Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 34

Many studies of race and racism in the lives of children and young people have focused on urban neighbourhoods (Back 1996; Kusserow 2004; Winkler 2012; Kromidas 2016). However, most research on race and racism in children’s lives has been done in schools by ethnographers, social psychologists and educationalists. This is partly for the simple reason that children in schools are relatively easy to access and most children in the population will be attending school. It is easy to draw a random sample of schools and a random sample within schools; claims can therefore be made about the likelihood that the findings of the study can be extended to the general child population. The interest in race and racism in schools also reflects the concerns of educationalists that African American children underachieve in public (state) schools and the suspicion that this is because, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, Black students are still getting a lower standard of education than their white peers and that Black students have to contend with racist attitudes in schools.

Amanda Lewis’s Race in the Schoolyard (2003) is an ethnography of three schools in California: a mainly white school in a suburban neighbourhood, a mixed Latino/a and African American urban school, and an elective school with a mainly Latino/a student body. Her main contention is that schools are ‘central places where race is made and remade in the everyday’ (Lewis 2003: 11). Learning the First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism (Van Ausdale and Feagin 2001) has a similar premise that educational institutions are one of the key sites in the learning of race. Van Ausdale and Feagin’s study is an ethnography of an urban pre-school in the USA in which they argue that young children are aware of racial privilege and that white children use racist statements as ways of demonstrating their racial privilege. Whilst I found some of their interpretations overdone, their argument that the children in their study were aware of racial categories was convincingly demonstrated. Since these children are very young (3 and 4 years) Van Ausdale and Feagin also argue that their study undermines Piagetian claims that moral and abstract reasoning is absent in young children.

Learning the First R is one of a handful of ethnographic studies of young children in school that focus on race and racism. The other major studies are Paul Connolly’s Racism, Gender Identities and Young Children (1998) and Barry Troyna and Richard Hatcher’s Racism in Children’s Lives: A Study of Mainly White Primary Schools (1992). Both of these were done in English primary schools. The subjects that Connolly’s study focused on were mainly Black and South Asian boys and girls in an urban primary school. He does not discuss the attitude of white children in the school towards race and racism. Troyna and Hatcher’s study was designed to fill the gap in empirical research on primary schools into relations between Black and white children. Despite the claims of Ausdale and Feagin that their findings are novel, Troyna and Hatcher, writing ten years earlier, albeit in the UK, agreed that ‘young people are “racialised” by the time they experience primary school education’ (Troyna and Hatcher 1992: 21). Their own study focused on the use of racist language by white children in school and the extent to which efforts at using the curriculum, for example the study of slavery, to undermine racist attitudes were seen by many white students as another opportunity to display racial privilege. Troyna and Hatcher report that many Black children interpreted the teaching of the history of racial oppression as a racist (sic) discourse.

Most studies of how race and racism shape schooling are about how Black and Latino/a students navigate the racism they have to contend with in the school environment. In the last few years a new stream of research has developed on understanding the way that whites benefit from and reproduce racism in schools, even while (for some) having a personal commitment to anti-racism (Lewis-McCoy 2014; Hagerman 2018; Underhill 2018).