The council’s disclosure is shocking but has it told the truth?
At the last ‘Children Young People and Skills Committee’ (CYPS) on March 7th deputy council leader Hannah Clare said:
“I spoke to a former teacher last week who described to me leaving his role due to constant racist incidents, including monkey noises being made at him in the corridor and the classroom”.
Of those watching the live webcast that afternoon, I doubt I was alone in finding her comment deeply troubling. Had this teacher really been hounded out of his job by targeted and sustained racist abuse? Why had his school, the teaching unions and the council not intervened immediately to eliminate the abuse and support him to continue in his role?
Three weeks after the CYPS meeting, I submitted these same questions for consideration ahead of a full council meeting scheduled for the following week but they were rejected. The reason given was all too familiar to citizens who raise an issue council leaders don’t want to talk about. These questions were, they said, “the same, or substantially the same” as a question or deputation previously put to council.
Accept they were not. How could they have been? Cllr Clare’s disclosure was the first time the press or the public heard about this incident. In fact, a rule designed to prevent persons or groups repeating the same question or continuously raising the same issue had yet again been deployed in a cynical and autocratic manner.
Exasperated, I decided to go directly to Hannah Clare so that she could clear the matter up once and for all. Had this incident even happened in a Brighton school I asked? I wanted to understand what forms of action had been taken and why these had be insufficient in preventing this teacher from abandoning his role? On April 4th she emailed to inform me that she was not obliged to communicate “on the same issue that has been repeatedly addressed at Council and Committee meetings …”.
More recently, however, the councils Freedom of Information team felt obligated to issue an answer. In my FOI request I had asked:
“Can the council confirm to me that the ‘monkey noises’ incident happened in a B&H school and, if so, the actions the council took in response”.
They responded:
“We can confirm that the information received by Cllr Clare indicated that the incident you refer to did take place at a school in Brighton & Hove.
We can confirm that support was offered and provided in line with what was requested by the person involved in the incident”.
Their answer evidently entailed asking Cllr Clare and relaying her reply back to me. And so we learn that actions were indeed taken by the council (though not what these actions were or why they failed). Yet, the question remains why was the abuse was so persistent (Cllr Clare uses the word “constant”), so much so that this teacher was forced out of his role? Should the public not be informed? After all, a school in our city appears to have allowed targeted and sustained racist abuse to drive a teacher out. Why is this not a matter of urgent public concern?
Moreover, at the March CYPS meeting, Cllr Clare had only mentioned this case, it seemed, to reinforce her assertion that racism is endemic in the city’s schools. A council ‘Safe and Well’ survey had revealed, said Cllr Clare, “59 percent of young people had witnessed racism in school” of which monkey noises directed at a black teacher was a typical example. Really?
Presumably, her point was that the harrowing experience of this teacher illustrates the climate of overt racist abuse engulfing Brighton and Hove schools. For Cllr Clare, it seemed that the vivid manifestation of racist abuse in our schools is so everyday and normal that it requires no further elaboration or discussion. It simply vindicates Green Party support for the council’s anti-racism strategy. Later, at the same CYPS committee meeting, an officer speaks about this new Anti-Racist Schools Strategy. From the report document this officer summarised, we learn about support programmes for pupils of colour “to explore their lived experiences of racism in a safe space”.
If true, this is extraordinary. When a teacher of colour, taunted by monkey noises, is so matter of fact and ordinary (a mere everyday illustration of racism in our schools) then it’s pretty obvious that pupils will be experiencing the same thing and possibly much worse.
But the incident is extraordinary. You will not find a councillor besides Hannah Clare who has ever heard of it. I’m not aware of a CYPS committee member who has ever heard of it. Last year, results from my own freedom of information survey of racist incident logs in the city’s schools revealed nothing of this alleged daily abuse (incidents were recorded but these were extremely rare).
Do we all have our head in the sand? On this point, council experts will say ‘yes’. They point out that racist incidents frequently “go unreported”. Their strategy document even implies a cover-up in as much as schools look the other way (apparently logging an incident “challenges the self-image of school”).
