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29 Oct 2016

The Case Against Black History Month – Promoting Racism

Teachwell Festival of Education, Humanity, Race 7

In my first blog on the talk I gave at Wellington College, I focused on the purposes of history. In this second part, I will look at why I think that race-based versions of history such as Black History Month need to be rejected.

Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist. His best known work is “Systema Naturae” in which he introduced the hierarchical classification of animals, plants and minerals. He also included his ideas on the five “varieties” of human beings. While grouping humans and attributing them with a set of characteristics was nothing new, the scientific nature of the classification during the enlightment period was.

Linnaeus was by no means alone in such classifications, as the belief in polygenism (the idea that different groups of people or races had different origins) was widespread unlike monogenism (single origin). There were a variety of racial classifications although the systems we know best that were underpinned by scientific racism – the USA and South Africa – were centred on the differences between black and white in particular. The histories of these two nations, plus Britain’s role in the slave trade, tend to be the focus for the stories and narratives that underpin Black History Month.

The origins of Black History Month stem from Negro History Week in the US. Interestingly, there was debate even at the time whether there was a need for a separate history of black people as the history of black people in the US was American History (a view that Morgan Freeman has put forward in recent times). Woodson was of his time and would have believed in racial classifications. He wanted black people to understand the role that their race had played and believed that their contributions to American and world history were neglected as a results of racism. Woodson believed that education and increasing contacts among blacks and whites could reduce racism and promoted the study of African-American history partly for that purpose. He was in the end attempting to expand the scope of the knowledge of history and contribute to that which existed.

In order to understand the morphing of Negro History Week into Black History Month however, we need to understand the split in the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

The split in the civil rights movement is almost entirely ignored in black history month accounts. King’s legacy seems to be summed up by his “I have a dream” speech. King and Malcolm X differed in many important respects, which underpin the common narrative of Black History Month.

Malcolm X did not reject scientific racism and the taxonomies of different races. He believed that the races were different and that segregation was necessary. His major point of difference was that the characteristics attributed to the race were incorrect. Thus his idea of race was simply a revised version of Linnaeus’s racial classification, emphasising the superiority of the black race compared to the white race. This view led to Black Power movements and the revised Black History Month. Unlike Negro History week, Black History Month was not an attempt to add the contributions of black Americans to American history but was a version of history in direct opposition to white history and it goes for it tit for tat.

In the UK, the introduction of Black History Month preceded the 1988 National Curriculum by one year. It was introduced by Akyaaba Addai-Sebo during his spell as the Greater London Council Special Projects Coordinator. The introduction of Black History Month was rooted in the idea of the Black Atlantic, promoted by academics such as Paul Gilroy. The Black Atlantic was the idea that a joint black culture could be formed based on African, Black American, Black British and Caribbean cultures.

In order to establish a link between the experiences of black people, Black History Month often conflates the histories of the the US, South Africa and the UK.

The race based nature of black history month is never referred to. Yet it is clearly a repackaged version of Linnaeus. Changing the characteristics of the black race to positive and white to negative, still promotes the racial classification based on scientific racism. This feeds into the later movements such as Black Lives Matter, which actively promotes segregation, Why is My Curriculum White? which pits a white curriculum with a non-white one and last but not least, Rhodes Must Fall which insists on setting the arbitrary start point of history at the beginning of the colonial era.

These are racist movements, promoting racist ideas and unable to challenge racism. The attempts to reclassify racism as prejudice plus power is simply a means of deflecting from the quite obvious double-standards in black and brown people promoting ideas which white racists have done so in the past.

28 Oct 2016

Battle of Ideas #1 – History Wars

Teachwell Education Policy, Other Events 0

This was my first year at the Institute of Ideas annual event, the Battle of Ideas. I took part in the History Wars panel alongside Nick Dennis, Kwasi Kwarteng MP, Frank Furedi and Sean Lang, with the rather brilliant Helen Birtwistle chairing.

I think Nick Dennis’s description of the session as an enlightened conversation is fair. While we had much in common, we still came at it from different angles I felt that the audience asked pertinent questions about a range of issues. I do think there is the will to improve the teaching of history and we need to make a concerted effort to ensure that historians and those with a genuine passion for history defend it as a subject and not merely a means of achieving other goals. I don’t think my memory can do the whole thing justice so will post the sound cloud of the debate when it goes live.

Below is the transcript of my five-minute introduction:

Humans are pattern seeking and so attempts to draw parallels between current and past events comes naturally. It is simply part of our DNA to make such comparisons.

What is interesting and concerning is that some invocations of history are not the basis of debate or discussion, but a means to prevent debate altogether.

