Challenging anti-Black linguistic racism in schools amidst the ‘what works’ agenda

Figures & data

Table 1. A typology of anti-Black violence (adapted from Johnson, Bryan, and Boutte 2019, 52–53).

Type of anti-Black violence	Description	Examples as applied to schools in England
Physical violence	Physical abuse and assault that stems from racial discrimination and prejudicial ideologies.	Immigrant children attacked for speaking their home languages or their languages banned in school; illegal strip searches of Black children; the presence of police offers in school which further surveil and criminalise Black children (e.g. Joseph-Salisbury 2021).
Symbolic violence	A metaphorical representation and realisation of violence.	Disproportionate representation of Black children classified as having social, emotional and mental health difficulties (Strand and Lindorff 2021); racist representations of Black communities and their language in children’s literature (e.g. Chetty 2016).
Linguistic violence	Marginalising, policing and annihilating the language of Black children and teachers.	Ofsted’s hostile policing of Black communities’ language practices (Cushing & Snell 2022); the subscription to ‘word gap’ policies and interventions which are rooted in the miscategorisation of Black children’s language (Cushing 2022).
Curricular and pedagogical violence	Curricula, teaching texts, classroom materials, and standards that center white and Eurocratic notions of existing and being in the world.	National curricula underpinned by celebratory narratives of British colonialism and the active denial of Black writers from the classroom (e.g. Elliott et al. 2021); white people failing to recognise their complicity in the production of white supremacy (e.g. Kulz 2017); carceral pedagogies which force Black teachers to assimilate to idealised whiteness (Poku 2022).
Systemic school violence	Policies, processes, structures, customs and laws which reflect and reproduce racist and hegemonic ideologies.	Narratives of suspicion around non-European languages (Khan 2021); the state-sanctioned normalisation of racist, punitive, and exclusionary behaviour policies (e.g. Bei, Knowler, and Butt 2021); Islamophobic ideologies underpinning so-called British Values (e.g. Abdi 2022).

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