 in the Geography Departments of McMaster University and the University of British Columbia. However, it began life in 1986 as postgraduate research at the Geography Department of Queen Mary and Westfield College in the University of London. Between then and now various bits of it have been through many different hands. Thanks to all those who gave me their comments and/or assistance, particularly David Smith, John Eyles, David Harvey and my parents. Thanks also to all the people I interviewed for this work, I could not have wished for a more hospitable group of respondents. I would also like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for funding my research in Canada. My special thanks go to Robert Miles for enabling this work to come to publication and for his many useful suggestions, some of which I even heeded, and to Alison Kaye for her incisive and critical support. Chapters 3 and 6 incorporate passages previously published in Sociology (May 1993) and Antipode (January 1992). I am grateful to the publishers and editors of these journals for their permission to use this material.

vi

Introduction

Recalling her activist past in the feminist movement the American poet Adrienne Rich (1985:11) observes, ‘We never meant less than the making new of all relationships’. ‘The problem was’, Rich continues, ‘we did not know who we meant when we said “we”’. The failure of social self-consciousness Rich identifies has in recent years become one of the central, and most contentious, areas of intellectual debate. The sense of urgency in this discussion may be partly linked to the decaying plausibility of monolithic emancipatory ideals. As heterogeneous critical currents, such as green politics and the women’s, gay and anti-racist movements, have emerged they have exposed anti-ecological, male, heterosexual and white biases within traditional visions of liberation. Moreover, for those on the left the question of who ‘we’ are and how do ‘we’ speak for others has become increasingly unavoidable as conservative forces have demonstrated their grip on political power. With the election of a Democrat President in the United States in 1992 the heyday of the New Right may be coming to an end. However, the conservative agenda has made profound in-roads into nearly all shades of contemporary political opinion. It has become an entrenched ‘common sense’, a taken-for-granted worldview deeply embedded within both popular and élite consciousness. The left, by contrast, has suffered a loss of direction and self-faith. Dazzled by the potency of conservative myths, radicals have been left wondering who (and how) they represent. The power of the political right has been felt particularly acutely within the ‘race’ equality debate. This process is especially clear in Britain, which has seen some of the most extreme and enduring examples of conservative entrenchment in the Western world. 1

2


Singled out for funding cuts and public ridicule, the confident local anti-racist interventions seen in some British cities in the early 1980s have given way to a sombre culture of survivalism. Indeed, obituaries have already been written for ‘what was once an antiracist movement’ (Gilroy, 1990a:192). Although these funereal arrangements are premature they reflect a further problematization of the aspirations and attitudes of social egalitarians. As the failures of anti-racist orthodoxy have become evident so the need for an unsentimental critique, and rigorous questioning, of the anti-racist and radical project(s) has become apparent. This book is about how, why and where radical and anti-racist consciousness develops. Interestingly the group whose political ideas I will be focusing upon—public educationalists—have tended to be neglected in the emergent debate on the ‘politics of location’ (Rich, 1985). Whilst ‘racial’ and gender identities have been widely recognized as legitimate subjects for study, the shared location of many of those taking part in this debate, as public educationalists, has tended to be overlooked. Perhaps it has seemed too selfindulgent a topic to merit attention or a little too close to home for comfort. Whilst the latter assumption may be true the former is certainly misplaced. As we shall see, the critical exploration of public educationalist politics provides a range of insights into the formation of liberal and radical, multicultural and anti-racist, commitments. My concentration on educators acting within and against capitalism limits the scope of this work. No pretence is made that a comprehensive ‘total picture’ of political identity or radical struggle is being supplied. This explicit specificity opens, rather than forecloses, the themes that will be raised here to further exploration and constructive critique. Rather than being appropriated by a cursory and recuperative presence, issues pertaining to, for example, the gender and sexual identity of educators are absent from my analysis, whilst those relevant to their ‘racial’ identity are highly restricted. These absences are clear and self-conscious, they betoken the particularity of the present study whilst silently challenging the notion of ‘all-inclusive’ social research. This study begins by introducing a wider historical and political context for the discussion of ‘racial’ representation and anti-racism (Part I). The remainder of the book is devoted to an exploration of the formation of liberal, radical, multicultural and anti-racist consciousness amongst educators (Parts I I and I I I). More

Introduction

3

specifically it will be argued that educators’ contradictory political experiences working both for and against the reproduction of capitalism are reflected in their ‘race’ equality ideals and strategies. Using evidence from interviews with educators gathered in London and in two ‘white’ areas of England (Tyneside and Devon) I will also be looking at the way anti-racist ideology has taken shape in different ways in different places. Thus a range of social contexts will be introduced within which ‘race’ equality consciousness has been formed. It is shown that there is no one anti-racism, even amongst as specific a group as public educationalists. No one linear development of ‘the debate’ can be traced. Rather a variety of ideals and assumptions have been arrived at within different historical and geographical contexts. At the end of the book it is suggested that this intellectual plurality provides a resource for those wishing to rethink anti-racism in the light of its contemporary malaise. There is one last facet of this study that needs to be introduced. It has been noted that this book seeks to make visible public educationalists’ political representations. However, it also explores how, why and where reflexivity (i.e. social self-consciousness) has developed amongst this group. In other words, it seeks to explain how educators have come to recognize their own ambiguous political and social location. As this implies, Rich’s plea for a socially self-conscious ‘we’ is already being met by some educators. These individuals have begun to reject anti-racist ‘common sense’ in favour of a more critical form of radical consciousness. DEFI NING TERMS: THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN DEBATES Issues of ‘race’ and politics both richly exemplify the cliché that the United States and Britain are two nations divided by a common language. There are four points of potential confusion between the terminology I shall be adopting and current American usage: Radical and liberal Nigel Wright (1989:15) notes that, whilst radicalism in America has ‘often meant a particularly vigorous form of liberalism’ amongst the British left it is ‘usually used in opposition to liberalism’. Although this generalization obscures the plurality of American and British

4


usage it does point to an entrenched tendency. Thus, for example, the British educationalist Richard Hatcher (1987:185) has argued that ‘what broadly characterizes socialist perspectives is their location of social problems including racism in the capitalist organization of society. Liberal analyses… differ from this in insisting on the progressive character of modern societies’. Hatcher’s definitions closely parallel my own. Radicalism is equated here with the conviction that the achievement of equality and social justice requires the transformation of society and the eventual abandonment of capitalism. Liberalism is defined, by contrast, as referring to beliefs that support the notion that equality and social justice can best be achieved by reforms within the existing social formation. Of course, to situate radicalism in opposition to liberalism is not to suggest that the two perspectives have not in practice been intertwined. Chapters 5 and 6 both provide ample testimony to the way these ideals have often been synthesized. Nevertheless, liberalism and radicalism are two distinct political projects; whilst radicalism implies the need to move towards a non-capitalist society, liberalism does not.

Anti-racism and multiculturalism In Britain the term ‘anti-racism’ refers to a movement for ‘racial’ equality that arose in the mid-to-late 1970s. The movement has had a variety of manifestations, from street-level anti-Nazi demonstrations to local government Racism Awareness Training programmes. However, the most active and controversial arena of anti-racist activity has been within the field of education. The anti-racist movement has frequently been characterized by its radical political tendencies. Anti-racists in Britain have often been critical of the liberal assumptions and cultural focus that they have associated with multiculturalism. Not unrelatedly it has been anti-racism rather than multiculturalism that has been at the centre of public controversy over ‘race’ equality initiatives. Indeed, its adherents have been the subject of a splenetic and mendacious campaign in many sections of the British press. Both the ferocity and dismal intellectual level of this campaign are indicated by the fact that many newspapers’ favourite, and incessantly reused, epithet for anti-racists is the ‘loony left’.

Introduction

5

The British anti-racist movement has no direct equivalent in the United States. Of course the issues raised by British anti-racists are also debated in America. However, they are not associated with a distinct political movement, a movement able to monopolize the label ‘anti-racist’. To be an anti-racist in the United States usually implies, quite simply, that one is opposed to racism, a position that would be happily publicly embraced by most people involved in political life. The controversial issue in American education is multiculturalism. In a sceptical article on multiculturalism in Time magazine entitled ‘Whose America?’ Paul Gray (1991) has explained that ‘the critical optic of this new “multicultural” perspective’ threatens to overrun the nation’s colleges. A more sympathetic observer, Barbara Harlowe (quoted by MacMartin, 1991), notes that multiculturalism is where ‘the battle line…has been drawn’. British and American multiculturalism have many similarities. Both seek to develop a non-Eurocentric curriculum that offers a variety of affirmations of ‘other’ cultures. However, there are three facets of the American debate that make it different from the British. The first is that in the former country multiculturalist perspectives have (at least within in recent years) been seen as emanating from pedagogical initiatives within higher education. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, both multiculturalism and antiracism have been developed largely within the pre-tertiary sector. The second difference turns upon the fact that multiculturalism in America has tended to be more open to issues of power and institutional racism than multiculturalism in Britain (Banks, 1986). This provides one possible explanation of why, to turn to the third difference, multiculturalism is a more politicized and sensitive issue in America. For although in both counties multiculturalism is controversial, it has excited far more public debate and acrimony in the United States (Bonnett, 1992a). This level of attention can also be related to multiculturalism’s more profound implications in a society that is far more ethnically diverse than Britain. ‘Racial’ names Since ‘racial’ nomenclature is considered in some detail in the analysis of anti-racist ‘modes of representation’ introduced in Part I, I shall limit my remarks here to just two points of potential confusion.

6


In the United Kingdom, the word ‘Asian’ usually refers to people of South Asian descent (including ‘African Asians’). It refers, then, to the same group of North Americans sometimes termed ‘East Indians’ (in North America the term ‘Asian’ generally refers to East Asians or people descended from all parts of Asia). The second area of potential confusion concerns the term ‘black’. In Britain ‘black’ has four main meanings. It is used, as in America, as a term for people descended from sub-Saharan Africa. It is also ubiquitously employed as a word for this latter group and ‘Asians’ (British definition). A third usage is to equate the term with all people who are not white. Finally, ‘Black’ is used in anti-racist debate as a political label for those who experience and resist White racism (this usage is sometimes signalled by the use of a capital ‘B’). The fact that four definitions can be supplied is an indication of the fluidity of the meaning of ‘black’. To add to the confusion, each of these definitions is often used interchangeably. Partly because of the confusing, ambiguous nature of the term I have avoided using the term ‘black’ (or ‘Black’) in this book other than to record the preferred usage of a specific group or individual. Examples of the ‘racial’ terminology adopted are ‘British Asian’, ‘Afro-British’, ‘British Chinese’ and ‘white’, phrases that refer to British residents of South Asian, sub-Saharan African, Chinese and European descent respectively. The term ‘visible minorities’ (sometimes shortened to ‘minorities’) is employed as a collective noun for all ‘non-white’ groups. These phrases are not unproblematic. Each constructs a contentious mythology of ethnic homogeneity. This homogenizing tendency can be countered somewhat by the use of additional terms such as ‘British Pakistani’ and ‘British African’ (the latter being used to denote Afro-Britons born in Africa). Nevertheless, the broader categories adopted here remain controversial. Their validity lies less in their accuracy as portrayals of objectively discrete social groupings and more in their power to reflect the collectivities around which the British ‘race’ debate is most commonly structured. ‘Race’ In recent years the practice of placing the word ‘race’ in quotation marks has become relatively widespread within British anti-racist debate. Although the swarm of quotation marks this custom

Introduction

7

attracts to the printed page has a certain aesthetic penalty it is, nevertheless, a useful device. The word ‘race’ and related concepts such as ‘racial’ and ‘multiracial’ imply the existence of discrete, naturally separate, population groups. Thus such terminology obscures the social construction of ‘racial’ difference and affirms a scientifically unsustainable and racist biological reductionism. However, since the controversy surrounding ‘white’ and ‘nonwhite’ identity continues to invoke ‘racial’ categories, such usages cannot simply be ignored. The problem of recognizing this process of racialization whilst resisting the racist implications of its attendant terminology has led me to follow the lead given by Ashley Montague (1969; see also Miles, 1982; Gates, 1986) and place a pair of self-problematizing quotation marks around the word ‘race’ and its allied expressions. THE SHORTER VERSION In order to provide readers with an accessible and concise sketch of the main themes developed in this book, each of its three parts as well as its conclusion, is briefly summarized below. Part I: Representations Part I (Chapters 1 and 2) introduces three forms of ‘racial’ representation: ‘racial’ rejectionism, multiculturalism and antiracism. Using examples from the post-Second World War ‘race’ debate in Britain, I sketch in Chapter 1 some of the most important ways adherents of each perspective have interpreted ‘racial’ difference. It is explained that all three traditions tend to portray themselves as ‘speaking for’ a particular subject. Thus ‘racial’ rejectionists have often positioned themselves as conduits for natural law and a vision of the ‘ordinary’ Briton. Multiculturalists, by contrast, have attempted to develop a more pluralistic vision of minority and majority identity. The subject spoken for by multiculturalists may be characterized as ‘other’ cultures. The chapter concludes by looking at anti-racist ‘racial’ representation. The central subject within British anti-racist debate, it is noted, has, at least until recently, been a monolithic vision of Black and White identity. It is suggested that this vision has come to sustain a ‘racially’ exclusionary mythology of authentic visible minority and majority experience.

8


Chapter 2 introduces three main reasons why anti-racist representations have become problematic: (a) the conservative assault on anti-racism; (b) anti-racism’s isolation from the wider community, particulary the white working class; and (c) the socalled ‘new ethnic assertiveness’. Each of these points of crisis has prompted some commentators to rethink anti-racism. The chapter concludes with two such reassessments, one tending towards a more politicized anti-racist politics, the other advocating a more professional, depoliticized approach. Part II: Public professional perspectives Part II (Chapters 3 and 4) begins my analysis of the political consciousness of public educationalists. In Chapter 3 theories of new-class and middle-class radicalism are introduced and criticized for neglecting the experiential context in which political consciousness is formed. Citing the work of Claus Offe on the political tensions within the welfare state, it is noted that the role of the public professional is characterized by the experience of contradiction. The public professional is an egalitarian, but also a capitalist, socializer and trainer. He or she is both ‘for and against’ welfare capitalism. It is suggested that educators resolve this tension into forms of rhetoric and action that conceal and cohere their ‘non-market’ and ‘pro-market’ political ambitions. This process is identified as the formation of ideology. Chapter 4 looks at liberalism and multiculturalism as examples of public educationalist ideology. The development and plausibility of these ideologies is explained by reference to the social context of their formation. Thus, for example, the plausibility of synthesizing non-market and pro-market ideals into liberalism is seen to be dependent upon the experience of discourses that affirm the compatibility of egalitarianism with capitalism. The chapter concludes by showing how liberalism has been inflected by discourses of ‘racial’ inequality and minority resistance to form the ideology of multiculturalism. Part III: Anti-racist formulations This section (Chapters 5, 6 and 7) is largely based upon interviews conducted with anti-racist educators. Chapter 5 opens, however, with an historical analysis of the radicalization of the ‘race’ debate

Introduction

9

amongst educators in London from the mid-1970s to the present day. I argue that a crisis of ‘racial’ inequality emerged in the mid1970s and 1980s that challenged the plausibility of liberal and multicultural ideologies. These crisis discourses acted to partially legitimize a radical anti-racist approach. The partiality of this process is central to my analysis. The experience of crisis discourses, it is suggested, did not lead to the complete abandonment of liberalism. Thus a contradiction has emerged in radical anti-racist debate; liberalism has been both subverted and affirmed, radicalism both supported and denied. Three anti-racist ideologies are picked out that resolve this tension. These ideologies turn upon the notions of anti-racism as good education, as consciousness raising and as part of the Black struggle. Chapter 5 goes on to argue, however, that anti-racist ideological closure has been incomplete. For some radicals the experience of crisis has provoked a turn towards reflexive critique. Chapter 6 looks at how anti-racism has developed in a predominantly white metropolitan area of England (Tyneside). After an introduction to the development of the embryonic ‘race’ equality movement in ‘white’ areas, the notion that anti-racist consciousness in such places can be adequately conceptualized as having been imported from more ‘multiracial’ localities is rejected. It is shown that the anti-racist attitudes expressed by Tyneside educators partly reflects their experiences of working and living in the area. Three ‘local’ anti-racist ideologies are examined: the gentle approach, locally sensitivity and the inculcation of empathy. Both liberal and radical anti-racists were interviewed on Tyneside. The radicals expressed a form of anti-racism unusually sensitive to the needs and fears of the white working class. The liberals, by contrast, have developed an apolitical, consensus-seeking anti-racism. The latter group also evidenced a tendency to return anti-racism to the kind of self-assured, non-reflexive certainties isolated in Chapter 4. Chapter 7 turns to another ‘white’ area, the county of Devon, to look at the way liberal assumptions and ideals can come to dominate ‘race’ equality debate. It is demonstrated that the marginalization of radicalism is linked to the absence of crisis experiences. The lack of such experiences enables liberalism to become virtually the only plausible paradigm for the discussion of social inequality amongst teachers. It also makes visible a political gulf between the educational experience of those working in tertiary

10


and pre-tertiary education. In effect, it throws the uniquely radical orientation of higher education into relief. It is suggested that this sectoral split poses some serious problems for the development of political debate in a non-crisis environment. Conclusions This study concludes by offering a prescriptive engagement with the anti-racist dilemmas isolated in Part I in the light of the forms of anti-racist consciousness explored in Part III. The class-sensitive anti-racism associated with educational practice on Tyneside is seen to provide a promising, if flawed, intervention in anti-racist debate. The chapter concludes with a brief, unprescriptive, note on the critical character of social self-consciousness.

Part I

Representations

Chapter 1


INTRODUCTION The representation of ‘racial’ difference and identity is one of the most controversial areas of contemporary cultural and political life. The forms of ‘racial’ representation that were ubiquitous thirty years ago are often found inappropriate today. Given the liquid nature of the debate it seems likely that the various categories and discourses that have replaced them will seem equally inadequate in thirty years’ time. One of the consequences of this interpretative fluidity has been to undermine static, ahistorical notions of ‘race’ and ‘racial’ difference. As stereotypes and assumptions once taken for granted have been challenged and superseded so the process of ‘racial’ representation has increasingly been revealed as less a reflection of objective fact than of reification. Some of the most insightful recent commentaries on the act of cultural representation are to be found in the work of the literary theorist Gaytari Spivak (1988a; 1988b). There are two ways, Spivak suggests, we may understand the act of representation. On the one hand, there is representation as re-presentation, as interpretation. On the other, there is representation as ‘speaking for’ the needs and desires of somebody or something else. The latter is not a very convincing form of ventriloquism. After all, in order to ‘speak for’ a subject we need to have found some meaning within it. We need, in other words, to have already performed an act of interpretation. As this implies, re-presentation is prior to ‘speaking for’. All representations are based on the re-presentation of their subject. And yet the act of interpretation is not readily admitted to. Indeed, as we shall see later, participants in the debate on ‘racial’ identity in Britain have tended to portray themselves simply as 13

14

Representations

conduits for others’ voices. In this way they have effaced the interpretative nature of their own political projects. To acknowledge the link between representation and re-presentation problematizes this kind of deletion. By making the transparent interpreter visible it disrupts claims to ‘speak for’. This chapter seeks to make visible three particular acts of interpretation. Through distinct rhetorics of ‘racial’, national, cultural and political identity, each of the modes of representation I will be discussing—‘racial’ rejectionism, multiculturalism and antiracism—has constructed different rationalities of ‘racial’ difference; different definitions of ‘racial’ minority and majority identities and what divides them. These rationalities have been used to construct different subjects to ‘speak for’. In the case of ‘racial’ rejectionism the subject has been ‘natural law’ and/or the ‘authentic’ white Briton. Multiculturalists, by contrast, have often claimed to be speaking for ‘other’ cultures, whilst anti-racists have positioned themselves as a conduit for ‘the Black voice’ and ‘Black’ resistance. By showing how rejectionists, multiculturalists and anti-racists interpret visible minority and majority identity I aim to critically explicate their disparate rationalities of ‘racial’ difference and claims to speak in the name of particular groups or ideals. ‘RACIAL’ REJECTIONISM Rejectionism may be defined as the rationality of exclusion and inclusion. Such rationalities are, of course, numerous and varied. Sexuality, class, gender, disability and physical appearance all have their own histories of rejectionist practices and theories. ‘Racial’ rejectionism is one such rationality of exclusion and inclusion. I have adopted this term in this chapter, rather than ‘racism’, because it directly implies the process of rationalizing and reproducing difference. Moreover, by using this phrase it is possible to avoid foreclosing the possibility that other modes of representation may be racist (for example, multiculturalism and anti-racism) and the debate on defining racism entered into by interviewees in later chapters. ‘Racial’ rejectionism is a diverse and ubiquitous tradition. Its disparate histories have been explicated in, for example, China (Dikötter, 1990) and Japan (Reischauer, 1988; see also Terry, 1991), as well as within many different North American and European societies. However, in the British context, two principal rejectionist


15

themes may be isolated: scientific rejectionism and everyday rejectionism. I will discuss scientific rejectionism first. Scientific ‘racial’ rejectionism Before the turn of the eighteenth century, the word ‘race’, as Michael Banton (1977:18) explains, was ‘primarily used in the sense of “lineage”; differences between races resulted from the circumstances of their history and though they were maintained over the generations they were not fixed’. However, ‘round the year 1800’ (ibid.), the fruition of a self-consciously scientific approach to the classification of both social and natural phenomena instituted a new perspective on ‘race’. This scientific approach manifested itself in the development of a number of theories on the inherent and indelible attributes of discrete ‘races’. One of the first and most influential was developed by the Swiss anatomist Georges Cuvier. From his studies of differences between the size and shape of human skulls Cuvier claimed, in 1805, to have identified three distinct and intellectually unequal ‘racial’ groups. These he set in following ascending hierarchy: Ethiopian, Mongoloid and Caucasian. These categories, or variants upon them, became widely disseminated and accepted in nineteenth-century Europe. In England, for example, Cuvier’s English translator, Charles Smith (1848), developed a more complex anthropological schema around the same list of groups. However, the scientific accuracy of Cuvier’s ‘racial’ triptych did not go unchallenged. Rather, as Banton and Harwood (1975) and Bolt (1971) have detailed, such ideas formed part of a wide-ranging discussion on the issue of how the ‘races’ should be properly ordered. Thus, for example, cultural differences within the Caucasian ‘race’, such as between Anglo-Saxons and Celts (see Curtis, 1968), were also used as markers of ‘racial’ dissimilarity. However, the divide between the white ‘race(s)’ and ‘non-white races’ remained an entrenched component of scientific rejectionism. Thus, when Darwinian theories of natural competition between and within species gained popularity in the latter part of the nineteenth century, they became tied to an already firmly established mythology of white superiority. The complicity between an evolutionist and hierarchical view of ‘racial’ difference and Europeans’ subjugation of their colonial possessions has been documented many times (for example,

16

Representations

Husband, 1982; Walvin, 1973). Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, the growth of European empires was often explicitly celebrated as simply reflecting the unfolding of an amoral natural logic. ‘The inferior organization’, it was suggested in the Journal of the Anthropological Society (quoted by Bolt, 1971:20) in 1866, necessarily ‘makes room for the superior. As the Indian is killed by the approach of civilization, to which he resists in vain, so the black man perishes by that culture to which he serves as a humble instrument’. In the Popular Magazine of Anthropology (ibid.) the unremitting logic of scientific law was phrased in even more brutal terms; ‘to colonize and to extirpate’, it was noted in 1864, ‘are synonymous terms’. The scientific delineation of ‘races’ has continued to remain an active tradition within the twentieth century, reaching its most murderous praxis through the attempts at genocide and ‘race’ purification carried out by the Nazis and their collaborators. ‘Racial’ typologies have also been developed in the post-Second World war era by social psychologists such as Eysenck (1971) and Jensen (1973) and, more ambiguously, amongst socio-biologists (see Barker, 1981, for a critique). However, since 1945, the dissemination of information about Nazi atrocities has shifted scientific ‘racial’ rejectionism to the margins of both the public and scientific debate. This process has also been facilitated by the emergence of a compelling, and increasingly widely accepted, body of social scientific and scientific evidence contradicting the notion that people can be separated into discrete ‘racial’ groups or that different ‘races’ can be linked to specific cultural traits or levels of intelligence (Richardson and Spears, 1972; Montague, 1969; 1974). Everyday ‘racial’ rejectionism ‘Natural law’ is only one of a varied group of rationalities that constitute what may be termed ‘everyday racial rejectionism’. In looking at how most people in modern Britain justify rejectionist sentiments we encounter a diversity of interconnecting ideas, none of which is necessarily dominated by, or betokens, a belief in a strict hierarchy of biologically defined ‘races’. In this tradition, ‘the nation’ and a popularist myth of ‘the ordinary Briton’, as well as ‘the race’, have all been ‘spoken for’, often simultaneously.


17

In the nineteenth century the two most stigmatized of Britain’s larger minority groups were the Jews and the Irish. At the turn of the century anti-semitism, combined with a fear of economic competition from Jewish immigrants, encouraged trades union leaders to join forces with Conservative politicians to campaign against Jewish settlement (Holmes, 1979; Garrard, 1971). As a result of this pressure an Aliens Act, designed to restrict the entry of ‘undesirable and destitute aliens’, was passed by Parliament in 1905. The issue of settlement was less central to anti-Irish sentiment. This was not simply the result of the fact that Ireland had been, since 1800, part of the United Kingdom. It was also a reflection of the fact that anti-Irish sentiment tended to accentuate intellectual and cultural inferiority (see Curtis, 1968; Gilley, 1978) rather than alien status. Stereotypes of immigrants as alien invaders, and/or as inferior to the indigenous population, have recurred throughout the twentieth century. However, in post-Second World War Britain, it has been the immigration of people from former British imperial possessions in Asia and the Caribbean that has made the most profound impact on perceptions of ‘multi-racialism’. The following discussion reflects this dominance as well as the related shift towards a focus on ‘nonwhite’ skin as the central marker of immigrant status. By far the largest visible minority grouping in the United Kingdom are British Asians. However, there is also a substantial Afro-British population as well as smaller communities of British Chinese, British Arabs, British Turks and British Cypriots. In order to give some indication of the growth and size of these groups a few statistical estimates maybe useful. Between 1951 and 1984–6 the population of Indian and Pakistani origin grew from 35,800 to 1,157,000 and of West Indian origin from 15,300 to 534,000 (Rees, 1982; Shaw, 1988). It has been estimated (Shaw, 1988) that in the period 1984–6 there were 103,000 British Bangaldeshi, 115,000 British Chinese, 103,000 British Africans and 66,000 British Arabs living in the United Kingdom. In addition, the 1981 census revealed 120,123 ‘persons living in private households with head of household’ born in Cyprus, Malta or Gibraltar (OPCS, 1983). Overlapping with this latter population group, Sonyel estimated in 1987 that there are 80,000 ‘Turkish Muslims’ (both Turkish Cypriot and Turkish) in Britain. ‘Racial’ rejectionism has constituted one of the central motifs of

18

Representations

British governments’ attitude towards immigration (Macdonald, 1983; Miles and Phizacklea, 1984). By the early 1970s three successive Immigration Acts (in 1962, 1968 and 1971) had reduced primary immigration from India, Pakistan and the Caribbean to a trickle. A new British Nationality Act was introduced in 1981 to set the seal on this exclusion by debarring many British passport holders in Commonwealth countries from rights of abode in the United Kingdom. However, the rejectionist motivation behind these legislative devices has been disguised, if only thinly, behind a façade of ‘colour blindness’. William Deedes, Minister Without Portfolio in the Conservative government that introduced the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, noted several years after the Act had become law, that The Bill’s real purpose was to restrict the influx of coloured immigrants. We were reluctant to say as much openly. So the restrictions were applied to coloured and white citizens in all Commonwealth countries—though everybody recognized that immigration from Canada, Australia and New Zealand formed no part of the problem. (Deedes, 1968:10) By enacting ‘racial’ rejectionism through ‘colour-blind’ immigration legislation the government was able to deflect accusations of racism. Thus Deedes provides us with an example of what Frank Reeves (1983) terms the ‘sanitary coding’ of ‘racial discourse’. A similar formula was utilized for the 1968 Act, the only one introduced by a Labour government. The 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act established preferential immigration rights for those with a parent or grandparent born in the United Kingdom. Of course, few ‘nonwhite’ Commonwealth citizens had any such relative. Thus the Act reflected a rejectionist agenda whilst avoiding direct engagement with the language of ‘race’. Although the development of immigration restrictions provides a necessary context for the discussion of ‘racial’ rejectionism in Britain, the practice of ‘sanitary coding’ makes the explication of the representations of minority and majority identity that lie behind immigration legislation dependent on secondary sources, such as recollection (Deedes, 1968) or private minutes (Carter et al., 1987). More direct insights into rejectionist rationality can, however, be gained by looking at some of the many expressions of white ‘racial’


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hostility that stimulated the demand for immigration control. One of the earliest and most heavily reported of such expressions in the post-war period were the ‘race riots’ of autumn 1958 in West London and Nottingham. The riots were, in fact, a series of street disturbances sparked off, as Rose et al. (1969:496; see also Miles, 1984a) explain, by ‘the systematic hunting of black men’ by white youth. However, although press coverage of the violence largely put the blame on the white youth involved—The Times (3 September 1958) calling them ‘pallid thugs’—they were widely interpreted as a predictable consequence of ‘non-white’ immigration. Thus some public figures (for example, Lord Salisbury) cited the riots as proof that immigration caused social disruption and should be stopped. The opinions of a few of the white youths who contributed to the violence provide a useful introduction to the rationalities of everyday racism. Some of these young men, identified as belonging to the Teddy Boy youth cult, were interviewed by a BBC reporter just after the autumn disturbances in Netting Hill. It is upon a transcript of this group interview (Glass, 1961) that the following account is based. The youth structured their rejectionist ideas around two moral dualisms which they used to divide ‘us’ from ‘them’: morality/ immorality and order/disruption. These dualisms were articulated principally as a commentary on the sexual morality of ‘racial’ minorities, their criminality and their threat to white prosperity, status and security. Thus immigrants are accused of being ‘lazy sods’, of being ‘ignorant’ and of ‘ninety-five per cent’ of them being pimps and running brothels. They are also seen as a sexual and economic threat to white society. ‘I don’t like ‘em with white girls, I don’t like ’em at all, they’re too filthy’, comments one interviewee. Another complains, ‘you can’t get a job in Lyons’s because a black man will go cheaper’. As we shall see later these themes of criminality, disorderliness and white vulnerability occur repeatedly in rejectionist representations of ‘racial’ minorities. Similarly recurrent are the categorical forms into which these attributes are assigned. Thus, for example, the Teddy Boys habitually rely on terms that homogenize visible minority people as one group: Interviewer: Now do you make any difference between West Indians, West Africans, Pakistanis, Indians, Nigerians? Voice: But they’re all spades if it comes down to the same thing— all spades.

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However, this last ‘voice’ immediately contradicts the idea that all immigrants are the same by claiming, ‘but the Jamaicans are the worst’. Another respondent affirms ‘as far as the Jamaicans is concerned they’re the people that’s really starting the trouble in London’. Others in the group claim ‘the Maltese they’re the same thing’. Thus Jamaicans and Maltese, two national categories, are extricated from the ‘racial’/colour based logic involved in drawing a clear line between ‘spades’ and ‘us’. It emerges, as the youth talk on, that whilst, when speaking in abstract terms, they claim to recognize no distinctions between ‘racial’ minority groups, when the conversation turns to specific issues, such as street violence, nationality is introduced as an explanatory factor. As this shift between categories implies nationality and ‘race’ are linked by the Teddy Boys, woven together as markers of ‘non-white’ and non-English/British difference and undesirability. Thus the English and British are spoken of, and spoken for, as a ‘racial’ group with a primordial territorial claim on England and the island of Britain. (The elision of England and Britain is a ubiquitous tendency within the English tradition of ‘racial’ representation. As this implies, the Scots and Welsh are only ambiguously incorporated within the English vision of Britishness.) The immigrants may, in legal terms, be British subjects, concede the youth, but at the same time they flatly assert, ‘They shouldn’t be allowed in. They should be kept out’. One respondent suggests that, ‘if an Englishman went over to their country and behaved the way they do…they’d be kicked out straight away’. The last thirty years have seen many similar rejectionist attempts to define visible minority and majority experience and identity. As with the Teddy Boys, at first glance the compacted crudity of such articulations often gives the impression that the only division being made is between a monolithic alien group and an undifferentiated native population. However, such expressions can also convey more complex rationalities of division. Such nuances are even apparent within the infamously brutal electioneering slogan ‘If You Want A Nigger For A Neighbour Vote Labour’. Clearly, this particular utterance invokes a rejectionist differentiation of ‘us’ and ‘them’. This dualism was fully employed when the slogan came to national attention through its use in the election campaign, and subsequent surprise victory of an anti-immigration Conservative candidate in the parliamentary constituency of Smethwick in 1964 (Deakin, 1965; Foot, 1965). However, the slogan also relies on a


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fragmentation of Britishness. For it suggests that, even though ‘we’ may be all be white, some of ‘us’ (i.e. the Labour Party) cannot be trusted to act in ‘our’ interests. Thus the slogan ‘speaks for’, and thereby constructs, an image of an authentic white experience characterized by fear both of minorities and of being misrepresented by inauthentic whites. Along with the dualisms of morality/immorality and order/ disorder and the conflation of ‘race’ and nation, this kind of reference to an authentic white British subject is a central rejectionist motif (see also Lawrence, 1982). The left-wing teacher ignoring the interests of her or his white pupils, the aloof middle-or upper-class consensus politician more concerned about ‘them’ than about ordinary people; such acts of betrayal have formed one of the most active well-springs of rejectionist anger. The constituent themes of rejectionism were drawn together and given their most powerful expression by the Conservative MP Enoch Powell in the late 1960s (Shoen, 1977; Foot, 1969). In this period Powell established himself as the principal intellectual legitimator of the rejectionist mode of representation. The content of Powell’s representations was not original. In his speeches and articles Powell articulated established nationalistic and ‘racial’ themes within a familiar vision of an authentic British/white experience and set this construction against the equally well-worn notion of the immorality and disorderliness of the ‘non-British’ and ‘non-white’. It was not the novelty of these ideas that made Powell important but his ability to blend them into a popularist and popular rhetoric of ‘racial’ difference and incompatibility. Powell was able to convince his audiences and readers that he, and he alone, was speaking for and to an objective, coherent subject; the ordinary Briton. As an example of Powell’s ability to position himself and his subject in this way we may turn to his most famous speech, delivered in April 1968 at a regional Conservative Party conference in Birmingham (Powell, 1968). Powell’s audience knew that on the Tuesday after his speech, the Labour government, as if to compensate for the discriminatory nature of its own immigration legislation, was to give its controversial Race Relations Bill (1968) a second reading in Parliament. The Bill’s most important measure was to make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of colour, race, ethnic or national group in the fields of housing, employment and other services. Powell wove his portrayal of the criminal and

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disruptive nature of Britain’s minority population into an attack on what he called ‘the ignorant and the ill informed’ politicians who, through the Race Relations Bill, were about to give ‘them’ ‘legal weapons’ to ‘overawe and dominate’ (p. 190) ‘decent, ordinary’ (p. 180) Britons. Both of these intersecting themes were brought to their emotional climax in Powell’s reading of a letter (see also Gilroy, 1987), one of ‘hundreds upon hundreds’ he had received from ‘ordinary, decent, sensible people’ (p. 186). The letter was from a Wolverhampton resident who wished to draw Powell’s attention to the plight of a lone ‘woman old age pensioner’. The woman had, worked hard…and begun to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion…. She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they do know. ‘Racialist’ they chant. Will the passing of the Race Relations Bill, Powell’s correspondent wondered, make it illegal for this woman to complain at her harassment? She is ‘convinced she will go to prison if she does. And is she so wrong? I begin to doubt it.’ Thus the gap between the fears of ordinary, decent people and aloof politicians, out of touch with their white constituency, is made a focus of white fear and frustration. The very everydayness of the details contained in the letter—the window, the excreta, the letter-box, the shops— indicates Powell’s desire to convey the domestic intimacy, the pervasiveness of the alien threat and, thereby, to position himself as speaking for ordinary Britons. Powell thus uses the letter to confirm his role as the voice for a voiceless people, the silent majority, whom the British ‘establishment’ do not understand or represent. Powell’s ideas have been reproduced in a variety of arenas, most notably in the popular press, which has consistently sought to portray ‘racial’ minority groups as a threat to white society (Hartmann and Husband, 1974; Dijk, 1991). The 1970s also saw the rise and fall in the electoral fortunes of the National Front (Walker, 1977; Husbands, 1983; 1984), a political party whose


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leaders are self-proclaimed believers in scientific racism, but which in its attempts to position itself as the voice of white discontent, frequently drew on similar chains of association to Powell. However, in the 1980s, some commentators (Barker, 1981; Gilroy, 1987; 1990b; Gordon and Klug, no date) discerned a ‘new racism’. This phenomenon was equated with the emergence of a new concern with the links between ‘race’, nation and culture amongst rejectionists. The ‘new racists’, it has been suggested, emphasize not biological ‘racial’ superiority and inferiority, but the existence of indelible national and cultural differences and incompatibilities between peoples. Although these critics have cited Powell’s speeches in the late 1960s as precursing the ‘new racism’, its rise has been firmly tied to a newly prominent group of assertively anti-liberal intellectuals associated with the Conservative governments led by Margaret Thatcher from 1979 to 1990. Two typical examples of this New Right perspective may be drawn from the writings of the Conservative political commentator and speech writer, Alfred Sherman, and the Cambridge academic John Casey. Sherman (1979) has argued for a definition of Britishness based on an appreciation of common historical roots. Britain, he notes, is ‘the national home and birth right of its indigenous peoples’. Moreover, ‘History, institutions, landmarks are an essential part of [Britons’] personal identity’. Reflecting a similar static and racialized conception of cultural identity, Casey has elaborated on differences between the ‘English’ and ‘West Indians’ in the following manner, the West Indian community is structurally likely to be at odds with English civilization. There is an extraordinary resentment towards authority—police, teachers, Underground guards—all authority…. Then there is the family structure which is markedly unlike our own; educational standards that are below those of all other racial groups…and the involvement of West Indians in a vastly disproportionate amount of violent crime. (Casey quoted by Husband, 1991:61) Thus both Sherman and Casey portray Englishness as inherently white. The vision of English and British culture proposed, as Gilroy notes, is one in which, England’s black settlers are forever locked in the bastard culture of their enslaved ancestors…. Their presence in the ancient

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Representations territory of the ‘Island Race’ becomes a problem precisely because of their difference and distance from the standard of civilized behaviour that are second nature to authentic (white) Britons. (Gilroy, 1990b:267)

However, whether these examples of New Right rejectionism can be said to indicate an intellectually original tendency needs to be questioned. It is, after all, one of the defining characteristics of everyday rejectionism that it uses a variety of rationalizations of exclusion/inclusion. As this implies, ‘racial’ reductionism has never been a necessary component of this tradition. Indeed, as we saw earlier, the attempt to synthesize cultural, nationalistic and ‘racial’ themes was a central feature of the kinds of representations evidenced by the Teddy Boys and reproduced by Powell. Sherman and Casey’s comments about English culture, far from being novel interventions, echo well-worn dualisms and myths. If a relatively novel problematic can be discerned within contemporary rejectionist thought it is of a less coherent, less uniformally exclusionary, nature than the kind of ‘blood and soil’ nationalism that some commentators have equated with the New Right. It is relevant to note that, although repatriation continues to be discussed amongst those associated with the right wing of the Conservative Party, it has become an increasingly marginal issue within the rejectionist agenda (Rich, 1986). The causes of this development are numerous but one factor seems clear. After four decades of substantial visible minority settlement, the premise that minority and majority peoples in Britain are incompatible and, therefore, the former should be encouraged to go ‘home’, has become more implausible. Despite white hostility and rejectionist immigration laws, minority communities have succeeded in establishing themselves as an integral part of the British political landscape. Moreover, Robert Miles (1990:285), drawing on opinion poll data collected by Banton (1988), detects what he describes as ‘some shift away from a very hostile evaluation of the presence of people of South Asian and Caribbean origin’ amongst white Britons. Combined with the potential electoral power of over 2.5 million minority residents, these developments have contributed to the emergence of new points of emphasis within the conservative ‘race’ debate, emphases that acknowledge the fact, as well as the unwelcome nature, of a ‘multiracial’ Britain.


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New emphases within rejectionism For some rejectionists, the ‘racial’ problematic of ‘why are they incompatible with us?’ has been combined or replaced with ‘what is it to be a member of a racial minority and British?’ and ‘what positive and negative attributes do they possess that make them less or more like us?’. The latter problematic has been answered through the assignment of British and non-British attributes to various minority groups. This allocation has been made in relation to familiar rejectionist images of a monolithic and superior white British culture. Thus British Asians and the British Chinese have been portrayed as, like the white British, hard working, resourceful and respectful of traditional family values. This gesture of inclusion has often been made in relation to a negative assessment of the contribution of Afro-Britons (see Miles, 1992, for an American parallel). From his detailed content analysis of press commentary in 1985/6 and 1989, Teun van Dijk concludes that the image of the ‘black community’ constructed is of a group that, condones crimes, shelters criminals, and generally does not want to integrate, as the Asians do. Its culture is defective, because ‘Chinese, Pakistanis and Indians live at peace because of strong family ties and codes’. (Sun, quoted in Tuen van Dijk, 1991:139) Moreover, Dijk (p. 145) continues, the press has constructed an image of British Asians as, victims of Afro-Caribbeans, they are ‘haves’, they have shops. Like ‘us’ and all ordinary people they are presented as hard working, as small entrepreneurs (and hence as good capitalists) and as the victims of blacks. They also look like us, and share in the Indo-European cultural tradition. Such images of the industrious and successful British Asian have resulted in their partial entry into the realm of the ‘spoken for’. Unlike Afro-Britons, the ‘quieter, gentler people from the Indian sub-continent’, noted Woodrow Wyatt in The Times (quoted by Dijk, p. 197), ‘are as law-abiding as the rest of the population’. Another conservative political commentator, Ray Honeyford (1986:50), has suggested that English and Chinese traditions have been

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sympathetically fused through the latter’s entrepreneurial and culinary contributions to British society. ‘One might legitimately applaud’, enthuses Honeyford, ‘the marvellous way the Chinese have richly transformed that important English institution, the fish and chip shop’. Although, these kinds of portrayal throw into relief established, indeed pre-modern, ideas about the cultural identity of Asia, they also present a novel point of emphasis within contemporary rejectionist debate. They uncouple the Powellite mythology of decent, ordinary people from any axiomatic conflation with the British/ white ‘race’. Instead an assimilationist myth is proposed, one that judges minorities’ ‘acceptability’ in terms of their compatibility with a supposedly hard-working, law-abiding, familyloving white society. However, the rejectionist vision of minorities’ Britishness is ambiguous. For example, Afro-Britons in the fields of sport and popular entertainment, unlike other minority groups (who remain relatively absent from mainstream British popular culture), are often celebrated as ‘Great Britons’ by the popular press. Indeed, the adoption of the Afro-British boxer, Frank Bruno, as a patriotic symbol, prompted Gilroy (1989:25) to observe that ‘the political and cultural gains of the black British go hand in hand with a further marginalization of “Asians”’. Moreover, some New Right commentators, such as Casey (quoted by Husband, 1991:61), have posited a ‘profound difference in cultures’ between white and Asian Britons. This difference, Casey continues, explains why British Asians ‘are most unlikely to wish to identify themselves with the traditions and loyalties of the host nation’. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, this kind of rejectionist unease with British Asian alienness became crystalized around the image of the Muslim fundamentalist. The growth of a Muslim presence in Europe (for discussion see Gerholm and Lithman, 1988), coupled with the Gulf War in 1990–1, established the figure of the Muslim zealot as a central point of reference within the rejectionist debate on Asian difference. This tendency has been reflected in the increasing number of anti-Muslim stories carried by the press. Thus, for example, during the Gulf War, the Sun (18 January 1991) reported that ‘True Brits at a factory were ordered to RIP DOWN…Union Jacks yesterday—after Muslims complained’. In a similar vein Paul Johnson in the Daily Telegraph (3 December 1991) raised the spectre of ‘an expansionist Muslim world’ full of ‘countless millions of Muslims, eyeing our wealth’.


