Festival of Education

29 Oct 2016

The Case Against Black History Month – Impact

Teachwell Education Debate, Ethnicity, Festival of Education, Humanity, Race 0

This series of blogs is based on a talk I gave at Wellington College earlier this year. The first was on the purpose of history, the second looked at the case against Black History Month by highlighting its roots in scientific racism.

In this third blog I will focus on the impact of Black History Month. In terms of individuals, one of the core claims, that it would impact positively on black people has yet to be substantiated. It is assumed to be a good in itself and I think it is time to challenge that belief.

In the US, it has fed identity politics. Initially, black was much like “of colour” is now – a generic term for non-white people. Now the focus of Black History Month is exclusively on the history of Black/African Americans.

This narrowing in scope has led to other groups demanding that their histories also be given special status.

In a country of immigrants, it was inevitable that those from white immigrant communities would seek to have their heritage validated too.

Given the seismic ructions that occurred in the US during the civil war, well it was only inevitable that there would be a…

I didn’t even cover the full list. The only thing more farcical than Confederate History Month is the fact that there are more history months than there are months in the year.

In the UK, Black History Month has slowly gone down the same route as in the US from a generic meaning of black to a specific focus on black people from the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Recent events at Kent University show that we are further down the road than I had thought. Zayn Malik’s inclusion on a poster for Black History Month was criticised for being culturally insensitive and Kent Union backed down even though they had consulted on these posters initially. Black means black and Zayn will have to wait for Asian History Month to be celebrated.

The saddest thing about the continued existence of Black History Month in the UK is that the 1988 history curriculum already included a wide range of histories of different people at different points in time. It is worth asking why a largely left-wing, anti-racist profession was unable to make the curriculum more inclusive given that it had the opportunity to do so. Why did they prefer to teach Black History Month instead of incorporating new units?

In the absence of research I think that the likely explanations are:

a) many anti-racists are simply adding a label to their lapel but don’t mean it,

b) conflict mongers will never be satisfied with a curriculum that doesn’t emphasise the conflictual elements of black and white history. It certainly struck me that there were some black and white colleagues who seemed hellbent on teaching the most conflictual elements of black/white history with no depth, no comparison or balance in terms of the accounts taught. I think we can put this firmly in the “radical history” model, or as I like to see it, grievance mongering.

c) it was easier to stick with units that were known,

d) there was genuine opposition to the new units (though it would be interesting to know from who and why).

The calls for black teachers for black children is rarely criticised even though it is explicitly based on the idea that different races need to be separate. The case I would make for black teachers is simply that as members of the community and this country, they should have the same opportunities to be a teacher as anyone else. I don’t see their sole role as supporting black children because it doesn’t solve the issues faced by them. It also lets white teachers off the hook in a way they are not allowed to do so for white children or indeed for other ethnic minorities. It also gives a false sense that the problems are based on race alone, when, it is clear from the performance of different ethnic groups in this country that race alone can’t explain disparities in attainment . None of this is positive and none of it actually helps us to support underprivileged black children.

The aspect of Black History Month that has always concerned me the most, however, is the acceptance of the conflict narrative that runs through the stories selected. It was simply one story after another with the same theme – black victim and white oppressor – as though there were no other dynamic between the two groups or ever could be.

Looking at the history of the US, it is clear that black and white people have lived together for hundreds of years. It’s unsurprising that the idea of a “white history” would arise given that black people were omitted from American history. The system of slavery and Jim Crow were underpinned by the idea of scientific racism. The break in history for the black people in the US and the Caribbean is real, and there is no way to trace roots to a specific location, which most of us take for granted. Thus their identities are tied to the start point they do know which is slavery. I don’t think it is surprising or indeed untrue for the black victim/white oppressor narrative to be so deeply embedded.

In settler colonies, such as the US and South Africa, it is fair to say that history has been deliberately distorted. The reign of white people has been seen as the high point and the history of different people in those nations have been deliberately ignored or sidelined. The UK was a colonial power but the country was not a settler colony and thus studying British history does not fall into the same category as these other nations.

There are key differences between British history and that of the settler colonies:

Britain was uninhabited prior to the crossing of the land bridge, there was no displacement of other people in order to settle here. Subsequent invaders and settlers were again, overwhelmingly white (with the exception of some ethnic Roman soldiers, who like most white Roman soldiers, are not taught about). Until the post-war era, there were no significant groups of non-white people living in the UK on a comparable scale to that of the US.

Even if there were no more white people in the UK tomorrow, we would still mostly be learning about white people as the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived in the UK have been white.

