Engaging with History after Macpherson

The Race Relations Amendment Act (2000) identifies a key role for education, and more specifically history, in promoting ‘race equality’ in Britain. In this article Ian Grosvenor and Kevin Myers consider the extent of young people’s current engagement with the history of ‘diversity, change and immigration’ which underpins the commitment to ‘race equality’. Finding that in many of Britain’s schools and universities a singular and exclusionary version of history continues to dominate the curriculum, they go on to consider the reasons for the neglect of multiculturalism. The authors identify the development of an aggressive national identity that depends on the past for its legitimacy and argue that this sense of the past is an important obstacle to future progress.