That's Racist! by Adrian Hart

That's Racist! by Adrian Hart

In twenty-first century Britain, children of all ethnic groups play together at school and in their neighbourhoods. They grow up together, and have children together. The ongoing rise of the 'mixed race' population shows the extent to which the awareness of 'racial difference' has disappeared from people's everyday experience: a fact, surely, that anti-racist campaigners should celebrate.

And yet in recent years, playgrounds and classrooms have endured unprecedented interference in the form of official racist-incident reporting, training on the importance of racial etiquette, and the reinforcement of racial identities. In workplaces and public institutions, self-styled 'anti-racist' campaigns seize on bad jokes, playground insults, and clumsy behaviours as evidence that racism is on the rise, and that more rules are needed to control people's attitudes and behaviours.

How do we make sense of this reality gap, between the genuine diversity of everyday life and the racialised assumptions that drive 'anti-racist' policy? In That's Racist Adrian Hart reflects on his experience of anti-racist campaigning in 1980s East London, and his later studies of allegedly racist behaviour among primary school children, to show how the language of anti-racism has been co-opted by a divisive new policy agenda.

In Britain today, it is no longer racism that sets us against each other, but the demand that we should be hyper-sensitive about each other's differences. As we try to navigate this new landscape, the first casualty is freedom of speech.

A former teacher turned maker of anti-racism educational films for schools, Hart is author of The Myth of Racist Kids - anti-racist policy and the regulation of school life (2009) and Leave the Kids Alone - how official hate speech regulation interferes in school life (2011). Both were reports for The Manifesto Club, a UK organisation that campaigns against the hyper-regulation of everyday life. The Myth of Racist Kids caused considerable media attention on the day of its publication (29/10/09) including the front page of the Daily Telegraph. Leave the Kids Alone featured the first complete Freedom of Information survey of hate speech monitoring by all 174 English and Welsh LEAs, and made the front page of the Daily Mail (17/01/11). Hart has written for the Daily Mail, The Big Issue and Spiked. He blogs at adrianhart.com and is preparing a third report for The Manifesto Club. An activist in east London anti-racism campaigns 25 years ago, his take on this issue is unique in its grounding in years of schools work, its dedication to facts, analysis and genuine anti-racism.