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There exist, then, contradictory rejectionist tendencies in the ascription of British and non-British characteristics to minority groups. However, despite this ambiguity, the assumption that this relationship provides a valid focus for rejectionist debate seems firmly established. The second of the two newly emphasized problematics within contemporary rejectionism turns on the question ‘What is it to be a member of a racial minority and British?’. This question received one of its most interesting answers in a 1983 Conservative Party election poster (see also Gilroy, 1987, for discussion). The poster showed a photograph of a smartly dressed young Afro-Briton wearing, as Gilroy (ibid.) has observed, the kind of unfashionable suit worn for a job interview. ‘Labour Say He’s Black’, ran the main caption, ‘Tories Say He’s British’. The rest of the text makes it clear that the poster is addressing minority voters. It explains, With the Conservatives, there are no ‘blacks’, no ‘whites’, just people…the Labour Party aim to treat you as a ‘special case’, as a group all on your own…the Conservatives believe that everyone wants to work hard and be rewarded for it. Those rewards will only come about by creating a mood of equal opportunity for everyone in Britain, regardless of their race, creed or colour. The admission of the suited youth to Britishness is made on the understanding that he has accepted and internalized the kind of cultural clichés of what it is to be an authentic, ordinary Briton constructed by rejectionists. The law-abiding, decent, everyday kind of Britishness that was developed as a national image by Powell is offered both as a role model and the price of white tolerance. However, the poster also clearly marks a departure from the Powellite conflation of ‘race’ and nation. It is suggested that a colour-blind British nationalism is possible: nationalism that can accommodate any minority group that is prepared to become culturally British. This colour-blind vision of British nationalism is not entirely new. What Paul Foot (1969:89) has described as the ‘liberal ascendancy’ within the Conservative Party, drew on internationalist, ‘multiracial’ conceptions of Britishness, derived from an imperial past, to maintain ‘racial’ assimilation at the centre of party rhetoric throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Even some Conservatives on the right of the

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party, such as Gerald Nabarro (quoted by Foot, ibid.), argued in the 1960s that ‘immigrants’ should be treated ‘as Englishmen, as neighbours, as friends, as comrades and colleagues’. However, aside from the activities of crude ‘racial’ nationalists, the meaning and de facto reality of visible minority Britishness was not directly confronted as a central issue by rejectionists within this period. The hesitancy to engage in open debate about ‘race’, a hesitancy which permeated ‘liberal’ discourse, made such discussion virtually taboo. It is within this context that the emergence of minority Britons’ cultural and national identity as a central focus amongst contemporary rejectionists may be said to reflect a novel development within this tradition. That this new emphasis has caused some confusion within rejectionist thinking, that it indicates an emerging, fragile tendency in conflict with more explicitly racialized sentiments, is indicated by the remarks of the conservative journalist T.E.Utley in his pamphlet One Nation: 100 Years On (1983). This is a very different work than the one offered by the same author in 1968, Enoch Powell: The Man and his Thinking. The latter book, although in some ways critical of Powell, recommended he be given a position in the Shadow Cabinet and suggested his ideas ‘offer the Conservatives a unique opportunity for…appealing to feelings in the country which in the long run cannot be ignored’ (p. 175). In One Nation, by contrast, Utley feels it necessary to defend a ‘non-racially’ specific nationalism alongside more familiar rejectionist themes. ‘What we have to do’, he suggests, is to develop a British nationalism so strong and generous as to enlist the loyalty of all who genuinely wish to be British. The point we have to emphasize is that British citizenship is a commitment, a complete and lifelong commitment, to our laws and customs…no Tory can accept the view that the existence within one small and homogeneous island of a huge variety of divergent cultures and religions is in itself a source of strength. The speed with which the ethnic elements are admitted to the community is a proper concern of government. But the positive task is to foster a national feeling strong enough to unite these divergent elements into a common loyalty. (Utley quoted by Rich, 1986:64) Utley’s meditation turns upon the established reality, as well as simply the unwelcome nature, of a ‘multiracial’ Britain. An acerbic


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rephrasing of his position was made by the Conservative MP Norman Tebbit in April 1990. Tebbit’s proposal for testing the acceptability of minority Britons was couched in the innocuous language of sport. His ‘cricket test’ of authentic Britishness was, quite simply, ‘which side do they cheer for?’ (quoted by Troyna and Hatcher, 1991:287). Only if it was England and not, for example, India or the West Indies, were ‘they’ proper Britons. Clearly, as with the Conservative election poster, the vision Utley and Tebbit offer of a ‘colour-blind’ nationalism is firmly tied to a rejectionist project to eradicate the foreignness from minority peoples. Moreover, as Gordon and Klug (no date, p. 59) note, this message carries the veiled threat ‘that those who cannot—or will not—be “absorbed” must go’. Nevertheless, by attempting to speak for a deracialized notion of Britishness, this same project makes problematic any direct equation of ‘race’ and nation. Thus, although drawing on the same stereotypes as Powell or the Teddy Boys, it is a rejectionist vision that grudgingly accepts the concept and reality of ‘non-white’ Britishness. One of the principal characteristics of contemporary rejectionism is its ambiguity. Far from being a rigid or static orthodoxy, rejectionism is mutable, open to change and challenge. As this implies, both the possibility of a reaffirmation of ‘blood and soil’ nationalism and the further development of an assimilationist, ‘colour-blind’ rejectionism are left open. It is against this background that it is necessary to note the emergence of an important new influence on British rejectionism (and anti-racism), the phenomenon of ‘Euro-racism’. A note on Euro-racism Despite minority groups’ success in establishing themselves, in the eyes of some rejectionists, as an unavoidable component of British society, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw a reassertion of overt ‘racial’ exclusionism. Fears of renewed primary immigration into Europe have fed into the creation of a political climate in which the expression of explicitly ‘race’ reductionist forms of rejectionism have become increasingly ubiquitous and institutionalized throughout the continent. This phenomenon has been most graphically illustrated by the electoral success of extreme rightwing groups in several Western European countries (for example, Vlaans Blok in Belgium; the Freedom Party in Austria; the MSI and the League of the North in

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Italy). The rise of such groups has tended to be paralleled by the introduction of tighter government restrictions on immigrants and refugees (see Joly and Cohen, 1990). In Germany, where the overtly racist Republikanner Party made significant electoral gains in the late 1980s, a cross-party anti-immigration consensus has emerged to restrict the entry of refugees and make visas mandatory for citizens of all non-Western countries (Räthzel, 1990). The most extensive incorporation of an overtly rejectionist political party into the mainstream political arena has occurred in France (Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1991). The Front National has secured significant gains in both local and national elections (for example, 14.4 per cent of the first round vote in the 1989 presidential election). Moreover, as in Germany, the success of this party’s anti-immigration and pro-repatriation platform has encouraged others to adopt more restrictive immigration policies (see Lloyd and Waters, 1991). This tendency had become so entrenched by the beginning of the 1990s that the leader of the Front National was able to position himself as, in his own words, ‘the leader of the [political] centre’ (Le Pen quoted by Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (CARF), 1991a:3). And yet tracing developments within individual European states offers only a partial insight into the rise of Euro-racism. For these moves towards militant rejectionism have taken place in the context of the integration of the European Community (EC) and the emergence of pan-EC immigration, refugee and social surveillance controls (see Gordon, 1989a; Balibar, 1991; Bunyan, 1991; Webber, 1991). Reflecting this trend, the British Prime Minister, John Major (quoted by CARF, 1991b:2), argued, at a European Summit in June 1991, for the construction of a ‘perimeter fence’ around Europe to protect the continent from immigrants. In fact, in the year of his address, Major’s request was already near fulfilment. The ad-hoc Committee on Immigration, comprising ministers from the EC states, had already drafted the 1990 Dublin Convention introducing measures designed to make it impossible for asylum seekers to request assistance in more than one EC country. A common visa policy and security measures designed to restrict the entry and movement of ‘undesirables’ within the EC were also nearly complete. The integration of Europe may have established the basis for a third new point of emphasis within British rejectionism, a quasinationalistic assertion of a European ‘us’ and a non-European


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‘them’. Although this tendency remains tentative, it is pertinent to note that, as the EC has moved towards greater integration, expressions of nationalism and ‘racial’ rejectionism in the British press have developed a heightened sense of European identity. Thus, for example, a series of articles in the Daily Mail in October 1991, titled The Invasion of Europe’ detailed a ‘flood of immigrants’ threatening to engulf ‘our’ continent. One headline in the paper (7 October 1991) exclaimed ‘Out of Africa and onto our Doorsteps’. Where once the word ‘Europe’ in a popular British newspaper would have been equated with ‘mainland’ Europe, and the word ‘our’ with ‘British’, now the meaning of these terms are more ambiguous. ‘Europe’, it is implied, includes ‘us’. According to an established popular mythology and isolationist rhetoric, the ‘continent’, ‘Europe’ and the ‘wogs’ all begin at Calais. Other myths may now be being combined with, or simply replacing, this Britcentric imagery. Europe is being resignified as white Britons’ homeland, a place to be defended from foreign invasion. Rejectionism assessed It is, perhaps, tempting to view ‘racial’ rejectionism as a perfectly co-ordinated system of unambiguous ‘racial’ exclusion and inclusion. Scientific racism, the Teddy Boy’s hatred and fear of ‘spades’, Powell’s vision of an authentic ‘national-racial’ Britishness, Casey’s fears about anti-authoritarian West Indians; each of these themes may be said to parallel and complement one another. Moreover, by making a rejectionist myth of Britishness its central point of reference, the less ‘race’ reductionist approach exemplified by the Conservative Party election poster, cited earlier, can be seen to draw on the same set of assumptions. And yet this model of rejectionism as coherent and monolithic only captures a partial truth. For the rejectionist project is also an ambiguous one, historically fluid and prone to internal contradiction. It is a tradition in which, for example, the conflation of ‘race’ and nation has been partially disrupted by a tendency towards an assimilationist nationalism. The fluidity of rejectionism has also been reflected in the subjects rejectionists have chosen to speak for. Overt invocations of ‘natural law’ have largely been superseded by the figure of the authentic, ordinary white Briton. More recently this latter figure has been combined with other, equally mythological, subjects, such as the assimilated minority, a

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somewhat tentative ‘colour-blind’ nationalism and, as indicated in my note on Euro-racism, an emergent sense of European identity. Evidently, who or what rejectionists speak for is not a fait accompli. Indeed, the assertion of Euro-racism could yet turn the notion of ‘non-white’ Britishness from a novel problematic for some rejectionists into a contradiction in terms. SPEAKING FOR OTHER CULTURES AND BLACK RESISTANCE: MULTICULTURALISM AND ANTI-RACISM ‘Racial’ rejectionists draw on a wide repertoire of stereotypes and assumptions in order to speak for their various subjects. However, these stereotypes and assumptions, like those associated with sexism and homophobia, have not gone unchallenged. With the rise of a series of liberation movements in the twentieth century, a politics that self-consciously identifies and subverts sexist, racist and homophobic forms of representation has been made possible. As Susan Bordo (1990:137) suggests, by demanding to speak in their own right and from the experiences of their respective constituencies, activists within these movements have been, ‘responsible for uncovering the pretensions and illusion of the ideals of epistemological objectivity, foundations, and neutral judgement’ within dominant white, Western, male, heterosexual common sense. By legitimizing ‘unheard voices, suppressed narratives’, Bordo continues, these liberation movements have attempted to expose ‘the perspectivity and partiality of the official accounts’. Yet it is not only rejectionists who have tried to reify the act of interpretation through the creation of ‘official accounts’. Radicals and liberals have also effaced their re-presentations by positioning themselves simply as conduits for abstract moral imperatives or other people’s needs and values. These acts of self-erasure have recently been made more visible through the development of a debate on the construction of the ‘Third World’ subject. The work of Spivak (1988a; 1989; 1990; see also O’Hanlon, 1988) is particularly relevant in this respect. Spivak points to the way Western and non-Western radicals have sought both to construct, and situate themselves as the voice of non-élite, colonial and postcolonial subjects (a group Spivak calls the subaltern). Visions of the subaltern as the resisting ‘Other’, as ‘the revolutionary mirror-image of the Western Self (Lowe et al., 1990:83), are challenged by


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Spivak. In the light of this critique, she argues (1988a:275), ‘The banality of leftist intellectuals’ lists of self-knowing, politically canny subalterns stands revealed; representing them, the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent’. Thus Spivak problematizes any easy dismissal of critical self-consciousness in favour of simple, unreflexive, affirmations of speaking for the marginalized or oppressed. The two ways of speaking for the marginalized and oppressed I want to discuss are multiculturalism and, in more detail, antiracism. In the ideal-typical forms presented here, multiculturalism is understood as an ideology which speaks for ‘other’ cultures and the principle of cultural inclusion. Anti-racism is portrayed as speaking for Black resistance and against White racism. As my employment of the concept of ideal-typicality implies I have not sought to explicate the complex, intersecting and heterogeneous ways anti-racism and multiculturalism have been applied in practice. Instead I have tried to distill one or two of the most characteristic aspects of each of these approach’s re-presentations of visible minority and majority identities. Later chapters will detail the many ideological parallels that exist between multiculturalism and anti-racism and make it clear that, in schools and colleges, few activists hold unambiguous positions in the education for ‘race’ equality debate. Cultural inclusion: the multiculturalist mode of representation Multiculturalism is the mode of representation of cultural difference and inclusivity. Within Britain multiculturalism has been associated with a model of society as a mosaic, a tapestry of equally valued but discrete cultures. As this emphasis on culture implies, it is in terms of language, tradition, religion and history that difference has been recognized. Different political agendas have tended to be ignored. Robert Jeffcoate (1974), one of the most influential exponents of multiculturalism in education, explains that the immigration of people ‘differing both racially and culturally from the indigenous population’ has encouraged some teachers to introduce changes that cover ‘everything from multifaith assemblies to various shades of ethnic study’ (p. 9). An editorial in the multiculturalist journal Multiracial School in 1972 (p. 1) echoed similar sentiments:

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Representations Our traditional curriculum must be reconsidered so that we give a fairer picture of the achievements of civilizations and cultures other than our own—their history, their modern economic achievements, their religious traditions, their wealth of literature, story, music, dance, art, costume, and cuisine.

Despite this editorial’s references to ‘our’ and ‘their’ cultures, multiculturalists are not all white. However, minority advocates have tended to speak about the nature of culture in the same way (see, for example, Parekh, 1975; 1986; Avari, 1989). Cultures are viewed as having what Maurice Craft (1984:15) calls ‘intrinsic validity’. In other words, cultures have a deep, authentic form with an established repertoire of ‘norms, values and traditions’ (ibid.). This interpretation leads to a view of the multiculturalist as a cultural explorer and/or retriever. As the remarks of Jeffcoate and Multiracial School indicate, the latter process, that of retrieval, has tended to take place on the level of cultural artefact (for example, literature, dance and cuisine). The multiculturalist as explorer extends and supports this kind of activity by taking ‘us’ into ‘the field’, i.e. into direct contact with minorities’ ‘living cultures’ and ‘ways of life’. For those who wish to embark on such a voyage multiculturalism comes to resemble ethnographic participant observation. Thus, for example, another educationalist, John Dolan (1983:433) notes that, the teacher needs to meet and mingle with those whose life perspectives are embedded in a culture different from the teacher’s own, for only then can the presence and validity of ‘others’ be properly known. The multiculturalist thus assumes the position not of an interpreter of different cultures and political agendas, but of an intellectual window onto another world. Thus we may look through multiculturalists to other people, other cultures, for they themselves are transparent. An interesting defence of this process is articulated by Jeffcoate in his book Positive Image (1979). ‘Other cultures and nations’, he explains, ‘have their validity and should be described in their own terms. Whenever possible they should be allowed to speak for themselves and not be judged exclusively against British and European norms’ (p. 33). Jeffcoate implies that affirmations of pluralism should not be


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identified with acts of cultural ventriloquism. It is clearly important to him that ‘they’ speak for ‘themselves’. And yet, as Jeffcoate’s concern with cultural and national ‘validity’ implies, he is representing ‘them’ in a particular way. Indeed, within Positive Image, ‘they’ tend to be given the opportunity to speak only through ethnic categories; ‘as’ West Indians, ‘as’ Sikhs and so on. Thus, although letting ‘them’ speak for themselves may initially appear to be a way of by-passing the multiculturalist, this impression is misleading. Multiculturalists’ re-presentations are intrinsic to the enactment of their vision; they may not have written the script but multiculturalism, in the school as elsewhere, is their performance. Letting others speak for themselves can thus be understood as a way of deleting what should be explicit, the multiculturalists’ participation in an act of interpretation. As noted by anti-racist critics (for example, Troyna and Williams, 1986; Mullard, 1985; Cole, 1986), the reifying tendencies within multiculturalists’ approach to culture have frequently led to a celebration of ‘other cultures’ as ‘racially’ discrete and static. Thus Mike Cole (1986:124) has suggested that multiculturalism tends to lack an historical dimension and thereby ignores the dynamic nature of culture, of forms of resistance and struggle within cultures…. The school (and the classroom) is seen as a neutral arena and all that remains is for the teacher to provide the right materials, to ‘teach’ a list of unchanging attributes… [of] black culture. Cole also notes, quoting Hazel Carby (1980a), that multiculturalists’ view of the exotic ‘other’ is paralleled by a vision of white British culture as a ‘homogeneous national culture innocent of class or gender differences’. The reluctance to critically examine white British culture was most conspicuous within the early phase of multiculturalism (before, that is, the movement became influenced by anti-racism). Throughout the 1970s Multiracial School carried virtually no commentary on the numerous cultures of that vast majority of Britons who might be cast as aboriginals. In part, this negligence reflected an unwillingness to deconstruct the rejectionist mythology of a monolithic, authentic white British identity. Ironically, this unwillingness was most apparent when, albeit momentarily, multiculturalists did allude to the existence of ‘a white culture’. On such occasions a noticeable evasiveness

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marked the discussion. One, perhaps seemingly inconsequential, yet indicative, example of this evasiveness surrounded four words articulated by the multiculturalist pioneer June Derrick. At a multicultural conference in 1974 Derrick (quoted by Lucas, 1975a:2) momentarily called teachers’ attention to the need to examine what she termed the ‘ white moral ethnic culture’. The fact that no such examination was, in fact, developed by Derrick, or within the wider multiculturalist movement in the early 1970s is, I would suggest, already anticipated in her tantalizingly brief remark. For there are so many different and unexplicated categories contained in Derrick’s statement that even a general picture of what a ‘white, moral, ethnic culture’ consists of becomes difficult to envision. In effect, Derrick’s density of expression throws up a protective screen, deflecting attention away from ‘white British culture’ and back to more familiar territory, the exotic artefacts and life-worlds of visible minorities. The compact nature of Derrick’s language, her collapsing of terms such as ‘white’ and ‘culture’, suggest that she is conflating multiculturalism with ‘multiracialism’. In fact a de facto acceptance that ‘a study of cultural difference is the same as confronting the racial dimension’ (Richards, 1982:223) permeated multiculturalism and further subverted any embryonic interest that some multicultural writers may have incubated concerning the nature of white identity (see, for example, Craft, 1984). Indeed, the word ‘multiracial’ has frequently been used as a synonym for ‘multicultural’. Thus, the National Association for Multiracial Education was, strictly speaking, advocating multicultural education, as was its journal Multiracial School. Multiculturalists’ equation of culture with ‘race’ strengthens the impression that culture was perceived within the movement as ‘racially’ discrete and historically static. Thus, despite its hostility to ‘racial’ exclusionism, multiculturalism perpetuates rejectionism’s static understanding of culture as well as its tendency to conflate ‘race’ and culture. Moreover, by positioning themselves as conduits for ‘other’ cultures multiculturalists have obscured their own involvement in the act of social re-presentation. Their ideas are presented as reflections of an unproblematic, common-sense reality. However, a reticence to expose one’s representations as representations has not been limited to multiculturalists or rejectionists. Anti-racists, despite their valuable critiques of the latter two projects, have also shown themselves eager to ‘speak for’.


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Black and White: the anti-racist mode of representation It is possible to identify two central tendencies within British antiracism. The difference between them is marked by dissimilar, if logically not mutually exclusive, understandings of the causes of racism. For whilst some anti-racists have viewed racism as an expression of misinformation and personal prejudice, others have argued that racism is an integral part of British social, economic and political life. The former approach is closely associated with the work of the American academic Judy Katz. The title of Katz’s influential book White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-racism Training (1978) indicates the premise of her approach; that racism can be ‘educated out’ of white people through challenging and changing their attitudes. Within Britain such ideas are best known through the development of the attitude reorientation workshops known as Racism Awareness Training (RAT). Such training, introduced by many ‘multiracial’ local authorities during the 1980s, encourages white people to recognize their own racism and begin to overcome it (see Peppard, 1980; 1983). Although this approach has sometimes been ascribed a dominant position within publicly funded anti-racist initiatives (for example, Gilroy, 1990a; Sivanandan, 1985), a number of anti-racist local authorities have also maintained that racism is rooted in the political and economic structure of British society (for example, I LEA, 19 8 3a; Berkshire LEA, 19 8 3). Individualistic anti-racism has also been subject to severe criticism by many anti-racist intellectuals. Thus, for example, in his essay ‘RAT and the deg radation of black struggle’ Ambalvaner Sivanandan (1985:20; see also Gurnah, 1984), perhaps the most influential of British anti-racists, argued that ‘by reducing social problems to individual solutions’ RAT ‘passes off personal satisfaction for political liberation’. Sivanandan warned those drawn to the individualistic approach’s seemingly direct engagement with white attitudes that ‘catharsis for guilt stricken whites’ does not contribute to the ‘political black struggle against racism’ (p. 28). That Sivanandan should feel it necessary to make this warning is an indication of how the two tendencies—individualistic and self-consciously political—are woven together within the movement. Nevertheless, it is from the political current within anti-racism that its most distinct and typical representations of minority and majority identity have

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been developed. It is, accordingly, upon this tradition that this discussion will focus. The predominant tendency within ‘political’ anti-racism has been to speak for Black resistance and, relatedly, to attempt to view the minority population as ‘an imagined community of resistance’ (Cohen, 1992:73); a unified body in struggle with white racism. Thus, for example, the anti-racist teacher Farrukh Dhondy (1982:18) noted that, If I as a teacher, want to represent black culture, black values, histories, assumptions, life-style of the people I am paid to school, I am determined to start from the fact that young blacks fight the police, they refuse dirty jobs; their forms of culture gathering always bring them into conflict with the rulers of this society. A similar vision of the Black voice as a homogeneous cry of resistance was articulated by Carby in the form of a parodic dialogue between Black students and a monolithic White educational establishment. This interchange also attempts to make clear that multiculturalism is a palliative to Black anger. Schools: We’re all equal here. Black students: We know we are second-class citizens, in housing, employment and education. Schools: Oh, dear. Negative self-image. We must order books with Blacks in them. Black students: Can’t we talk about the immigration laws or the National Front? Schools: No, that’s politics. We’ll arrange some Asian and West Indian cultural evenings. (Carby, 1980b:38) As these quotations imply, one of the most important aspects of anti-racism’s representation of minority peoples is the development of a political definition of the word ‘Black’. This development (discussed in more detail below) is closely related to a problematization of the concept of ‘race’. ‘Racial’ divisions, antiracists have explained, are not a reflection of the existence of distinct ‘races’ but of the way ‘racial’ categories have been socially constructed (for example, Miles, 1982; Goldberg, 1990; Jackson and Penrose, 1993). Thus the concept of ‘race’ is understood as a


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reification, the meaning of which is historically contingent and contestable. To study ‘race’, then, is to study racialization: i.e. the process whereby social phenomena and groups are given ‘racial’ labels and meanings. Gilroy (see also Omi and Winant, 1986) explains that ‘race formation’ consists of both the racist compartmentalizing of peoples and the politics of resistance developed by collectivities who have come to identify with particular ‘racial’ labels. ‘Race formation’ (1987:38), then, refers, to the transformation of phenotypical variation into concrete systems of differentiation based on ‘race’ and colour and to the appeals to spurious biological theory which have been a feature in the history of ‘races’…[And to] the release of political forces which define themselves and organize around notions of ‘race’. The concept supports the idea that racial meanings can change, can be struggled over. Gilroy’s argument both problematizes the process of racialization and concedes that ‘race’ is a de facto axis of social conflict. The problematization of the concept of ‘race’ has allowed antiracists to abandon conventional ‘racial’ classifications and develop original forms of nomenclature. It is against this intellectual background that anti-racists in the United Kingdom have sought to resignify ‘Black’ as a political term (this resignification is sometimes signalled by the use of a capital ‘B’, a usage I adopt here). Thus ‘Black’ has been used, not as a noun for any one ‘race’, but as a term that acknowledges solidarity amongst those who experience white racism. This usage forms a reflection and appropriation of the established rejectionist practice of addressing ‘non-whites’ as a homogeneous and inferior group. Although less commonly employed, the term ‘White’ has also been adopted as a political term (for example, by Mullard, 1984; Clark and Subhan, no date) for those people or institutions which perpetuate racism. Some typical examples of the use of these neologisms may usefully be introduced to provide further insights into anti-racists’ representation of minority and majority identity. The word ‘Black’, notes Bash et al. (1985:91), designates ‘solidarity among the peoples of Caribbean, African and Asian origins who are oppressed in white British society’. Speaking as a Black person in order to legitimate his participation in the act of speaking for Black people, the sociologist Chris Mullard (1982a:7) lends his support to a similar definition of the term:

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Representations many of us would prefer to see ourselves as blacks rather than as West Indians, Asians or Africans, for this not only accentuates our common experience in Britain, but it also points to a set of explanations that cannot be presented as ethnically specific.

Thus Mullard implies that a concern with ethnic difference is a conservative force that fractures Black solidarity (see also Sivanandan, 1983; Bourne and Sivanandan, 1980). However, his definition also tells us something else. For Mullard and Bash et al. specifically equate ‘Black’ with peoples descended from the West Indies, Africa or Asia. Moreover, rather than restricting the use of the term to affirmations of ‘multiracial’ political solidarity, these authors proceed to use ‘Black’ to describe all West Indians, Africans and Asians. Thus, for example, when commenting on unemployment amongst Black people, or the size of the British Black school population, they derive the relevant figure simply by adding up the number of West Indian, African and Asian unemployed or school students. Although this approach is almost universal amongst anti-racists it points to a ‘racially’ exclusive representation of Black Britishness. The notion that anti-racism has a ‘racially’ exclusive agenda is reinforced by the two ‘common-sensical’ defences of the equation of Black with Caribbean, African and Asian peoples that may be offered; firstly, that other minority groups are not dark skinned enough to experience the worst racism and, secondly, that other visible minority communities are too small to be worthy of inclusion. Clearly, the former contention is based on stereotypes and a form of rationality alien to any attempt to define ‘Black’ politically. It is, moreover, deeply misleading. West Indian, African and Asian peoples are not the only minorities that have been rejected as ‘non-whites’ and/or ‘racially’ different by white British society. British Chinese, British Cypriots, British Turks and British Arabs, as well as white ethnic groups such as the Irish, may also claim to have suffered similar processes of discriminatory racialization. It is, in addition, important to recall that, although dark skin colour is one of the most important loci of rejectionist racialization, it is not the only attribute that has been used to divide up people into ‘races’. As noted earlier, people’s culture, even their skull shapes, have also been employed to this end. Anti-racists’ focus on Africans, West Indians and Asians cannot be defended, then, on the


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grounds that these groups have the darkest skins or/and/ therefore are the sole or principal sufferers of racism in Britain. This critique is especially pertinent when such an exclusive focus is brought into dialogue with anti-racists’ own refutation of ‘racial’ categories and the division of Black people into different ethnic factions. Far from subverting these tendencies, the separation of the ‘darkest skinned’ groups from other minorities (both white and ‘non-white’) is compatible with them. This is not to imply that anti-racists are offering Black as a ‘racial’ category. It is, however, to suggest that the group-specific definition anti-racists work with institutes a conception of Blackness constructed in terms of the membership of particular ‘racial’ groups rather than solidarity against, or the experience of, White racism. The second ‘common-sensical’ defence of the equation of ‘Black’ with ‘West Indians, Asians or Africans’ turns on the idea that these groups have been ‘picked out’ by anti-racists because, in Britain, they are the numerically largest and, therefore, the most important, of the visible minority groups. However, again, this is both an erroneous and, from an anti-racist point of view, an indefensible position. It is erroneous, firstly, because ‘Africans’ are one of the smaller visible minority groups in Britain. It is also erroneous because terms such as ‘West Indian’ or ‘Asian’ cover a wide variety of distinguishable groupings (Indians, Bangladeshis, Kenyan Asians, etc.) some of whom are numerically far smaller than, for example, the British Chinese. Moreover, the notion that the largest visible minority groups may legitimately form the exclusive axis of antiracist categorization is indefensible. Anti-racists are, after all, supposedly committed to a non-fragmented view of Black struggle, one that contests the division of oppressed peoples rather than perpetuates it. It is, moreover, pertinent to note that ‘racial’ rejectionism is not limited by the fact that a ‘racial’ group has only a few ‘representatives’ living in the United Kingdom. Thus, for example, anti-Arab sentiment is pervasive in British society (CARF, 1991c), although the British Arab community is relatively small. Thus engaging with possible defences of a ‘racially’ exclusive definition of ‘Black’ only strengthens the impression that the antiracist representation of the Black population is confused and contradictory. This contention may be developed by addressing some examples of anti-racist writing that explicitly address the need for a coherent definition of ‘Black’. Of particular interest in this regard are attempts to connect the term, not with a list of groups

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who experience racism, but with the experience of racism as such. An example of this approach is presented by Gillian Clark and Nazreen Subhan (no date). In guidelines on acceptable language and definitions within a regional arts group, they state (p. 33). Black as a political term in relation to people is not a descriptive term for the colour of skin of a person. It is a common term used to describe all people who have experienced and have a common history of: imperialism, colonialism, slavery, indentureship and racism. Clark and Subhan also propose a parallel definition of ‘White’. This word, they note, should be used as, a political term in relation to people…. Both in global terms and in the British context…. White as a political term is a term for the oppressor. Taken together these definitions provide a consistent view of antiracist political classification. However, Clark and Subhan are not able to maintain this consistency. Those who have experienced Western imperialism and its attendant oppressions include a huge variety of groups, including, for example, the Irish, Native Americans and Arabs. Yet Clark and Subhan do not regard such people as ‘Black’. ‘Black people’, they note, ‘may be African, Caribbean, Chinese or South Asian in origin’. (Interestingly, the handful of accounts that do include the Irish as Black have tended to do so tokenistically, the Irish being marginal, or entirely excluded, from these accounts’ analyses of ‘Black struggle’; for example, Sivanandan, 1983.) Although, somewhat unusually, Clark and Subhan admit the Chinese to the fold of Blackness, it is apparent that, as soon as their discussion turns from abstract categorization to a concrete list, they are proposing a ‘racially’ exclusive vision of being ‘politically’ Black. Given anti-racists’ concern with developing a political terminology of racialization, it is not surprising that the overt defence of a ‘racially’ restrictive definition of Black has been absent from anti-racist commentary. However, an interesting reflection on some of the implications of this form of categorization was produced by the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) in the seminal anti-racist documents, issued in 1983, that introduced the


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authority’s anti-racist policy. The word ‘Black’, the ILEA firstly reminded its readers, is useful because it ‘emphasizes the common experience which both Afro-Caribbean and Asian people have being victims of racism’ (1983a:19). However, Other groups who, together with the black communities, are usually referred to as ‘ethnic minorities’ also suffer varying degrees of prejudice and discrimination. These include Chinese, Greek Cypriots, Turkish Cypriots, Turks, Vietnamese, Moroccans. In a similar way, though not always to the same extent, some white ethnic groups, such as the Irish and the Jews, experience prejudice and discrimination. In using the term ‘black’…it is not the Authority’s intention to exclude any minority group. Despite the ‘Authority’s intention’ not to ‘exclude any minority group’ the ILEA’s original definition of Black, as referring to ‘AfroCaribbean and Asian people’, clearly does exclude those it refers to as ‘ethnic minorities’. However, the I LEA’s phraseology is curiously ambivalent. Groups such as the Chinese and Greek Cypriots are introduced as being usually ‘referred to as “ethnic minorities”’. It is then suggested that they may be Black. In this way the ILEA avoids responsibility for naming these peoples. The consequence of this manoeuvre is that these communities are positioned as marginal, both within British society and within anti-racist analysis. This impression is strengthened by the fact, that whilst other minorities are mentioned only rarely and briefly, ‘Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities’ are addressed by the ILEA (1983a:24) as ‘the chief victims of racism’. As with the other definitions quoted, a political definition of Black is thus combined with a ‘racially’ specific identification of Afro-Britons and British Asians as the ‘real’ Blacks. And yet British Asians’ status as Blacks has also been undermined within anti-racism. For another characteristic of the use of the term that we can draw attention to indicates that, not only has it been constructed as an ambiguous ‘racial’/political category, but that this phenomenon has been exacerbated by a tendency to find the essence of Blackness within peoples descended from subSaharan-Africa. To explain this process it is necessary to recall that the word ‘Black’ first emerged as a self-definition within the African American Black Power movement. It has subsequently been widely

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adopted in many different countries as a ‘racially’ specific noun for peoples descended from sub-Saharan Africa. It is not altogether surprising then that the British attempt to resignify Black as a political noun has retained echoes of its original meaning. Not unrelatedly, Tariq Modood (1988; 1992; see also Mason, 1990) notes that the majority of British Asians have not accepted ‘Black’ as a self-definition. Modood also draws together numerous instances of the deletion of the British Asian experience in anti-racists’ use of the term. Thus he notes how books that have promoted a politicized view of ‘racial’ formation, such as Gilroy’s ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’ (1987) and Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984), concern themselves almost exclusively with Afro-Britons. This kind of deletion has also been enacted through anti-racists’ careless but revealing combination of the term ‘Black and Asian’ with a political use of ‘Black’ (for example, Giovannone, no date). The Afrocentric current within anti-racism has also been exhibited through the positioning of African descended peoples as the most politically vigorous of Black groups. Thus, for example, Mullard (quoted by Marks, 1986:39– 40) in a vitriolic passage describing how ‘Black Britons’ are discarding their ‘yoke of humility’ adds that ‘niggers, American, British or African, will go on fighting until racism is obliterated…Black American and African campaigns have shown that the only argument which society understands is force’. A similar equation of Black resistance with ‘black’ resistance is implied by Bourne and Sivanandan (1980:345) when they suggest that ‘West Indian cultures are, by the very nature of their slave and plantation histories, anti-racist and anti-capitalist’. In the absence of comparable statements about, for example, the intrinsic radicalism of British Asian or British Chinese cultures, such affirmations are also denials. For as Afro-Britons become stereotyped as the archetypal resisters, so other minority communities are marginalized within the anti-racist struggle. CONCLUSION The phrase ‘mode of representation’, although suggestive of a critique, does not provide a criticism. Interpretation is intrinsic to every act of communication. In delineating a mode of representation we can, however, engage with issues that do invoke critical judgements. For example, we can show how a particular


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mode of representation constructs its categories through ‘racially’ exclusionist rationalities. Such is the case with each of the three modes of representation I have discussed. We can also criticize a mode of representation for obscuring its interpretative nature, a process often enacted through claims to speak directly for a particular subject. The subjects we have seen being spoken for in this way include natural law, authentic white/ British identity, cultural ‘others’ and Black resistance. Each of these examples constitutes an effacement of the process of interpretation, an effacement that allows the act of representation to become one of appropriation, a kind of intellectual colonization of the subject. This analysis disrupts the authority of each of the forms of representation discussed. However, it may seem to have the greatest consequences for anti-racism, the mode of representation most closely associated with a non-appropriative, politically radical ‘racial’ politics. We have seen that anti-racists have represented minority and majority identities in specific ways. They have adopted the notion of Black resistance and set this construction against an equally monolithic notion of White racism. However, like rejectionism and multiculturalism, these ideas collapse different rationalities of difference. The terms ‘Black’ and ‘White’ have been used as both a ‘racially’ exclusive and as a political terminology. To be Black, to be spoken for within anti-racist debate, one needs to be either Afro-British or British Asian. Moreover, to be archetypally Black, one needs to be Afro-British and engaged in political resistance to White racism. The further away from this vision a minority’s identity is assumed to be, the more peripheral its place within the anti-racist mode of representation. This has led to the marginalization of communities and forms of consciousness, such as religious and other cultural affiliations, that are considered outside the terrain of Black struggle. As we shall see, these characteristics of the anti-racist mode of representation have made it vulnerable to charges both of marginalizing minority groups’ ‘own’ agendas and of alienating white support. At the same time anti-racists’ tendency towards political radicalism has made it the target of an unremitting and deceitful campaign by the New Right and Conservative press. The development of a state of crisis within the anti-racist movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s may be seen as the result of each of these factors; a product both of its own rationalities and a confrontation with a powerful political antagonist. Although these

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points of crisis are not necessarily complementary they have combined to produce a period of considerable retreat and intellectual self-doubt. In the next chapter I outline each of the three main areas of crisis within anti-racism—the conservative assault, isolationism and the ‘new ethnic assertiveness’—and assess their impact upon the anti-racist mode of representation.

Chapter 2


INTRODUCTION This chapter looks at some of the causes and proposed cures for the crisis within the anti-racist movement. Three anti-racist dilemmas are identified: conservative entrenchment; the isolation of anti-racism from the wider community and what Tariq Modood (1990a) has termed the ‘new ethnic assertiveness’. By the end of the 1980s these tendencies had created a period of intense selfquestioning and self-doubt amongst British anti-racists. This process has, in turn, provoked a new willingness to openly debate the political orientation of the anti-racist project. At the end of this chapter I look at two such reassessments—one leaning toward a radicalized anti-racism, the other pointing towards a depoliticized anti-racism—and consider their critique of anti-racist orthodoxy. THREE DILEMMAS: THE CONSERVATIVE ASSAULT, ISOLATION AND THE ‘NEW ETHNIC ASSERTIVENESS’ The conservative assault The two main manifestations of the conservative challenge are within the fields of legislature and the press. In terms of the resourcing of anti-racist initiatives, the most damaging of these developments has been the first (see Ball et al., 1990). Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s the British education and social welfare system has been the subject of numerous policy interventions by Conservative governments. Although many of these interventions were specifically designed to curb the autonomy of Labour47

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controlled local authorities they have succeeded in winning the tacit acceptance of many within the Labour leadership (Hatcher, 1989; 1990). Viewing the activities of anti-racist radicals as an electoral liability, centre-left politicians have increasingly sought to avoid contesting the Conservative Party’s ‘race’ and education agenda. Thus the Conservatives have been able to dictate the hegemonic common sense on anti-racism within mainstream British politics, a common sense that has specifically targeted anti-racist ‘extremism’ in local government as a focus of concern. Introducing a package of educational reforms in 1987, Margaret Thatcher told a Conservative Party conference that young people’s opportunity for a ‘decent education’ is all too often snatched from them by hard-left education authorities and extremist teachers. Children who need to be able to count and multiply are learning anti-racist mathematics, whatever that may be. (Quoted by Tomlinson, 1990:90) The abolition of the two local authorities that had the most developed and influential anti-racist policies in the United Kingdom (if not Europe), the Greater London Council and the Inner London Education Authority, in 1986 and 1990 respectively, provides one of the most striking examples of the Conservatives’ determination to root out anti-racist radicalism from local politics. However, the most effective and far-reaching measures introduced to curtail anti-racist initiatives have been the imposition of financial constraints on local authorities and the introduction of the 1988 Education Reform Act. I will briefly outline each of these interventions in turn. Constraints on local spending have been enacted principally through the introduction of reduced and prescriptive central government grants. The ‘permissive’ role central government has traditionally played in its financial support of local authorities has been replaced by a far more interventionist approach. Thus, for example, in order to obtain Educational Support Grants (introduced in 1984) local education authorities have had to shape their grant applications to the national government’s political priorities. Not surprisingly, as Ball et al. (1990:89) explain, ‘a bid reflecting a high profile commitment to anti-racist work simply will not succeed’. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the introduction of a flat-rate local tax levied on all British residents (1988 Local Government Finance


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Act) had a similar effect on local autonomy. The new form of taxation (substantially modified in 1992) redirected council resources away from budget areas deemed inessential or politically controversial. The Conservative government’s placing of financial ceilings on councils’ taxation plans added to the pressure to cut back on such items of expenditure. Anti-racist programmes and services were amongst the first to be marked for contraction or abolition by increasingly pragmatic Labour councils. Thus, for example, in a survey of the crisis within local government sponsored anti-racism, Richard Hatcher (1989) reported that, in March 1989, Birmingham’s Labour-controlled education department moved to cut its central support services (consisting of some 200 teachers) and thus substantially reduce city-wide anti-racist provision. Similar reductions took place in many metropolitan LEAs throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. The net effect, Hatcher (1989:25) concludes, has been ‘devastating for anti-racism as an official reform movement’. The challenge to anti-racism in the field of education has been intensified by the introduction of the 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA). Signifying its departure from traditional educational goals, the Secretary of State for Education, Kenneth Baker (1987:9), introduced this piece of legislation at the 1987 Conservative Party Annual Conference with the words ‘the pursuit of egalitarianism is now over’. Baker went on to explain that ‘education is not just about acquiring academic and technological skills. It is also about a return to the underlying values of our society.’ Although the Act, with its 238 clauses and 13 schedules, is a labyrinthine legislative edifice, its main provisions may be stated in outline as follows: to introduce a national curriculum; to allow schools to opt out of LEA control; to relate government grants to schools to schools’ ability to attract students; to decentralize to schools, from LEAs, financial and staff-hiring decisions. The implications of the E RA have been a matter of some contention amongst anti-racists. There are those, like Beverly Anderson (1989), who have argued that the National Curriculum has opened up new opportunities for nation-wide anti-racist instruction. Anderson’s contention is, in part, supported by the fact that, despite Kenneth Baker’s own priorities, multicultural education was explicitly recognized and endorsed by the consultation reports issued for the science and English components of the National Curriculum (see National Curriculum Council, 1988; DES, 1988a).

