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The status of terms 'people of colour' and BIPOC in the UK

My take is that it's an institutional response to the expropriative and dehumanising ways of doing research and teaching. How it plays out in organisations is unsurprisingly unsatisfying in the main.
I went to this talk on a closely related subject yesterday, it's worth looking out for the recording in the next week or so. Srila Roy uses quite technical vocabulary at times but it's a good window into that world. The Sociological Review Annual Lecture 2023 Dissonant Intimacies: Decolonising higher education in the Global South
 
You were probably right, but I don't think it's fair to use their skin colour as the key factor here. I'm assuming you are white. Did you tell the organisers?

In the end the whole thing was cancelled because the school was closed for storms that day.

I do not think white people should be uninvolved in decolonisation. It can't possibly have any impact without white people. I don't think it should be led by white people. I've been to similar things in the past that amounted to reading out other people's experiences as mere case studies, without empathy or understanding.

Also decolonising the curriculum is tricky when the curriculum is entirely out of our hands. Even at school level there's nothing we can do about it.
 
Decolonising challenges ideas and ways of working that are established through colonial philosophies and practices. It can be about the way education is organised as well as style and content of teaching. Perhaps the session could be used to explore or reimagine what that looks like.

Decolonising the curriculum is not really about changing the source materials as such, it considers what counts as good teaching (materials, delivery, assessment) and why.

There is always something that can be done.
Of course, crappy implementation of policy is a great way to kill challenging initiatives.
 
Obv half caste has dodgy history, but “half x” or “quarter y” (however people want to slice it up by parentage / grandparentage) doesn’t seem problematic to me.
contextualised it's not a problem , where it;s used to cast doubt on honesty, integrity or commitment to a locality it becomes a problem ...

i have a numbero f frends of who very proud of their mixed Italian and British Heritage and also various friends who while of a particualr ethnicity define themselves as British of <whatever> heritage ...
 
Decolonising challenges ideas and ways of working that are established through colonial philosophies and practices. It can be about the way education is organised as well as style and content of teaching. Perhaps the session could be used to explore or reimagine what that looks like.

Decolonising the curriculum is not really about changing the source materials as such, it considers what counts as good teaching (materials, delivery, assessment) and why.

There is always something that can be done.
Of course, crappy implementation of policy is a great way to kill challenging initiatives.
In my kids’ school a large part of it was making sure there were a load of books (fiction and non fiction) featuring Black people and other PoC, and offering teaching on Black history all year round. They’ve got a high proportion of Spanish and Portuguese speaking staff, regularly translate letters into multiple languages, and changed their taught language to Portuguese with a deal with the Portuguese embassy (who teach advanced skills to the kids who already speak it). I suspect there’s also been staff teaching on how neurodivergence in Children of Colour is frequently missed (it’s also got a good reputation for SEN Inclusivity).
 
I definitely agree you'd want to know the provenance of any guidance including what kind of research had been done, involving how many, in which geographical areas and which classes had been sampled for their views together with an indication of what %age of the population that was etc etc.
I agree, but often criticism based on methodology is simply a way of avoiding the findings. The kind of data you describe is very difficult to get and is often expected to meet higher standards of 'evidence' than the things we know or care less about (for example, medical research relating to women's health is woeful).

IME people will start picking apart complex research methods with more energy than they devote to engaging with the findings.
Some one I know - who is a proper academic prof - uses the term 'people racialised as black'
This is a very technical term referring to the way groups of people are treated institutionally. Hopefully not used too much where the topic of conversation is informal.
I think some policy-makers blithely assume there's one cohesive and united [people who are not white] community,
This is a crucial point in decolonising, the idea that black and brown people have more in common with each other than with white folk is baked in our social norms. There's little space for the idea that class, age, urban/rural living, religious or other factors might be more important groupings, partly because the lived experience of black and brown people is generally worse than their white counterparts in each category. Of course this is true in colonising countries but it is also true in colonised societies.

In the UK this 'othering' might mean that a brown person is routinely offered unnecessary translation services to access public services and a white person who needs them is not... because the probability that people 'like them' need the service is high/not high.
 
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I suspect there’s also been staff teaching on how neurodivergence in Children of Colour is frequently missed (it’s also got a good reputation for SEN Inclusivity).
The people I was with last night would question the fundamental understanding of neurotypical and divergent thinking and behaviours which are essentially based on Western (white) approaches.
 
The people I was with last night would question the fundamental understanding of neurotypical and divergent thinking and behaviours which are essentially based on Western (white) approaches.
Interesting… my own thinking on this could go two different ways based on the exact context but don’t want to risk detailing the thread away from race to neurodiversity. If I remember I may talk to you about this in the pub at somepoint.
 
So black people/ POC should do all the work around this? Teach the white people?

I don't think white people can do it by themselves. I also can't fault the motivation of white people who try and do this kind of work off their own backs. I just don't have a lot of faith in school CPD generally as it tends to be a box-ticking exercise which is then ignored the rest of the time because everyone is too busy and has too little wiggle room in their professional practice to do anything with it.

A lot of policies and procedures which have implicit biases built into them are all but universal in British schools. Arbitrary notions of what constitutes a tidy haircut being one of the most obvious, but probably not the worst. These exist alongside a lot of good intentions from nice people. Ideas about decolonisation are allowed to proceed so far, and no further. When the people who are running the CPD sessions are the same ones who could make meaningful changes, but don't, that's where I have an issue. Skin colour not really relevant as it's not only white people in that position.

No reason you would have got any of that from my original post, which I can see was throwaway and ill-considered.
 
She's in her 60's so probably remembers 'coloured' being widely used but also there have been multiple decades since where it hasn't been.

She didn't have a bad word to say about anyone and only wanted to get things right, but you'd think it would have occurred to her to check before now. I probably should have explained that it's also fine not to comment on a person's skin colour at all, but that might have been too big of a leap for one day.
I'm in my 60s, so how come the people of my generation I know are aware that it is fine to refer to people as Black, but she did not?
 
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This is a crucial point in decolonising, the idea that black and brown people have more in common with each other than with white folk is baked in our social norms. There's little space for the idea that class, age, urban/rural living, religious or other factors might be more important groupings, partly because the lived experience of black and brown people is generally worse than their white counterparts in each category. Of course this is true in colonising countries but it is also true in colonised societies.

In the UK this 'othering' might mean that a brown person is routinely offered unnecessary translation services to access public services and a white person who needs them is not... because the probability that people 'like them' need the service is high/not high.
also the whole 'BAME' labels us wrong seems to often come from either 'Robinsons and Coopers' South Asians or Trevor 'tread on my neck harder B'wana' Philips assimilationist black folx, which means the nuanced discussions aobut it get lost
 
So black people/ POC should do all the work around this? Teach the white people?

Marginalised groups should not be expected to be experts and teach it for free

where the teaching is paid for thing it needs to be at least co-produced if not fully produced and delivered by people with experience of (relevant) Marginalisation
 
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The yanks do love policing language even when it’s daft.
Maybe, but you should see the reaction from some here when a word is spelled in the American variant style.

The word colored (or coloured) means different things in the US and SA. It's quite an emotive term.

Always felt uncomfortable hearing it mostly, but not exclusively, from mainly white people - Irish, British and South African.
 
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