Having worked as a primary teacher for ten years, I would say that educators and the education system bears some of the responsibility for the current misuses of history.

When knowledge is elitist, ignorance becomes a revolutionary act. The line between education and indoctrination has been blurred by teachers who believe they belong to a priestly class, ordained by their left-wing teacher training institutions, and imbued with a sense of purpose based on curing social ills rather than educating.

In such a climate, it becomes easier to justify cherry picking historical interpretations and evidence.

Carter G Woodson believed that the introduction of Negro History Week in the US was the start of a journey to ensure that both black and white contributions were recognised as part of American history. It was an attempt to expand historical knowledge and add to what already existed.

The same cannot be said for those who claim to be his heirs in either the US or the UK. My time teaching in London brought this home to me. Black History Month and offshoots such as Rhodes Must Fall and Why is My Curriculum is White? are not about history, but about power. Self-esteem not enlightenment. Self-deception not self-awareness.

The peddling of ignorance in the form of conflating histories of different nations – the US and the UK, in particular, is what leads to a situation where a person on a Black Lives Matter rally in Manchester was filmed bemoaning Martin Luther King’s dream not being realised. It’s shocking that he didn’t understand that MLK was calling for changes in another nation and that the organisation he was marching for opposes much of what King stood for. The split in the civil rights movement is something which most resources for Black History Month gloss over. I find it hard to believe that so few have called out or debated what is glaringly obvious – that the black power movement seeks to promote their own revised and repackaged version of Linnaeus’s racial classification.

One website, which the Historical Association links teachers to for materials, states clearly that schools should be aiming to teach black children, in particular, to construct accounts of history that they can be proud of. This has nothing to do with history. You cannot expect the past to solve your self-esteem problems in the here and now. Neither should adults be allowed to indulge themselves at the expense of the education of the young. Of course, white liberals lap up these demands as it seems to give them an outlet to engage in masochistic self-flagellation, claim the moral high ground and all without examining their actual beliefs or conscience.

While some may simply be paving the path to hell with their good intentions, others are actively promoting their ideological stances under the guise of “radical history”. I recently read one such account which implies that the happy-go-lucky Indians were getting along just fine under the Mughals and then the nasty British came along with their capitalist beliefs, where they did nothing but ill with evidence deliberately selected to prove this point of view.

At best this is a form of overcompensation, which leads to accounts of history that are just as stereotypical and patronising as the accounts they seek to replace. Both at home and at school what Indian and colonial history I was taught was far richer and an attempt to help me understand the complex interactions between the different groups. There is something wrong if the accounts being taught and which are being called for to be taught today are regressive in comparison to what I taught 30 years ago.

At worst, this kind of ideologically-driven teaching of history is an attempt to nurture and encourage conflict and grievance mongering. It is no surprise that we have an immature generation of social justice warriors insisting on avenging the past. This was surely the intention of some within the education system in the first place. It’s not just historians but moderates from all groups who need to protect the freedom to teach history as honestly as we can.

The fact that no one is neutral does not mean that there is no difference between a person who is self-aware and can cope with the strengths and weaknesses of their ideas as well as the evidence that counters their preferred ideological stance, and those who are outright liers and propagandists.

The past is the past; it does not care about you or your feelings, and we just have to learn to live with that. At a time when we could be piecing together history from a wider range of sources, expanding scholarship and understanding the complexities of the past, we need to actively resist attempts to misuse and limit the teaching of history.

18 Oct 2016

Beyond Political Correctness and Black History Month: What is the Purpose of Teaching History?

Teachwell Education Debate, Festival of Education, Humanity, Race, Teaching and Learning 3

Earlier this year I presented a talk at the fantastic Wellington Festival of Education. I have simply not had the chance to write it up thus far.

As the talk covered a range of different issues, I will be blogging about each aspect of it individually in a series. First up, I will be tackling the issue of the purpose of teaching history.

At its best, history enables us to know about and understand the past and make sense of our present world. This includes knowing that we don’t always have a complete picture of the past for a wide variety of reasons.

A recent conversation with a Marxist history teacher ended with him sarcastically vowing to be a liberal propagandist in future. Because all history teachers are propagandists, right?

This seems a fundamental confusion between the purpose of teaching history and the ways in which it has been used. Just because history has been used as propaganda does not give history teachers license to do it themselves.

Disappointingly, the Historical Association also seems unable to make this distinction between aims and uses. A recent email advertising one of its forums contained the following:

“We’ve all heard that common lament that history is about dead white ruling men; but what of the untold stories that make up the rich fabric of history? The stories that help us to see the past through the eyes of those that lived it? From stories of ordinary men and women to our wide global cultural heritage, it is our job as history educators to weave these stories into the fabric of the history that we teach.”

