I will continue to research and write on the issues raised by The Myth of Racist Kids. I have one or two feature length articles which were not taken up by the press.   Stop Racialising Our Kids! from 2007 describes in some detail the experience that triggered my resolve to write the report. 

Stop Racialising Our kids!    

Anti-racist policy in primary schools is too often a muddle, writes Adrian Hart. It risks racialising the most diverse generation of kids Britain has ever seen forcing schools into a damaging bureaucratic exercise. 

It’s Monday morning and I’ve been sent to another primary school somewhere in Essex.  This time, I’m told, the school will have quite a few black children and racist incidents occur regularly.  Seated in front of the video camera is a ten year old black child we’ll call Joe.  Apparently Joe has been at the centre of a number of incidents officially recorded by the school as part of its race equality duties.  Before we start I ask Joe if he thinks there is racism in his school.  “No” he says “this is a good school”.  “But we heard mention of some recent difficulties, things that happened to you?” I say.  Joe looks thoughtful, “well, some children say things but I say sticks and stones - you know what I mean?”.  I like Joe.  He seems older than his years, very funny and very confident – and he isn’t finished, “you know, it doesn’t matter the colour of your skin, its what’s on the inside that counts”. 

Later, at break-time, Joe darts off to join his friends in the playground. The two young drama tutors running the workshop discuss children's refusal toadmit to their experience of racism at school and wonder if they might be in denial or frightened to talk about it. As I listen to my colleagues talk I lookout of the classroom window at the kids in the playground. There must be ahundred kids out there. Joe has joined a group of friends and they are allleaping around, wide-eyed as if having learnt that the entire Arsenal team areshortly to visit the school. They wrestle each other and collapse giggling.Suddenly they leap up and disperse in all directions. I look for Joe. He's nowat the far end of the playground with a different group and a set of (probably)football cards are causing intense concentration. The mysterious dynamic ofthe playground has distracted me.

I think it was this moment that triggered the questions. A lot of questions.The contradiction between a playground scene which could teach the adultworld a thing or two about multi-cultural harmony and a brief based on theidea that Britain's primary schools are struggling with racism seemed worthyof my first question: What the hell were we doing here? On one level it wassimple. Racist Incident Reports submitted to the council indicated a problemin primary schools "of a verbal nature". Money had then been allocated tocommission a young peoples theatre company to investigate this problem andcreate an educational film for use in primary schools. As a freelance videomaker who had worked for this organisation over many years I joined a team of drama tutors to visit a number of schools and create the film. No doubt my best interests would have been duly served had I got on and made a film that 'celebrated difference' and, perhaps, lined up a few footballers to remind kids that racism really is bad. But the questions kept on coming. How should we define racism? How should we define race? Surely we should celebrate the things that make kids feel alike not differences like skin colour?

Cut to the Essex school. This time a black child is being interviewed by oneof the drama tutors. "You know how we sometimes identify ourselves aswhite or black or asian or mixed – how would you identify yourself?". Heanswers. "Ah, a dark skinned person" recites the drama tutor. "No, aDANCING person" he exclaims (his ambition is to become a professionaldancer). As I drove back from Essex it was almost as if voices trapped insidea thousand hours of videotape were forcing their way back into my mind. It was clear. For ten years I've been filming kids in primary schools and nowlike a chorus they were yelling 'stop asking us where we are from, ASK USWHERE WE'RE GOING!".

This seems so fundamental to the task of educating children and yet inprimary schools up and down the land, in one guise or another, we pour ourloss of faith in the future, our pre-occupation with identity (the naval gazingof the politically dispossessed), our muddle-headed thinking onto children.In the case of black children it's not just a skin difference they have tosanctify but a whole history of oppression and struggle. You have to askyourself the question, is it healthy for children of 10 or younger to be'awareness raised' from an instinctive and often colour-blind state oftogetherness to a new racialised and potentially divisive view of themselvesand each other? Primary aged children happily recite these messages butwhen you meet them again a few years later (as I frequently do) a broodingsense of victimhood (in black children) and a resentful strain of guilt (in whitechildren) is sometimes evident.

