Student Roles and Perspectives in Antiracist Education: a crisis of white ethnicity?

Abstract Writing on race and education has tended to neglect questions of pedagogy and lived experience at the school and classroom level. The paper begins to redress this by using qualitative research to examine secondary schools that have given antiracism a high priority. In particular, the paper focuses on the roles and experiences of students (aged 11‐16) and explores their pivotal role in supporting and extending antiracist developments. The position of white students in these schools highlights dilemmas in antiracist theory and practice. The paper examines white students’ reactions to antiracist change and describes the schools’ attempts to involve them positively in the developments—forcing teachers to re‐evaluate their assumptions about the nature of race and racism. The paper concludes with a discussion of the concept of white ethnicity. Antiracism is opening up new and important debates about ethnicity and identity in education—debates that can sometimes seem to exclude white students. Constructions of whiteness are often constrained by rightist, nationalist and racist discourses. If antiracism is to challenge these ideologies, a pressing task is critically to address the idea of whiteness itself and to identify new emancipatory discourses such that white students can find a legitimate voice and role in antiracist struggles.