Engendering Racism: History and History Teachers in English Schools

Racist stereotypes of black peoples are ubiquitous in Britain and are not class-bound. (Nor are they, of course, restricted to blacks; negative stereotypes of, for example, Irish and Roma [gypsies] are also abundant.) Such stereotyping is common in books for children and adults, in all genres of writing. Well-known examples of such writers are Sax Rohmer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and John Buchan, who bridged the worlds of literature, religion, and politics as he became Governor-General of Canada and Commissioner of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Among children's authors, the best known names are Enid Blyton, G. A. Henty, and Capt. W. E. Johns (see Rankin; Dabydeen; Clegg; and Castle).

These writers, with the exception of Joseph Conrad, were all schooled in the United Kingdom. While the media, visual arts, and popular culture must all take their share of the burden of inculcating English superiority and negative notions of the "other," I would argue that once free education was made available to all in the late nineteenth century, schools must bear the major responsibility. Within schools the content of history textbooks and the attitude of teachers must be the locus of the engendering and perpetuation of racial prejudice. Furthermore, teachers may also—deliberately or unconsciously—practice racial discrimination.

Is there any evidence to substantiate these allegations? Let us begin our investigation by looking at textbooks from the closing years of the nineteenth century:

[There is] widespread ignorance prevalent in England about the treatment of native races under European rule . . . . Whole numbers of the African race are clubbed together, indicating so many helpless subjects fit for philanthropic sympathy. There are not considered independent thinkers and doers. (Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams, qtd. in Geiss 180, 195. Williams, a lawyer, was the founder of the African Association, which called the first Pan-African Conference in 1900 in London.)

Society seeks in children's education 'to poison its early understanding of history by false ideals and pseudo-heroes'. (Imperialism, London, 1902, in Castle 162)

At the turn of the century, Joseph Chamberlain, the Secretary of State for Colonies, declared: "I believe in this race, the greatest governing race, so proud, self-confident and determined, this race, which neither climate nor change can degenerate, which will infallibly be the predominant force of future history and universal civilisation" (Chancellor 115). In support of such politicians' perspectives, by the late nineteenth century there was a growing emphasis on racial and national/racial characteristics in history texts and children's fiction. The typical Englishman as propagated by the textbooks was an honest, industrious Anglo-Saxon, brave, calm, and courageous in the face of danger (Chancellor 118). This racial/national superiority was dependent on "the creation of the imperial subject [on whom] are built the deepest hopes and fears of the imperialist nations. . . . Securing the youth into the imperial ethos involved both positive identification with Britishness and distancing from the undesirable other" (Castle 7-8).

How was the "other" depicted in the texts? The notions of racial hierarchy that were the bedrock of social Darwinism and the eugenics movement are clearly evident in the texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The colonies and India are presented as having had no history prior to the arrival of Europeans, and no rational motives are ever attributed to subject peoples, who were clearly expected to welcome their British conquerors. Negative stereotyping is common so that, for example, the nascent Indian nationalist movement was described as "silly and seditious" as Indians' political awareness was "inchoate" (Chancellor 2; Castle 14, 22, 25). Contrary to school texts, university lecturers such as Sir John R. Seeley, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, admitted that India had a "fabulous antiquity . . . petrified as it were. India is all past, and I may almost say, has no future" (176).

Africa and Africans, who appeared in the...