Rolling Stone Menu ‘It’s About a Certain Kind of Blackness’: Steve McQueen on the Making of ‘Small Axe’
The director discusses his five-film opus tracing the experience of West Indian immigrants and their families in late-Sixties through early-Eighties London
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Small Axe concludes with Friday’s release of
Education, the story of a boy named Kingsley (Kenyah Sandy), whose difficulty with reading has him reassigned to a school for the “educationally subnormal” a.k.a. students for whom the British school system has abandoned all hope.
Education completes a quintet of remarkable stories set between 1968 and 1984, some rooted in fact, others inspired by the experiences of the
It s About a Certain Kind of Blackness : Steve McQueen on the Making of Small Axe
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Elements of Education, the fifth installment of Steve McQueen s Amazon Prime Small Axe film anthology series, could have played as comedy if the circumstances weren t tragic. One scene places its main character Kingsley (Kenyah Sandy) in a room with what will be one of his classmates at the school to which he s been transferred, a big-eyed girl wearing a vacant expression who communicates by barking like a dog.
Later a teacher clumsily strums his guitar as he sings House of the Rising Sun off-key, eyes pinched closed, as his students deflate at their desks. This performance masquerades as a lesson since at the end of this criminal display, he asks the children who wrote the song. Of course they don t know. The Animals, he says sagely, repeating it so they ll remember.
School can be a dangerous place for Black youth. If the teachers are primarily white, there’s a good chance they don’t know how to interact with and properly support the education of Black children. A large part of racism is based on a combination of fear and a natural inclination toward condescension. If a white teacher looks down on their Black students, they can feel it, whether it’s explicitly expressed or not. That, coupled with the white-centric nature of education in the Western world, reveals the deep biases in learning environments. When one considers how much white educators control the content of textbooks, standardized tests, and the overall tone of the educational environment, it’s easy to understand why so many Black students have difficulty in school. Why learn in an environment pre-determined to reject you? How can you come to a teacher for help if they don’t want to be around you?