Doing Race: How Secondary School Pupils in Mainly White Schools Construct ‘Race’

Abstract

This article examines how ‘race’ impacts upon the lives of young people who attend secondary schools in a mainly white British area of the United Kingdom. Schools Stand up 2 Racism (SSu2R), a Big Lottery research project, brought together a community partner – the Cheshire, Halton and Warrington Race and Equality Centre – and a team from Manchester Metropolitan University to investigate racism in Cheshire secondary schools. In an area where the population is over 93% ‘white British’, the sense that ‘there's nothing to be racist about in this school’ (Year 8 pupil) was found to be common. The three-year SSu2R study used a multimethod approach to study how students ‘do race’ in these schools, where the silent advocacy of a ‘colour-blind’ approach is promulgated through the popular rhetoric of ‘everyone is unique’ and ‘we should treat everyone the same’. Race is tackled only tangentially through the curriculum, accompanied by silences that close down discussion. Perhaps unsurprisingly given this context, forms of everyday racism are endemic and yet mostly unnoticed by staff or students. The article uses Bourdieu's concepts of ‘doxa’ and ‘the game’ to examine the nature of this silence.