Robert M. Young Online Writings
RACIST SOCIETY, RACIST SCIENCE
by Robert M. Young
The problem of racism might seem an eccentric starting point for rethinking a science
curriculum. It would appear that the problems raised from this vantage point, however
legitimate, would not take long to clear up, at least in principle. The ways in which race
and IQ are discussed in the general culture, and the ways in which they are taught in some
contexts, are obvious examples of potential 'abuses' of science. Taking the argument
further, the concepts of race and IQ are themselves problematic and would disappear in a
different society - one which did not concern itself with human differences in certain
physical attributes or in the ordinal ranking of individuals according to the ability to
think in certain abstract ways.
Even within the existing culture, it can be argued that 'race' has no
biological foundation; it is only, at best, a statistical concept of relatively pure gene
pools. No biologist could draw lines in a large mixed sample so as to demarcate sharply a
given race from another. Research on blood antigens would provide a good way of addressing
this question.
This approach could be contrasted with overtly racist writings by
reputable scientists like C. D. Darlington, a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Professor
at Oxford. His writings celebrate 'racial differences' and are overtly racist; examples
are The Evolution of Man and Society and The Little Universe of Man. Consider
the following quotations from his earlier book (1969):
By inbreeding within classes Irish society was thus genetically fixed and stabilized at
a pre-industrial stage and this has hindered its evolution in step with its neighbours.
Only the disappearance of the barriers between Catholic and Protestant can break this
evolutionary stalemate.
(p. 455)
Thus the slaves were now racially changed. They were now more variable in features and
in colour, in intelligence and in temperament ... The genetic basis of the original
relation of master and slave had disintegrated.
(p. 592)
In short, racial discrimination has a genetic basis with a large instinctive and
irrational component.
(p. 606)
All the great races of man differ in smell; they dislike one another's smell and are
kept apart by it.
(p. 645)
The Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz was also an overt racist during the German Nazi
era, when he wrote:
Nothing is so important for the health of a whole Volk as the elimination of 'invirent
types': those which, in the most dangerous., virulent increase, like the cells of a
malignant tumour, threaten to penetrate the body of a Volk ... Especially today the great
difference depends upon whether or not we can learn to combat decay phenomena, in Volk and
in humanity, which arise from the lack of natural selection. In just this contest for
survival or extinction, we Germans are far ahead of other culture-Volks.
(quoted in Kalikow, 1978)
Another Fellow of the Royal Society, Nobel Prize winner and Oxford
Professor, Sir Hans Krebs, argued that biology 'proved' that trade unionism was against
nature. Indeed, he said, '. . . a continued decrease in working hours is an unrealistic
and utopian dream. The survival of nations, alas, is a matter of ruthless competition with
other nations' (quoted in Young, 1973).
Therefore, we do not need to look at the most obviously biased
materials and the work of disreputable scientists in order to see the intermixture of
scientific concepts and value systems. Indeed, one can find work by reputable
anthropologists, economists and other social scientists which claim that nature 'proves'
that right-wing political theories are true.
The measure of IQ, like that of race, links politics with the typing
and ranking of people for elitist reasons. This has become obvious in the debate around
the work of Arthur Jensen and Sir Cyril Burt, both of whom have recently been exposed by
careful research (Kamin, 1977; Levidow, 1977). This kind of thinking has been linked to
wider issues by the recent books of Martin Barker (The New Racism) and Alan Chase (The
Legacy of Malthus).
The topics of race and IQ help us to move on to a deeper level, one which illuminates
why the task of creating an antiracist science curriculum is far from eccentric but leads
us to the heart of science. As soon as we move off the question of race and IQ as abuses
of science or as bias, we are faced with a more searching question, of which they are
striking examples: where do scientists' questions come from? What leads to the priorities,
agendas, assumptions and fashions of science? Science is not something in the sky, not a
set of eternal truths waiting for discovery. Science is a practice. There is no other
science than the science that gets done. The science that exists is the record of the
questions that it has occurred to scientists to ask, the proposals that get funded, the
paths that get pursued, and the results which lead curiosity to rest and scientific
journals and textbooks to publicize the work.
