Posted 13th October 2010

I gave a talk on The Myth of Racist Kids to The Leeds Salon on Monday 11th October.  It formed part of a number of satellite events positioned around the annual Battle of Ideas conference in London which took place on the 30th and 31st of October.  The issue of 'racist kids' and the opportunity to discuss it at the Leeds event was picked up by the Yorkshire Post - it made a succinct prelude to a lively debate.  Read the Yorkshire Post article here.

Below is an edited transcript of the talk:

As a freelance community filmmaker, I’ve worked on several anti-racism projects in schools over recent years.  And it led to this report.  So I thought I’d summarise the main arguments I put forward in The Myth of Racist Kids:

In short I argue that:

A brand of top-down ‘official’ anti-racism currently operates in schools which interferes with the progress of a generation of kids who are fully capable of transcending race.

It’s most obvious manifestation is the government requirement (soon to become a legal duty) for schools to identify, record and report so-called “racist incidents”.   In Britain this has produced over 250,000 reported incidents since 2002; figures which have inspired numerous educational interventions.

I argue that official anti-racism undermines the authority of schools, mistrusts teachers and profoundly misunderstands children – who they are and how they develop.   

And I ask this question:  In an increasingly cosmopolitan Britain where race is less and less relevant, is it not the case that this phoney anti-racism is fast becoming the dominant racialising influence on young children?  

Its quite a toxic area to have sailed into.  People want to shoot you down just for asking these questions.  Certainly the advocates and architects of anti-racist policies don’t want to come here and debate this issue.

The title of my report refers directly to the myth conjured by a policy of racist incident reporting – i.e.  the statistics gathered from schools which lead many to conclude that there’s an endemic problem of racism to be addressed – particularly in primary schools.  There isn’t an endemic problem, it’s a myth.  But I’ll come back to that.

First lets get past the sticking point: … can kids be racists? – , its all a bit daft really.  It depends how you want to define racism.   If you want to divorce the things kids say from any kind of intention or conscious idea then all sorts of labels can apply – they become flippantly racist, sexist, homophobic … But that means you’ve decided to reduce your notion of racism solely to language; something autonomous and separate from its user.   And so in this mindset, the language becomes racist all by itself – and, if you then imagine children as hapless sponge-like creatures, the language is especially dangerous if its not immediately quashed. 

In other words, its imagined that without a zero tolerance, ‘naughty step’ approach the ‘racist’ language has the opportunity to normalise itself and beckon children – pied piper-like – along a path which ends in fully-fledged adult racists.  Its not enough that teachers demonstrate firm adult authority in relation to virulently anti-social language – which in my experience they invariably do – they must view the language as viral, infecting its user and requiring an official report to government.

This is the mindset that guides policy in schools.

Today, racism is officially defined as something ‘in the eye of the beholder’ or – more to the point – anything ‘perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’.

And so, this is the definition enshrined in the Race Relations Amendment Act and, from 2002, the definition operating in schools – In Leeds it produced 1248 racist incidents last year – most from primary schools.

A parrot can be a racist!  I could walk past and it might say ‘who’s a paki bastard then’, I could feel terribly upset – after all where did the parrot pick up this kind of language - and this would be a racist incident.  One of you might feel offended that I’ve just popped out with ‘the P-word’ (I don’t mean parrot).  And despite the context I’ve just given it – in a school setting – that would be a racist incident too.

It’s a serious point because advocates of the policy in schools argue that regardless of whether kids are parroting back words they’ve heard and understood only as a good insult, there are two very important things to uphold:

First is that it’s the recipient of these words – and the injury they might experience – that must be prioritised.

Second, its vital to demonstrate zero-tolerance and send children a “powerful message” (they always use that phrase) that this is racism and the school deems it unacceptable.

We could add a third:  which the government often cites – that without formalising this approach as an official procedure there’s no way of flagging up a serious problem of sustained and targeted racial bullying.

It might sound reasonable…   but I want to issue a challenge:

First of all… whatever happened to trust in teachers?  There’s no-one better placed to deal with children’s conflicts or explain why certain words are just plain nasty or anti-social than teachers. 

Why not let them judge when to apply a light touch and recognise and support the resilience of children who get called names, or recognise when the resilience isn’t there; maybe it is bullying? …   In other words let them employ their professional skills without racialising children’s relationships with one another and without engaging in the state reporting regime.

