Time and race in history education.
| Author | Elias, Hannah |
Following the death of George Floyd in May 2020, global protests against state violence, structural racism and white supremacy have brought necessary attention to the wilful acts of forgetting that have shaped public understandings of the past. In the UK, at Black Lives Matter demonstrations organised to express transatlantic solidarity against state violence, young activists have drawn attention to the historic roots of race inequality in Britain, and called for forms of institutionalised racism - exacerbated by conditions created by the Coronavirus pandemic - to be confronted and dismantled. Debates about Britain's colonial legacy have continued in the months since the statue of Edward Colston, a slave trader, was removed from a plinth and dumped in Bristol's harbour. This action was the unexpected culmination of years of campaigning by local groups to have the statue removed, after petitions and appeals had fallen on deaf ears in local government. In the months afterwards, many of the UK's civic and learning institutions have started heeding calls to look inwards, at the names of the benefactors of the slave trade, eugenicists and architects of empire that are etched on their own buildings, plinths or street signs. A significant conversation about Britain's cultural values is in process. How can we, as a nation, purport to believe in equality, fairness and human rights, when the names of people who have been part of a centuries-long system of violence against black lives are honoured in our institutions? How can we reckon with the legacies of colonialism which have shaped British wealth and establishments? How can we ensure the long history of African-descended people in Britain is not marginalised in school lessons, or erased from national memory?
In response to sustained calls for Britain to reckon with its imperial legacy in a substantive and meaningful way, a Conservative and far-right backlash has grown. The Conservative think tank Policy Exchange has recently launched a monitoring project called History Matters, which 'confirms that history is the most active front in a new culture war', and tracks institutions which have taken steps to remove statues, rename buildings or update university curricula. (1) History certainly does matter, and it is important to acknowledge that British history has long been politicised in public spaces, public memory and in school education. History is not a fixed and static entity, and it is misleading to construe it as one. History is continually contested and redefined, and the prisms through which we interpret historical facts, construct narratives, or even understand epochs of historical time, are grounded in shared values, lived experiences and social constructions of meaning. What do we want our national myths and our national history to be? While historical facts and evidence are fixed, the narratives we choose to tell depend on how we want to define ourselves as a nation.
Calls for greater attention to be paid to Britain's colonial history and the legacies of slavery are certainly not new. Wendy Williams, author of 2020's Independent Windrush Lessons Learned Review into Home Office conduct, has argued that the Windrush scandal 'was in part able to happen because of the public's and officials' poor understanding of British colonial history, the history of inward and outward migration, and the history of black Britons'. (2) This observation echoed an earlier finding from the report of The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry in 1999, which advocated for amendments to the National Curriculum 'aimed at valuing cultural diversity and preventing racism'. (3) The Runnymede Trust, Britain's leading independent race equality think tank, has issued a number of reports over the past two decades pointing to the importance of history education reform, and the implications of this work for our understandings of British identity, citizenship and belonging. (4) The Runnymede's work has roots in the anti-racist and anti-colonial political coalitions of the mid-twentieth century. Priyamvada Gopal, in her recent book Insurgent Empire, has shown that British dissent to the project of imperialism has a long history, one that stretches back to the nineteenth century and was influenced by rebellions and acts of resistance in colonies, though this history has often been obscured. (5)
Britain has a history problem; public memory is riddled with contradiction and denial. There is both an imperial amnesia about the painful and enduring consequences of British imperialism, and a postcolonial melancholia for an empire lost. (6) A YouGov poll conducted in 2019 found that 32 per cent of the public thought the British Empire was 'something to be proud of', with a further 37 per cent expressing neutrality on the issue, and only 19 per cent 'ashamed' of the imperial past. (7) Misunderstandings about the past have huge ramifications in the present; without understanding Britain's long history of migration, it can be easy to dislocate people of colour and minoritised communities from the centre of Britain's national story. Claire Alexander and Debbie Weekes-Bernard have observed that Britain's schools 'have been a key site of struggle for racial, ethnic and religious equality for over 50 years...and an ideological battleground for competing ideas of Britishness'. (8)
Calls for history curriculum reform in schools have gained greater urgency thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement. (9) Other youth-led movements, including The Black Curriculum, Fill in the Blanks and The Advocacy Academy, as well as history teachers dedicated to reforming their own teaching practice within the current curriculum framework, are leading crucial conversations about how the history curriculum could better help students to understand Britain's multi-racial and colonial past. The Black Curriculum has called for education in black history at all learning stages, and has created learning resources for teachers and parents; (10) the Runnymede Trust's #TeachRaceMigrationEmpire campaign has both organised a letter writing campaign to MPs and schools, and produced a free access digital resource, hosted by the Institute of Historical Research, which connects teachers and learners to historical documents and materials that can be used in classroom teaching and research. (11)
However, to adequately reform the history curriculum, we need to do more than add histories of Black British experience, stories of migration and the history of empire to the existing curriculum. We also need to teach students how understandings of 'race' and 'blackness' have been contoured and governed by colonial modes of thinking from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and that these concepts are not fixed, but shift through time. We must advocate for black history to be included within the existing curriculum framework, and for that framework itself to be recast, rethought and reconsidered. In doing so, we can ensure students gain a richly contextualised understanding of Britain's place in global history, and the legacies of Britain's colonial past which continue to shape the politics of the present.
Re-visioning the national history curriculum
The first aim of...
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