In July, voice.wales published an article on the reality of racism in Welsh schools, which was based on recent peer research undertaken by Race Alliance Wales. The article generated a huge response, but we also saw a significant amount of comments and ‘shares’ from people who could relate to the experiences of racism discussed in the article. Some of these individuals reached out to voice to share their experiences of racism in the Welsh education system. Here are their stories.
Cover image by Tom Davies, design by Veronika Merkova.
Last year, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement generated huge momentum across Wales after the death of Black man George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis cops. The Welsh BLM movement brought to the fore issues of police brutality and institutional racism, but it also placed the Welsh education system under the microscope.
Earlier this year, Race Alliance Wales (RAW) published a peer researched report entitled ‘Show Us You Care’, which contained testimonies of direct racism, indirect racism and microaggressions, and institutional racism experienced by racialised individuals in schools across Wales. It also explored a lack of representation within the education workforce, the flawed processes for reporting racist incidents within schools, and the long-term impacts on those who experience racism.
RAW’s research underlined how multiple and repeated experiences of racism – regardless of how big or small these are and whether they occur in primary school or higher education – have “a lasting and often traumatic impact on young people, impacting on their long-term mental health, identity and aspirations for the future.”
“She always looked at me like she was disgusted I was alive”
After reading our initial article on RAW’s research, Ben got in touch to share his story. Ben wishes to remain anonymous due to the impact these experiences had – and continue to have – on his mental health, so we’ve changed his name in this article.
Having moved to Wales from South England, Ben attended Ysgol Uwchradd Aberteifi, a bilingual mixed comprehensive in Cardigan, Ceredigion, between 2009 and 2012. He told Voice.Wales about how he suffered continual racism and bullying due to his mixed race, and how this impacted his decision to leave education early.
Some of the incidents he tells me are deeply shocking.
Ben recalls an incident where he was stopped in the corridor by a senior member of staff at the time. He remembers the senior staff member pointing out his skin colour showing through the school shirt, and then being asked to wear another shirt underneath, to make his skin less visible. He was told to go to lost property for an extra top.
As well as this, he received frequent comments from a teacher training assistant, who asked Ben when he was going to “cut [his] hair as it looks messy and disgusting” and told him that “no girl wants a guy with crazy unkempt hair.”
“This was a recurring thing,” Ben explains. “She [teacher training assistant] always looked at me like she was disgusted [that] I was alive.”
We asked Ysgol Uwchradd Aberteifi if they’d like to comment on these allegations, but they did not reply to our request.
Ceredigion is a coastal county and is Wales’s second most sparsely populated county. Based on the 2011 census, 3.2% of Ceredigion’s population identified as ‘Black and Minority Ethnic’ and 0.9% identified as ‘mixed race.’
In a predominantly white school, Ben took the brunt of racial slurs.
“My mum’s black and my dad’s white,” he explains. “I’m not the darkest person but still my name was ‘black [Ben]’ to everyone or a slur for Pakistani people, the list goes on.”
“I was somehow anything that fit their [other pupils’] rhetoric of ‘you’re this because we’ve all decided’ and ‘we’ve all decided it’s gross.’ They all just called me by that, gave me my value, name, sense of self entirely about my skin colour, not even my heritage. No one cared at all about that.”
One of the most disturbing aspects of Ben’s experience is not just the racist behaviour itself, but Ben’s claims that when he tried to take action, he was met with little assistance. Ben says he was “laughed at” when he asked for help and was simply told there is “no racism in this school as we have a zero tolerance policy.”
This lack of intervention seems to ring true for many racialised individuals in Wales’s schools. RAW’s peer research found that when victims went to the effort to report racist incidents, researchers “heard repeatedly that schools did not respond effectively.”
Young people reported that they often felt there was a “burden on the victim of the aggression to provide concrete evidence of the incident” and this often led to victims feeling that they wouldn’t be believed or taken seriously, sometimes leading to them feeling that there was ‘no point’ in reporting incidents at all.
“I didn’t see it as a place of education anymore”
This persistent racial abuse and bullying inevitably had a knock-on impact on Ben’s behaviour. He says the racism was “so ingrained into everyday” that he experienced “stockholm syndrome” at first. Then he started to fight back.
