What’s in a word? Modelling British History for a ‘Multi-racial’ Society

Sutherland, Claire (2023) What’s in a word? Modelling British History for a ‘Multi-racial’ Society. Race Ethnicity and Education. pp. 1-19. ISSN 1361-3324 (In Press)

Preview	Text (Advance online version) What s in a word modelling British history for a multi racial society.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Download (748kB) | Preview
	Text GovtRecommendations.pdf - Accepted Version Restricted to Repository staff only until 26 July 2024. Download (358kB) | Request a copy

Abstract

In March 2022 the United Kingdom (UK) government published Inclusive Britain: the government’s response to the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. This accepts the ‘bad apple’ understanding of racism but is incurious as to the historical context and existing power relations shaping racist attitudes, thereby creating a tension with its stated aim of developing a model history curriculum. This article will address two, key issues resulting from this tension: Firstly, it unpicks Inclusive Britain’s handling of race and, secondly, adopts a decolonial standpoint to critique its recommendation on how to make the school history curriculum more inclusive. The article concludes that Inclusive Britain’s vision of the UK as ‘multi-racial’ serves to re-establish racial categories as an unquestioned and unproblematic series of fixed, reified identities, without acknowledging the hierarchies and uneven power relations inherent in racial terminology.

Actions (login required)

View Item

Downloads