ABSTRACT
Despite the need for pedagogic interventions to counter the influence of racism, ethnocentrism and xenophobia, such measures continue to be criticized by neoconservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United Kingdom, since the late 1980s, the influential cultural restorationist wing of the New Right has not only derided and lampooned such interventions, but has sought to impose its own narrow, exclusivist and cultural-racist construction of British national identity (as English and Christian) on the National Curriculum in England and Wales. British antiracist educators, with a few notable exceptions (see, for example, Cohen, 1988; Gillborn, 1995; Modood, 1992; Rattansi, 1992, this volume), have given little attention to what Barker (1981) has dubbed the ‘new racism’. In so far as the latter is treated at all in the generality of antiracist literature, it is only ever mentioned in passing and its pedagogic implications appear never to have been addressed.
