Critical Race Theory and Education: Racism and antiracism in educational theory and praxis David Gillborn*



different nation states. Notably, many scholars internationally share a common
experience of increasingly market-driven education reforms where key words like
“standards” and “accountability” are having are markedly regressive impact
regardless of the official tenor of the governing political party: Howard’s Australia,
Blair’s Britain and Bush’s America, for example, have each witnessed the emergence
of a complex and multifaceted Rightist “Hegemonic Bloc” (Apple, 1998a) that has
come to define educational commonsense in a particular way:

We are told to “free” our schools by placing them into the competitive market, restore
“our” traditional common culture and stress discipline and character, return God to our
classrooms as a guide to all our conduct inside and outside the school, and tighten central
control through more rigorous and tough-minded standards and tests. This is all supposed
to be done at the same time. It is all supposed to guarantee an education that benefits
everyone. Well, maybe not. (Apple, 2001, p. 5)

The paper has three main sections; first, I reflect on the role of theory in British
antiracism; second, the consequences of the present situation are examined; and
finally, CRT is outlined and its promise for critical antiracist scholarship and praxis is
considered.

Theory and Antiracism

Antiracism is a familiar term in many educational systems but with a wide variety of
specific meanings (see Carrim & Soudien, 1999). In Britain, antiracism arose as much
from a critique of liberal multiculturalism as it did from an analysis of the racist
nature of the state. Academics, notably in places like Birmingham’s now disbanded
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS, 1982), played a vital role but so
too did committed teachers and activists struggling to affect change in a wide variety
of ways (Bourne, 1980; Brah & Minhas, 1985; Brandt, 1986; Chevannes & Reeves,
1987; Coard, 1971; Cole, 1986; Dhondy, 1974; Gill & Levidow, 1987; Gilroy, 1987,
1988; Lawrence, 1982; Mullard, 1984; Nixon, 1985; Sarup, 1986; Tomlinson, 1984).
Antiracism established its credentials by exposing the deeply conservative nature of
approaches that struck liberatory postures but accepted the status quo and frequently
encoded deficit perspectives of Black children, their parents and communities. Among
many especially notable examples, perhaps the most influential were Hazel Carby’s
corrective to white middle class feminism (Carby, 1982) and Chris Mullard’s analysis
of the assimilationist basis of multicultural education (Mullard, 1982). In education
this trend was perhaps at its strongest and most sustained in the work of Barry Troyna.

Initially Troyna had been, in his own words, “seduced by the ideology of
multicultural education” (Troyna, 1993, p. vii) but he emerged as one of the most
steadfast critics of multiculturalism and the most prominent advocate of antiracist
education throughout a career cut tragically short by illness (Troyna, 1984, 1987,
1988, 1991, 1992, 1993). Troyna refused to compromise his antiracist commitments,
even when faced with the dual challenges of the postmodern turn and the Burnage
Inquiry—which in the late 1980s and early 1990s seemed to many commentators to
require a new but unspecified approach (Macdonald et al., 1989; Troyna &
Carrington, 1990; Troyna & Hatcher, 1992).1 The Burnage Inquiry has been dealt
with at length elsewhere,2 suffice it to say that a group of highly respected anti-racists
delivered a damning report on the state of race relations in a Manchester school where
a young Asian boy, Ahmed Iqbal Ullah, had been stabbed to death by a white peer. At
the time, the Burnage Inquiry was misread by many commentators as signalling the
end of antiracism. This owed a great deal to a concerted press campaign which grossly
distorted the report’s findings (see Macdonald et al., 1989, pp. xvii-xxv). In fact, the



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