Back at my studio I start to dig a little deeper. I playback hours of videotapeof children talking to camera, I read books on the meaning of race and onDNA. I begin to email my team on the questions that were forming. How dowe explain 'race' to children? Certainly to do so in terms of skin colour makesabout as much sense as defining people with ginger hair as a separate 'race'.Surely the exponential increase of so called "mixed race" children in Britain'sschools is set to make a mockery of this skin game we play? Surely weshould make a film that abandons the obsession with skin and the race vocabulary of the past? Can we not make a film that focuses exclusively onhuman commonality?

To their credit the two drama tutors were more than willing to engage withthese issues. The youth theatre organisation we were all contracted to mighthave preferred that we shut-up, duck the awkward questions and select theprojects 'core values' off the peg. But the drama tutors and I agreed tothrash it out via a very lively email debate. But they grew a little angry withme: A film for schools that blatantly ignores difference, they contended,exposes the lone black child in a class of thirty white children to a profoundcrisis of identity. "A child has a right to a positive identity, not an ignoredone" stated one email. Black children are "entitled to a collective identity ....to belong their group; to be black and proud".

Of course these kinds of arguments – rather than mine – are commoncurrency amongst 'diversity' educators. And as with any orthodoxy, askingtoo many questions can make people very irritable. Why, for example, is itautomatically a good thing to take a group of children perfectly happy withthemselves and each other, single out the children with darker skins and tellthem that they, rather than their white friends, should feel pride in skincolour?

One deputy head-teacher colleague back in London seemed flustered when Iasked this question. "It's complicated" she said, and referred me to thefrequently asked questions page of the DCSF website TeacherNet. But ifchildren are frequently asking these questions and the answers are toocomplicated even for their teachers to explain we surely have a problem?

The children I filmed in Essex struggled to reconcile the mixed-messagesthey'd taken-on from past assemblies, citizenship classes and now our dramaworkshops. 'Its what's on the inside that counts' (ie it doesn't matter whatyou look like) crashed head on with 'be proud of how you look' (ie it doesmatter what you look like). One thoughtful kid, during a group discussion,even attempted to resolve the contradiction: "it only matters if you're beingpicked on for it" she said. Wise words, which seemed to instantly trigger amurmur of solidarity from around the circle as everyone contemplated how, atone time or another, they'd been taunted for being either too tall, too short,ginger haired, dark skinned, freckled, overweight, underweight,bespectacled... the list goes on and on.

For my drama tutor colleagues it was vital to encourage a unilateral pride inall these differences; 'everyone is special' was their slogan. Of course theaddendum ...but some people are more special than others wasn't theirslogan. But it should have been - because, for my colleagues, minority 'nonwhite' children represented a special case ipso facto they required affirmative action - to embrace and bolster their racial identity. Unlike other visible minorities such as obese children – ran the argument - black children occupy a cultural identity and their sense of belonging is damaged if, for example, their "blackness" is ignored.

But the argument doesn't quite stack-up. I can understand how, in the adultworld, the centuries long effects of racism and the struggle to overcome,actively defines black experience and instils a sense of collective identity. AndI can well accept that to experience discrimination and prejudice simply for'being black' will inevitably invoke a powerful and inescapable sense of whyskin matters. But surely, in 21st century Britain, children have a uniqueopportunity to form a trans-race generation? In 1964 Martin Luther Kingdreamt of a future liberated from the preoccupation over skin-colour, a futurewhere people are judged "by the content of their character". Then, thedemand was equality – for human beings to be accorded the same rights asone another. Today this demand has surrendered to the right to be different,and worse, the right to be revered as a victim -to have historical grievancesforever permeate the present. If Martin Luther King's dream is not to becontinually deferred, at the very least, children should be entitled to developand learn without adults insisting that their experience be colour-coded atevery turn.

