I Heard What You Said by Jeffrey Boakye

Author:Jeffrey Boakye [Boakye, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK
Published: 2022-04-22T17:00:00+00:00

‘We need to do something!’

Take a good look at that exclamation mark. A rare sight in a serious book about race politics. Punctuation that is usually reserved for email correspondences when I’m trying to not come off as confrontational and end up looking manic instead. That was the urgency with which the phrase above was said. ‘We need to do something!’ Exclamation mark.

It happened during a lesson about systemic racism. We’re a few years into my second school now, and I’m beginning to find my way regarding how to tackle race theory in the classroom. On this occasion, I was teaching a mixed group of Year 9 students about social injustice and race politics, and we’d reached some pretty sobering statistics on the disproportionality of black youth to fall out of education and into the criminal justice system. I hadn’t intended it to be particularly emotive – just the sharing of cold, hard facts. Nothing that you couldn’t easily discover for yourself with a few quick Google searches. But the impact was huge.

I can’t remember the exact moment that one of my students gasped and made the exclamation that heads this chapter. Maybe it was the bit about black boys and girls being nine times more likely to be arrested than their white peers. Or the bit about black Caribbean boys being disproportionately likely to be excluded from mainstream education. Or the figures showing that black people are drastically underrepresented among the UK’s higher earners. It could have been any of these facts, or all of them. Either way, I do remember the look on her face. It was a combination of bewilderment and disbelief. She said it with the kind of alarm you hear when someone has just realised the scope of a problem that didn’t exist to them moments before. She looked around the room. It was as though I had given her a jolt of reality. She wasn’t white.

If the villain of this piece is the whitewashed, postcolonial curriculum, then I’m starting to wonder if its biggest act of treachery is dampening the urgency of our shared human crisis. Let me explain.

The world we live in, the one I was born into and the one my students are learning to navigate, is on fire with inequalities and structural prejudice. It’s a world built of systems and institutions that are diseased with oppression and subjugation, gripped by recent narratives of exploitation writ large across history. These problems are not historic. They are now. Racism is now. Sexism is now. Homophobia is now. Social injustice and social inequity are now. And these fires are burning without mercy or discrimination, turning even the future into ash, before we’ve had a chance to build it.

Kids are born into a burning building. But the curriculum pretends that everything is OK. The curriculum pretends that the past is exactly that: passed. It lies to us. It asks us to believe that we have enough distance to look upon the past with slow beating hearts and academic pencils in our hands, rather than racing pulses and fists of fury.

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