THE LAST TABOO

A new documentary gets pupils to segregate and talk about race. It’s controversial, but eye-opening too

Racial segregation has been the cause of hundreds of years of discrimination and pain for people of colour across the Western world. Now a two-part Channel 4 series segregates 11 to 12-year-old pupils along ethnic lines for an experiment to examine race, unconscious bias and white privilege, and the result is both enlightening and frightening.

It’s also sure to be controversial at a time when the issue has dominated the news.

In The School That Tried To

End Racism, US educationalist Mariama Richards conducts her experiment at Glenthorne High School in south London, which has a nearly 50/50 makeup of white and non-white pupils.

Students, including girls Beth and Miyu and boys Bright and Henry, were asked to divide into white and non-white groups. One girl, Farrah, with a white English mother and Sri Lankan father, wasn’t sure which to pick. ‘I don’t want to be described by my race,’ she tells the teachers, before finally joining the non-white group.

In the non-white group the children share awful stories of being accused of shoplifting and having bus drivers refuse to let them on because they’re wearing a head covering. In the white group, meanwhile, discussion is stilted. They don’t really ever have to think about race.

‘It was clear many of the nonwhite pupils have experienced racism,’ says Dr Nicola Rollock, an academic who works on race relations and is an advisor on the show. ‘They thought they were alone in their experiences. Talking about these things as a group, they could see they weren’t.

‘For the white pupils there was a discomfort and a guilt, but as we introduced more activities there was an understanding.’

In one experiment the children engaged in ‘the privilege walk’. Each child began at a start line and would step backwards or forwards depending on their answers to different questions. Has anyone in your family been stopped by the police? Do your parents speak English as a first language? The white children stepped forwards each time and ‘won’ the contest.

In another challenge, white pupils had to listen to the experiences of their non-white friends and then describe them as if they were that person. It’s an uncomfortable watch.

Bright (left) and Henry, who

felt guilt over his ‘privilege’

Some of the minority children are in tears as they reveal instances of racism. Girls say they would talk to their parents about wanting whiter skin. ‘I thought I’m not pretty – the only way to be pretty is to be white,’ Farrah, who is in fact very pretty, says.

But the white children are left in tears too as they feel guilt about their privilege. ‘You feel you’ve done something wrong,’ says Henry. Mariama believes this is an important way for white children to learn. ‘They all had upsetting stories, but if we ignore the way things are we can’t do anything to fix them.’

That we need to talk about race is clear. But whether this is the way to do it, less so. Even at the end of the three weeks, while they all felt more comfortable talking about race, the non-white group split up – into black and Asian – as they had different experiences.

A year on from the experiment, the school’s headteacher Stephen Hume, who is white, says that while he’ll incorporate some of the lessons from the experiment, he won’t be repeating it. ‘All the children who took part learned a lot and their confidence has grown. But it’s also important to realise society is more diverse. We have Eastern Europeans who also have specific concerns even if they would be placed in the white group. Privilege is many-faceted: you have to look at culture, poverty, gender and class. But it’s clear we need to talk about race more.’

Beth (left) and Miyu