ABSTRACT

The text for this chapter is taken from a spoken lecture.2 As such it is a personal retrospective that seeks to move our understanding of educational inequality forward by examining what appears to be disparate, but intimately linked issues and discourses. Through the lens of gendered autobiography this chapter brings together the dynamics of racist educational policy and practice in Britain in the context of the shadow of colonial history and migration. Finally it reflects on subsequent black strategies of transcendence and overcoming and their struggle for equality through education. It is written in a reflexive and rhetorical style addressing the reader directly, which is characteristic of traditional storytelling.