"We Were Just Unwanted": Bussing, Migrant Dispersal, and South Asians in London

Abstract

From 1963 to 1981, the London borough of Ealing bussed South Asian students away from neighborhood schools, citing a need to assimilate migrant students into British culture. The increasing number of migrants in the area and their supposed detrimental effect on education frightened local parents, who pressured Ealing Council to implement bussing to maintain a majority of white, “native” children in each school in the borough. The bussing system and its advocates, initially supported by the Department of Education and Science, relied on ill-defined ideas of assimilation and integration that privileged British cultural authority. The practice also lent itself to American comparisons: the idea of bussing as a progressive civil rights practice across the Atlantic provideda liberal gloss that obscured how bussing worked in different political contexts. This article examines the parties involved in bussing—including educational reformers, South Asian students and parents, and race relations authorities—who invested it with their own meanings and values, making competing arguments for the merit of the practice in England. It argues that despite its liberal transatlantic veneer, bussing made South Asian children vulnerable to racism and ostracization, a position which many parents and local organizations made abundantly clear. The borough terminated the practice only after the Race Relations Board found Ealing guilty of educational discrimination. The long debate over bussing’s legitimacy in London came to represent both national and international discourses of integration and segregation, even as Ealing officials pursued drastically different goals than their counterparts in the United States.