If racism of the kind Hannah Clare describes is rife in our schools then Brighton and Hove presides over a scandal that merits national let alone local news coverage (and no wonder pupils of colour need to take refuge in a ‘safe space’). Like the sexual abuse of children in local authority care back in the 1970s, is news about unremitting racist abuse in Brighton schools is about to break?
One thing is for sure – the council is more interested in justifying the need for its highly controversial ‘anti-racist’ schools strategy with a casual reference to what appears to be a very serious and sustained incident of racial abuse of a Brighton teacher than they are in providing any specific details about it. Could it be that that Cllr Clare’s account of the horrifying experiences this teacher endured is not entirely accurate? To be blunt, if this is a real occurrence our elected representatives need to show us it’s real and prove they did something about it.
My scepticism is not without foundation. Since the summer of 2020, in the wake of George Floyds murder and the BLM protests that followed, council leaders have made noble proclamations on how they represent an “anti-racist council” that will go beyond a passive ‘non-racist’ stance and proactively start to dismantle the racism in our midst. Our council believes that it governs over a city that is simultaneously “anti-racist” but also dripping in a deeply “entrenched” racism. From that moment in 2020, the five-year plan for schools (requiring an initial outlay of £0.5 million) was hatched as one ostentatious example of a progressive council rolling up its sleeves and finally tackling the problem.
This same narrative on endemic ‘everywhere’ racism now traps the council inside a lie they can’t seem to escape from. To admit that Brighton is not dripping in everyday racism would be heretical to systemic racism ideology, the creed that requires unquestioning belief. For the rest of us, however, it is precisely the rarity of serious racist incidents in Brighton and Hove that makes the occasional example so shocking.
Until they are voted out of office and replaced, council leaders cannot change their tune. After all, consultants have been paid, teacher training is underway and a new officer has been appointed to deliver the 5-year plan. When Hannah Clare disclosed the ‘monkey noise’ incident, she wanted to reinforce the view that criticism of the plan is naïve; a refusal to accept a reality that needs no evidence. Indeed, for Cllr Clare, such criticism from those (including black people) who, really, should go and ‘educate’ themselves simply means, “this work is evermore necessary”. And so the strategy proceeds onward. If you dare to challenge its divisive, racializing nature you risk being smeared as a racism denier.
There’s plenty to challenge – what will the ‘racial literacy’ PSHE classes entail? How can it be anything other than divisive to teach pupils of colour that they are victims of their white classmates ‘privilege’? Why are teachers being taught Critical Race Theory as the basis for their classroom practice when it’s accepted that CRT represents contested beliefs? Beliefs are not facts. To challenge this is to invite accusation that you too are an unwitting cog in systemic racism. Century’s in the making, this is the “white supremacy” hard-wired into all our social relationships; this is the racism that maintains white privilege (racism is its survival strategy).
Ultimately, it will be down to parents themselves – including black parents – to expose the lie at the heart of the emperor’s new anti-racism. Opposition to the CRT version of anti-racism isn’t about white parents against black parents (some of the staunchest advocates for CRT based approaches are white, while some of the staunchest critics are black). This is about ideology, and specifically about challenging activist councillors, activist officials and activist teachers to smuggle their belief-system into Brighton and Hove classrooms and indoctrinate other people’s children with it. They are doing this without parental oversight, consultation or consent.
Considerably braver than the average city councillor, local journalists will, I hope, feel compelled to investigate Hannah Clare’s anecdote about of targeted racial abuse. This is either a story of daily harms experienced by teachers and pupils or a council deception designed to justify a schools strategy that is no less harmful. As a petition launched by Brighton supporters of the ‘Don’t Divide Us’ campaign argued, our city’s CRT-based school policy teaches children the vital significance of skin colour in a social world divided into racial oppressors and racial victims. If the relationships between white children and their non-white friends are to be re-engineered in this divisive way, the council must at least come clean and convince parents that its radical programme for schools is not based on a grotesque distortion of reality. The council must convince us that its whole strategy is not, in fact, the political project of ideological zealots wielding a solution in search of a problem.