Racism,Reconstructed Multiculturalism and Antiracist Education

To the long‐standing debate over the relative merits of multicultural and antiracist education, Short and Carrington have added a new dimension. It is their contention that in order to challenge racism, educators should promote a reconstructed form of multiculturalism in addition to conventional antiracism. Their argument is that a new form of racism has emerged in which culture assumes a pivotal role and, accordingly, that a revised form of education is required to deal with it. While accepting the crucial role that culture plays in racism in contemporary societies, I question in this paper Short & Carrington's virtually exclusive concern with cultural racism, which is based on a relatively uncritical acceptance of Martin Barker's concept of the ‘new racism’. Instead, I offer a reformulation of the concept of racism which incorporates both biological and cultural elements, but which also includes seemingly positively evaluated characteristics in addition to the more obvious negative ones. This paper notes a number of problems with Short and Carrington's concept of reconstructed multiculturalism and concludes with a critique of their associated liberal pluralist conception of ‘the unity of the nation’.