Confronting the Limits of Antiracist and Multicultural Education: White Students’ Reflections on Identity and Difference in a Multiethnic Secondary School

This paper is drawn from ethnographic participant-observation data and interview materials collected between September 2004 and July 2005 in ‘Kingsland’, an inner-city, multiethnic comprehensive secondary school in the South West of England. It explores the complex and often contradictory ways in which young people negotiate and reflect on notions of identity and difference in relation to social and pedagogical vocabularies of belonging, friendship and fairness which operate within their school. The paper pays particular attention to experiences and perspectives outlined by Kingsland's ‘white British’ or ‘ethnic majority’ students in order to highlight and critically examine some of the tensions within, and limitations to, both national policy frameworks for citizenship education and local, institutional discourses which powerfully construct the school as a strongly antiracist multicultural community.