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However, the majority of anti-racists have viewed the ERA as a serious threat to ‘race’ equality initiatives (Troyna and Hatcher, 1991; Eggleston, 1990; Hatcher, 1989). They point to the total exclusion of an anti-racist perspective from the National Curriculum and the marginalization of multiculturalism in most subjects. In the case of history teaching, for instance, multicultural input was specifically singled out as inappropriate. Parents, it was explained, wish to see their children’s education dominated by ‘a British dimension that supplies the framework of experience in political, social and economic and cultural terms’ (National Curriculum Interim Report quoted by Grinter, 1990:205). The mathematics component of the National Curriculum similarly excludes multiculturalism, although this time because it ‘could confuse young people’ (DE S, 1988b). In the light of public suspicion of multiculturalism and anti-racism these kinds of appraisal are also likely to affect the practice of other aspects of the ERA. Thus, for example, anti-anti-racist and ‘racial’ rejectionist attitudes are liable to be reflected in parents’ decisions concerning where to send their children to school (see MacLeod, 1991) and school governors’ preferences when hiring staff. Although the public’s aversion to anti-racism may be traced to a variety of rejectionist rationalities it draws us into consideration of the second front in the assault on anti-racism, the development of a media and intellectual campaign vilifying the movement. In a series of books (for example, Palmer, 1986; Lewis, 1988) and conservative journals (most influentially the Salisbury Review), New Right intellectuals have taken issue with the ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘extremism’ of anti-racism. However, the anti-anti-racist perspective has received its most prominent and influential articulation in the popular press. A high profile campaign against anti-racism continued throughout the 1980s in nearly all tabloid and, if less vociferously, broadsheet, newspapers (see Murray, 1986; Gordon, 1990). The two central themes that were developed within this campaign were (a) that anti-racism is a product of the extreme left and (b) that anti-racism is anti-white and anti-British. These themes were generally presented in the language of ridicule, a stance encapsulated in the name the tabloid press gave to anti-racists—the ‘loony left’. The tone of ridicule was also evident in the kind of news items about anti-racism the press chose to highlight. Nancy Murray (1986:8) provides us with an example concerning antiracists’ supposed desire to ban Tufty the Squirrel:


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over fifty articles sending up the left—some a full page long— appeared in the national and regional press when there was an alleged leak from Lambeth Council that it was about to ban its road safety symbol, Tufty the Squirrel, on the grounds that it was both ‘racist and sexist’. The fact that the story was bogus did not deter the papers, which found Tufty irresistible. Other ‘loony-left’ stories appeared in connection with the alleged banning, by left-wing London authorities, of the nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep, along with black garbage bags and all reference to black coffee in staff canteens (cited by Gordon, 1990). Similar reports were published concerning local councils’ plans to multiculturalize London street names. Thus, for example, the Sun reported (7 September 1985) that Hackney Council, in East London, was going to transform Britannia Walk to Shaheed-EAzam Nhagot Singh Avenue. However, it was anti-racist activity in education that drew the most critical comment. Innovative anti-racist policies by local education authorities, such as Brent and the ILEA, were vilified as ‘bigoted and oppressive’ (the Evening Standard, quoted by Richardson, 1992:138). At the same time national heroes were made of educators who transgressed multicultural or anti-racist guidelines. Thus, for example, when headteacher Ray Honeyford was suspended from his position at a predominantly British Asian school in Bradford for publicly airing his derogatory opinions about the cultural background of his pupils (Honeyford, 1983; 1984; for discussion see Foster-Carter, 1987; Halstead, 1988), he was widely heralded as a political martyr, a plain-speaking man persecuted by anti-racists on a ‘McCarthyite witch-hunt’ (the Daily Mail, 17 June 1985). Anti-anti-racist news items, repeated almost every day in one of the mass-circulation newspapers, had a profound effect on the image of anti-racism. As with central government interventions, anti-anti-racism established anti-racism as a political liability in the eyes of many local authorities. Thus, for example, Sikora (1988:52) reports one official in a local authority in the English North West admitting that, ‘to openly declare itself anti-racist the Authority might suffer the consequences of being branded “left wing” and “extremist” and experience…negative treatment from central government and the media’. ‘Afraid of the gutter press’, notes Herman Ouseley (1992:132), local

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authorities have retreated into a ‘survivalist culture’. This ‘survivalist culture’ dictates that they must ‘lie low’, avoid upsetting central government or the press, and stress financial prudency over egalitarian social initiatives. ‘No longer wishing to be dubbed by the mass media the “loony left”’, Ouseley (ibid.) explains, local councils now stress ‘cost effectiveness, value for money, rationalization…poverty and discrimination are shunned terminology’. However, despite this conservative assault, it would be misleading to dismiss the crisis of anti-racism as the result purely of attacks by its political enemies. Certain tendencies inherent within the anti-racist mode of representation need also to be considered. It will be recalled that the anti-racist mode of representation constructs a monolithic Black subject, a construction that contains a propensity to conflate ‘racial’ and political categories. Two problems that arise from this stance are (a) the isolation of anti-racism from the wider community and, (b) an inability to respond to minority groups’ assertion of cultural and religious identities. Both these tendencies will now be considered in more detail. Isolationism The anti-racist mode of representation’s conflation of ‘racial’ and political themes and dualistic vision of White and Black identity combine to create a view of white people as inherently politically suspect. Since this tendency is intrinsic to these representations, this attitude persists whether racism is considered to be an individual or a socio-economic phenomenon. Thus, irrespective of their political allegiances or actions, W/white people, and ‘their’ institutions, become the legitimate targets of perpetual political distrust. The atmosphere the rigorous pursuit of this form of anti-racism can produce is described by Lansley et al. (1989) in their account of ‘race’ equality initiatives within Brent, a London borough whose anti-racist policies acknowledged racism as both an individual and political phenomenon. Accusations of racism against teachers and officials were commonplace. The exercise of professional judgement became increasingly difficult for fear that any form of criticism, however constructive, might be wrongly construed. There were no checks on the abuse of power in this climate. Demoralization was widespread…. Politicians, teachers and administrators were all


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seen as guilty [of being] ‘outright racists[’]…. Teachers and heads left in droves, and posts were difficult to fill. (pp. 134–6) Disaffection with anti-racism was not confined to professional workers. Considerable insight into anti-racism’s alienation from the white working class has been provided by the Burnage Report (Macdonald et al., 1989a). The report draws together the findings of an investigation into a single act of racist violence. In September 1986 Ahmed Iqbal Ullah, a 13-year-old British Asian student, was stabbed to death in the playground of his Manchester school (Burnage High School) by Barren Coulburn, a white student of the same age. The school had an anti-racist policy at the time of the murder but, as the Burnage Report later revealed, the policy failed to engage with the concerns of white students or parents (for further discussion see Nelson, 1990; Troyna and Hatcher, 1992a). The Burnage Report, written by four individuals sympathetic to and/or active within the anti-racist movement, argued that the approach taken within the school was one in which ‘white students were all seen as “racist”, whether they are ferret-eyed fascists or committed anti-racists’ (Macdonald et al., 1989b:22). This perspective, the report continued, ‘excludes white students and parents from the process of anti-racism and absolves them from responsibility for an anti-racist education’ (p. 23). The report specifically charged, moreover, that Burnage High School’s policy alienated and marginalized white working-class parents and students. It explained (p. 33): To deal with sex and race, but not class, distorts those issues. Disadvantage can only be dealt with if it slots neatly into a race or sex pigeon hole. All grievances, if they are to be remedied, become issues of racism or sexism, even when the causes are much more complex. This ostrich-like analysis of the complex of social relations leaves white working class males completely in the cold. They fit nowhere. They become all-time losers. Their interests as a group are nowhere catered for. That, surely, is a recipe for division and polarization, particularly in the area of anti-racist policies. Unsurprisingly the press seized on the Burnage Report as an indictment of anti-racism (see Gordon, 1989b). The report’s criticisms were equated both with the idea that Burnage High

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School’s ‘Anti-racism policy “led to killing”’ (the Daily Telegraph, 26 April 1988) and, in the words of Ray Honeyford, ‘that anti-racist policies are a disaster’ (Daily Mail, 26 April 1988). Clearly, this reaction represents a gross distortion. Yet the opportunity and plausibility of this distortion emerged from the fact that the committee of inquiry had identified a failure within the anti-racist policies implemented at Burnage High School to engage with the white working class. As this implies, anti-racism’s isolationist tendencies make it vulnerable to criticisms both from those antipathetic and those sympathetic to the movement. The ‘new ethnic assertiveness’ The challenge to the anti-racist notion of a homogeneous Black voice has reflected a much broader challenge to British society. This challenge has been widely interpreted as a ‘new ethnic assertiveness’ (Modood, 1990a:148) formed around issues of culture and religion. In the United States, the assertion of African American ethnicity is perhaps the most publicized example of this tendency. An example of this assertion is the decline in the acceptability of ‘black’ as a noun for African Americans. The term has increasingly been rejected on the basis that it fails to convey a sense of African Americans’ cultural heritage and identity. The phrase ‘African American’ has emerged as a suitably ethnically sensitive replacement. In Britain the most active ethnic assertions have emanated from sections of the Muslim community. There are about a million Muslims in the United Kingdom (although see Peach, 1990), twothirds of whom are British Asians (Modood, 1990a). The establishment of the Islamic Party of Great Britain in 1989 (the party fielded five candidates in the 1992 General Election) and the inauguration of a 155-member unelected ‘Muslim Parliament of Great Britain’ in 1992 are the most striking examples of the rise of Islamic political self-consciousness in the United Kingdom (see Khanum, 1992). However, the two issues that have been at the centre of the debate about Muslim identity have been the campaign for state-sponsored Muslim schools and against the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. Pressure for separate schools has manifested itself in both the rise in private institutions (there were eight private Muslim schools in 1983 and fifteen in 1989; Arkwright, 1990) and the emergence


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of a campaign for government financial support for Muslim schools (Halstead, 1986). An explicitly Islamic form of education, campaigners have claimed, is necessary in order to maintain religiosity amongst Muslim youth in a secular society. Within the existing state system, Ashraf and Husain (1979:3) note, secular text books and courses and even methods of teaching are creating doubts in the minds of students about the fundamental tenets and assumptions of Islam instead of reinforcing faith in God and purifying the sensibility by removing confusion and contradiction. However, the demand for separate Muslim provision cannot be traced simply to the desire for a religious education. The need for separate schools has also been rationalized in recognizably antiracist terms. Thus, at a conference organized by the Muslim Educational Council in 1989, the Muslim educationalist Saleh Sanjel (quoted by Arkwright, 1990:29) argued that separate provision was needed in order to avoid the ‘overt and covert individual and institutional racism’ within the state system. As this remark indicates, anti-racist and theological ambitions have sometimes overlapped in the campaign for an Islamic education. A similar combination of secular and religious considerations can be seen to have woven its way through the Rushdie affair. The campaign organized against the publication and distribution of Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, on the grounds that it blasphemed against Islam, has driven home the importance of religion as an axis of identity amongst minorities in a Eurocentric society. Noting the prominent role British Asian youth played in the campaign against the book, Modood (1990a:148; see also Alibhai, 1989) points out that, ‘Asian teenagers…are beginning to say “so far it is we who have had to make all the changes, now it is the turn of the British to change to accept the fact of our existence”’. This challenge extends to those anti-racists who, in affirming Black unity and solidarity, marginalized British Asian identity and the plurality of Black opinion. It undermines the monolithic Black subject, a subject that denies issues of cultural and religious difference. As Simon Cottle (1991:46) noted in the radical antiracist journal Race and Class, the campaign against The Satanic Verses ‘has contributed to unsettling both liberal complacencies and radical orthodoxies alike’.

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For anti-racists the irony of the Rushdie affair was that it expressed both militant Black resistance and a challenge to the antiracist mode of representation. Summarizing this crisis of representation, Modood (1990b:92) argues that orthodox anti-racists have seemed unable to recognize that it is ethnic communities, no less than colour and class, that lie at the heart of race and race relations today. The root of this inability lies in creating race exclusively from the point of view of the dominant whites and failing to recognize that those who white people treat as no more than the raw material of racist categorization have indeed a mode of being of their own which defies reduction to racist categorization. Thus Modood turns the tables on those who would reify Black people as the resistant Other of White racism by arguing that this perspective denies minority groups their own voice. Indeed, in the context of Modood’s argument, some anti-racists’ recent attempts to dismiss the ‘new ethnic assertiveness’ as a ‘narcissistic celebration’ (Gilroy, 1990a:200), and as betokening ‘a general retreat into the dubious comfort of ethnic particularity’ (Gilroy, 1990b:271), begin to sound like the defensive hyperbole of a movement wrong-footed by its own constituency. RETHINKING ANTI-RACISM I have addressed three of the most important recent challenges to anti-racism. In terms of the continued resourcing of anti-racism within local authorities, central government and anti-anti-racist interventions has been the most damaging. However, intellectually, the increasing evidence of anti-racism’s social isolation, coupled with the assertion by minority groups of religious and cultural identities, have provided the more profound problems for antiracism. Each has cast doubt on the legitimacy of attempts to construct minority peoples as a monolithic political category to be defined through its resistance to White racism. I shall now discuss some of the ways anti-racists have responded to these challenges. ‘The End of Anti-racism’ is the provocative and pessimistic title of a recent essay by Paul Gilroy. In it he describes the failure of ‘what was once an anti-racist movement’ (Gilroy, 1990a:192). In 1987, the year in which his essay was initially prepared, such fatalism was


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almost beginning to look justified. Despite the continued existence of several national anti-racist organizations and the commitment of activists in various parts of the United Kingdom, at the level of local public policy anti-racism was in retreat and on the defensive. It is hardly surprising, then, that some anti-racist commentators were beginning to consider that some kind of reorientation and reassessment was needed. I shall shortly describe two of the forms this reappraisal has taken, but first it is necessary to briefly outline why, within a few years, Gilroy’s title itself began to look dated. As noted earlier, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw an upsurge in overt ‘racial’ rejectionism. As well as the election successes of self-proclaimed racist political parties across Europe, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment, as well as ‘racial’ attacks, have all been reported to be increasing (CARF, 1991c; 1991d). This activity has stimulated a revitalization of the anti-Nazi strand within the antiracist movement. In Britain this revitalization has been signalled by the formation of two major anti-racist groupings, the Anti-racist Alliance (formed 1991) and a resurrected Anti-Nazi League (reformed 1992). Other initiatives, such as the founding of a Campaign Against Fascism in France as well as the reinvigoration of the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism and Anti-Fascist Action have also reasserted the anti-racist presence. Indeed, when placed in a European perspective, anti-racism in Britain, far from being dead, appears both theoretically sophisticated and organizationally impressive. As the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (CARF) noted in 1992, ‘Unlike in most European countries, we have developed, in Britain, a vibrant infrastructure of black and anti-racist groups and organizations whose experiences sustain and inform a wider national and international fight against racism’ (CARF, 1992:2). However the revitalization of anti-racism in Britain should not be confused with an engagement or resolution of the anti-racist crises of isolationism, the ‘new ethnic assertiveness’ or conservative attack. The dominant tendency within this activity, most clearly represented in the reformation of the Anti-Nazi League, is to develop anti-Nazi, anti-fascist campaigns rather than to address the wider politics of rejectionism and of ‘racial’ representation. By positioning itself as a response to the immediate threat of a rising tide of ‘race hate’ in Europe, the revitalized movement has largely by-passed the problems of anti-racist interpretation. It is also important to note that anti-Nazi anti-racism is not a novel approach

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but directly echoes the anti-racism of the mid-to-late 1970s, the period when the original Anti-Nazi League was formed (this phase in anti-racism is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5). Clearly the contemporary problems of anti-racist representation are unlikely to be convincingly resolved by a revival of its earlier incarnation. If the ‘new’ anti-racism is to sustain and develop its praxis and theory it will have to confront the failures of the established antiracist tradition. As I have indicated, such a confrontation is already being undertaken by some within the movement. Rather than orienting themselves towards anti-Nazi, anti-fascist campaigning, these disparate reassessments constitute attempts to construct a politically nuanced and sustainable critique of both racist and antiracist politics. Although these projects have developed a variety of trajectories, I will focus on two central tendencies: the radicalization of anti-racism and the depoliticization of anti-racism. A radicalized anti-racism Anti-racism has been criticized by several commentators for its lack of political radicalism. It has been suggested that a focus on individual ‘racial’ prejudice, combined with a tendency to disconnect ‘racial’ oppression from other social inequalities, particularly those of class, have contributed to anti-racism’s alienation of potential support. As this analysis suggests, it is around anti-racism’s crisis of isolationism that radical critics have structured their analysis. Earlier I introduced one of the principal examples of this approach, the Burnage Report on the murder of Ahmed Ullah in his Manchester school. It will be recalled that the report criticized forms of anti-racism that viewed racism simply as a moral failure and called for a less ‘racially’ reductive anti-racism, one that could engage with other forms of struggle and would be capable of speaking to and for the white working class (see also Nelson, 1990). One of the authors of the report, Gus John (1991:85), has argued that an important lesson to be drawn from Ahmed Ullah’s murder was the need ‘To develop practices informed by an understanding of the integral relationship between the struggle for social justice and the struggle for racial justice’. The Burnage Report’s critiques of individualism and ‘race’ reductionism within anti-racism have been developed by Paul Gilroy. For despite his references to ‘the end of anti-racism’, Gilroy


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has offered a vision of a revitalized anti-racism. Indeed, in the same essay, Gilroy put the case for a more politically engaged ‘race’ equality agenda. It was the conceptualization of racism as something ‘peripheral to the substance of political life’—like a ‘coat of paint’ over institutions and individuals—that Gilroy (1990a:195) argues led to the development of a persecutory approach. The assumption that, with enough moral pressure and censure, racism could be ‘scrubbed off, he suggests, gave anti-racism a ‘dictatorial character’ (p. 191). Thus Gilroy implies that only if racism is conceptualized as endemic, as at ‘the core of politics’ (ibid.), can anti-racism’s isolationist tendencies be countered. ‘The anti-racism I am criticizing’, he notes ‘trivializes the struggle against racism and isolates it from other potential antagonisms—from the contradiction between capital and labour, from the battle between men and women’ (p. 193). These radical critics suggest that the problem of isolation developed from anti-racism’s individualism and its related refusal to situate ‘racial’ conflict within wider frameworks of social struggle. At first sight this interpretation seems entirely adequate. It seems logical to suggest, for example, that viewing racism solely as a problem of individual error or immorality would lead to an alienating and moralistic political project. However, as an explanation of the anti-racist crisis of isolationism this insight is incomplete and misleading. It ignores the widespread acceptance within the anti-racist movement, including many local governments, of an understanding of racism as a political and social, as well as an individual, phenomenon. Moreover, it sidesteps the fact that a dualistic vision of Black and White political identity necessarily polarizes minority and majority groups. This polarization process proceeds whether racism is seen as an individual problem or as endemic to White institutions and socio-economic structures. Drawing out the implications of a dualistic approach for class analysis, Robert Miles (1984b:223) points out that to view ‘“black people”, “black communities” and “black masses”…as a collective in opposition to the capitalist state and “white” society’ inevitably marginalizes and undermines an appreciation of ‘non-racial’ forms of social division. Although both Gilroy and the Burnage Report are sensitive to political differences within the Black population, neither provides a critique of this dualism. Indeed, Gilroy’s (1990a:200) attack, mentioned earlier, on the ‘new ethnic assertiveness’ as a ‘narcissistic celebration’, seems to betoken a

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belief that traditional anti-racist categories need to be defended against the forces of fragmentation. A depoliticized anti-racism The view that anti-racism needs to be depoliticized has emerged in two main ways: through arguments for an ethnicized anti-racism and through arguments for a self-consciously professional antiracism. I will introduce the latter project first. A number of anti-racists have argued that anti-racism needs ‘detaching…from its Left wing moorings’ (Carrington and Short, 1989:235) and guiding to the calmer waters of professionalism and apoliticism. This position has been defended both on the basis that anti-racism will not flourish in the public (let alone the private) sector if it is perceived as solely a concern of radicals and, more proscriptively, that anti-racism should be politically unbiased. Thus, for example, in an essay considering ways forward for anti-racism in the wake of the Education Reform Act, Robin Grinter (1990:210) notes ‘anti-racist education, as good education, is not doctrinaire. It is, if anything, the very reverse, since it challenges all stereotyping from whatever political and cultural perspective.’ Grinter explicitly positions this vision in opposition to radicalism. Any injunction ‘to politicize’ the curriculum, he suggests, ‘can only be accepted if defined in terms of critical awareness and skepticism of all received opinions’. Thus the ‘most important aim for antiracist curriculum development should be to work steadily with colleagues to gain acceptance for a redefinition of “professionalism” to include anti-rac[ism]’. Similarly, Carrington and Short suggest that the ‘unease and suspicion’ (p. 228) many educators harbour about anti-racism will only be placated by ‘promoting more vigorously those principles that demonstrate the compatibility of anti-racism with “good education”’ (p. 235). Carrington and Short define ‘good education’ in characteristically liberal, ‘apolitical’, terms as, ‘an education which seeks to equip young people with the range of skills and dispositions needed to become decent, fairminded, responsible and rational citizens’ (p. 232). These criticisms challenge anti-racist priorities. The desire to articulate radical Black resistance and dethrone the liberal professional as arbiter of the ‘race’ equality agenda, is portrayed both as politically naive and against the spirit of public professionalism. Thus a model of a politically uncontroversial anti-


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racism is offered, a model that, if made concrete, would avoid provoking conservative censure and win the support of those in the public professions and wider community. In the context of antiracism’s ostracism from mainstream British politics this response to conservative attacks and the crisis of isolationism will have a certain attractiveness for everyone who wishes to see anti-racism maintained outside the confines of academic treatise or tiny activist groups. Better to have a practical, uncontentious movement, it may be argued, than no movement at all. However, the notion of an apolitical anti-racism is conceptually incoherent. For such a vision subverts the most important insight of anti-racism. Anti-racists’ distinct contribution to the ‘race’ equality debate has been precisely their insistence that ‘race’ is a political issue and that ‘apolitical’, ‘unbiased’ approaches to the subject are likely to be based on unexamined conservative or liberal political agendas and assumptions. It is pertinent to note that anti-racists have frequently sought to show that the values of traditional ‘good education’ and ‘professionalism’ contain biases against radical and non-Eurocentric forms of knowledge (for example, Menter and Braunholtz, 1991; Gurnah, 1991). These are, it has been argued, élitist concepts that instate hierarchy and orthodoxy as unproblematic, taken-for-granted, knowledge. As this implies, any attempt to shift anti-racism from speaking for Black resistance towards speaking for ‘good education’ or ‘professional values’ will necessarily reproduce unacknowledged politically biased orthodoxies. It may be concluded, then, that although the affirmation of an apolitical anti-racism may be a laudably practical response to the movement’s crises, it throws the baby out with the bath water. It subverts the thing it attempts to save. However, the advocacy of a professionalist approach is not the only way a depoliticized anti-racism has been defended. Modood has developed criticisms of the ‘bands of militants’ (1988:402) who, he argues, have distorted the anti-racist agenda, into an argument for an anti-racism sensitive to ethnic difference. Modood suggests that the starting point for anti-racism must be minority groups’ right to self-definition. Positioning this perspective in opposition to radical stereotypes of Black radicalism, he suggests that, ‘antiracism…ought to begin…by accepting oppressed groups on their own terms (knowing full well that these will change and evolve) not by imposing a spurious identity and asking them to fight in the

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name of that’ (Modood, 1990b:92). Modood goes on to suggest that an ‘Authentic anti-racism for Muslims, therefore, will inevitably have a religious dimension and take a form in which it is integrated to the rest of Muslim concerns’. Thus the struggle for the recognition of an Islamic ethos reflected in, for example, ‘the right of Muslim women to wear modest dress at work’ (p. 93), or provision for religious holidays in school calendars, is seen as inseparable from anti-racist struggle. Modood’s challenge to anti-racism has been reflected in the emergence of a series of debates within the movement over the appropriate response to Muslim identity. Thus, for example, a rift has developed within the anti-racist education community over the provision of separate religious schooling. At the 1989 annual conference of the National Antiracist Movement in Education delegates were divided on the issue. Whilst some argued that ‘religious separation in education will increase racial division, and divide the Black community itself on ethnic grounds’ (Hatcher, 1989:26), others supported Muslims’ right to self-determination, ‘arguing that Muslim parents had the right to choose an Islamic ethos’ (Smith, 1989:18). It is important to note that many who contest anti-racists’ antipathy to the consideration of ethnic difference would also contest the depoliticization of anti-racism. A recognition that the notion of a single Black identity presents ‘a false, dangerously simple homogeneity’, notes Cross (1988:35), enables anti-racists to engage with the plurality of experiences of racism. This argument provides a point of intellectual intersection for the radicalizers and those critical of the homogenization of Black identity. However, as this emphasis on the experience of racism implies, these assessments of anti-racism represent a less archetypally ‘new ethnicist’ approach than that adopted by Modood. Thus, leaving the notion of a pluralistic anti-racism to later discussion, I will focus my critique of this position on Modood’s provocative intervention. His argument can b e paraphrased as follows: ‘Anti-racists have been pretending to speak for minority people whilst being engaged in a political act of re-presentation; anti-racists should be engaged in letting minorities speak for themselves.’ The former of these two points is, as previously indicated, legitimate. The latter, however, with its attendant implication that anti-racism can be extricated from politics, is more problematic. Indeed, it can be accused of doing


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the same thing Modood charges radical anti-racism of doing: i.e. effacing its participation in an act of interpretation. For like those multiculturalists who proposed that minorities should be allowed ‘to speak for themselves’ (Jeffcoate, 1979:33), Modood is drawing on the notion of objectively valid and authentic cultures. He implies that the task of the ethnically sensitive antiracist is simply to allow other cultures ‘more space do to their own thing’ (Modood, 1990b:94). More specifically he encourages anti-racists to accept a particular Muslim educational agenda— one that accepts orthodox Islamic precepts—on the basis that it represents the authentic expression of what it is to be a Muslim. The question this assertion begs is ‘who decides?’. Who decides what is authentic and what it is to be a Muslim? And who decides who will answer these questions? Modood fails to ask or answer these points. He treats ethnic identity as an objective ‘thing’ capable of being unproblematically imported into antiracist analysis rather than as something socially constructed. Thus, by positioning ethnically sensitive anti-racists as conduits for authentic voices, his argument, like those of the anti-racists he criticizes, obscures the act of re-presentation. CONCLUSIONS The dilemmas I have described have thrown the anti-racist mode of representation into crisis. This process has provoked a number of attempts to rethink the anti-racist project. Both reassessments of anti-racism discussed in this chapter— radicalization and depoliticization—offer important interventions in this debate. However, as we have seen, these reassessments do not offer unproblematic responses to the crisis of anti-racism. The retention of a dualistic view of Black and White identity disrupts radical critique, whilst the attempt to steer anti-racism to the tranquil waters of professionalism and apoliticism subverts anti-racism’s distinguishing political insights. Towards the end of this book I shall be revaluating each of these critical trajectories in the light of the forms of anti-racist theory and practice explicated in Part III. Part I has attempted to describe some of the main features of contemporary forms of ‘racial’ representation. However, to understand the social formation of anti-racism requires something more than description. It requires the investigation of the social

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Representations

bases of anti-racism amongst a specified social grouping or groupings. Part II begins such an exploration.

Part II


Introduction

The liberal or radical public professional is a familiar figure in the popular and academic imagination. In Britain teachers’ and other welfare professionals’ sympathy for egalitarian causes has been consistently documented by social scientists and ridiculed by a predominantly hostile mass media throughout the last thirty years. Public professionals have come to be particularly closely associated with the politics of ‘racial’ equality. Indeed, within certain quarters, this imputed relationship has encouraged a view of anti-racism and multiculturalism as essentially public professional projects. Thus the British popular press has frequently sort to portray ‘race’ equality initiatives and programmes as the virtual creation of left-wing ‘trouble-makers’ or bleeding-heart liberals in the public sector. Other commentators have formulated a similar equation. Modood (1988:397), for example, construes within the terminology of antiracism ‘a professional-political consensus’, a consensus that has been imperiously imposed on minority communities without their consultation or approval. The identification of anti-racism and multiculturalism with public professionals effaces the plurality of groups that have been instrumental in developing these perspectives. The most striking deletion is of the central role non-professional minority activists have played in placing issues of ‘race’, cultural bias and racism on the contemporary political agenda. Not unrelatedly, this identification also obscures the fact that ‘race’ equality consciousness has not risen spontaneously or autonomously amongst welfare professionals but through a complex series of interactions with other agendas and ‘outside’ pressures. However, although this view of multiculturalism and anti-racism is deeply misleading, it does point to the existence of a real and 67

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significant social trend. For the public professional, particularly the public educator, has indeed played an undeniably major role in formulating and propagating some of the most pervasive and powerful images of what ‘race’ equality politics is all about. This group may not have invented or disseminated every variety of antiracism or multiculturalism but it has developed a particular, and particularly influential, perspective on these projects. Part II seeks to provide a theoretical framework for the study of the formation and characteristics of public professional ‘race’ equality politics. This is done in two main ways. In Chapter 3 an overview of the wider debate on public professional political commitment is sketched. In Chapter 4 this analysis is extended through an account of the way multiculturalism has been developed as a public educationalist ideology. Some of the ideas encountered in Part II will be familiar to readers of earlier chapters. Thus, for example, although the following account is necessarily more analytical, it engages and develops the notion that liberal and radical representations need to be discussed as socially situated re-presentations. However, other, perhaps less familiar, themes will also be introduced; themes designed to provide a more focused account of the formation of political commitment. For, as we shall see, public professional consciousness cannot be reduced to a list of fixed or unequivocal attitudes. Any relationships that can be found between this or any other social location and particular forms of consciousness are better understood as historically contingent tendencies rather than as predictable and immutable correlations. Moreover, these tendencies are often contradictory. The role of public professional is fraught with the experience of ambiguity.

Chapter 3


INTRODUCTION This chapter looks at public professional politics within the context of middle-class leftism and the contradictions of the welfare state. It begins by criticizing some of the ways contemporary middle-class attachments to liberal and radical causes have usually been theorized. These theorizations, it is noted, have tended to propose a series of objective and monolithic causes for these political forms and neglect the question of how they have come to make sense to their adherents. In the second half of the chapter it is suggested that these commitments need to be considered in the light of the middle-class left’s close ties to the welfare professions. This idea is developed by looking at the politics of the welfare sector and the contradictory nature of its relationship to modern captalism. It is indicated that a useful way of approaching the formation of public professional political consciousness is to study how this group has made sense of its ambiguous political experiences working both for and against the reproduction of the social and economic status quo. THE MI DDLE-CLASS LEFT Critical political opinions within the middle class are still popularly regarded as a somewhat peculiar, even inexplicable, phenomenon. It seems, perhaps, somewhat perverse that anti-status quo, even revolutionary, ideas and ideals should be espoused by people who, far from being amongst society’s poorest or most oppressed, form one of its more privileged groups. In his book on the social bases of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Frank Parkin (1968:17) concluded, 69

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Public professional perspectives It may be taken as axiomatic that the middle classes are on the whole more closely integrated into society and its major values and institutions than are lower status groups…. Middle class status with all that it implies in the way of material security, favourable home and work environment, high access to valued cultural and welfare resources, and a general ability to control personal environment and life-chances, makes for an overall personality and social type altogether unlike that posited for alienated man.

However, the view that members of the middle class are inherently drawn to conservatism has been challenged in numerous studies of contemporary radical attitudes, not least by Parkin’s own analysis of CND’s membership profile. Indeed, it has been argued that, in the late twentieth century, the middle-class left has expanded in size and influence to the point where it now threatens the identity and continued existence of working-class radicalism (Hindess, 1971). Noting the dissolution of working-class socialism in America, Barbara and John Ehrenreich (1979:5) go so far as to suggest that the ‘“middle-class” left’ is no longer ‘a minority within a mass working class (or peasant) movement; it is, to a very large extent, the left itself. We do not have to agree with the sweeping nature of this overly hasty obituary for working class radicalism to recognize that it points to the existence of an important tendency within contemporary political life. The middle-class left, far from being a marginal anomaly, constitutes one of the most dynamic and significant points of opposition to contemporary capitalism. The middle-class left is significant not only because of its growth and influence but also because of the nature of the political projects and ideals with which it has come to be associated. The notion that this group has its own distinct political agenda has been proposed in numerous surveys of political opinion (for example, Cotgrove and Duff, 1980; Parkin, 1968). On issues such as ‘race’ and gender equality, gay rights, and environmental protection, it has been found that middle-class leftists are far more likely to take a liberal or radical position than left-wing members of the working class. Tersely summarizing the contrast, Roberts et al. (1977:146) note that, ‘anyone wishing to find support for Gay Lib or equality between rich and poor nations is better advised to visit a university than a trade union branch meeting’. However, although the quantity of empirical evidence detailing the


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development and political specificity of middle class leftism is impressive, the analyses that have been offered of this phenomenon are less convincing. Researchers have frequently relied upon surprisingly simplistic models of political consciousness to explain this ‘dissident’ group’s emergence and attributes. Some of the most unsatisfactory lines of inquiry have emanated from the ascription of moral qualities and origins to middle-class liberalism and radicalism. An example of this tendency is the classification of these ideologies as representing an ‘altruistic’ politics. Drawing a distinction between the working-class left’s economically instrumental attitudes and ‘radical movements with a middle-class base’, Parkin (see also Whiteley, 1983; Hindess, 1971) argues that the latter tend to be far less orientated to the achievement of economic or material rewards for their supporters. They are instead more typically concerned with issues of a moral or humanitarian nature—as, for example, Anti-Apartheid, the campaign against capital punishment, white support for Negroes’ civil rights in the United States, CND and so on…benefits are felt to accrue to others (e.g. Negroes, political prisoners) or to society as a whole, rather than to themselves specifically. (Parkin, 1968:40–1) The image of political selflessness advanced here dovetails with the commonly heard view that middle-class radicalism can be explained and characterized as the politics of guilt. Implicit within this ubiquitous piece of popular wisdom is the suggestion that, feeling morally racked by the pressures of privilege, certain members of the middle class have simply chosen, out of the goodness of their own hearts, to assist or identify with the oppressed. This model of the middle-class left’s moral universe stands in stark contrast to another, almost equally widespread, assessment of the same phenomenon; namely that the middle-class left are an essentially selfish group attempting to secure power and status for themselves by dominating and manipulating the politics of liberation. This portrait depicts not altruists but ‘empire builders’, people who establish institutions and other bureaucratic structures in order to gain prestige and secure control over public funds and political activity. Far from being political angels, the ‘intellectuals and technical intelligentsia’, Alvin Gouldner (1979:7) explains, are ‘elitist and self-seeking and [use their] special knowledge to advance [their] own interests and power’.

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These two models of the middle-class left—one of the politics of altruism, the other of the politics of self-interest—are equally inadequate. Their major limitation is that instead of offering social explanations of social processes they merely impose unexplicated moral categories on political outcomes. Altruism, guilt or selfishness may indeed provide appropriate labels for particular actions but they tell us very little about the context and formation of consciousness. The fact that all of these categories could be applied simultaneously to most political acts also indicates their limited usefulness to the present study. Self-interest and altruism are not, after all, incompatible; they merely require that one identifies a positive outcome for oneself with a positive outcome for others. The unhelpful nature of moral categorizations has, unfortunately, been echoed in other, seemingly more sociologically substantive, analyses of the formation of middle-class radical and liberal commitment. Before explaining why, it is necessary to note that there exist two principal sociological traditions in the definition of these political forms. Some theorists have situated the middle-class left within a broader category called the ‘new class’, a group seen to comprise a newly influential stratum of business, technical and welfare professionals (for discussion see Brint, 1984). Others have preferred to see the middle-class left in more discrete terms, viewing them as forming an identifiable class faction, the ‘radical middle class’. Both the investigation of the new class and radical middle class represent a critique of the orthodox Marxist assumption that the natural and/or only home of real political dissent is the working class. However, the diverse group of analysts who have sought to explain what, in both traditions, is often termed the ‘new radicalism’ by reference to the new class (for example, Gouldner, 1979; see also Eyerman et al., 1987a; Bruce-Briggs, 1979), have tended to place a characteristically heavy emphasis on their historical significance as the new ‘major antagonist of capitalism’ (Berger, 1986:68). By contrast, those who prefer the notion of the radical middle class (for example, Parkin, 1968; Cotgrove and Duff, 1980) have been more likely to represent them as a social strand emerging alongside a still relatively vital working-class radical movement. Despite their differences, empirical research within both of these traditions has shared a propensity to amass data on the political attitudes of the ‘new radicals’ from questionnaires and electoral statistics rather than from qualitative methods. Thus,


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analysis tends to be based around the consideration of percentage support for political parties and/or ‘agree/disagree’ responses to standardized political statements (though see Jary, 1978). This methodology has meant that the complexities and contradictions within respondents’ views on any one issue have usually been overlooked. As a result a static conceptualization of political consciousness has come to dominate debate. This approach has, in turn, encouraged researchers to concentrate their attentions on outlining a series of supposedly objective causes for liberalism and radicalism amongst the new or middle class, rather than on exploring how and why such attitudes have come to make sense to their adherents. The three most frequently cited of these ‘causes’ are listed below: (a) Middle-class and new-class political dissent is caused by these groups’ high levels of education. It is interesting to note that the influence detected is towards critical, libertarian forms of consciousness rather than the uncritical acceptance of traditional leftist beliefs or patterns of behaviour. Gouldner explains that modern higher education is one of the principal sites in which a ‘culture of critical discourse’ (as he calls it) is developed and disseminated. This culture, he suggests, promotes the development of reflexive, cosmopolitan consciousness that ‘de-authorizes all speech grounded in traditional societal authority’ (1979:29). Further specifying his subject group as the ‘educated middle class’, Parkin (1968:178) similarly contends that ‘the “liberalizing” effects of higher education’ create ‘a permanent source of political opposition to certain commonly accepted socio-political values’. (b) The radical middle class and new class are radicalized by witnessing their high educational achievements undervalued in a capitalist economy. Those with ‘an interest in having privilege based on educational credentials’, Peter Berger (1986:69) notes, feel ‘a general antagonism against privilege based on “raw” achievement in economic terms and thus against the capitalist market system that, in principle, is open to anyone regardless of education’. Finding this antagonism most fully developed amongst welfare professionals, Parkin (1968:182–4) also argues that, a further cause of radicalism among…welfare occupations may be traced to the discrepancy between their high educational status and low economic status…the conflicting expectations deriving from [this] status inconsistency may predispose some

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Public professional perspectives members of the service professions to adopt a more radical outlook than commonly found among the middle class as a whole. (1968:182–4)

(c) The new radicalism is caused by a lack of involvement by the new class and the radical middle class in the day-to-day running of capitalist business. As Cotgrove and Duff (1980:344) explain, middle-class radicalism is sustained within ‘non-industrial enclaves within industrial society’, enclaves that ‘are the carriers of alternative non-economic values’. Cotgrove and Duff specify these ‘non-industrial’ zones as ‘schools, hospitals and welfare agencies’. Atypical example of this relationship maybe found within Parkin’s occupational profile of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Out of a sample of 163 middle-class members of CND, Parkin found 104 were in welfare and ‘creative’ jobs and only 31 in business-related occupations (the single largest group, comprising 48 individuals, were teachers or college lecturers). New class theorists have broken down their central category in a comparable manner. Thus, as Steven Brint (1984:44) explains, they have differentiated radically inclined ‘humanistic intellectuals’, who work in the arts, media and, most significantly, in state education and other welfare agencies, from ‘other occupational segments’ such as managers and engineers. The latter group, it is suggested, tend to be less well educated, less economically ‘undervalued’ and, consequently, less radical. Thus the ‘new radicals’ are identified as highly educated, economically thwarted individuals who, both new class and radical middle class theorists agree, tend to be most active in the public (and ‘creative’) professions. However, what in both traditions emerges as a convincing demonstration of the centrality of public professional support for the ‘new radicalism’, cannot conceal the logical circularity of the three assumptions listed above. For example, although it has been shown that the ‘new radicals’ are more educated than other sections of the new/middle class, the explanations given for this correlation refer straight back to the inherently liberating and critical capacities ascribed to education. Thus, along with those correlations assumed to exist between radicalism and economic status, as well as between radicalism and relative autonomy from the business sector, this kind of analysis tells us very little about the actual formation of public professional


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political consciousness. It may also be noted that at least one of the assumptions listed above can be set against historical counterexample. Higher education in many Western nations in the present century has been a centre of reactionary and anti-egalitarian rather than, or as well as, liberalizing social thought. It is pertinent to recall that the universities were central to the intellectual growth of, as well as opposition to, fascism and Nazism in 1930s Germany (see deHuszar, 1960; also Larson et al., 1980). I am not arguing that the correlations listed above are necessarily wrong but that they do not provide an explanation of public professional liberalism or radicalism. By ignoring the fact that it is people’s experiences and interpretations that shape and are, in turn, shaped by, their social attitudes, both traditions disconnect politics from consciousness. This argument may be further developed by reference to John Mattausch’s (1989) assessment of Parkin’s work. Mattausch returns to the same group of middle-class radicals that Parkin chose to study, i.e. members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Drawing on his own and other workers’ surveys, Mattausch reaffirms Parkin’s empirical finding that a high proportion of CND members come from the public professions (80 per cent of Mattausch’s sample of CND members were in ‘welfare/ creative’ occupations). However, unlike Parkin, Mattausch relies upon semi-structured interviews, rather than questionnaires, to explicate his respondents’ attitudes, attitudes which he claims are ‘expressions of continuous accomplishment’ (p. 4) rather than simply symptoms of educational or occupational attainment. Mattausch notes that this attempt to ‘take respondents’ accounts of their behaviour seriously’ (p. 6) enabled him to appreciate how his subjects’ experiences within the welfare state patterned their political values. More specifically, he suggests that public professionals’ ‘internalization’ of the values of social responsibility and egalitarianism inherent within the welfare state, can propel them into radical politics. He proposes (pp. 37–8) that, part of being a teacher entails adopting the ideology of the profession and having a sense of duty: in common with other welfare state professions, the internalization of a sense of duty can turn a job into a vocation. However, Parkin also alluded to such a process. Although suggesting a better explanation lay in radicals’ attraction to, and subsequent

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movement into, the non-capitalist ‘sanctuary’ (1968:187) of the welfare professions, he noted (but left undeveloped) the view that the welfare professions ‘inculcate…humanistic values’ (p. 181). As this implies, far from disrupting the objectivist thrust Mattausch criticizes in Parkin’s work, the notion of internalization is compatible with it. In both cases internalization is equated with the absorption of unambiguous ‘welfare values’, an interpretation that leaves little room for the consideration of the formation of radical consciousness. It may be concluded then that, although Mattausch’s work indicates the importance of looking at public professionals’ attitudes in the context of their experiences within the welfare state, his adoption of the simplistic notion of ‘internalization’ undermines his ability to explain the formation of this group’s political ideas. A second characteristic evident in Mattausch’s consideration of the state professionals’ ‘sense of duty’ is his assumption that ‘welfare values’ are monolithic and static. This view has been challenged by the next approach to the politics of public professionalism I wish to discuss, a view that stresses the ambiguous, contradictory nature of this social location. THE CONTRADICTIONS OF PUBLIC PROFESSIONALISM Some of the most interesting recent theorizations of the contradictions of welfare capitalism have been provided by the German sociologist Claus Offe. At the heart of Offe’s inquiry lies the insight that the welfare state both supports and subverts the reproduction of capitalism. Offe contends that ‘the problem for the system of late capitalist societies’ is the problem of preventing the regulatory processes of administrative power which are ‘foreign to capital’ and yet upon whose permanent expansion the monopolistic sphere of the economy is dependent from becoming autonomous and controlling private exchange relationships, either through paralysing them or subverting them in revolutionary ways. The increasing utilization of the regulatory medium of non-market, state power cumulatively produces weak points that facilitate intrusions into the system by non-capitalist structures. (Offe, 1984:48) Offe believes that the late, or welfare, capitalist public sector carries