We may have heard the common lament, but it doesn’t mean that one has to swallow it wholesale as fact. The forum itself was devoid of any attempt to examine or analyse this proposition. Instead, the HA went full social justice warrior on the issue. When I emailed to question this and why the HA were accepting an identity politics agenda without question, I basically got a reiteration of the position stated above, which is just bandwagon jumping.

It’s not our job to weave anything into history; it’s our job to evaluate and analyse these accounts just as we would do any other. The characteristics of those who wrote them may or may not be of importance. There is nothing inherently problematic about the accounts of “dead white ruling men” and nothing inherently authentic about the accounts of those who don’t fit this category.

The Historical Association’s descent into identity politics is further evidenced by its promotion of the following website as part of its black history month coverage. I will go into the whole issue of BLM in a separate blog but what is interesting here are the aims of this organisation below.

1. We want young people to be able to construct accounts of the past they can be proud of.

2. We want history curricula in schools that are relevant to the multicultural Britain of the 21st century, which will include hidden histories of peoples of African descent.

3. We want history teachers to be resourced with research that reveals these hidden histories.

4. We want history lessons to be focused on rigorous historical enquiries that engage and challenge young people in historical thinking.

Of all the aims only number 3 is actually of any worth, in my opinion. Indeed, we need to ensure that teachers have access to as much material as possible to be effective history teachers. I disagree about hidden histories though. Hidden to whom? If by hidden they mean not studied then there is a role for scholarship here. If by hidden they mean not on the curriculum then a reality check is needed. We can not possibly teach all history on the curriculum.

Aim 2: Only total ignorance of the different iterations of the National Curriculum from 1988 onwards can lead to this conclusion. The study of multicultural Britain has been a staple unit in the history curriculum. If a left-wing profession (teachers and management), selected and trained by left-wing academics, all of whom pride themselves on their anti-racist credentials, have not been teaching it, then why is that?

Multicultural Britain is still 86% white, and whatever the ethnic make-up of the country is right now, it doesn’t change the fact that the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived in Britain have been white. I will explore the issue of content fully in another post, but in summary, political correctness, ignorance, abdication of responsibility and narcissism fuel many of the calls to make the history curriculum representative of the population. I have no intention of indulging it.

Aim 1 and 4 are completely at odds with one another. Constructing accounts of history one can be proud of necessitates cherry-picking facts, events and no small amount of deceit. How does one teach Idi Amin’s expulsion of African Asians so that both groups can be proud of their history? Do we erase this event from history and never mention it? Do we use the progressive stack to decide who is most oppressed (and therefore whose perspective is “authentic”)? Or do we use the ethnic minority “get out of being responsible for your actions because of *delete as appropriate (racism/oppression/colonialism) card” and blame the whites (preferably male) for everything?

I am grateful to my mother for reiterating the following idea repeatedly when I was growing up – there is good and bad in all people and all groups. It takes maturity to cope with the reality of this statement and no it won’t lead to you learning about history which makes you feel good about yourself or indeed simple accounts of goodies and baddies.

What others did in the past reflects on them and what you choose to do in the here and now reflects on you.

What concerns me more is that justifying the use of history to cure the ills of society, has lead to practices that are at best unhelpful to developing historians and historical scholarship, and at worst are downright unethical.

Teachers do not have a god given right to indulge themselves based on personal beliefs. This does not lead to the healthy debate and dialogue needed to further develop the subject. In fact, it doesn’t result in a debate at all as “correct” interpretations are doled out to pupils in the name of anti-racism without ever examining them in the detail required to develop historical thinking.

Also, basic requirements such as thinking about whether units are age-appropriate are thrown out of the window. One of the reasons why I began to question the teaching of history in schools was based on my experience of teaching young children. The teaching might have made some teachers feel radical, but it left ideas of racial differences and scientific racism reinforced and embedded rather than discussed or challenged. If you must indoctrinate then at least get the outcomes you want.

How can pupils debate and come to their conclusions if the history that is taught is deliberately leading to a particular conclusion? Units entitled “Why Should Britain be Ashamed of Colonialism?” are peddled as part of history schemes of work to primary schools. A cherry-picked view, supported by cherry-picked evidence to lead to a single conclusion is not teaching history. You don’t have to agree with the different interpretations to teach them but to dismiss them based on personal beliefs is wrong.

History at its best illuminates the past, it is our duty to do this as fully as we can for our pupils. Teaching versions of history to alleviate insecurities or promote ideological stances is nothing more than an exercise in the misuse of history. Teaching history in this manner is abdicating our responsibility as current historians to future historians.