Should I Be Talking to BME People About Race?

I've just come out of one of the most intense classes I've ever been involved with and thought it might be worth mentioning, even though I'll have to skirt around some aspects to preserve students' confidences and identities.

I run a module which looks at literary and cultural responses to a number of liberation movements: mostly literature but occasionally other media. It has flaws: like all modules, there's too little time to do too much and I made the decision – perhaps erroneously – to cover several movements rather than devote the module to, for example, African-American civil rights, or gay liberation. It feels, therefore, a touch if-it's-Thursday-it-must-be-feminism about it, really just skimming the surface and it obviously reflects my interests. Not ideal, but I wanted students to get their hands on as many texts as possible that they might never otherwise see. We look at two proletarian/socialist novels, Gwyn Thomas's The Alone to the Alone and Lewis Jones's Cwmardy, Virginia Woolf's 'Three Guineas' and Valerie Solanas's Manifesto of the Society for Cutting Up Men, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Gil Scott-Heron's The Nigger Factory and Reni Eddo-Lodge's Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Ginsberg's Howl, Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Tony Harrison's poem 'V', Alan Moore's V for Vendetta and Chuck Pahlaniuk's Fight Club.

It's a small second-year class - 19 when everyone turns up, and I know all the regular attenders well from first-year, except for the Erasmus students. Only one student is male, virtually everyone is the first person in their family to attend university, there's a fair age range, and the students' ethnic origins are very diverse – much more so than you'd get in an Oxford college for instance. Basically, they reflect the local community and this institution's stated intention of making HE available to all.

Each week, I expect the students to have read the week's text(s) and we start with a sub-group presenting their perspectives. They're asked to build in opportunities for discussion, and part of the overall grade depends on participation in other groups' presentations. That means everyone has to read all the books and contribute in the way they'd expect others to contribute to their own week. Nobody can hide at the back or ride freely.

Some weeks the texts seem impossibly distanced from the students' lives. Cwmardy and The Alone to the Alone aroused considerable debate, but the days of autonomous, organised mass working-class politics sounded fantastic to them, depending as it does on mass employment, industrial economies and less atomised communities. All of the students have jobs, but unionisation is either a mystery to them or a privilege of middle-class, securely-employed people like me. A lot of students liked 'Three Guineas' but found Woolf's (self-admitted) concern for upper bourgeois women limiting: Manifesto led to a huge discussion about men and sexism in their own lives, but the rhetorical aspects of Solanas's work, especially the humour, was missed. Last week we looked at Invisible Man, the 1950s classic of one man's attempt to be himself when neither his black community, the Communist Party nor white society would ever see him as anything other than a type or a representative. All the discussions were lively, sometimes going on for 90 minutes without me having to say much at all, and the students' engagement was serious, passionate and thoughtful (even though at least one person initially read The Invisible Man before realising her mistake!). It's also an education for me, intellectually and emotionally. I'm essentially Privilege personified: every week I teach people who don't look, act or sound like me about texts in which the people who do look, sound and behave like me are justifiably the enemy. All the things I'm reading about in the abstract are being experienced by my students in their daily lives.

This week was Gil Scott-Heron's The Nigger Factory and Reni Eddo-Lodge's book, starting with a presentation by three white continental European students from different countries about the latter text. All the terms that have swirled around in current debates came to a head, particularly 'white privilege'. Even requiring students to read a book with this title, and talk about the word in class, is an act of white, gendered, class privilege: while I've been the target of local media ire in the past, I can't help thinking that a black colleague – if we had any – would face accusations of indoctrination by the forces of reaction.We talked about discourse and representation, about media coverage and about 'black racism'. Students discussed their personal lives, the murders of close friends, their experiences in schools and relationships and tried to fit them into the racialised structures identified by Eddo-Lodge and Scott-Heron. We talked about why I and my colleagues don't look like the student body in terms of sex, gender, class and race, and we looked at the notorious White Saviour advert the university deployed in the summer (which I ridiculed in an earlier blog post). The discussion quite often became an argument and I tried hard, not completely successfully, to encourage students to express themselves honestly while thinking about the impact of their language choices and assumptions.

One of the things that came out is the huge amount of emotional and intellectual labour needed to discuss these things. When we discussed representations of BME characters in fiction, we talked about the way their plots always relate to their ethnic identity, or they're always bad guys: the BME students made it very clear how utterly exhausting it is to live – like the nameless protagonist of Invisible Man – as a type or an issue rather than a person. Conversely, my white students had to work hard too: Lodge's book in particular demands that white people examine their lives and fortunes as the product of structural racism rather than individual good or bad luck or effort. One student needed a break to calm down after some ill-chosen words struck home, while we all struggled to relate anecdote to systemic issues. Voices were raised and I frequently had to consider the tensions between free speech, full exchanges of views and the nature of offence. 'Safe space' is a much-abused concept these days, but we all had to think about it, and I had to consider the ways in which the power I wielded in that classroom is a product of my own multiple privileges, and whether I was wielding it responsibly (I did encourage revolt though). One of my slides simply asked 'should I be in the room?'.

