Earlier this year a TV series, Boarders, dramatised the vexed relationship between race and education in the UK. In the BBC drama, a distinguished boarding school called St Gilbert’s gets itself into trouble when a video is leaked of a group of its students urinating on a homeless man. In order to improve its image, St Gilbert’s agrees to a scheme whereby five black inner-city kids are awarded full scholarships to attend the school.
The show is full of the clichés that typify many screen and fictional accounts of race. There is the racist and thick posh white boy. The black girl who complains about bougie coffee shops destroying black communities. The white girl who sexually fetishises black boys. There is even, to top it all off, a black actor playing a Nigerian character with an unforgivably bad accent; most of the people watching the show will not be Nigerian and so will be none the wiser.
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