My view is that the problem of racism in science teaching is a special
case of this deeper issue. The agendas in scientific and technological research reflect
the prevailing values of a given culture. Research and development are the embodiment of
values in theories, therapies and things. A racist society will have a racist science. A
different society could have different science and, indeed, could break down the
convenient and confusing barrier between science and the rest of society. The course of my
argument is an attempt to move from obvious examples to less obvious ones so that we can
see the larger issue.
The questions that get asked
Nature 'answers' only the questions that get asked and pursued
long enough to lead to results that enter the public domain. Whether or not they get asked
and how far they get pursued, are matters for a given society, its education system, its
patronage system, and its funding bodies.
Let us take another example in the general area of 'race'. There is a
disease which is specific to certain peoples, one group of whom come from a certain part
of Africa. It causes episodes of anaemia due to a genetic defect in the red blood cells.
They collapse in a way that makes the cells look like sickles rather the the round,
slightly dished-out shape of functioning red blood cells. The resulting disease is called
sickle cell anaemia. It reduces life expectancy in the people in whom the gene is
expressed. The cells are incapable of transporting oxygen properly; the disease produces
various aches, pains and other forms of debilitation. But how could such a gene prosper?
The answer is that sickle cell anaemia confers a relative selective advantage in evolution
because the red blood cells of its sufferers are immune to infection by the malaria
parasite. Therefore, in areas where malaria is endemic, people with sickle cell anaemia
are relatively better off and have more surviving offspring than people who
contract malaria. But when those offspring were taken as slaves to America, and when a
cure for malaria was found, sickle cell anaemia became, again relatively speaking, a
liability.
The 'racial' link is that the disease is specific to particular
populations. When researchers became interested in the disease in the United States, the
fashionable tendency was to apply for grants to look into elitist and fancy topics, for
example the biochemistry of the sickling process (Michaelson, 1971). This was considered
more worthwhile than spending funds for setting up screening and counselling programmes so
that potential sufferers could be advised about marriage and having children. Public
health, screening, genetic counselling and other activities of this kind in black ghettos
are a long way down the pecking order of scientific prestige, and spending time on them is
not likely to enhance a scientist's career. However, when black people began to fight for
their civil rights, they were able to reorientate funding priorities and to get screening
and counselling programmes set up.
Sickle cell anaemia provides a striking example of changing
prioritization in research. The search for drugs for the treatment of leprosy or for a
simple male contraceptive are examples of other priorities which have been slow to come to
the top of the pecking order.
A further possibility - genetic engineering - has emerged as a
by-product of other priorities and holds out a long-term hope for a cure for sickle cell
anaemia through genetic transplants. Examples of this kind help to show that the real
history of science is a series of choices for research which depend, in turn, on matters
of class, prestige, gender, and the 'clout' of interest groups. For example, in the same
period during which sickle cell anaemia was being ignored, programmes were developed for
screening for breast cancer and cervical cancer. Research on blood chemistry which might
lead to lower incidence of heart attacks was also well funded. These problems were of
great interest to members of the white middle class. It could be argued that most
expensive research gets done on diseases that a majority of the world's population does
not live long enough to contract. Similarly, many diseases are importantly related to
diets which the majority of the world's population has no chance of consuming.
Priorities in research
From those examples one could move on to a whole series of issues
about setting priorities in medical research. Approaches to disease through public health
measures have been systematically undervalued as compared to approaches which lead to
marketable products. Indeed, one of the most striking examples of this concerns the
aggressive marketing of a product which is of very little use indeed: powdered milk. The
naturally occurring product - mother's breast milk - is more wholesome, contains natural
antibodies, and costs nothing. This is the limiting case of the creation of marketable
products in lieu of other measures. The scandal surrounding the marketing of powdered milk
in Third World countries highlights the absurd consequences of commercial priorities.
An antiracist science curriculum could open out the
teaching of science to a historical and social approach to knowledge. This
perspective would break down the distinction between the substance and the context of
knowledge and examine the social forces and connections (or articulations) of scientific
and technological disciplines and research problems. Once one begins to think in this way,
many things we already know take on new significance. We also begin to see the blinkering
effect of current disciplinary boundaries in the school and university curricula.
