All-Black Schools?

Lee Jasper is actually, like Barack Obama, one of us, whose skin colour could just as easily have been completely different. He is rightly concerned about underperformance by Afro-Caribbean boys. But he attributes this to “institutional racism”.

I care not for this catch-all term. It was coined by Stokely Carmichael, a ranting anti-Semitic demagogue who was rightly banned from entering this country. Carmichael strongly opposed the closest possible economic, social, cultural and political co-operation, both within the United States and throughout the world, between the English-speaking people of West African slave descent (primarily concentrated in the United States and in the Commonwealth countries of the Caribbean) and the people of English, Scots, Welsh and Irish descent (primarily concentrated in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Irish Republic, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), on the basis of their shared economic, social, cultural and political Christian heritage, including their shared English language and their shared blood ties.

But, if we must use it, then it seems clear to me to whom it actually applies. It actually applies to those who maintain that there is something inherent in that common tradition's pedagogical principles which renders Afro-Caribbean boys, in particular, effectively unteachable in accordance therewith, and accordingly something inherent in Afro-Caribbean boys to the same unhappy effect.

In fact, the schools in the Caribbean are famously disciplined and orderly places. They deliver excellent education to pupils of both sexes, routinely poorer than almost anyone in Britain. Indeed, Afro-Caribbean British parents quite often send their children, and especially their sons, to such schools. This is in order to avoid what has been done to the grammar schools on which those in the Caribbean were modelled. The 11-Plus is still in use there.

By contrast, here in the North-East, I have worked as a supply teacher in all-white schools, which are the norm here. At one school, in the only 100% White British district at the last census, the behaviour was so bad that it cannot possibly be worse elsewhere. Pupils in such schools are being robbed of their academic and wider heritage. But pupils in the Caribbean are not being so robbed.

And it is the same heritage, shared by people of West African slave descent and people of Anglo-Celtic descent. It even includes vast blood ties. Blame it on slavery if you will, but Afro-Caribbeans do not seem to mind. Indeed, almost all of the Afro-Caribbean countries even choose to retain the same Head of State as most of the Anglo-Celtic countries. Just as the monarchy is the institutional and personal embodiment of our common heritage, so grammar schools here were key vehicles for that heritage’s transmission. And in the Caribbean, they still are. That is why Afro-Caribbean British parents actively prefer what has been preserved in the Caribbean over what has replaced it in Britain.

To deny that heritage, on ethnic grounds, to any member of either of our interrelated peoples: that is the real institutional racism.