Test of racial awareness

GLENTHORNE High School, a highperforming multicultural state secondary in south London, is the setting for Channel 4’s new series THE SCHOOL THAT TRIEDTO END RACISM

Just under half its pupils are black or from an ethnic minority background.The rest are white. And it sounds as if everyone gets along fine.

Typical of these kids’ remarks are: “I don’t think race matters.”

“It doesn’t matter what skin colour you are.”

“It’s who you are as a person.” “I think we’re all normal, we’re all equal to each other.” But these 11-year-olds are about to become the subjects in an experiment.

That’s because, we’re told, they may have prejudices they’re not aware of.

Dr Nicola Rollock and Professor Rhiannon Turner, experts in unconscious racial bias, have come to conduct it. “The approach to race in this country has generally been one of colour blindness,” says Dr Rollock. “We pretend that we don’t see race and that racial differences don’t matter.”

“That approach,” she tells us, “isn’t working.”

The first test these kids have to do – associating a series of negative and positive words with faces of different colour, flashing up before them on a hand-held screen

– seems to leave them anxious and confused.

“Research shows that for 11-year-olds, making friends from different racial groups is easy,” Professor Turner acknowledges. “But we know that as children get older, it’s a different story.They start to become more aware of ethnic differences.”

Professor Turner says this results in “a process of self-segregation, when children split off into different friendship groups on the basis of their ethnicity.

“Intervening at this age is crucial,” she insists, “if we’re to target and change children’s attitudes before they become crystallised in adulthood.”

When the results of their test come through, the kids are informed that 18 out of 24 of them showed a “significant preference for white people”.They look shocked. But Professor Turner seems satisfied it’s done its job, proving that she and Dr Rollock are right.

“It’s exactly what we’d expect to find,” she tells us, “in a majority white country like the UK.

“We’re exposed from an early age to white people in positions of power, white heroes and heroines.

“All of these influences tell us that white people are ‘better’ than black and minority ethnic people in society.”

The children, we’re told, would now embark on a three-week programme designed to reduce unconscious bias.At the end they’ll be tested again.