Page 132 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

In search of a ‘good mix’ 125
– those people who are not interested in community and who ‘come in,
do up the houses, send their kids to a private school’ – and others whose
dominance in a school will turn it into a ‘rundown’ ‘sink school’. Teresa,
for instance, described it as ‘a typically inner-city dilemma’. The reference
to ‘sink schools’ was not only classed, but also raced. Deborah was drawing
on a discourse of ‘sink schools’ where schools in deprived areas fall into
a downward spiral of reputation and standards as schools are increasingly
unable to recruit ‘successful’ pupils and are left with those who ‘sink’ to the
bottom. This wider discourse is often coded for ‘race’. As Paul Gilroy points
out, education has come to play an important role in the discourses of new
racism:

For a long while, the crime question provided the principal means to
underscore the cultural concerns of this new nationalist racism [. . .]
However crime has been displaced recently at the centre of race politics
by another issue which points equally effectively to the incompatibility
of different cultures supposedly sealed off from one another forever
along ethnic lines [. . .] Where once it was the mean streets of the de-
caying inner city which hosted the most fearsome encounter between
Britons and their most improbably and intimidating other – black youth
– now it is the classrooms and staffrooms of the inner-city school which
frame the same conflict and provide the most potent terms with which
to make sense of racial difference.
(Gilroy 1992b: 54–5)

Deborah appeared to be drawing on this discourse. She went on to explain
in the following extract that, when she said ‘sink schools’ or ‘rundown’,
what she meant was too black, or not white enough, and a threat was posed
by the presence of ‘too many’ black pupils:

I went to an assembly recently – I go to quite a lot of the assemblies,
they have assemblies on Fridays for parents . . . [. . .] and . . . I’d say
it was probably maybe 80/85 per cent Afro-Caribbean, and . . . I’d say
probably . . . maybe 5–10 per cent, 10 per cent maybe, Asian and a few
other minority groups. And I just don’t think that’s a good mix because
it doesn’t reflect the community. I mean if I went into an assembly and
saw sort of 95 per cent white children, I’d be worried. I’d think well
that doesn’t reflect the community, and I just don’t . . . you know, that
sort of idea that I wanted Tom to have a mixture of friends, from lots of
different backgrounds.
(Interview 17)

From this account, it is clear that, for Deborah, considerations around
schooling were highly racialised. In fact, ‘race’ emerged as the central reason
for her not wanting her son to continue in the school he already attended