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out a training and social supervisory role that has grown too complex and vast a task to be left to the free market. He argues that, because of the increased complexity of maintaining effective and efficient social organization, and the new expectations that advanced capitalism encourages amongst citizens, ‘it becomes functionally necessary for these subsystems to partially emancipate themselves from the relationship of…subordination [to the interests of capital]’ (ibid: 48; see also Offe, 1985a; Gough, 1979). Thus the greater the difficulty capitalist exchange mechanisms have in training and socializing ‘post-industrial’ populations, ‘the greater is the degree of independence or relative autonomy required by the political-administrative centre if it is to repair, or compensate for, these problems’ (Offe, 1984:49). As this implies, the public professional is both essential to the reproduction of a trained and disciplined population and a potential source of resistance to capitalism’s anti-egalitarian and socially oppressive tendencies. By exposing both the mutual dependency and incompatibility of what may usefully, if crudely, be represented as ‘pro-market’ and ‘nonmarket’ values, Offe’s notion of a dysfunctional welfare capitalism, identifies the political contradiction at the heart of public professionalism. It is pertinent to note that, despite the anti-public sector rhetoric of recent conservative governments in Western Europe and North America, the welfare state (and its contradictions) is still very much with us. Even at the height of the New Right’s power, in the 1980s, the welfare state remained, to borrow Taylor-Gooby and Dale’s (1981:263) phrase, ‘impoverished but intact’. In 1989 Taylor-Gooby (pp. 639–40) reaffirmed this description: ‘despite the rhetoric of change’, he noted, ‘shifts in total amounts of spending or in the redistributive impact of policy could be summed up…as “more (or rather less) of the same”’. Writing on changes within welfare provision in the United States and the United Kingdom in 1987, Ruggles and O’Higgens explain that while Reagan and Thatcher began with visions of major structural rollbacks and remarketization of welfare provision— visions whose failure could easily be foreseen—they have moved to an acceptance of the structural role of welfare in democratic mixed economies and are now focusing on ways of constraining and redistributing its cost. (1987:187)

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Given the necessity of a sizeable welfare sector for the reproduction of advanced capitalism, its resilience to the forces of ‘remarketization’ should not be surprising. As Offe (1984:153) reminds us, ‘The embarrassing secret of the welfare state is that while… capitalism cannot exist with, neither can it exist without, the welfare state.’ However, the welfare state’s ‘embarrassing secret’ does not imply that it cannot be reoriented. Indeed, in the United Kingdom, Conservative interventions in education (for example, the 1988 Education Act) clearly demonstrate that the public sector can be maintained at the same tine that its universalist and egalitarian roles are, if not abandoned, constrained and redefined. Assessing the complex, ambiguous currents within the reorganization of contemporary welfare capitalism, Ramesh Mishra (1990:38) makes the valuable observation that to view changes ‘in terms of a simple dichotomy such as the reversibility/irreversibility of the welfare state’ is simplistic and premature. A more realistic approach is to acknowledge that the welfare sector may be significantly modified and redirected whilst remaining cognizant of the fact that it is not in serious danger of extinction. As this implies, and notwithstanding a tide of ill-conceived free-market fundamentalism in the 1980s, the tension between pro-market and non-market roles within the public professional’s political experience is unlikely to disappear. Thus, we may conclude that, despite conservative attacks on public provision, Offe’s model of a subversive-conservative welfare sector remains a useful one. However, although Offe’s delineation of this tension is valuable, he rarely considers the development of radical or liberal commitment as resulting from anything more specific than a general, ‘functionally necessary’, decommodification of exchange values. Consequently he has difficulty explaining the development of particular political ideas and social movements. This deficiency is most apparent in his approach to issues on the ‘new radical’ agenda such as environmentalism, anti-racism and anti-sexism. In accordance with his emphasis upon universal crises within the whole capitalist system, Offe tries to ascribe these movements’ cross-class, cross-occupational, appeal. Such ‘problems’, he suggests (1987:513), ‘are absent from the welfare state’s agenda and…are carried out by nonclass social movements’. Offe notes elsewhere (1985b), however, that the ‘new radicalism’ does have its origin within the middle class. He goes on to suggest that, ‘high educational status, relative economic security’ and ‘employment in


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personal-service occupations’ are not only the principal ‘structural characteristics of the new middle class core of activists’ (p. 833) but explain, or ‘lead to’ (p. 850), their political ideals. Thus when Offe does address the social specificity of the ‘new radicalism’ he falls back on a list of objective causes, such as level of education and autonomy from the business sector, already familiar from the new and radical middle-class debates. As this indicates, although Offe’s work is useful in enabling us to isolate the contradictory conservative-subversive impulses within the public professional’s role, it is unable to illuminate how this group makes sense of its contradictory political experiences. As with the previous approaches discussed, this shortcoming can be firmly tied to the erasure of the conscious subject. As Keane and Held (1984:258) point out, ‘the only remaining agents in [Offe’s] anonymous world appear to be Madame Economic Subsystem and Messieurs PoliticalAdministrative and Legitimation Subsystems!’. Another, and more useful, way of looking at the formation of state professionals’ political commitment is to examine how this group has actively made sense of its experiences working for and against welfare capitalism. This process of making sense of contradiction, which I shall term the formation of ideology, provides a view of public professional political consciousness as historically contingent and mutable, a dynamic and constantly creative act of cohering and concealing an ambiguous social location. CONCLUSIONS: RESOLVING CONTRADICTIONS INTO IDEOLOGY This chapter has suggested that the study of radicalism within the public professions needs to consider how this group makes sense of its ambiguous social location. It has been argued that those theorists who have categorized the public professional left within the new class or radical middle class have tended to conflate correlations (between, for example, level of education and political commitment) with explanations. Similar objectivist currents have been seen to wash through Offe’s, otherwise valuable, explication of the immanent contradictions of welfare capitalism. The widely accepted empirical conclusion that the rise of the ‘new radicalism’ is linked to the rise of the public professions, combined with Offe’s

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dissection of late capitalism, have, however, indicated a useful starting point for my own analysis. It has been noted that a useful way of analysing public professional politics is to look at the way this group resolves (i.e. conceals and coheres) its contradictory political experiences working both for and against welfare capitalism. This process has been defined as the creation of ideology (see also Bonnett, 1992b). Unlike many models of ideology, this experiential approach conceptualizes ideology not in terms of its function as a servant of the status quo but as a social process that creates taken-for-granted, or ‘common sense’, attitudes, attitudes which may be of any political complexion (cf., Thompson, 1990; on ‘common sense’ cf. Gramsci, 1971). Although this approach does not pretend to raise the analyst above the terrain of ideology it offers a critical approach to the development of political meaning. It confronts consciousness with the incoherences and ambiguities of its social construction, exposing the unreflexive denial of contradiction embedded in ideological thought. The notion that people cohere and conceal their contradictory experiences is not new. Murray Elderman (1964), for example, has analysed how linguistic ‘condensation symbols’ act to bring together different interpretations of the same event. In his essay ‘The political language of the helping professions’, Elderman (1984:48) shows how the term ‘mental illness’ allows hospital staff to ‘condense and confound’ the conflicting roles they experience in ‘helping the suffering sick person, [and] repressing the dangerous non-conformist’. Ann and Harold Berlak (1981), by contrast, have explained how conflicting pressures can also be resolved in the realm of action. Using an example from primary education, they suggest that teachers’ conflicting interpretations of pupils’ and educators’ legitimate authority in the classroom, are brought together through forms of play and tuition that enable teachers to feel that, although they are in control, they are not being authoritarian. The resolution of contradictory experiences appears most natural, most unchallengeable, when ideology can be mistaken for obvious, uncontentious knowledge. As this implies, reflexivity and ideology are antagonistic tendencies; the former makes visible the socially situated nature of consciousness, the latter enables people to treat their political beliefs as unproblematic. In the following chapter it is explained how the reproduction of ideological common sense is


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dependent upon the social experiences that surround its formation. More specifically, I shall be exploring the formation of multiculturalism as an example of public educationalist ideology.

Chapter 4


INTRODUCTION This chapter looks at the formation of liberal and multiculturalist attitudes amongst public educators. Taking examples mostly from the period before multiculturalists’ intellectual engagement with anti-racism (i.e. before the late 1970s), it will be shown that the ideals and assumptions of multiculturalism have been constructed upon contradictory, characteristically liberal, political foundations. There is, of course, nothing novel in claiming that liberalism is an ideology or that multiculturalism represents a reformulation of liberal precepts. However, a definition of ideology as the resolution of contradictory political experiences provides a specific point of departure for such an analysis. Rather than consigning liberalism or multiculturalism to the realm of a vague ‘system of beliefs’ (Jeffcoate, 1984:161) or functionalist ‘power models’ (Mullard, 1982b:130), this approach attempts to explore how and why these ideologies have come to make sense to educators. This emphasis also enables the historical specificity of these projects to come into focus. Liberal ideologies do not, after all, carry some innate objective plausibility. They have come to appear reasonable and unproblematic only within certain historical contexts. However, as we shall see, the formation of ideology is rarely an entirely smooth or complete process. Despite their ability to cohere and conceal contradiction, the tensions upon which liberal ideological forms are based can sometimes be momentarily glimpsed, awkwardly jutting through an otherwise seemingly selfassured common sense.

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BACKGROUND TO LIBERAL DOMINANCE The 1944 Education Act (the Butler Act) committed the British state, for the first time, to the provision of a free education for all. It is widely accepted, even by its critics, that the Butler Act, and subsequent developments extending and expanding public provision (for example, the expansion of the tertiary sector, comprehensive schools, raising the school-leaving age), enshrined principles of equality and access in the political role of the public educational service. These developments in education, along with the National Assistance Act (1948) and the creation of the National Health Service (1946), have been seen as inaugurating a turning point in British society; the creation of a welfare state. The provision of public welfare is not, of course, unique to the second half of the twentieth century. The institutionalization of local and central government welfare programmes can be traced back to early twentieth-century reforms and to nineteenth-century state and charitable social programmes. However, it was only with the development of post-war initiatives that the welfare sector came to acquire a central, and defining, position within what could henceforth be legitimately termed British welfare capitalism. Entrusted both with sustaining a capitalist economy and society, and with providing an egalitarian and universally accessible public service, the public professionals were at the contradictory centre of this novel social formation. The defining political experience of the caring professions became their ambiguous position ‘in and against’ capitalism. As T.H.Marshall (1971:45) noted, public professionals have to live with the ‘dilemma or antithesis inherent in the principles and structure of the welfare state’, a dilemma Marshall summarizes as, ‘the problem of establishing equal opportunity without abolishing social and economic inequality’. The public educationalist experiences his or her dual political role as more than simply an abstract clash of competing loyalties. This tension is also experienced through concrete, practical conflicts within his or her day-to-day working life. The educator is under enormous and constant pressure, on the one hand, to produce an endless stream of trained, disciplined and credentialized students and, on the other, to strive constantly to treat students as equally valuable and valued members of society. Students have to be educated so that they may find and submit to a role within a

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competitive and unequal society. But their education also has to be egalitarian and anti-élitist. To be caught in such a moral bind—to be contributing to the reproduction of capitalism whilst being committed to values that come into conflict with capitalism—is to, day-in-day-out, experience contradiction. The experience of this tension has been cohered and concealed into many different ideological forms. Nevertheless, one particular formulation has been dominant, that of liberalism. Public educationalist liberalism carries within it a promise—a promise born of a sense of optimism—that significant egalitarian change is achievable within a modern ‘free-market’ society. This vision of a society in which capitalism and equality can go hand-in-hand partly resolves the contradictions of public professionalism. However, although fundamentally describing one ideological process, educationalist liberalism manifests itself as a multifarious and complex mass of interacting ideological strands. These different strands can be abstracted and isolated as reformism, consensusseeking, individualism, educationalism and professionalism. Each of these strands articulates different aspects of the liberal project. This process can be introduced and exemplified by looking at perhaps the most central and paradigmatic of liberalism’s constituent threads: reformism (liberalism’s other ideological tendencies are discussed in more detail later in this chapter). The term ‘reformism’ denotes a belief in the value of change within a system rather than in opposition to it. In the context of the public professions a more specific definition may also be offered: reformism is the belief in the desirability and possibility of reducing or abolishing social inequality and injustice through gradual changes within social behaviour and governmental or private sector practice and resource allocation. Reformism can be defined, then, in contrast to conservatism, as referring to a commitment to progressive, egalitarian change and, in contrast to radicalism, to the principle that such change can and should take place within the existing socio-economic formation. This combination of principles has established reformism at the heart of the politics of public professionalism. For by bringing together a commitment to both equality and to the reproduction of capitalism, reformism resolves the public professional’s antagonistic political experiences. However, in order to fully understand why this specific ideology has made sense to public educators we need to look at the


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historical context in which it has achieved its plausibility. This draws us into consideration of the once potent mythology of Britain as a modernizing and increasingly socially and economically mobile society. Discourses affirming the possibility of a progressive capitalism have remained virulent throughout the late twentieth century. However, they were at their most powerful in the two decades of relatively dynamic economic growth after the Second World War. Expressing the optimism of the period John Vaizey, an economist and highly influential educational policy adviser, noted in Education for Tomorrow (1962), that, although once it had been legitimate to consider educational resources as limited, Since our society is now entering a period of great wealth, and already has the capacity to provide an education system which is satisfactory for any child, there is no need to maintain this assumption of scarcity. (1962:14) For readers in the 1990s this statement will invoke a certain wistfulness, a nostalgia for a distant era of naive hope. As if to compound our discomfort, Vaizey (1963:240) went on to blithely predict that, ‘by 1980 we shall be able to afford a lavish education service, a lavish health service, a lavish road service’. However, at the time they were made such confident assumptions did not seem exaggerated, or even particularly controversial. They appeared as logical extrapolations of apparently entrenched trends. The economy was growing, universal welfare programmes were being expanded, social mobility was increasing; the possibility of a politically progressive market society was, it seemed, being proved. Thus it was within the context of a modernizing, rapidly changing Britain, that reformism came to provide a plausible resolution of the contradictions of public professionalism. The historical specificity of this process serves to reinforce the point that any analysis of how contradictions are concealed and cohered into belief-systems, such as liberalism, needs to be sensitive to the discursive context in which ideology is formed. Liberal common-sense, radical tendencies As we have seen, educationalist liberalism is partly based on egalitarian, non-market, political ideals. It may be said, then, that the

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potential to inhibit the development of advanced capitalism is immanent within liberal ideology. And yet this subversive undercurrent has for the most part remained latent. As suggested, the reason why can best be explained by reference to the discursive environment in which the contradictions of welfare capitalism have been resolved. Discourses of ‘progressive capitalism’, centred around such themes as social and economic mobility, have legitimized liberal ideological closure. In general, this resolution seems to have been supportive of the maintenance and development of the consumeroriented, technically advanced, highly adaptive capitalism of the midto-late twentieth century. Yet educational liberalism has not arisen from the ‘requirements’ of capitalism (see also Avis, 1991; cf. Sharp and Green, 1975). It has arisen from educators’ ability to make sense of their contradictory social location. As this suggests, educators’ relationship to the reproduction of existing power relations is likely to be haphazard. At any time new discourses may delegitimize one particular form of ideological closure and legitimate another, perhaps far more radical, form of ideology. Any correspondence that may exist between public educationalist common sense and the reproduction of late capitalism, we may conclude, will be prone to crisis and perhaps, short-lived. Shifting our attention from social reproduction back to the intricacies of ideological closure allows us to glimpse another aspect of liberalism’s complex and unpredictable political character. For, if we look closely, the resolution of contradictions often appears to be incomplete. Despite their suppression within liberal praxis, radical tendencies can be momentarily glimpsed within even the most committedly liberal of arguments. Ideology, it seems, is rarely able entirely to smooth away all the ragged edges of contradiction. As if haunted by its own repressed ideals, liberal common sense can be interrupted and disturbed by subversive self-critique. For some examples of the ‘return’ of repressed radical ideals let us look again at the ideology of reformism. It will be recalled that John Vaizey articulated an optimistic vision of the possibilities of social change within welfare capitalism. The social democratic philosophies he espoused hinged upon the assumption that equality and capitalism were compatible. However, on a few rare occasions Vaizey also implied, if never explicitly stated, that achieving egalitarian change will require something more, something other, than reformism. Britain, comments Vaizey (1962:114), is a ‘class-


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ridden society’ with a ‘class-ridden education system’ which needs a ‘rapid shift’ (p. 16) towards equality. Mere reform, he muses, will simply assist in the creation of a ‘middle-class society’ (p. 107). Another influential liberal educationalist, Robin Pedley (1963) was even more radical. In an optimistic book on the need for egalitarian change within the school system Pedley slides in an extraordinarily disruptive remark. Equality of opportunity, he notes, ‘will of course strengthen the class system’ (p. 11). Thus these authors, both important and, in many ways, archetypal exponents of liberalism, seem to momentarily loose faith in their own ideology and hint at the likelihood that equality will be unobtainable without an explicitly anti-capitalist politics. Despite these brief transgressions of liberal ideology, Vaizey and Pedley remained committed to reformism. Liberalism remained the dominant current within their political vision. These subversive moments of radical critique serve to make clear, however, that the formation of ideology represents a tendency and not the complete sealing of consciousness from any display of contradiction or reflexive insight. The secret history of self-doubt within liberal ideology may also be traced within the ideologies of multiculturalism, which are explored below.

MULTICULTURALISM: LIBERALISM REFORMULATED Background Relatively few children migrated with the first substantial settlements of visible minority peoples in the United Kingdom in the late 1940s and 1950s. However, by the early-to-mid-1960s ‘nonwhite’ students began to enter both primary and secondary schools in significant numbers. Between 1960 and 1973 the number of students the Department of Education and Science (DES) classified as ‘immigrant pupils’ grew, from what Kirp (1985:25) describes as, ‘an uncounted handful’, to an estimated 3.3 per cent of all pupils (DES, 1973). Although reliable figures are no longer available it was estimated by Mullard (1982b) that, in the early 1980s, 8 per cent of British school students were ‘Black’. The issue that tended to dominate assimilationist debate in the early years of ‘multiracial’ schooling was that of language. Within Goldman and Taylor’s (1966) comprehensive review of the field,

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the linguistic ‘disabilities’ of ‘immigrant’ children are repeatedly cited as a primary concern. Although the inability to speak English was identified as one such disability, so too was the ability to speak an English dialect or Creole. ‘The dialect or Creole English’, noted one study quoted by Goldman and Taylor (pp. 173–4), ‘is an immature language which is clearly inadequate for expressing the complexities of present-day life’. Yet, despite the pretensions to objectivity imbedded in such professional sounding claims, they evidently carry within them a pejorative appraisal of what another educational researcher cited by Goldman and Taylor (p. 171) called minority peoples’ ‘poor socio-economic, cultural and linguistic environment, defective education and family instability’. As these concerns with the inadequacy of minority languages and cultures imply, the early phase of the education and ‘race’ debate was dominated by a largely uncontested assimilationist perspective. Minority groups, it was felt, needed to be absorbed into the norms of British society, their own languages and cultures being construed as impediments to this process. Clearly, this assimilationist stance was (and is) formed within a discursive context of Euro- and Anglocentrism. However, from the late 1960s, other discourses began to make an impression on the debate— discourses that challenged assimilationism. New challenges: ‘racial’ inequality and minority resistance Beginning in the late 1960s a number of challenges to both the ethnicality and efficacy of assimilationism began to be experienced by teachers in ‘multiracial’ inner-city areas. Two of the most pressing of these challenges revolved around the issues of ‘racial’ inequality and minority resistance. As we shall see, although both of these discourses were interpreted within traditional liberal categories, they succeeded in inflecting the ‘race’ and education debate with a new sensitivity to cultural difference and bias. Within educational circles the discourse of ‘racial’ inequality was experienced primarily in terms of the academic ‘underperformance’ of minority students. Evidence from a 1968 Inner London Education Authority (I LEA) survey (Little, 1975:68) concluded that: ‘The relatively poor performance of minority pupils is across the curriculum…underprivileged white children perform at a higher level than West Indian settlers.’ Underchievement was not seen as being confined to West Indian


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children. As David Kirp (1985:26) reported: ‘West Indian performance was somewhat worse than that of Pakistanis and Indians, but both fell substantially below the average.’ As evidence of ‘underperformance’ grew so did other signs of educational disadvantage. An internal I LEA report in 1966 showed that, whilst ‘immigrant’ students made up 13.2 per cent of all students, 23.3 per cent of those placed in ‘educationally subnormal’ (ESN) units were from this group, a figure that reflected a national trend (Coard, 1971; Tomlinson, 1981). The discourse of ‘racial’ inequality forced more educators to become attentive to minority communities’ resistance to discrimination and disadvantage. For from ‘the hurt and anger’ sown by white racism, Trevor Carter (1986:87) observes, ‘quickly sprang strength and organization’. This anger manifested itself in a wide variety of ways. Two of the most influential were the development of campaigns designed to reform the educational system and a drive for educational self-organization. As an example of the former we may cite the campaign, in Haringey in the late 1960s, by the North London West Indian Association (NLWIA) to confront assimilationist practices. The parents who formed this group were particularly concerned with the disproportionate placement of Afro-British pupils in lower academic bands and the practice of ‘bussing’ minority children to predominantly white schools so as to avoid their concentration in any one institution. As Carter (ibid.: 88) explains, the NLWIA grew ‘in response to the growing need for information, solidarity and self-help amongst black parents who could not understand their children’s lack of progress at schools’. Another of the ways minority resistance expressed itself was through the rise of a minority supplementary school movement. One of the earliest Afro-British supplementary schools was Shepherds Bush Supplementary School, which opened in 1967 (Sealy, 1972). Separate educational provision was also established within the British Cypriot and British Chinese communities as well as under the auspices of religions with a predominantly British Asian following. Thus, for example, the Muslim Educational Trust, registered as a charity in 1964, organized visiting teachers to offer Muslim pupils religious instruction. Many mosques, Sikh gudwaras and Hindu temples also held classes. Such initiatives were not, however, only aimed at providing religious tuition. They were also, as Cronin describes (1984:256), designed ‘to foster a positive

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identity and self-esteem as well as a consciousness of the cultural experience and heritage of minority children’. Minority activism, coupled with a growing consciousness of ‘racial’ inequality in the education system, established a conducive context for the formation of multiculturalist ideology. Reflecting the changes that were taking place in the debate amongst educators C.D.Roberts (1973:230–1) noted in New Community that, “‘naive assimilationism”…is far too simplistic and quite unreal’ and that, ‘much further thought has been given to the question recently…. Today our community has to reconsider its notion of assimilationism and its assumption that the migrants must change completely and the host community not at all’. The vanguard tone that pervades Roberts’s comments finds a parallel in George Meredith’s contribution to the influential multiculturalist text, The Multi-Racial School (McNeal and Rogers, 1971). Meredith, a teacher in Birmingham, argued that he had abandoned the belief that it is sufficient to treat all children alike …the task of the school is to recognize, in much more positive ways than before, the group identity which the pupils have through their family history and their home culture…. We now understand much more fully than ever before that a multi-racial school cannot succeed in either its educational or social aims if this is ignored. (Meredith, 1971:103) The link between such statements of multicultural intent and the discourses of ‘racial’ inequality and minority resistance is not a direct or unproblematic one. They represent interpretations of these discourses, interpretations guided by the assumptions of liberalism and the belief that the central issues in the field of ‘race relations’ were cultural (mis)representation and individual prejudice. The facts of ‘racial’ inequality and minority resistance could, of course, have been viewed quite differently, including as indictments of liberals’ ‘apolitical’, culturally focused concerns. However, although offering educators a challenge these discourses were not intense or threatening enough to throw the liberal project into doubt. Instead of sending educational debate on social equality into crisis they provoked its realignment along familiar ideological lines.


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Multiculturalism: five liberal strands The optimism of liberalism suffuses multiculturalism. This optimism has had a variety of sources, many of which can be traced to the still potent mythologies of Britain as a modernizing, reformable society. Although, by the early 1970s, this vision had become tarnished by a series of economic crises, it remained capable of generating widespread faith in the possibility of a socially progressive form of capitalism. This conviction was also articulated in a series of myths more specific to the ‘race’ debate amongst educators. In the remainder of this chapter these myths are introduced and shown to have rewoven the five characteristically liberal ideological strands of reformism, individualism, educationalism, consensus-seeking and professionalism. The following account also traces a more unkempt and disruptive thread within multiculturalist common sense. Moments of ambiguity, of explicit contradiction are identified that exemplify the incomplete nature of ideological closure. Reformism Multiculturalism is premised on the belief that the rejection of cultural bias and ‘race’ prejudice is both achievable within the existing educational system and can be equated with the eradication of ‘racial’ inequality. It is a philosophy, notes one of its most prominent English exponents, Robert Jeffcoate (1979:122), founded on a hopeful view of ‘the future of the multiracial class-room; that is it can become a place where pride in race is affirmed, and where interracial friendship and understanding are celebrated’. Optimism concerning the creation of a fair and tolerant society is thus closely tied to what one of Jeffcoate’s colleagues, Alan James (1977:8), describes as ‘the elimination of prejudice’ through ‘fostering…a positive interest in the diversity of human experience’. However, the formation of ideology, as suggested earlier, cannot be equated with a mechanical, seamless, concealing of all trace of contradiction. Multiculturalists have not always appeared entirely confident about the compatibility of their egalitarian ideals and the educational and economic system which they sustain. Despite James’s conviction that prejudice may be eliminated by fostering interest in diversity, he also notes that there exists ‘a system of economic relations that generates class and racial inequality’ (ibid.:

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9). This assertion sits uneasily with affirmations of cultural pluralism as a way to erode ‘racial’ inequality. The most ‘positive interest’ in diversity imaginable would, after all, surely have little impact upon such an evidently powerful economic system. After the intellectual engagement of multiculturalism with anti-racism in the late 1970s, a more sustained articulation of radicalism come to be made within the movement (for example, Bullivant, 1986). However, prior to this engagement displays of radicalism remained highly infrequent, ‘mere’ moments of discord and uncertainty within an otherwise confident common sense.

Individualism Public professional individualism has two main characteristics. On the one hand, it affirms the principle of egalitarianism and people’s right to be treated as equally valuable members of society. On the other, it supports the socially atomizing culture of competitive capitalism and the subordination of group rights. The ideology of individualism brings these two political projects together into an apparently unified rhetoric of prerogatives and responsibilities. The seemingly coherent rhetoric of individualism which binds these antagonistic political tendencies together thus forges a compromise between egalitarianism and capitalism. Individualist common sense has imbued the education and ‘race’ agenda. Indeed, two of the most typical aspects of multiculturalism are examples of individualism: self-image theory and the principle of equality of opportunity. Although a focus on individual self-image is characteristic of all liberal child-centred education, it plays a particularly central role within multiculturalism. The supposed poor self-image of minority children, their lack of respect for themselves and their own cultural heritage, has been linked by educational researchers to their poor relative academic performance (Milner, 1975; Verma and Bagley, 1979). In a caricatural but usefully concise summing up of self-image theory, Maureen Stone (1981:26) argues that it hinges upon the notion that, ‘When dealing with black children’, teachers should work on the assumption that ‘attitudes to the self must…be changed as blacks hate and despise themselves and this causes them to fail at school’.


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Self-image theory has also been rationalized through the principle of equality of opportunity. This principle has been expressed by multiculturalists as a commitment to the right of students to compete with one another without fear of colour or culture prejudice. Thus equality of opportunity has been viewed as a way of providing minority students with the chance to prove they are as intelligent and as skilled as white children. ‘Hundreds of teachers’, proclaimed a London Working Party of Teachers and Lecturers (1974:17–18), are making ‘heroic attempts to ensure that black children are offered every chance…[to] have a more equal opportunity of making use of what the school system has to offer’. Expanding upon a similar theme, Roberts (1973:232) commented that multiculturalism’s general philosophy ‘stresses the importance of the individual and the importance of his freedom to cultivate his individual powers’. One of the consequences of this emphasis was the virtual effacement of the notion that racism was entrenched within educational and wider social structures or that its eradication would require acts of explicitly political collective struggle rather than, or as well as, individual initiative. A familiar ideological process may be identified here. For by locating the causes of the minority child’s success or failure within her or his own individual ability or self-image, the educator is able to be, at one and the same time, an egalitarian and sustain an antiegalitarian society. Roberts’s ideological closure is, however, imperfect. He continues: ‘We can only hope to develop the individual by knowing something of the possibilities of his community background and only help him to make some sense of the world by understanding the social problems he is confronting’ (p. 233). Here the origin of a pupil’s failure is both personalized as ‘his’ ability to ‘develop’ and located within a wider arena of ‘social problems’. Thus the difficulty of tackling inequality solely at an individual level is simultaneously affirmed and problematized. The tensions within Roberts’s commentary are eased by the stress he places upon culture as the terrain in which marginalization and prejudice are experienced. The problem of overcoming the socio-economic location of students, although implicitly raised as an issue, is thus avoided through an emphasis on the safely ‘apolitical’ issue of cultural harmony.

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Educationalism Clearly a commitment to the intrinsic value of education is likely to be held by many of those who have decided to join the profession. However, liberal educators have defended a distinctly exaggerated version of this philosophy, one that makes the implicit or explicit claim that the provision of neutral, objective knowledge can extinguish social injustice. Thus the term ‘educationalism’ will be defined here as referring to the belief that, through education’s innately beneficial effects, social inequalities and irrational prejudices can be eradicated. Within multiculturalism this theme emerges most clearly though the idea that rationality and accurate knowledge can cure ‘race’ prejudice. The term ‘cure’ is an apt one since educationalism encourages a view of racism as akin to mental illness, a symptom of a breakdown in individuals’, or society’s, ability to think rationally. The ‘mass of ignorance and even superstition which provides a fertile source for all kinds of prejudice’, Hatch (1962:63) noted, ‘should be replaced by a body of accurate and up-to-date knowledge’. Developing this idea, Margaret Nandy (1971:123) suggested that the ‘central problem’ of good ‘race relations’ is students’ ‘tenacious predisposition’ to prejudices ‘acquired by non-rational means’. What is required, Nandy observed, is the provision of a ‘rational viewpoint’. The focus on ignorance and irrationality places the educator centre stage in the fight against ‘racial’ inequality. He or she is positioned as the arbiter and provider of truth, truth which will be able to banish ill-informed fears. The notion that racism may be a rational reflection of cultural, social and economic inequalities of power is thus marginalized. Marginalized but not obliterated: for the validity of this latter perspective is implied by the assertion, cryptically inserted into many multiculturalist texts, that multiculturalism’s impact on inequality is likely to be slight. Thus, for example, midway through an article on education’s ability to inculcate ‘racial’ tolerance amongst students, Duncan Scott (1974:6) suggests that teachers ‘have limited influence on society’. Scott’s brief lapse of optimism subverts the otherwise confident vision of ‘information?playing=attitude change’ that his paper is based upon. The idea, to take one of the examples of role-play Scott offers, that students wheeling each other around in invalid chairs will instil ‘consideration of the place of minorities’ and have ‘real significance’ (pp. 8–9) is thus momentarily undermined.


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Consensus-seeking Despite its affirmation of cultural difference, the multiculturalist project is imbued with an almost missionary zeal to foster ‘racial’ and cultural harmony. By encouraging schools to become meetingplaces for the display and affirmation of difference, multiculturalists attempt to create the conditions for mutual respect and co-existence. Multiculturalism, notes Otto Polling (1975:18), is concerned with ‘developing mutual respect among people’ so as to encourage ‘a due appreciation’ of the contribution to British society of ‘our fellow citizens of African and Asian descent’. Thus respect for diversity and the achievement of social solidarity are seen as inseparable. In an assessment of the Devon LEA’s multicultural policy, Roy Pryke (1985:14) observes that ‘it is essential to look ahead to educating all children from whatever ethnic group to an understanding of shared values in British society and to an appreciation of its diversity of lifestyles and cultures’. One way an appreciation of ‘shared values’ has b een encouraged is through the development of exchange programmes between predominantly white and ‘multiracial’ schools. From the earliest examples of the practice, such as the project ‘Getting together’—which took place in Leicester in the early 1970s—school exchanges have been understood as ‘attempts towards racial harmony’ (Lucas, 1975b:19). In a more recent example of a similar project, involving a visit by some British African adults to a rural Devon school, the org anizer noted the way that ‘friendships made’ enabled white children to feel they had something in common with minority people (Smith, 1987:65). The climax of the exercise was attained when a white child felt able to say ‘they’re just like us’. And yet, as with other facets of multiculturalism, this harmonious ideal is sometimes interrupted, briefly subverted by the recognition that ‘racial’ conflict is not a marginal or epiphenomenal part of British society. Britain, notes Jeffcoate (1974:12) at the end of an otherwise serenely consensus-oriented article, is ‘endemically racist’. Of course, if true, such a statement would imply that ‘racial’ conflict and disharmony may be even more pressing issues to acknowledge than the search for shared values.

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Professionalism Professionalism has been defined as a strategy for controlling an occupation…. This involves restriction of entry into the occupation through the control of education, training and the process of qualification…there is the reinforcement of this situation by the acquisition of state support. (Parry and Parry quoted by Ozga and Lawn, 1981:14–15) This definition usefully summarizes the way professional status has been used to control access to, and the responsibilities of, particular jobs. However, professionalism is more than an exclusionary strategy. It is also a form of consciousness, an attitude that draws on a wide range of ideals. Two of the most important of these ideals turn upon the professional’s capacity for objectivity and the ethic of public service. The difference posited between a professional and non-professional approach hinges on the defence of these principles. R.H.Tawney (1948:94), one of the intellectual progenitors of the British vision of public welfare, explained that for the true professional, ‘the meaning of their profession, both for themselves and for the public, is not that they make money, but that they make health, or safety, or knowledge, or good government or good law’. Tawney’s romantic account of professional altruism disguises the fact that professional status, and improved working and wage conditions have been, and continue to be, struggled for by educators. Moreover, it also obscures the conflicting nature of the professional’s dual loyalties. As Magali Larson (1979:63; see also Johnson, 1991) has pointed out, ‘at the core of the professional project, we find the fusion of antithetical ideological structures and a potential for permanent tension between “civilizing function” and market-orientation’. Professionalism pervades multiculturalist ideology. It positions the educator as an objective cultural arbiter and expert. It is implied that this impressive figure is able to stand astride society gaining insight from its constituent ‘racial’ and cultural components. It is revealing that the widely read multicultural text The Multi-Racial School (McNeal and Rogers, 1971), although designed for a general readership, was subtitled A Professional Perspective. This label communicated a distinction between what were advertised as the book’s ‘sober accounts’ (Nandy, 1971:11) and ‘level-headed realism’


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(Hipkin, back cover, 1972 edition) and the, presumably, unreliable and emotional perspectives of parents and students. In the multiculturalist journal Multiracial School, Jeffcoate (1974:11) noted: ‘the first questions must be—What are our goals? What concepts, skills, attitudes, values and so forth do we want children to acquire?’. What Jeffcoate terms the ‘range of expertise’ required to answer such questions precludes the communities upon which they are imposed from responding to them. It is the teacher who sets the questions and marks the answers. However, as we may have come to expect, professionalism often displays the potential for self-critique. In a statement in the same article that sits uneasily with his repeated affirmation of teachers’ ability to make unbiased, politically detached responses, Jeffcoate (p. 12) notes that ‘racism pervades our institutions and all sections of our society (including the teaching profession)’.

CONCLUSION We have seen how liberalism has made sense to educators within a discursive environment that affirms the possibility of egalitarian change within contemporary capitalism. This experience has been inflected for multiculturalists by discourses of ‘racial’ inequality and minority resistance. These latter discourses have provoked a reformulation of liberal ideals and assumptions. They have not subverted liberalism’s optimistic vision of social progress. Rather this optimism has been remodelled around a series of multicultural mythologies that rearticulate the liberal ideological strands of reformism, individualism, educationalism, consensus-seeking and professionalism. This chapter has also proposed that ideology is not always characterized by the complete closure of contradiction. Moments of radical critique, of implicit self-doubt, can sometimes be glimpsed even within as seemingly assured an ideology as liberalism. Such momentary lapses of liberal optimism form a kind of submerged history of self-critique within this form of common sense. How this radical tendency has been turned into an overt politics is the subject of Part III.

Part III


Introduction

Part I II looks at the development of educationalist anti-racist ideology in three different parts of England. The three areas— London, Tyneside and Devon—have been chosen because they each provide a different social and political context for the formation of ‘race’ equality commitments. London, particularly Inner London, is one of the most ‘multiracial’ urban localities in Europe. It has also been home to the continent’s most active anti-racist movement. Tyneside and Devon, by contrast, are commonly regarded as ‘white’ localities. Neither area has ever had a large or wellestablished community of ‘race’ equality activists. However, in many other respects Tyneside and Devon are very dissimilar. Tyneside is a metropolitan area with a tradition of socialist politics; Devon is a predominantly rural county with a largely Conservative political heritage. My analyses of anti-racism in London, Tyneside and Devon are mostly based upon interview material (see the methodological Appendix; also Bonnett, 1990a). These interviews were conducted in 1987 and 1988. A total of sixty-six people were interviewed. Sixty-one individuals within this group positioned themselves at the ‘cutting edge’ of the ‘race’ equality debate in their area. This positioning was conveyed by respondents’ repeated reference to the old-fashioned and/ or unoriginal nature of other ‘race’ equality paradigms and the new and/or challenging nature of their own approach. The remaining five interviewees (all in London) adopted a defensive, non-vanguardist stance. It is the attitudes of those sixty-one educators who considered themselves to be at the ‘cutting edge’ of ‘race’ equality activity that will be considered in the following chapters. My interviews resulted from letter or phone call approaches to 101

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101 educators identified as sympathetic to anti-racism and/or multiculturalism. This initial identification was usually made on the basis of an individual’s membership of a ‘race’ equality organization, contribution to an anti-racist/multiculturalist journal or professional responsibilities (for example, LEA Multicultural Adviser). Once the interviewing process had begun potential interviewees were also identified through the recommendation of other respondents. My interview approach was semi-structured. Although I attempted to cover a number of set topics in each encounter the length and nature of these discussions were not limited. After I had undertaken several interviews, two basic lines of questioning emerged and were introduced into most conversations. The first, which was usually introduced early in the interview, revolved around the definition of racism and the politics of anti-racist practice. Discussion on this topic was instigated through one or more of the following four questions: What is racism? How can education tackle racism? How can individual prejudice be countered? Do you give priority to recognizing conflict or encouraging social harmony? All four of these topics quickly established their place on my interview agenda, although it was often the case that raising only one led to discussion of the others. The second area of questioning revolved around the issue of anti-racism’s relationship to professionalism. Dividing this area off from the rest of the interview enabled conversation to be reoriented away from anti-racism as an educational strategy and towards antiracism’s wider role in the community. This issue was usually approached through one of the following three questions: What is the relationship between anti-racism and the local community? Is anti-racism community or educator led? Is anti-racism a professional approach? This pattern of questioning provides a guide to the conduct of interviews. It was not strictly adhered to on every occasion. My lines of questioning were adapted to engage with respondents’ own priorities. This flexibility was particularly important in encounters with interviewees who expressed a sense of discomfort about labelling people or institutions as racist. Although affirming the importance of anti-racism, these individuals (most of whom worked in the two ‘white’ localities studied) often preferred to see themselves primarily as multiculturalists. In order to preserve interviewees’ anonymity and avoid the


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cultural sub-texts that accompany the use of false names (for example, the Anglocentric connotations of imposing English pseudonyms) respondents are identified by two alphabetical letters. The second letter identifies an individual within one of the study areas and has been chosen at random. The first letter indicates where the interviewee worked. The prefix ‘L’ stands for London, ‘D’ for Devon and ‘T’ for Tyneside.

