Jeffrey Boakye - I Heard What You Said

Jeffrey Boakye is an author, broadcaster, educator and journalist with a particular interest in issues surrounding race, masculinity, education and popular culture. Originally from Brixton in London, Jeffrey has taught secondary English for fifteen years. He is the author of several books Hold Tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials and the Meaning of Grime; Black, Listed: Black British Culture Explored; What is Masculinity? Why Does it Matter? And Other Big Questions; and Musical Truth: A Musical Journey Through Modern Black Britain. He is also the co-presenter of BBC Radio 4s Add to Playlist. He now lives in Yorkshire with his wife and two sons.

www.jeffreyboakye.com

jeffreykboakye

Fitting in and standing out

Becoming visible

Kin deep

Challenging the curriculum

A revolutionary spirit

New beginnings, old problems

Embracing anti-racism

When someone told me that schools could be racist places, I never thought that might be in any literal sense. By which I mean Ive actually been to a racist school. Not a school staffed by individual persons with racist attitudes, but a school that was actually possessed by racist spirits, like the hotel in The Shining or something.

It sounds far-fetched, but heres what happened.

I rock up at the racist school for a teacher-training session, accompanied by a selection of colleagues and various teachers from other schools, who I do not know. The racist school is glaring at me from afar but I do not notice because I am busy making small talk and generally being charming.

I approach the racist school and its racist doors reluctantly open for me, probably because I am flanked by white teachers who the school is not prejudiced against. So in I go, oblivious as to what is about to happen next.

The racist reception desk is staffed by a friendly faced woman behind a wide panel of racist glass, but this isnt about her. She motions towards the sign-in system. It is one of those fancy digital facial recognition things that takes a picture of your face and turns it into a little printed security pass, after you type your name in. You know whats coming next.

Chat chat chat, laugh laugh laugh, banter banter banter... I type my name in and stand in position, ready for my photo to be taken. Its a process that shouldnt take more than a few seconds overall. Theres a pause. Then a wait. Then another pause. Then the machine speaks to me via digitised display.

Face not recognised.

People nearby offer helpful advice about standing further back or higher up or into or out of the light. I laugh it off and try again.

Face not recognised.

It feels like day is transitioning into night as I try for the third, fourth, fifth, sixth time. I am the only person who this machine has failed to recognise. I am the only person who is black.

Face not recognised.

For some reason or other I am not allowed to enter this school until this machine sees my face and turns it into a security pass, but thats not happening. I seriously consider leaving. My blackness is now an elephant in the foyer, squashing us all against the walls. Someone else asks if they could try. They do and it works. I go again.

Face not recognised.

I know that a school cannot in fact be racist, in a physical sense, and I know that any racism at play here was deep in the coding of the facial recognition system, obviously. I also know that it reflects a default whiteness that permeates society at every level, up to and including how technology is programmed to consider white skin as normal and thus recognisable.

It might sound paranoid, but the rejection I felt by not being recognised echoed wider suspicions that I might not be recognised by the teaching profession. How I felt waiting for that machine to see me is symbolic of my discomfort around being a black teacher in a white education system.

Eventually, with a few tweaks of the settings and a wild stroke of luck, the machine did finally see me and let me into the school, and I swiftly drowned my sorrows in a lukewarm cup of tea.

I dont know what you do for a living, and I cant ask you because Im not with you right now, but I want you to imagine that youve been doing it for, lets say, five to ten years. Now I want you to imagine that youve just been introduced to a room full of your primary service users. The people who use the service you provide. You get introduced as [insert your name here], a new [insert profession here]. Then a hand goes up and someone asks, Are you really a [insert profession again]?

This has happened to me on two separate occasions that I can remember. The profession in question is teacher, and the primary service users in question were kids.

My profession of choice is teacher, English teacher to be precise, and its a profession dominated by white women. Thats not hyperbole: in 2019 over 86 per cent of all teachers in state-funded schools who chose to reveal their ethnicities were white and British. Then, of the 498,100 teachers on record, 376,300 were female. Thats 76 per cent. So as a teacher living and working in the UK Im significantly more likely to be a white woman than the black man I see when I peer into the mirror.

Due to matters of patriarchy, gender stereotyping, inequality and dominant masculinity, teaching is an historically female profession. Its the kind of nurturing, low-stakes, non-money-making career option that educated girls have been allowed (by men) to pursue before being subsumed into the roles of (house)wives and mothers, while educated boys went on to populate offices and factories. As with any other profession you can think of, women dont run education. It doesnt matter how many female teachers there are out there: the strings are pulled by mans hands.

Like gender, race is a pertinent lens through which to view the teaching profession. If you look like me, and come from the kind of place that I come from, and grew up in the environment that I grew up in, in the historical period in which I live, then that means that a) you were very recently a black boy, and b) youre probably not going to be a teacher.

In matters of educational aspiration, the black boy in Britain is the unbackable horse. In this country, black boys dont become teachers. And thats not an overstatement. The numbers dont lie. They cant. Im a blip. An anomaly. A glitch on the educational landscape. And yet, here I am, staring at a CV that confirms that I have been a teacher for over fifteen years.

What happened?

If Im technically not supposed to be here, my existence as a black teacher is something of a provocation to the status quo. Sometimes, I feel like a drop of ink in a test tube, clouding the issue and staining the waters. At other times I feel like a drop of ink in the ocean, insignificantly small and diluted away without a trace.

Another way of looking at it is that Im not so much an anomaly as someone whos bucked the trend. I mean, real talk, anyone can be a teacher. Its just a complex series of socio-economic and historical factors that have led to it being seen as a female profession, something that then plays out as a self-fulfilling prophecy over time. Me, the black male known as Jeffrey Boakye, has as much right to be a teacher as the average white woman has to become a professional rapper or pastor at a Nigerian evangelical church. Its unusual, yes, and highly unlikely, true, but not unfeasible.