The rise of apparently esoteric disciplines makes sense if considered
in terms of the power relations in a given society and between communities and power
blocs. Remove the conventional barriers and we can see, for example, that the recent
dramatic rise in funding for seismology and oceanography (mapping the ocean floor) takes
on new meaning in the light of the need to monitor nuclear test ban treaties and to find
places to hide nuclear submarines and to find the enemy's. This is not to say that this
study of faulting and plate tectonics is wholly explained by these priorities. It only
helps us to understand why lavish funds are available for this sort of research.
Indeed, over 40 per cent of scientists in Britain and over 50 per cent
of research and development funding comes from the military (Hales, 1982). This is quite
often expended on 'pure' science projects which might otherwise not get funded or might
not get very much funding. For example, when I was an undergraduate, a professor of marine
biology at Yale, Professor Talbot Waterman, got a large grant to go to Bermuda every
summer to study crabs who navigated by polarized light in shallow water. This money was
given because the United States Office of Naval Research wanted to be able to design ways
of flying over the earth's poles, where magnetic compasses do not work.
Similar stories can be told about many seemingly unconnected researches:
Studies of rare-earth metals were orientated towards their use in plane
fuselages;
The transport revolution of containerization was a technical spin-off
from the development of 'rapid deployment' forces in the United States military;
The development of high-resolution cameras and films was a by-product
of spy planes and satellites;
Non-stick frying pans (the example everyone knows) were a by-product of
the heat shields used on missile nose cones.
Of course, the money for much of this research comes from the profits of multinational
companies which exploit the workers and resources of Third World countries.
It is sometimes hard to grasp the scope of this prioritization process. The whole of
the funding of computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacture (CAD/CAM) and
numerical control of machines was derived from American military funding (Noble, 1984).
The United States armed forces have ambitious plans in this area. General Larry Scance,
head of the United States Air Force Manufacturing Command, said the following to a group
of contractors (including Westinghouse, Boeing, General Electric):
Since our war-fighting equipment comes from the industrial base, the condition within
that base must be addressed and corrected. We now have an effort under way to provide a
planning system that will guide our industrial-based investments and will eventually
integrate technology opportunity and business investment planning. It is a top-down
approach we call 'industrial base planning'. We plan to maximize application of
mechanization and automation, and we plan a paper-free factory with planning, scheduling
and control on the latest computer hardware and software techniques. We thus expect the
factory that can perform at least one full shift per day unmanned.
Separate out the jargon and you have a fully computerized factory
without any workers to give you trouble - manufacturing military materials.
The development of cybernetics - the modern science of communication
and control - grew out of wartime research on control systems in gunnery and led on to
produce new perspectives in a variety of sciences - for example, endocrinology,
physiology, psychotherapy, electronics - and connects closely with general systems theory,
widely used in management sciences and town planning. (See Haraway, 1981-2; Heinis, 1980;
Lilienfeld, 1978; Wiener, 1956).
Nuclear physics is the most obvious and generously funded example where
military priorities took a relatively esoteric science and made it into a hugely funded
research industry. For example, the vast resources at the European Centre for Nuclear
Research (CERN) are a by-product of military priorities but have led to the discovery of
new fundamental particles by 'pure' scientists.
Computers from the first generation to the fifth are the result of
espionage priorities stemming from World War 2 research to present competition between
Japan and the West, with vast resources coming from industry, military, and government
(Jones, 1979).
From this need for rapid computation (coupled with developments in
planes and missiles) we can derive the whole growth of solid state physics, leading to the
transistor, the microprocessor and all the developments extending from pocket calculators
and brain scanners to the integrated defence system known as SIOP (Pringle and Arkin,
1983). Someone who is doing research in solid state physics on, for example, selenium
arsenide might not be aware of all of the connections of his or her particular PhD
project. Indeed, I have a friend doing research in optics at Imperial College who claims
that it is extremely hard to avoid doing research which is funded by the military or is of
interest to the military. The most abstruse mathematicians have recently found whole areas
of their discipline classified.
Even the most advanced and humane research, the transplanting of hearts
and other organs, depended on developments in immune system suppression which Sir Peter
Medawar and others developed during the treatment of severe military burns during World
War 2.
