Black History and Cultural Diversity in the Curriculum

Bell Ribeiro-Addy Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Streatham) (Lab) [V]]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans) on securing the debate. Previously—I believe it was the year before last—no subject of parliamentary petitions had received more signatories than black history being taught as part of our national curriculum. That has certainly continued with this petition. I am not surprised, because when it comes to black history, we are not given a complete picture. When it comes to British history, we are not given a complete picture, because black history, and the history of our past slavery and colonialism, are often missing. How can we truly understand this country as it is if we do not address those issues?

Like most people who have grown up in the UK over the past century, I never learned very much about that, and what I did was self-taught. The majority of the information we can find is about the US civil rights struggle. These international perspectives are important, but it was far too long before I discovered the UK’s own rich civil rights history and all the information related to our role in the slave trade and colonialism. I want children in our country to learn about these things and why our country is the way it is today; about why they may, if they are black, Asian or from an ethnic minority, experience discrimination; and about important figures such as William Cuffay, Mary Seacole, CLR James, Claudia Jones, Olive Morris and so many more. I cannot stress enough how damaging it is not to see oneself reflected in what we learn and what we learn about our history. Our Government seem quite obsessed at the moment with patriotism and having children sing certain songs in schools and so on. However, when someone is constantly made to feel like they do not belong, because of rhetoric around immigration, and when that is reinforced by what they learn—or rather, what they do not learn—that can be extremely damaging.

My first black relative born in the UK was actually born in 1806, in Twyford in Winchester. His name was Thomas Birch Freeman. He was the son of a freed slave and a maid and went on to become a Methodist minister. He eventually settled in Ghana but often travelled between Ghana, Nigeria and the UK. When I read about his history, I do not hear how strange it was for a black man to be walking around in the UK at that time. Black people have been part of this country for hundreds of years, but far too often people today are made to feel as if it is very recent—in the past 50 or 60 years—and that they are still very much migrants.

We also know that history is always written by the victors, and that is one obvious explanation for the status quo, in terms of what we learn at the moment. The historical amnesia surrounding our country’s own civil rights struggle and the slavery and colonialism that came before has a pretty blatant function in our political discourse. However, obscuring the past victories of the oppressed and marginalised does not help to prevent history from being repeated.

People often refer to this sort of teaching as decolonising our curriculum, but it is important to note that it is every bit as much about class as it is about race. In school, we have other notable gaps in our history lessons about struggles that were ended—for example, the miners’ strikes, the poll tax riots and the accomplishments of trade unions. The attempt to put the history of slavery and colonialism and black civil rights in the UK into the curriculum is an attempt to put the history of the working class into the curriculum. That is key.

I worry that there is an ideological reason behind resisting this change, despite the fact that we can see in this petition and previous ones just how many people want this change to be made to the curriculum. If working-class kids learn about movements for change and about just how much power they have as citizens, what is to prevent them from recognising parallels between past events and what is going on in the present, and—even more important—from mounting effective challenges and bringing about change?

We know that black history is usually confined to a month. That month is really a means to an end. That end has to be giving everybody a clear picture of our collective past. That is why we cannot keep confining black history to just that one month. Too great a burden falls on busy teachers, who often—I know this from information given to the Women and Equalities Committee—do not feel confident about teaching certain subjects, and there is not much support from the Government for them. The Government should take a lead from the brilliant teachers who do all the work themselves, and organisations such as the Black Curriculum, the Coalition of Anti-Racist Educators and the Black Educators Alliance.

It feels like subjects to do with issues of race are treated completely differently from other subjects, which is wrong. When someone wants to talk about race, it is treated as if they are taking away from talking about something else, which itself is the essence of racism. Far too often, the idea that we should teach slavery and colonialism in schools is dismissed as nonsense; we hear that all that it does is reinforce the idea that at some point people in our country did something wrong, in the process it takes children away from learning other more important things. I cannot understand why some people cannot see just how important it is for people to learn about these issues, so that they are not repeated and so that we understand where discrimination comes from.

Confronting the history of slavery and empire is not about recrimination. We need to address our shameful past to understand why we are living our shameful present, and eventually—hopefully—to change what we see and move to a future of equality. To do that, we need to understand that the process starts with education, because nobody is born racist; it is in what we learn. If racism is ignorance—I am sure that all Members would agree that it is—what is education if not the absence or ending of ignorance? I believe that if we teach these very important parts of our history, it will change our discourse, change the rhetoric and change some of the shameful things that we hear about now.

I wholeheartedly support this petition. I hope that the Government take on board yet another petition that is very clear about what we need to see in our curriculum.