by Akala
I had the distinct urge to throw my chair at her and I am pretty sure that, had she been a man, I would have done just that and certainly got expelled as a result. The class collectively gasped, a few other students made statements of protest and shook their heads; they knew a line had been crossed. She looked at me, resigned. She had said it now, it was out in the open and there was no use in apologising, so she did not even bother trying. I can’t remember how the rest of the lesson panned out and whether I stormed out of the class, I just remember swearing repeatedly, shouting and really wanting to punch her in her bright-red face but knowing that hitting a woman, even a woman that wished death on me, was not something I could bring myself to do. I also feel like there was something approaching relief in both her and me; I had always wanted her to expose herself fully and she had trodden carefully, sort of, but clearly she found restraining her real opinion quite challenging. Now I had the full truth, though it did indeed taste bitter.
Her comments became a mini scandal, students that were not even in the class seemed to know before the end of the day. I went home that night and when I told my mum what had happened I realised that I obviously had to act; something about repeating her words made their full absurdity clearer and gave the situation an urgency. My mum was in total agreement and support. I decided to write to the school governors to complain. Surely someone with beliefs like this, expressed so publicly and openly, could not be permitted to go on teaching? How could she possibly teach people she believed to be half-human, innately criminal savages? I had already learned to distrust the levers of power and so doubted that she would actually lose her job or face any severe disciplinary action, but I at least hoped that the governors would do something.
What actually transpired was a profound lesson in institutionalised racism and the protection of abusers by power. The headmaster somehow ended up with my letter and he called me into his office for a meeting. I explained the events to him roughly as I have retold them here and he sheepishly promised to talk to the teacher in question and clear it up. It was instantly obvious to me that he would have preferred me not to have put him in this ‘uncomfortable’ position, of, you know, actually having to do part of his job and administer justice. Then, in a moment of almost unwriteable irony, he gave me – or should I say tried to bribe me with – a book about Martin Luther King. I still have the book somewhere, it’s called The Children.
The incident became, for me, the perfect embodiment of Dr King’s statement to the effect that the greatest impediment to racial justice in America was not the open bigot but the indifferent and cowardly white liberal, more concerned with a quiet life than justice. There is no question that my Martin Luther King-reading headmaster would have thought of himself as a liberal, as open-minded and certainly non-racist, and maybe he was all of those things, yet he chose to do nothing when confronted by such profound abuse.
A few weeks passed and I had not heard back from the headteacher, so I went to see him. He told me that the teacher had denied saying what I was accusing her of saying, but had admitted to playing ‘devil’s advocate’, and essentially that he was not going to take any action, not even by asking the other thirty or so children in the class that day what had happened. She would keep her job, there would not even be so much as a hearing and from what I was told – though it may be an urban myth – she was promoted after I left the school. I am not suggesting that the school thought so much of me that it waited till I left before promoting her, but rather that they did not care enough about her white-supremacist views to not promote her. Perhaps if I had been a ‘rich’ kid with a hotshot lawyer for a parent and the ability to go to the press and generate a story – kind of like I am now! – the school may have felt compelled to do something, who knows? But not only was I black, I was also poor and had no such connections. I’m also pretty sure that had the teacher from the Nation of Islam said that ‘Nazis stopped greed by killing Jews’ he would – quite rightly – have been seen as a psychopath and lost his job immediately.
I left the whole affair wondering how many other teachers thought like this one and what impact does their racism have on their ability to effectively teach students from Britain’s former colonies?
My mum and I demanded that I be removed from her classes. The school reluctantly, but perhaps also a little relieved, agreed. I never forgot the larger lesson, though; many self-proclaimed, selectively reading, MLK-quoting liberals will choose to support or at least ignore injustice rather than rock the boat when in positions of power. The following year, when I took my GCSEs, I was still extremely angry about the whole affair and so I chose to write a protest on the exam paper of the subject she taught me about the ‘cultural and ethical bias of my teaching’ rather than to do the actual exam. I still remember the exam board observer seeing me sat, arms folded, trying to encourage me to ‘have a go’. It was understandable that she assumed I was a struggling student rather than a wannabe revolutionary and I really wanted to let her know why I was not writing but of course I could not, so I wrote the same protest passage out over and over again so it would look like I was at least trying. I got a U as a result and, despite all my other A stars, it is probably the exam grade I am still most proud of.
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Was my experience in secondary school unique, isolated, the result of one bad apple, or is there a general pattern of conflict between teachers and black students? Is there any evidence that the systemic discrimination against black students that we saw in action in primary school continues into secondary school? Unfortunately, the answer to the second question is a resounding yes.
