Black British Education Movements: Political Struggle, Critical Hope

• In Event: 31.060 - Critical Hope and Social Justice

Abstract

This contribution maps the origins and development of education as a site of black political struggle in Britain. It examines conditions in the post-WWII Commonwealth migration period and in today’s ‘post-multicultural’ Britain. Examining black commentary on educational struggles shows how educational injustices have engendered critical realism among black educational activists, necessitating hope, but of a critical kind.

The school system’s initial, dramatic failure of black youth was made tragic precisely because of the faith that migrant Caribbean parents had in what Britain’s schools might offer. Early campaigns around race and education policy, curriculum, achievement, school exclusions and teachers’ expectations set the tone for subsequent struggles because they defined education for black British communities as a site of political struggle. Black British educational activism has been predicated upon critical hope, wherein critical understanding of the school system's maintenance of race-class inequalities, and hope in education as potentially transformative have existed in tandem and in tension.

This paper’s theoretical approach is based on analysis of writing by black British public intellectuals, whose voices remain marginalized. This approach to documentary research draws upon critical theories of race and intellectual production developed in both Britain and the USA (e.g. Leonardo, 2009; Warmington, 2014). It positions black educators as powerful speakers entangled in burdens of representation, often caught between organic and universal intellectual claims.

This paper’s principal sources are written literature: not only scholarly work but also campaign literature, black journalism and educational materials, c.1960 to 2010. This is a response to recent calls among black scholars for greater attention to written black history. These ‘black’ texts are treated both as the focus of study and sources of conceptualisation (cf. Delgado, 1984; Gilroy, 1993). Texts have been examined in order to identify how black educators have constructed political readings of education and how those readings are located within the wider flow of black Atlantic intellectual production.

There is no rigid distinction, particularly not in the ‘early’ post-war phase, between black British community activism and intellectual production. Black Caribbean communities learned quickly that British schools were not places to which they could unproblematically entrust their children. Black parents and pupils would not accept ‘realistic’ expectations of horizontal integration into a stratified system. Their social critiques were born out of community struggles around schooling, unemployment and policing.

Black education movements encompass diverse philosophies, strategies and specific campaigns. What they have in common is a critique of the racialized nature of educational inequalities and assertions of black communities as a permanent, agentive presence in Britain. This paper emphasizes black education movements as agents of critical hope.


REFERENCES

Delgado, R. (1984) The Imperial Scholar. Reflections on a review of civil rights literature. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 132.
Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. London: Verso.
Leonardo, Z. (2009) Race, Whiteness and Education, Abingdon: Routledge.
Warmington, P. (2014) Black British Intellectuals and Education. Abingdon: Routledge.

Author

• Paul Warmington, The University of Birmingham