Chapter 5

Radicalism, ideology and reflexivity: anti-racism in London

INTRODUCTION One’s immediate impression, on turning from the multiculturalism of the 1970s to the anti-racism of the 1980s, is that a complete political realignment has occurred. Where once the ‘race’ debate in education had been conducted with the politeness and lack of overt passion characteristic of a professional disagreement, by the 1980s it had become openly polarized and frequently ferocious. For the right-wing educator Ray Honeyford (1986:51), anti-racism arises ‘from that restricted mentality which underlies all fanaticism’. Honeyford himself was described by one of my London interviewees as a ‘right-wing loony’ and ‘tricky bastard’. An ‘apolitical’, apparently uncontroversial debate has, it seems, been replaced by an acrimonious dispute between right and left. The language of consensus transformed into that of conflict. This chapter has two main components. In the first half I draw on a variety of historical sources, and a few observations from London interviewees, to chart the radicalization of the ‘race’ and education debate. This process is set within the context of crisis experiences, including a crisis of economic and social decline and a crisis of ‘racial’ inequality. Thus the first half of this account traces a historical line that leads towards militancy and the rejection of liberalism. The certainties of linear narrative are, however, disrupted in the later stages of this chapter. Here a more complex and ambiguous portrait of anti-racism is introduced. This interview-based analysis explains how both liberal and radical strands are woven into the radical anti-racist project. It is demonstrated how these strands are pulled together to form ideologies (see also Bonnett, 1990b; 104

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1993a). It is also noted that some radical anti-racists have developed a reflexive, socially self-conscious, politics; a form of consciousness capable of untying anti-racism’s ideological knot. In summary, this chapter attempts to chart the development of three intertwined social processes: radicalization, the formation of anti-racist ideology and reflexivity. It does so without presuming that the empirical instances it explores are universally applicable. Nowhere is it suggested that this case study offers a representative example of anti-racism’s development in Britain or ‘the inner cities’. All the examples offered in this chapter, and all the educators interviewed, come from one particular city, London. In other areas of the United Kingdom, as Chapters 6 and 7 document, the emergence of anti-racist consciousness has often occurred at a different pace and with somewhat different priorities. The interviews in London were derived from a larger set conducted at various times between 1987 and 1988 within the boundaries of the area once administered by the Greater London Council. Twenty-five interviews were undertaken. Of those interviewed twenty individuals (seventeen of whom were white) positioned themselves at the forefront of anti-racist and political debate. It is this set of interviewees whose opinions interest me here. All the quotations from anti-racists cited in this chapter are from this ‘vanguard’ group. SUBVERTING LIBERALISM: THE TRANSITION TO RADICALISM The radicalization of the education and ‘race’ debate was enabled by the experience of crisis. As Holton (1987:502) warns, ‘crisis’ has become one of the ‘all-pervasive rhetorical metaphors’ of contemporary social research and, as such, its precise meaning has become confused. It is generally agreed that a crisis signals some form of break down. However, a more precise definition can be offered, one that is based on the assertion that a crisis is an experience that challenges hegemonic common sense. To mention that crisis is experienced may seem superfluous. However, it distinguishes the approach advanced here from the work of those crisis theorists, such as Claus Offe (1984), who equate crisis with an abstract state of social and economic dysfunctionality. Although able to offer useful models of social process, such a purely theoretical view of crisis implies that it exists

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‘out there’, above and beyond daily life. By contrast, a focus on experience connects crisis to meaningful social events, occurrences such as riots or social collapse, that undermine established assumptions. The crises experienced by educators in the postwar years have partially subverted the plausibility of liberal common sense. In other words, they have cast doubt on the notion that egalitarian and pro-market political ideals can be synthesized into a coherent political project. As noted earlier, although these crises have a number of different origins and characteristics, two main forms can be isolated, a crisis of ‘racial’ inequality and a crisis of economic and social decline. The latter discourse provides an important context for the experience of the former. It was the crisis of economic and social decline that first enabled the formation of a radical current in education in the 1960s and early 1970s—a current that was later to provide a supportive intellectual environment for the development of radical anti-racism. The crisis of decline The assumption that post-war Britain was destined to be an increasingly wealthy, equal and socially mobile society was disrupted in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A series of economic and social problems provided clear evidence that the momentum of progressive reforms was liable to be drastically slowed, if not put into reverse. The ensuing crisis of decline never managed to cast such doubt over the values of reformism, individualism, educationalism, consensus-seeking and professionalism as to provoke a mass desertion from liberalism amongst educators. Then, as now, these value systems retained enough plausibility to ensure majority support. However, the crisis instituted a cynicism concerning liberal optimism amongst an increasingly significant and vocal minority within the educational community. This current was particulary powerful in urban areas, where the crisis of decline had its most obvious, and most fully recorded, consequences. The economic and social context for the growth of this radical current can be sketched through a number of statistical indicators (cited by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1981). The long-term unemployment rate, from an average of 1.5 per cent in the 1940s and 1950s, rose to 3.8 per cent in 1972. Inflation, from a steady rate of 2 per cent during the 1950s, rose to 8 per


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cent in 1971, 12 per cent in 1974 and 27 per cent in 1975. These economic pressures acted to legitimize cutbacks in the public expenditure growth rate, which slowed from 6.1 per cent a year between 1963 and 1968 to 3.2 per cent between 1968 and 1973. As mentioned, it was within urban areas that these statistics had their most evident social repercussions. Thus, for example, figures released by the Greater London Council (1973) show that whilst, between 1965 and 1971, 25 per cent of households with the lowest income in Greater London and the South East suffered a relative decline in their income, the poorest 25 per cent in Inner London suffered an absolute decline. The concentration of poverty in Inner London was also revealed by the fact that, as the 1971 census showed, of the 147 enumerated districts with over 15 per cent unemployment in Greater London, 104 were in Inner London boroughs. As decline became more apparent the liberal belief that the gradual reform of capitalism was leading to social equality became less credible. Liberal strategies were opened up to the charge of being both naive and ineffective. The corollary of the delegitimization of liberalism was the legitimization of radical ideas and ideals. Reflecting this process, Ken Jones (1983:113), in his study of the development of socialist politics amongst teachers, notes that the years 1968–74 were the formative period of a new, minority current in education. Unlike the traditional movements for equal opportunity this current was inclined to see the school as a repressive institution; in contrast to traditional teacher unionism, it was eager to adopt trade-union methods of struggle. This radical current manifested itself in the development of a number of different radical organizations and journals, all of which drew their majority support from urban educationalists. The most important of these groups was the militant union block Rank and File (founded 1968; see Wright, 1976; 1989). A number of influential socialist education magazines also appeared around this time, including Further Left (founded 1971), Teaching London Kids (founded 1972), Hard Cheese (founded 1973), Radical Education (founded 1974) and Teachers Action (founded 1975). Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s inequality tended to be viewed by radical educators, particularly white radical educators, through a single prism, that of class. Authoritarianism and state

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control were also sometimes placed on the agenda by the strong, if usually unacknowledged, anarchist strand within the movement. However, issues of ‘race’ (and gender) equality remained very marginal. This lack of concern has been reflected and reproduced in the historical overviews of the period that have since appeared. Thus for example, in Teachers, Ideology and Control, a work that contains a detailed account of radical activity in education in the 1960s and 1970s, Gerald Grace (1978) does not even mention ‘race’ equality activism. In Nigel Wright’s (1989) even more comprehensive Assessing Radical Education, three pages are devoted to ‘race’-related matters. Moreover, most of this discussion centres on a single-issue information service devoted to the critique of IQ testing (the Campaign on Racism, IQ and the Class Society; founded 1974). In addition, Wright provides four short paragraphs on Teachers Against Racism, a small and short-lived radical multiculturalist group founded in London in 1971 (see also Harris, 1972). The minimal treatment Grace and Wright accord the subject of ‘race’ equality is a faithful echo of the educational left’s dominant priorities in this period. This lack of interest may be explained, in part at least, by reference to the overwhelmingly white nature of the profession. Minority educators, both then and now, represent only a tiny proportion of the profession. According to one recent survey fewer than 2 per cent of teachers come from the ‘ethnic minorities’ (Ranger, 1988). It is certain that more visible minority educators would have encouraged a greater sensitivity to issues of ‘race’ and racism both within the educational left and within the profession as a whole. However, this explanation is only partly convincing. After all, from the late 1970s onwards, while the educational left remained overwhelmingly white, anti-racism became an accepted and influential part of the radical agenda. Thus other factors also need to be considered. It is particularly pertinent to re-emphasize radicals’ class reductionist, and often crudely economically deterministic, theoretical heritage. This heritage, derived from Marxism, supplied a largely unchallenged context for the (non)discussion of ‘race’ issues until the mid-1970s. The prevalent attitude was, as Graham Davies (1972:7) notes, that if you ‘Solve the basic problems of employment and housing, either by revolutionary or gradualist methods…you will as a by-product eradicate colour prejudice’. However, despite this emphasis upon class equality, the establishment of a militant current in education provided a


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necessary context for the development of radical anti-racism. A radical professional culture had been established, a culture that enabled the language of social struggle and transformation to become a familiar facet of educational discussion. This culture and its associated rhetorical forms were able to be adopted and adapted by anti-racists. The process of adoption and adaptation was, of course, a mutual one. By about the same time the anti-racist movement was benefiting from the interest and direct assistance of many leftist groups, the Socialist Teachers Association (STA; founded by ex-Rank and File members in 1977) and the International Socialists (later renamed the Socialist Workers’ Party), both providing significant support for ‘race’ equality activists in schools. The crisis of social and economic decline remained a conducive context for radicalism throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Worsening levels of unemployment and social deprivation continued to subvert liberal optimism. Unemployment quadrupled between 1975 and 1982 (Youth Task Group, 1982). However, by the mid-1970s, social inequality and injustice were increasingly being interpreted by radical educators, not simply in terms of class, but also through the prism of ‘race’. THE CRISIS OF ‘RACIAL’ INEQUALITY Two main stages in the development of anti-racism in London can be isolated. These two stages are associated with two different aspects of the crisis of ‘racial’ inequality. The first stage is associated with struggles against neo-Nazism and dominated the movement between the middle and end of the 1970s. The second stage, which emerged at the end of that decade, is associated with minority resistance and revolt. It is towards the former of these themes, that of neo-Nazi threat, that I turn first. Anti-Nazi anti-racism Sensing increasing support, British fascism’s largest and most effective political vehicle, the National Front (NF; founded 1967), participated for the first time in a General Election in 1970. It received 3.7 per cent of the total vote. However, it was in 1974, in the wake of renewed popular anxiety about British Asian immigration, that the NF started to look like a party in sight of real

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power. In that year it won well over 6 per cent of the vote in several parliamentary seats in the east of London (its highest vote being 9.4 per cent in Hackney South). In 1974 the NF averaged nearly 10 per cent of the vote in a number of districts in London local government elections. Throughout this period NF-inspired racist graffiti were becoming an increasingly common sight on London streets. The initials ‘NF’ seemed to be scrawled on every wall, crudely cut into every public bench. Unsurprisingly, the NF’s growth at a time of economic slump provoked many to compare their rise to that of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s. They seemed, reminisced one interviewee (LA), ‘to be gaining a stranglehold on the minds of ordinary whites’. The importance of responding to the NF, and the rising number of racial attacks (see Bethnal Green and Stepney Trades Council, 1978), was pressed with considerable urgency on educators by minority students and parents. In July 1978, for example, 400 pupils from the predominantly British Asian Robert Montefiore school in East London joined a local strike against local racist violence. However, perhaps the most direct challenge to teachers’ traditionally detached and anti-confrontational approach to ‘race’ issues, came through the NF’s transgression of their professional sanctum, the school. The NF targeted white students for recruitment. It also used schools as sites to disseminate its literature. The circulation of Bulldog, the NF’s youth paper, and leaflets such as How to Combat Red Teachers and How to Spot a Red Teacher, were considerable provocations for educators used to viewing ‘their’ institutions as apolitical spaces under firm professional control. In effect, the NF’s success subverted the idea that schools can be viewed as centres of social harmony. It also undermined the notion that liberal, consensus-seeking appeals to reason are able to foster egalitarianism and tolerance. The NF and its supporters did not seem to be readily influenced by appeals to rationality. They expressed themselves through physical confrontation and a blatant contempt for the principle of equality. Set against the NF’s tactics and aims liberal values increasingly appeared irrelevant and ineffectual. In a parallel development, the rise of a predominantly workingclass ultra-right organization disrupted the somewhat romantic visions of working-class solidarity harboured by many radicals. The NF’s evident appeal amongst the left’s own supposed support-base problematized orthodox, class reductionist, interpretations of social


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conflict. The issue of ‘racial’ oppression was being forced into view for white radicals. As one interviewee commented: ‘the left had to wake up to race or it was just going to be irrelevant to the struggle as it existed, not as [it was] traditionally thought it should exist’ (LB). The already firmly established radical current in education seemed to many London educators to provide a more plausible rhetoric of response to neo-Nazism than the increasingly unconvincing language of liberalism. The radical tradition was replete with references to struggle, to resistance and to conflict. It was those educators who refashioned this rhetoric around issues of ‘racial’ inequality who were able to position themselves as at the cutting edge of the rapidly changing ‘race’ and education debate. The term this group eventually came to adopt for itself—anti-racists— is itself redolent of a militant, confrontational view of social process. The radical implications of defining oneself as ‘anti’ a reactionary attitude contrast sharply with the liberal connotations of defining oneself as ‘for’ multiculturalism. Indeed, the former perspective sits uneasily with the latter’s emphasis upon social harmony and mutual trust. Reflecting this unease the prominent multiculturalist and leading figure within the National Association for Multiracial Education (NAM E), Robert Jeffcoate (1979; see also Jeffcoate, 1977), expressed his concern over the changing tone of the debate: There are many who argue that, since the [National] Front is an unmitigated evil, it should be ‘smashed’; which may include any or all of—denying it access to public platforms and the media; disrupting its meetings and the distribution of its literature; stopping its marches; and proscribing it. Certainly I take the Front to be an evil organization but I have no wish to ‘smash’ it. On the contrary I defend its rights as a legal political party in a parliamentary democracy, even its right to hold public meetings in multiracial schools at election time. (Jeffcoate, 1979:103) It is evident that Jeffcoate’s commitment to liberalism and multiculturalism was undiminished by the rise of neo-Nazi activity. However, the leading edge of the debate had moved on without him. In 1978 Jeffcoate (1978:2) attacked the ‘“anti-racist movement”’ (a neologism he placed, with clear distaste, in inverted commas) by suggesting that many multiculturalists ‘harbour reservations, doubts or anxieties about some of the directions in which the fight against

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racism is being pushed’. Once a trail blazer of the ‘race’ and education debate, Jeffcoate was thus forced into a defensive position. Indeed, in 1978, after militant anti-racist tendencies had become apparent in NAME, Jeffcoate left his position as editor of its journal, Multiracial School. A year later his newly released book Positive Image was roundly condemned by the London branch of NAME. Not only was Positive Image described as ‘muddled and dangerous’ (Wright, 1979:1), but a working party was set up to develop a critique of the work. The radicalization of the National Association for Multiracial Education led, eventually, to the organization being relaunched in 1985 as the National Antiracist Movement in Education. However, although always associated with the left, the political identity of anti-racism in the mid-to-late 1970s was itself sometimes accused of being muddled. Despite the radical rhetoric, the movement’s concentration on neo-Nazism frequently restricted its view of racism to the margins of the political spectrum. This focus on neo-Nazism made racism appear a peripheral strand within British political life. Thus the magazine Radical Education (1974:2) felt able to suggest that the ‘most unpleasant of the right wing’s many faces is its racialism’. This expression of concern simultaneously confines the issue of racism to a discrete facet of right-wing politics whilst trivializing it as merely ‘unpleasant’. The superficiality of anti-Nazi anti-racism was mirrored in other aspects of the movement. Thus, for example, one of the attacks on the N F made by a newly formed London-based group called Teachers Against the Nazis (a sub-group of the Anti-Nazi League; founded in 1977), was the accusation that the N F were ‘fake patriots’ (see also Gilroy, 1987). Thus it was simultaneously implied both that racism was a problem of ultra-rightism and that a more honorable nationalist tradition needed to de defended. The uncertain nature of anti-Nazi anti-racism’s political identity was exacerbated by the so-called ‘broad front’ approach advocated by many within the movement. This attitude was clearly articulated by some of the founders of another London based antiracist group, All London Teachers Against Racism and Fascism (ALTARF). ‘The strength of the organisation we envisaged was its appeal to the entire staffroom’, argued ALTARF members Peacock and Hood (1978:14). Towards this end a pre-foundation mass rally was planned, ‘a rally which simply called teachers, as teachers, into an anti-racist formation…. We desperately didn’t


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want sectarian battles. We wanted the organization to be multipolitical’ (ibid.). ALTARFs foundation rally was held on 16 March 1978 and was attended by about 2000–2500 individuals. As a display of solidarity against neo-Nazism and racist violence it was a spectacular success. However, the overall effect, as described by Farrukh Dhondy (1982:16), who was one of the principal speakers, was that although attendants ‘knew what they were against [they] hadn’t quite decided what they were for…. It was as though the organizers had set out to represent the confusion that exists on the race question in the staffroom.’ In retrospect, the mid-to-late 1970s appear as a period of transition from a liberal to a radical vanguard ‘race’ debate. It was a transition instigated by discourses of ‘neo-Nazi threat’, discourses that subverted the plausibility of liberal common sense. Yet, although liberal ideology was being partially delegitimized, radical anti-racism had not yet achieved a clear and distinct identity. It was only with the more intense experiences of crisis at the end of the 1970s and 1980s that a recognizably radical anti-racist current came to dominate the vanguard debate. Radical anti-racism The late 1970s and 1980s witnessed a series of events that acted to further delegitimize liberal definitions of racism and dispel the ‘multipolitical’ pretensions of anti-Nazi anti-racism. None of the constituent elements of this process—which included minority economic disadvantage, police harassment and riots—was in itself new. However, the power of their collective impact on educators’ attitudes to ‘race’ and racism distinguishes them from earlier periods. I shall outline each of these crisis themes in turn, beginning with visible minorities’ deteriorating economic situation. Economic and social decline affected the majority of Londoners during the 1970s and 1980s. However, most indicators of unemployment, income and housing deprivation showed a pattern of worsening relative and/or absolute disadvantage for minority groups (Greater London Council, 1986; Townsend et al., 1987; Cross, 1978). Throughout the 1970s minority unemployment rose faster than amongst the white population. In 1981, 16 per cent of the British Asian and Afro-British population in London was unemployed and ‘only’ 9 per cent of the entire population (Townsend et al., 1987). It was widely assumed amongst many

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within the minority communities that their relative economic disadvantage was the direct result of ‘racial’ discrimination. That this interpretation may be the correct one is indicated by the fact that a London Jobcentre-based study (cited by Ohri and Faruqi, 1988) showed that application to placement ratios were eight to one for white Britons, sixteen to one for British Asians and thirteen to one for Afro-Britons. Alongside increasing evidence of economic inequality there grew daily evidence that racism was also entrenched within the police force. As Carter (1986:104) relates, a disproportionate number of Afro-British people had, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, been stopped and/or arrested under section 4 of the 1824 Vagrancy Act (often termed the ‘sus’ law) for being suspected of ‘loitering with intent to commit an arrestable offence’. In 1975 the inadequacy of the police response to racism, and the question of ‘racial’ harassment by the police themselves, had provided one of the spurs to the formation of the North London-based Black Students’ Movement and Black Parents’ Movement. However, in the late 1970s and 1980s, police racism was drawn dramatically to the attention of educators by a series of violent confrontations between the police and minority youth. The high-profile policing of AfroBritish communities and events, such as the Netting Hill Carnival, proved particularly incendiary. Violent confrontations between police and Afro-British youth at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival and between the police and anti-fascist demonstrators at Lewisham in 1977 cemented an emergent cynicism towards the police within the anti-racist movement. The police, noted the rapidly radicalizing ALTARF group, are ‘a very powerful political force’ (ALTAR F, 19 8 2:1). Anti-racists, ALTAR F continued, must ‘convince our colleagues of [police] nonneutrality, and explain… their racism’. It was, however, the killing, by a member of the police force’s Special Patrol Group, of the London teacher Blair Peach, a member of both Teachers Against the Nazis and the Socialist Workers Party, that became the central symbol of police brutality. Peach was killed by a truncheon blow to the head at an anti-fascist demonstration in Southall in 1979. In his honour a Blair Peach Teachers’ Resource Centre was established in London to provide anti-racist material. Although the centre was short-lived, Peach’s death had a considerable impact on other anti-racist educators (see, for example,


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North, 1979). It intensified their conviction that they were embarked, not on a polite professional campaign, but on a necessarily militant struggle. One of the ways this increased militancy was reflected was through an increased sensitivity to the views of those minority groups articulating the language of Black struggle. Thus, for example, the work of the Black radicals associated with the Institute of Race Relations (see, for example, Sivanandan, 1982) came to be widely read and accepted amongst anti-racists. Although relatively few in number, minority teachers, organized in groups such as Inner London Black Teachers’ Group (ILBTG) and Hackney Black Teachers’ Group (HBTG), also played an increasingly central role in interpreting the ensuing crisis of ‘racial’ inequality from a Black perspective. Thus Afro-British and British Asian anti-racist educators were able to adopt a specific and discrete position within the movement. They came to be seen as representatives of the Black oppressed. As this implies, although Black and White antiracist radicals both articulated the same basic form of anti-racism (although the former group placed particular emphasis on the slow pace of promotion and recruitment of Black teachers), a selfinstituted friendly schism grew between them. As Lynette Hubah (1984:45), co-ordinator of the ILBTG and HBTG, noted: ‘We as Black teachers have to educate the majority of the White to what their racism is…. We have suffered the effects of racism, we are the oppressed ones.’ However, the most powerful radicalizing influence on the debate were the riots of 1981 and 1985. Between 10–13 April 1981, one of London’s largest Afro-British communities, in Brixton, saw three days of rioting. The following weekend police and youth fought in Finsbury Park and Ealing Common. The violence continued into June and July. Smith et al.’s (undated) summary of the events of 1981 lists twenty-five ‘riot areas’ in London, most of which were situated in localities with large minority settlements (although disturbances were also reported in Romford, Walthamstow and Penge). Rioting returned to London in 1985 in Brixton and Tottenham. In both places it was police brutality towards an Afro-British woman that provided the spark for confrontation (in Brixton with the shooting of Cherry Groce by police and in Tottenham with the death of Cynthia Jarrett during a police raid on her home). Although Gilroy (1987) reports that only between 29 and 37

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per cent of those arrested during the 1981 riots were ‘nonwhite’, both the 1981 and 1985 disturbances were widely seen in the popular press, and by anti-racist educators, as conflicts between Black (predominantly Afro-British) youth and the police. This interpretation within the popular press has been examined by researchers as a manifestation of the racism of the mass media (Richards, undated; Burgess, 1985). This analysis is certainly plausible but does not explain why anti-racists also saw the riots as, in the words of one respondent, ‘examples of Black protest’ (LC). Amongst anti-racists this representation seems to arise from two sources. Firstly, from a critical recognition of the de facto racialization of the riots by the media. ‘Like it or not’, commented LC, ‘“Black riots” is how they are seen.’ The second explanation turns upon the conviction that it was visible minority people who formed the ‘leading edge’ of the 1981 and 1985 disturbances. ‘The riots’, commented another interviewee, ‘were the result of the anger of oppressed Blacks finally boiling over’ (LD). LE suggested that, ‘what the violence taught us was the power of Black rebellion… and its hunger for an end to racism’. It is interesting to note that, whilst anti-racists were increasingly finding multiculturalism irrelevant, the ensuing crisis of ‘racial’ inequality was galvanizing many local education authorities (LEAs) into introducing multicultural policies. By 1982, thirty-three English LEAs had issued multicultural policy documents, almost half the issued titles coming from London (thirty-five out of a total of seventy-six; figures derived from Mullard et al., 1983). Unsurprisingly, the sudden conversion of the LEAs only heightened anti-racists’ suspicions about multiculturalism’s political characteristics. Multiculturalism came to be seen as ‘a political manoeuvre’ (Troyna and Williams, 1986:37); ‘an instrument of control and stability rather than one of change’ (Mullard, 1985:50). Thus multiculturalism was increasingly perceived as not merely inadequate and irrelevant but, through its reformist tokenism and perpetuation of an apolitical model of social change, as actually sustaining inequality. The crisis of ‘racial’ inequality succeeded, notes Richard Hatcher (1985:9), in ‘undercutting, in education, the Liberal middle-ground on which the “soft multiculturalists” stand, trying to hold together a consensus on “race and education” between forces that are steadily moving further apart’. A parallel point


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may be made in relation to the delegitimization of ‘race’-blind radicalism. The disbandment of many of the first wave of radical groups, such as Rank and File (in 1982), is indicative of the declining plausibility of this radical paradigm. As class reductionist radicalism declined, groups such as the Socialist Teachers’ Alliance (the STA has drawn its strongest support from London teachers), committed to a broad, if still recognizably Marxist, critique of the class, gender, ‘racial’ dynamics of power, came to articulate the new cutting edge of educational socialism. Hatcher (1979) suggested in the STA’s journal, Socialist Teacher, that the ‘most advanced example’ of the radicalization of teachers is ‘that of anti-racism. Hundreds of teachers recognize the need to go b eyond “multi-cultural education”…they represent a very important new element in the rebuilding of the left among teachers.’ The assertion of a radical current within the ‘race’ and education debate cannot be correlated with a decline in the numbers of educators who supported liberal multiculturalism. Liberal perspectives remained the majority view, the radicals seeing themselves (as they do today) as a struggling minority. What this assertion can be firmly tied to, however, is a change within the nature and organization of the debate. For radical anti-racists were now able to position themselves as at the forefront of ‘race’ equality commentary and situate liberal multiculturalism as dated and conservative. As one teacher expressed it: ‘the multicultural edge of the early years is no longer the edge’ (LB). Anti-racism: dead or alive? In the early 1980s anti-racism became a significant influence on local government policy in many of the more ‘multiracial’ areas of London. In 1982 the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) set up an Anti-racist Strategies Team, a move that was followed in 1983 by a series of anti-racist policy documents (ILEA, 1983a; 1983b; 1983c; 1983d; 1983e). Other London LEAs with large minority populations drew up similar documents (for example, Brent LEA, 1983a; 1983b; Newham LEA, 1985). These anti-racist initiatives did not represent as radical an engagement with the issue of racism as many within the grassroots movement would have liked (see, for example, Teaching London Kids, no date; ALTARF, 1983a; 1983b). However, they were felt by most activists to be

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important contributions to the anti-racist movement and worthy of critical support. Since the mid-1980s anti-racism has fallen from favour within local government circles (see Chapter 2 for discussion). This process has had a knock-on effect on teacher-organized anti-racist groups, particularly those which had become partially reliant on public funding, such as ALTARF (which shut down in 1990). Nevertheless, anti-racism remains a persistent current amongst educators in most ‘multiracial’ schools and colleges. Many professional educators still describe themselves as anti-racist, or as sympathetic to anti-racism. Indeed, even at an organizational level, the movement continues to be a significant one. The founding in 1985 of the Campaign Against Racism in Schools (begun as an East End alliance of Black and trade union bodies) and in 1988 of another London-based group, the Campaign for Anti-Racist Education, indicate the maintenance of an organized anti-racist education tradition. The recent revitalization of anti-Nazi anti-racism has also stimulated new activity. The Anti-Racist Alliance, for example, has developed an education sub-group called the Teachers’ Anti-Racist Alliance. The continuing grass-roots support for anti-racism should not be surprising. For, despite the decline of publicly funded anti-racist initiatives, the social conditions that provoked anti-racist consciousness in the first place have not gone away. The crisis of ‘racial’ inequality remains, continuously provoking educators to question their assumptions and stereotypes. A similar point can be made in relation to public professional radicalism. The non-market orientation of welfare professionals has not disappeared on a raft of Conservative policy interventions. It remains an intrinsic tendency within public professionals’ political experience ‘in and against’ capitalism. Whether latent in liberalism, or made explicit in radicalism, non-market ideals continue to be a source of protest and militancy. The durability of these radical tendencies should be borne in mind by those who might be tempted to approach this chapter as of purely historical interest, an excavation of a graveyard of radical hopes. Neither anti-racist nor radical consciousness has been safely entombed by the Conservatives. Nor are they likely to be as long as the social experiences that enabled their initial formation persist. It would be foolish, however, to deny that in recent years antiracist interpretations of Black and White political identity have


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become increasingly problematic. Indeed, one of the implications of Part 1 was that anti-racism, at least in the forms discussed here, can no longer be convincingly defended as simply ‘speaking for’ the oppressed. In the rest of this chapter anti-racist interpretations are opened up to critical scrutiny. It is explained how and why particular anti-racist ideas have come to make sense to public educators. TH E CONTRADICTIONS AND IDEOLOGI ES OF ANTI-RACI SM The first part of this chapter charted a linear trajectory from liberalism to radicalism. The account it presented is, I believe, accurate and useful. The truth it conveys is not, however, the whole story; for, as explained below, liberalism remains a central component of the radical anti-racist world-view (see also Troyna, 1992). Liberalism’s continued salience arises from radical educators’ unsevered link with an education system steeped in pro-market and liberal practices, values and assumptions. As this implies, the conflict radical educators experience between liberalism and militancy cannot be equated merely with an abstract sense of split loyalties. It is a concrete, practical tension; a tension that has to be confronted every working day. The radical anti-racist finds proof of the inherently racist nature of British society and British capitalism all around: in students’ experiences of ‘racial’ attack; through racist media representations; through minority groups’ unimproved economic position. Equally evident, however, are the demands placed upon her or him to control and subordinate students to the rigours of such a society; exams have to be marked; respect for law and authority enforced; students have to be separated into achievers and underachievers, winners and losers. As one respondent noted: At the end of the day kids need a good education if they’re to stand a chance out in the job market. I try to supply that education, give what all the parents want—and of course make it all wonderfully anti-racist. (LF) The phrase ‘wonderfully anti-racist’ was uttered with a sardonic laugh, a laugh that reflects the seemingly absurd position in which

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the radical educator is placed; to sustain a society which he or she considers deeply unjust. How do radicals make sense of this situation? As the following interview-based account shows, the answer to this question is threefold: firstly, anti-racist radicals articulate both liberal and radical positions; secondly, some of these tensions are cohered and concealed through the formation of anti-racist ideologies; finally, and uniquely, anti-racists ‘refuse’ ideology and develop reflexive consciousness. The first of these themes is addressed below by looking at the way interviewees conceptualized racism and anti-racism. Racism and anti-racism: a variety of definitions The meaning of the word ‘racism’ is central to the anti-racist project. Unsurprisingly it was a topic that excited considerable interest from respondents. A number of different usages and definitions were offered. I have categorized these into three groups: (a) Racism is a manifestation of, and/or an integral component of, capitalism’s tendency to institute inequality in the economic and political reproduction of society. Racism is meat and wine to capitalism because it relies upon the division and rule tactic. Racism needs capitalism and capitalism needs racism. In my view it is part of the structure of capitalist reproduction. (LA) (b) Racism is the result of an individual’s conscious and unconscious colour and cultural prejudices. Racism is a kind of distrust between people. It’s a kind of blindness, a turning in on yourself…it sets up all sorts of mistrust and envy over different traditions. (LA) (c) Racism is the belief in the existence of superior and inferior biologically defined ‘races’. The real racists, like the NF and BM [British Movement], now they have that basic ideology of race hate. (LA) Unlike anti-Nazi anti-racism, the radical anti-racist perspective is firmly committed to some form of anti-capitalist critique and only rarely reduces racism to neo-Nazism. Nevertheless, respondents


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articulated a variety of definitions of racism, individuals often shifting from one definition to another (see also Cohen, 1992). Readers may have noted that the three quotes cited above were all derived from the same interviewee (LA). Clearly, this one individual had three different perspectives on the meaning of racism. When challenged on the possible inconsistency of adopting all these definitions, LA suggested that definitions (b) and (c) were simply manifestations of (a). In other words, racism manifests itself as personal distrust and as neo-Nazism because it is embedded within the ‘structure’ of capitalism. However, this argument is not entirely convincing. Further light on the discordancy that exists between LA’s different definitions was shed by his response to the question, ‘How can education tackle racism?’ ‘Through raising the awareness of the child in the classroom’, LA responded. Although this solution is compatible with the individualistic and anti-Nazi definitions of racism offered, it is made problematic by his earlier stipulation that racism is ‘part of the structure of capitalist reproduction’. Clearly, if ‘racism needs capitalism and capitalism needs racism’, then simply raising levels of ‘awareness’ is likely to be an ineffectual method of eradicating it. There are two basic political tendencies woven within LA’s approach to the issue of racism. These two tendencies are liberalism and radicalism. His conceptualization of racism as a deep-rooted component of capitalism leads towards a radical, explicitly anticapitalist view of anti-racist politics. By contrast, his identification of racism as a problem of personal prejudice, or as related to an ultraright political subculture, tends towards an individualistic and reformist anti-racist agenda. The following exchange with LG provides another example of how this tension between liberalism and radicalism was expressed: LG: Education for racial justice is how I understand the antiracist contribution. Anti-racism challenges society’s work to make people unequal…. It’s a form of liberation education of a new and radical kind that scares…liberals. Is it always accepted amongst your…anti-racist colleagues that it is a politically radical form of education? LG: I think you’d have to be a fool to deny it, quite frankly…. But what people refuse to understand is this, that [anti-racism] is practical, good education, not really threatening anything

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Anti-racist formulations but ignorance and stupidity. That it teaches the facts, it doesn’t mislead, and opens up kids to a world that is not as Mr Murdoch would have them believe it is…. And, as I see it, most anti-racists would say that anti-racism’s function as good education is far more significant than its political role.

We see again in these remarks an overt commitment to a radical, explicitly anti-liberal politics. Anti-racism, LG notes, challenges ‘society’s work to make people unequal…. It’s a form of liberation education of a new and radical kind.’ However, it is also evident from LG’s comments that this radical commitment is being articulated alongside a liberal political agenda. Rather than proposing the transformation of society, the latter project suggests that racism can be eliminated through the provision of apolitical and rational information. Anti-racism, LG contends, does ‘not really threaten anything but ignorance and stupidity’. Another respondent had this to say about the politics of racism and anti-racism. Racism, LD argued, is ‘not a question of personal failings or moral failings’. He continued, I totally reject consensus loving one-worldism…. The fact that conflict exists in society needs to be recognized in the classroom. But it shouldn’t in any way be stressed to the detriment of those things that unite. I would emphasize that. So the emphasis I would wish to [make is upon the] struggle against mutual misunderstanding in all its forms…. And taking up the cause of Black struggle involves us in this delicate process of bringing an awareness of structural racism into education…. and thus creating good education. This response drifts from a radical to an individualist, consensusseeking approach and back again. Racism is conceptualized in terms of social conflict, then in terms of ‘mutual misunderstanding’, then as a ‘structural’ phenomenon. Although these political tendencies are not necessarily mutually exclusive, their articulation as a single political project is clearly problematic. Another theme around which tensions appeared concerned the relationship between educators and their students. For many respondents the notion that educators should be community led and non-hierarchical was articulated alongside the more familiar idea that education is something handed down to students by


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objective experts. The following two quotations each display this dual trajectory: I’m starting from a grass-roots ideal, that’s my vision of education…. The raising levels of community awareness that anti-racism can activate are amazing to behold. When it really works it really works. (LH) What we can do is lay the professional mythologies on one side and [work] within a broader picture.... I’ve got a lot to say to students in the university…about the real nature of racism. They are truly ignorant when they come in here! (LI) These statements testify to a commitment to a community oriented, grass-roots education that lays ‘professional mythologies on one side’. However, these comments also indicate that knowledge, albeit radical knowledge, is perceived in traditional professionalist categories. LH wants to raise levels of awareness whilst LI suggests that students ‘are truly ignorant’ about ‘the real nature of racism’. Each statement implies that knowledge is a gift of the educator. It is seen as something that is passed on from a specialist to the intellectually unskilled and the irrational. Thus a contradiction emerges between the anti-racist’s commitment to both antiprofessionalism and professionalism. We have seen how anti-racist interviewees were highly critical of liberalism but remained attached to many of its fundamental assumptions. Whilst criticizing professionalism, reformism and so on they also affirmed these ideals. Over the next few pages I shall explain how this tension is partially resolved into anti-racist ideology. However, before doing so, we need to return, very briefly, to the subject of why radicals continue to sustain liberal ideals—for the quotations cited above have shed some new light on this phenomenon. The continuing appeal of liberalism It seems clear that although the crisis pressures detailed earlier acted to partially delegitimize the plausibility of liberalism, they failed to push it entirely off the radical agenda. In other words, although the radicalism latent within the public professional’s political role was made more plausible by crisis discourses, its legitimacy was not strengthened to the point where it could not be

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combined with liberal political strategies. However, to answer why these educators retained a commitment to liberal values it is necessary to refer, not simply to the strength of the crisis, but also to anti-racists’ continuing involvement with the day-to-day practice of educating. As indicated above, this argument may be clarified and exemplified by reference to some of the comments made by those interviewees already cited. It will be recalled that within several of these statements liberalism was closely tied to accounts of institutional activity. In the classroom, noted LG, anti-racism ‘is practical, good education’ that ‘teaches the facts’. In ‘the university’, suggested LI, ignorance can be dispelled. By contrast, the radical remarks of these individuals were formulated in more abstract, society-wide, terms. Thus, for example, referring to the world outside the classroom, LG notes that ‘anti-racism challenges society’s work to make people unequal…. It’s a form of liberation education’. When working ‘within a broader picture’ LI was committed to laying the ‘professional mythologies to one side’. The dualism of liberal and radical commitments that emerges in these remarks is also a dualism of workplace-oriented and wider society-oriented political commitments. This tendency illuminates the continued appeal of liberalism for radicals. For it points to a connection between the durability of liberalism and the political limits and general culture of educational institutions. More specifically, it reaffirms the notion that the entrenched nature of liberalism within the education system cannot be avoided by educators, no matter how radical they consider themselves to be. The ideologies of liberalism are embedded within educational routines. The wider professional and community expectations and assumptions of what makes a ‘good’ teacher (see Grace, 1978, for a discussion) are not easily flouted. A corollary of this phenomenon is the way educational institutions can provide openly hostile environments for the display or enactment of radical ideals. That the overt articulation of revolutionary ambitions is disabling of career prospects is a taken-for-granted fact of life by every radical educator. Less acknowledged, but also significant, is the sheer difficulty of incorporating radical ideals and practices within an education system so intensively structured around exams, competition and students’ prospective careers (though see London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group, 1980). Liberalism has thus become both a strategy for survival and an unchallenged


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institutional norm for radicals. At the ‘chalk face’, it provides a workable, effective way of dealing with the day-to-day pressures of educational life. The connection that seems to exist between the dualism of radicalism and liberalism and the dualism of workplace-oriented and wider society-oriented political commitments resembles a coping mechanism. It appears to be a way of managing and making sense of one’s role within the existing system whilst being explicitly critical of it and the possibility of its reform. However, this coping mechanism is not the only way radicals have made sense of their liberal and radical ideals. They have also developed anti-racist ideologies—a process explored below. Bridging the gulf? : anti-racism as ideology So far my analysis has seemed to suggest that there is an almost unbridgeable gulf between the conflicting terms of radical antiracism. Interviewees’ understandings of racism and anti-racism have been shown to sustain both liberal and radical assumptions. If this gulf is so wide, it may be asked, is anti-racism able to be constituted as an ideology? And if so how? The answer to the former question must be a hesitant yes. The reason for hesitancy will become apparent later. Now, though, I turn to the ‘how?’. The anti-racist rationality of re-presentation, its interpretative mythology, may be summarized as follows: ‘There is a Black struggle with homogeneous needs and demands. Anti-racism arises directly out of this struggle. Anti-racism is good education. Anti-racist goals can be achieved by consciousness raising’ The three principal ideologies that can be explicated from this mythology are those of anti-racism as good education, as part of the Black struggle and as an exercise in consciousness raising. All of these themes may be seen weaving their way through the quotations from anti-racists supplied earlier. However, so as to avoid returning repeatedly to the same set of remarks, the following analysis will draw on new material. The notion that anti-racism is ‘good education’ can be introduced through the words of LF: Above all a non-racist education is a good education. That is what we should be shouting from the roof-tops!…It’s true that [anti-racism] is radical, it intervenes in the reproduction of inequality, of course it does, as any critical idea does…but here’s

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something that everyone from the Tories to the SWP should agree upon, if they want a decent, honest education for their kids…anti-racism is good education. LF’s statement seems to support two different political strategies. A radical project aimed at intervening in ‘the reproduction of inequality’ and a liberal, apolitical, project that can draw all-party support. In the light of respondents’ definitions of racism and anti-racism (introduced earlier) this kind of dualism may seem like familiar territory. However, another process can also be explicated from LF’s remarks. For LF can also be seen to be avoiding confronting the contradiction between these distinct political visions through her politically ambiguous employment of the notion of ‘good education’. LF implies that anti-racism is good education both because it is a critical, radical strategy and because it is the kind of ‘decent’ education both Conservatives and the Socialist Workers’ Party ‘should agree upon’. This kind of rhetorical elision of liberal and radical ideals can also be seen within the comments of LJ: The racism upon which this kind of society flourishes is but part of a wider power imbalance which will, eventually, require the total transformation of this society…. And that’s what real education can do…. The teacher’s job is not to spread propaganda but to provide a good education. That is to educate out racism, which, at the end of the day, is what anti-racism, good anti-racism, is all about. This interviewee makes clear her belief that racism can only be effectively challenged through a radical transformation of society. However, she also suggests that racism can be educated out of individuals by teachers. As with respondent LF, these two sentiments are both understood as representing a creditable (i.e. ‘real’ and ‘good’) education. The concept of ‘good education’, we may conclude, contains and articulates both liberal and radical ambitions. The characteristically liberal notion that educational reforms are able to eradicate social inequality, which is entangled in LF’s and LJ’s remarks, is also evident in the notion that anti-racism is an exercise in ‘consciousness raising’. Through raising the level of awareness amongst a group of


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people, anti-racism is signalling its desire for an end of inequality. (LF) Anti-racism…attempts to get inside the racists’ system and deconstruct it, i.e. taking out the myths and putting in the truth. (LC) Raising levels of awareness. That, for me, is what it is all about. Racism can only be attacked at this level…[which] brings together the need for the transformation of society and individual transformation. (LK) An emphasis on ‘raising levels of awareness’ is evident in each of these three quotations. In each case it enables the speaker to assume the position, at one and the same time, of an authority figure whose consciousness is already raised and an antiauthoritarian concerned that everyone has the right to knowledge and power. The notion of ‘consciousness raising’ thus bridges professionalist and radical, anti-professionalist, ambitions. This process of ideological bridging is also enacted through the emphasis the theory of consciousness raising places on the provision of accurate information and the skills of critical enquiry. Imparting such critical abilities to students, it is implied, can help them overcome ‘the myths’ ‘inside the racists’ system’. This vision combines two conflicting views of the relationship between education and social change. On the one hand, it is assumed that individual students should be the principal site and resource for anti-racist intervention and, on the other, that consciousness is socially conditioned and reflects patterns of inequality that can only be effectively challenged, to use LK’s phrase, by ‘the transformation of society’. Each ideal problematizes commitment to the other, yet resolved into the rhetoric of consciousness raising, this antagonism is neutralized and cohered and concealed into ideology. The interpretation of anti-racism as good education and as an exercise in consciousness raising is complemented by the third ideology I wish to discuss, the notion that anti-racist education is part of ‘the Black struggle’. The ambiguities within the support given by respondents to ‘the Black cause’ (LC) revolve around the divergent definitions advanced of what this struggle is over. The comments of LE introduce us to this uncertainty: taking up the cause of Black struggle involves us in this delicate process of bringing an awareness of structural racism into

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education…and thus creating good education…. It’s a struggle for ordinary, decent things, things that whites take for granted, [like] education, things everyone wants for their kids. This response begins by seeing the Black struggle as a revolutionary project aimed at achieving a fundamentally transformed, presumably socialist, society. However, LE’s statement ends by affirming a reformist vision of a struggle for ‘ordinary, decent things’, which ‘everybody wants’. It is interesting to note that LE’s ability to contain political ambiguity within the rhetoric of ‘the Black struggle’ is assisted by the way he defines the word ‘Black’. The following comment from respondent LL is also revealing in this respect: Black is not the only term you can use but it’s so much more powerful than all the rest, it sums up the state of struggle…it’s something of a mental lynchpin in understanding why the fight against racism is a political, wide-ranging fight. As LL implies, his use of the word ‘Black’ as a political term enables him to coalesce the confusing and disparate strands of the debate in which he is immersed into a common-sense stance. One of the ways this ‘mental lynchpin’ acts to cohere the political tensions of antiracism is by shifting responsibility for anti-racist political practice from the educator to a homogeneous Black community whose demands must be obeyed. Thus it allows educators to avoid critical engagement, not only with ‘the Black struggle’, but also with their own contradictory political experiences. The following remark from LJ further exemplifies this point: I have always defended a political definition of ‘Black’ because that is how that community wants to be seen…a Black view is that the racism of the [educational] system must be stopped. Not tomorrow but now! A Black view, the Black fight, out there, at street-level…is that education must educate against prejudice and that I as a teacher should raise these issues to raise awareness. The existence of ‘the Black fight, out there, at street-level’ sweeps away the need for self-reflection. LJ’s treatment of the ‘Black view’ acts to cement the conflicting tendencies within her political position and render them irrelevant to her anti-racist commitments.