It would be possible to extend this list indefinitely from
low-technology matters like modern nursing in relation to the Crimean War, to group
psychology and World War 2 stress research, to the entire war-related agenda of the
largest private research organization in the world, Bell Labs. From the two-volume history
of Bell Labs one can derive an astonishing list of inventions where military and civilian
applications were closely integrated (Fagen, 1975, 1978). The same can be said of the
history of IBM, the giant which dominates the computer industry.
Commercial agenda-setting
A similar story can be told about commercial
prioritization and agenda-setting. Vitamins are vital coenzymes; small amounts are
necessary to avoid well-known deficiency diseases, for example rickets, pellagra, scurvy.
This is a real need at some times and in certain parts of the world, but the vast sales of
vitamins in metropolitan countries bears no relationship to the real need. This is simply
the result of hype. Yet this same drug industry does not develop cheap vaccines against
malaria and other diseases because the potential purchasers of such products cannot afford
them (Medawar, 1986).
Look at the way the commercial potential of biotechnology has created a
bonanza in shares for researchers and genetic engineering and other aspects of the
commercial side of biology. They have been frank about their priorities and have gone for
products - human insulin, growth hormone - which will lead to expensive saleable
commodities (Yoxen, 1982). Indeed, the adding of hormones to animal feeds has already
begun to have dire consequences in Puerto Rico, where children are developing secondary
sexual characteristics as a result of substances fed to the animals which the children
eat.
The United States health industry is operating at over two hundred
billion dollars per year. This produces dramatic scientific findings, but their
connections should also be spelled out. Much of this money feeds the drug industry, the
insurance industry, the medical equipment industry, the hospital construction industry.
Beyond this, large profits are derived from the private management of medical facilities
and the remuneration of medical practitioners and researchers. Medicine, like other forms
of technology, is big business.
The whole question of energy can be seen in the same terms. For
example, the debate between various forms of energy derived from the sun - wind, water,
heat storage, photovoltaic - is a function of how the big utility companies are able to
control research agendas. They have managed to forestall some kinds of research and to
co-opt others. The developments which have been done have mimicked the vast power stations
that the big utility companies are accustomed to erecting. This is done at the expense of
small-scale solar units which can operate in a neighbourhood, a block, even a single house
or flat. While this is going on in metropolitan countries, the energy crisis for most of
the Third World is more stark. When will the brushwood and charcoal run out? Women forage
further and further from home daily in order to find wood with which to cook. Failure to
cook food produces disease and debilitation.
Both in the military case and in the setting of commercial priorities,
science pursues certain topics and sets up certain research and development agendas at the
expense of others. An antiracist science curriculum could easily move into the detailed
examination of these matters and their relations with power politics within and between
cultures and power blocs.
Charities: patronage in action
Let us look at another aspect of patronage. It would be interesting to
tell the whole story of the Rockefeller charities. Before the vast national funding
agencies were set up in Britain, Europe and America, the most enlightened and active agent
was the Rockefeller charities. Indeed, these provided the model for national funding
agencies. Rockefeller wealth was derived from a near-monopoly in the oil industry. The
charities were set up for a mixture of altruistic and tax-avoidance reasons. They touch on
medicine, public health, social sciences, molecular biology, animal behaviour, the
organization of scientific research, First-Third World public health and medical teaching.
The history of Rockefeller patronage has been examined by a number of researchers, who
have illuminated the following directions:
The United States medical system orientated its professional students towards the
elimination of alternative medical approaches and the setting up of scientifically-based
medical education, at the expense of a system based on practice and care;
The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine set the pattern for health systems
and health practices throughout the Third World;
The Tavistock Institute of
Human Relations played a leading part in the use of psychodynamic ideas in industry;
The Yale Institute of Human Relations created a reorientation of all
behavioural and social sciences so as to play a palliative role in the American human
sciences and in their adoption in other countries;
The whole discipline of molecular biology was virtually created by
Rockefeller patronage, which gave funds for the use of physical models and research
techniques, e.g. the ultra-centrifuge;
The Harvard Business School provided models for management and
organization which were deeply influenced by Rockefeller patronage and draw on organic,
non-conflict conceptions drawn from physiology;
CIMMYT, the Mexican-based Rockefeller research centre which gave us the
Green Revolution, has had the effect of endangering the peasant farmer. This has led to
the worldwide spread of high technology, high fertilizer farming. It is being followed by
a 'new green revolution' using the techniques of biotechnology which are derived from
other aspects of Rockefeller patronage;
The monkey colonies in Florida and Puerto Rico provided much of the
basis for modern private research and the models of primate behaviour and family relations
which have had a wide influence on the behavioural sciences;
Finally, the style of research funding which was established by the
Rockefeller Foundation provided the model for public sector research patronage, the
Science Research Council, Medical Research Council, the National Institutes of Health,
National Science Foundation.
