Warning: this article contains a racial slur
“What do you call Pakis in a box?”
“What?”
“Coco Pops!”
An eight-year-old told me this joke when I was in P5 in Falkirk back in the 1990s, while we were in the dinner line. He laughed, waiting for my reaction. I visualised the similarity of a crushed group of brown-faced people and a packed box of brown-covered rice cereal, which made me burst out laughing. But I knew the boy was trying to insult me, having been called that racial slur many times already in my new neighbourhood. My response to his “joke”?
“What do you call white people in a box?”
“What?”
“Rice Krispies!”
That wee boy was gobsmacked at how I turned the “joke” around and I remember never hearing from him again.
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Playground politics is a mixture of what is being learned at home and what is reinforced at school. The notion of white privilege has been embedded in Western culture for so long it has become the norm. But it’s amazing what happens when the mirror is held up and the situation reversed. Just like with that wee boy.
Fast-forward to the present day, and it is sad to see that not much has changed. Both of my children have been called “brown chocolate” and “poo” because of their skin colour. Unfortunately, they do not have the same confidence to retaliate with an equivalent comparison. The question arises, then, is: why hasn’t this situation changed in the past 20 years?
My then six-year-old’s teacher, proudly showcasing the class’s learning journey, tweeted a photograph of learners painting the human body (which was their topic). Five out of five were of Caucasian resemblance. That’s when it clicked. I promptly sent a reply to the teacher highlighting this, and the next tweet had a brown body in it. Equality was achieved! But what struck me was that this class already had one brown South Asian and one black African pupil. So why did I, as a parent, need to point out to the teacher about making a visual representation of different skin colours?
As an MSc student of the Education, Public Policy and Equity (EPPE) course, my perspective has adjusted to analyse education through a critical lens of social justice. So naturally, when it comes to curriculum resources, I do the same because I believe if Scotland is to be an equitable nation then social justice needs to be achieved.
In a contribution to the EPPE blog, titled “The Scottish Curriculum and Minority Representation”, I argue that subliminal messages and context highlight race inequality in curriculum resources. For example, the popular resource library of Twinkl, in which most characters are white, embeds in the subconscious mind that white skin is more prevalent, therefore more important. Context influences the absorbent mind, such as portraying Winston Churchill as a hero during the topic of the Second World War, while missing out his roles in the East (whitewashing, anybody?). To produce critical thinkers, surely more than one perspective should be taught?
While educators are restricted to teach the content outlined in the “experiences and outcomes” in Curriculum for Excellence, there is always scope in the classroom to challenge the whitewashed syllabus, such as having a variety of skin colours in resources and including black and ethnic-minority authors in reading lists. I read from different researchers that typical children become socially aware from the age of 5. We must be aware that, as influencers of young minds, we may have the power to embed social justice mechanisms for better or worse.
Since my time in primary school, it seems as though the traditional characters of Biff, Chip and Kipper - used to help generations of primary pupils learn to read - may be making more diverse friends since the 1990s (imagine my delight). More generally, however, we are still far away from 21st-century education expectations.
Race equality needs to be incorporated at all levels in the Scottish curriculum, including resources with multilateral diversity and training to encourage and empower educators from the top down to incorporate this discourse. In recent months, at least, two South Asian women have been appointed depute headteacher, but we only had one in Scotland prior to that. This is not good enough. In 20 years, the white hierarchy of education governance has not changed much. Perhaps we need to start from there.
Farah Farzana is community and political activist and a member of the University of Glasgow’s Education, Public Policy and Equity Network (@EPPE_Network). She tweets @faz627 and writes a blog on living as a Muslim in the modern world