Much is made of the Blackamoors and Lascars and the lack of focus on them has been taken as an indicator of a deliberately racist history being taught. Yet the same argument could be made for many other groups such as Jews. It doesn’t require much curriculum time to point out that Britain was not 100% white for its entire history up 1948. For most of this country’s history the most important changes that took place were enacted by the monarchs. It is possible to understand the Britain of today without studying the Blackamoors and Lascars, it’s not possible to do so without studying Henry VIII.

Do I think that ethnic minority children were deliberately taught “white history” in the post-war era? No. I think that the people in this country simply taught as they had been taught. That the colonial era was glorified is unsurprising, as were the stereotypes of different groups because that is what most people had to go on. The idea that the choices on the curriculum were intentionally racist is one that I have seen no evidence for.

Until the 1950s and 1960s, I don’t see why the average white teacher in Britain should or would have cared about or thought much of the impact of the history they were teaching on people living in the colonies/ex-colonies just because they were/had been part of the Empire, any more than I spend time thinking about the Falklanders or Gibraltans. I’m not interested in condemning people for not managing to do what I don’t do myself. In advance of immigration, how could they have known what impact the history they were teaching would have?

Even when the first post-war immigrants arrived, it was not clear that they would stay or settle here. My parent’s attitude was the norm for Indian immigrants, they would come, work here and then move back with their children. It didn’t happen and it didn’t happen in part because of the children of immigrants like me, who did not see those foreign shores as a home to go back to.

BAME children did suffer from racism, low expectations and discrimination in the education system but over the past 60 years, this has not been a uniform experience. The failure of all ethnic groups has given way to the situation we have now, where it is simply not true to say that race alone is the major factor in why some groups succeed and others don’t in the education system.

In addition, it has not taken hundreds of years for the history curriculum to reflect a wider range of histories; it took 40. I would ask you to look again at the 1988 history curriculum. In some cases it took less time than that as schools, pre-National Curriculum, changed aspects of their curriculum in response to teaching ethnic minority pupils. Ignorance, as well as racism, played a part in the teaching of British history and the extent to which it was the former is indicated to by the fact that changes have been enacted.

If we want to learn about British history we just have to deal with the fact that most of it will be about white people. And yes I know that colonialism means the history of Britain is linked to its colonies but let’s not forget that does not just mean African nations and India, it means the US and Australia as well. It is still only a part of the history of this country, as well as the countries that were colonised. I was speaking to my brother about this only last night, the Indian history my mother taught us made it clear to us that there was more to Indian history than the Raj and India was not singularly defined by it.

We can not cover the whole of British history on the curriculum but to focus on the colonial era onwards is to leave children in this country ignorant for the sake of political correctness. It is narcissistic to insist that the British history that is taught reflects the current population rather than the actual history of Britain. Our joint history in this country simply doesn’t stretch back that far. If you need to see yourself reflected, look in a mirror.

The Black Atlantic narrative has insisted on shoehorning and conflating US and UK history (and at times South African history). There were no Jim Crow laws, no apartheid, no laws based on race that classified black and Asian migrants as second class citizens that I know of. No separate fountains or beaches. The “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs” sign shows that prejudices existed that were not based on race alone. It is rarely taught that the Race Relations Acts did not repeal discriminatory laws because there weren’t any to repeal. Instead, they ensured protection under the law from discrimination as that was lacking.

It also does not serve the “white history” narrative that the people who were the most discriminated against since 1948 were not ethnic minorities at all but Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland, who were not even covered by the Race Relations Acts. The Protestant majority in Stormont would not enact it as they would have had to stop discriminating based on religion and they weren’t about to do that.

The insistence on Black History Month is in some quarters is nothing more than a means of transmitting ideological beliefs about race.

The harsh truth for the BAME in this country is that no one forced our parents and grandparents to come here, they were never kept here against their will, and neither are we. Our relationship with this country and the colonial past is different to that of black Americans, and that includes the fact that we are the beneficiaries of the colonial era that did cause so much suffering to others. This is not an easy legacy or even an easy thing to admit. But it is an honest admission.

If we are to understand the nation we live in we need to learn its history and not a deliberately conflated version of those of other nations which does little to enhance our understanding of the society that we live in, worse still introduces false ideas of the past which create barriers between different groups in the here and now.

29 Oct 2016

The Case Against Black History Month – Promoting Racism

Teachwell Festival of Education, Humanity, Race 7

In my first blog on the talk I gave at Wellington College, I focused on the purposes of history. In this second part, I will look at why I think that race-based versions of history such as Black History Month need to be rejected.

Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist. His best known work is “Systema Naturae” in which he introduced the hierarchical classification of animals, plants and minerals. He also included his ideas on the five “varieties” of human beings. While grouping humans and attributing them with a set of characteristics was nothing new, the scientific nature of the classification during the enlightment period was.

Linnaeus was by no means alone in such classifications, as the belief in polygenism (the idea that different groups of people or races had different origins) was widespread unlike monogenism (single origin). There were a variety of racial classifications although the systems we know best that were underpinned by scientific racism – the USA and South Africa – were centred on the differences between black and white in particular. The histories of these two nations, plus Britain’s role in the slave trade, tend to be the focus for the stories and narratives that underpin Black History Month.

The origins of Black History Month stem from Negro History Week in the US. Interestingly, there was debate even at the time whether there was a need for a separate history of black people as the history of black people in the US was American History (a view that Morgan Freeman has put forward in recent times). Woodson was of his time and would have believed in racial classifications. He wanted black people to understand the role that their race had played and believed that their contributions to American and world history were neglected as a results of racism. Woodson believed that education and increasing contacts among blacks and whites could reduce racism and promoted the study of African-American history partly for that purpose. He was in the end attempting to expand the scope of the knowledge of history and contribute to that which existed.

In order to understand the morphing of Negro History Week into Black History Month however, we need to understand the split in the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

The split in the civil rights movement is almost entirely ignored in black history month accounts. King’s legacy seems to be summed up by his “I have a dream” speech. King and Malcolm X differed in many important respects, which underpin the common narrative of Black History Month.

Malcolm X did not reject scientific racism and the taxonomies of different races. He believed that the races were different and that segregation was necessary. His major point of difference was that the characteristics attributed to the race were incorrect. Thus his idea of race was simply a revised version of Linnaeus’s racial classification, emphasising the superiority of the black race compared to the white race. This view led to Black Power movements and the revised Black History Month. Unlike Negro History week, Black History Month was not an attempt to add the contributions of black Americans to American history but was a version of history in direct opposition to white history and it goes for it tit for tat.

In the UK, the introduction of Black History Month preceded the 1988 National Curriculum by one year. It was introduced by Akyaaba Addai-Sebo during his spell as the Greater London Council Special Projects Coordinator. The introduction of Black History Month was rooted in the idea of the Black Atlantic, promoted by academics such as Paul Gilroy. The Black Atlantic was the idea that a joint black culture could be formed based on African, Black American, Black British and Caribbean cultures.

In order to establish a link between the experiences of black people, Black History Month often conflates the histories of the the US, South Africa and the UK.

The race based nature of black history month is never referred to. Yet it is clearly a repackaged version of Linnaeus. Changing the characteristics of the black race to positive and white to negative, still promotes the racial classification based on scientific racism. This feeds into the later movements such as Black Lives Matter, which actively promotes segregation, Why is My Curriculum White? which pits a white curriculum with a non-white one and last but not least, Rhodes Must Fall which insists on setting the arbitrary start point of history at the beginning of the colonial era.

These are racist movements, promoting racist ideas and unable to challenge racism. The attempts to reclassify racism as prejudice plus power is simply a means of deflecting from the quite obvious double-standards in black and brown people promoting ideas which white racists have done so in the past.

18 Oct 2016

Beyond Political Correctness and Black History Month: What is the Purpose of Teaching History?

Teachwell Education Debate, Festival of Education, Humanity, Race, Teaching and Learning 3

Earlier this year I presented a talk at the fantastic Wellington Festival of Education. I have simply not had the chance to write it up thus far.

As the talk covered a range of different issues, I will be blogging about each aspect of it individually in a series. First up, I will be tackling the issue of the purpose of teaching history.

At its best, history enables us to know about and understand the past and make sense of our present world. This includes knowing that we don’t always have a complete picture of the past for a wide variety of reasons.

A recent conversation with a Marxist history teacher ended with him sarcastically vowing to be a liberal propagandist in future. Because all history teachers are propagandists, right?

This seems a fundamental confusion between the purpose of teaching history and the ways in which it has been used. Just because history has been used as propaganda does not give history teachers license to do it themselves.

Disappointingly, the Historical Association also seems unable to make this distinction between aims and uses. A recent email advertising one of its forums contained the following:

“We’ve all heard that common lament that history is about dead white ruling men; but what of the untold stories that make up the rich fabric of history? The stories that help us to see the past through the eyes of those that lived it? From stories of ordinary men and women to our wide global cultural heritage, it is our job as history educators to weave these stories into the fabric of the history that we teach.”

