The evidence that racism exists within British education is overwhelming. While the way that racism manifests may have changed over the past three generations, becoming more ‘subtle’ and ‘insidious’ (Vincent et al. 2013), students and teachers of African, Arab, Asian and Caribbean descent – black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) students and teachers1 – experience racism right across primary, secondary, and tertiary education.
In the summer of 2017, Schools Week reported a dramatic rise of over 50% in reports of racial hate crimes and subsequent arrests in schools between the years 2014–2015 and 2016–2017, based on freedom of information requests to the UK’s 43 police forces (Camden 2017). The same year, the Scottish Parliament’s Equalities and Human Rights Committee (2017) published a report on ‘prejudice-based bullying’ of children and young people in schools which claimed that children from black, Asian and minority ethnic communities are far more likely to experience racist bullying than their peers. In 2016, Show Racism the Red Card Wales revealed that teachers in Wales reported a rise in racist name-calling against both students and staff, as well as a lack of confidence, training and support among teachers on how to deal with racist incidents, despite the fact that over 90% of those surveyed strongly believed that anti-racist education should be incorporated into the curriculum (Lewis 2016). A common theme in the news coverage on these statistics was the claim these increases were part of an ‘aftermath’ or ‘wake’ of Brexit, whose campaigns and media coverage, founded on anti-immigration platforms, fuelled the normalisation of anti-immigrant views, speech and actions (Kroet 2016).
As well as racist name-calling, physical attacks or other forms of harassment, students who are racialised as non-white are likely to experience other forms of structural or ‘institutional’ racism. For example, recent UK government figures show that black Caribbean students were three times more likely than white British students to be permanently excluded from education, and twice as likely to face a fixed period of exclusion (UK Cabinet Office 2017, 23). In November 2017, Ofsted announced that it was encouraging its school inspectors to question Muslim girls in primary schools wearing the hijab as a measure against the ‘sexualisation’ of young girls, sparking an outcry from over 100 teachers and faith leaders who signed an open letter protesting that such action would be institutionally racist (Halliday 2017). Consider too, two key policy initiatives by the UK Government introduced since 2010: first, the introduction of statutory duties under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 – the so-called ‘Prevent’ duty – where teachers and university staff are required under law to monitor student populations for signs of radicalisation into terrorism with the outcome that BAME students, especially Muslim students, are subjected to heightened surveillance (UCU 2015); and second, the collection of schools census data in which parents of school-age children are being asked to provide documentary evidence of their child’s nationality and immigration status as part of the UK government’s agenda of creating a ‘hostile environment’ for immigrants (Schools ABC 2017).
Also in 2017, the Runnymede Trust and the National Association of Teachers report (Haque and Elliot 2017) on the impact of racism on teachers in schools offered a similarly complex picture, with teachers from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds identifying ‘persistent discrimination, “microaggressions” and unfair and unequal treatment in their everyday teaching lives,’ including ‘being denied promotion without institutional clarity, cultural or racial stereotyping in terms of teaching roles… and a lack of support or firm action (e.g. zero tolerance) in relation to racist incidents against staff in school’ (6). Demographically, the teaching workforce remains a predominantly white workforce (15), with significant disparities between the number of BAME students in primary schools (30.4%) and secondary schools (26.6%), the number of primary (6.5%) and secondary (9.6%) BAME classroom teachers, those in primary (5%) or secondary (6%) school senior leadership roles and primary (3.2%) or secondary (3.7%) BAME headteachers (14).
Universities do not fare much better. Annual demographic monitoring by the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) reveals that for the period of 2015–2016, BAME academics are similarly chronically under-represented in teaching posts in universities, representing only 9.1% of UK academic staff, and only 8% of those holding professorships in UK universities. This is despite BAME students making up 23% of those undertaking undergraduate degrees and 16.9% of those in postgraduate study. In the case of women from BAME backgrounds, they make up only 4.1% of academic staff and 1.7% of all professorships in UK universities. BAME academics are more likely than their white counterparts to be on casual or temporary contracts, and are much less likely to be represented in academic senior management roles (ECU 2017). Similarly, and despite evidence that BAME pupils overall outperform their white peers in schools (UK Cabinet Office 2017), the ECU reports that white students are more likely than BAME students to achieve a 2:1 or a first in their undergraduate degrees, with 76.3% of white male students qualifying with a 2:1 or above compared to only half of black male students. BAME individuals are overrepresented within university admissions but under-represented in university teaching posts as well as being less likely than their white counterparts to either achieve top degree classifications or to continue to postgraduate study and on to become academics (ECU 2017).