It was true that children in provincial schools had taken anti-bullying andmulticultural messages to heart. Not unreasonably, they tended to assumedrawing attention to another child's skin colour was wrong. But they alsoassumed that describing a child as "black" was in some way racist. For thesekids 'racism' meant picking on someone's colour just like bullies pick on - well,anything! A few teacher-assistants also, nervously, took this view and it wasapparent that racist incidents were being reported not just on the basis of"paki" or "chocolate face" but "black" too. After all, the definition they arerecommended to use is "any incident perceived to be racist by thevictim or any other person". Ofsted cites a more succinct definitionquoting a headteacher: "If a child feels the incident is racist, it is".

This absurdly subjective definition is a new development. It used to be thatracism meant having a conscious opinion about the inferiority of a certaingroup and so children were almost never racists. To the extent that childrendo consider certain groups to be inferior beings - e.g. girls (if you're a boy),boys (if you're a girl), Year 4 (if you're in Year 5) and so on - should onlyremind us that they are children. And if children have any rights at all itshould be the right to be treated as children rather than miscreant miniadults. In other words, the right to a certain kind of freedom based on adultsknowing when to take a step back and allow the experience of unfetteredinteraction (be it conflict or kinship). At school, in the playground, this is howchildren flourish and develop.

A view of society as a state of perpetual malaise, of humans as either selfseeking bullies (or downtrodden victims) and schools as centres for correction and therapy, is a view alive and well amongst many of my colleagues. When I ask the drama tutors if they agree that the inevitable random nastiness of kids is getting pulled into an ever-widening bullying and 'racist incident' dragnet, they disagree: "Bad behaviour in children, random or otherwise, cannot be divorced from the adults children become" says one. "If you are not challenging this behaviour you are condoning it". This view of childhood as an experience teetering on the brink of a 'lord of the flies' meltdown is very telling. It confers almost heroic status to those who intervene and 'rescue' children otherwise destined to be the bullies and racists of the future.

At the last school we visit I ask another teacher if its not the case thateveryday playground spats are being elevated, somewhat erroneously, intoracist incidents? He looks horrified so I attempt to clarify, "surely when kidsfall out they grab anything that will hurt, then minutes later they're friendsagain?". "We have to be seen to be taking racism seriously", he says "it's thelaw". And again I'm referred to teachernet.Ah, teachernet, at last we meet. Finally I visit the site devoted to patientlyexplaining government policy to confused teachers. No Adrian. The definition of a racist incident is not absurd, please copy the following into your exercise book. Salvation! my naïve (possibly racist) misconceptions are to be politically corrected. "Just because an incident is alleged or perceived to be racist does not mean that it is racist. But it does mean that it must berecorded and investigated". For teachernet, failure to investigate "could beseen as condoning racism". This anxiety to 'be seen' as steadfastly anti-racisttraces back to government brow-beating over its own multiculturalist policiesand what it dubbed 'community cohesion'. Following the murder of StephenLawrence, the Association of Chief Police Officers needed to drive into theminds of police personnel the, doubtless, novel idea that they must takeallegations of racism seriously. The definition of a 'racist incident' originatedhere and was later adopted by the 1999 Macpherson Report. Local authoritiesexpect schools to seek out, investigate and record all incidents by applyingthis recommended definition.

Teachernet offers further guidance: "Two children are arguing. One calls theother 'fatty' and the second replies with a racist term such as 'Paki' ...". Theadvice is detailed. "Both types [of insult] are hurtful but "Paki" goes to thevery roots of someone's identity and sense of belonging, and attacks not onlythe individual child but also his or her parents and grandparents and the wider community and tradition to which they belong. [] People don't get murdered for being fat or for having ginger hair, or for wearing glasses, orhaving spots on their faces". Sensitive to school anti-bullying policies theadvice urges teachers to check if children are "equally matched in terms ofpower". If they are the weaker of the two, then the recipient of 'woundingwords' like "fatty" may, says teachernet, be deemed a victim of bullying butthe bully is still a victim of a racist incident – and it is this that must berecorded. Seemingly uncomfortable with its insistence that there can be nomoral equivalence, not even in a child's world, between "fatty" and "paki",teachernet adds; "the incident is the exchange of insults, not just the oneinsult". Well that's some solace to a child taunted as "fatty" and who'schildish retort has resulted in their teacher explaining that the word usedattacks their classmates 'identity, family, community and traditions'. If onlythey could have been less angry, less lonely, less in need of some way oflashing out against the other kid; if only they could have behaved less like achild and acted correctly. Acting in a grown-up manner is, of course,something children can be very good at. But acting is all it would be.