We may have heard the common lament, but it doesn’t mean that one has to swallow it wholesale as fact. The forum itself was devoid of any attempt to examine or analyse this proposition. Instead, the HA went full social justice warrior on the issue. When I emailed to question this and why the HA were accepting an identity politics agenda without question, I basically got a reiteration of the position stated above, which is just bandwagon jumping.

It’s not our job to weave anything into history; it’s our job to evaluate and analyse these accounts just as we would do any other. The characteristics of those who wrote them may or may not be of importance. There is nothing inherently problematic about the accounts of “dead white ruling men” and nothing inherently authentic about the accounts of those who don’t fit this category.

The Historical Association’s descent into identity politics is further evidenced by its promotion of the following website as part of its black history month coverage. I will go into the whole issue of BLM in a separate blog but what is interesting here are the aims of this organisation below.

1. We want young people to be able to construct accounts of the past they can be proud of.

2. We want history curricula in schools that are relevant to the multicultural Britain of the 21st century, which will include hidden histories of peoples of African descent.

3. We want history teachers to be resourced with research that reveals these hidden histories.

4. We want history lessons to be focused on rigorous historical enquiries that engage and challenge young people in historical thinking.

Of all the aims only number 3 is actually of any worth, in my opinion. Indeed, we need to ensure that teachers have access to as much material as possible to be effective history teachers. I disagree about hidden histories though. Hidden to whom? If by hidden they mean not studied then there is a role for scholarship here. If by hidden they mean not on the curriculum then a reality check is needed. We can not possibly teach all history on the curriculum.

Aim 2: Only total ignorance of the different iterations of the National Curriculum from 1988 onwards can lead to this conclusion. The study of multicultural Britain has been a staple unit in the history curriculum. If a left-wing profession (teachers and management), selected and trained by left-wing academics, all of whom pride themselves on their anti-racist credentials, have not been teaching it, then why is that?

Multicultural Britain is still 86% white, and whatever the ethnic make-up of the country is right now, it doesn’t change the fact that the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived in Britain have been white. I will explore the issue of content fully in another post, but in summary, political correctness, ignorance, abdication of responsibility and narcissism fuel many of the calls to make the history curriculum representative of the population. I have no intention of indulging it.

Aim 1 and 4 are completely at odds with one another. Constructing accounts of history one can be proud of necessitates cherry-picking facts, events and no small amount of deceit. How does one teach Idi Amin’s expulsion of African Asians so that both groups can be proud of their history? Do we erase this event from history and never mention it? Do we use the progressive stack to decide who is most oppressed (and therefore whose perspective is “authentic”)? Or do we use the ethnic minority “get out of being responsible for your actions because of *delete as appropriate (racism/oppression/colonialism) card” and blame the whites (preferably male) for everything?

I am grateful to my mother for reiterating the following idea repeatedly when I was growing up – there is good and bad in all people and all groups. It takes maturity to cope with the reality of this statement and no it won’t lead to you learning about history which makes you feel good about yourself or indeed simple accounts of goodies and baddies.

What others did in the past reflects on them and what you choose to do in the here and now reflects on you.

What concerns me more is that justifying the use of history to cure the ills of society, has lead to practices that are at best unhelpful to developing historians and historical scholarship, and at worst are downright unethical.

Teachers do not have a god given right to indulge themselves based on personal beliefs. This does not lead to the healthy debate and dialogue needed to further develop the subject. In fact, it doesn’t result in a debate at all as “correct” interpretations are doled out to pupils in the name of anti-racism without ever examining them in the detail required to develop historical thinking.

Also, basic requirements such as thinking about whether units are age-appropriate are thrown out of the window. One of the reasons why I began to question the teaching of history in schools was based on my experience of teaching young children. The teaching might have made some teachers feel radical, but it left ideas of racial differences and scientific racism reinforced and embedded rather than discussed or challenged. If you must indoctrinate then at least get the outcomes you want.

How can pupils debate and come to their conclusions if the history that is taught is deliberately leading to a particular conclusion? Units entitled “Why Should Britain be Ashamed of Colonialism?” are peddled as part of history schemes of work to primary schools. A cherry-picked view, supported by cherry-picked evidence to lead to a single conclusion is not teaching history. You don’t have to agree with the different interpretations to teach them but to dismiss them based on personal beliefs is wrong.

History at its best illuminates the past, it is our duty to do this as fully as we can for our pupils. Teaching versions of history to alleviate insecurities or promote ideological stances is nothing more than an exercise in the misuse of history. Teaching history in this manner is abdicating our responsibility as current historians to future historians.