WHITE HEAT: racism, under-achievement and white working-class boys

Abstract

This paper examines students' experience of inner-city education in one of England's most disadvantaged areas. In particular, we reflect on the views of white working-class boys, a group that has recently been identified by policy-makers and the media as especially at risk of educational failure. These boys recognize the educational disadvantage they face on a daily basis, made explicit in a tangible lack of resourcing and institutionalized through selection systems (like banding and setting). These injustices are reworked through the students' perspectives, taking cues from national and community racist discourses of white victimhood. In this way, the white students view their educational and class disadvantage as a ‘race’ issue. It is concluded that this is an important but largely unrecognized way in which racism continues to work through a system that, despite changes in rhetoric, refuses to engage with the reality of racism as a deeply rooted and defining characteristic of the education system.