If you're reading this and thinking hang on surely racism is more serious thana few kids getting picked on for having ginger hair or spots then perhapsyou're investing their childish words with your world-aware meanings. In the adult society beyond the primary school gate, racism certainly is a bigger problem and I am not suggesting that schools or children are immune fromits effects. But for primary schools the problem is not racism. Under thebanner of 'anti-racism', 'celebrating difference' and 'being seen' as takingracism seriously, children's understanding of themselves, their friends and theworld around them is re-interpreted and fed back to them through the prismof race.

When I was at school in the 1970s I was routinely called "paki" and "coon" byschoolmates – and by my teachers (with no Asian kids around, my unusuallydark complexion was close enough!) Back then racism was acceptable,something to laugh about on TV sitcoms. This kind of everyday racismgained its legitimacy from the top. Lets face it - racism was a social forcedriven along by politicians, police and immigration authorities. In no smallpart due to an assertive black and Asian presence in Britain, society today ispalpably less racist and more tolerant than it was 20 or even 10 years ago.That doesn't mean its vanished. But few stop to consider that it might be therarity of racist abuse and violence that makes it so shocking to us. The lesswe see of everyday racism, the more we seem to imagine its presence.Today, we are told, racism has gone "underground". Virus like, it creepsabout potentially surfacing in any of us (or could it be the congenital diseaseof white people?). Thank god we have principled anti-racists like Cameronand Brown to save us from ourselves!

Government 'official' anti-racism is just another desperate attempt to imposea new moral code and occupy the high ground as though it were a decentand compassionate headmaster. But, like its website teachernet, and theinterventions it funds (like our film project), 'being seen' to be anti-racist andenforcing a stifling etiquette marks out this anti-racism as a far cry from whatwe should be fighting for.

Back in Essex I'm filming Joe dancing with his friends. For several days nowmy team and I have been filming kids eating, playing, laughing – all thethings that define the ethnic group I call children. My colleagues seemhappier now that a theme has emerged for the film which seems toacknowledge their preoccupation with "identity". Its along the lines of enjoy difference but celebrate sameness; love the skin you're in and move on(after all, we're only human). The funny thing is, the more you look atdifference the more you arrive at sameness. An exploration of why humans all look different led us into genetics and a realisation that the more we pop out endlessly different the more it confirms the human race as one big mixedbag of DNA. And of course in DNA terms there are no 'black' or 'white' races, just human populations genetically interacting with environment and each other. The children we worked with in Essex loved this message. It chimedwith the kind of multicultural community they were creating and living outeveryday.

We tend to assume that 'racial identities' emerge in response to the experience of racism. But how often do we consider the role of anti-racism infostering a sense of belonging to a separate race? One black writer describesthis as race-holding – a defensive and debilitating maintenance of a personal identity solely in relation to one's "race". Whether its their class, their gender or their "race", the last thing children need to hear from adults is why something about them is likely to hold them back. The film we eventually made wasn't all that bad. But it so easily could havebeen. I'm left wondering how many other DVDs or books or touring plays orawareness raising workshops are, despite their good intentions, disabling ageneration. This is a generation that should have had a right to grow-upuntainted by race-think, to enact their own resolutions and invent their ownfuture. So what can teachers do? Beware of 'official' anti-racism for onething. Ask whether children need intervention - are they not creating theirown multi-culture before our very eyes?{jcomments on}