On Being ‘Mohamed’ in Primary Education.
Who are you? When are you? Where are you? Why are you?
Not a day goes by when I think how my life would have been a little easier if I wasn’t called ‘Mohamed.’ Having turned sixty-years of age those days, sadly, have been many. It’s hard to explain the small micro-aggressions and the thousands of times I have to bury, deny, avoid and discuss my name in conversations and explain a part of my mixed-heritage identity to people I have just met. I seem to have spent a lifetime in environments with people who have un/consciously coerced me in to explaining my identity in social situations on building sites and in places of education.
Do I have a problem with who I am or has it been society’s and education’s problem with; who it thinks I am?
‘I am not one of those crazy, terrorist ‘Mohamed’s’, you see raging on television or hear on the radio or on social media’, repeats my sub-conscious self, today and everyday or some similar negative manifestation that happens to be doing the social/media rounds in that particular moment of history or time.
Growing up half-caste (as I was called then) in the 1960s and 1970s was un/knowingly challenging. I couldn’t articulate it at the time but I knew my name would be problematic. I didn’t have the words nor the knowledge to fully understand my situation or my predicament. I was a child growing up on an all white council estate. Diversity did not exist in that time nor in our world.
At primary and mostly at secondary school my six brother’s and I were the only Mohamed’s. We survived on the council estate and out on the streets. We lived most of our school years in a two bedroom house so space was minimum and fall outs a maximum. We spent much of our time out on the streets and slept in shared beds. I will not dwell, suffice it to say we knew no different at the time and thought our situation was the norm.
My Pakistani (Muslim) dad, Amir Mohamed, worked in the steelworks and my English (Christian) mother, Mary Watts, worked in a sweet factory.
At school I/we were called ‘Mo’ by our peers. Little Mo, Big Mo, Middle Mo, Ray Mo and so on. At the time I was okay with ‘Mo’ and I was okay with being called ‘Ray’ at school. I much preferred ‘Ray’ or ‘Mo’ as I was beginning to feel uncomfortable with my birth, given name, ‘Ramon Mohamed.’
I was baptised and had the ‘adhan’ (Islamic call to prayer) whispered in my right ear at birth.
It became the norm and a sort of acceptance that my name would be interchangeable depending on peer or family context.
All my friends were English and white. I was ‘accepted’ as one of them. I knew no different, apart from a nagging feeling inside my head. On occasions I got called ‘Paki’ in heated arguments, most of the time after a bad tackle during school or street football. Playing football on the street or in the playground seem to have happened everyday before I left school at sixteen and joined the world of work.
For a time I was called ‘Taj’ by my my peers at school because, for some reason, it was written as my middle name on the school register. ‘Taj’ was spotted by another child who was the register monitor and must have had a sneaky look whilst taking the register to the school office. My father’s middle name was Taj so, how his middle name ended up as my register middle name is still a mystery to me.
When I left school in 1976 and applied for jobs I cannot remember getting one interview. My parents asked me to walk around an industrial area close to where where we lived and knock on factory doors. Reluctantly I did, most said there was no work.
On one occasion though, I was asked to pop into an office of a small factory, that had lathes, for a quick chat/interview. The person asked my name, ‘Ray’, and we chatted about the possibility of a machinery apprenticeship. He asked me to fill in a form/application. I did, passed him the form and within a split second his demeanour and body language changed. His words were:
I’m sorry mate but I can’t possibly give you a job as you would find it difficult to work here because some of the workers don’t like ‘Pakistanis.’’
Astonishingly, at the time I understood and I apologised!
I still carry that interview.
After we left school I would meet with a few of my school friends and they all seemed to have been accepted on apprenticeships. We all had the same, ‘not-many’ qualifications, looking back however, we had different birth names and therefore, application names.
After a few months on the dole and knocking on factory doors I did manage to get a job as a labourer in a small, family run, welding and steel factory who employed only two others, both father and son. Over, the years from 1976-1984 I taught myself the art of welding and fabricating steel. The factory grew and I became part of a team that erected steel fabrications across Sheffield and Yorkshire building sites. However, during that time I had to negotiate my ‘Mohamed’ identity. I had to put up with industrial language both on site and in the canteen. The word ‘Paki’ was used without any remorse. I was identified by my working peers as a ‘not one of them’ or a ‘good Paki’. Many times I ‘hid’ who I was behind my anglicised name ‘Ray.’ On the surface it was easier, but down deep inside I was uncomfortable and forever explaining or negotiating away my name and identity. I uncomfortably laughed alongside my peers during banter on ‘Love thy Neighbour’ or ‘Alf Garnet’ and ‘On the Buses,’ racist television programs aired during the 1970s.
