We have serious lessons to learn here about racism and our schools
Our schools are diverse and multicultural places — but are failing to address the issue of ethnic discrimination or racial abuse, writes Ita O’Kelly
IT is a fairly flimsy social construct if your worth in society is determined solely on the basis of the amount of melanin in your skin. In very simplistic terms, more is bad and less means good. The lighter your skin, the higher you climb. No child is born with hatred in their heart for others. Bias based on skin colour is something that children learn or are taught. However, this can be unlearned. This is why it is crucial that schools and educators be centrally involved.
Given that Irish schools currently have modules on LGBT issues, well-being and bullying/cyber bullying, it is problematic that no such stand-alone module on racially motivated abuse is included.
A cursory mention of racism in a Civic, Social & Political Education (CSPE) book amounting to a page in the entire book for Junior Cycle, is derisory and wholly inadequate.
Racism is not just an issue for the odd child from an immigrant family. Many Irish-born students are from different ethnic groups.
We cannot forget that children from the Traveller community are also vilified in schools. White kids would also benefit from the message that there is only one race. The human race.
The recent murder of George Floyd and other black people in the United States has put the focus very firmly back on the colour of your skin, if it ever went away. But it is not simply a black and white issue.
The received wisdom is that the door to racism was opened when Obama left the White House. A tacit permission was perceived to have been given by his successor to openly articulate and express abhorrent sentiments and behaviours. Many well-intentioned Irish people imagine that the only place that institutional racism exists in Ireland is within and around the deeply shameful direct provision system here. They would be wrong.
I have an unusual perspective in that I am white but my daughter is not. She was adopted by myself and her father, who is also white, as a tiny baby from China. She is an Irish citizen but chooses to identify as Asian.
I inhabit two very different worlds. The white and the nonwhite world. If you don’t live it, you don’t see it. I have never once been tested for explosive residues on both sides of my hands and the soles of my shoes at Dublin or any other airport. She has. It happens every time we travel by air. Such airport screenings are supposedly random.
While travelling with me — as a very petite 12-year-old — on a train in Dublin with her Child Leap card, she was asked to produce ID to prove that she was not over 16 years of age. A passport was suggested. When she indicated that she was with me — blonde and blue-eyed — suddenly there was no need for ID after all.
She has been accused of eating dog by virtue of her ethnicity. She was shouted at in the street — in the leafy environs of Ranelagh — and told to ‘‘go back to where you came from’’.
I have long had a problem with the use of the umbrella term of ‘‘bullying’’ in schools, to cover all eventualities. If someone says they don’t like your backpack, this is mean and hurtful, but ultimately inconsequential.
If they say that your hands are too brown to play, well that is an altogether more significant issue. The now overused term of bullying is too meek a label for such behaviour.
The traditional Anti-Bullying Policy in Irish schools amounts in many instances to a fuzzy message, best summed up by the mantra ‘‘everyone should be treated respectfully’’. This negates the issue of overt racism in schools.
Unless we call it out and name it as racial abuse and decry it, the issue will not be resolved.
Racism chips away at your dignity, your ego and your selfworth. A well-being module that does not speak to you and address the deep pain you are suffering is a meaningless and empty exercise.
The arrival of the coronavirus has been an added agony. President Trump’s insistence on pronouncing it as the C-H-I-N-A virus has had the effect of equating the virus with all Chinese people.
Imagine being made to feel that you are personally to blame for making people sick with the virus. Peers rapidly moving out of your way or donning face masks if they have to sit near you.
There is, of course, a certain irony in the fact that white folk still like to emulate our brown brothers and sisters by tanning our pallid bodies.
However, this does not change the fact that we live in a world where white people are placed at the top of the pecking order.
While we do have a biracial Taoiseach, he is very much the exception rather than the rule.
During my daughter’s schooling to date, the issue of ethnic discrimination or racial abuse has never been addressed. Ever.
This must change.
The Department of Education & Skills (DES) must move with the times to reflect the changes that have taken place in Irish society over recent decades. Schools here are now diverse and multicultural places in 2020. But staff remain almost exclusively white. This must be addressed urgently.
Schools are not obligated by DES to deliver a module on racism and racist abuse. This is long overdue in my opinion. However, the primary role of the teacher is to teach and that must remain so.
Many outside groups do conduct very effective LGBT awareness and anti-homophobia programmes in secondary schools, with excellent outcomes. A similar model could easily be adapted to address the issue of school-based racism in primary schools.
Throughout the primary school years, I have dutifully attended a total of eight adorable nativity school plays. I waited in hope for an Asian Mary or a brown-skinned Joseph, even once.
It never happened.
Change comes dropping slow. Unfortunately.
‘Unless we call it out and name it as racial abuse, the issue will not be resolved’