In academic circles concerned with race and education there are two ‘buzz’ phrases, ‘the exclusion gap’ and ‘the attainment gap’. The exclusion gap refers to the fact that black students have historically been always at least three times as likely to be excluded as their white counterparts, some years six times as likely. However, there is a significant difference between the rates of expulsion for black students of Caribbean origin and those hailing from Africa, with ‘British-African’ students being far less likely, especially in recent years, to be expelled than those whose great-grandparents came from the Caribbean. At first glance, this difference in outcomes between two different types of black students, which is also replicated in academic attainment, might seem to confirm certain stereotypes of ‘Caribbean’ communities; however, at three or more generations removed many of these ‘Caribbean’ children have never even been to the Caribbean so what we are really comparing is fourth generation black English children with children mostly born in the UK to African parents. Also a close inspection of the relevant research shows that a more sophisticated explanation will be needed. For example, a 2006 DfES report into the exclusion gap found that:
• Black Caribbean pupils are three times more likely to be excluded from school than white pupils.
• When FSM and SEN were taken into account, black Caribbean pupils were still 2.6 times more likely to be excluded from school than white pupils.
• Excluded black pupils were less likely to fit the typical profile of excluded white pupils (such as having SEN, FSM, longer and more numerous previous exclusions, poor attendance records, criminal records or being looked-after children).1
In translation, this means that even black English students of Caribbean origin from less ‘challenging’ family circumstances, even those with decent grades and good previous attendance, who have displayed better previous behaviour, are still far more likely to be permanently expelled than other ethnic groups. Why is this such a huge problem? Because permanent exclusion from school virtually dictates the future of a person’s life. In the words of Martin Narey, former Director General of HM Prison Service, ‘The 13,000 young people excluded from school each year might as well be given a date by which to join the prison service some time later down the line.’
The 2006 DfES report concluded
The clear message of the literature is that, to a significant extent,
the exclusion gap is caused by largely unwitting, but systematic, racial discrimination in the application of disciplinary and exclusions policies. Many cite this as evidence of Institutional Racism. The Department has a legal duty to eliminate such discrimination under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000.
So the empirical data and government studies pretty much echo what black people have been saying ever since the 1960s; that black students in particular have been treated unfairly within the British education system for decades, beyond just the usual challenges of being poor, and that little to nothing has been done about it, beyond lip service. Of course, many will still claim, even when presented with the hard data and thorough investigations, that it is all in black pupils’ and parents’ imaginations or that, yep, you guessed it, we just have ‘a chip on our shoulder’.
The ‘attainment gap’ refers to differentials in performance between ethnic groups in schools and what could cause them. Before we look at the evidence I would like to point out the obvious fact that I am not suggesting that all differential achievement between human groups in a given area of activity is the result of discrimination, what I am arguing is that where clear evidence of discrimination exists it should be removed, and then if individuals and/or groups do not take advantage of the opportunities afforded, we can talk more clearly about personal responsibility. As you already saw in Chapter Three, under the old empirical baseline assessments black students actually outperformed their white counterparts, but now that the mode of assessment has been left entirely to teachers’ whims that is no longer the case. You also saw how much teachers under-assess black students’ intelligence throughout primary school to age eleven. This pattern unsurprisingly continues throughout secondary school.
Warwick University investigated teacher bias by observing the proportion of black Caribbean pupils who are entered for higher-tier maths and science tests at age 14.2 Being entered for higher tier allows a student to be awarded as high as an A*, whereas being entered for foundation means the highest possible mark is a C. They found that, at the same level of previous academic attainment, for every three white British pupils entered for higher tier only two black ‘Caribbean’ pupils were entered. These figures hold even when we account for gender, free school meals, maternal education, home ownership and single-parent households, in addition to their prior academic attainment. Once again, teachers’ assessments underestimate the academic potential of black students.
Both the Warwick study and the Bristol one examined in Chapter Three looked at every state school in the UK, painting a bleak picture for black students. This means that under the current system of setting and tiering it is literally mathematically impossible for above a certain percentage of black students to get top-grade GSCEs, as they are significantly less likely to be entered for higher-tier GCSE papers even when they have the same previous academic attainment and family circumstances as white students.
To recap the odds stacked against black children in British schools, black students are:
• Under-assessed at five
• Dramatically under-assessed at eleven
• Significantly less likely to be entered for higher-tier exams when they have the same previous academic attainment
• 2.6 times more likely to be expelled even when control factors are taken into account
Despite all of this, in recent years, in particular since 2013, black children of African origin have surpassed the national average in GCSE attainment, with some ‘national’ groups such as children of Nigerian and Ghanaian origin faring particularly well. This is extraordinarily impressive given that children of African origin are concentrated in Hackney, Peckham and Croydon/Thornton Heath, which are some of the poorest and toughest regions of the capital. If we were not so addicted to social Darwinism, black African students might well serve as an example for other working-class students to imitate.