Either fit in or shut up!
Having to demean myself and be accepted in to the dominant culture is still painful when I self reminisce about the ‘good old days!’
My name also played a part in attracting, or not attracting, girls at the time. Don’t forget It was the 1970s and 1980s and I tried to be a ‘lad’ like most other ‘lads’ at the time.
I went to pubs and nightclubs and realised that the only way I could attract the opposite sex was by being or ‘acting’ Spanish and promoting ’Ramon’. I have light brown skin and under strobe, night club lights I became Spanish, Italian, Latin. I wanted to be anybody but me.
They were times when girls had worked out my ‘Mohamed’ name or when I shared my name I was quickly shunned or ’politely’ waved goodbye. Some girls actually said their parents would be mortified if they knew they had been conversing, drinking, dancing or even sleeping with a Mohamed.
On one occasion I was invited to a ‘posh’ girlfriends home who’s parents wanted to sound me out. She had accepted my mixed-heritage and asked me not to identify myself has ’Mohamed’ but just say I have some Latin blood further down my family tree. I wasn’t that ‘educated’ at the time. The parents had professional jobs, lived in a posh area and wanted their daughter to go to university. As soon as I arrived the parents had their suspicions. However, they couldn’t bring them selves to directly discriminate and refer to my name so they ‘forced’ me to play scrabble. A ‘posh’ people’s game, so I thought, in 1980. I couldn’t spell for the life of me. I was made to feel humiliated. I never saw the girl again. Forty years on I am reminded everyday of the humiliation. I now live round the corner from where, what was once her parents house in a ‘posh’ majority ‘white’ area of Sheffield, where I still don’t feel I belong.
However, little did I know at the time that the incident would lead me, eventually onto another journey.
Name discrimination and racism has, and still does play a detrimental part in my life.
As soon as they were eighteen my six brothers changed their names to my English mother’s maiden name. They understood more than me about burying their identity and have negotiated ‘life’ a little easier. I am the only ‘Mohamed’ in my birth family.
I was accepted at the University of Hull as a mature student in 1986 to study for a joint degree in Politics and Sociology. I was twenty-six. I had lost my job during the mining and steel strikes in 1984. I went to college. Studied and received four ‘O’ Levels and was lucky enough to be accepted by the university that, at the time, encouraged mature students like me, who had experience but not necessarily had all the formal qualifications.
I will never forget my first day when I arrived at the student house owned by the university. The final year ’white’ student looked uncomfortable as he coldly greeted me by my surname! I know some people have Mohamed as their first names. He should have known Mohamed was my surname or maybe he knew and was jus being an obnoxious, privileged student or just plain racist! I thought I would find university more challenging because of my ‘class’ not my ‘race.’ I was nervous. I was from a poor working class background entering a ‘middle class’ space. The house had six bedrooms. I was guided to a ground floor room next to the living/kitchen area. The student said ‘Here’s your room and that window there is facing Mecca so you can pray’ I was astonished! There was an assumption I was a practising Muslim. I am not. I ticked the no-religion boxes on the application form. If he had seen the student housing application he was more stupid than I thought. Furthermore, the window face Mecca. Even more astonishing, this particular, baptism of fire, ignorant, arrogant student was studying Geography! Looking back, maybe he wasn’t happy with having to accommodate a Mohamed in an all white, ‘boys will be boys,’shared house.
I struggled in that first year. I met very few students of my name, my class, my maturity and my colour. Not only that, I had to endure, from my bedroom, high volume racial/sexist television programs and late night video watching by privileged, white, middle class students who echoed the language and the programs they were watching. These so called enlightened, educated-students were frightening and unbelievably bigoted. I thought at the time, university life would be different from the industrial language of the the building sites I had become accustomed too. I was sadly wrong, on some level, these so called intelligent people were the worse!
Making a formal complaint to the university accommodation department made no difference. It seemed I was the problem and what I was experiencing was student life!
I struggled through university life, got a degree but never fully fitted in. I had no role models of Mohamed colour. I received a place in 1989 to study for a Postgraduate Certificate in Education at Bradford College. I stupidly thought, yes multi-cultural Bradford lots of ‘Mohamed’s’ on the course but no! I was still an outsider. Of the fifty or so students studying on the primary section of the course I was the only person of Mohamed colour. The same would go for those who taught on the course. The same would go for teacher/ tutors in schools.