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Clearly, there are profound anti-reflexive, ideological tendencies within the anti-racism expressed by these interviewees. Indeed, some respondents’ unreflexive self-assurance manifested itself in an overt antagonism to social self-consciousness. LL’s irritation with an overly self-contemplative radicalism is evident from his comment that, We could sit here and prattle till kingdom come about teachers and the conflicts of being one, and…this and that theory…and how terribly difficult it all is to get democratic action. But the fact remains that it doesn’t mean anything to Black people…. I know which side I’m on! We all have to choose! This respondent was keen to situate himself on the Black side. And by doing so he was able to marginalize as ‘prattle’ any concern with the ambiguities of the educators’ political role. However, LL’s attempt to position himself as a conduit for Black resistance contains an edge of self-doubt. ‘We could’, he points out, sit and ‘prattle till kingdom come’ about the conflicts of being a teacher. Although LL is making a well-directed attack on over-academization and indulgent self-contemplation (and, no, he was not talking about my own research!), he is clearly also aware that the educator’s role is not an unambiguous one. This realization has not always been met with defensive self-censorship. Rather it forms the basis of an important anti-ideological tendency within public professional radicalism, a tendency towards reflexivity. TOWARDS REFLEXIVITY Reflexivity emerges in two main ways amongst anti-racists. The first and most-well travelled route is through ‘racial’ selfconsciousness. More pertinent to this study, however, is a second, and far more critical path towards an awareness of the ambiguous nature of the public professional’s political role. Nevertheless, before addressing this latter phenomenon it is necessary to briefly outline the former. The anti-racist dualism of Black and White encourages antiracists to identify themselves through one of these terms. Since, as explained in Chapter 1, these terms are both ‘racial’ and political categories, the potential for white anti-racists to be accepted within the movement as Black, or for dark-skinned peoples to be accepted as anything other than Black, is remote. Thus the two

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classifications imply two discrete sets of social experiences for lightskinned and dark-skinned peoples. To be Black is to speak from the position of the oppressed, it is to know what racism is ‘really like’. To be White is to be a beneficiary of racism and to know racism only in theory, or from its effects on others. An acceptance of a Black and White model of ‘racial’/political identities impels anti-racists to be conscious of the fact that they speak ‘as a Black person’ or ‘as a White person’. This formula was widely utilized by interviewees. For example, ‘as a white person all I can do is lend my support to the Black cause’ (LG); ‘as a Black person I know racism from the inside’ (LB). Such selfawareness is clearly a form of reflexivity, a form that I have described elsewhere as the social self-consciousness of fixed identity (Bonnett, 1993b). As this phrase implies, this reflexive praxis is based around the acceptance of static and discrete categories rather than the critical interrogation of radical consciousness or forms of representation. It affirms rather than problematizes radical assumptions. Far from disrupting anti-racist ideologies this form of reflexivity reproduces them. A very different conclusion may be drawn from the second example of reflexivity that will be considered here, a form that may be categorized as the social self-consciousness of social process. In the discussion of liberalism and multiculturalism presented in Chapter 4, it was suggested that ideology represents a tendency towards the cohering and concealing of contradiction. However, it was also noted that, rather than the smooth covering over of all trace of conflict, liberal rhetoric often displays moments of open contradiction, moments when liberalism is thrown into doubt. Such lapses are infrequent. They have not led liberals to the reflexive consideration of their contradictory social location. Within radical anti-racism, by contrast, the tendency towards critical self-awareness is far stronger. Such expressions of reflexivity are not articulated as a sloganized, dogmatic position. Nor are they presented as an after-thought, something that most educators could, if sufficiently prompted, be expected to declare. The reflexivity introduced here is a problematizing and uncomfortable process. It is something that has come only when it could no longer be ignored. It has come only when the contradictions of radical public professionalism could no longer be plausibly synthesized into common sense. This reflexive tendency can be directly related to the explicitness


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and extent of the gulf between anti-racists’ political attachments. We have seen how overt this contradiction is within interviewees’ conceptualizations of racism and anti-racism. We have also seen how the ideologies of ‘good education’, ‘Black struggle’ and ‘consciousness raising’ have, at least in part, cohered and concealed this tension. Given the overtness of the contradictions that educators are trying to bind together, it is unsurprising that the latter process is not always adequate to the former. Crisis discourses have pushed the tensions of public professionalism into the open and they cannot easily be put back together again. This openly conflictual discursive context provides a singularly unconducive environment for the synthesis of antagonistic political projects. The radical has to live in a kind of ideological limbo, perpetually torn between her or his radical and non-radical commitments. The following five quotations betray some of this difficulty. It is clear, perhaps, that I’m tied here, trying to be sort of radical and serve the existing educational service. Though its taken an explosion in the Black community to push these issues open. But once open what can one do, you cannot ignore it but you’ve got to recognize the conflict as real, and at the same time confront it. (LH) So as an educationalist, a professional, I’m caught out…on one [hand] I’m a beacon of ‘all that is decent’, on the other, though, I’m all that is subversive…and our politics, even our interpretations of what ‘The Black struggle’ means are refracted through that glass. (LK) I know I’m moving in two, if not more than two, [political] directions at…once here. But…that’s the dilemma of being a teacher in a capitalist state and being a radical. It’s not easily solvable. (LB) The gradual path to equality…policy after policy and so on, is [the one] I’m committed to, but only at one level. It’s an avenue leading nowhere, we know that by now, so, on another level I don’t believe it for one moment. And so I’m caught out by myself …its a real headache…. Anti-racism is as radical or as conservative as you want to make it, the fight for Black equality…is something we come to with our own agenda and sets of assumptions. (LC)

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The conflict is obvious to me, in as much as the fact that I advocate forms of change that I inevitably, as a teacher in this sort of society, run headlong into. That is, my role as an antiracist takes me in all sorts of different directions at once…. It’s convenient to generalize about Black people’s needs and imagine you can understand them but it isn’t as easy as that. Just saying those things stops you thinking too hard about your own position…so it’s vital to know where you’re coming from if you’re to be an effective agent of change. (LD) Here anti-racist ideology is being found out. In a particulary telling and cogent statement LH explains that a crisis of ‘racial’ inequality has forced him to recognize the existence of a conflict in his political role. It ‘has taken an explosion in the Black community to push these issues open’ he explains, but ‘once open what can one do, you cannot ignore it but you’ve got to recognize the conflict as real’. Similarly, LB contends that he is moving in two, or more, political ‘directions…at once’. Both LK and LC note that they are ‘caught out’ between radicalism and liberalism. LD argues that antiracist generalizations can act to conceal the contradictions within public educationalism. These reflexive considerations are tied by LD, LK and LC to their own ability to speak for the Black community. ‘Our interpretations of what “The Black struggle” means’, argued LK, ‘are refracted through’ educators’ contradictory social location. LD similarly problematizes generalizations about ‘Black people’s needs’ which stop ‘you from thinking too hard about your own position’. It is interesting to note that these instances of reflexive consideration do not seem to be leading these anti-racists towards a resigned, immobilized pessimism. Rather, social self-consciousness is seen as a necessary deepening of radical critique. LD asserts, ‘it’s vital to know where you’re coming from if you’re to be an effective agent of change’. If ideology is a bridge, then reflexivity is the dynamite strapped to its girders. The explosion, of course, might never have come. But in London it did. Thus, although several respondents were content to imagine that their radicalism was simply a reflection of their ability to speak for the oppressed, other interviewees showed a different inclination. These self-critical individuals had begun to disrupt the notion that educators are simply conduits for other


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people’s needs and desires. They had begun to make visible the public professional’s contradictory social location. CONCLUSION This chapter began with an account of the radicalization of the ‘race’ equality debate amongst educators in London. It has concluded with a further sign of this radicalization, the move towards reflexivity. These two phenomena have been linked through an examination of the way crisis discourses (summarized as a crisis of social and economic decline and a crisis of ‘racial’ equality) have polarized the politics of ‘vanguard’ ‘race’ equality commentary in London. As we have seen, a radical, implicitly or explicitly revolutionary critique of welfare capitalism has been developed alongside more familiar, liberal commitments. It is the very overtness of this contradiction, its irresolvability, that has finally provoked social self-consciousness. It needs to be remembered that reflexivity remains a tendency, a current within a powerful ideological sea. That radicalism, reflexivity and anti-racism are not always so closely linked will become apparent in the following two chapters. We will leave London and head to two very different contexts for the development of radical and anti-racist consciousness. First northeast, to the metropolitan region of Tyneside, and then south-west, to the predominantly rural county of Devon.

Chapter 6

Anti-racism reformulated: Tyneside

INTRODUCTION This chapter will address the development of anti-racist consciousness amongst public educationalists on Tyneside, a metropolitan conurbation in North East England. It begins by introducing the growth of ‘race’ equality initiatives in ‘white’ localities and explaining why anti-racist consciousness in these areas cannot be adequately conceptualized as having been imported from more ‘multiracial’ places. The rest of the chapter is devoted to the examination of the ideological characteristics of the anti-racist ideas and strategies expressed by a group of Tyneside interviewees. Tyneside presents a very different context for the development of anti-racist attitudes than London. It is an overwhelmingly white area. Moreover, like many other regions outside South East England, it is on the economic and cultural periphery. This marginalization has been mirrored within the academic literature on ‘race’ and ‘racial’ equality, which continues to be mainly concerned with ‘multiracial’ localities. The surprisingly widespread assumption that anti-racism in ‘white’ areas, such as Tyneside, is less important or original than parallel activity in ‘multiracial’ cities needs to be challenged. The discursive environment in which anti-racism has developed on Tyneside, as in other ‘white’ localities, has a number of distinct (if not necessarily unique) characteristics (see also Bonnett, 1992c). These discourses have encouraged anti-racists to formulate some provocative strategies. Thus, for example, the necessity of inculcating empathy, or ‘mutual recognition’, between Black and White students has been stressed. Radical educators on Tyneside have also argued that class relations need to be considered 134

Anti-racism on Tyneside

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alongside ‘race’ relations. As this emphasis implies, the problem of white working-class alienation from anti-racism has been at the centre of radical ‘race’ equality thinking in the area. However, as we shall see, radicals share the vanguard debate on Tyneside with liberal anti-racists. The latter group has adopted and adapted anti-racism to accord with its reformist, individualist and consensus-seeking vision of ‘race’ equality and political change. Moreover, unlike their radical colleagues, liberal anti-racists have not developed a commitment to reflexivity. Their anti-racist common sense is self-confident and unprepared to engage with the contradictions and social situatedness of public professional consciousness. This account is based upon interviews with twenty-five Tyneside educators (twenty-four of whom were white) who positioned themselves in the forefront of anti-racist activity in the area. These interviews were conducted in May and June 1988. As I have indicated, a division was apparent amongst these interviewees between liberals and radicals. Given the close connections that exist between liberalism and radicalism it will be appreciated that the difference between the two groups appeared as a tendency rather than as an absolute dissimilarity. However, although most respondents considered that there existed a relatively united local ‘movement’, fairly clear differences could be discerned amongst them. The principal political characteristic that distinguished respondents was the expression, or non-expression, of a persistent critique of capitalism and/or liberalism. Whilst twelve respondents expressed such a critique, thirteen others, who I have categorized as liberals, did not. However, before beginning my analysis of anti-racist ideology on Tyneside a broader portrait of the development of anti-racism in ‘white’ areas needs to be offered. ANTI-RACISM IN ‘WHITE’ AREAS Despite the centrality of white racism to the anti-racist project, the literature on the development of anti-racist educational strategies has traditionally been focused almost exclusively on ‘multiracial’ areas. Thus, the existence of racism and anti-racism within what are sometimes, rather patronizingly, called the ‘white highlands’, has been neglected. That this gap in our knowledge conceals an important area of concern is apparent from the increasing amount

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of attention the issue of ‘racial’ rejectionism has recently been receiving from teachers and teacher trainers working in a wide variety of ‘white’ schools, colleges and localities. Indeed, despite the fact that most social scientists have failed to expand their field of interest, in the past ten years or so an embryonic ‘race’ equality movement can be said to have emerged amongst educators in ‘white’ areas. The lack of interest shown by social researchers in ‘white’ localities is paralleled by another traditional lacuna within the academic literature, an appreciation of the geography of anti-racist consciousness. Valuable contributions have been made to the study of the development of local education authority anti-racist policies (most notably, Troyna and Williams, 1986) but these have failed to develop a coherent explanation of how and why anti-racist commitment has emerged differently in different places. Instead, a simplistic and aspatial causal relationship between Black pressure/presence and educationalist anti-racism has tended to be assumed. Typical of this tendency is Ebbutt and Pearce’s (undated, p.v) claim that Different areas of the country have gone through different phases at different times, as the black population has spread. The arguments between multicultural and multiracial are old hat in London and Birmingham, but have still to arrive in all-white areas. Ebbutt and Pearce provide no evidence to support this association between minority presence and ‘race’ equality education. Their statement does, however, effectively demonstrate how such a correlation pushes out of sight the emergence of a ‘race’ equality movement in ‘white’ localities. The widespread assumption that the education and ‘race’ debate has ‘still to arrive in all-white areas’ is simply wrong. At the heart of this development lies the realization that students in predominantly white localities are, at present, not being adequately prepared for living and working in a ‘multiracial’ society. Articulating what is rapidly becoming a familiar theme within the education for ‘race’ equality debate, the Schools Council noted, in 1982, that Teachers in schools which appear to be monocultural and monolingual have possibly the greatest responsibility; their


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pupils are not likely to encounter the issues and implications of cultural diversity during their school lives, and yet the world outside the classroom is already interdependent and culturally diverse. (Schools Council quoted by Page and Thomas, 1984:45) Such concerns, coupled with growing evidence that racist attitudes are deeply ingrained in the educational and wider culture of ‘white’ areas (for example, Troyna and Hatcher, 1992b; Norcross, 1990), have persuaded many local education authorities in ‘white’ areas to start supporting ‘race’ equality teaching practices and policies. The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE, 1987) reported that 77 of the 115 LEAs in Wales, Scotland and England had produced a ‘race’ equality policy or were in the process of doing so. However, the most significant stimulus to this development has been the publication of a Department of Education and Science report (the ‘Swann Report’; DES, 1985; see Chivers, 1987, and Robertson, 1988, for discussion) affirming the need for ‘race’ equality work to be developed in the so-called ‘non-contact’ areas. Mirroring this new focus, the National Antiracist Movement in Education (NAME) devoted its 1987 annual conference to ‘Antiracist Education in White Areas’ (Gaine and Pearce, 1987). Similarly indicative of growing interest has been the publication of a lengthening list of articles by teachers and education lecturers stressing the centrality of ‘white’ institutions to ‘race’ equality programmes (for example, Taylor, 1984; 1986; Brown, 1988; Duff and Turnball, 1987; Chauhan, 1988; Troyna, 1989; Short and Carrington, 1992). Several books addressing the same issue have also now appeared—titles including No Problem Here (Gaine, 1987); Spanner in the Works (Brown et al., 1990); Multi-cultural Education in White Schools (Tomlinson, 1990) and Racism in Children’s Lives (Troyna and Hatcher, 1992b)—as well as a clutch of pamphlets (for example, Epstein and Sealey, 1990; Page and Thomas, 1984). The momentum and morale of the education for ‘race’ equality movement in ‘white’ areas has, however, undoubtedly suffered a set-back with the introduction of the 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA; outlined in Chapter 2). It is true that, in theory at least, the introduction of a National Curriculum opens the possibility of multiculturalism and anti-racism permeating beyond their traditional ‘multiracial’ confines. However, the National Curriculum that has

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actually been developed is highly Anglocentric. It marginalizes multiculturalism and completely rejects anti-racism. There are, moreover, a number of negative consequences for ‘race’ equality practice in ‘white’ areas that flow from other aspects of the ERA. The Act’s diminishment of LEA control over schools and empowerment of parents and schools governors has particularly serious consequences in localities where ‘race’ issues are not widely considered important. Ruled by the demands of ‘popular choice’, schools have little incentive to develop their educational practice in non-traditional ways or hire staff sensitive to the issue of ‘racial’ inequality. Similarly worrying is the fact that institutions whose ‘roll numbers have benefited from [the] process of “White flight”’ from ‘multiracial’ areas are, as Grinter (1990:201) explains, especially ‘unlikely to sanction antiracist teaching’. We may, then, be tempted to conclude with Bill Taylor, one of Britain’s leading exponents of anti-racist and multicultural education in ‘white’ regions, that ‘the tenuous progress already made outside the areas of ethnic minority concentration could be threatened with extinction’ (1990a:369). However, ‘race’ equality consciousness in ‘white’ areas is unlikely to disappear. The issues of cultural bias and white racism that stimulated the debate remain a source of concern and contention in these localities just as they continue to be in ‘multiracial’ cities. A small but not insignificant group of educators in ‘white’ institutions have already come to consider such issues as an intrinsic component of ‘good education’. Although official support for such developments may, at least in the short term, diminish, consciousness of ‘race’ equality issues is likely to prove more stubborn to the vagaries of political fashion. Indeed, Somerset LEAs’ Equal Opportunities Adviser (Preston, 1990:28) noted in 1990 that ‘although we are few in number, we know we are recruiting an ever-increasing band of committed supporters to challenge the old “white highland” image’. It is also pertinent to acknowledge that the ‘robust and dedicated’ (Taylor, 1990b:5) group of individuals who have worked to establish ‘race’ equality issues on the educational agenda in ‘white’ areas have done so only in the face of considerable opposition and indifference. As one teacher interviewed in Devon suggested to me: ‘It’s been a struggle, it will continue to be a struggle, but I don’t see how these issues are going to go away.’


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Anti-racism’s ‘move’ to Tyneside The implication of homogeneity within the phrase ‘white area’ obscures a far more heterogeneous reality. Tyneside (and Devon, the ‘white’ locality addressed in Chapter 7) is home to a huge variety of white and ‘non-white’ minority groups (see Tyne and Wear Community Relations Council, 1986). Even if we restrict our view to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we see a constant stream of white ethnic groups, such as Irish, Jews, Scots and Poles, settling in the area. ‘Non-white’ settlement also has a long history. This is especially true for North and South Tyneside where a number of discharged sailors, mainly Arab or Indian, made their homes from the end of the nineteenth century (Carey, 1984: see also Byrne, 1977). Moreover, in some parts of Newcastle’s West End, visible minority settlement is well above the national average, rising to 11.3 per cent in Wingrove ward. The largest visible minority groups in the area are British Asian and British Chinese, a dominance indicated by the fact that, of those Tyne and Wear residents born in the New Commonwealth or Pakistan, 74 per cent were born in the Indian sub-continent or the Far East (OPCS, 1983). Nevertheless, the perception that Tyneside is a relatively white locality has been expressed by many visitors from other large English cities (for example, Supple, 1986; Keel, 1987). This impression can also be supported statistically by reference to the fact that in 1981 the average number of people with head of household born in the New Commonwealth or Pakistan was 1.2 per cent on Tyneside as compared to the national average of 4.2 per cent (OPCS, 1984). The term ‘white area’ needs, then, to be approached cautiously as a broad generalization, rather than as a literal description. It is not a reflection of the absence of ‘racial’ plurality in ‘white’ areas, but of prevalent perceptions of the density of visible minority residence in such localities relative to Britain’s main centres of minority settlement. The temptation to regard recent multicultural and anti-racist activity in ‘white’ areas as completely unprecedented also needs to be treated sceptically. ‘Race’ equality activism on Tyneside, as in many other ‘white’ localities, is not entirely new. Indeed, a local branch of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD) was formed in the area in the late 1960s. Newcastle CARD helped

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organize an ‘anti-Powell’ march through the city in 1968. However, as Taylor (1976) relates, the 1968 march was poorly supported and Newcastle CARD was short-lived. As this implies, although it is necessary to be critical of the myth of the totally inactive ‘white highlands’, it is reasonable to conclude that the 1980s and 1990s have seen the first steps towards placing ‘race’ equality firmly on Tyneside’s educational agenda. Despite the relatively small numbers of visible minority Tynesiders, over the last decade the anti-racist movement has made some significant advances in the region (see Multicultural Teaching, 1986; Chivers, 1987). Thus, for example, as well as a flurry of local education authority activity, the early 1980s saw the formation of a Newcastle branch of the National Association for Multiracial Education. Moreover, in 1986 the teacher-dominated Gateshead Federation to Combat Racism was founded and a regional conference of the Anti-Racist Teacher Education Network held in Newcastle. In the following year the Tyneside and District AntiFascist Association (founded in 1983) began producing an antifascist newssheet, Unity, aimed at school children. On Tyneside the emergence of an anti-racist movement is often explained by reference to anti-racism’s ‘move’ from ‘multiracial’ cities. Over the next few pages I will outline the various ways such an assessment can be rationalized and explain why it offers an inadequate appraisal of the development of anti-racism in ‘white’ localities. The four main ways such an explanation may be supported are by reference to: (a) the high geographical mobility of educators, (b) the effects of the Swann Report, (c) increased local education authority activity and, finally, (d) the influence of teachertraining institutions. The fact that, as with other professions, it is not unusual for teachers, and other educators, to move several times in the course of their careers, means that individuals with experience of antiracism in ‘multiracial’ cities regularly secure posts in ‘white’ institutions and locations. All of the activists interviewed on Tyneside had some teaching/lecturing experience in areas which had, in their own estimation, large ‘non-white’ populations (most often in an English ‘multiracial’ inner city but also, for example, in Chicago). Moreover, interviewees often recalled the feelings of ‘surprise’ and ‘shock’ they experienced when first entering Tyneside and discovered that the issue of ‘race’ did not have an overt place on the educational agenda. As one respondent noted:


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Coming up from my multiethnic school to Newcastle was a shock to the system…suddenly everyone was white and no one was putting the issue of race, [which] I had been unable to avoid in London, on the agenda. I think that stimulated me to become involved. (TA) The experience of ‘shock’ on arriving in a ‘white’ environment was particularly widely shared amongst those individuals who had experience of a post in a ‘multiracial’ city in the past five years or so. However, even teachers who had been working on Tyneside for most of their teaching career would frequently refer to their earlier experiences as reference points in discussion. All this suggests that the high geographical mobility of the educational profession is a factor in the growth of activism in Tyneside. For respondents it was interpreted as showing that anti-racism ‘was brought up [to Tyneside] by’ ‘those with experience of the problem [of racial inequality]’ (TA). Or, as TB self-mockingly expressed it, ‘the antiracist missionaries finally arrived!’. Yet, on reflection, it is evident that anti-racism cannot simply be imported like a consignment of bibles. After all, its plausibility depends upon an act of interpretation. It depends upon educators’ ability to develop forms of anti-racist consciousness that make sense to them in the context of their experiences of educating in a particular place. If these experiences, which I term discourses, are not the same on Tyneside as those perceived in, for example, London, then the ideological forms that have developed in the latter area will not seem plausible in the former. As we shall see, this is indeed what has happened and was one of the strongest themes that emerged in my interviews. As TC, articulating a feeling expressed by nearly all interviewees, noted: ‘I guess I’ve had to rethink my approach in the light of local circumstances.’ The other three factors in my fourfold explanatory schema— namely the effect of the Swann Report, LEA activity, and the catalytic role of teacher and in-service training courses at higher education institutions—share similar limitations. The Swann Report (DES, 1985) provided the first significant central government level recognition of the need for ‘pluralistic’ education in ‘white’ schools. Noting that the restriction of ‘non-racist’ forms of education to the ‘multiracial’ classroom ‘has tended to distort discussion on this aspect of educational development’ (DES, 1985:326), the report suggested that multiculturalism should be advanced under the

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slogan of ‘education for all’. The report has been extensively used by those seeking to justify the development of multiculturalism and, to a lesser extent, anti-racism, on Tyneside and elsewhere (for example, Devon County Council, 1988). The view that Swann ‘enabled race aware education to shift’ (TA) to ‘white’ areas is bound up with a similar perspective on the role of LEAs in encouraging anti-racist consciousness. In London the anti-racist initiatives of local education authorities (LEAs) came after the development of a grass-roots anti-racist movement. Although, for a short period in the early 1980s, a few LEAs (most notably the Inner London Education Authority) supported the city’s anti-racist vanguard, they could not be said to have been vital for its foundation. This situation has not been repeated in Tyneside. Here all four local LEAs (Newcastle upon Tyne, Gateshead, North Tyneside and South Tyneside) have, to a greater or lesser extent, been instrumental in initiating the local ‘race’ debate. Thus all of Tyneside’s LEAs had produced policy documents on multicultural education by 1984. Although in 1986 North Tyneside LEA established the region’s first and only ‘multicultural centre’, Newcastle LEA has been the most active authority, contributing a whole series of policy documents (for example, Newcastle upon Tyne City Council, 1984; 1985; 1990) and relevant appointments (for example, Adviser in Multicultural Education). It is pertinent to note, additionally, that the fact that Tyneside’s LEAs took action is partly due to what one local activist has termed Tyne and Wear Community Relations Council’s ‘gentle but persistent pressure’ (Mould, 1987:47). Nevertheless, despite the undoubted role of local and national public initiatives in encouraging awareness of ‘race’ equality in ‘white’ areas, it is evident that they cannot be used to justify a diffusionist view of anti-racism’s development on Tyneside. This inability is particularly evident if an attempt is made to analyse texts, such as LEA policy documents, with an eye to the discursive environments in which they were formed. Such texts are generally written in a formulaic policy language, often copied directly from documents published by other LEAs, which yields very little to analysts concerned with the development of political consciousness (cf. Troyna and Williams, 1986). This also applies to the last of my four candidates, the influence of multicultural in-service and teacher-training courses at local institutions of higher education. The anti-racist and multicultural content of courses at such


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institutions grew in scale and importance throughout the 1980s and have been influential in raising the profile of ‘race’ issues amongst local educational communities. Moreover, these institutions have often played a vital role in undertaking surveys and running conferen-ces that expose the extent of local racism (for example, Adamson et al., 1985). However, the training agenda of institutions of higher education is constrained both by a number of official accreditation bodies (for example, the Council for National Academic Awards and the Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education) and by their responsibility to attract and send out trainee and qualified teachers all over the United Kingdom. Thus anti-racist courses have tended to set the issue of ‘race’ equality within a national, ‘multiracial’ context that obscures ‘the all important local circumstances’ (TA) so keenly felt by respondents. As this suggests, the existence of these ‘progressive’ institutions provides us with few clues as to why anti-racist ideology on Tyneside has developed in its present form. We may conclude that, although the four factors isolated above can be all said to have had a role in the growth of activism on Tyneside, they offer an inadequate paradigm to explain its political development. To understand the nature of anti-racist beliefs on Tyneside we need to become sensitive to the local experiences that have shaped them. THREE TYNESIDE DISCOURSES Three main themes describing the experience of educating on Tyneside emerged in interview. I have labelled these ‘white racism’, ‘race crisis elsewhere’ and ‘class crisis’. The first of these discourses relates to the ‘overwhelming sense of racism’ (TD) respondents perceived within Tyneside. This perspective was expressed in terms of ‘the everydayness of racism’ (TE) and ‘its pervasiveness’ (TF) and, with far greater frequency than amongst London respondents, the ‘threat of neo-Nazism’ (TE). As this latter concern implies, the activities of neo-Nazis continue to have an important influence upon the local anti-racist debate. Local National Front magazines, such as Newcastle Patriot and Geordie Bulldog, as well as the British National Party’s Lionheart, testify to the continued virility of these ultra-right parties on Tyneside. Membership of neo-Nazi groups and overt displays of racism are also reputed to be widespread amongst supporters of the area’s largest football club, Newcastle United.

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This focus on anti-Nazism may be contrasted with the concerns of London anti-racists. The decay of electoral support for neo-Nazi groups (see Husbands, 1984), and the increasingly wide-ranging critique of the endemic nature of racism, forced the issue of neoNazism (and ‘racial’ attack) down the anti-racist movements’ agenda in London in the 1980s (although, as noted earlier, there has been something of a revival of anti-Nazi anti-racism in the early 1990s). On Tyneside, however, these themes have remained an unavoidable focus of concern throughout the past decade. The fact that, in the opinion of many interviewees, Tyneside was a bastion of ‘fascism, intense racism, total hostility’ (TG), was explained in three main ways. Firstly, most interviewees suggested that the white population was afraid that minority groups would compete with them for scarce local jobs and council resources. Secondly, the strength of racism in the area was related to the ‘defensiveness’ (TH) of those Tynesiders who perceive their region’s relationship to the rest of metropolitan England as being that of an all-white island in a hostile, alien ‘multiracial’ sea. Finally, although mentioned relatively rarely, some radical respondents also suggested that the local weakness of what TI called ‘that sop to racism’, the Conservative Party, was also significant. The unpopularity of Conservative politics in the area, argued TJ, meant that racists had ‘no political representation in the area’ and therefore had to organize separately. However, the plausibility of this argument was challenged by other activists who maintained that the Labour Party on Tyneside had not shown itself to be significantly less racist than the Conservatives. Despite this disagreement, the importance of a politically broad-based and united challenge to neo-Nazism was stressed by nearly all respondents. TI noted, ‘we can’t posture on politics [on Tyneside]… political differences need to be left aside in a front against fascism’. In another remark reminiscent of the early anti-Nazi phase of London anti-racism, TJ similarly contended that ‘a politically all-inclusive’ opposition to neo-Nazism needed to be developed. The affirmation of a ‘multipolitical’ approach to neo-Nazism indicates that the discourse of white racism has not delegitimized liberalism. In other words, it has not been experienced as a discourse that threatens hegemonic common sense but merely as ‘something of a worry’ (TK); a problem certainly, but not a crisis. The perceived absence of ‘race crisis’ has enabled liberals to assert a strong influence over, and see themselves as forming part of the


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vanguard of, the local anti-racist debate. An interesting reflection of this phenomenon is the fact that liberals arriving in the area from more ‘multiracial’ places found that opinions once considered conservative were now at the ‘cutting edge’. Thus, for example, TL noted: I think that I was behind the times there but here I’m under far less pressure…[I can] consider myself at the forefront of multicultural, anti-racist activity [on Tyneside]. The absence of ‘race crisis’ on Tyneside has been sustained and rationalized by the second of the two discursive threads that emerged in interview. This is the discourse of ‘race crisis elsewhere’. This theme may be introduced through the words of TK: It’s from Handsworth and Brixton that Black action has been throwing down the gauntlet for the old school system…and that crisis of racism has forced us to arrive at a more engaged, or political, position and move beyond the multicultural ethic. I’m sorry to say this but in this area…people are very behind the times. We need to realize the changes that have taken place in other parts of the country and learn from them rather than sticking our heads in the sand. TK speaks here of a ‘crisis of racism’ that poses a threat to the continuation of the established education system. It is a crisis that has acted to legitimize radicalism and delegitimize what she terms ‘the multicultural ethic’. Educators, TK asserts, need to become ‘political’. However, the crisis TK presents is highly geographically specific. It has taken place not on Tyneside but in ‘Handsworth and Brixton’. In other words, it has taken place in ‘multiracial’ areas rather than in ‘white’ localities where people are ‘behind the times’. It is evident that, although TK sees the ‘crisis’ as an important and urgent issue, it is a crisis at a distance, a crisis elsewhere. Comparing her teaching experiences in a ‘multiracial’ city to Newcastle, TM explained that in the former area ‘there was pressure from [Black] parents and from the whole situation’. On Tyneside, by contrast, there isn’t the involvement of outside groups, so, somehow, with no

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one really caring about racism all those political distinctions lose their edge. As TM’s comments indicate, the corollary of the discourse of ‘race crisis elsewhere’ is a certain insensitivity to the racism experienced by Tyneside’s own minority groups. It is implied that, ‘with no one really caring’, racism becomes a less interesting and less urgent issue on Tyneside than in more ‘multiracial’ localities. This interpretation was strengthened by a widespread feeling among interviewees that Tyneside’s visible minority groups were ‘generally conservative’ (TD), ‘undemanding’ (TN and TO) and ‘very traditional’ (TJ). Yet visible minority groups on Tyneside are far from being inactive. Organizations such as the Pakistan Muslim Association, Saheli (a Black women’s group), Newcastle upon Tyne Bangladesh Association and the North East Chinese Association have, for example, acted in support of the development of supplementary and separate schools. The formation of community self-defence groups has also indicated that the image of minority Tynesiders as passive is misleading. It seems, however, that the fact that the local visible minority population is small, and that a large proportion of its initiatives and demands have been related to the provision of language and religious needs, has weakened its collective impact upon anti-racist educators’ consciousness. Several respondents made it clear that they did not consider local minority demands to be as significant as the ‘Black anger’ they saw being generated in other parts of England. Noting that, ‘the religious angle and separation of sexes are, of course, important to Muslims in Newcastle’, TO added that such demands ‘weren’t really, obviously progressive’ and ‘shouldn’t be part of anti-racism’. This marginalization has been exacerbated by the perception that local minority students and school leavers are not academic or economic underperformers (empirical support for this opinion can be found in Taylor, 1973; 1976). Such a portrait has important consequences within a ‘race’ equality project, such as anti-racism, that sustains an image of Blacks as an entirely oppressed, chronically disadvantaged group. The following remarks of TP are particularly revealing in this context: The ethnic minority community here has its rich and its poor. Many are small businessmen and I don’t feel it’s legitimate to look upon them as particular needy. Maybe…in other parts of


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the country, Black people are far more political. Then they really are, well, a force to be reckoned with. This respondent implies that minority groups need to be ‘needy’, and articulate their demands through the language of radical resistance before their priorities can be incorporated within the anti-racist agenda. The marginalization of the concerns of minority Tynesiders conveyed in this statement clearly draws on a particular stereotype of what Black people should be like. This stereotype, moreover, seems to be based around the perceived character of Afro-Britons. It will be recalled from Chapter 1 that Afro-Britons are the archetypal Black population within much anti-racist debate. This identification has serious consequences in places, such as Tyneside, with very few AfroBritish residents. It encourages anti-racists to look elsewhere for signs of ‘real’ Black activity. As noted earlier, TK pinpointed Handsworth and Brixton—the two most well-known Afro-British communities in Britain—as the places where ‘Black action has thrown down the gauntlet to the old school system’. By contrast the visible minority population on Tyneside, which is predominantly British Asian and British Chinese, are found to be undemanding or felt to be too economically and educationally successful to be a proper focus of concern. The unspoken rationality is clear; minority Tynesiders are politically and ‘racially’ not Black enough to be perceived, to adopt TP’s phrase, as ‘a force to be reckoned with’. The third and final discourse I wish to isolate is that of ‘class crisis’. This phrase designates the crisis experienced by Tyneside educators in relation to local economic collapse and working-class deprivation. Tyneside has had, from the late 1950s, one of Britain’s highest unemployment levels. Newcastle had a 19.5 per cent unemployment rate in 1985, whilst on 30 July 1985, on local television, unemployment in Scotswood ward (1.5 per cent visible minority residence in 1981), in the west of Newcastle, was officially put at 80 per cent (figures cited by Flynn and Kitchen, 1986). These figures reflect a bleak overall picture for Tyneside. TQ, contrasting the pressures of racism and class inequality on the educational profession, argued: what you have to deal with is not so much day-to-day racism… but things like unemployment and housing, which are chronic, are class issues. It’s these that push teachers in Tyneside to look beyond equal opportunities and other liberalisms.

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As if to drive home TQ’s point a number of riots broke out in some of the most deprived parts of Tyneside in September 1991 (as they had the month before in Cardiff and Oxford). Widely interpreted as white counterparts to the ‘Black riots’ of the 1980s (for example, Campbell, 1991), these disturbances only served to emphasize the extent of social deprivation amongst Tyneside’s white working class. Following the 1991 riots one London-based anti-racist magazine noted: ‘Britain was on fire again, for the first time since 1985— only this time it was in unexpected and strange places’ (CARF, 1991e:7). As most Tynesiders know, the view from London is often highly parochial. For many anti-racists on Tyneside the notion that the natural home of deprivation, and the violence it seems to spawn, is the ‘multiracial’ inner city, has never been remotely plausible. The ‘unexpected and strange’ place they inhabit provides daily proof that Whites, as well as Blacks, can be the victims of oppression. It is, then, a crisis of class inequality that has provided the radicalizing discourse for educators on Tyneside. It has delegitimated liberal solutions and legitimated non-market, classconscious educational projects. It has also made the expression of a ‘race’ reductionist anti-racism seem an implausible, somewhat irrelevant, project. Radical anti-racists in the area cannot help but be aware that, as TQ noted, Inequality comes in many forms…we can’t ignore class in [Tyneside], we just can’t, it wouldn’t make any sense at all, not to me, not to the kids even, not, just not to anyone. It is interesting to note the effect that this discourse of class inequality has upon liberals. For, unlike their radical colleagues, liberals, whilst often recognizing the existence of class inequalities, did not regard them as necessarily pertinent to the anti-racist project. Thus the disjuncture between liberals and radicals is also a disjuncture between class-conscious and non-class-conscious antiracism. These different reactions to the discourse of class crisis serve to remind us that two kinds of anti-racism exist in Tyneside, liberal and radical. Both of these forms have developed ideological themes and strategies within the context of the three discourses outlined above. In the rest of this chapter I shall explore the formation of these ideologies.


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THE RADICALS Many of the ideals and ideas expressed by the radicals were familiar from my London case study. However, other, more distinct concepts were also apparent. It is upon these issues and concerns that I shall be focusing here. Chapter 5 employed an ideal type ‘plausible myth’ to encapsulate the basic tendencies of London anti-racist common sense. For the radical anti-racist on Tyneside another myth can be formulated. It runs as follows: ‘Anti-racism needs to be locally sensitive to the fears and needs of the White working class. What is locally possible on Tyneside is a gentle anti-racist approach that enables the White working class to recognize the mutual oppression of White and Black.’ The three ideological elements I shall extract from this myth are indicated by the phrases ‘local sensitivity’, the ‘gentle approach’ and ‘mutual recognition’. Each of these ideologies coheres and conceals the contradiction experienced by the radical public educationalist between liberal and radical political ideals. And each does so in a way which, although not necessarily unique to Tyneside, may be explained by reference to the three discourses identified earlier. I shall address the ideology of local sensitivity first. As has already been indicated, interviewees placed considerable emphasis upon the idea that ‘multiracial’ places have a more advanced anti-racist debate than Tyneside. Radicalism, it was argued, was appropriate for London or Birmingham but unsuitable for Tyneside. Too radical an approach on Tyneside would be ‘provocative’ (TC). Thus anti-racism in the North East needs to be advanced through ‘steady reform’ (TG) and through ‘careful steps’ (TC). The remarks of TG succinctly express the rationality of ‘local sensitivity’ behind this perspective: The local anti-racist is involved, OK, in a national struggle, which has at its head Black people…and Black people in London, OK, where change is being forced…but there needs to be local sensitivity to different conditions. What is acceptable in London isn’t here. Newcastle just isn’t the right place (do you see?) or the right time for anything too confrontational. As this remark implies, the discourse of ‘race crisis elsewhere’ has encouraged respondents to believe that overtly radical anti-racism is a legitimate educational strategy only in those areas of the United

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Kingdom with large minority populations. TQ expressed a similarly geographically expressed political dualism: I try to support the work of ILEA and ALTARF. Much of the real work is being done by them and I support what they have been doing, as well as the adoption of the IRR [Institute of Race Relations] definition of racism, which seems to me to be the right one, in as far as I understand it to be pointing to that structural, deep-rooted, dimension of racism…but we must be aware of the limits of this place where we work. You can get away with a lot more in some places than in others, like here. Although my work is simple in one sense, it’s good education for the Tyneside population…. That means looking at how the child becomes prejudiced and encountering and countering that. Both TQ and TG imply that the fight against racism can be broken into geographically and politically defined elements. One ‘must be aware of the limits’ of anti-racist development on Tyneside, TQ argues. In ‘multiracial’ areas, by contrast, the ‘structural, deeprooted, dimension of racism’ can be tackled. Of course, if the struggle in ‘multiracial’ cities has to be as radical as TQ suggests, then it undermines the notion that egalitarians anywhere can plausibly adopt individualistic, non-confrontational approaches to anti-racism. The concept of local sensitivity resolves the mutually subversive dialogue between these two strategies. It coheres a dualism into a unified rhetoric. The ideological rhetoric of ‘local sensitivity’ feeds into another difference between radical anti-racism in Tyneside and London. This difference turns on the Tynesiders’ stress upon a ‘softly-softly’ or ‘gentle’ approach. This ‘gentle’ approach is intended to avoid alienating students from anti-racism. Rather than directly accusing students of being racists and/or benefiting from racism it proceeds through more oblique strategies. Thus, for example, critical readings of racism within British society are replaced by general discussion and role-playing designed to show how prejudices between social groups inhibit mutual understanding. The ‘gentle approach’ was also defended by reference to the possibility of a ‘white backlash’ if ‘overly aggressive’ (TQ) methods were adopted. For radical interviewees the threat of such a backlash was intimately bound up with the discourse of ‘class crisis’. ‘The fact remains’, TI argued:


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that you can’t go ramming racism down people’s throats…who aren’t better off than blacks…they [would] have every right to say ‘look, I’m not getting much out of this so-called white power! Sod off!’. That is what constitutes white backlash…my fear is that overly challenging [anti-racist] material can insult working-class people. Thus the term ‘white backlash’ is consciously set within the context of white working-class oppression. Instead of being framed within a conservative sense of inevitability, TI’s fears of backlash evidence class consciousness. The ‘soft’ approach, TM explained, ‘doesn’t attack unemployed and deprived ordinary people…it works with them, not against them’. The ‘gentle’ approach, TH concurred, ‘is right for [Tyneside]…where aggression doesn’t pay…you have to respect the struggles here, working class [struggles] as well as the Black struggle’. However, this strategy, as expressed by radical interviewees, is fraught with political tensions. Alongside more militant statements, radical interviewees rationalized the ‘gentle approach’ in characteristically liberal terms. Taking a ‘soft’ stance, TM continued, ‘necessitates a backing off from politics’. TP similarly concluded: being gentle means not being too political, or upsetting anyone. It’s a way of bringing people together in a supportive atmosphere that…allows all those issues of power and prejudice to be put to one side, I mean just for one moment, just put to one side so we can make some progress with the group. Thus the concept of the ‘gentle approach’ brings together two antagonistic political ideals. It affirms both a class conscious radicalism and an apolitical, consensus-seeking liberalism. Like the ideology of ‘local sensitivity’, the ‘gentle approach’ displays both radical, non-market, commitment and the partially pro-market, reformist assumptions of liberalism. It is another example of a ‘liberal-radical’ ideological bridge that makes sense on Tyneside but not in London. The third of the ideological forms I wish to isolate also derived its plausibility from the experience of ‘class crisis’. It was expressed through a stress upon the importance of ‘mutual recognition’, or ‘empathy’, between White and Black oppressed peoples. The

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‘working class’ needs to recognize its ‘common interest’ with the Black working class, TG noted, adding: this is really radical, this…seeing your fight in the fight of people you don’t know, or have maybe just seen on telly, and doing what? Rioting of course!…the steady work of teachers can form links of understanding [between Black and White]. TA concurred. ‘The working class’, he argued, ‘can be taught to recognize themselves in the Black movement.’ Such affirmations of ‘mutual recognition’ have clear radical connotations. However, this recognition of a common interest between Whites and Blacks also draws on liberal ideals. It is implied that individuals can be educated out of their racism through what TG calls ‘the steady work of teachers’. As the radical TQ explained, ‘teaching some kind of identification between White and Black kids…requires hours of patient education’. The rhetoric of ‘mutual recognition’ affirms the mythologies of educationalism and reformism just as strongly as it does more radical themes, a dual affirmation that combines both sets of ideals into an ideology. This discussion of radical interviewees’ ideologies has outlined the development of a form of anti-racism sensitive to both class and ‘racial’ oppression. The radical Tynesiders cited were constantly aware and concerned that, to mean anything in their region, antiracism must be part of a wider emancipatory project; a project whose starting point is an engagement with students’ own experiences of oppression rather than a lecture on the oppression of others. However, overt radicalism is not an inherent component of antiracism. On Tyneside, as in other ‘all-white’ areas, the anti-racist vanguard is also sustained and developed by liberals. THE LIBERALS The suggestion that both liberal and radical anti-racists consider themselves as at the forefront of the local ‘race’ equality debate may sound like a recipe for confrontation. However, there is little overt struggle between the two groups. Indeed, as noted earlier, both liberals and radicals consider themselves as part of united current. There is virtually no acknowledgement of the fact that there exist two politically distinct tendencies within the local movement. Before


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addressing the ideological characteristics of liberal anti-racism, this outbreak of political harmony needs to be explained. Part of the explanation may be found within the political character of the radical perspective. As we have seen, affirmations of the ‘gentle approach’ and ‘local sensitivity’ imply that, whilst anti-racist radicalism is a necessary political project, it is not necessarily desirable on Tyneside. This displacement of radical ideals means that liberals and radicals are able to find considerable common ground on the local application of education for ‘race’ equality. Two other factors have also encouraged a sense of solidarity amongst liberals and radicals: their shared anti-racist rhetoric and the weakness of the local movement. I shall consider the former point first. Both liberals and radicals are committed to the ‘fight against racism’. Both use the term ‘Black’ to describe Afro-Britons and British Asians and both are critical of multiculturalism’s tendency to, what the liberal TJ called, ‘slide into the fallacy of cultural fetishism’. The existence of these and many other units of common linguistic currency acts to mask political differences. The other main reason a liberal and radical anti-racist vanguard are able to co-exist on Tyneside relates to the small size and relative organizational weakness of the local movement. Indeed, the word ‘movement’ might be considered a misnomer for the scattered and sporadic activity that exists on Tyneside or, indeed, in any other ‘white’ area. The sense of ‘being alone, of having no one to turn to’ (TL) and ‘of fighting a very hard and unsupported fight’ (TJ) was one of the strongest impressions I received from interviewees. This feeling of isolation inhibits the overt display of political conflicts. As TK pointed out, in a ‘hostile environment’ ‘we need to pool our efforts if we’re to get our message through’. Nevertheless, despite the united front Tyneside anti-racist educators display to the world, deep political differences exist between them. Liberals have developed an anti-racist agenda that stands in marked contrast to the ambitions of their radical colleagues. They have adopted and adapted the rhetoric of anti-racist debate to their own political priorities. One reflection of this process is their refusal to view anti-racism as separable from multiculturalism. Of course many radical anti-racists also affirmed elements within the multiculturalist project. However, for liberals this affirmation is stressed to the point where anti-racism loses much of its distinctive character. Anti-racism and multiculturalism, commented TF, are ‘one

