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Abstract
This paper critically examines the discursive (mis) representation of ‘race’ and racism in the formal curriculum. Combining qualitative data derived from interviews with 35 young people who were enrolled in a Dublin-based, ethnically diverse secondary school, with a critical discursive analysis of 20 textbooks, the paper explores parallels between young people’s understandings of ‘race’ and racism and curricular representations of these constructs. It is argued that the formal education system reinforces, rather than challenges, popular theories of racism, and endorses the ideological framework of colour-blind racism by providing definitions and explanations which individualize, minimize, and naturalize racism. The analysis centres on four major inter-related themes: (1) the individualization of racism; (2) the attribution of racism to difference; (3) the role of narratives of denial and redemption in the construction of an ‘anti-racist’ state; and (4) the reification of ‘race’. The final section of the paper seeks to synthesize some of the broader political and ethical consequences and ideological effects of dominant discourses on ‘race’ and racism, and offers some concrete illustrations of how ‘race’ and racism could be re-narrativized in schools.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a Dean’s Grant for Student Research and a President’s Grant for Research in Diversity from Teachers College, Columbia University. It was also supported by a Conflict Resolution Network Award from Columbia University and a Spencer Foundation Research Training Grant, for which I am very grateful. I would like to thank Aaron Pallas and Anna Neumann for their very helpful advice regarding the publication of this paper. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their detailed and constructive comments on an earlier version of the paper. My thanks also to Melíosa Bracken and Benjamin Mallon for their editorial assistance.
Notes
1. Under the terms of the Equal Status Act (2000, 2004), schools in the Republic of Ireland are permitted to discriminate in their admission policies in order to ensure the maintenance of the religious ethos of the school, so long as this discrimination is publicized in the school’s admissions policy.
2. The 2006 census shows that 10% of the total population were classified as non-Irish nationals and that there was an 87% increase in the number of non-Irish nationals resident in the State in the 4-year period between 2002–2006.
3. Despite a professed commitment to ‘combating racism’, the National Action Plan Against Racism devotes minimal attention to issues of ‘race’ and racism and rationalizes the need for anti-racism in terms of securing economic competitiveness and bolstering the country’s national reputation, not because racism has profoundly unjust and devastating consequences for those who experience it. For a critical analysis of Irish anti-racism policy outside of education, see Bryan (Citation2010) and Lentin and McVeigh (Citation2006).
4. There is little distinction between how the concepts of interculturalism and multiculturalism are deployed and operationalized in practice. Moreover, despite rhetorical nods to ‘inclusion’, ‘equality’, and ‘human rights’ in official discourse, inter-culturalism has become increasingly integrationist and assimilationist in its ideological approach as it has evolved as a policy response to the increasing diversification of Irish society. In 2010, an Intercultural Education Strategy 2010–2015 was launched by the Department of Education and Skills and Office of the Minister for Integration. ‘Successful integration’ of migrants is one of the dominant themes of the strategy, and the word ‘integration’ appears 89 times in the document. Successful integration is identified as a ‘precondition for Europe’s economic competitiveness and for social stability and cohesion’ (Department of Education and Skills and Office of the Minister of Integration [DES and OMI] 2010: 57), as opposed to say a means of the tackling the historical and contemporary injustices of racism. Moreover, the expectation that Ireland should ‘accommodate’ or ‘respect’ cultural diversity is repeatedly expressed in conditional terms. For example, successful integration is defined as comprising a two-way dynamic, with ‘mutual respect for cultural differences, ‘as long as these do not conflict with the fundamental democratic values of society’ (DES and OMI 2010: 48, emphasis added). The strategy further maintains that diversity should be respected and accommodated ‘where it contributes to the social good’ and that ‘cultural and identity values’ should be protected ‘as long as they do not infringe on the overall good and wellbeing of Irish society’ (DES and OMI 2010: 47–48).
5. Specific problems with how this additive logic intersects with the existing curriculum in the Irish context have already been addressed as part of the larger project on which the present study is based (Bryan Citation2008, Bryan and Bracken Citation2011b).
6. All names used to refer to people and places in this article are pseudonyms.
7. The source of this quotation is deliberately omitted to protect the identity of the school.
8. One of the somewhat unique features of the Irish education system, relative to other liberal democracies, is the level of Church involvement in the ownership, governance, and running of schools. While the education system is funded or ‘aided’ by the state, ownership and control of schools rests predominantly with Trustees or Patrons; these patrons are defined almost exclusively in denominational terms (Devine Citation2011). BHC is a Community college, under the control of the County Dublin Vocational Educational Committee (CDVEC). While community colleges are theoretically non-denominational, in the sense that they neither admit nor refuse to enrol students on the basis of their religion, in practice, the underlying ethos or spirit of many such schools often remains overtly or subtly Christian. Community Colleges (also known as vocational schools) comprise about a third of all second-level or post-primary schools in the Republic of Ireland, and cater for a similar proportion of students. They are administered by local Vocational Educational Committees (VECs), which are statutory bodies with responsibility for providing a broad range of educational and training programmes, including the management and operation of second-level and further education colleges. Secondary schools, which comprise 54% of post-primary schools in the Republic, are, in contrast, privately owned and managed, in most cases by religious communities (predominantly Catholic), and can give preference in enrolment to students whose religious identification supports the ethos of the school. The remainder of second-level schools in the Republic of Ireland are community and comprehensive schools, which were established in the 1960s as a new model of post-primary education, most of which are under the control of the VECs.