Everyone was ‘white’ on the course except a Greek female called Victoria. It was interesting how we were paired up by the college tutors, the only two people of colour student teachers, Mr Mohamed and Ms Evangilinou. I remember the first school we did our first placement. It had 100% white teachers and 100% white children. We were told in blunt and in no uncertain terms by the school teacher/tutor that we ‘were the worse teacher students the school had ever had!’
Victoria has been in education most of working life in Cardiff and is now an experienced educational psychologist. My story is below, with a few challenging caveats and, suffice it to say, there was certainly an element of racism in our experience of the schools and college in Bradford.
So, I trained in Bradford schools where the primary staff were predominantly white and the children predominantly brown or predominantly white depending on which school or which area of Bradford you went too. Thirty years later, here in my home city of Sheffield, I have still yet to come across another ’Mr Mohamed.’
I managed to qualify as a teacher in 1990 and got my first teaching post in a multicultural London school. However, again, the staff were predominantly white with minority Turkish/Greek exceptions.
The schools philosophy was for children to address the teachers using their first names. So, I was ‘Ray.’
Not sure of the merits either way of Sir, Mr or Ray. At the time it felt comfortable to me. London was a place you could be anonymous to some extent. Whilst the community inside and outside school felt multicultural, the staff, at that time, did not. However, it was significantly more diverse than past and later, future experiences mentioned below.
It was during this time I made personal journeys to Pakistan and Afghanistan in search of my identity and roots, two countries I visited and explored for the first time in my thirties.
A change came in 2001 with the terrorist attack on the twin towers in New York. Then, the educational landscape splintered and felt more tribal both in and outside the school community. I was suddenly referred to as ‘Mr Mohamed’ by a minority of parents. I was asked ‘which side are you on’ during a conversation with a ‘friend’ in a pub. I was no longer ‘Ray’ but something ‘other.’ Hushed conversations were had in staffroom and classroom spaces. The sudden demarcation in the school together with parents from similar cultural backgrounds became visible at the end of school day. Things looked and felt different.
Sudden events in our global society can have an immediate detrimental affect on school communities and in turn amplify division. However, in my case and most of my teaching career it feels a part of me as been constantly at war with the ‘other’ self.
So, a world event and the negative chastisement across media platforms and in society of the Muslim/Mohamed community encouraged fear and difference. I began to wonder again how I should self-name, identify or ‘take a side.’ I began to wonder again how others would identify me. I began to wonder again how I would self-identify. I had no dual or mixed heritage role models. I meandered. I oscillated. I did not choose a side. I chose me, ‘the mixed up chameleon!’
Having a name like ‘Mohamed’ is exhausting and its not just from the ‘white’ Islands of Britain.
I spent five years teaching mostly privileged, ex-pat students at a British School in Saudi Arabia.
They were those (‘Little Britons’) who become more British than the British when abroad living on secure compounds; gated communities with neo-colonial undertones and prominent union-jacks.
Most of the British/expat parents had drivers, maids, cleaners etc predominately Muslim, Asian, ‘Mohamed’, cheap labour, guest workers. The school, employed white western teachers from the UK, Australia, New Zealand etc and again, not many teachers of colour, not even local teachers.
I witnessed on many occasions, both students and parents, treat the guest workers with contempt on the imperial compound. I received my own micro-aggressions and, I have to say some of these aggressions came from the host, and expats from Asian/Middle Eastern surrounding countries, who would much prefer a ‘full-English-named’ teacher who did not carry the same ‘Mohamed’ title as their ‘servants’ and who they could trust to teach a full British curriculum and full British values. They weren’t sure of this ‘half and half’ as I was identified by some of the non-British expat community.
International schools have a privileged hierarchy amongst expats. British is best! There were Indian, Pakistani, Filipino, Sri Lankan schools and so on but the British education system was deemed superior, if you could afford the fees, that is. So, being taught by a Mohamed was a bit uncomfortable with some of the expat community.
I digress.
For the past five years I have been a supply teacher in Sheffield, my city of birth. During this time I studied for an MA in Global Education at the University of Sheffield. I did very well. I was asked and, supported by my tutors, to embark and research a PhD. I was interested, from my experiences of living in the Middle East; violence and education. However, commitment at that academic level was too much of a personal challenge. I am a mature dad with two young children, I had bills and academic fees to pay, and I was still supply teaching. With a feeling of ‘imposter-syndrome’ I left the PhD after struggling through the first year. I had reached my academic limit.
However, I do believe that education has undercurrents of benign violence. I think some my ‘hidden’ experiences bare witness to that.
One side issue: when I was a welder and fabricator I was involved in fabricating and erecting the steel structure of the Octagon building at the University of Sheffield in 1982, and there was I, having a PhD induction under the steel structural frame that I welded!