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and the same thing’, or, as TE noted: ‘different sides of the same coin…all good multiculturalism is by definition anti-racist’. Thus antiracism is incorporated as just one, not necessarily dominant, element within a broad ‘race’ equality perspective, a perspective that as, TJ suggested, is ‘anti-racist because it opposes racism, multiculturalist because it is concerned with cultural roots’. Liberal anti-racism does, however, display a number of ideological characteristics that differentiate it from the kind of multiculturalism explored in Chapter 4. It seems likely that, on Tyneside, some of these distinct characteristics may be related to the experience of the local discourses of ‘white racism’, ‘race crisis elsewhere’ and ‘class crisis’. Interpreting these discourses through the prism of their reformist, individualist, consensus-seeking perspective, liberals have developed a number of concepts not evident within the liberal multiculturalism of the late 1960s and 1970s. At a rhetorical level, each of these ‘new’ concepts mirrors the kind of strategies defended by radicals. Liberals, too, expressed the importance of ‘local sensitivity’, a ‘gentle approach’ and ‘mutual recognition’. Yet although the language may sound familiar the political meaning with which it was invested is very different. For whereas radical interviewees inflected these concerns with an overt political militancy, liberal respondents did not. The difference is immediately apparent from TO’s explanation of the notion of ‘local sensitivity’: We need to pay attention to the way different area [sic] are perhaps appropriate for different things…so you might go away and do some [teaching]…with Black boys and girls in say Brixton and come back and say ‘what we need is positive selfimages, what we need is this and that’. Well, OK, my point is this: that’s alright for Black kids but here in the North [East] it’s not a question of self-image but of information…. All change should be sensitive. It should never, never be barked out. That is a mistake, a mistake some have made in other schools maybe. I don’t see the point of alienating young people by left-wing rhetoric. These remarks indicate a very different idea of ‘local sensitivity’ than that conveyed by the radicals. It will be recalled that the latter group argued that local sensitivity was necessary because ‘white’ areas were not yet ready or suitable for anti-racist radicalism. By contrast, TO is suggesting that local sensitivity is necessary because


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the kind of liberal professional techniques (for example, self-image work) that are appropriate in ‘multiracial’ localities may not be helpful in ‘white’ ones. There is no suggestion that radicalism is a defensible position in ‘multiracial’ areas. No political dualism is expressed that assigns liberalism to one kind of location and nonliberal approaches to another. As TO states, ‘all change should be sensitive’, wherever it occurs. TE concurred: the point is not to push to hard or too fast…that’s just as true for London as it is for us ‘white highlanders’, you’ve got to be careful not to ruffle to many feathers…this gentle approach I’m talking about is necessary, isn’t it, not just here but for London [too]. Like their more radical colleagues, the ‘gentle approach’ was linked by liberals to the need to avoid a ‘white backlash’. However, the two groups maintained very different views about the political meaning of ‘white backlash’. Rather than being understood as a reflection of the alienation and oppression of the white working class, ‘white backlash’ was defined by liberals as an inevitable ‘natural human reaction’ (TL). TO explained the phenomenon through the notion of ‘individual resentment’ and suggested, what you have to understand is that…people get upset when they think the playing field has been tilted…that’s always going to happen when your trying to improve equal opportunities for one group or another. The last of the rhetorical forms shared by both liberals and radicals returns us to the concept of ‘mutual recognition’. Amongst liberal respondents this theme tended to be expressed in strictly individualistic terms. Thus, for example, TR commented that the fact that pupils in Tyneside can, ‘if left to their own devices’, empathize with black kids, means, in a way, that people need not be too harsh in accusing one another of things, like racism…. I try to draw those links at a very personal level, making sure that kids understand that, under the skin, we are all alike. Unlike those radicals who saw the inculcation of empathy between Whites and Blacks as a way of engendering solidarity amongst the oppressed, TR defines the concept in psychological rather than political terms. The aim is the establishment of social harmony—to make students understand that ‘we are all alike’—not the recognition

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of shared struggles. TE articulated this consensus-seeking, individualistic perspective as follows: The importance of multicult [sic], non-racist work is that it can bring children together…after all kids need to get jobs in a stable society. Society needs to be run, what shall I say, it needs a level of calm and consensus. If any country is to prosper…a common interest needs to be found between Black and White people, a sense of…many cultures as or in one. TE’s concern with the establishment of ‘calm and consensus’ is clearly resonant of the kinds of multiculturalist approaches discussed earlier. The individual child is once again centre stage, the desirability of bringing people together and educating for tolerance is affirmed. Thus, as we have seen, anti-racism can be detached from its radical heritage and incorporated within an ‘apolitical’ approach. It is a mutable project, not an inherently radical one. The political meaning of anti-racism is open to change and challenge. Its liberal appropriation has another consequence, one that pertains to reflexivity. For whilst the ideologies of radical Tyneside educators are disrupted by the expression of social self-consciousness, liberal anti-racism is far more self-assured. Radical reflexivity and liberal common sense Liberals and radicals on Tyneside have developed anti-racist ideologies. However, amongst radical interviewees these ideological forms have failed to stifle social self-consciousness. This reflexive current derives from the same basic source that it did in London; namely, the overtly irreconcilable nature of radical public professionals’ political convictions. A clear example of such irreconcilability is the notion—exemplified through the rhetoric of ‘local sensitivity’—that radicalism and liberalism are both tenable if kept to different parts of the country. That the expression of this kind of overt contradiction has encouraged reflexive consideration is particularly palpable in the remarks of TS: So, maybe you’ll say, how can my analysis be so far-reaching one moment and then, sort of go off in the opposite direction? Well, we need to look at that, I mean, OK, confront that contradiction head on…doesn’t it all remind us that the…anti-


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racist, kind of movement, is poised between the devil and the deep blue sea. On the one hand, we educate for liberation; on the other, we educate for submission. TS does not attempt to resolve the contradiction she identifies into an assured common sense. She does not attempt to maintain that public professionals are not engaged in acts of re-presentation. Rather, like her peers in London, TS has moved decisively towards social self-consciousness. Another radical, TH, explained, there is a wrench between political poles in teaching…one can’t pretend, I guess, that all these ideas fit together, all snug, smug, like, and we all so clever and happy ever after. It isn’t like that. Within liberal anti-racism, however, politics is somewhat like that’. Liberal interviewees expressed little interest in the subject of contradiction or the social location of public professional political consciousness. The imperviousness of liberal anti-racism to reflexive consideration is indicated in the following dialogue with TT: TT: The teacher’s role is to educate. To educate with reason. The teacher’s role is that uncomplicated? TT: Well, in a sense yes. It is, when you actually think about [it], all terribly straightforward isn’t it? It is also a question of priorities…the teacher is after all a light in very dark room indeed. …She is also passing on all sorts of values perhaps? TT: Well yes, values of integrity, a value for truth. The important thing is to value the teacher also, isn’t it?…Our mission [is] to show the error of prejudice and the stupidity [of prejudice]. My questions to TT were leading ones, but they led nowhere. For TT the teacher’s role is ‘straightforward’. The contradictions and self-doubt expressed by radicals are swept away on a tide of assurances about the educator’s ‘mission’ to impart the truth. No ideology is able to entirely smooth away all the ragged edges of contradiction. As with the multiculturalist perspectives discussed in Chapter 4, glimpses of overt contradiction and reflexivity do sometimes emerge within liberal anti-racism. However, such incidents are momentary and superficial. Thus, for example,

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although TT later noted that his own anti-racist agenda ‘is guided by existing power relations’ he did not develop this theme. Moreover, when at the end of the interview I returned to it, he assured me that it was a meaningless statement since it was ‘true for everyone’. ‘The point about teachers’, he continued, is that they can stand above the mêlée and offer some kind of good counsel and advice…teachers can step back from society and they can see the wood from the trees. CONCLUSION This chapter has indicated a number of ways that the development of anti-racist political consciousness amongst public educationalists is different on Tyneside than it is in London. The identification of the ideology of the ‘gentle approach’, ‘local sensitivity’ and ‘mutual recognition’ indicate that some distinct emphases have emerged. Moreover, we have seen how the debate has been split into different, if not necessarily consciously competing, factions. This phenomenon has been enabled by the absence of a discourse of ‘race crisis’. Unlike London, liberal approaches have not been delegitimized to the point where they are excluded from the vanguard ‘race’ equality debate. Three provisional conclusions can be drawn from this case study (see also Chapter 8). The first relates to the geographical and thematic variability of anti-racist ideology. Between London and Tyneside a number of reformulations have occurred. A crisis of class inequality has been moved centre stage by Tyneside radicals, as has the importance of a non-confrontational, non-alienating antiracism. A second conclusion arises from the first; that anti-racism’s political identity is mutable. Although in London we saw antiracism developing as an increasingly radical project, the present chapter has shown that anti-racist radicalism may be articulated in a variety of forms and that anti-racism is not an inherently or irrevocably radical movement. The latter point serves to reinforce the argument that radicalism is enabled by crisis discourses. In the absence of such discourses the vanguard ‘race’ equality debate may be adopted and adapted by liberals. This leads us to the third and last of the provisional conclusions that can be derived from this case study: the existence of different levels of reflexivity within antiracist debate. As we have seen, whilst radical Tyneside interviewees


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maintained a reflexive tendency, liberal respondents expressed a more ‘common-sensical’ approach, one that treats the educator’s political role as unproblematic. Anti-racism is not an inherently reflexive project. Indeed, that a liberal form of anti-racism can come to be hegemonic within anti-racist debate, and marginalize radicalism to the fringes of the educational system, will become apparent in the next chapter.

Chapter 7

The marginalization of radicalism: Devon

INTRODUCTION This chapter will focus upon the marginalization of radical perspectives within the anti-racist and multiculturalist debate amongst educators. This process is described and explained within Devon, a largely rural county in England’s South West. The marginalization of radicalism, it will be suggested, can be linked to the absence of crisis experiences. This absence enables liberalism to become virtually the only plausible paradigm for the discussion of social inequality amongst teachers. It also makes visible a political gulf between the experiences of those working in tertiary and pre-tertiary education. In effect, it throws the uniquely radical tendencies of higher education into relief. As we shall see, this sectoral split poses some fundamental problems for the development of political debate in a non-crisis environment. In Devon sixteen interviews were conducted between November and December 1988 (fifteen of my interviewees were white). These interviews, which followed roughly the same agenda as those undertaken in London and Tyneside, were held in various parts of the county. However, the majority were held in and around the area’s two largest urban centres, Plymouth and Exeter. Five of those interviewed tended towards a radical interpretation of the politics of ‘race’, eleven adopted a more liberal approach. All but one of the former group was in the tertiary sector, all but one of the latter was in pre-tertiary education. BACKGROUND There is no part of Devon that cannot be categorized as a 160

Marginalization of radicalism: Devon

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predominantly ‘white’ area. The number of Devon residents with ‘head of household’ born in the New Commonwealth or Pakistan was 1.1 per cent in 1981 (Taylor, 1990a). This low percentage was widely regarded by interviewees as in itself sufficient explanation of why Devon education has, as DA noted, ‘been very slow to develop a consciousness of race issues’. Nevertheless, over the last ten years or so ‘race’ equality and cultural pluralism have become the focus of a number of local initiatives. One of the earliest was the founding, in 1981, of a multicultural support group based at Exeter Teachers’ Centre. Following an in-service course on multicultural education held in 1987, this organization was incorporated into a county-wide support network consisting of four groups (North, South, West and East Devon). Institutions of higher education have also developed and disseminated multicultural and anti-racist strategies and ideas, particularly through their role as centres for teacher training. The School of Education at Exeter University has been especially active. As Bill Taylor (1990b:3), who lectures at the School, notes: Today, every training course at the School of Education has significant elements that deal with cross-curricular issues such as multiculture…progress is measured by the ever-increasing number of teachers and schools that are adapting their teaching materials, course content and staff attitudes in order to make explicit, positive and identifiable responses to the nation’s cultural pluralism. The School of Education also hosts the Standing Conference for Multicultural Education in the South West, which was founded in 1986 and meets annually. However, perhaps the most significant institutional development in the county, at least symbolically, was Devon County Council’s decision to adopt a multicultural policy. The policy was finally approved by the council in 1989, five years after a working party had been set up to prepare it. The council’s strategy is firmly oriented towards a multicultural perspective. However, as Taylor (1990a:374) explains, earlier unwillingness to include any reference to anti-racism has been overcome, and a mild paragraph asks schools to counter ‘personal racial prejudice’ (institutional racism is not mentioned) by ‘perhaps’ including racism-awareness training in in-service training programmes.

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As we shall see, this model of multiculturalism with a dash of antiracism is also the dominant paradigm for ‘race’ equality work amongst those teachers to whom I talked in the county. LIBERAL DOMINANCE The themes of ‘white racism’ and ‘race crisis elsewhere’, so central to the experience of anti-racists on Tyneside, were also important to respondents in Devon. For the latter group, however, the first of these discourses might be more suitably described as ‘white prejudice’. Interviewees often showed a marked reluctance to invoke the concept of racism. One teacher, DB, noted: There is prejudice here. It’s not like in London…where the situation is very tense, as far as I understand it…. But we are very aware of the ignorance and suspicion with which outsiders are sometimes greeted in this part of the world. In comparison to his London and Tyneside peers, DB’s critique of white attitudes is distinctly muted. It is ‘prejudice’, not racism, that concerns him, a concern that is somewhat euphemistically presented in terms of a ‘suspicion’ of ‘outsiders’. DB went on to explain that he was a multiculturalist, and maybe an anti-racist…multiculturalism implies a bit of anti-racism, it expresses its [concern with] personal prejudice…. I’m quite happy to be an anti-racist, if that [means] non-racist, someone who treats people just as they are, not on the [basis] of the skin. That’s what is so important, what is inside. DB’s definition indicates how anti-racism can be subsumed within both liberalism and multiculturalism. The notion that anti-racism was a minor sub-set of multiculturalism, a sub-set oriented towards the overcoming of personal prejudice, emerged repeatedly in my conversations with teachers. As DC noted, anti-racism ‘is that side of multiculturalism that looks at white misconceptions…nothing more than that’. However, as noted in the introduction to this chapter, the most distinctive aspect of anti-racism in Devon (distinctive, that is, as compared to London and Tyneside) arises from the absence of experience of local crisis. Neither ‘race crisis’ nor ‘class crisis’ form a significant component of the local debate. The lack of these


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radicalizing discourses has contributed to the relative weakness of the radical tradition amongst educators in the county. As on Tyneside, the absence of ‘race crisis’ may be related to the perceived insignificance of the visible minority presence in the area. As DB’s conclusion that ‘there is prejudice here’ but ‘it’s not like in London’ implies, issues of ‘racial’ conflict, minority residence and disadvantage, are seen as somewhat removed from the realties of teaching in Devon. Referring to ‘social breakdown’, DC explained: Thank goodness nothing like that really goes on down here, we don’t have riots, we don’t have people pushing in windows, all that [sort of] thing…just doesn’t occur. So it’s a bit like ‘it’s all on T.V.’, everything’s at a distance…we’re just spectators. Expressing a similar sense of the remoteness of ‘race crisis’, DD opined that, unlike ‘black cities’, ‘we don’t have burning cars on the streets’. As on Tyneside, this feeling of remoteness cannot simply be traced to the absence of overt ‘racial’ antagonisms in Devon. Indeed, survey evidence from Plymouth suggests that visible minority groups feel ‘they would be safer in a multicultural city’ (Harris et al., 1990). Moreover, although neo-Nazi activity seems to be at a relatively low level compared to London or Tyneside, it remains in evidence. Indeed, Exeter Anti-Fascist Action (1992) have published A Catalogue of Crime and Terror detailing acts of violence and intimidation undertaken by National Front members in the county. Taylor (1987) reports that the National Front’s activities outside Cornish and Devon schools led to a Crown Court conviction for ‘inciting racial hatred’ in March 1986. Nevertheless, the perception that ‘race crisis’ is ‘elsewhere’ remains entrenched. This perception draws on the same stereotypes and assumptions concerning the character of ‘real’ racist activity and Black resistance that have been encountered in previous chapters. DC’s suggestion (quoted above) that ‘nothing like that really goes on down here, we don’t have riots’, and DD’s reference to the absence of ‘burning cars’ on Devon streets, are clear examples of a tendency to equate authentic ‘race’-related events with images of violent disturbance in ‘multiracial’ cities. As on Tyneside, Devon interviewees’ images of ‘race crisis elsewhere’ have been influenced by the association of violent resistance with Afro-Britons. Combined with the Afrocentric sub-

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text within anti-racist’s use of the word ‘Black’, this focus seems to have directed attention away from local racism and the discrimination encountered by minority Devonians. The definition of ‘Black’ offered by DD is particularly revealing in this respect: Asians and African people, that is Black people, which is what we should call them I suppose…we don’t have Black people [in this area] so much as half-caste and Indians…. I suppose the troubles in mixed [race] cities are related to the way they feel about themselves…. They must still think of slavery, it must always be there for them. The term ‘Black’ has no overtly political implications for DD. Her definition is, nevertheless, somewhat confused. She affirms an interpretation of ‘Black’ as referring to ‘Asians and African[s]’ but then excludes ‘half-caste[s] and Indians’ from this category. It is, moreover, evident from DD’s reference to Black people’s experience of slavery that it is ‘Africans’ who animate her vision of ‘race crisis elsewhere’. It is they who are being associated with the ‘troubles’ of ‘mixed’ areas. However, in Devon the absence of crisis experience is not limited to the terrain of ‘race’. There is also a perceived absence of class crisis. This perception is not as natural as it may at first appear. Despite the county’s prevalent association with pastoral tranquillity most Devonians are not affluent. Poverty and deprivation are particularly noticeable amongst the rural working class and in Plymouth. Indeed, according to Deacon (writing in 1987; cited by Popple and Popple, 1987), the South West has the highest percentage (9.4 per cent) of full-time employees in Britain earning less than £100 per week. And yet respondents found little evidence of class antagonism or social crisis in Devon. Indeed, nearly all saw the county as, in most part, ‘a pretty harmonious place…a prosperous county’ (DE), a place ‘without social conflict’ (DF). As these reactions indicate, just as racism does not necessarily engender a discourse of ‘race’ crisis, nor does the existence of class inequality necessarily lead to the development of a discourse of class crisis. One possible explanation for interviewees’ lack of sensitivity to local deprivation lies in the mismatch between the rural and/or traditional forms of poverty that they saw as predominating in the county (Plymouth excepted) and their stereotype of the urban, ‘ghetto-like’, nature of ‘real’ class conflict and ‘real’ poverty. DB noted:


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The normal worker in Devon is not a radical. He is content with his or her lot on the whole…I mean in comparison to the poor elsewhere. There aren’t any ghetto children in Devon, if you understand me. This statement draws upon two assumptions: that the Devon ‘worker’ is contented and unrebellious, and that the natural home of the politics of social dissent is the inner city. DB’s specific assertion that Devon lacks ‘ghetto children’ also indicates that he is linking social crisis with ‘multiracial’ areas. The combined effect of these stereotypes is to marginalize both the reality and the importance of economic disadvantage and social discontent within the non-metropolitan working class. Although the image of Devon as a region contentedly wallowing in its own social harmony is a misleading one, it has profound consequences for the political agenda of those who espouse it. The absence of perceived crisis has enabled liberal assumptions and ideals to become, not merely the dominant mode of political expression, but a virtually unchallenged, and seemingly unchallengeable, common sense. The strength of liberalism’s grip on discussion about ‘race’ equality is indicated by the way respondents talked about radicalism. ‘Socialist’ views, DF opined, ‘are not something you hear much of in Devon’. DG noted that he had not ‘really considered [radical] anti-racism’: It’s not something I take very seriously since we aren’t really living that kind of life down here…we take a straightforward view of things…and try to treat all children as equals, as human beings, be they black, white, yellow or green…those of us few who are concerned about these things, well, we’re not weirdos, let me put it like that; you know, not ‘loony left’. DG’s suggestion that none of the people committed to ‘race’ equality work that she knows is a ‘weirdo’ or a member of the ‘loony left’ is a revealing indication of the political uniformity of the local debate (at least amongst teachers). Confirming this impression, DD commented that she had not ‘met any’ radicals in her teaching experience; ‘except of course on courses’ in institutions of higher education. DD’s reference to meeting radicals on courses suggests that in the tertiary sector liberalism may not be able to sustain such an unchallenged position. However, before going on to explore this

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seeming anomaly I shall, by way of a footnote to this discussion of Devon school teachers’ non-radicalism, make a brief observation on the role of the media in sustaining such attitudes. This comment arises as a reply to DH who, noting local teachers’ antipathy to radical anti-racism, suggested that it was a direct reflection of the anti-anti-racist campaigns of the national and local media. The media is always bashing anti-racism. We know that. So teachers involved in multicultural work, who are consumers of the news, come to swallow the lies…. If people only have the media to tell them about Black Britain, like they do in Devon, well, then they are at its mercy. This statement exaggerates the power of the media. Individuals committed to multiculturalism and/or anti-racism are, after all, highly unlikely to be unaware of the biases of the infamously deceitful and reactionary British tabloid press. The notion that educators could mindlessly ‘swallow the lies’ is, then, improbable. Nevertheless, as an explanation of teachers’ aversion to anti-racist radicalism DH’s argument reflects an important and partly convincing acknowledgement of the ability of the mass media to shape perceptions of ‘race’ issues. Indeed, the phrase DG (quoted earlier) used to identity the kind of ‘race’ equality activists she did not want to be associated with—the ‘loony left’—was originally invented by the right-wing press. It is also pertinent to note that images of ‘race crisis elsewhere’ in Devon, as in other ‘white’ areas, have been largely viewed through the prism of television and press coverage. It seems likely that the emphasis on violent confrontation and minority—particulary Afro-British—lawlessness that permeates this coverage may go some way to explain the image that many Devon teachers hold of antiracism and ‘Black’ resistance: i.e. as something remote and frequently undesirable. We may agree, then, with DH that it is necessary to acknowledge the role of the media in providing some of the images that feed the liberal (and radical) imagination. However, this argument cannot legitimately be extended to suggest that the media’s political agenda explains anti-racism’s historical, geographical and ideological heterogeneity. The fluidity and plurality of anti-racism have not been moulded by the press or broadcast news but reflect the different ways educators have made sense of their social experiences at different times and in different


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places. Although the media have undoubtedly influenced the debate, it cannot be said to have determined its diversity. HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE RADICALS There are few conducive spaces for the expression of radicalism within Devon’s education system. The only significant site in which such ideas form an influential and sustainable politics is higher education. This is not, of course, to suggest that radical anti-racist teachers do not exist in Devon or that the fact that I only interviewed one radical anti-racist teacher in the county is in some way statistically significant. Nor is it to claim that Devon colleges are awash with fire-eating militants. Like most educational institutions they are dominated by the values and assumptions of liberalism. What can be claimed is that the tertiary sector provides a more supportive atmosphere for radicalism than the pre-tertiary sector. School teachers’ opinions of higher education provide an interesting reflection of this tendency. The relationship between the two sectors was summed up by DI (a teacher) as follows: A lefty view isn’t going to attract support in Devon. Maybe it might be listened to in one of the colleges but that’s a mile away from the reality of teaching…. Anything too daft would get short shrift with us. Such a comment could not have been made in London or on Tyneside. The institute of higher education is the only educational environment in Devon in which, to adopt DI’s terminology, ‘daft’ views can form a legitimate politics. As one respondent in higher education explained: ‘I guess we’re very tolerant within these walls of [radicalism] but it wouldn’t go down too well in the schools’ (DJ). This is the first time in this book that I have treated the education service as divisible. Both on Tyneside and in London several of my interviews were conducted with educators in tertiary institutions. However, neither these interviews nor the ones undertaken with pre-tertiary educators in these two localities revealed any concentration of radical attitudes in higher education. This sectoral spread can be tied to the experience of crisis discourses. In both London and Tyneside crisis discourses have radicalized educators in all sectors of the system. A radical

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movement has been created that includes educators from both inside and outside colleges. The rising level of radical activity has thus submerged sectoral differences. In Devon such a submergence has not occurred. As a consequence higher education’s radical orientation stands exposed; an island of political plurality in an ocean of liberalism. The reason why tertiary education should provide a favourable environment for radicalism has been the subject of a somewhat inconclusive debate amongst social theorists. Gouldner (1979; see also Chapter 3) suggests that colleges are the central sites for the dissemination of critical and cosmopolitan forms of consciousness. Thus, as Eyerman et al. (1987b:6) explain, the ‘university and other institutions of higher education’ are interpreted by Gouldner as ‘the central institutional basis’ for a ‘culture of critical discourse’. Of the many strands of theorizing that emerge in Gouldner’s explanation of this phenomenon, the implicit causal correlation of educational level with critical rationality is perhaps the most widely accepted. However, as noted in Chapter 3, the correlation that may be drawn between political progressivism and educational attainment cannot be assumed to prove that increases in the latter lead to increases in the former. Indeed, it could be argued that the more an individual is entrusted with maintaining a society’s intellectual resources and institutions, the more likely she or he may be to adopt conservative, preservatory values. An alternative explanation of tertiary radicalism has been developed recently by some conservative commentators in America. Authors such as Roger Kimball (1990) in Tenured Radicals and Dinesh D’Souza in Illiberal Education (1991) have rejected the notion that the academy is inherently oriented towards social dissent (see also Bloom, 1988). Rather they have suggested that these institutions have been invaded by a new and militant generation of intellectuals. Although sometimes expressed in somewhat melodramatic language, this perspective has succeeded in opening up the issue of radicalism in higher education to public debate in the United States. It is matter of concern, notes Kimball, that a ‘nontraditional’ (p. viii) group of insurgents has entered the university. They are, he explains, (pp. 166–7) children of the sixties [who] did not give up the hope for a radical cultural transformation…. Now, instead of disrupting classes, they are teaching them: instead of attempting to destroy


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our educational institutions physically, they are subverting them from within However, despite the fierce language, the idea that radicalism in this sector may be explained by reference to a mass trespass of political aliens is misleading. It fails to engage either with the fact that radical ideas have long been associated with universities or the sustainability of the radical project within these institutions. More specifically, the phenomenon conservative critics focus upon, the post-1960s’ radicalization of humanities and social science departments, needs to be understood in the wider context of radicalization within the welfare professions. As this implies, the ‘nontraditional’ practices and approaches Kimball refers to may be more plausibly explained by reference to the crisis delegitimization of traditional orthodoxies (for example, orthodoxies concerning issues of ‘race’ and class) than by denouncements of the intellectual mugging of universities. Thus, despite the intense controversy the issue has aroused, we are still left seeking a satisfactory explanation for the radicalism of the tertiary sector. Part of such an explanation may be found in educators’ different experiences of their non-market and promarket political roles. This argument needs to be understood as speculative and exploratory. My interviews only skimmed the topic of educatorstudent relations. However, in the wake of my emphasis, in earlier chapters, upon educators’ experience of role conflict, a parallel explanation of sectoral dissimilarity clearly suggests itself. This argument begins with the contention that most instructors at the tertiary level have less direct involvement with the task of qualifying and socializing students for employment in the capitalist labour market than other educators. Indeed, unlike school teachers, tertiary educators are often expected, to a greater or lesser extent, to maintain an interest in activities (such as research) directed away from tuition and towards the production of ‘novel’, ‘challenging’ or otherwise ‘valuable’ ideas. The teacher’s role in relation to her or his pupils is, by contrast, intensive and manifold. The teacher is required to be an instructor, careers counsellor and stand-in parent. She or he cannot avoid being constantly aware that without the necessary credentials and socialization many students will not succeed in the world of work or other adult roles. Where pupils’ life prospects are made bleak by, for example, economic depression or racism, this direct involvement may be disillusioning and thus potentially

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radicalizing. However, in a more seemingly favourable economic and social climate (the myth of which, it will be recalled, is prevalent in Devon), this practical, everyday engagement with the rationalities of social control and the marketplace may dispose teachers to look on capitalist social relations as unproblematic and beneficial. In comparison with teachers, the burdens of career supervision and socialization weigh lightly on educators in colleges. They are far more likely to have middle-class, already well-qualified, students whose life chances are not a cause of great concern or interest. Thus they are able to remain relatively unengaged with the role of overseeing students’ entry into ‘adulthood’ and the labour market. This lack of engagement may, in part, immunize tertiary educators from the full radicalizing effects of discourses of economic or social crises. However, it also enables them, irrespective of the existence of such crises, to develop a more distanced, less market-oriented, attitude towards capitalist social relations. As this implies, in the absence of crisis conditions, whilst radicalism in the pre-tertiary sector is unlikely to flourish, higher education’s radical orientation will remain entrenched. The relative openness of higher education to radical ideas also needs to be viewed in the context of a receptivity to the mythologies of ‘metropolitanism’ and ‘intellectual change and challenge’. Each of these themes forms part of the distinctive discursive culture of higher education. The emphasis on the importance and interesting nature of urban, ‘multiracial’ places—the myth of metropolitanism—can be introduced through the words of DK: What we are facing is a cycle of decline, of decay in our cities and…Black resistance relating to the racism that these cycles of decline have set in motion…. My feeling is that the situation is going to get a lot worse before it gets a lot better. When the provocation goes to a certain level, then, suddenly we shall see, the liberal remedies are suddenly at hand. The focus of this Devon educator’s remarks is a crisis in ‘our cities’. DK stresses and specifies the immediacy of the problem by noting that it is a crisis ‘we are facing’; a ‘decay’ that ‘we shall see’ provoking liberal palliatives (my emphases). DK does not seem to be describing a ‘crisis elsewhere’. She is immersed in the urban, ‘multiracial’ ‘situation’. It is a ‘situation’ in which ‘Black resistance’ and ‘cycles of decline’ provide the central motifs. The ‘situation’ in


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Devon is not mentioned. One of DK’s few comments on the latter was to refer to ‘the humdrum reality of Devon’. Reiterating a similarly aloof opinion, another radical, DL, noted: things are at a pretty petty level [here]…. I try to look at the broader issues, things like the crisis of inner-city race relations. I guess that’s one of the functions of the ‘intellectual’—to look outside the ‘home’ patch. DL’s example of a ‘broader’ issue is, in fact, fairly specific and limited. His concern with ‘inner-city race relations’ reflects a focus on, and attempted engagement with, the crises of the metropolitan ‘centre’. This fascination with the urban seems to be associated with a desire to prove that, even though one may be working in an institution on the geographical periphery, one is completely up-todate with all the ‘newest’ and most ‘challenging’ developments within intellectual and political life. The fact that, unlike schools, students come to colleges from all over Britain and, having graduated, depart for numerous different locations, intensifies the pressure to avoid ‘parochial’ forms of tuition. One of the ways this felt need has been translated into practice in Devon is through the attempt to give trainee teachers first-hand insight of living and working in a ‘multiracial’ inner city. Thus, for example, the School of Education at Exeter University organizes ‘“multicultural” field trip[s] from Exeter to the East End’ (Taylor, 1990b:4). In a parallel development, the College of Saint Mark and Saint John, on the outskirts of Plymouth, has established an urban studies centre in the same area of London. The centre allows students to gain ‘the experience of working with children from ethnic minority groups’ and thus acquire a ‘training based on realism’(Clayton, 1987:25). These initiatives are imaginative and valuable attempts to widen teachers’ ranges of interests and skills. However, the fact that this widening has been done by organizing field-trips to London (trips which, as far as I can ascertain, are not reciprocated by London colleges) implies a particular interpretation of what is, and what is not, significant and authentic experience. Indeed, the fact that teachers have to be driven to the East End to find ‘realism’ begs the question: ‘What are they experiencing in Devon?’ The second of the two mythologies distinct to higher education hinges upon the importance ascribed to intellectual change and challenge. The production of bold and original ideas is a cherished

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ideal within academia. The PhD, one of the cornerstones of the career structure within this sector is, perhaps, the prime example of this thirst for the novel. For a PhD to be awarded it is required to show originality ‘by the discovery of new facts and/or by the exercise of independent critical power’ (University of London, 1987, paragraph 9.2). This orientation towards the ‘new ’ and ‘critical’ provides a conducive environment, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, for the exploration of vanguard and leftist intellectual projects, such as radical anti-racism. Given the emphasis placed on intellectual novelty, this receptivity is far more likely to be expressed as an interest in the idea of radicalism and/or anti-racism than with the implementation of these projects in higher education. However, it remains a distinctive political orientation, an orientation that can be contrasted with the suspicion of the Devon teacher who, the radical DK noted, ‘wonders what is the use of antiracism…it doesn’t get little Bill a job or lead to a qualification’. CONCLUSION It has been suggested that the absence of crisis experience exposes political differences between the tertiary and pre-tertiary sectors. Clearly, this phenomenon poses a number of problems for the development of anti-racism. To conclude this chapter I will reemphasize and expand upon the most serious of these problems, the suffocation of political plurality and debate. As we have seen, liberalism can become so entrenched within the realm of ‘common sense’, of the ‘taken-for-granted’, that even the suggestion of a more critical approach can appear, literally, nonsensical. The notion that Britain is an endemically racist society becomes ‘nonsense…an absurd idea’ (DI). Whilst on Tyneside radical ideas are able to be engaged with and be taken seriously by teachers, in Devon radicalism is often seen as something irrelevant and alien. Thus DB noted that the idea that part of a teacher’s function was to ‘maintain inequality’ was not really to do with us in schools…more to do with university research perhaps. We stick to very practical issues here at [Devon school]. We don’t see ourselves as changing what’s always worked well. The association of radical critique with higher education enables


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the marginalization of radicalism to be concretized as an institutional division of labour. Innovative and challenging ideas become something that ‘goes on’ at the university. Such ideas may be seen as intellectually interesting; they are quite likely to have been encountered by teachers during their initial student training, but are fundamentally remote. Describing her experience of higher education, the liberal teacher, DM, explained: I’ve fond memories of my time at [university]…it’s all rubbish, of course, what they teach you, totally irrelevant. Of course [tertiary sector educators] have their own little world and we have ours, and never the twain. DM’s reaction to her university life is not, of course, an uncommon one. It reflects, however, more than simply the ubiquitous cynicism of students towards their educators. DM then went on to contrast the marginality of the university with her teaching experiences in Devon: Once you’ve settled into a job a lot of it goes out the window and you just get on with it…. I don’t think teaching in Devon is an uncomfortable [experience]…all this [talk about] racism this and racism that, is just such hooey, really, isn’t it?…I always say that if doesn’t sound like common sense, if it does not make sense, then it isn’t common sense, that’s my criteria. DM’s common sense resounds with the assurance of a dominant ideology. It is a dominance, moreover, that need not defend itself against alternative viewpoints. In the absence of crisis experiences such confidence seems almost beyond challenge.

Conclusions

INTRODUCTION This book has explored the formation of ‘race’ equality consciousness from a specific, admittedly limited, point of view. Its focus has been upon anti-capitalist radicalism and anti-racism as public educational (or, more broadly, public professional) projects. This perspective may not have been an entirely comfortable one for those readers who are themselves immersed in this occupational field. However, it has, I believe, provided some useful insights into an important, and all too often neglected, social and political location. Moreover, although the book has been highly focused, it has nevertheless engaged a wide variety of political forms and ambiguities. In the process it has opened up some of the problems and possibilities of radical and anti-racist representation. In these conclusions I want to do three things. Firstly, I wish to provide a summary and general assessment of some of the themes that have emerged in Parts II and III. Five such themes are isolated: an emphasis upon experience; the experience of contradiction; the resolution of the experience of contradiction into ideology; the geographical and historical variability of ideologies; and, lastly, and more prescriptively, the importance of drawing ‘white’ areas into anti-racist debate. My second aim is to consider some of the implications for radicalism and anti-racism of the case studies presented in Part III. The third and final part of these conclusions will seek to shed some further light on a subject that has repeatedly disrupted the conceptual neatness of this book: reflexivity. There would, after all, be a pleasing dialectical symmetry to a model of political consciousness that simply focused on the experience, and then the 175

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resolution, of contradiction. However, reflexivity seeps up within even the most assured of ideological forms. And it spills between the gaping cracks of public professional radicalism. These currents can, perhaps, be channelled towards constructive ends. It is certain that to ignore them is to present a misleading portrait of political consciousness. FIVE THEMES Experience The analyses presented in the preceding chapters have been based upon an experiential model of social process. Every idea or assumption discussed has been explained by reference to people’s social, economic or political experiences. Thus, although much of this study has been somewhat theoretically oriented it has, nevertheless, been rooted in ‘lived’ situations. My analyses have focused on how people make sense of these situations. As this implies, experience has not been equated with the internalization of objective social facts. Roles and discourses are given meaning by people and woven by them into a plausible, usually seemingly coherent, view of the world. Thus the development of political consciousness has been understood as an active and rational process (cf. Bonnett, 1989). Yet, if this approach to the formation of consciousness has not assumed that political ideas are simply poured into people, nor has it arrived at, or drawn from, the opposite conclusion and argued that people are ‘free agents’. Every example of radical or liberal thought discussed has been used to demonstrate the social situatedness of political consciousness. People, as Karl Marx (1970:96) pointed out, ‘make their own history…but they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves’. The experience of contradiction The notion of contradiction provides the conceptual core of the model of political consciousness presented in Parts II and I II. Contradiction has been defined experientially. More specifically, it has been equated with the experience of role conflict. This conflict has been summarized, in a crude but usefully concise formulation, as between pro-market and non-market tendencies. It has been

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suggested that this tension (a) is intrinsic to contemporary capitalism, and (b) is experienced as a series of concrete, practical tensions by public professionals in their everyday working lives. I shall look at both of these points in more detail. The growth of significant state welfare provision has established the public professional as a central and highly significant category within the organization of modern societies. It has been suggested by theorists of ‘late’ capitalism, most notably Claus Offe, that the welfare sector exists in a contradictory subversive-supportive relationship with capitalism. On the one hand, it sustains the reproduction of capitalism by undertaking such duties, as public education, socialization and social care; duties which have grown too essential, vast and complex, to be left to private provision. And yet, on the other hand, the welfare sector subverts capitalism by emancipating these responsibilities from the rules of the market place and inculcating within and through them the values and ideals of universal and egalitarian social provision. Offe’s theorization of the two faces of welfare has itself been supported and subverted in the analysis developed in this book. It has been supported through the advancement of the notion that the public professional is in a contradictory position, permanently torn between market orientations and egalitarian, non-market tendencies. It has also been sustained by pointing out that the welfare sector is an inherent facet of contemporary capitalism. Although public welfare can be reoriented and reorganized, it is not a luxury item that governments are at liberty to abandon. The welfare sector, and its attendant contradictions, are an entrenched component of contemporary economic and social relations. These points of broad agreement with Offe’s thesis need, however, to be set against the less supportive suggestion that the study of social process requires the analysis of the formation of political consciousness. To view contradiction only in terms of the abstract interactions of economic and social systems inhibits the study of the production and transformation of social meaning. This draws us into consideration of the second of the points raised above, that contradiction needs to be understood at the level of lived experience. As we have seen, educators are under constant pressure to credentialize and discipline students to ‘fit in’ with a market economy and conservative society (cf. Willis, 1977; 1983). They are also expected, both by themselves and others, to treat all students in an egalitarian and non-élitist fashion. The tension

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between these two roles has been seen to weave its way through both liberal and radical consciousness. The experience of this tension has not, however, been readily acknowledged. This lack of social self-consciousness leads us towards another major theme that has permeated this study, the resolution of contradiction. Resolving contradictory experiences Conflict resolution may be approached in a number of ways. People’s apparent need to turn their contradictory experiences into coherent common sense might, for example, be viewed as a psychological or existential phenomenon. In this book I have not, however, been interested in building a ‘mega-theory’ that draws in every aspect of this process. My focus has been more limited, but also more precise. I have sought to explain how and why public educators cohere and conceal their contradictory experiences into radical and liberal ideologies. The studies presented have indicated that the cohering and concealing of contradiction enables acts of re-presentation to be portrayed as acts of representation, as direct manifestations of social realities. Thus the resolution of contradiction leads to what might be thought of as a doubt-free kind of consciousness, the sort of thinking which is confident of its own obviousness, its commonsense character. The resolution of contradictions is apparent within many aspects of public professional political life. I shall comment on two facets of this process: the formation of political consciousness as a rational common sense and the way radical ideology binds liberal and radical ambitions together. By looking at the discursive context in which liberal or radical common sense is formed, it becomes clear that the development of ideology is a rational process. This observation provides some clues to the answer of a question that has perplexed many radicals, namely: ‘Why should liberals believe that social equality and justice can be achieved within capitalism when it is clear that capitalism is inherently antithetical to these ideals?’. Frustrated by this seemingly deviant logic, radicals have sometimes been tempted to ascribe it to false consciousness or the self-interest of members of the middle class. The error in both responses is to overlook the social experiences that have nurtured liberalism. As Chapter 4 sought to show, liberalism has been formed and sustained in the context of discourses that have affirmed the possibility of a socially progressive

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form of capitalism. These discourses have seemed to provide proof that equality and capitalism are indeed compatible and that egalitarianism and social justice can be effectively fostered in a market society. Since the late 1960s these discourses have weakened and become prone to an almost perpetual crisis. However, they remain very powerful. Complemented and supported by a wider pro-capitalist political culture (for example, in the media) and the failure of non-capitalist societies (or, for that matter, radical theorists) to offer attractive alternatives, they still enable liberalism to be the dominant public professional ideology. Of course, to say that liberalism is formed rationally is not to say that it necessarily provides a convincing argument. The high hopes of a universally affluent society entertained by liberals in the 1950s and 1960s have proved ill-founded. Vaizey’s (1963) confident vision that by 1980 Britain would have ‘lavish’ public education and health provision sounds today more like a piece of early science fiction than the responsible prediction of an eminent economist. As this reaction to liberalism’s tarnished hopes implies, egalitarians who have come to the conclusion that welfare capitalism cannot be entrusted with their political ideals have also done so in a rational manner. They have done so in the context of a series of discourses that have subverted the plausibility of liberal optimism. This radical tendency is a deeply inscribed, if relatively slender, current amongst British public professionals. As we have seen, radicalism is not an alien intrusion into British professional life. It represents the overt expression of beliefs and assumptions that are already latent within liberalism. Indeed, as Chapter 4 indicated, radicalism haunts liberal ideology; it is shackled to its highest hopes and worst fears. Although liberalism remains the dominant common sense of welfare occupations it is not the inevitable or ‘natural’ perspective of this group. However, to trace the emergence of radical ideology is to expose the way radicalism itself draws on liberal ideals. For, as Chapters 5 and 6 demonstrated, although liberalism has been partially delegitimized as a vanguard position within the education and ‘race’ debate, it still forms an important thread within the radical project. The professional responsibilities and routines institutional life impress upon educators are reflected in the political consciousness of even their most unconservative members of staff. Public professional radicalism is not a pure, monodimensional entity but an ambiguous project, riven with tensions. It is both

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revolutionary and reformist, both individualistic and antiindividualistic; in summary, a constantly fluid and unsettling mix of antagonistic ambitions. I have argued that this experience has been partially resolved into a variety of ideologies that combine radical with liberal assumptions. Moreover, this process has been shown to be spatially variable, a point discussed below. Spatial variation The geographical plurality of political consciousness is enabled by the spatial variation of the discursive environments that surround its formation. To put it bluntly, people think differently in different places because they experience different things within those places. By opening up the plurality of social process the acknowledgement of geographical variation challenges linear forms of explanation. An example of a linear approach is the trajectory ubiquitously drawn between the following phases in the British education and ‘race’ debate: assimilationism to multiculturalism to anti-racism (see, for example, Troyna and Williams, 1986; Mullard, 1985). This line has recently been extended by Gilroy (1990a), all too hastily, towards a new apocalyptic phase, ‘the end of antiracism’. Such strictly chronological approaches to social process have certain advantages. They are conceptually clear and, for those whose interest is limited to the area of public policy, offer a valuable reflection of changes within the vanguard ‘race’ debate. Unfortunately, they have usually been offered as a way of understanding the development of the entire education and ‘race’ debate. This misleading suggestion erases the fact that there is not one debate but several. For those outside the ‘multiracial’ metropolitan ‘centre’ such chronological models often appear meaningless. Two Tyneside anti-racists, Palmer and Ranson (1986:41), explain that, In many ways we in the North East are only now coming to terms with debates which people in other areas have disposed of years ago. Observers of the development of racism in Britain have commented on the different ideological frameworks within which ‘race relations’ are understood—integrationist, multiculturalist, pluralist, anti-racist and equal opportunities (to name but a few?)—as if they represent a chronological

