Professor Bill Boyle and Marie Charles investigate Liverpool’s inability to reflect the city’s 400-year black presence

“You have to pierce through the surface to tell the truth” (James Baldwin, 1964)

The Liverpool Council’s education workforce by ethnicity data interrogated by Many Faces in Teaching (MFIT) researchers last year reveals that there are only 18 black teachers employed in Liverpool while the city employs 3,380 white teachers.

However, the disparity does not stop there. On further examination of Liverpool’s school workforce statistics, this ‘near invisibility’ of the city’s 400 years old black population extends into the schools’ learning support assistant data shows only 33 black employees against a total of 4,414 white learning support assistants.

A previous survey conducted by us in 2010, of the Liverpool Council’s workforce ethnicity for all its departments, evidenced minimal black representation of just 2% across all city council departments.

These data demonstrate that the Liverpool council workforce with 93% white employment is ‘an embodiment of white supremacy and white hegemony’ (Gillborn, 2005,p.465). The ‘surface’ continues to reveal that black boys and girls are the lowest performing ‘ethnic’ group in Liverpool in 2015.

Cornel West cogently argues: “…this is a pathology… no such thing as black children failing but as a falsehood, this has been institutionally populated as the denial of black humanity, intelligence and creativity in a school system; dishonoured and devalued in a structure that ranks blacks at the bottom of an imprecise and flawed metric.”

MFIT exists to continue to ‘pierce the surface not only to find the truth’ of exclusion and invisibility but equally, to seek out those constituted outside or at the bottom of a structure particularly, their identity and their voices.

In doing so, when we talk about the structures that subordinate, we want to hear the agency of those who are reacting and responding in such a way; we want them to know that these structures are always contingent, tentative, provisional and therefore, subject to transformation. In a recent email correspondence from the deputy Mayor of Liverpool, Nick Small, stated:

I feel that there may be a danger that repeatedly portraying Liverpool and the teaching profession here in such a negative light will only serve to discourage those groups that we are actively trying to encourage into the profession from applying in the first place” (March 3rd, 2016).

This ‘well-intentioned’ response not only falsely projects ‘race’ as neutral and objective, but also upholds three constants: firstly, it negates the consequences of institutional racism that are so subtle as an everyday occurrence, that is not recognized by the people inside the system (Gillborn, 2005).

Secondly, it is the ultimate goal of the ‘dominant race’ to defend its collective interests (i.e, the perpetuation of systemic white privilege, and this group develops rationalizations to account for the status of the various ‘races’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2000, p.9).

Note how Mr Small adopts a colour-blind discourse and singles out ‘those groups’ as being discouraged by our report and not empowered because people who like them, have now become the counter forces to talk about their racist experiences in the teaching profession in Liverpool. In short, when it concerns domination, whites suddenly disappear… their previous omnipresence becomes a position of no-where, certain politics of undetectability and ‘otherness’ is ultimately to blame” (Rector-Aranda, 2016, p.5).

Educational, business and political leaders do not want to acknowledge that there is a serious problem with the city’s structural processes and this element is particularly virulent in the teachers’ narratives in our recent published research report. A headteacher quoted said:

Someone had written the word ‘N****r’ in very large letters on the ground in the yard close to my classroom. I brought it to the attention of the head teacher. She asked me by email if I thought it was directed at me. When I replied that I did not think so she responded by saying that she was glad this was the case as she would have taken it much more seriously if she thought it was directed towards a member of staff.

“In my previous school I experienced racism and I am still suffering from the effects. However, at my current school, the management have been very supportive in all areas. But there are some staff members who seem programmed to be uncomfortable with people of another ‘race’. I had my share of racial slurs at work but I learnt to ignore them.

“I have had ‘oh my God, she’s black’ when I opened the door to let my class in from the playground. Then I am just walking down to Asda to get my lunchtime sandwich and young guys are shouting out the car ‘N****r’. I thought you don’t even know me”.

Within this colour-blind discourse is the misunderstanding of the ‘construction of racism as a system of socio-economic power, exploitation and exclusion (Gunaratnam, 2003. P.4). The head teacher [above] fails to understand how colour- blindness operates as a false premise because the conscious avoidance of the topic of race, and the unconscious actions based on race, contradicts the notion of colour-blindness (Chapman, 2007, p.621).

Micro-aggressions (Sue, 2010) operate as a type of covert racism in which the brief and common place daily verbal, behavioural and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory or negative racial, or gender slights and insults to the target person or group are part of the above teachers’ narratives.

Bill Boyle is Director of The Evaluation Business at MFIT and a retired professor at the University of Manchester. Marie Charles is Director of MFIT.

Key mission and description of MFIT’s activities:
• To address the damaged histories that Liverpool’s black descendants have inherited and continue to experience-through the facilitation of black faces in every tier of schooling from classroom leaders, authority leaders and training leaders.
• MFIT is an evidence based organisation based on rigorous collection and interrogation of data for practical application and development of a robust database to support identity, agency and employability
• Micro-stepped workshops on Hegemonic understandings, Culture and Empowerment
Marie Charles, Director, MFIT