Yet despite all of the actual evidence of obvious neglect and/or stereotyping of black students regardless of class, over the past few years a trend can be observed in the British media of positing Working-Class White Boys as the victims of the education system:
THE LOST BOYS: HOW THE WHITE WORKING CLASS GOT LEFT BEHIND – New Statesmen3
IT’S NO SURPRISE THAT WHITE WORKING CLASS BOYS DO BADLY AT SCHOOL: THEIR MORALE IS LIKELY TO BE LOWER THAN MORE SUPERFICIALLY ‘OPPRESSED’ GROUPS –Tim Lott, Guardian4
WHITE BOYS LET DOWN BY THE EDUCATION SYSTEM – Daily Telegraph5
WHITE BOYS ‘ARE BEING LEFT’ BEHIND BY THE EDUCATION SYSTEM – Daily Mail6
After noting the obviously sympathetic tone of the articles across the print media spectrum, from the Guardian to the Mail, in marked contrast to the manner in which some of the publications report about so called ethnic minorities, we are left to examine the actual data and ask if these headlines are accurate. It’s interesting that all of the articles in question choose to focus on race rather than the British class system as a whole, as it’s a matter of fact that the gap between white working-class boys and other ethnic groups in the same social class is far smaller than the gap between poor white boys and the white middle class. The message from these journalists and those that pedalled this narrative is clear: it’s fine for working class white kids to fail relations to the white middle-classes – but they should never fall behind the darkies. Furthermore ‘working class’ here is being defined only as those on free school meals, which does not include 86 per cent of the white population.7 Students from poorer backgrounds who receive free school meals do much less well in exams than students who do not; this holds true for every ethnic group in Britain. Girls also do better than boys; again, this holds true for every ethnic group.
I’d like to be clear at this point that I agree working-class white boys have been neglected at every stage of British society – that is what classism is and does – so it’s not support and sympathy for working-class white boys that I have an issue with, it’s the notable lack of support for similar issues when they affect other demographics within the ‘working class’ more clearly, and also the ludicrous assertion that the white working class are being neglected because they are white. Of course, within British society the working class is taken to mean the white working class more often than not anyway.
It won’t matter how many empirical studies you can provide, including the DfES’s own report, or studies that have looked at every school in the UK or decades of academics and leading experts in the field showing empirically and measurably that anti-black racism is still a serious systemic issue adversely affecting outcomes for black students; many will do intellectual backflips to conclude something else is the cause, even when the black person talking to them is already successful and educated and therefore has nothing to ‘make excuses’ about. Naturally, it’s far easier to believe that there is just something wrong with black people than really accept the scale of the mundane injustice of everyday black life in Britain; decades of unfair expulsions, potential wasted and dreams derailed.
In this national context and against this backdrop of history my experiences in school start to make complete sense, not as isolated incidents with a few bad apples but rather as systemic problems. There is an inability among some white teachers to be able to cope with the ‘wrong’ student being top of the class, and said teachers deploy a range of actions to mitigate it, from open bullying – my magic button – to sly attempts to hold me back – special needs group – hitting me, sending me out, telling me I am unable to read things well within my capacity, even advocating genocide at the extreme. Because I went to a very mixed school with lots of middle-class white children, unlike my cousins in Harlesden and Brixton, I was able to see even more clearly that my treatment by these teachers stood in marked difference to the manner in which similarly ‘smart’ white and even other non-black children were treated.
I was one of the lucky few who had the right family and community support to make it through the tumult, but what about all those other black
children represented in this data? All those unfairly marked down, the gifts and talents they have overlooked, shoved into lower tiers where they really have no place being, but where they are now locked into a limited range of possible achievement that will affect their entire life. For some this will all sound a little conspiratorial, but the scholarship is pretty clear if you bother to read it. My individual experience is just one number among all those graphs and lines.
10 – Britain and America
Black American culture was an ever-present force in my upbringing. In our house James Brown got as much play as Dennis Brown, and Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha (she needs no second name), Nina Simone and all the icons of black American music were names that I knew as well as any reggae artist. This influence was so strong that the first time I performed publicly it was to dance to Ray Charles’s song ‘Shake a Tail Feather’ with my siblings and cousins on stage at the Hackney Empire, in front of a packed house. Black British identity more broadly was and is fashioned out of the material left from our home countries – Ghana, Jamaica, Nigeria – our concrete experiences and reality here in Britain, and from the inspiration of other black populations, mostly America. We grew up with Malcolm and Martin posters on the wall at the barber’s and in our food shops, our parents used the language of black power for their own ends and even set up their own Black Panther parties, we watched the Cosby Show and A Different World and both delighted in and envied HBCUs, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, wishing we had our own.