More and more people are recommending that unconscious-bias training should be brought into schools to tackle racism. This is a mistake, says Kevin Rooney.
Racism is real. I have spent a large part of my life fighting it, and understand it is often deeply rooted in our social structures, and therefore hard to tackle.
So, when Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer announced that he is to have unconscious-bias training after criticism of his language around the Black Lives Matter protests, many welcomed it. Starmer’s endorsement of unconscious-bias training for himself, and for others in the Labour party, seems to demonstrate a new determination to root out racism, even from the darker recesses of our minds.
It follows on from the Channel 4 programme, The School That Tried To End Racism, in which a class of Year 7 pupils was filmed taking a scientific test to detect unconscious racial bias, and then given a three-week unconscious racial-bias training programme.
The narrator of the programme told viewers that the Implicit Association Test (IAT) is now widely accepted as an accurate measurement of unconscious racial bias.
The Times Education Supplement