But the thing is - policy doesn’t trust teachers.  Government and Local authority guidance continually warn schools that failure to apply zero-tolerance and report convincing numbers of incidents is itself a tacit indicator of institutional racism:  This is from TeacherNet:

Failure to investigate, even where an incident appears to be of a relatively minor nature, could be seen as condoning racism and could be used as evidence that a school is not taking seriously its legal duties under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act.

In the effort to be seen as a ‘good school’ many headteachers ensure the radar is permanently on and everything gets reported to government.  My freedom of information (FOI) research for 08/09 resulted in 81% of English education authorities informing me of 29,485 incidents.  So UK wide we can estimate the annual total is probably close to 40,000.   The FOI request showed over half emanate from primary schools and almost all are classified as verbal or name-calling incidents. 

For example: The LibCon coalition authority of Birmingham recorded over 1600 incidents last year – most were from primary schools, a few from special schools and nurseries.  Every state school and nursery sends in termly reports and everything initially recorded, however trivial, carries forward into the total.    Last year The Jeremy Vine Show ran a phone-in on the issue of the estimated 40,000 incidents per year.  A primary school teacher from Birmingham rang-in and spoke of her frustration having only recently had two boys falling out and calling each other ‘mars bar’ and ‘milky way’.  Her deputy head then assisted ‘mars bar’ be recorded as a racist incident.  She said this:

Some of those statistics are coming from our school and you’re getting a vision of racism within primary schools, but we really don’t have a problem [  ] we genuinely have a mixed ethnic school that’s a pleasure to work in…

And so … to view these figures as evidence of a problem of racism in the cities schools would be to turn reality on its head.  Even senior council officials admit that much. One said in the press:   

“… we have relatively cohesive communities. Racism has no place in this city and we will remain vigilant in monitoring and acting on all incidents of this nature.” 

So, we can detect a policy mind-set that kind of fools itself that the absence of any particular problem of racism in schools is the result of an on-going, zero-tolerance policy which – rather like filtering the water of a swimming pool – ensures a healthy state of affairs is maintained.  The implication here is that without state regulation the disease of racism will simply inccubate and grow.        I don’t know about you but I think – this is a self-serving, ‘keeping up appearences’ policy.

Just to illustrate this point … Essex council knows full well that large numbers of racist incidents are the result of its pro-active reporting regime.  It knows that racism isn’t a particular problem in its schools.  But this doesn’t stop it from urging schools to look harder: “high levels of reported incidents” it says, “are the result of good practice rather than the converse”.

Essex, like most LEAs view incident reporting as part early warning system part health and safety programme for the racism that might incubate unless intervention moves-in to stem its progress.  In 2005, noting the high numbers of incidents from primary schools, Essex felt it needed to take action.  It commissioned teacher training, and PSHE and Citizenship programmes which must, they stated, “ensure that pupils know how to identify and respond appropriately to racism”.  Schools were reminded to adopt an ethos that actively seeks ‘to identify and eradicate all manifestations of racism, however trivial they may seem’.

So you can see how incident reporting fulfils its own prophecy … it sets out to ensure nothing perceived as racism is ever ignored, then regards the accumulating statistics as evidence of the need for more reporting and more intervention.  And of course the net effect of ‘doing more anti-racism’ is more hypersensitivity and more so-called racist incidents.

One of the interventions launched by Essex that year was an educational programme for primary schools called ‘Watch Out for Racism!’.  It was to end with the production of an educational DVD for use in all its primary schools … and they hired me to do that part.  I want to quickly take you thru the early part of that experience. 

I was sent in to observe anti-racism drama workshops taking place in 4 Essex primary schools where, I was told, “problems” existed.  This was to give me the impetus for the film and, later, the opportunity to work with Year 5 and 6 kids to make the film itself.     This was my learning curve on this stuff:

It took a while to realise that despite submitting a handful of racist incidents each term, these schools didn’t think they had a problem.  The drama tutors suggested I set up a video-box in a tent so that the problem could be gently teased out in a ‘safe place’.  But staff, pupils – including black and minority ethnic pupils – all described their school as ‘a good school’.  A 9 year old talked about being called “chocolate” in year 3 – he shrugged saying ‘sticks and stones.. you know what I mean…’.

