policy responses), nor am I criticizing work that attempts to address race equity at the
school- and classroom level (this is a vital tool in the struggle for greater race equity).
Indeed, I have actively contributed to both strands of work, as have many colleagues
(predominantly scholars of colour) all of whom share a commitment to greater race
equality in education, and some of whom are self-avowedly antiracist (Bhavnani,
2001; Blair et al., 1998; Dadzie, 2000; Gillborn, 1995; Gillborn & Gipps, 1996;
Gillborn & Mirza, 2000; Haque, 2000; Modood et al., 1997; Osler, 1997; Richardson
& Wood, 1999; Weekes & Wright, 1999). This is important work but it is not the sum
of critical scholarship on race and education in Britain. There is a real danger that we
are being seduced (by funding priorities and demands to be “relevant”) into a school-
level focus that loses sight of the “bigger picture” (Thrupp & Wilmott, 2004, after
Ozga, 1990). If we only focus on the scale of inequity, and school-level approaches to
addressing it, we lose sight of the most powerful forces operating at the societal level
to sustain and extend these inequalities. Essentially, we risk tinkering with the system
to make its outputs slightly less awful, but leaving untouched the fundamental shape,
scale and purpose of the system itself.
There is a problem, therefore, of ensuring that antiracism resists the pressure to
become a reformist perspective and retains a radical, critical edge. This refers not only
to the directions taken by experienced and established researchers but also, indeed
especially, to the work of younger scholars. There is a pressing need to offer new
researchers a clear and coherent map to help them navigate the essentials of an
antiracist perspective. At present, there is a danger that each new researcher must “re-
invent the wheel” so far as antiracism is concerned. The lack of a clear and widely
understood set of antiracist perspectives means that each new contributor (scholar,
activist and/or practitioner) must re-learn the antecedents of any antiracist analyses
that they wish to develop. This is both wasteful and risky. It is wasteful because the
lack of a widely recognised antiracist framework means that each new researcher
must construct such a map for themselves. Of course, this can be highly rewarding
and generate new perspectives but it may be easier for new voices to re-shape and
revitalize antiracism if they could be more certain of what has gone before. This can
be difficult in such a diverse but relatively poorly charted field. In particular, it is
becoming increasingly difficult to access many of the original sources that have
shaped antiracism. The growth of ICT applications has had a major impact on how
educationists identify and access previous work in their field. There is a danger that
newer secondary sources (that are more easily accessed electronically) could come to
take prominence over older, but more detailed and contextually sensitive, original
sources. This is especially dangerous in the field of antiracism because of the
tendency of secondary sources to oversimplify the originals. Put simply, antiracism
needs a clear and accessible conceptual map in order to enable new antiracists to build
on the successes, failures and frustrations of previous work.
The present situation for antiracism, therefore, is not encouraging. A range of
different pressures (from the rhetoric of policymakers to the financial and lived
pressures of the academy) threaten to remove antiracism’s critical content and reduce
it to a reformist level where it is at best a palliative to make a divisive system seem a
little less exclusionary, and at worst, an empty phrase to be mouthed by policymakers
content that their plans can be enforced unchanged on a relatively docile audience. It
is in this context that Critical Race Theory may offer an invaluable way ahead for
antiracist scholars beyond North America and, as part of the process, CRT itself may
gain from a wider exposure to new territories, debates and questions.