ABSTRACT
It is now customary, almost de rigeur to denounce antiracist education. The caricatured and malevolent reconstruction of events in Brent, Haringey, Dewsbury and Burnage High School has ensured that antiracist education is assigned demoniac properties. It is characterised as a child of the ‘loony left’ and especially of those socialist local education authorities described by Kenneth Baker as ‘apostles of mediocrity and bigots of indoctrination’ (7 October 1987). What is most insidious in this trend, however, is the tendency to contrast antiracist education with ‘real education’, a sleight of hand neatly deployed by Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative party’s annual conference in 1987. Then, it will be recalled, she told delegates: ‘Children who need to be able to count and multiply are learning antiracist mathematics-whatever that may be’ (9 October 1987). The ‘anti-antiracist’ crowd, then, is expanding at an inexorable rate. Nor are its constitutents drawn exclusively from the right-although that is where its most influential and assertive exponents tend to be (Oldman, 1987). No, the ‘anti-antiracist’ crowd also includes members who are committed to cultural pluralism and ‘prejudice reduction’ but who find antiracism too ‘political, confrontational, accusatory and guiltinducing’ (Lynch, 1987, p.x). These ‘new multiculturalists’ as Richard Hatcher (1987) calls them, echo Tory critiques of antiracism as ‘propaganda’ and parody its aims and approaches (Parekh, 1986, for instance).