“…by year 9 I was fighting back and getting in a lot of trouble for it. I started not to care… I didn’t see it as a place of education anymore,” Ben remembers. “I used to enjoy feeling and being seen as a bright person who wanted to learn. My experience of secondary school in Wales stomped that out of me.”
When Ben defended himself against a racist attack, he says he was excluded for a week, while the other person had “absolutely no punishment.”
“I still don’t understand that one,” he reflects. “I started to think that it was me, [that] I had a chip on my shoulder or something.”
“By age 15 I was suicidal and violent”
Sadly, Ben’s experience is also echoed in the institutional racism that has been widely documented and evidenced in the higher exclusion and intervention rates amongst ‘Black and Mixed Ethnicity’ pupils – particularly young males.
One report on promoting academic achievement for ‘Black and Mixed Ethnicity’ pupils in Wales mentions how “Schools often react to instances of misbehaviour without trying to fully understand or address the underlying reasons, and they take too little account of the dimensions of race and identity when investigating incidents.”
While Ben’s reactions were at the time dismissed as bad behaviour, it’s now clear to see that this was a symptom of the deeper mental trauma he was carrying.
“By age 15 I was suicidal and violent towards people because of a self-hate I had developed and I know in my heart that this was because of school,” Ben tells me.
Things eventually got so bad for Ben that he ran away, trying to return to his hometown in England. Realising the severity of the situation, his parents agreed the best thing was to remove him from Ysgol Uwchradd Aberteifi.
Looking back on his experiences of school, Ben feels let down by the lack of action on the school’s behalf.
“I can’t lay all the blame for how I am completely on them [the school] but it’s what started everything,” Ben says. “If I’d felt supported, as supported as the white kids, if I wasn’t bullied and teased by prejudiced teachers and ignorant children alike, I would have stayed, I would have felt the education was worth it.”
Ben says he still suffers the consequences of his experiences in the school.
“Til this day I don’t trust people that make a point of saying they don’t tolerate racism,” he adds. “I don’t trust people in a position of care. It’s a real problem for me and it stems from their [the school’s] neglect.”
“I have to work so much harder to prove something”
Experiences such as Ben’s are not isolated to Wales’s more rural areas. Voice.Wales was also contacted by another pupil, who we’re calling Alicia. Alicia attends a predominantly white high school in North Cardiff which has a prestigious reputation. She didn’t want us to share the name of the school for fear that it would have repercussions on her education.
Alicia got in touch with us because she believes “[it’s] important to reach out as a black student who has attended predominantly white institutions her whole life.”
She told us about an experience whereby a student called her a racist slur in school, and has made multiple racist comments since, causing them to build a reputation as a ‘racist person’ in the school.
When Alicia reported the incident to the school, they gave the pupil an isolation but Alicia points out that this is “the same punishment given to students who get [into] fights or record them.” The school also told her they would contact the pupil’s parents, though Alicia says she “never heard anything back” and the school “allowed them [the pupil] to attend the school as regular.”
“I was hesitant to report it at first,” she recalls. “I remember I told my form tutor, who led me straight to my head of year. I then had to write a report… I would say they handled it in the same way they would handle a witness to a fight.”
Alicia adds that this has had a huge effect on her mental health, and that she “[has] to work so much harder to prove something” – a point that was raised by participants in RAW’s peer research, who pointed out that the burden of evidence is consistently placed on the victim of racism.
After reading the experiences of Ben and Alicia, and based on their previous peer research, Race Alliance Wales provided the following statement:
‘Young people are calling for more representative history in and outside of schools. They want teachers to be more proactive in educating themselves and others about different forms of racism. They want available, accessible, and more robust reporting systems for racist incidents in schools. Justice and accountability help heal the wounds of racism and hate. Without robust complaints procedures, support and closure, experiences of racism scar and hurt for life’.
“casual racism runs rampant throughout school”
Like Ben, Alicia also experienced microaggressions to do with hair, and she says that “casual racism runs rampant throughout school.”
