ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the lived experience of the young, in particular, is no longer shaped by racism and that educators, sociologists and policy-makers should be cautious about equating black communities with social disadvantage and educational underachievement. A different 'post-racial' position is one that Zeus Leonardo terms 'race ambivalence'. One of the effects of the concern with standards and achievement was that it drew attention to education as a site in which the outcomes of 'black and minority ethnic' (BME) groups were increasingly differentiated. The adoption of ethnicity as the key category would, it was hoped, dispense once and for all with the ghost of racial pseudo-science and encourage us to think in terms of the interplay between open categories of culture, faith, language and nationality. Critical Race Theory (CRT) emerged in the USA during the 1970s and 80s as a framework for understanding the endemic presence of race within the American social and political formation.