(See Abir-Am, 1982; Brown, 1979; Dicks, 1970; Fisher, 1978; Fitzgerald, 1986; Fosdick,
1952; Kloppenberg and Kenney, 1984; Kohler, 1976; Morawski, 1986; Yoxen, 1981,1982.)
An analogous story could be told about the
history of museums - the custodial homes of scientific progress. Research on the forces
which have led to the presentation of knowledge in various museums show how they frame
nature and human achievement. There are studies available about research in this vein on
the London Science Museum and the New York Museum of Natural History (Levidow and Young,
1984; Stocking, 1985). It is important to understand that the presentation of science to
the general public and to schoolchildren plays an important role in the way we think of
'human progress'.
Philosophy of science
This argument has moved from narrow issues of race and IQ to how
agendas are set in science. The above examples have been an attempt to break down the
barrier between science and society, between pure enquiry and the sources of
prioritization and funding. A way of summarizing the link is to say that a racist society
will give you a racist science, in both obvious and unobvious ways. The 'powers that be'
in a society will constrain its research and development agenda - military powers,
economic forces, the social structure of a society. This is not true only of the funding
and of the choice of questions and research proposals. It is also true of ideas of nature
and human nature, as well as the philosophical assumptions of science itself. It is harder
to make this level of the social constitution of knowledge accessible. One needs to make a
big jump.
We are taught to think of science as knowledge of nature pursued by the
best method of discovery and proof - the scientific method, which uses quantitative
measures of physical variables. But this was not always so. There was science before the
'scientific revolution' in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are alternative
ways of thinking about the world - alternative world-views - in different cultures as well
as in our own. If we try to think like anthropologists, we can look at scientists as a
tribe and the assumptions of science as a belief system. There is a literature about some
of these matters which shows how our'tribe' and others construct their world-views or
cosmologies and set up knowledge systems, technologies and cures within that framework
(Douglas, 1970, 1973, 1975; Horton, 1967). The institutions and the educational systems
which reproduce them propagate the priorities and values of that tribe.
The curriculum
A sophisticated antiracist science curriculum would compare the thought
system of our own culture with those of others. It would also show the examples where
systems of knowledge have successfully cut across particular cultures - Arabic numbers,
acupuncture, herbal remedies. Similarly, it could look at the Western capitalist approach
to science post-seventeenth-century rationalism - and see the concomitant growth of the
scientific revolution, the Protestant revolution, and the capitalist revolution. There is
a good literature on these matters.
There are both historical and theoretical issues at this fundamental
level. For example, the scientific revolution began the separation of fact and value,
matter and mind, mechanism and purpose. It would be useful to demonstrate the growth of
this mechanical philosophy and compare it to more organismic ways of thinking, then and
now. The relationship between mechanistic and reductionist thinking on the one hand, and
environmentalist and organismic theories on the other, has important philosophical and
political bearings.
It would also be possible to spell out the system which separates facts
from their origins, meanings and the values that inhere in knowledge systems, by looking
at positivism itself. It is positivistic to teach science in the way we do, such that a
science staff in a particular school could make the following reply to a questionnaire on
anti-racist science:
1 The nature of Western science is factual and
international in character. While clearly the product of European/American historical
socio-economic processes, it purports to be culture free, in that it deals with facts and
theories elucidated by a process of logical deduction and reasoning which has its roots in
the capacity of the human mind, and not in culturally determined conditions.
2 The dominant form of science in the world today is 'Western' science.
The process of logical hypothetical deductive reasoning on which it is based is the
subject matter of science education, as is the result of such reasoning expressed in
3 Although many of our pupils originate from divergent cultures, most
of them are first-generation Londoners, and their original cultural backgrounds subscribe
to Western science. There is therefore no case for introducing other forms of science
which are characteristic of particularly minor cultural experiences.