Undeterred, the workshop tutors felt there was a level of fear and denial taking place.  ‘The problem’ was hidden.  

We fell out quite quickly because we saw things so differently.  At break-times I saw playground communities of kids engaged in an impressive level of multi-ethnic, multi-cultural interaction.  These kids were colour-blind in the sense that ethnicity didn’t matter to them – the furious, energetic business of being children trumped everything.

The drama tutors saw this too.  But for them racism was simply out there like a virus – the incident forms proved that (playground spats had involved terms like ‘chocolate bar’ and ‘white trash’) and in any case it had to be leaking-in to children’s minds because, they insisted, society – and certainly a predominantly working class school in Essex – is racist.  The very idea that kids might be colour blind irritated the tutors – because for the tutors ‘every child has a right to their racial identity and the right to have it recognised.’  

For me the contradictions and clumsiness of this intervention were embodied in workshops which saw groups of Year 5 and 6 pupils gathered in circles to discuss the importance of ‘identity’ and in particular identity in relation to ‘race’ and skin-colour.  The children were really confused by these messages: ‘we were told its what’s on the inside that matters?’ said one child.  ‘I didn’t think the colour of skin had any importance?’ said another.  One child seemed pleased with this new message on the importance of skin colour and asked if white people should be proud too because, as he put it,  ‘its not just white people being racist’.   To their credit, the workshop tutors noticed these contradictions too and resolved to collaborate in the making of an educational DVD ‘Only Human’ that sought to transcend race.

But the point here is that from no tangible evidence of a problem other than a handful of incident forms came workshop interventions that interfered with what children were already doing for themselves and – worse still – actively racialised their sense of each other.

The interventions take on a life of their own.  In Tower Hamlets in east London an anti-racist workshop tours primary school Year 3 groups.  Again it was instigated by concern over racist incident statistics.  But you have to dig into these statistics to know that a typical racist incident in Tower Hamlets is when Banglesdeshi kids call other Bangladeshi kids ‘Kalabander’ (which means ‘black monkey’).  But I’ve yet to meet an advocate of these policies who feels something needs to be done about the racism of the Banglesdeshi community toward itself.        Its at this point that so-called ‘racist’ incidents ought to surrender-up the ‘racist’ part:  all these incidents really show is children of any ethnicity can be nasty …hardly breaking news.

So - on one level advocates of official anti-racism cant quite decide if they’re lifting the lid off the racism suffered by Britain’s ethnic minority population at the hands of the white majority, or if they’re simply fighting a general disease of racism that can effect any group.  

Today, at a policy level, its tending to merge together into the new single equalities ethos which rounds up hate-incidents per se and sets up a vision of people as ‘at risk’ from a certain rotten-ness that resides permanently in the population – a ‘war against discrimination’. Age, disability, gender, race, religion and belief, sexual orientation and gender reassignment are all lined up as protected categories   As more hate-speech and anti-bullying regulation pours into schools we can expect the atmosphere to become increasingly fraught as the radar attempts to identify, record and intervene on each of the protected categories.  In one example from a primary school in Bath a racist incident vied for recognition with a homophobic incident as kids hurled ‘batty boy’ and ‘broccoli head’ back and forth.

Its all good for the lobby groups though – ‘broccoli head’, ‘mars bar’ and ‘chocolate face’ can carry forward into statistics indicating the problem of racism, while ‘batty boy’ can join ‘that is SO gay’ in stats that further enable Stonewall to conclude there’s an “epidemic” of homophobia in UK schools.   Incidentally ‘that is So gay’ keeps coming up in relation to a poor choice of trainers.  You have to pity the teacher trying to record and deal with all this.

I think one of most corrosive aspects of incident reporting and the interventions it inspires is how cramped and stifled school life becomes.  Schools simply have to surrender to the imperative of state regulation legitimised by the idea that children are ‘at risk’ from being damaged by racist language in a world where adults (especially teachers) can never quite be trusted to deal with it.  

And so teachers feel they’d just better go along with it …   one said:

 ‘You might think its daft, you might even wonder if you’re racist to think its daft, but in any case these days you’re going to think, hang on I’d better be careful here. The best thing to do is just report it.’

