Creating an Anti-Racist Culture in the Early Years

An Essential Guide for Practitioners

Sandra Smidt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367258092
• eBook ISBN: 9781000028508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

At a time of growing evidence of racism across many countries and cultures, Creating an Anti-Racist Culture in the Early Years will help those working with young children recognise racism, name it for what it is and help their young pupils understand that difference is nothing to be feared.

Drawing on both personal research and established theory, Smidt includes examples of anti-racist practice from real life and in literature, looks at how racism is acquired and cites examples of people who have spoken or acted against racism through the centuries.

She emphasises how and why it is essential to develop multicultural education into anti-racist education and why it's so important to go beyond the mere celebration of differences in cultures. This indispensable resource also addresses:

• What racism is and why it is so corrosive

• How to recognise and challenge it in an early years setting
• How to work with parents and carers to help them reassess their prejudices or unconscious bias
• How to create an anti-racist curriculum and culture through inclusion, multiculturalism, literature, art and drama.

Creating an Anti-Racist Culture in the Early Years is an indispensable resource for all early years practitioners and students of early childhood education who believe in creating more equitable opportunities for all of our young children.

Section 1

What is meant by racism and anti-racism

Chapter 1

Let’s talk about racism

Article 2: The convention applies to every child without discrimination, whatever their ethnicity, gender, religion, language, abilities or any other status, whatever they think or say, whatever their family.

Politics in the nursery?

Many people blanch at the mere suggestion that politics plays any role in the nursery. Peter Moss – as long ago as 2007 – wrote a paper on this subject and I read it then and found it significant and my opinion has not changed. The paper was entitled “Bringing politics into the nursery: Early childhood education as a democratic practice”.

In this piece, Moss suggests that institutions for children and young people, like schools and nurseries, could and should be places of political practice – particularly democratic political practice. If you think carefully about what you would expect your child to learn in the early years you might talk about learning to read and write, to play with other children and be safe and happy while her parent or parents are at work.

I think you would agree that young children need to learn to be members of a community, to use and share resources and communicate with others; to think about things that interest or scare them and talk about their ideas, feelings, hopes and concerns. Does this proposition make sense to you or would you object to taking this stance? Those of you familiar with the famous nursery schools set up by Loris Malaguzzi in Italy will know that the children there produce startling images, reveal insights into how societies work, collaborate, communicate and join in making decisions and choices with each other and with the adults. They are functioning as little citizens in democratic institutions.

You will have noticed that I refer to the child as “her”. I will continue to use this throughout the book.

What do you think about this so far? Does it make you anxious or would you like our small children to be viewed as little citizens? I am certain that very young children, in making sense of their world, develop an interest in other people, new experiences, how things work, what is good and bad, who is right and wrong and much, much more.

For Moss democratic practice means that the child is seen as being a competent citizen, someone with ideas and opinions worth listening to and an expert on her own life. She has the right and ability to join in making collective decisions. Moss joins with Malaguzzi in recognising that even very young children – and, of course, adults too – have a hundred languages to express their ideas and thoughts and feelings. They can speak and read and write and paint and make and take down and build up again. More than having a hundred languages to “speak”, the competent child can also listen to and pay attention to the hundred languages. Parents too can be seen as competent citizens because through their life experience they have developed opinions, points of view, interpretations and ideas which may be rooted in their own experience as parents and citizens. They have and develop their own experience, points of view, interpretation and ideas … which are the fruits of their experience as parents and citizens. The adults working with young children assume what Oberhuemer (2005) called “democratic professionalism”, which means understanding their roles as practitioners of democracy. While recognising that they bring an important perspective and a relevant local knowledge to the democratic forum, they also recognise that they do not have the truth nor privileged access to knowledge.

What values do you think need to be shared by all those involved in the democratic setting?

According to Moss democratic practice needs certain values to be shared among the community of the early childhood institutions and offers these (based on Rose 1999) for consideration:

• a respect for diversity, which relates to the ethics of an encounter: such a relational ethics was foregrounded by Dahlberg and Moss (2005) in their discussion of ethics in early childhood education. (It may help to know that a relational ethic is knowing what the right thing to do would be);
• a recognition of multiple perspectives and diverse paradigms – which means that there is more than one answer to most questions and that there are many ways of viewing and understanding the world, a point to which I shall return;
• welcoming curiosity, uncertainty and subjectivity and accept the responsibility that they require of us; making sure that children know that they can ask questions and are entitled to a serious and meaningful response.
• critical thinking which requires “introducing a critical attitude towards those things that are given to our present experience as if they were fixed or timeless, natural and unquestionable”. It means being able to challenge the sayings, values, practices of one’s time and received wisdom … What this means, put more simply, is that children should be enabled to question things that might seem obvious or right in terms of their experience.

I asked a group of students what they understood by these terms – diversity, curiosity, uncertainty and critical thinking – and what they had learned about them when working in early childhood. Read their responses to see if you agree with them.

Helena: Of course you have to have respect for diversity. We are all different. Even two girls of the same age will be different. We are all individuals and we are all entitled to respect.

Jaime: Well, in theory, you are right but I don’t respect the views of racists and I don’t respect the ways some people talk about other people calling them names.

Omar: I think you are entitled to dislike individuals but not to label a group of people. For example I don’t like my next door neighbour because he is a racist but I don’t call him a fascist to his face!

