ABSTRACT
This chapter is the author's a personal commentary on the changing rationale of the course leading to the advanced Diploma in Education for a Multicultural Society at Southlands College in September 1976, and in particular on the centrality of race awareness within it. He realised that the debate on multicultural education had dominated either by an emphasis on the teaching of English as a second language, or by an obsession with minority cultures, subcultures, religion, customs and traditions. It had become a theory and practice of containment without making any dent in the pervasive assimilative model, or raising the most central issue affecting all our children, both black and’ white – that of racism. Myrdal’s American dilemma of conflict between what whites believe and what they actually do in their collusion, conscious or unconscious, with racist practices, can be transposed. The core of the Diploma course is now firmly rooted in anti-racist awareness and teaching.
