Racism, Gender Identities and Young Children

Social Relations in a Multi-Ethnic, Inner City Primary School

Paul Connolly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134672318
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book offers a fascinating yet disturbing account of the significance of racism in the lives of five and six year old children, drawing upon data from an in-depth study of an inner-city, multi-ethnic primary school and its surrounding community. It represents one of the only detailed studies to give primacy to the voices of the young children themselves - giving them the space to articulate their own experiences and concerns. Together with detailed observation of the children in the school and local community, it provides an important account of how and why they draw upon discourses on race in the development of their gender identities. The book graphically highlights the understanding that these children have of issues of race, gender and sexuality and the active role they play in using and reworking this knowledge to make sense of their experiences.

1

INTRODUCTION

Daniel:	You’ve got a Paki girlfriend!
Stephen:	You go out with Neelam! [South Asian girt]
Daniel:	And so do you! [ … ] You go out with all the Pakis! I go out with all the Whites! [laughs]
Stephen:	You go out with all of the Pakis! Because I, do I look like a Paki though? You do! You go the mosque, mate, where all the Pakis go!
Nicky:	Emma goes out with James and Michael [both Black boys] … I hate Black boys!
PC:	[ … ] Why do you hate Black boys, Nicky?
Kylie:	Because they’re always around us, ain’t they, Nicky?
Nicky:	Yeah! … What, kissing?
Kylie:	[laughs] No, chasing!
PC:	Where’s Jordan today?
Stephen:	He’s waiting at his girlfriend’s house.
PC:	Is he? Whose?
Paul:	Yeah, waiting for her.
Stephen:	And when she comes in, he’s hiding, right, and when she comes in he’s going to grab her and take her upstairs and then she’s going to start screaming and he’s going to kiss her … and sex her!
PC:	And sex her? And why’s she going to be screaming?
Stephen:	Because she hates it!

The use of racist insults, the introduction of sexually violent images and the argumentative nature of some of the above conversations are all testament to the central importance that Nicky, Stephen and the others gave to the maintenance and development of their gender identities. However, these were not teenagers on the brink of adulthood exploring their sexuality, but young children. The maximum age of those quoted above was 6. This fact may well be surprising considering that these themes of racism, sexuality and gender identities are not traditionally associated with children as young as this. And yet, as we will see in the chapters to follow, for these young children their experiences of schooling and their emerging social identities cannot be understood without recognising the importance they gave to the exploration, negotiation and development of these racialised and gendered discourses in their day-to-day lives.

It is for this reason that this book provides a detailed exploration of young children’s social worlds through an in-depth study of 5- and 6-year- old children in an English multi-ethnic, inner-city primary school and its surrounding community. The book is particularly concerned with understanding the complex ways in which racism intervenes in young children’s lives and comes to shape their gender identities. As will be seen, while these processes are clearly evident among the young children’s peer-group cultures, they only can be fully understood by tracing their origins to the social organisation of the school and the local community.

YOUNG CHILDREN AND SOCIAL RESEARCH:
‘SEEN BUT NEVER HEARD’

We should not be too surprised about our general ignorance of these aspects of young children’s lives considering the nature of social research in this area. Within the sociology of education, for instance, we find a distinct lack of attention paid to young children’s own experiences and concerns. When their behaviour, culture and social identities are not ignored altogether, they tend to be studied in a very restrictive way simply in relation to how they present demands upon their teacher.¹ Moreover, the few studies that have actually focused on primary school children’s cultures have tended either to avoid the younger age ranges altogether or to rely solely on observation when studying them.² To understand this lack of interest in directly engaging young children and ascertaining their own perspectives it is useful to quote from King’s (1978) work, which is now widely recognised as a classic study of infant classes in three English schools:

How is it possible to understand the subjective meanings of very small children? … If teachers are unused to reflecting on their own actions young children seem to be almost incapable of doing so. However, it was possible to observe children’s behaviour in the classroom and to listen to their talk (and sometimes to talk with them), and to judge to what extent their behaviour and their talk were related to the actions of their teacher. It was also possible to infer something of a small child’s subjectivity by his or her emotional response to a situation. I assumed that a 6-year-old who cried was probably upset and one who laughed was happy, assumptions not always justified in relation to adults.

(King 1978: 8)

It was clear from King’s research that the young children in his study were there to be seen but not heard. There was little point, as he makes quite clear above, in actually talking to or meaningfully engaging with these children. Traditional socialisation and developmental models of childhood tell us that children as young as these are socially and cognitively incompetent; they do not have the basic skills or ability to think through meaningfully, critically reflect upon and adapt their own behaviour. The strategy adopted by King was therefore purposely to avoid direct social contact with the young children. In relation to his own work this meant, among other things, always standing up to avoid eye contact, showing no immediate interest in what the children were doing and, where possible, hiding away in the Wendy House to conduct observations.

What we find, therefore, is a set of assumptions about young children that tend to foreclose any meaningful study of their social worlds in and of themselves. While there are few other studies in the sociology of education that are so explicit about their perceptions of young children, it is tempting to believe that these assumptions still pervade the research in this area some two decades on from King’s work. How else can we explain a distinct lack of substantive research investigating the subjective experiences of young children? Why, of all the work that has been done on young children, is there an overwhelming tendency to avoid in-depth interviews and simply to use observations?

