I am grateful that the issue of race didn’t affect me until I was 31. Most people are not that fortunate. Ignorance, prejudice, and idiocy yes but not racism. Working in Brixton meant that for the first time I saw ‘race’ was still a living/breathing concept (as opposed to a dead, incorrect theory consigned to history).
When I moved back to Leicester 4 years later, I upset my mum by asking her if she had felt that our mainly white British teachers had been racist. I am sorry for doing that. I checked because of all the craziness of the previous few years had made me doubt even myself. She may have made her mistakes but the one thing she had got right for us was our education.
‘I didn’t think they were racist because they never treated you any differently’ was her reply. Indeed, that’s how I, my siblings, my old school friends remember it. Even now, when parents and pupils talk of my Primary…
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The Echo Chamber 