4 The document 'Are we meeting the multi-ethnic needs of the school?'
cannot therefore be replied to by this department, except to state the following:
(a) The science staff are of course aware of the international
character of their subjects. This is stressed when appropriate.
(b) A 'Statement of intent' has been produced by the science
department. This is displayed in the science block and every pupil has the opportunity to
see it. The statement stresses that staff are actively examining materials to eliminate
racial, sexual and religious bias where they are found to occur.
(c) Where the subject matter of science includes a discussion of racial
origins and differences, as it does in biology, the subject is dealt with in a factual
manner.
I think that students should be invited to consider this reply.
Similarly, they could be invited to look at Sir Keith Joseph's arguments - as Minister of
Education - against the teaching of 'peace' studies on grounds that it amounted to
political indoctrination:
SCHOOLS SHOULD GIVE BALANCED VIEW ON PEACE
AND WAR
Sir Keith deplores attempts at indoctrination
The extent to which explicit attention to the issue of peace and war should have a
place in the classroom should be decided on educational not political grounds, Education
Secretary Sir Keith Joseph said today.
Speaking in London at a one-day conference on peace studies, organized by the National
Council of Women of Great Britain, Sir Keith deplored attempts to trivialize the issue,
cloud it with inappropriate appeals to emotion and present it one-sidedly.
Arguing for a rational approach to the subject, he said local education authorities
should support the professionalism of teachers, who should seek to present to pupils a
balanced and objective picture of the issue.
Sir Keith said peace and war, like other important issues of the day, would crop up
naturally in the curriculum. There was no need to make special space for studies labelled
'peace'.
Teachers' presentation of the issue should be objective in that their selection of fact
gave a balanced picture, fact and opinion was clearly separated and pupils were encouraged
to weigh the evidence and arguments so as to arrive at rational judgements.
If asked by his pupils for his own views the teacher should, as appropriate, declare
where he himself stands but explain at the same time that others, in particular the
pupil's parents and other teachers, may disagree.
(Press Release, 3 March 1984)
The overall model for a science curriculum should be one that always considers all the
following in their mutual interrelations:
origins
assumptions
articulations
who benefits
alternatives
When we begin to think of alternative perspectives, we can look a science as a way of
expressing the values of a given culture. We can also begin to question those who want to
maintain the separation between science and culture. For example, Sir Keith Joseph also
argued that the arts should be eliminated from all polytechnics in Britain. Why? Students
could also be invited to examine the exhibits at various museums. The idea would be to
help them to see what lies behind the way scientific knowledge is presented and to see the
interests which are being served by the separation of science, technology and society.
The problem of an antiracist science curriculum is the problem of changing the terrain
of science teaching. We need to look at deeply held assumptions about what science is, and
what its role in culture is. In particular, there is a series of very basic separations
which have to be challenged in the curriculum and not just as an ornament to teaching
after we have finished presenting the serious part. Some of these separations are:
pure and applied
science and its abuse
science and culture
fact and value
substance and context
body and mind
science and society.
Once teachers and students have become accustomed to thinking about
these matters, it should not be difficult to move on to the deeper level of why we
think about nature in the ways that we do and why we find it so difficult to think about
it in different ways. The more we consider these matters, the more closely integrated we
will see questions of industry and knowledge, of science and culture, so that in the end
debates about the science curriculum can be seen as debates about what kind of society we
wish to have. Do we wish to have one in which people are spoon-fed with facts according to
an agenda set by others, or one in which they have a genuine voice in determining what our
future will consist of?
In order to understand that, it becomes necessary to understand the
nature of a technocracy - a society based on blinkered technique, while the priorities are
set in a way that is kept out of sight. These blinkers are at work in the framing of
scientific education. From this set of topics it should be evident that the question of an
antiracist science is the same as the question of a just society in other areas.
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L I S T 0 F C 0 N T R I B U T O R S
Terry Allcott has been head of the Centre for Multicultural
Education in Leicester since 1984. He is the author of an INSET Pack on Multicultural
Education in the National Curriculum.