I've never left a three hour class before so sure that we could have carried on literally all day, but I'm also left with doubts and concerns, particularly about my duty of care towards them. I'm thrilled that my students felt able to say what they think to each other; I'm not sure that all the wounds will heal, and the hard labour involved falls disproportionately on those from subaltern positions. There are wounds, and many of the students were clearly reassessing their own perspectives and others' as the class went on. I genuinely don't know whether the pain involved justified requiring them to read and consider these texts. One student very much felt that the opportunity to talk about these things in the open was exactly what a university should be doing, but I'm sure that others felt that either their own lives were post-racial, or that they might be expected to speak as representatives of their own ethnicities. All lives are texts, I suggested, but a classroom shouldn't become a psychologist's couch with the students and teachers as the psychologist. I'm not from a culture that shares much (ugh), but that means that if I weren't a perpetually-worried academic, I probably wouldn't interrogate my behaviours and their contexts much either: while my students have a very full range of personal and political perspectives, they're much happier to discuss them without filter as the kids say.

It comes down to power. I have it, they largely don't. I used it to make them confront themselves and others through the medium of these texts. If I hadn't, would they have had the opportunity to consider these issues? Is it OK to invite BME students to publicly address their experience in the interest of educating those from the dominant group, or is it empowering to given them and the others the opportunity to locate their personal experiences within structures and systems? At the very least, we can't just 'do' this subject in one class and move on: it's got to be part of a long, serious conversation.

Any thoughts?

Midsomer Madness?

The producer of inexplicably-popular Sunday night crime drama Midsomer Murders has claimed today that part of the appeal of his show is that there are no non-white faces.

"We just don't have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn't be the English village with them. It just wouldn't work.

"Suddenly we might be in Slough. Ironically, Causton (one of the main centres of population in the show) is supposed to be Slough. And if you went into Slough you wouldn't see a white face there.

"We're the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way," he added.

"I'm trying to make something that appeals to a certain audience, which seems to succeed. And I don't want to change it." 

The setting is an English village: such places are almost exclusively white, which is certainly true. What bothers me though is that he isn't really claiming that his show is realist - he's asserting that he has deliberately excluded ethnic minority characters and actors because his audience doesn't want to see them.

I hope - and assume - that this isn't true. I'm sure that a lot of the programme's appeal is the nostalgic presentation of a time-warped village society, but apart from the OAP wing of the British National Party, I'm certain that nobody's settling down of a Sunday evening with the intention of watching something specifically because it's all white.

True-May's racism is clear in his sweeping claim that Slough is non-white. In actual fact, the 2001 census reveals that Slough's population is 58% White British plus 5% White Irish/Other, which looks pretty white to me.

I don't think TV should be tokenistically sticking ethnic minority actors into every show, but I fail to see how skin colour should be a selection factor for a murder comedy drama. To deliberately exclude them does look racist to me. I'm also disturbed by this definition of Englishness as white. Given that the English are an incredible mix of various Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and many other groups, deciding that Englishness is a matter of skin colour rather than location and/or a range of cultural activities (difficult enough in itself) is deeply problematic.

Black? Get back.

No doubt Oxford and Cambridge (and some of my readers) will provide complex arguments about why this isn't so bad as it appears, but I'm shocked.

more than 20 Oxbridge colleges made no offers to black candidates for undergraduate courses last year and one Oxford college has not admitted a single black student in five years.

The university's admissions data confirms that only one black Briton of Caribbean descent was accepted for undergraduate study at Oxford last year.

Let's just reflect on that for a minute. Are we really going to accept that across all classes and educational backgrounds, there was only one British-Caribbean student worthy of a place at Oxford?

Figures revealed in requests made under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act by the Labour MP David Lammy also show that Oxford's social profile is 89% upper- and middle-class, while 87.6% of the Cambridge student body is drawn from the top three socioeconomic groups. The average for British universities is 64.5%, according to the admissions body Ucas.

The FoI data also shows that of more than 1,500 academic and lab staff at Cambridge, none are black. Thirty-four are of British Asian origin.

One Oxford college, Merton, has admitted no black students in five years – and just three in the last decade. Eleven Oxford colleges and 10 Cambridge colleges made no offers to black students for the academic year beginning autumn 2009.

No one from Knowsley, Sandwell and Merthyr Tydfil has got to Cambridge in seven years. In the last five years, pupils from Richmond upon Thames have received almost the same number of offers from Oxford as the whole of Scotland. 

