Anti-racist leadership: part 3 - What we say

One of the most common questions that I get asked during my training is, ‘Liz, what can I say and what can I not say because I don’t want to offend anybody?’

The non-statutory guidance document, Birth to 5 Matters, states that ‘talking about race is the first step in countering racism’, and it is something we must never forget if we are committed to working towards creating an anti-racist thread that runs through the early years. We must understand that anti-racism goes hand-in-hand with dismantling the ableism, patriarchy and classism that forms the bedrock of our sector and wider society.

In the previous features we have discussed why we must start holding up a mirror in our sector so that we can more honestly examine how racism can show up in practice. We’ve also looked at why it is important to consider our personal anti-racism journey before starting conversations about race with each other and how to embed a culture of belonging. Now we are going to focus on language.

So, when asked what people should or shouldn’t say, my response is always the same – ‘Reframe that question and instead of thinking about it in that way, ask yourself how would you respond if you were corrected about the terminology that you used?’

This is a better lens to apply because:

• It removes the pressure and responsibility off the racially minoritised person to give you an exhaustive list that covers all words and phrases that can be perceived as racist when it is much more complex than that.
• It feeds into the problematisation of terms such as BAME which attempt to flatten the racialised experiences of all non-white people. These terms ignore the nuances of the endless ways that different people with various racialised identities experience racism. Racist language is not a one size fits all.
• It encourages you to take responsibility for your own learning for this part of your anti-racist journey as you lean in to getting it wrong, which after all, is how we all learn as human beings.
  
  

What our language says about us

White supremacy is woven into the fabric of how society is built. When it comes to language, we should be aware that how we communicate in our day-to-day roles is predicated on our proximity to systems of power, privilege and oppression.

Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw has dedicated some of her most profound works on the concept of intersectionality. While in her book, Teaching to Transgress, author bell hooks speaks about why ‘teaching to transgress against racial, sexual and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is an important goal’.

As early years educators, we need to have an awareness of how the language that we all use is indicative of where we sit within these intersecting positions from our own experiences of how we have navigated society and, equally, how society has responded to our navigation.

Have we been met with hostility because of how we communicate? Has our language been ridiculed because of pronunciation? Has our bilingualism been deemed refined and elevated because we speak French, Russian and Latin or viewed as being less worthy because our Jamaican patois is described as inappropriate or slang?

I remember two distinct incidents during my time as a nursery manager when parents – both dads, racialised as white, gendered as male, able-bodied heterosexual and middle class – expressed concerns to practitioners, who did not share all if any of these identity markers, about their children being exposed to, what they perceived to be, forms of inappropriate language.

I am going to use these two incidents as case studies to provide examples of how we may address this and unpack the problematising and value of languages and speech within an early years environment.

Case study 1

Dad asks to speak to the key worker. The key worker is racialised as white and gendered as a woman. She uses the pronouns she/her and has short, cropped hair. She identifies as LGBTQ+ and is born and grew up in an area called Oldbury. She has what could be described as a ‘Black country accent’. Dad expresses concerns that his child is coming home pronouncing the word ‘bath’ as ‘baff’ and has said that he would like for her and other staff members to make a concerted effort to pronounce the word as ‘baa-th’.

Case study 2

Dad drops his child off at nursery and speaks to a staff member about the inappropriate music played at the nursery which has ‘slang’ in it. He would like the music played at the nursery not to be ‘urban music’ and would like nursery rhymes. The staff member, who is racialised as Black, is British-born with Jamaican heritage, gendered as a woman, and was born and raised in an area called Smethwick, explains to dad that the children listen to a variety of music at the nursery and that the radio station plays a wide range of chart hits. Dad suggests that if they are to play the radio, could they just play Classic FM.

Reflection questions

• What do these dads’ requests about preference in pronunciation/choice of music tell you about the dynamic of class, gender, race, socioeconomics, privilege and power between themselves and the practitioners?
• How would you respond to each scenario and would this differ depending on your own individual identity markers? (Perhaps discuss this within your teams at work).
• How do you think that different accents influence people’s perceptions of intelligence?
• In case study 2, what do you think the dad meant when he said ‘urban music’?
  
  

White privilege

How language is perceived in our society and indeed within our early years settings is impacted by how privilege works. We widely accept that members of society are judged differently depending on how they speak or communicate and what languages they speak.

For example, two people who are both racialised as white but are from different parts of the UK with different accents may be subject to discrimination and prejudice because of stereotypical attitudes and preconceived ideas about their abilities. Judgements may be made about many factors of their life, and this bias is something that exists in us all, but how is this further heightened when the lens of a racialised identity that is not white is added?

How do we process the languages and the accents of our children and families if they are not racialised as white but are Black, South Asian or East or South East Asian and are Bangladeshi, Nigerian, Vietnamese or Eritrean, for example?

What white privilege essentially means is that although it may be a fact that you have experienced discrimination due to one of your protected characteristics, or based on the way that you communicate, in a racialised society where hierarchical value is placed on all of us because of our skin colour, one of the ways in which you will not have experienced discrimination and marginalisation will be because of the colour of your skin if you are perceived as white.

Liz Pemberton is director of The Black Nursery Manager, a training and consultancy firm that focuses on anti-racist practice in the early years. She is a trained teacher and former nursery manager and is speaking at theNursery World Show 2022 in London on 29 and 30 April: www.nurseryworldshow.com.

The problem with BAME

In the past few years there has been a growing use of the acronym BAME, which stands for Black, Asian and minority ethnic. It is lazily used to describe anybody who is perceived as ‘not white’. Indeed, even in using the term ‘not white’ there needs to be an acknowledgement that this centralises whiteness as the default and that all other racialised identities are constructed around this. We never use the term ‘not Black’ when describing a white group.

The danger with BAME is that it flattens out the extremely nuanced experiences that all those who are supposed to be covered within this umbrella term have. It also blurs the lines when we discuss representation, for example, in the early years workforce or on panels for education conferences.

A person of South Asian, specifically Indian, heritage who is UK-born cannot speak to my experiences as a person racialised as Black who was born in the UK and is of Jamaican heritage, nor can they seek to represent our educators who are, for example, British-born Vietnamese. They should not be used as a sole token of ‘BAME’ representation.

Furthermore, when people use the term ‘BAME’, they tend not to think about those white ethnic groups who are also impacted by marginalisation and disadvantage, such as the Gypsy, Roma and traveller communities or Jewish communities. We must also recognise that the racialised identities of people who are Gypsy, Roma or traveller and Jewish can also be Black or brown. We should make a conscious effort to ensure that we draw upon as many diverse kinds of people to represent our sector in the UK with more explicit consideration given to racialised identity and ethnicity.

One’s ethnicity includes lots of things and it is important that people can define their own ethnicity.

References

• Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks
• Birth to 5 Matters: https://birthto5matters.org.uk