Emmanuel: On my teaching practice there were two little boys who ganged up against one smaller boy and taunted him, called him dirty and smelly just because he was black and they were white. I did try to deal with it but the class teacher just said “Well, boys will be boys”, which was not very helpful.

Jodie: I was interested in how a white child in the nursery where I go kept touching the skin of a new black child in the class. I thought it was just curiosity and it did not offend me. I asked the white child why she was touching the new child’s skin and she said: “I thought it might feel hot”. I thought that was intriguing.

(Personal notes)

Let’s think some more about what we mean by racism.

The word “race” is said to have come about in early attempts to categorise people according to their physical differences and similarities – features such as colour of skin or other physical characteristics – and things such as curly or straight hair, height, facial or other visible features. This is not rooted in any scientific basis and today the term is falling out of use. If you look up its meaning you might not find it, or you might find it merely applying to people ­competing in or enjoying races!

When I lived in South Africa I was classified as “white”. I had no choice about it and could not change my race had I ever wanted to. My skin colour alone determined that I was entitled to privileges denied to people whose skins were black or shades of brown and who were classified then as being mixed race or “coloured” (as it was called in apartheid South Africa).

The traditional definitions of race and ethnicity are related to biological and sociological factors respectively. Race refers to a person’s physical characteristics – things like bone structure and skin, hair or eye colour. Ethnicity, however, refers to cultural factors, such as nationality, regional culture, ancestry, religion and language.

An example of race is usually expressed as having brown, white or black skin (all from various parts of the world), while examples of ethnicity could be Greek or Han Chinese or Buddhist. Your race is determined by how you look while your ethnicity is determined by the social and cultural groups you belong to. You can have more than one ethnicity, but you are said by some people to have only one race, even if it’s “mixed race”. When I am asked about my ethnicity, I want to say “white South African English/Afrikaans/­Italian-speaking British passport holder atheist/Jewish expat – immigrant”.

However tricky it is to define racism it is apparent that the characterising or labelling of people according to their physical characteristics or the customs and values and beliefs they hold is still evident in many parts of the world and is the basis for extreme reactions such as hatred. For me, racist means more than prejudice because there is such a history of the horrors that have been done in its name. Let’s try and look at what two black African leaders said about racism:

1. At the Global Convention on Peace and Nonviolence in New Delhi on 21 January 2004), Nelson Mandela, the South African leader imprisoned for opposing the racist government, said that religion, ethnicity, ­language, social and cultural practices are all elements which enrich human civilisations and add to the wealth of our diversity. He questioned why they should be allowed to become a cause of division, and violence. This raises the question of why we should demean our common humanity by ­allowing that to happen.
2. At a conference in Belgrade in 1961, Haile Selassie, political leader in ­Ethiopia, reminded the audience that all people strive for a better life, and hope to educate their children even though they, like him, had not been well educated. All parents want to shelter and clothe their children, spare them from cruel diseases, have opportunities to improve the quality of their lives. The danger is that many need to be reminded of the possibility and dangers of doing this at the expense of others. The inequalities embedded in many societies give rise to fear in some and hatred in others. Where the rich and privileged and the very poor encounter one another it is often fear, greed, envy and even hatred of those who are different from them. This, as we know, is often the root of racism.

Here are two Oxford Dictionary definitions of racism. Please read them and think carefully about whether you think either or both or neither sufficiently explain the meaning of racism.

Racism is prejudice, discrimination or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.

The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.

Racism, in essence, is the process of making something about a person or a group of people who are unlike you in some way or ways appear to be inherently bad. This can refer to power and position (what work they do, where they live, for example), or to physical characteristics (having black skin or curly hair) or to cultural things (the language they speak, their religion and its customs), or to social things (like their position in society, the people they associate with, the clothes they wear) … almost anything.

What we need to do is understand that racism is a system adopted by those who have some power to group together to ensure that they hold on to their positions in society by denying people who are different from them from taking or sharing the benefits. The apartheid regime in South Africa was a prime example where all aspects of life were organised for the benefit of the white people and the enslavement of the black people. When Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as president of South Africa in 1994, he stated that no one is ever born hating another person because of the colour of his or her skin or their background or religion. It is apparent then, that people must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can also be taught to love, which he believed comes more naturally to the human heart than the fear of or hatred of others.

These words mean a great deal to me because they reveal that no one is born racist: it is a learned behaviour. This means that a person who reveals racist actions or words must have learned them from someone else.

Many of you reading this may remember the murder of black student ­Stephen Lawrence. In the inquiry in 1999¹ into this racist murder Macpherson defined institutional racism as “the collective failure” of an organisation or body of people to provide appropriate and professional services to people on the basis of their skin colour, culture or ethnic origin. We recognise racism through the negative or prejudicial processes, attitudes and behaviours which may occur through lack of knowledge, unwitting prejudice, ignorance or thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.

Racism and the law in the UK

I have some difficulties with Macpherson talking of acts of hatred being unwitting or thoughtless but respect the role he played in the amendment to the Race Relations Act (19...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• SECTION 1: What is meant by racism and anti-racism
• SECTION 2: Challenging racism
• SECTION 3: Working with children and adults
• SECTION 4: Anti-racist heroines and heroes
• Appendix
• Bibliography of books
• Bibliography of journal articles
• Index