United Kingdom: Labeled a racist in first grade

last updated 8 January 2015

Melanie Phillips

Daily Mail

Political correctness in our schools has reached “ludicrous” levels, said Melanie Phillips. The noble aim of stamping out racism has been perverted by an overzealous bureaucracy to the point that we now see “widespread, state-sponsored bullying of children.” In the latest example, a 7-year-old boy was pronounced a bigot, and his mother told to sign a paper acknowledging her son’s racism, all because the lad asked another kid if his skin was brown because he was from Africa. Slapping the racism label on such an “inoffensive question from a curious child” trivializes real racism. And branding a young child a racist “is really quite obscene.” Unfortunately, it is no isolated event. Under the 2000 Race Relations Act, teachers are required to report any incident that is perceived as racist, by the victim or anyone else. Over the past decade, thousands of children have been reported to the authorities, including a 10-year-old hauled in front of a judge for saying “Paki” and a 14-year-old arrested and fingerprinted after asking if she could do a science project at another table because the girls at hers spoke only Urdu. How has this country gotten to the point where it “conducts witch hunts against children for expressing forbidden views?” It is a “deeply sinister, upside-down onslaught upon common sense.”