ABSTRACT

The liberal or radical public professional is a familiar figure in the popular and academic imagination. In Britain teachers' and other welfare professionals' sympathy for egalitarian causes has been consistently documented by social scientists and ridiculed by a predominantly hostile mass media throughout the last thirty years. Public professionals have come to be particularly closely associated with the politics of 'racial' equality. Indeed, within certain quarters, this imputed relationship has encouraged a view of anti-racism and multiculturalism as essentially public professional projects. Thus the British popular press has frequently sort to portray 'race' equality initiatives and programmes as the virtual creation ofleft-wing 'trouble-makers' or bleeding-heart liberals in the public sector. Other commentators have formulated a similar equation. Modood (1988: 397), for example, construes within the terminology of anti-racism 'a professional-political consensus', a consensus that has been imperiously imposed on minority communities without their consultation or approval.