The 'élite' universities are the training grounds for power: your chance of success in any field, but especially politics and government, is immensely boosted by attending these places, with their élite social networks. Denying access to the poor, regional and minority ethnic applicant reinforces the closed nature of the ruling class. Obviously, I'd rather make all universities as good and respected, but in the meantime, we need to smash down the doors. These minority applicants aren't asking for relaxed entrance requirements: they're the best. Take exam results out of the equation and we're left with a very crude and unpleasant explanation for why they're rejected. 

Your opinion please

I spent the afternoon firstly at a union meeting (very productive), then showing Laurence Olivier's Othello on DVD. It's the only performance the university had available on DVD - there are some ancient video tapes, but one has white man Anthony Hopkins playing Othello. Another features Laurence Fishburne, but it's only 'based on' the play, and the Willard White version has its own problems (and I didn't see it on the shelf).

Olivier plays the lead role. He's a brilliant actor, but there's no getting round the fact that he's blacked-up for the role, and looks ludicrous. It's a fascinating insight into the racial politics of the 1960s, and of the theatre world - but it's also very uncomfortable, to put it mildly.

The question is: should this performance not be screened, ever? My class is racially diverse and (I hope) antiracist. Olivier's film is 45 years old. Should we show it and talk about the cultural situation which somehow made it OK for him to black up, or should we see it as so unquestionably racist that it should never be seen again? Should students of colour be protected from seeing this stuff? Some would say: it happened and needs talking about. Others would say: these students have plenty of experience with racism, why add to it?

So - what would you have done? At least one student is upset, and it's really on my mind. Here's a clip - Olivier appears about 3 and a half minutes in:

I ain't no suit-wearin' businessman like you... you know I'm just a gangsta I suppose...

Quote of the day, from the passionate, leftwing author of The Wire, to which I'm quite attached:

"It is possible," he has observed, "that a few thinking viewers, after experiencing a season or two of The Wire, might be inclined, the next time they hear some politician declaring that with more prison cells, more cops, more lawyers, and more mandatory sentences that the war on drugs is winnable, to say, aloud: 'You are hopelessly full of shit'."

I do worry a little about watching the show - it's pretty voyeuristic to watch the travails of a mostly-black city. From top to bottom, it depicts a capitalist dystopia in which life is cheap, getting paid is all that matters, and from which all oversight is absent. The newspaper jettisons standards and journalists at an appalling rate. The politicians are obsessed with their careers and kickbacks, whether they started idealistically or not. The legal system is politically compromised, and the police - some of whom are broken, others corrupt - care little for their citizens, with a few exceptions. The unions are mob-controlled, the schools act as mini-prisons for kids who really want to be earning on the corners, and the black men are determined to kill or be killed for money and prestige. Add the racial tensions and you have a recipe for disaster.

Yes, it's fiction, but it's based on long experience. The Tories are currently claiming that the UK is like The Wire, which is astonishingly irresponsible, and proof that they haven't actually watched it: the show's implied solutions are leftwing, calling for altruism, a strong and caring state and a sense of community. The Wire's problems, meanwhile, are those of Thatcherite capitalism, in which unbridled capitalism, the free market, privatisation, contempt for public services and 'there is no such thing as society' (Thatcher) feature prominently. Think about it: drugs are a selfish bit of indulgence. There's demand, and businessmen have spotted a gap in the market and behaved like good little capitalists by filling it. Legality, guns and the like don't matter - we've all been taught that profit is more important than morality or community. The dealers shouldn't be alienated: they're just further along the continuum that is us.

Monday conundrum! What the hell is 'the British way of life'?

Ok, I'm still here. There's been a certain amount of traffic to my post on the government's plan to restrict freedom of speech to well-behaved citizens, and I'm still annoyed by the incredibly rightwing and intellectually vacuous nature of the idea. (The main discussion of this in relation to freedom of speech was in an astonishing interview on Radio 4)

However, Phil Woolas says that you can only have your say if you agree with 'the British way of life' (odd: you can say whatever you want as long as you agree), and you have to admit, there's a great argument to be had here. (What's he like? Try here).

So come on, what's your definition of 'British way of life'? Remember - you can't have anything specifically English, Scots or Welsh. Even the things that the Norn Irish unionists think are British aren't - e.g. wearing bowlers, hating Catholicism and fetishising the Queen.

'Britain' in its current state has only been around since 2000 or so - whenever the devolved Scots and Welsh assemblies opened. Before that, Ireland's withdrawal from the UK was 1922 or 1937 depending on your preference. Ireland was only technically 'in' since 1801, and Scotland was incorporated in 1601. 1563 saw the final conquering of Wales, and of course 'England' was merely a French Norman outpost for most of the 1066-1500 period. 'England' before that was a patchwork of Saxon and Celtic states. So really, it's a recent and unstable state, as Colley's Britons brilliantly demonstrates.

