Telegraph and Daily Fail have a problem with stopping kids hating

The Telegraph newspaper (and the Daily Mail, in a similar article using many of the same words) writes that, "Teachers logged more than 10,000 confrontations involving primary school students making racist insults or derogatory comments about homosexuals in 12 months." They add that, "A further 20,000 “hate crimes” were recorded against secondary school students such as using the phrases “white trash” or “gaylord” during playground squabbles." (I'm going to assume that "white trash" was a long way from being the most frequently heard racially-based insult, but it's the one that is seen as most trivial, and therefore better for the case made by the Telegraph and Daily Fail).

This, according to the Telegraph and "experts", is a bad thing not because racism and homophobia are bad things, but because:

“I feel that childhood itself is under attack,” Adrian Hart, from the Manifesto Club, a civil liberies group, which obtained the figures.

“It’s absolutely the case that these policies misunderstand children quite profoundly."

I'm going to pause right there to make my first point, which is: I would suggest that childhood is under worse attack when children are the targets of unopposed racism and homophobia. And no, I don't think it makes a difference whether the racism or homophobia comes from an adult or a child.

The argument followed by the Daily Fail and the Telegraph is set out by Mr Hart:

He added to the Daily Mail: “Racist incident reporting generates the illusion of a problem with racism in Britain’s schools by trawling the everyday world of playground banter, teasing, childish insults – the sort of things that every teacher knows happens out there in the playground.”

And of course, if you happen to grow up to be straight, then the use of homophobic terms such as "gaylord" to insult people does turn out to be just harmless banter. If as you grow up you discover that you happen not to be happy with straighthood, however, then it's just the beginning of your problems.

Mr Hart says that this "generates an illusion of a problem with racism in Britain’s schools". I say that it reveals that there is a genuine problem with racism amongst our young people. If race-based insults are seen as insulting, then that must imply that being of a certain race is also seen as despicable or making a person less worthwhile. Likewise with homophobia and being gay.

If we allow those insults to go unchallenged, then we teach young people that it is Not Okay to be gay, or to be Black, or Brown (note that the term "white trash" has to qualify Whiteness to make it something worthless; race-based insults don't often have to do that for people of colour!) We teach them that racism and homophobia are normal and acceptable. Mr Hart, indeed, wants us to believe that it is normal for children to be racist and homophobic and we should allow them to be! But then, how much harder it is to persuade the gay folks among the class that they're okay, and to prevent the PoC from being subtly pushed aside in all manner of ways? I mean, how do they think that the children who made 20,000+ offences in secondary school learned that they could do so, if not by hearing and using those same insults at primary school?

The Telegraph writes, "And nursery school staff reported several dozen such bullying incidents involving young children despite most not understanding the meaning of what they were saying."

But I'm willing to bet you remember it meaning something bad, and then you grow up and learn that you are that "something bad", and then you feel bad, and the people around know that you are something bad, too, and that makes it okay to hate you.

Now, I'm not so sure that reporting and recording these incidents as black marks against students' names is necessarily the right approach - the Mail article says that schools pass the records on; the Telegraph article simply states that:

Racist incident forms were then created that required teachers to name the alleged perpetrator and victim, and spell out what they did and how they were punished. Schools can keep these details on file.

However, be that as it may, the suggestion that is implicit in the tone of the two newspapers' articles, and explicit in Mr Hart's vile outpourings, is that these incidents should not be of any concern to us because they are "normal". I say that it is precisely because they are normal that we should be concerned and we should seek urgently to make them less and less normal! If we want to put an end to racism and homophobia, we're not going to get very far if we allow our children to teach racism and homophobia to each other.