Abstracts Sociology

Racism in Memories of British Schooling, 1960-1989

by Joe Hopkinson

This thesis is an oral history analysis of multiethnic education history in Britain which emphasises, above all, the experiences, and memories of the visible minoritised people who lived through it as children. It details eighteen interviews with people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds who either arrived during the era of mass post-war migration or were born in Britain to earlier migrants. Each was educated in the Liverpool area or the West Yorkshire towns that formed the Metropolitan Borough of Kirklees in 1974. The focus is the interviewees’ experiences of racial discrimination in the British education system during the three decades after 1960, and how their memories were shaped by popular discourses surrounding race at the time and ever since. These issues are linked to the development of a multiethnic education discourse in Britain and changes that were taking place in the language of race and race-thinking in post-war Britain. A range of theories from the Sociology of Education, and Critical Race Theory in particular underpin the oral history analysis which is contextualised by a variety of primary sources relating to racism and multiethnic education in Britain. The conclusions emphasise that racism was uniquely unpleasant for visible minoritised schoolchildren during this period in history because of the enduring strength of traditional eugenic style racist views combined with the development of new, systemic, covert forms of racism. It is also argued that popular narratives about race have shaped collective memory in Britain in ways which have to varying degrees gaslighted the interviewees into an ambiguity surrounding their own experiences of racism.