Personal experience

I have had two recent experiences that have highlighted for me the importance of writing this book. Firstly, I have been applying for my first headship and have been invited to many interviews (with varying levels of success!). In a recent interview, in a London school that was looking to develop its curriculum and deliver racial literacy training, I was given the feedback, upon being successful, that they felt that I brought ‘colour and flavour’ to the day but I simply was not experienced enough. Now there was no deliberate malice in this comment; however, in a school advertising for someone to champion diverse practice and racial literacy, I feel that this was clumsy and, quite frankly, inappropriate feedback. Feedback should support and develop someone’s practice and approach to interviewing, not adjectives to describe that person. I also asked myself: did they/would they give the feedback of ‘colour and flavour’ to my White counterparts? Who knows.

The second experience was in the summer term of 2022 when I took my Year 6s away for their school journey to a well-known outdoor experience centre. One of the activities was a campfire, led by the instructors, involving storytelling and songs. When the instructors announced that the theme of the evening was ‘A Journey to Africa’, I had a shiver of nervousness and looked over to my colleagues to see whether it was just me. It wasn’t. The instructors then went on to tell a story of a person from England taking a ‘journey to Africa’, via ship, and arriving at a ‘banana plantation’. They then sang a song about this. Upon arriving at said ‘banana plantation’, the voyager came across ‘a man who lived in a shack, who made medicines’. They then sang a song about this. My colleagues and I were incredulous about the content of this ‘campfire singsong’, but before we could muster any words to say to each other, one of the children had yelled out, ‘Africa is actually a continent, what country specifically do you mean?’. I’m not sure that I have ever been prouder of an untimely call-out from a child. I felt horrified by the session but proud that a child had questioned it publicly. This is the impact of strong, anti-racist and anti-discriminatory teaching. The worst part of this experience was that, upon giving feedback to the company the morning afterwards, the response was that if my school were to come back, they would not timetable this session for them. The point is that this practice was reinforcing negative stereotypes that ‘people from Africa’ live in shacks, work on plantations and are witch doctors. The reaction from the company completely highlighted for me how entrenched ignorance is, the desperate need for racial literacy and the fact that many people do not know that they do not know how to spot or question deeply rooted racism.