How A ‘Race' Test Reduced British Schoolkids To Tears

A controversial TV documentary segregated classmates by colour and got them to talk about racism as part of an experiment to unmask unconscious bias… with some startling results

- James Murray

Eleven year old Henry is a joyful little boy with a beaming smile and a mop of vibrant ginger hair who seems to be content among his friends from rainbow ethnicities at his comprehensive school.

Bright-eyed and alert he listens carefully to his teachers, follows the rules and never gets in trouble at Glenthorne High School in south London.

Tonight, though, Channel 4 viewers will see him – and others in his class – become so emotionally distressed by a sociological exercise to gauge unconscious racial bias that they are driven to tears.

Some scenes are painful to watch as Henry and 23 other pupils in his Year 7 class are confronted with the issue of racial discrimination in an unflinching experiment to detect whether there is underlying unconscious racism in Britain’s classrooms.

Using a method widely employed in schools in America, social scientists gave the children a video “game” that reveals whether the player displays unconscious racial bias.

On one side of the screen are cartoon faces of white people and on the other are faces of people of colour. Words like “horrible” appear and children are asked to assign these adjectives to the groups by swiping the word left or right.

Although it sounds brutal and crude the software is widely used in America, where there is a greater racial divide than in Britain.

Cameras in the classroom capture the uncomfortable moment when the children swipe one way or the other as well as at the end of the “game” when the tally reveals that pupils have shown unconscious racism in the way they responded.