9. The term ‘international students’ was the term used by school administrators to refer to ethnic minority students of migrant background, irrespective of how long they had lived in Ireland or whether they were Irish citizens. Nine of the ‘international’ students were of Eastern or Central European origin (from countries such as Bosnia, Albania, Romania, and Russia) and were white. The remainder were from Africa, South East Asia, or the Middle East (India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Democratic Republic of Congo) and were racialized as ‘other than white’.
10. To the extent that I drew on the discourse of ‘race’ in at least some of the interview questions means that I am equally guilty of encouraging young people to think uncritically in racialized terms.
11. I spent on average 3 days per week at BHC, and also volunteered as a language support teacher 1 day per week, providing ‘extra English classes’ to individual and small groups of English as an additional language (EAL) students. My own whiteness, as well as my positioning as an Irish-born adult and as a language support tutor within the school who was asking about a ‘controversial’ topic, was a persistent feature of the research process and surely shaped how young people chose to respond to the interview schedule and to express their views on ‘race’ and racism. See McLeod and Yates (2003) for a more detailed discussion of the ways in which researcher and participant positionality affects responses in interviews about racism.
12. Out of a total of 26 examinable subjects, students are typically examined in 8 to 10 subjects for the junior certificate exam. English, Irish, Mathematics, Science, CSPE, History, and Geography are mandatory subjects in most schools.
13. Some of the racialized minority students whom I interviewed self-identified as Irish or as both Irish and another nationality, and some had Irish citizenship. The term ‘Irish-born’ in this context refers to students who were born in Ireland.
14. As I have discussed elsewhere, at least some racialized minority students who attended BHC experienced racist name-calling, verbal insults, and ‘slagging’; in one reported instance, a group of female Pakistani Muslim students were targeted by a group of white Irish boys in the schoolyard during the holy month of Ramadan. Aware that the students were fasting, these boys threw food and stones at the female students, hitting them in the face and head (Bryan 2009b).
15. BHC’s policy of ‘positive inter-culturalism’ was largely focused on informing students that racism was unacceptable or ‘wrong’ during events to ‘celebrate’ the cultural diversity of its student body and on facilitating and ensuring positive interaction and social integration between Irish and ‘international’ students and members of the wider community, through such activities as a ‘buddy-system’ pairing Irish and international students and social evenings for parents from different cultural backgrounds. A more detailed analysis of the school’s positive inter-culturalism policies and practices is described in Bryan (2009a) and Bryan and Bracken (2011b).
16. Jews in many European nations and the Irish in the UK have, of course, indeed, historically been treated as racial groups, but the reasons for this did not feature in the texts I analysed.
17. Between 1933–1946, the Irish government admitted only 60 Jewish refugees, and Jewish immigration was actively obstructed by a number of Irish civil servants, including Charles Bewley, the Irish envoy in Berlin in the 1930s. Bewley claimed that that Jews monopolize academic positions, dominate the financial world, refuse to assimilate, and ‘invariably sacrifice the interests of the country of their birth to Jewish interests’ when ‘the interests of the country of their birth come into conflict with their own personal or racial interests’ (Bewley 1938, cited in Keogh 1998: 132–133).
18. ‘Operation Shamrock’ was an initiative by the Irish Red Cross which ran between 1945–1950 to save German, British, and French children from starvation and the destruction of post-World War II Europe. Approximately 1000 children—most of whom were German Catholics—were taken to Ireland to be cared for by Irish foster families. While most of the children returned to their countries of origin after a number of years, some remained in Ireland.
19. The Irish Taoiseach, Eamon De Valera, eventually granted permission for the children to come to Ireland on the grounds that their stay would be for a limited duration of 2 years, that they would be removed elsewhere as soon as arrangements could be made, and that the Chief Rabbi’s Religious Emergency Council would take full responsibility for the proper care and maintenance of the children while they remained in this country (Department of Justice memorandum April 1948, cited in Keogh 1998: 211).
20. Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Féin, published an editorial in and around the time of the Pogrom in the United Irishman, which identified Jews as enemies of the nation, depicting them as ‘… strange people, alien to us in thought, alien to us in sympathy’ and as ‘people who come to live amongst us, but who never become of us’ (cited in Fanning Citation2002: 49).
21. Apple (Citation2000) differentiates three ways in which people can potentially respond to a text: dominant (where one accepts the messages at face value); negotiated (where a reader may dispute a particular claim but still accept the overall interpretation); and oppositional (where the reader rejects dominant interpretations and repositions herself in relation to the text).