It’s our class, not our colour, that screws us up

Lots of children are lazy and look set for poor exam results. The difference is that

the kids from wealthier backgrounds are likely to be thrown a lifeline

Barbara Ellen

Black academic Tony Sewell is a brave man, but he’d be even braver if he were white. Had he been white, his opinions in his recent article for “Prospect” magazine might have got him denounced as a Nazi head-measurer.

The son of Caribbean migrants, Sewell claims that institutionalised¹ racism in British schools is not failing black children. He says that the routinely disquieting exam results, particularly from boys (in 2008, only 27 % of black boys achieved five or more A*– C GCSE grades), are because of the pupils themselves.

As well as being poorly parented, these children are disrespectful, lazy and badly behaved. This is why they fail their exams, not because they are being held back. In decades gone by, such children may have been “burned out in a racist school system”, but times have changed. These days, says Sewell, school leaders are so afraid of being branded racist, they prefer to cast black children as victims. Meanwhile, black boys in particular rush to embrace victimhood.

Sewell has wide-ranging experience of educating black children – one of his hats is director of the charity, Generating Genius, which targets African-Caribbean children, to get them to university. Sewell is also one for tossing flare bombs into race debates: a few months ago, he argued on these pages that absent fathers were a bigger problem for black boys than racism.

So is Sewell right? Is there such a thing as an obsolete racial victimhood thriving in our school system? Victimhood as comfort blanket, an excuse for bone-idle black kids, who don’t seem to have noticed that Asian children tend to do pretty well in British schools?

In turn, is there what could be described as a “racism excuse” in schools? A chilling attitude of: “Nothing is your fault or your own responsibility – you’re just black, you poor thing.” It’s difficult to tell. Maybe we should ask the hordes of failing white kids.

One presumes that Sewell realises that his descriptions of failing black children could just as easily be applied to failing white children, in particular poor white boys who sometimes do even worse than their black counterparts (girls, whatever their race, tend to do better).

Moving away from the hot topic of Asbo-toting hooligans, there are the other kinds of white children who rarely get mentioned in these debates – children who are much better off in material terms, but who are lazy, disrespectful and balls up exams. The difference is not that these children are white, which means little if you're extremely poor, it’s that they are middle class, which means that when they start sliding towards the cliff edge of educational failure, their parents often have the resources to rescue them.

Having gone through exams with a child, it has been an eye-opener to see the complex, expensive series of educational safety nets (tutors, retakes, courses, crammers) that are in place for children whose parents can just about afford it. Then there is the middle-class culture of 24/7 involvement in the child’s education. This sort of behaviour takes time, energy and, all too frequently, money. These are resources that poor families, black and white alike, simply don’t have.

All children have the capacity to be disrespectful, lazy screw-ups. The difference is that when better-off kids start drowning, they tend to be rescued, while poorer kids sink straight to the seabed. No one is judging the middle-class way (I’m as guilty of the exam rescue mission as anybody). However, this is a crucial class factor, which dovetails inexorably into race.

Sewell makes a valuable point that black children, or their parents and teachers, must not use “racism” as an excuse to embrace victimhood. However, we should still acknowledge that for all children the social status of their parents is often a deciding factor in their education success and whatever the intricate details of UK wealth distribution these days, it’s not likely to be concentrated in black communities. Indeed, while class remains the headline for educational outcome, more often than not, race will be writhing about in the subtext somewhere.

The Observer, September 26, 2010

Task 10. What is the structure of the article above? Find its constituent parts.

What is the meaning of the colloquial phrasal verb in the headline?

What do the underlined word combinations in the lead mean?

Task 11. Analyse the author’s argumentation in the article above. What linguistic and stylistic means does he employ? Do they sound convincing to you? Why? Put forward your arguments.