RESEARCHING RACISM IN YOUNG
CHILDREN’S LIVES

It is precisely this tendency to ignore the subjective experiences and concerns of young children that pervades the more specific studies of racism in their lives. Up until the mid-1980s, very little work sought to engage young children in any meaningful way. An assumption appeared to predominate that there was little point in attempting to encourage young children to reflect upon and articulate their beliefs in relation to ‘race’. Rather, as we have seen in relation to other work, it was believed that much more could be learned by simply observing these children and assessing how they react to particular situations. This led to the development of a plethora of psychological studies that commonly clustered around two main methods: attitudinal tests and sociometric analyses. The former commonly offered a child the choice of a Black or White doll and then drew conclusions as to the nature of their racial attitudes from the particular doll that they chose. The latter usually asked a number of young children each to nominate their three best friends and then drew conclusions as to their level of racial preference from the ethnic background of the children chosen.³ What emerges from these studies is the silence that has tended to surround young children. Very little attention has been given to the voices of the children themselves, and to allowing them the space to articulate their own experiences and concerns.

Sadly, even in the more recent ethnographic work, with its essentially qualitative and open focus using detailed observations and interviews with young children in their ‘natural’ settings, the same basic picture emerges. While this work has offered some very important insights into the nature of racism among primary school children, it has often tended to avoid young children altogether and/or simply ignore their subjective experiences and concerns.⁴ This is particularly evident in one of the more recent in-depth studies of racism and young children conducted by Holmes (1995). This study is particularly ironic given that she adopted a qualitative, ethnographic methodology with the express desire of entering into and understanding young children’s social worlds. However, while she spent much time talking to young children, she rarely appeared to listen to them (see Connolly 1997a). Consider the following example, where she was talking to Terri, a young Black girl:

Terri:	Some White people are mean. Because some White people sometimes, because some White people don’t like Black people and they’re mean. The other day I was walking to school. I saw this little White girl and I said ‘Hi’ and then she said ‘Hi’ and I thought she liked me and she did ’cause she played with me. One day, I was playing with this White girl and her mommy said I couldn’t play with her no more. She was mean.
Inv:	Are all White people mean?
Terri:	Not all, only some. You’re never mean, Robyn. You always play with us.

(Holmes 1995: 60)

According to Holmes, this conversation provided evidence of ‘young children’s inabilities to engage in deductive thinking’. As she went on to argue, ‘rather, these children concentrated on particular individuals and events when forming conceptions about groups of people’ (p. 60). And yet, as can clearly be seen from the above, Terri was very careful not to generalise from her experience with that one girl, even – ironically – against the encouragement of Holmes herself. Sadly, the constraining influence of traditional models of child development and socialisation appears to live on.

Moreover, this general approach to the study of young children has a number of wider repercussions. In particular it has led researchers to develop an all too simple and restricted understanding of the nature of racism in the children’s lives. If we take the psychological tests described above, then it is clear that the fixation with statistical aggregates and the desire to quantify and measure the levels of racial prejudice among young children have effectively ruled out any understanding of the contradictory and fluid nature of racism and its context-specific nature. Rather, racism has simply been regarded as a static set of beliefs that can be identified and measured among young children. Moreover, this is an understanding which assumes that once a child has internalised these attitudes they will uniformly act upon them, regardless of context. If a child chooses a White doll over a Black one in a laboratory test, for instance, then the assumption is that this indicates they are racially prejudiced and will always wish to avoid and exclude other minority ethnic children.

Even the more recent ethnographic work, in ignoring the particular perspectives and experiences of young children, has been limited in the appreciation it can offer of the complexities of racism in their lives. And yet, as illustrated by the quotes at the beginning of this chapter, as soon as we begin directly to engage young children and offer them the space to articulate their own concerns, then we can be left in little doubt of how competently and with what complexity the children are able to appropriate, rework and reproduce racist discourses in relation to a variety of situations and contexts.

It is this recognition of the social competency of young children and the active and diverse ways in which they make use of discourses on ‘race’ which forms the basis of this book. In focusing on racism, and in particular the significance of ‘race’ in the development of young children’s gender identities, I wish to move decisively beyond the confines of traditional socialisation and developmental models of childhood to foreground the subjective worlds of the children themselves. The study provides one of the first substantial pieces of work to place young children’s perceptions and experiences at the heart of its analysis. Through the use of a large number of interviews with the children and data gathered from detailed observations, the study offers a more in-depth account of how racism intervenes in their social worlds and the active role they play in managing, adapting and reproducing discourses on ‘race’ within this. More specifically, it draws attention to the ways in which racism represents one of many particular contexts within which young children actively come to develop a sense of their own gender identities and to think about others.

THE PRESENT STUDY

When you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.

(Lord Kelvin, quoted in Sayer 1992: 175)

There remains a distinct tendency to judge social research ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Key to transcripts
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Racism, culture and identity: towards a theory of practice
• 3 The racialisation of national political discourses
• 4 Living in the inner city: the Manor Park estate
• 5 Teacher discourses and East Avenue Primary School
• 6 From boys to men? Black boys in the field of masculine peer-group relations
• 7 Invisible masculinities? South Asian boys at East Avenue
• 8 The field of feminine peer-group relations and Black girls
• 9 The ‘Sexual Other’? South Asian girls at East Avenue
• 10 Conclusions
• Notes
• References
• Author index
• Subject index