School Days

It’s funny, the things that cause racism to rear its ugly head.

County Hall wants all incidents of racism to be declared by schools. If none is declared, it is assumed that the staff is either incompetent or intrinsically racist. It does not seem to occur to anyone that there just might be no racism.

I live in a very white area of the country. Indeed, when I first began teaching there was only one non-white child in the school. Whenever he was told off for not doing his homework, he would cry ‘Is it ’cos I’m black? You’re racist!’

Now we are much more diverse. We have South-east Asians and black Africans, South Americans and Eastern Europeans. We have girls in hijabs and no one turns a hair. We seem to coexist in glorious harmony.

Or do we? It takes only a little thing to upset the equilibrium.

Hearing two boys argue bitterly about the merits and demerits of Bangladesh and India (coming from each of those countries themselves), I prepared to jump into the fray, tear apart the racist anger and reunite the boys in a friendly, loving way. Until I realised they were talking cricket, and their argument was entirely friendly.

While sporting competition is entirely friendly, not all such discussions are. Coronavirus has brought back a hideous rise in racist taunts – anyone remotely

Asian (not just Chinese) is now avoided, with shrieks of ‘Stay away, you’ll catch the virus!’ Ugh, the stupidity!

Meanwhile, I have been teaching persuasive writing, using political speeches as the examples. It’s good fun, particularly because some of my most disengaged boys have admitted to enjoying the breadth of topics we can take in. Pankhurst, Obama (any excuse), Shaftesbury … you get the picture.

And all was fine and dandy until we came to Wilberforce. I had thought the students would get overexcited by discussing child labour, but that didn’t seem to concern them at all. Slavery, on the other hand, really drew them in. There were some interesting conversations – about the use of the word ‘Negro’, for instance, which some children would not even say for fear of sounding racist. The descriptions of the slave ships fascinated them, and the whole idea of shipping goods round the world and back again warmed their little mercantile souls. It turns out Napoleon was spot-on with his definition of us as ‘a nation of shopkeepers’.

But it was the discussion of racism itself that opened my eyes. While not one of them would admit to (or I hope even have) any feelings of racism towards black or Asian people, one group was still nominated as likely to be victimised because of their race: the Poles. Even above any other Eastern European group, in this neck of the woods the Poles are those most reviled. The children were careful not to express any racism themselves but just to report what they had seen, which mirrors pretty much what I witness as I go about my business in both the town where I teach and that in which I live.

Why? It’s back to Brexit, isn’t it? Those racists who feel overwhelmed by BAME neighbours have learned that they can’t articulate their senseless resentment publicly. But somehow the Poles, because of the European Union, because their shops have sprung up on the streets of all our towns, because they work hard and their children mostly behave well, and because you can’t tell a person is Polish until you hear them speak – the Poles are to blame for everything.

But I had to point something out to my class. When our school was recently successful in a competition for girls run by the National Cyber Security Centre, I couldn’t help but notice that every one of the girls in the team that went off to the final had a Polish surname.

When are the small-minded bigots going to realise that many of the best, boldest and brightest Poles came to the UK, and that their children might well be at the forefront of our future successes?