So what's 'British'? 100 years ago, you could have said that all the constituent nations got together to invade places, take their raw materials and hook them on opium (China, 19th century). Making things, inventing sports (playing them well was a colonial innovation). Speaking English was an English imposition on the rest of the UK, aided by eager sell-outs, but it didn't fully work. What else? Tea-drinking is quite popular in Ireland, India and China, though the former acquired the habit through the Empire.

There's a massive tradition of dissent and protest: the Peasants' Revolt, the Levellers, Diggers and so on during the Civil War, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists, the NUM, Marx and Engels living here, and the Poll Tax rioters. Parliamentary democracy is a possible contender, though plenty of other states got there first (go Iceland) and perfected it quicker, by letting women and the poor vote, and of course lots of places don't have an unelected upper chamber and a first-past-the-post lower one.

Monarchy? A mixed blessing, and hardly original (or indeed native). Beautiful weather and landscape are strong contenders. Perhaps mass participation sports - cycling and rambling, though they were big in Germany too, until the Nazis banned them. The pound? OK, though retaining it hasn't been much use. Co-operative Societies were invented in Britain - a Welshman (Robert Owen) opened the first co-operative factory in Scotland (New Lanark) and the first co-operative society opened in Rochdale in 1839.

Strong trades unions were perhaps a British innovation, and they were closely tied to the very democratic forms of religion which sprouted in the 18th century - Methodism in particular (there's a saying - unfortunately true - that the Labour Party owes more to Methodism than to Marx). How about the famous British love of an eccentric, from Beckford to racist comic, philanderer and Mayor of London (Alexander) Boris Johnson?

Beckford:

'Boris' and his friends at university:

I guess there's literature, about which I shouldn't have to say much. I'd also be tempted to say that the vibrancy of pop culture is quite a British thing, though borders are porous in this regard. Political satire and a dark sense of humour are strong threads, though Serbs and Russians apparently share the same gloomy outlook. Nostalgia? Individualism? Consumerism? Benefit cheating? Jeremy Kyle? Eating sausages and chips on Spanish beaches? Loving animals more than their children (except for foxes)? The BBC, the Guardian, Steve Bell or the Daily Mail? White people in stately homes or mixed race couples on the streets of Wolverhampton?

Swearing. If there's one brilliant achievement of the British, it's swearing. Not so much the Welsh, as Welsh-language swearing is mostly religious oaths, but there's definitely a national love of inventive, baroque, witty swearing, such as Malcolm Tucker.

It's hard, isn't it? Cultures aren't monolithic: they influence and are influenced. Within any society there are competing and co-existing beliefs. That's what makes life a) fun and b) progressive - the dialectic ensures that ideas are debated. The goverment's plan is to preserve some bullshit idea of what constitutes Britishness (and you just know it's going to be a terrible bunch of self-righteous platitudes) and fix it in amber.

So what's the perfect Brit? A sunburned fat bloke in a union jack hat, slumped in front of Jeremy Kyle, calling Gordon Brown a See You Next Tuesday? If you don't like it, you can go back where you came from. And I'll come with you.

Or, is it an eccentrically-dressed union member of mixed race taking to the streets in righteous anger at the way the most vulnerable in society are treated, accompanied by a fantastic soundtrack - whether it be Late Junction on Radio 3 or Radio 1 (or The Archers)? I sure hope so. The point is that, like all societies, this one is plural, dynamic and mostly brilliant - trying to define it is like nailing jelly to the wall.

Bald men fighting over a comb

That was fun. At a UN conference on racism, the racist president of Iran made a speech calling Israel racist - which seems fine to me, given Israel's treatment of the Palestinians within Gaza, the Occupied Territories and within its own borders. Then the racist countries of Germany (Holocaust, Turks), Britain (Empire, slavery, 'institutionally racist' police, mass ethnic minority unemployment), the United States (slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, 80% of black men with criminal records) walked out.

This is a matter of representation - does being vocally upset about particularly poisonous racism make up for structural, ongoing, silent racism? Are we meant to think that speeches are more important than the discrimination which ensures that our black boys leave school less qualified, less likely to find employment and more likely to go to prison with conviction for which white people don't? (It's the same for women, by the way: they are disproportionately imprisoned for crimes such as non-payment of TV licences and fines, for which men tend to receive non-custodial sentences). Naomi Klein makes the point in No Logo that worrying about representation of race has diverted the left from the clear real racial problems - the Ahmedinejad case demonstrates the effect of this kind of tokenism.