Cari A. Bagley is a sociologist and qualified community worker. As an equal
opportunities officer and researcher he has been concerned with the development of
strategies aimed at eliminating racism and racial discrimination.
Kevin J. Brehony is lecturer in education at the University of Reading. He was
co-director, with Rosemary Deem, of the ESRC-funded research project The reform of
school governing bodies'.
Celia Burgess-Macey is a primary and early years adviser for the London Borough of
Lambeth. She has written widely on the topic of racism and sexism in primary school
reading materials.
Bruce Carrington is a senior lecturer in education at the University of Newcastle-upon
Tyne. He is currently investigating the effects of cross-age peer tutoring on pupil
performance and attitudes. He is co-author, with Geoffrey Short, of 'Race' and the
Primary School (NFERJNelson, 1989).
Rosemary Deem was senior lecturer in education at the Open University
until October 1991, when she left to take up the post of Professor of Educational Research
at Lancaster University. She has published extensively in the fields of gender and
education and the sociology of work and leisure. She was co-director, with Kevin Brehony,
of the ESRC-funded research project 'The reform of school governing bodies'.
Will Guy is part-time lecturer in the Centre for the Study of Minorities and Social
Change at the University of Bristol. He has written widely on travellers and gypsies,
especially in Eastern Europe.
Jan Hardy is county advisor for Multicultural Education in Hertfordshire.
Richard Hatcher is senior lecturer in education studies at Birmingham Polytechnic. He
is co-author, with Barry Troyna, of Racism in Children's Lives (Routledge, 1992).
Sue Hemmings was research assistant to the ESRC-funded project The reform of school
governing bodies'. She is currently part-time lecturer in education at Plymouth
Polytechnic.
Máirtín Mac an Ghaill teaches in the Faculty of Education at the University
Birmingham. His main research interests include the sociology of 'race' and the school of
education; he has a particular interest in Irish studies. He is author of Young, Gifk and Black: student-teacher relations in the schooling of black youth (Open
University Press 1988).
Ian Menter is director of studies for initial teacher education at Bristol Polytechnic.
He has written a number of articles on education policy, antiracism and teacher education.
Herman Ouseley is chief executive for the London Borough of Lambeth. He was previously
principal race relations adviser and head of the Ethnic Minorities Unit at the GLC, and
later Director of Education and Chief Executive for the ILEA. He has also been actively
involved with community work through his local CRE.
Bhihku Parekh is professor of political theory at the University of Hull and was for
sever years deputy chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality. He was a member of the
Rampton Committee and, for a short time, of the Swann Committee. He has published widely
in the field of political theory, and is author of Colonialism, Tradition and Reform
(1989).
Kenneth Parker is professor and head of the Graduate Centre in Cultural
Studies at the Polytechnic of East London.
Robin Richardson is director of the Runnymede Trust. He was previously
adviser for multicultural education in Berkshire (1979-85) and chief inspector in the
London Borough of Brent (1985-90). He is author of Daring to be a Teacher (Trentham
Books, 1990).
Geoffrey Short is senior lecturer in education at Hatfleld Polytechnic.
His current research interest is in primary and secondary school children's knowledge of
Jewish identity and culture. He is co-author, with Bruce Carrington of 'Race' and the Primary
School (NFER/Nelson, 1989)
Barry Troyna is a senior lecturer in education at the University of
Warwick. Amongst his publications in the field of antiracist education are Racism,
Education and the State (Croom Helm, 1986) which he wrote with Jenny Williams; Racial
Inequality in Education (Tavistock, 1987); and with Bruce Carrington, Education,
Racism and Reform (Routledge, 1990). His latest book Racism in Children's Lives with
Richard Hatcher is published in 1992 by Routledge.
Chris Vieler-Porter is an advisory teacher for multicultural education
in Hertfordshire. His main research interests concern the production of audio-visual
images of'otherness'.
Cecile Wright is lecturer in education at the University of Leicester.
She has written a number of articles on the experiences of ethnic minority students in
British schools, including 'School processes - an ethnographic study', published in Education
for Some (Eggleston et al., Trentham Books, 1986).
Robert M. Young is Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies at the
University of Kent and Managing Director of Free Association Books. He is editor of the
journal Science as Culture.
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