There are countless examples of the collapse of democracy due in whole or in part to extreme forms of racism, the most notorious in Europe being Nazism. Racism undermines the whole basis of democratic citizenship, and tends to be based on essentialised notions of identity and the categorisation of humans into homogenous groups. Thus Citizenship Education (CE) in the European tradition is considered by many to be inextricably linked to notions of democratic education, social justice, anti-racism, and an exploration of multiple identities (Osler & Starkey, 2005). This paper presents an ethnographic case study of CE in the UK. Introduced in 2002, CE was paraded by the government as a way of combating institutional racism evidenced by the MacPherson Report on the racially motivated killing of teenager Stephen Lawrence (Gillborn, 2006). However, analysis of the policy suggests that CE has been introduced to contain threats to Britishness, which is constituted as homogenous, white and Christian, and implicitly excludes British ethnic minorities. Therefore, not only does the notion of institutional racism disappear in CE policy guidelines, the policy also reproduces the racism it claims to address. CE can be seen as part of New Labour’s response to concerns about the perceived threat which young people present to Britishness, due to their allegedly increasing criminality and disengagement from party politics and particularly growing ethnic diversity, which is perceived as a main cause of social conflict. Whilst across Europe, minority ethnic young people have been identified as a group especially vulnerable to social exclusion, they continue to be constituted as threatening to European nation states due to perceived links with crime and violence, strengthened by recent events including 9/11, the protests in northern England in summer 2001, 7/7 and protests in the Parisian banlieues (Colley et al, 2005). Key research questions include: • How do young people negotiate discourses of threat and Britishness performed onto them by the state and education system? • To what extent do teachers conform to or resist the role of social control performed onto them by educational policy? The theoretical framework of the paper innovatively brings together strands from both critical and poststructural theories. It uses Critical Race Theory to situate the findings in a broader framework of structural racism (e.g. Lynn & Parker, 2006). It also draws on Butler’s (1993, 1997, 2004) notion of performativity, which theorises that identities are discursively and performatively constituted.

This study entails ethnographic research on young people’s experiences of CE in the classroom. There is, as yet, very little such research. Fieldwork was conducted in 2 schools in northern England and included discussion groups with 21 students in Key Stage 4 (the final stage of compulsory schooling for secondary pupils aged 14-16) and lesson observations. Much weight has been given to the perspectives and experiences of minority ethnic students, in order to produce a counternarrative to official discourses (Ladson-Billings & Donner, 2005). As the researcher is a white female, care has been taken to problematise power dynamics in interview situations where the hegemony of neo-colonialism could be recreated (e.g. Tuhiwai Smith, 1999).

This analytical framework allows us to understand that schools and CE, supposed to be a safe, nurturing space for young people, can actually constitute dangerous spaces for minority ethnic students. They are positioned as threats to order, disengaged from contemporary issues, and inherently ‘different’ to white people. This in turn, positions them as implicitly threatening, and outsiders to, Britishness. Classes are also far from democratic. This represents continuity with previous education policies not only in the UK, but across Europe and globally. Formal education in nation states has historically functioned as a method of containing threats to the imagined national community (Durkheim, 1956), by creating compliant citizens, and by defining ‘insiders’ in distinction to perceived ‘outsiders’ who implicitly threaten the normative identity of the community by being ‘different’. Such findings are especially relevant at this time, as social inclusion remains a key concern in European policies for learning.