Human Rights, Racism and the Multicultural Curriculum

Abstract

Several countries are now experiencing serious difficulties in the field of race relations and human rights. Economic decline has sharpened social tensions and helped to foster the emergence of extremist groups. Increases in racial harrassment and violence have been recorded and institutionalized and individual racism is seen by visible minority groups as the main and central issue in the struggle for legitimate human rights, justice and equality. Decisions on immigration and nationality appear capricious and racially motivated. At the same time, early enthusiasm for the development of a predominantly ’folkloric’ multicultural education has waned, before the time has been available or the resources concentrated on the construction of a more theoretically well‐based and practically operationalized multicultural curriculum. Increasingly, there is dissatisfaction from all shades of political opinion with, on the one hand, the apparent legitimating function of multicultural education vis‐à‐vis the status quo and, on the other, what are seen as the ridiculous pretensions of its adherents and the destabilising role which it may play. Now it is seen as part of capitalist society's racist comeback, now as the tool of Utopian and marginal revolutionaries and idealistic extremists.