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stare 09-08-2010, 00:10   #3
Jelonek
Kwoka - out, loud & proud
 
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Zarejestrowany: Aug 2006
Skąd: Essex
wiek: 38
Kraj partnera: Zimbabwe
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Domyślnie Odp: Good article about mixed-race family in England (from the Times).

continued:
Instead of addressing the racist behaviour with the girl or discussing it with our daughter by way of support, the school proposes “friendship counselling” for them both. By this stage there has long since ceased to be any friendship.
Months later, early last summer, there was yet more unpleasantness with this girl and her family and the racist incident was raised. The mother plausibly denied knowing anything about it.
The head had apparently never spoken to her and had never recorded it either. So he cannot prove his claim that he really did speak to the mother. I suspect, in fact, he avoided speaking to her because he finds her difficult to confront. Instead, it appears, he fobbed me off with a lie.
It is during and because of this sequence of events that Petal starts to feel isolated — let down by the head, avoiding talking about it to others because there are no black people around to share it with and she doesn’t want to have to keep explaining it.
The school makes little or no attempt to celebrate diversity or embrace black history and culture. Why bother, seems to be the position, when there are so few black people. Arguably, of course, the more homogenous the racial mix the more important it is to teach diversity.
When our daughter was having the problem with her hair, her friend told her not to worry, she knew just how she felt. That girl is mixed-race too and her father, Mo, now separated from her mother, has lived in Lewes for many years where he works as a potter. There are, even now, what seems like no more than a handful of black and mixed-race families in Lewes — you very quickly get to know all the rest by sight, even if you don’t actually talk to them, though Petal, much to our children’s shame, will smile and start a conversation with more or less any passing black person she sees down here. In London, that would have been impractical and ridiculous.
One person we got to know that way was Tony Kalume, who was black African from Kenya and came here with his white English wife four years ago. They have two children. Tony recalled early on in Lewes seeing a black man walking towards him and the excited look on the other man’s face: wow! Another black man! Tony wondered from then on what kind of place Lewes would be.



All the conversations I had with Tony and others about their lives in Lewes would lead to school, to education… to Tony’s son, at the local secondary where his English teacher admitted he had been “surprised” to find that Tony’s son was a talented writer. Like our eight-year-old, like other black or mixed-race boys, Tony’s son could do “cool” to white people’s satisfaction, but being black or mixed-race is not just about being “cool”, it is about… well, everything that being any other child was about.
Happily, at Mackenzie’s school, the old head retired a year ago and a new head arrived and suddenly it was very different. Within a week or two she had called the staff together and told them there was a problem with race in the school that needed to be addressed. Within a month of her start every pupil had drawn a portrait and written a poem about a black icon. Mandela, Beyoncé, footballers, actors… their images were plastered all over the main corridors. A new race-and-diversity policy was drawn up. As far as we were concerned, the school was transformed.
We wished the new head could take her ideas to the town’s moribund secondary school, too, where there is also an outgoing head, who seemed to us a remote, aloof figure, and where, again, black history barely features.
Unsurprisingly, in such an atmosphere, our two older daughters at the school often overhear or are subjected to casual racism — microaggressions. On a couple of occasions a pupil tells “nigger” jokes in the playground in front of our 13-year-old. At one stage she has a small group of friends who want to give each other cute nicknames. One wants to call our daughter “chocolate-brown bear”. No, says our daughter, you can’t call me that, it’s racist. The girl doesn’t get it — which is bad enough for our daughter — and won’t change her mind, which is worse. In the end our daughter walks away from the friendship. She is worn down by what she sees as the constant use of racist language in the playground: “Chinks”, “( )s”, “Pikeys” and all varieties of racist jokes. She thinks nobody can do anything to stop it as it is so ingrained in the school’s playground culture. There are so few black pupils at the school that the handful are highly visible, none more so than a young boy who is always getting into trouble and ends up being permanently excluded. I pick up a local paper, the Sussex Express, one day and there is the boy in a mug shot on the front page. He is the lead story because he has been given an Asbo — “Lewes crime spree teen hit with Asbo”.
I look at this in dismay. Here in Lewes in 2010 a boy of 14 is being demonised on the front page of the paper and entirely legally. In fact, the magistrate issuing the Asbo has gone out of his way to call for publicity. There are stocks in the grounds of Lewes Castle, perhaps we should put the boy in there too. That would teach him.
A week after the black boy’s appearance on the front page, another Asbo story featured a white miscreant — a man jailed for 13 months. But this story appeared on page five.
The black boy’s father pointed this out to me as an example of racist unfairness — but the editor of the paper insisted to me they had done nothing wrong and threatened to sue for defamation if I say he or any of his staff were racist. The paper did subsequently produce a front-page Asbo story featuring another white man, but I am still haunted by the image of that one black boy.
Of course, I am thinking not just about that one demonised boy but about my own son and whether he too will go on being visible and singled out because of his race. Petal says no way is our son going to the local secondary. Let’s wait and see, I say, how things will change with a new head. I wonder what might be possible.
I hear of a new school in Brixton, Evelyn Grace Academy, where they are overturning all the old myths about black pupils. Peter Walker, the principal, welcomes me on a visit. It is an extraordinary place, perhaps the most remarkable state school in the country, modelled on high schools on the south side of Chicago. Three-quarters of its pupils are black or mixed-race. The day begins at 8.30am and ends 90 minutes after most other schools at 5pm. There is more time for study and less time for mischief outside. Mischief in that area readily extends to drugs and violent crime. So far, it has stayed at the door.
Every pupil is expected to go on to higher education after achieving five A*-Cs at GCSE.
Pupils move from class to class in total silence, they never barge about in the corridors. At breaks they are not allowed to form groups of more than six. They all have a book, a paperback in their blazer pocket. At the end of break the staff raise their hands and the pupils line up in single file, taking out and reading their books.
Each pupil, and their parents, has a close relationship with the school. It is like a primary school ethos in that respect. Parents are contacted directly for any problem and know, before their child ever gets to the school, that they are entering into a very demanding arrangement. Remarkably, something like 40-45% of all the pupils have arrived with some kind of statement or supposed diagnosis of special educational needs (SEN) or learning difficulties. The school is finding that many of those issues just fall away as pupils are drawn into the rigid system and discover that it becomes a platform for learning.
Norris Morrissey, who is the school’s lead SEN co-ordinator, told me of pupils who had thrown chairs around in class at primary school and threatened primary teachers with knives, but responded positively to the Evelyn Grace regime.
And, in an unanticipated knock-on effect, the school’s ethos was having an impact in the community too. On two occasions pupils had been applauded as they walked smartly through Brixton market on a trip. People liked the way the school was overcoming the stigma that sometimes attached to the area.
Just as I was writing this our 13-year-old came home from school and told us about that day’s music lesson on West Side Story during which the teacher had spoken of when the “coloured” people came to America. How terrible, and ironic, that a celebrated musical about the tragedy of racism should be taught in such ignorant terms.
I just knew our son Mackenzie would have loved Evelyn Grace and told Walker I would have been proud to have him be a pupil there but, of course, we live in Lewes not Brixton and that would be one hell of a daily school run. We could move back to London, and sometimes that seems like a good idea, but there have been many positive aspects to our move too, mainly involving making good friends, our children included.
Still, there is constant talk between Petal and I of alternative approaches to our children’s education — often agonising conversations about what to do for the best, especially about how to save Mackenzie from his statistical destiny.
We can only hope that a bit of Brixton comes to Lewes, and some of that inspirational approach to teaching and overcoming racism in education eventually rubs off round here.
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