Dr Lemah Bonnick

This is the 3rd and final instalment on the series of discussions on race, class and education in the UK. It only felt right to interview the person who is the reason I am who I am, who has shaped the way I see the world - the person who literally brought me into the world, my mother, sociologist Dr Lemah Bonnick.

Bio

Lemah trained at the Institute of Education where she obtained her PhD in the Sociology of Education ‘Racial structuring of Educational Marginality’.

She was a senior lecturer in sociology at St Mary’s University: Twickenham. She also served as a school governor. She has presented her work in the United States - at Temple University, Ohio State University and Brown - In the Service of Neglected People: Anna Julia Cooper, Ontology, and Education

She is currently working on a book - The Will to Know: Redemptive Tradition in the

Struggle for Education among People of African Descent in America and the

English-Speaking Caribbean

We talk about her journey into Sociology working with Dr Basil Bernstein considered one of the architects of the Sociology of Education. We talk about class as a component of social, cultural and economic capital and its impact on education and what my mother describes as the ‘commodification of education’.

We talk about Caribbean intellectuals and their contribution to shaping discussions around Britain’s colonial legacy in the UK and the Caribbean - C.L.R. James, Stuart Hall, educational psychologist Bernard Coard, Jessica Huntley, New Beacon books founder, John La Rose, Kamau Braithwaite. We talk James Baldwin, Toni Morrisson, W.E.B Dubois, Anna Julia Cooper. We talk about Windrush, about the complex relationships between minority groups. We talk about the controversial UK report on race by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities and we talk about music.

Guest: Dr Lemah Bonnick

Title: We talk about the exception as if it’s the rule

Artists on playlist: Marvin Gaye, Schubert, Ella Fitzgerald and Lionel Richie

Links:

Bernard Coard - How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System: The Scandal of the Black Child in Schools in Britain 

Jessica Huntley

John La Rose, New Beacon Books

Kamau Brathwaite

Windrush - https://www.bl.uk/windrush

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43782241

Akala - Natives: Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire

Learn more about our Season 3 sponsors Airbnb and Project Lighthouse

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