“In year 7 they policed black hairstyles such as weaves and braids,” Alicia says. She also recalls pupils “sticking their hands in [her hair] and “applying black stereotypes to [her] subtly.”
Emma Dabiri, the author of “Don’t Touch My Hair” wrote for the Guardian that “across the [UK] black and mixed-black pupils are being excluded because their hair is too short, too long, too big or too full.”
The author and academic started a petition last year to amend the Equality Act so that afro-textured hair is explicitly protected, and so far it has reached over 79,000 signatures.
“I’ve become convinced that the draconian policing of afro hairstyles in schools has to be recognised as being firmly in a continuum of 19th-century racist ideologies,” Dabiri argues.
The ignorance surrounding protective braids and styles for afro hair is just one of many symptoms of a curriculum which is steeped in an archaic interpretation of western imperialism and colonialism.
I asked Alicia whether she feels her lessons are representative of Black history, and whether she has been taught about the British empire and colonialism.
“Not at all!” she replied adamantly. “I wrote a letter about this in May to my local MP. I knew absolutely nothing about colonialism and the British empire before I did personal research in my own time.”
Under Wales’s new curriculum, which is set to be introduced in 2022, the Welsh government earlier this year announced that all children will be taught about racism and the contributions of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic communities.
However, there are some loopholes in the new curriculum which could mean that vital topics are neglected. Under the new framework, schools will be able to set their own curriculum based on six “areas of learning and experience”.
While learning about diversity, identity and equality is mandatory under the new curriculum, Professor Charlotte Williams has previously pointed out that there is no requirement for schools to teach pupils about slavery, the British Empire, or the Holocaust. In a report published earlier this year, Prof Williams warned that without such topics being made mandatory, BAME histories could “continue to be marginalised or ignored” in Wales.
Both Ben and Alicia told me they had some positive experiences of teaching staff in their schools, with Alicia adding that one teacher “has taken every opportunity to listen to black voices… even though we are few in number.”
“Of course white pupils and teachers will never fully understand,” she says. “I think listening and actively taking those steps to try to [understand] is the most important thing… having an open mind, and truly trying to hear what we’re saying is so important.”
One of RAW’s recommendations from the ‘Show Us You Care’ report is for schools to become actively “anti-racist” – challenging the traditional cultures that exist in institutions and educating both staff and pupils so they are equipped with the knowledge to do so.
“the black community still keeps getting performative change”
Before carrying out her own reading, Alicia describes her education of Black history as “pretty surface level” and says that it didn’t go beyond Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King.
“It was only until recently I realised that the school system only stuck to those two people, and that there were many other prominent figures like Angela Davis, Huey Newton, and Malcolm X that were never mentioned,” she adds.
Why did she think this was, I ask? Were they too ‘radical’?
“Exactly!” Alicia replies. But again, even MLK was whitewashed, she points out.
“When you do more research, you realise that MLK wasn’t completely opposed to violence, saying ‘riots are the language of the unheard’, and that he was actually a socialist,” she adds.
“Even at that, being as peaceful as he was, he was still the most hated man in America during his time alive… Both MLK and Malcolm X wanted black liberation, even if they had different methods of achieving [this]. In the end, they were both assassinated despite this.”
Our conversation moves from the historic civil rights movement to the current struggle. Last year’s BLM movement saw protests sweep the globe, and in Wales, demonstrations were organised in cities such as Cardiff and Newport, but also in Wales’s smaller towns such as Aberystwyth, Caerphilly and Wrexham.
Seeing these protests in small, predominantly white towns was encouraging, but dialogue has since died down. When I asked Alicia how the BLM movement made her feel, her answer aired on the side of caution.
“Honestly- it has brought light to the racism we still endure,” she admits. “…it has also shown me how the black community still keeps getting performative “change”. I don’t believe anything has truly changed since the rise of the BLM movement. Some have said that they don’t believe BLM is radical enough, that asking our oppressors for liberation will never get us anywhere.”
Do you agree? I ask her.
“Honestly I’m not too sure,” Alicia replies. “I think I need to educate myself more on black history – on what it actually is, not the whitewashed version – before I get to that conclusion.”
