22 October 2005: Black History Month and Further Education

Here's the text of the talk which got me into such trouble on Wednesday:

What I want to talk about is black history month: where it comes from, the knowledge associated with it, and your college, its bricks and stones: how they fit into a world outside. Ninety years ago, not here but in the United States, there was a man called Marcus Garvey. Now Garvey looked at the way black people lived in the States. He saw how they were deprived in terms, education, housing, decent jobs, and how in much of their country they weren't allowed even to share buses (and this is true) or public toilets with white people.

Garvey founded an organisation called the Universal Negro Improvement Association. And his great Association quickly became a movement, with several million supporters in America, Britain and the Caribbean. Garvey's strategy told black Americans to return to Africa, because he said Africa was their home. They would receive justice there. In Garvey's hands, Africa became a symbol for a great project of liberation. The men and women who listened to him heard in his speeches the sound of confidence and pride. They felt ten feet tall. I don't know if they really wanted to go back to Africa: they wanted to feel strong in themselves and they did.

This period also witnessed the Harlem Renaissance, the development of Jazz music, black film and art. It's a strange fact that more new books were published by black American authors in the 1920s, than in any subsequent decade.

Black history followed in Marcus Garvey's wake. Another figure Carter Goodwin Woodson created an Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Its job was to teach black historians and to preserve the documents of previous black history. Woodson founded Negro History Week, which exists in the States today and here as Black History Month.

Why do we need this history? Well one thing it teaches us is that education doesn't just spring out of the ground, but has its own stories. People lead it, people with plans and ideas. You go to school, you go to college. Education hits you as a series of rules, 'don't do this, don't do that'. But the rules come from somewhere. Even pens and paper have a story. Let's leave Carter Goodwin Woodson for a second and think about the history of colleges like this one, 'further education'.

In Britain, we didn't have a black history month eight-five years ago. We could have had one: for there had been in Black people living in Britain for hundreds of years. Even in the 1920s, there were black people in London, in Cardiff, Liverpool and South Shields. In Shields, many of them were Muslims from the Yemen. They were the most rebellious sailors you could possibly imagine: in part because they had some of the worst employers, and some of the worst pay.

There wasn't black history. But there were causes and movements, which looked at people without money or education, and tried to give them a chance. In Britain, these movements looked to the cities and to the millions of working class people in them. They saw them in the offices or the factories or the shops, in places like Islington. Eighty years ago, the poor in America were usually black. The poor in Britain were usually white.

Colleges like this came out of movements to give working people a chance, people who left school at 14, adults going back to study late in life: the Central Labour Colleges, the Plebs League, the Mechanics Institutes, the Workers Educational Association – even the names tell you that these were movements of the poor.

I don't want to go through the history of all these organisations except to make a simple point. Further Education is often called the Cinderella sector, and you will remember the story of the young woman who slept 'on a wretched straw bed, while her sisters slept in fine rooms'. Colleges are a product of the cities, and especially the inner cities, of poverty and aspiration and hard work.

Something else follows: because colleges have been for many years poor and white, so today they have become a black sector. All over the country, one in five students in colleges are black. In London, the figures are much higher. Colleges like this are blacker than London, blacker than Britain, blacker than the police, or the army, or the banks, or just about any other industry you care to mention.

If you place one group of people who have faced discrimination in Britain inside a sector which has long been under-funded, then inevitably the danger is that people who have known discrimination will continue to suffer it. I work for a union, we start from the condition of the people who teach. For too many black lecturers, the experience has been low pay and lack of promotion.

But you are students, you have a stake in this sector too. It seems to me that there are still processes that mean that you get less out of colleges than you should. You can look at all the colleges around Britain, draw up figures, and patterns emerge. Black students are more likely to be found studying in basic skills, English as a second language, on vocational courses, studying sports or nursing, courses that lead to a job, but not so as often to university.

The real question, all of us are asking is not – how bad is the present – but what we can we do to change it? Let me finish with one modest proposal, and one which actually comes not from black history but from the experience of another long dispossessed group – disabled people in Britain. Next year, a new law is going to come into effect, the Disability Discrimination Act. This says that every time a college takes any decision of relevance to disabled people - about buildings or courses or anything – they must talk and really listen to groups of disabled students and staff. It is a good law. But why stop there?

Shouldn't colleges have an equal duty to establish and fund groups of black staff and of black students? And women? And lesbian and gay staff and students? And when colleges take decisions which are relevant to staff or students – shouldn't they be obliged, by law, to talk to people, to ask, to consult? And maybe, if colleges learned to listen better, couldn't some of the problems I've mentioned be solved?

21 October 2005: how (not) to negotiate for race equality

I spent the afternoon yesterday at a certain north London college, where I was fortunate enough to have been invited to as one of two or three speakers at the college's black history month event. There were many people there, bands, staff, students, the college principal, around 200 people all told.

I gave a pared-down version of the standard NATFHE race speech, deliberately failing to mention anything relevant to the college (including the fact that it has lost two race discrimination cases in the last 4 weeks, one at tribunal, one by prior settlement), but speaking in general terms about the residue of discrimination in the sector.

Afterwards, the principal took me aside, through the canteen and into a separate courtyard, and like those people you sometimes see building themselves up to anger, gave me the full hairdryer: 'How dare you say that my college doesn't listen to black students?' I was adamant that I had said nothing of the sort. I had said that NATFHE has concerns that through the sector, colleges aren't listening to black students, but I had gone out of my to distinguish colleges in general from that one in particular.

This went backwards and forwards three or four times with neither of us budging.

So I said, 'Ok, the college listens to your black students - how?' He said, 'We have a group that meets regularly for black staff and students.' 'You listen to the group?' 'Of course.' Now I know such mixed staff-student groups are rare in FE, so I said, 'when did it last meet?' At that, he turned bright red and stormed off with such a torrent of abuse, that I slightly fear he may use it against the next NATFHE employee he meets.

I don't normally talk to principals like that, and feel rather embarrassed about it all now, but I can't think how else I could have responded.