The overall picture is clear: right across the educational pipeline, from primary to secondary to the university sector, black students and teachers experience systematic disadvantages compared to their white counterparts on top of the threat or presence of racist name-calling or assault.
Racism not only exists but endures in British education, despite decades of work of awareness-raising and policy-making aimed at promoting a ‘tolerant’ and ‘multicultural’ educational landscape. Why might this be? This paper seeks to argue that one way of making sense of the persistent existence of racism in British education – and indeed within Britain generally – is through the lens of the concept of ‘white ignorance’, introduced by Jamaican political philosopher, Charles W. Mills. ‘White ignorance’ identifies a phenomenon whereby contemporary and historical realities of racism are subject to the widespread, systematic and pernicious production of ignorance, as opposed to knowledge.
The paper will proceed as follows: in the first section, I offer an overview of the concept of ‘white ignorance’ and ‘the epistemology of ignorance’ in the context of Mills’ work, as a sort of preliminary conceptual map for those who might encounter it while thinking through questions relating to ‘race’ and education. In the next section, I consider a range of evidence which I argue shows that systematic, pervasive and pernicious production of ignorance on matters relating to racism and its aetiology exists in British schools and universities, i.e. that ‘white ignorance’ exists in the British education system.
In this section, I set up Charles W. Mills’ account of ‘the epistemology of ignorance’ and its connected concept ‘white ignorance,’ situating these concepts in the context of Mills’ broader project of conceptualising the racialised political system of global white supremacy through social contract theory, ideology and social epistemology.
Mills works within the tradition of analytic political philosophy, and his work is framed within, and aimed at, the dominant concepts and theoretical frameworks of this tradition. Mills (2014) describes himself as using what Audre Lorde (1984) calls ‘the master’s tools’ to provide a political philosophical analysis of race and racism which he argues is endemic to Western liberal democracies. Contrary to the view prevalent within liberalism, racism is not an anomaly within an otherwise just political system, but the norm (1997, 2003, 2007a, 2007b, 2017). Mills’ descriptively-oriented, naturalised account traces how the late fifteenth-century onwards marked the start of several hundred years of European colonisation and imperialism in which the violent theft and expropriation of lands, bodies, labour and resources of black and brown people created wealth and prosperity for countries such as Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Italy, as well the British settler-colonies and ex-‘Dominions’ of the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. As these empires intersected the world, trading, fighting, annexing and ceding territories to one another, this gave rise to a global system in which the assumed superiority of phenotypically ‘white’ Europeans relied on the construction of a non-white ‘Other’ whose humanity was sufficiently undermined to be eradicated, subjugated, and exploited for white profit, even in the midst of the construction of a ‘white’ European identity as benevolently paternalistic and morally superior. Thus, Mills theorises the political system of what European scientists and philosophers came to reify in terms of ‘race’, where ‘bodies and bloodlines’ (Taylor 2013) became markers for membership and standing within moral, intellectual and political communities.
This global political system is what Mills calls ‘white supremacy’: ‘the system of domination by which white people have historically ruled over, and in certain important ways, continue to rule over nonwhite people’ (1997, 1–2). This is ‘the most important political system of recent global history’, (1–2) despite, on Mills’ reading, having been overlooked by mainstream and traditional political philosophy, ‘taken for granted’ (2). According to Mills, ‘white supremacy’ denotes:
[A] political mode of domination, with … special norms for allocating benefits and burdens, rights and duties; [with] its own ideology and an internal, at least semi-autonomous logic that influences law, culture and consciousness. (2003, 98)
White supremacy thus denotes a global political system in which power, resources, opportunities, and liabilities are distributed within this structure on the basis of ‘race’. Mills (1998) follows radical black and colonial intellectuals, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and C. L. R. James in understanding
race in international terms, as a set of relations to be understood not merely locally … but as the global outcome of historic processes of European imperialism, settlement and colonialism. (126)
Race is thus understood as a ‘social construction’, a social not a biological category (Mills 1997, 1998, 2007a, 2015, 2017), and one whose history is inextricably tied to the operations of the European global imperial project. White supremacy is thus a political system that racialises persons, socially constructing them into race, specifically hierarchies of racialisation framed around white superiority and non-white inferiority. Mills (1997, 1998, 2003, 2007a, 2015) notes that naming this political system ‘white supremacy’ was...
