Antiracism, Culture And Social Justice In Education, Edited by Morwenna Griffiths and Barry Troyna, Trentham Books Pounds 14.95
This book is the result of a symposium in 1994 and explores the relationship between racism and education.
The voices are new, the ideas fresh, and the contributions varied, covering such subjects as antiracism, black masculinity, Muslim girls and racism in children’s culture.
Tony Sewell’s essay on “Black Masculinity and Education” investigates African-Caribbean boys in an inner-city school and finds that several had swapped education for masculinity. They get their self-esteem through domination and sexual possession of women, see education as effeminate and confrontation as manly. Although African-Caribbean boys’ masculinity makes them envied by white boys it also reduces them to white society’s stereotypical image of the black aggressive male.
Kaye Haws’s essay “Muslim girls are more feminist in a Muslim school” explores the idea that Muslim girls’ schools provide better opportunities than non-Muslim schools for students to discuss race and gender and to achieve educationally.
This is possibly because Muslim schools employ only female staff who act as role models and who adopt an approach “which seeks to make the actual experiences of women more central to the education of the student”.
