Burnage Report
The report of the Macdonald inquiry into racism and racial violence in Manchester schools Longsight Press £9.95
Reviewed by Debbie
Epstein
Two years have passod since the Macdonald Inquiry completed its work. Almost twice that length of time has passed since Ahmed Ullah, a 13 ycar old Bangladeshi student arrived at school half an hour before the session began in he morning and was dead before school started.
In response to the demnads of particularly Bangladeshi Manchester City Council set up: the Inquiry: yet when the Cammittee submitted its full report. Manchester refused in publish it on the grounds that it was libelIous.
The members of the Commitlee have always denied the media claims that the Report condemned anti-racist education, and have pushed for its publication. saying that they had firm evidence for all the allegations made in the book. Manchester City Council would not relent, so now the members of the Commitce have published the report in their own names, laking any risk on their own heads.
However this was not the first information we have had from the report - its final conclusions were leaked to the Manchester Evening News, and the Council published a selection of chapters:
So was the publication of the full Report worth it? The answer must be an emphatic yes. The Burmage Report may well tun out to be the most important and authoritative document on practice of anti-racist education and the effects of racism in schools to come out of the 1980s.
It documents in detail the way in which racism can and does af fect the running of schools; and though that has been done before in documents ranging from the Rampton Report to the Commission for Racial Equality's Learning in terror, the evidence provided by the Macdonald Inquiry, and particularly the survey carried out for the committee by Elinor Kelly is an important addition to previous knowledge.
What is new and important about the Burnage Report is the documentation of the failure of a particular kind of anti-racism, labelled by the Committee moral anti racism' in which black students are seen as the victims of the immoral behaviour of white students'.
This kind of anti-racism, says the Report, places racism in a moral vacuum, with no reference to class, sex. age, sexuality or size difference;
"In practice it has been an unmitigated disaster. It has reinforced the guilt of many wellmeaning whites and paralysed them when any issue of race arises. They have become the wimps of race relations, It has taught others to bury their racism without in any way changing cheir attitude. It has created resentment arid anger and stopped free discussion".
Far from being a wholesale condemnation of anti-racism, this is part of a passionate and compelling call for effective antiracism: "We do not believo that an effective anti-racist policy can exist unless the other issues (of equality) are also addressed and dealt with, in particular class and
The Report calls for more and accountability within schools and LEAs; for the involvement of students parents, both white and black, in the development of anti-racist policies and practices; for the recognition that oppressions cannot be put in a hierarchy, and that to deal with one we need to deal with the others. We ignore these conclusions at our peril.