A primary school in a tough, working class area of Basildon in Essex, felt actively discriminated against by this policy.  Here the kids were less polite – but they were good kids and it was very good school.  The school had to undergo a race equality audit for turning-in racist incidents above the expected quota.  

Ofsted picked up on this. The headteacher said this to me:

Being judged on the number of racist incidents – it causes all sorts of anomalies doesn’t it? As Ofsted says our “standards” are “inadequate”, my “teaching and learning” can only be “satisfactory”, and our “leadership” can only be “satisfactory”. And yet what I think we’ve created in our school is a good atmosphere for children.

This is from another Essex school I worked in.  The head told me:

We’re not interested in slotting anti-racism into the curriculum just so we can tick a box. We’re trying to do something much more subtle so that the spirit of anti-racism flows through the curriculum more seamlessly. We build on children’s empathy – right now we’re running cross-curricula projects that link us with schools in several countries around the world.

[   ] We have to record incidents but they’re rare. A couple of times the County got in touch because we hadn’t reported any incidents for a couple of terms.... You can’t win this one – if you don’t report incidents you’re told you’re not being aware of racism – If you do report it there’ll be someone who decides there’s a major problem in the school. 

I heard from an Asian parent who told me about his mixed-race daughter (the mother is white) who was accused of racism last year.  The daughter is 10 now but when she was 6 she had played a ‘lets pretend’ game with some other girls where one was being a checkout counter girl and the others were pretending to be food items: 

My daughter wanted to be chocolate, so did a black girl in the group, so my daughter settled for strawberry. THREE years later the black girl mentioned to her mother that she had been called chocolate, which led to a complaint to the school, then an inquiry by the headteacher …

A formal notification was then sent out informing him that his daughter and some of her friends were being investigated over a racist incident.  Parents and children had to receive a lecture about how bad racism is.

Before I finish I just want to say something about the wider social context for all this.  If you think that Britain is in one way or another as racist as it ever was you’re unlikely to be moved by my argument.  On the other hand you might accept that things have changed but only because of policies like this – (its often said to me that whilst these state enforced measures can be a ‘blunt instrument’, they are the only way to keep racism in-check.)

But one thing we can’t argue about is the exponential pace at which the population is mixing.  And this phenomenon is surfacing in its most vivid form – as you might expect it to – in primary schools.  This is from is from research by the Institute for Social and Economic Research using the Labour Force Survey:

 …Almost 20% of children under the age of 16 are from an ethnic minority. Nearly 10% of children live in a family which has multiple white, black or Asian heritage.”   IN LONDON its much higher – nearly half of under-5s have at least one black or minority ethnic parent.                                   

Do the maths!  Its astounding … And it offers a glimpse of a future (and ever more waves of inter-mixing) which is likely to confound racists and anti-racists alike.

When it comes to anti-racism in schools – the phrase ‘first do no harm’ comes to mind…. Because what we’re in danger of getting instead is kids told to…‘stop what you’re doing … listen-up … the real world is about race.’

The alternative I’d propose to policymakers is this:

Scrap compulsory incident reporting and trust teachers to use their professional skills.

Above all, let schools really educate kids (don’t spoon-feed them); foster their capacity for autonomy so that, at the appropriate stage of development, they can make their own judgements on social-issues like racism.

I want to return to the spectre of those Essex schools I mentioned:  They abide by the obligation to report racist incidents with zero tolerance and they dutifully open their doors to the interventions their local authority imposes on them.  But if you took that away you wouldn’t have schools that do nothing when kids use terms like ‘Paki’ – they are quite used to asserting firm adult authority in these moments. 

What you’d have is schools unburdened from this top-down race-relation exercise, free to build on what children are already doing – as one head put it – free to allow the spirit of anti-racism to flow seamlessly – invisibly – to really use teachers professional skills and deploy a light touch.  Teachers call it the ‘hidden curriculum’ – the understanding of how children socialise and move forward – understanding that, at break times children need us to take a step back, allow unfettered peer interaction, work things out, experience the consequences of their cruelty and their kindness … and discover their resilience.   

It’s this space that is becoming increasingly supervised and policed.  And so, to end, I would say the state’s attempt to intervene on the racism it conjures is bad medicine – it doesn’t work, it just makes things worse.