ABSTRACT
On the Woman’s Hour programme an advertiser said that, if he used too many black models, white women would feel that ‘my product wasn’t for them’. Being black in our society is not analagous to being white in it. Being white isn’t an issue. As Geoffrey Short and Bruce Carrington observe in Andrew Pollard’s book Children in their Primary Schools, ‘schools in all white areas…have tended to eschew both…multicultural education and anti-racist education’. Indeed, the author have seen few schools where he can imagine himself as a black or Asian girl feeling at home. Short and Carrington sum up the differences between multicultural education and anti-racism like this: Whereas multiculturalists are principally concerned to celebrate cultural diversity, overcome curricular ethnocentrism, and increase intergroup tolerance, anti-racists stress the need for schools to play a more active role in combating forms of racism at an institutional as well as an individual level.