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development. In the North East, at least, we see all these approaches being practised by different agencies and individuals simultaneously. This statement indicates that the ‘race’ debate has not developed in the same way on Tyneside as it has in other places. However, it also indicates an acceptance on the part of its authors of one of the central mythologies that has perpetuated a non-geographical approach to political consciousness. Palmer and Ranson imply that the ‘ideological frameworks’ they isolate are merely derivative leftovers from the real discussion which, as so often seems for educators in ‘white’ areas, is elsewhere. Indeed, their analysis conjures up an image of the North East as a poorly organized and very provincial ideological jumble sale, with all its disposed of exhibits merely cast-offs from the recognized centres of political fashion. In some ways this portrait is even more misleading than the linear trajectory Palmer and Ranson are seeking to dispute. For as my case studies of anti-racism in London, Tyneside and Devon have sought to show, the formation of anti-racist consciousness cannot be reduced to an act of simulation. In each area ‘race’ equality consciousness has been worked out within a specific (but not, of course, necessarily unique) discursive context. It is a constantly original act, not a form of cribbing from the discarded notes of other, more authentic, anti-racists. Indeed, as readers may have already concluded, Tyneside anti-racism, far from being an irrelevant imitation, offers some provocative interventions in the contemporary ‘race’ equality debate. ‘White’ areas The relative indifference to ‘white’ institutions and areas that has characterized most academic and activist discussion on ‘race’ equality, both in Europe and North America, is somewhat extraordinary. To find this widespread disinterest bizarre is not to find it inexplicable. The association of ‘race’ and racism as ‘something to do’ with visible minority people is deeply entrenched within all aspects of contemporary discussion on ‘race’, including that within anti-racism. Combined with the obsessively metropolitan focus of the academic and wider ‘race’ debate it is, perhaps, more surprising that issues of ‘racial’

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equality ever managed to enter the educational agenda of ‘white’ areas at all. However, over the past ten years or so an embryonic ‘race’ equality movement has been sustained by a small but important group of educators in most ‘white’ regions of England. There are two points I wish to raise concerning this development: Firstly, the centrality of ‘white’ areas to anti-racist discussion and secondly, their heterogeneity. Several interviewees in Devon said they knew of parents, and even teachers, who have decided to move to the county to escape living in a ‘multiracial’ environment. Noted DD, they ‘seem to want to get “home” to the “real England”’. Anti-urban utopias and aspirations are stereotypical English characteristics. However, this mythology has been (and, perhaps, always was) racialized. Places such as Devon, a retirement destination for many white metropolitan residents, have become the ‘real England’ because the ‘real England’ is white. Although a less prized destination in the national imagination, the ‘whiteness’ of urban areas like Tyneside has also become, for some of its residents, an important facet of their character and attraction. In both Devon and Tyneside the ‘multiracial’ locality is often positioned as an alien and unwelcoming place, a place from which to escape. As this implies, anti-racist and multicultural activity, if it is to venture to the heart of British (and/or Scottish, Cornish, English, Welsh and Irish) ‘racial’ and national myths and patterns of exclusion, cannot be content with its ‘multiracial’ focus. One need not subscribe to the implausible idea that racism is inherently a white problem to acknowledge that, in predominantly white societies, the ‘race’ equality movement in ‘white’ areas is working, not at the margins, but at the centre of the racist imagination. The second point I wish to make about ‘white’ areas concerns their heterogeneity. Much of the most valuable literature that has emerged around the issue of multiculturalism and anti-racism in ‘white’ localities has been rooted in local experience (for example, Taylor, 1986; 1990a). However, it has also often been assumed within this work that local examples are merely instances of an undifferentiated ‘white highlands’ experience (see also Tomlinson, 1990; Gaine, 1987). This experience, it is implied, is the same from the suburbs, to rural counties, to ‘white’ metropolitan regions. However, as the contrast between Tyneside and Devon indicates, different ‘white’ areas can develop very different ‘race’ equality

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debates. A monolithic view of ‘the white experience’ by-passes this diversity and sustains a misleadingly simplistic view of white identity. DILEMMAS AND POSSIBI LITIES: RE-(RE)THINKING RADICAL ANTI-RACISM This book was not written as a manual for educators looking for a better way to teach ‘race’ equality. Nor was it designed to advance a formula for a new anti-racism. However, in the light of my criticisms of the attempts to rethink the anti-racist project introduced in Part I, some prescriptive conclusions are clearly called for. These conclusions will not present an unbiased account. They will be oriented towards the development of a radical project. Both liberalism and radicalism represent sincere attempts to forge a civilized and just society. Liberalism is no more a reactionary device aimed at securing a pliant population than radicalism is an alien intrusion into a naturally unmilitant educational system. However, liberal optimism has been shown to be largely ill-founded. The egalitarian and other non-market political ideals nurtured by liberals have been frustrated and betrayed. Only radicalism offers a political project capable of comprehending and fulfilling public professionals’ progressive political vision. However, radicalism too requires considerable rethinking. Partly as a result of its alienation of potential support and inattention to the plurality of oppression—and partly because of its, not unrelated, associations with authoritarian, statist and anti-democratic regimes and theories—radicalism, like liberalism, has been in crisis. Reflecting this crisis, the following remarks offer both support for, and a challenge to, the radical project. These prescriptive comments will be based around the forms of anti-racism isolated in London, Tyneside and Devon and related to the three ‘anti-racist dilemmas’ introduced in Chapter 2. It will be recalled that these three dilemmas were identified as resulting from (a) conservative campaigns against anti-racism, (b) the isolation of anti-racism from the wider community, particularly the white working class, and (c) the ‘rise’ of a new ethnic assertiveness. As I explain below, my case studies in London and Devon, to which I turn first, provide little room for optimism concerning a radical response to these dilemmas. However, the class consciousness evinced amongst Tyneside interviewees provides a valuable

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engagement with the issue of white working-class alienation and a more encouraging prospect for the movement. Anti-racist orthodoxy: London The most orthodox and familiar forms of anti-racism introduced in this study have been drawn from the London movement. What has become the standard model of the development of the British ‘race’ and education debate—leading from multiculturalism to antiNazism to radical anti-racism—is well exemplified in London. The anti-racist ideologies expressed by interviews were often similarly conventional. Three ideological forms were identified: anti-racism as part of the Black struggle, anti-racism as consciousness raising and anti-racism as ‘good education’. Of these ideological forms it is the last that provides the most interesting response to the dilemmas of anti-racism. The notion that anti-racism is good education has clear advantages for those seeking to defend antiracism against conservative attack and to widen its appeal amongst educators. In fact, this application of the ideology has become increasingly evident in recent anti-racist initiatives. Thus, for example, one of the founding ‘aims and objectives’ of the Campaign for Anti-Racist Education, formed in 1988, was ‘To reclaim anti-racist education as good education’ (CARE, 1988). Similarly, according to All London Teachers Against Racism and Fascism (1989:17), participants at a conference held in 1989 on the theme of ‘Developing an Anti-racist National Curriculum’ found but one theme to unite them: ‘One phrase from the conference was not rejected by anyone—anti-racist education is good education—and we must not forget that!’ For many of those who use it, the slogan ‘good education’ has radical connotations. For example, a good education may be seen as an education that exposes injustice. However, as a strategy to avoid liberal or conservative censure it is highly problematic. The charge that anti-racism is bad education was, after all, always less important to the anti-anti-racists, and liberal sceptics, than the charge that anti-racism is ‘political’ (i.e. radical) and, ipso facto, alien to British education and values (see, for example, Palmer, 1986). As this implies, the rhetoric of good education will only be effective in gaining conservative (or liberal) support if it is accompanied by an affirmation of non-radicals’ right to take education ‘out of politics’. This fact seems to have been accepted

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by those commentators (introduced in Chapter 2) who have sought to define anti-racism as good education whilst simultaneously distancing it from the left. Thus, for example, Carrington and Short (1989:228) propose a vision of a fully professional anti-racism able to allay other professionals’ ‘unease and suspicion’. Similarly, Grinter (1990:211) has suggested that anti-racism must be presented as ‘good practice. That is the root of its academic credibility.’ We may conclude that, in a conservative political milieu, the equation of good education with a withdrawal from overt radical committment is likely to inflect all aspects of the slogan’s use. However, if the ideology of good education offers an ultimately unattractive trajectory for the reformulation of anti-racism, the ideologies of ‘Black struggle’ and ‘consciousness raising’ offer neither new suggestions nor viable solutions. The difficulties of the concept of Black resistance, and its corollary, White oppression, have already been examined in some detail. As suggested in Chapter 1, the homogenization of Afro-British and Asian British identity as Black identity has three main problematic facets; the construction of Black and White as antagonistic terms which conflate ‘racial’ and political identities; the erasure of other minority groups (and, to a significantly lesser extent, British Asians) from anti-racist debate; and the suppression of religious and other forms of cultural identity within the Black and White communities. These characteristics disable anti-racism’s ability to engage with the plurality of people’s ‘racial’, cultural and political identities. These problematic tendencies are sustained through the notion that antiracism is an exercise in ‘consciousness raising’. Consciousness raising, as explained by interviewees in London, is a way of pouring in to students correct and rational information about racism and Black struggle. In other words, it is a form of education developed around the educator’s own ‘race’ equality agenda and categories rather than from students’ experiences of inequality and powerlessness. Those forms of identity that may have meaning for students but not for anti-racists thus come to be subsumed or marginalized. Post-political anti-racism: Devon If the example of London indicates the problems of a certain type of anti-racist radicalism, the case of Devon shows us what happens

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when radical politics is marginalized to the very peripheries of debate. In Chapter 7 the enormous hegemonic power of liberalism was seen imposing an artificial consensus on the fractures and tensions within Devon society. Liberalism was not merely a dominant ideology among the Devon teachers I talked to, it was a virtually unchallenged one. Ironically, the fact that higher education provides a somewhat more supportive environment for radicalism may actually sustain liberal hegemony amongst teachers. For, in the absence of local crisis experiences, the tertiary sector’s radical orientation comes to be seen as a reflection of its intellectualism and remoteness; a symbol of the essential difference between the sectors. In the light of the visions of a professional, depoliticized antiracism introduced above, the study of Devon’s post-political antiracism is highly relevant to the wider debate. The ‘bands of militants’ who Modood (1988:402) has found distorting ‘race’ equality discussion are not a problem in Devon. Indeed, of the three study areas explored, Devon may be said to offer the most consummate strategy for defending ‘race’ equality work against the right and extending its influence amongst teachers. However, the example of Devon also indicates two likely and closely related consequences of the depoliticization of ‘race’ discussion; the loss of political plurality and the assertion of unreflexive self-assurance. One of the advantages of the intervention of radical critique is that it stimulates controversy and disagreement. It stimulates both liberals and radicals to defend their position against alternative paradigms. In a situation where liberalism (or any other ideological perspective, including unreflexive radicalism) can gain a relatively unchallenged dominance, political debate withers away. Ideologies no longer have to be defended or overtly rationalized. They become ‘natural’ and ‘obvious’, the only sensible choice in an evacuated political landscape. Class-conscious anti-racism: Tyneside Given the paucity of general interest in the ‘white highlands’ it is somewhat ironic that it is from these regions that some of the most creative thinking on anti-racism has come. The most significant examples of the engagement presented here have been derived from the views of radical Tynesiders. These educators have developed a vision of a class-conscious, locally sensitive anti-racism. There are

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three aspects of this development that I wish to discuss. The first concerns the way Tyneside anti-racists have engaged with the issue of white working-class oppression. The second hinges on some of the problems that a dualist view of Black and White identity poses for this engagement. My final comment will be on the plurality of students’ experiences of powerlessness and marginalization. It is the sensitivity to the alienation of anti-racism from the wider community (the dilemma of isolationism) that makes Tyneside radicals perhaps the most provocative of the anti-racist communities encountered in this book. Many of the ideas and points of concern expressed by this group find an echo in a substantial body of research stressing the mutually supportive relationship between class oppression and racism (see especially Phizacklea and Miles, 1979; Miles, 1982). However, it is also clearly resonant of the vision of anti-racism offered by the Burnage Report (Mac donald et al., 1989a; also Nelson, 1990). As noted earlier, the Burnage Report sought to provide a broad view of anti-racist practice, one that encouraged educators to engage with the alienation of white students both from anti-racism and from their own class culture. Anti-racism, the report suggested, needs to be advanced as part of a wider emancipatory project, a project in which all pupils and students can feel they have a direct stake. As one of the authors of the report, Gus John (quoted by Young, 1988:40), has noted, ‘the most successful anti-racist policy one can have is one that assumes that white parents have got to own racism as an issue within the school…and seek to work in partnership with the school to realize its objective’. The radical strategies isolated in Chapter 6 provide some ideas on how a more inclusive, less alienating, anti-racism might be advanced. Each of the ideologies of ‘local sensitivity’, ‘the gentle approach’ and ‘mutual recognition’ expressed by radical interviewees may be understood as an attempt to engage with the fears and attitudes of the white working class whilst developing a level of empathy amongst students for the principles of anti-racism. Thus these strategies emphasize the importance and possibility of basing anti-racist work around students’ own experiences of inequality. It is important to emphasize that these strategies are not advocated simply as devices to relay the message of ‘race’ equality. Their starting point is not the demand that students must sympathize with minority peoples but an interest in, and respect for, their own identity and lack of power, choices and status. This

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approach has also led to some rethinking of the issue of racism. Instead of conceptualizing racism and ‘white backlash’ as products of irrationality or moral bankruptcy, these phenomena are considered as, amongst other things, a rational reflection of the fears and susceptibilities of the powerless. Alongside the positive and encouraging aspects of this reformulation of anti-racism there are, however, some serious problems. These problems take us back to what may be regarded as one of most problematic facets of contemporary anti-racism, the adoption of an exclusionist dualism of Black and White political identity. One of the central difficulties that arises from this dualism in ‘white’ areas concerns the issue of White empathy for Blacks. Despite Tyneside radicals’ suspicions about initiating anti-racist tuition with the demand that Whites sympathize with Blacks, the experience of empathy, of mutual understanding, clearly needs to be part of any successful ‘race’ equality project. The ideology of mutual recognition (which in its radical form asserts a recognition of mutual oppression) may provide a point of departure for such a project. However, this intellectual trajectory will inevitably be disrupted if whites are defined as Whites, and thus placed in an inherently conflictual relationship with Blacks. Such ‘racial’/ political monoliths establish a repertoire of political identities that damn white groups, such as the white working class, to permanent exile from the anti-racist struggle. There is no meeting point, no grey zone, between White and Black. The self-defeating task of finding common ground between two groups defined in opposition to each other is likely to be exacerbated by the Afrocentric sub-text that often accompanies the use of the term ‘Black’. If this centrism is conveyed to students (or if they read it into the term ‘Black’) in areas where there are few Afro-Britons it will entrench the notion that ‘race’ equality is a remote and irrelevant issue. This usage will also perpetuate the invisibility of those visible minority groups most widely spread over the United Kingdom, such as British Chinese and British Asians. The dualism of Black and White identity raises another problem for anti-racist work in ‘white’ localities, a problem that hinges upon the plurality of white identity. As noted in Chapter 6, white settlement on Tyneside, as in other ‘white’ areas, has many different strands. Individuals of, for example, Irish, Jewish and East European descent contribute to a very heterogeneous population.

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The division of political identity into Black and White camps obscures this diversity. Moreover, it conceals the fact that many of these white groups have direct experiences of racism, experiences that may provide a valuable resource for anti-racist educators (see, for example, Breen and Hickman, 1984). Similarly marginalized is the issue of regional identity. The lack of interest in this topic reflects a wider trend within anti-racist debate. Although some antiracist interventions have been made concerning Scottish national identity (for example, Wilson, 1985), regional diversity has remained largely unexplored. Yet, despite this lack of interest, one of the most important ways people in Britain experience inequality and social and economic peripheralization is through their connection to, or identification with, a particular region. The economic and cultural marginality of the North East is an issue that affects every resident of the area. One example of this process is the representation of the area’s history, culture and dialect as without value and as being merely eccentric or comic. (An interesting account of how such attitudes are reproduced even within a local museum supposedly devoted to the display of ‘the North East and its people’ (Beamish Museum) is presented by Bennett, 1988.) It is pertinent to note that in the course of several of my interviews respondents (very few of whom were from the area) mimicked the local dialect for comic effect. Imitating dialects is not, of course, a great sin. Unlike many of the themes identified in this book, anti-racism and a sense of humour are not contradictory tendencies. However, in this case the comedy was somewhat undercut by the fact that working-class Tynesiders are not a powerful, influential or, indeed, acknowledged group in British society. Against this background caricatured displays of the quirky, comic ‘Geordie’ can all too easily become a way of denying the importance and seriousness of local people’s lives and experiences. It may be concluded, then, that by effacing regional identities, anti-racists reproduce the hierarchical and élitist patterns of regional stereotyping and exclusion already entrenched within British society. In summary: a radical education Although in post-Bush North America faint breezes of change can be detected, the early 1990s is not a propitious time to be reaffirming the radical project. Indeed, in Britain (which admittedly

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offers some of the most extreme examples of conservative social entrenchment in the Western world) educators are grateful if any progressive initiative can survive the archaic and intellectually stultifying climate produced by the political culture of Conservatism. However, it is a mistake to imagine that radical consciousness can be legislated away. Radicalism will remain, whether expressed in public policy or not, as long as the social conditions that legitimize its plausibility persist. It is in this context, and with the knowledge that the conservative moment, even in Britain, will one day be over, that these remarks are offered. This book has raised many themes and issues that are relevant to a radical educational project. However, I shall conclude my prescriptive comments with two broad strategies, each of which touches on the theme of developing a more inclusive anti-racist project. The two strategies are: (a) to engage with the plurality of people’s political identity and experience of oppression; (b) to locate the issues of power and inequality, rather than any single set of their many manifestations, at the heart of radical education. The first of these strategies must include the need to open antiracism to the class, religious and regional nature of social experience. One of the most disappointing absences from the anti-racist projects introduced in Part III was a failure to engage with the ‘new ethnic assertiveness’. Earlier I criticized Modood’s (1990b:92) defence of an ‘authentic anti-racism for Muslims’ for offering an essentialist vision of Muslim identity. Nevertheless, Modood’s broader emphasis on the need to take people’s own self-categorizations seriously is an important one. Of course, for those who wish to develop a critical educational project, this emphasis cannot simply be equated with giving different groups, in Modood’s words (p. 94), ‘more space to do their own thing’. Rather, it indicates that the starting point of education for liberation needs to be students’ own experiences and definitions of power and equality. Such a broad project will need to address a variety of overlapping issues of power and inequality, including those pertaining to gender, sexuality and disability. The connections between anti-racism and anti-sexism have been explored by several commentators (Brah and Deem, 1986; Burgess-Macey, 1992; Gewirtz, 1991). It is now widely accepted that racist and sexist attitudes are woven together within the power relations maintained in schools and the wider society. There has, however, been relatively little discussion by those contributing to the ‘race’ and education debate on the relationship between ‘racial’

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identities and the social construction of sexuality (though see Rattansi, 1992; Cohen, 1988; Gilman, 1992) or disability. In Britain, educators’ room for manoeuvre on the former topic is hampered by Conservative legislation designed to censure local government’s ability to ‘promote’ homosexuality. However, it clearly provides an important arena within which equality education can and should develop. This project may be complemented by the acknowledgement of the mutability of students’ ‘racial’, class, regional and other identities. People’s social identities are not fixed or monolithic, nor are their experiences of power and equality. The fluidity of ‘racial’ identity has been usefully explored by a number of cultural theorists (Jones, 1988; Cohen, 1988; 1992; Gilroy and Lawrence, 1988). Thus, for example, Simon Jones’s (1988:219–20) ethnographic study of white reggae fans reveals how, for young whites, the processes which reproduced and confirmed racist ideas… existed in a constant state of tension with local patterns of shared experience, social interaction and cross-cultural affiliation. Class continuities and racial divisions amongst the young were continuously being reproduced, negotiated, and contested. Similarly, even amongst as seemingly trenchantly racist a group as young National Front supporters Philip Cohen (1992:94) finds glimpses of respect and sympathy for ‘Black’ culture, glimpses which he suggests may provide ‘points of possible engagement for antiracist work’. The fluidity of identity enables anti-racists to respect students’ self-definitions while simultaneously refusing to treat them as static or beyond criticism. For radicals it is not enough to affirm or celebrate difference. Radicalism requires an explicit commitment to finding commonality and points of contact between people. This commonality will necessarily invoke issues of power and inequality—issues that engage with, but also transcend, people’s different social identities. This draws us into consideration of the second of the strategies for an inclusive anti-racism raised above. The charge sometimes made against public professional radicalism, that it is merely ‘single-issue’ politics, is misleading. As we have seen, anti-racists are often very aware of the connections that exist between racism and other forms of economic and social inequality. However,

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partly because of the limitations of anti-racist’s dualistic rhetoric, the full implications of accepting ‘race’ equality work as only one strand of a wider emancipatory project have often b een suppressed within the movement by other, more exclusionist, tendencies. By overtly situating the themes of power and inequality at the heart of the anti-racist/radical project these latter tendencies may be mitigated and a more challenging form of education may take shape. And yet in my excitement to demand more and more from public educationalists, to imperiously scold that they have failed to speak for working-class and other social struggles, I am forgetting that many of my radical interviewees had already made a political gesture considerably more demanding, more troubling, than the expansion of the list of those to be spoken for…. REFLEXIVITY: THE VI SIBLE INTERPRETER Reflexivity is not an answer to the dilemmas of anti-racism or radicalism. Although it may provoke more rigorous critical debate, it is not necessarily a strategy for a successful politics. It may, indeed, prove more of a hindrance than a help for those wishing to claim (or implicitly accepting) moral high grounds and universal truths (which is most of us, ‘anti-foundationalists’ included). It is, however, the most anti-authoritarian and provocative of the radical currents identified in this book. It is also the only political gesture that intervenes in the history of ‘speaking for’ with a distinct and disruptive message: ‘I speak.’ The question why anyone would want to undercut their own authority to be a conduit for common sense has been answered in Part III. Although it was indicated in Chapter 4 that liberalism may also contain latent reflexive tendencies, the clearest and most distinct expressions of social self-consciousness were articulated by radicals. Although not necessarily always found together, public professional radicalism and reflexivity are both nurtured in the soil of crisis. As crisis discourses delegitimize liberal ideologies they drive the political tensions inherent within public professionalism into the open, a phenomenon which engenders social selfconsciousness. This self-consciousness takes two closely related forms, the open discussion of one’s politics as ‘caught’ between conservative and radical ideals and the development of a critique of ideology. Both these tendencies expose social representations as re-

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presentations. They make the previously transparent interpreter visible. For some this process has appeared liberating; a point at which a more critical politics can begin. LD phrased this belief in the following way: If we are to accept that our role is full of tensions, pulling us in different directions, then shouldn’t we look honestly at those tensions, and admit them, rather than constantly seek to forget that they’re there. It’s almost a question of owning up, of saying that teachers aren’t gods who know it all…that what we say reflects who we are…and once that step has been taken, well, anything’s possible, because complacency has been replaced by self-doubt. For LD reflexivity is a way of ‘owning up’, of overtly positioning himself as someone coping with the tensions of working both for and against welfare capitalism. Part of this process of ‘owning up’ is the refusal to resolve contradictions into common sense. Thus the self-assurance of ideology is replaced, and subverted, by a willingness to acknowledge the social situatedness and ambiguities of public professional political consciousness. This vision has much to commend it in terms of a more critical, more nuanced and less appropriative radical politics. It enables educators to locate the contradictions within their political ideas and practice. This process can, in turn, foster a more rigorous interrogation of public professional ideals and assumptions. It encourages discussion of this group’s political theories and praxis to be brought to the surface of debate. There is, moreover, no necessary link between this process and a retreat into solipsism. Reflexivity does not impel one to stop ‘speaking for’ but to think about how one is doing so. Thus it provokes debate not silence, a deepening and clarifying of critical capability not a conservative nihilism. However, I am less certain than LD that ‘self-doubt’ makes ‘anything possible’. A degree of certainty, of anger, even of arrogance, is an essential attribute for any one who wishes to provoke social change. It might be suggested, then, that ideologies once uncovered should not necessarily be abandoned. The transparently ironic notion of ‘reflexive ideology’ or ‘self-aware common sense’ might, therefore, be proposed as a strategic

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compromise between reflexivity’s insatiable appetite for deconstruction and the politics of self-assurance. However these issues are negotiated, it seems clear that there is little to be gained from continuing to pretend that radical ideologies are merely windows onto the desires and needs of ‘the oppressed’. Whether ‘we’ like it or not, the public professional is an increasingly visible interpreter.

Methodological appendix

THE CONDUCT OF INTERVIEWS In this appendix I shall explain why semi-structured interviews provide an appropriate approach to the explication of ideology. I shall also show how I sought, within the interview situation, to create an environment conducive for the discussion of sensitive issues (such as the politics of racism and the contradictions of public professionalism). There are many sources to which the researcher interested in the formation of political consciousness may turn. Chapters 4 and 5 drew on published texts and there is no reason why contradictions could not be explicated from even more formal sources such as policy documents or questionnaires (by ‘formal’ I mean texts whose style and content is governed by a relatively strict and limited set of traditions and/or codified rules). However, the more formal one’s source, the more difficult it is to draw out the plurality of people’s political agendas and the ambiguities within their commitments. Interviews—particularly relaxed, informal interviews—provide the most useful source for this kind of information. I say this for two reasons. Firstly, informal or semi-informal interviews can provide a lot of information, including information that the researcher could not have predicted. The information supplied can also be qualitatively different, which brings me to my second point, that speaking to people in a conversational manner enables interviewees to avoid the constraints imposed by more formal modes of expression and to explore the multi-faceted nature of their own attitudes. The constraints of more formal approaches take many forms. Questionnaires and other regimented forms of interview clearly offer an inappropriate approach to the study of political 195

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ambiguity. However, the author of written work is also severely constrained. She or he is likely to be conscious of a larger audience as well as the manifold norms of good, rational and coherent writing (manifested through, for example, the redpencilling of repetition, overt contradiction and over-emotive prose). Of course, interviews, however unstructured, can breed their own varieties of formality and ritual. An environment conducive to the expression and exploration of attitudes does not spontaneously arise merely from the absence of a rigid interviewing schedule. This is particularly important when one is engaging with people who are aware that their opinions are the subject of fierce controversy. As several of my respondents noted, teachers have lost their jobs and damaged their career prospects by appearing too committed to radical anti-racism. Conversely, some liberal interviewees suggested that educators are often fearful that if they do not appear ‘politically correct’ enough they will be branded as racists. The end result of this sensitivity is that, instead of talking openly, respondents may be tempted to rely upon a series of uninformative diplomatic clichés. Compounding these difficulties is the fact that the interview situation in itself can be a source of pressure. As Kress and Fowler (1979:63) note: ‘The basic fact is that the interviewer has power qua interviewer. He is in control of the mechanics of the interview: he starts it, he has the right to ask questions.’ Thus my subject-matter and the imbalance of power between interviewer and interviewee both contained the potential to subvert my intention to create informal, relaxed encounters. I judged my prime task in the interview situation as counteracting these tendencies. I attempted to do this by giving respondents a sense of control over the interview. Six principal strategies were adopted to achieve this goal: 1. Intervention The image of the largely silent interviewer, patiently awaiting answers to her or his questions, is a highly valued role-model in social research. Taciturnity is seen to ensure that the researcher’s own biases and interpretations do not inflect the responses of interviewees. However, taciturnity is an inappropriate response when one is faced with the problem of getting people to talk about difficult and controversial issues. The cold, unemotional social

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scientist may inspire respect, but he or she also inspires the observance of formalities and the strenuous attempt to say the ‘right thing’. To avoid this kind of sterility I tried to treat interviews as similar to ‘real’ conversations, open-ended and with an interplay of views. Thus, although interviewees overwhelmingly dominated these encounters, a sense of discussion, of exchange, came to pervade many of my interviews. 2. The display of sympathy with anti-racism/multiculturalism It is far easier to get people to talk about their political commitments if they feel that they are speaking to someone who is, broadly, on their side. Since I was overtly broadly supportive of the work interviewees were doing, I was able to engage with them, and draw out their attitudes in a way that would have been impossible if I had played the role of the disinterested observer. Displays of my own commitment took many forms, most of which may, at first glance, appear distinctly muted. For example, although I changed my letter of introduction several times, one common theme within it was the use of the vocabulary of anti-racism and multiculturalism, a vocabulary that would be immediately recognizable to those committed to these positions as ‘their language’. The following sentence is taken from one such letter. ‘This project looks at teachers’ reactions to racism and Black resistance to racism.’ This sentence is loaded with assumptions that locate the author as sympathetic to anti-racism; for example, that it is legitimate to use an inclusive definition of Black (at the time the letter was written I held that it was) and write of ‘resistance to racism’. 3. Complete confidentiality The possibility of getting respondents to talk freely about a sensitive issue such as anti-racism requires assurances of complete confidentiality. Indeed, the first thing some respondents told me was that they did not want their names used in any published work, nor the name of the institution where they worked. In order that such worries would not inhibit conversation I gave assurances of confidentiality to interviewees which included (a) that their names would not be used in any written work (b) that no institution would be linked to individual names, and (c) that no

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one, other than the interviewee or me, would see notes or hear tapes that were made at the time of interview. 4. Beginning on familiar grounds Interviews usually began with a discussion based around themes of direct local interest to the respondent. This was a deliberate strategy designed to put interviewees at ease and make them feel in control of the interview situation. Thus I would often begin by asking respondents what they thought were the important events in the development of anti-racism/multiculturalism in their area. Inevitably respondents knew far more about local issues than I did and so in this initial period I was effectively able to relinquish control of the interview. The subjects for discussion in this early phase usually involved the machinations of the local LEA’s antiracist/multiculturalist policy but also touched upon the fortunes of the anti-racist/multiculturalist group the respondent was in (if any) and his or her practical experiences of introducing ‘race’ equality work into the classroom/lecture room. Sometimes the interview never progressed beyond this stage. However, usually after ten or twenty minutes I was able to orientate the discussion in the direction of my interview agenda. 5. Giving respondents control over the length of the interview The average estimated time of interviews with vanguardist individuals in each of the study areas was 55–65 minutes in London, 70–80 minutes in Tyneside, 55–65 minutes in Devon. However, these averages obscure wide discrepancies between interview length. For example, one interview in Tyneside lasted seven hours and one in London fifteen minutes. Although I generally found that about, or just over, an hour was long enough to relax both myself and the interviewee, and enable my question agenda to be adequately covered, I tried to ensure that the actual length of the interview was determined, as far as possible, by respondents. This was achieved by suggesting, at the time of initial contact and at the start of the interview, that the interview could be as short as the interviewee wanted and, during the course of the interview, by asking (usually after half to threequarters of an hour had elapsed) whether the respondent had the inclination, or could spare the time, to continue. Apart from

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allowing interviewees a feeling of control over the interview situation (and thereby encouraging them to relax and talk more freely) this strategy was also necessary because respondents, like most educationalists, were generally very busy and had little time to spare. Thus I felt I could not make too onerous demands on their time. 6. Letting interviewees choose the place of interview/permitting joint interviews Cole (1984:56) notes that interviewing teachers in their homes reduces the ‘problem’ of respondents feeling ‘constrained to contrive a particular presentation of self. By implication Cole is arguing that the physical setting of the home is in itself capable of relaxing respondents. This suggestion may at first seem entirely plausible. The home is, after all, a by-word for relaxation and the absence of pressure. However, on reflection it is apparent that Cole is conflating the generally accepted stereotype of the ‘peaceful home’ with his respondents’ particular and individual response to being interviewed at home. After all, such respondents, after having been, if only ever so gently, pressurized into giving an interview in the place where they live, may feel that their own private space has been invaded. This feeling, far from relaxing respondents, may cause them to resort to little more than cliché-ridden rhetoric. I would argue that the physical space of the interviewee is not as important as the control the interviewee feels she or he has over the interview situation. This view was strengthened during the course of my interviews as I encountered very frank and open exchanges in the most institutionalized settings (for example, offices and staffrooms) as well as in informal spaces (for example, homes and school stock rooms). On the same principle of trying to empower respondents I agreed on several occasions to joint interviews. Forty-three of my sixty-one interviews with vanguard individuals were one to one, three were one to two, and four were one to three. These latter seven occasions were all lively and I did not detect any inhibition to ‘speak out’ or be controversial on the part of respondents due to the presence of their colleagues. This lack of self-consciousness may be explained by reference to the solidarity that these individuals felt with one another as anti-racists/multiculturalists. It was noticeable, however, that respondents tended to intellectualize and talk in more abstract, rather than personal, terms about the phenomena they

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were discussing at such joint meetings as compared with individual encounters.

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Index

African Americans 43–4, 54 Afro-Britons 6, 17, 23–7, 40–5, 88–9, 95, 113–16, 147, 153, 163–4, 166, 185, 188 All London Teachers Against Racism and Fascism 112–14, 118, 150, 184 anarchism 108 Anderson, B. 49 anti-anti-racism 4, 45, 47–54, 56, 104, 166–7, 181–4 Anti-Fascist Action 57, 163 Anti-Nazi League 57 anti-racism; as anti-Nazism 57–8, 109–13, 118, 120–1, 143–4, 183; and class 8–10, 53–4, 58–9, 134–5, 147–52, 162, 186–8; contradictions of 9, 104, 119–25, 149–59; crises of 1–2, 8, 45–64, 118–19, 183–5; and gender 59, 62, 190–1; as ideology 9, 105, 119, 123, 125–33, 149–59, 179–80, 184–5, 187–8; and liberalism 9, 37, 60–1, 104–6, 110–13, 116–17, 119–33, 135, 144–5, 148–60, 162–5, 172–3, 184–6; and radicalism 4, 9, 37–45, 48, 50–1, 58–61, 104–6, 109–33, 135, 145, 148–59, 160, 165–6, 172–4, 183–94; and reflexivity 9, 104–5, 129–33, 156–9; and sexuality 190–1; in ‘white areas’ 3, 9, 101–2, 134–73, 180–3, 185–9

Anti-Racist Alliance 57, 118 Anti-racist Teacher Education Network 140 anti-sexism, 190–1 Ashraf, S. 55 assimilationism 25–9, 31, 87–8, 90, 180 Baker, K. 49 Banton, M. 15, 24 Bash, L. et al. 39–40 Berger, P. 73 Berlak, A. 80 Berlak, H. 80 Black; as anti-racist category, 6–7, 33, 37–45, 52, 54–6, 59, 62, 115, 118, 125, 127–32, 146–7, 153, 164, 185, 187–9 Black Parents Movement 114 Black Students Movement 1 14 Bolt, C. 15 Bordo, S. 32 Bourne, J. 44 Brint, S. 74 British Arabs 17, 40–1, 139 British Asians 6, 17, 24–6, 40–5, 53–6, 89, 95, 109–10, 113–14, 139, 146–7, 153, 164, 185, 188 British Chinese 6, 17, 25–6, 40, 42–4, 89, 139, 146–7, 188 British Cypriots 17, 40, 43, 89 British National Party 143 Bruno, F. 26 Burnage Report 53–4, 58–9, 187

218

Index Campaign Against Fascism in France 57 Campaign Against Racial Discrimination 139–40 Campaign Against Racism and Fascism 57 Campaign Against Racism in Schools 118 Campaign for Anti-Racist Education 118, 184 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 69–70, 74–5 Carby, H. 35, 38 Carrington, B. 60, 185 Carter, T. 89, 114 Casey, J. 23–4, 26, 31 Clark, G. 41–2 Cohen, P. 191 Cole, M. 35, 199 Commission for Racial Equality 137 Conservative Party 17–18, 20–1, 23–4, 27–9, 31, 47–50, 77–8, 101, 118, 125–6, 144, 191 Cotgrove, S. 74 Cottle, S. 55 Coulburn, D. 53 Craft, M. 34 crisis, definition of 105 Cronin, A. 89 Cross, M. 62 Cuvier, G. 15 Dale, J. 77 Davies, G. 108 Devon 9, 95, 101, 103, 138, 160–8, 170–3, 181–3, 185–6, 198 Deedes, W. 18 Derrick, J. 35–6 Dhondy, F. 38, 113 Dijk, van T. 25 Dolan, J. 34 D’Souza, D. 168 Duff, A. 74 Ebbutt, K. 136 Education Reform Act (1988) 48– 50, 60, 78, 137–8

219

educationalism, definition of 94 Ehrenreich, B. 70 Ehrenreich, J. 70 Elderman, M. 80 Europe 15–16, 26, 29–32, 57, 77, 180 European Community 30–1 Eysenck, H. 16 France 30 Front National 30 Foot, P. 27 Fryer, P. 44 Gateshead Federation to Combat Racism 140 Germany 30, 75, 110 Gilroy, P. 23–4, 26–7, 38–9, 44, 56–7, 59–60, 115, 180 Goldman, R. 87–8 Gordon, P. 29 Gouldner, A. 71–3, 168 Grace, G. 108 Gray, P. 5 Greater London Council 48, 105, 107 Grinter, R. 60, 138, 185 Gulf War 26 Hackney Black Teachers’ Group 115 Harlowe, B. 5 Hatcher, R. 4, 49, 116–17 Held, D. 79 higher education 10, 75, 83, 142–3, 160–1, 165, 167–73, 186 Holton, R. 105 Honeyford, R. 25–6, 51, 54, 104 Hood, C. 112 Hubah, L. 115 Husain, S. 55 ideology; and anti-racism 9, 105, 119, 123, 125–33, 149–59, 179– 80, 184–5, 187–8; definition of 79–81; and multiculturalism 8, 82, 87, 90–7; subversion of see reflexivity

220

Index

immigration (non-white); numbers 17; opposition to 18–24, 30–1, 109 individualism, definition of 92 Inner London Black Teachers’ Group 115 Inner London Education Authority 42–3, 48, 51, 88–9, 117, 142, 150 Institute of Race Relations 115, 150 International Socialists 109 James, A. 91 Jeffcoate, R. 33–5, 91, 95–7, 111–12 Jensen, A. 16 John, G. 58, 187 Johnson, P. 26 Jones, K. 107 Jones, S. 191 Katz, J. 37 Keane, J. 79 Kimball, R. 168–9 Kirp, D. 87–9 Klug, F. 29 Labour Party 18, 20–1, 47–9, 144 Lansley, S. et al. 52–3 Larson, M. 96 liberalism, central themes of 4, 84– 7, 90–7; see also multiculturalism; anti-racism Local Education Authorities 37, 42–3, 48–9, 51, 116–17, 137, 141–2, 198 London 9, 19–20, 52, 88–9, 101, 103, 105, 107–8, 110–33, 143–4, 148–9, 155–8, 162–3, 167, 171, 181, 183–5, 198 Major, J. 30 Marshall, T. 83 Marx, K. 176 Marxism 108, 117 Mattausch, J. 75–6 Meredith, G. 90 Miles, R. 24, 59

Mishra, R. 78 Modood, T. 44, 47, 55–6, 61–3, 67, 186, 190 Montague, A. 7 Mullard, C. 39–40, 44, 87 multiculturalism 4–5, 7–8, 14, 32–6, 38, 63, 67–8, 81–2, 87–97, 102, 111–12, 116–17, 153–4, 161–2, 179; as ideology 8, 82, 87, 90–7; in United States 5 Murray, N. 50–1 Muslims 26, 54–7, 62–3, 89, 146, 190 Nabarro, G. 27 Nandy, M. 94 National Anti-racist Movement in Education 62, 112, 137 National Association for Multiracial Education 36, 111–12, 140 National Curriculum 49–50, 137–8 National Front 22–3, 109–13, 120, 143, 163, 191 nationalism 20–32 neo-Nazism 22–3, 109–13, 120–1, 143–4, 163 New Class 8, 72–4, 79 New Right 1, 23–9, 45, 47–52, 77–8 North London West Indian Association 89 Offe, C. 76–80, 105, 176 O’Higgins, M. 77 Ouseley, H. 51–2 Palmer, N. 180–1 Parkin, F. 69–71, 73–6 Pedley, R. 87 Peach B. 114 Peacock, M. 112 Pearce, B. 136 police 114–15 Polling, O. 95 Powell, E. 21–4, 27–8, 31 professionalism, definition of 95–6

Index Pryke, R. 95 ‘race’, concept of 6–7, 15–16, 38–9 ‘racial’ nomenclature 5–7, 39; see also Black; White racism (‘racial’ rejectionism); definitions of 14, 37, 120–1; in Europe 15–16, 29–32, 57; new emphases within 24–32; scientific racism 15–16, 22–3, 31; see also anti- anti-racism; New Right; neo-Nazism Racism Awareness Training 4, 37, 161 radicalism; and anti-racism 4, 9, 37–45, 48, 50–1, 58–61, 104–6, 109–33, 135, 145, 148–59, 160, 165–6, 172–4, 183–94; and higher education 75, 165, 167–73; and middle class 8, 69–76, 79 Rank and File 107, 117 Ranson, L. 179–80 Reeves, F. 18 reflexivity 3, 9–10, 33, 80–1, 104–5, 120, 128–33, 135, 156–9, 175–6, 192–4 reformism, definition of 84 Rich, A. 1, 3 riots; in London 19–20, 114–16, 163; on Tyneside 147–8 Roberts C. 90, 93 Roberts, K. et al. 70 Rose, E. et al. 19 Ruggles, P. 77 Rushdie, S. 54–6 Sanjel, S. 55 Schools Council 136–7 Scott, D. 94 Sherman, A. 23–4 Short, G. 60, 184 Sikora, J. 51 Sivananadan, A. 37, 44 Smith, C. 15 Smith, W. et al. 115 Socialist Teachers Association 109, 117

221

Socialist Workers Party 109, 114, 125–6 Spivak, G. 13, 32–3 Standing Conference for Multicultural Education in the South West 161 Stone, M. 92 Subhan, N. 41–2 supplementary schools 89, 146 Swann Report 137, 140–2 Tawney, R. 96 Taylor, B. 138, 161, 163 Taylor, F. 87–8 Taylor-Gooby, P. 77 Teachers Against Racism 108 Teachers Against the Nazis 112, 114 Teachers Anti-Racist Alliance 118 Tebbit, N. 29 Thatcher, M. 23, 48 Tyne and Wear Community Relations Council 142 Tyneside 9–10, 101, 103, 134–59, 162, 167, 180–3, 186–9, 198 Tyneside and District Anti-Fascist Association 140 Ullah, A. 53, 58 United States 1, 3–6, 37, 43–4, 54, 70, 77–8, 168, 181, 189 Utley, T. 28–9 Vaizey, J. 85–7, 179 White; as anti-racist category 7, 33, 37–45, 52, 59, 129–30, 186–9 ‘white areas’; and anti-racism 3, 9, 101–2, 134–73, 180–1, 185–9; and class inequality 134–5, 147–8, 150–2, 164–5, 186–8; minority settlement in 136, 139, 160–1 white ‘backlash’ 150–1, 155, 188 Wright, N. 3, 108 Wyatt, W. 25

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