It was all too much! Imposter syndrome kicked in.
I thought I was never really interested or, maybe good enough to promote myself up the school management hierarchy. I enjoyed the practicalities of teaching. I have a degree a PGCE and during my teaching career I studied for a Postgraduate Certificate in Sports Management at London Metropolitan University and a Cambridge assessed TESOL certificate at Sheffield Hallam University as well as the above MA in Global Education. Together with numerous levels (qualifications) in teaching primary sport skills as well as attending many curriculum and assessment courses I have worked in teams on five OFSTED school inspections, one of them at the international school. I have voluntary teaching experience in Afghanistan and Pakistan. So, I have qualifications, I have history I have experience. What I have never had is the comfort of acceptance of who I am in education nor the confidence to climb the education pyramid.
Back to ‘Mohamed.’
Supply teaching can be an eye opener in terms of how schools are managed, how the curriculum is taught, resourcing, support, the cultural make-up of members of staff and more importantly the happiness and well-being of the children. I have supplied in the North, East, South and West of Sheffield. I have also supplied occasionally, in Barnsley and Chesterfield. I have noticed a lack of diversity in the school workforce and disparities in terms of school resources.
It’s a lonely ‘Mohamed’ experience walking into a predominantly white primary school. Where no one who looks like you from the off, and who has a ‘name’ like you that has ‘baggage’ discrimination.
When you arrive at a school office you show your DBS (child protection) certificate and a proof of identification even though you are booked in to the school by the supply agency who have scanned and emailed the school your documents and photograph. Schools also have access to the online DBS service so they can double check. I accept having to prove who you are by providing my original DBS certificate and one piece of ID. However, there have been occasions when ’Mohamed’ has been asked to show two pieces of ID and received that extra interrogation and suspicious stare. On occasions I have been escorted around the school and shown where the toilet, staffroom and classes are etc by staff who speak meticulously s.l.o.w.l.y making sure they pronounce their words clearly as if speaking to a someone ‘foreign’ to the English language. On many occasions I have walked in to all ‘’white’ staff rooms seen my name misspelled on the whiteboard. On occasions I have walked in to staff rooms where I have been stared at, ignored, where the chat level suddenly changes to hushed tones, where some staff look visibly uncomfortable when you sit next to them. Small micro-aggressions, not all, I understand are meant to be distrustful I know, but they build and add to a feeling of insecurity, discomfort and otherness.
Furthermore, supply agencies lack diversity and have not supported me in the past when I have been visibly racially discriminated. What do I expect, when agencies are in the business of education, when agencies mirror schools and lack ‘colour’ and when agencies prefer to ‘move you on’ to another school and not lose business!
I have experiences of school staff who will not engage in ‘banter’ conversation with a Mr Mohamed, that is, until you lie or exaggerate your ‘night out’ or your ‘hangover’ or the ‘music concert’ or the ‘football match’ you attended with your ‘white’ mates. On many occasions I have had to initiate a ‘wild’ sometimes, un-truthful conversation in order to fit in or to feel a sense of belonging.
It’s tiring.
You are un/consciously cornered, pushed in to a workspace environment in order to become accepted and that you are not one of those real or imagined ‘Mohamed’s’ that’s still negatively portrayed across the media. I very rarely do staff-rooms these days I see no ally’s no role models. I have been stopped from time to time, by members of staff, walking around school and have my school lanyard extra scrutinised.
It’s tiring.
I’m agnostic but I am interested in all religions and I enjoy teaching the RE curriculum and making connections in primary schools. I enjoy teaching religious diversity and shared, common values. However, I have had occasions when I’ve walked in to a school on supply and been asked to teach a ‘bit of’ Islam! There has been an assumption because I’m ‘Mohamed’ I am an ‘expert’ on Islam. It’s not that I don’t enjoy teaching about Islam, its that I equally have the same knowledge and skills to teach all areas of RE in the primary curriculum. I am not a Muslim supply teacher nor am I an expert on everything Muslim or everything Islamic. I am a primary teacher.
As we know racism or (if there are such terms) ‘name-ism’ or being ‘name-ist’ is/are a social construct. Children in schools are inquisitive. I have never been phased when children miss-pronounce my name or even call me ‘Miss’ as male teachers, on occasion, get called. I have been asked by children in class ‘where are you from?’ Sometimes, I will receive a bemused look when I reply, ‘Sheffield!’ I have been called ‘Paki’ and asked if I’m a ‘terrorist’ by children who innocently parrot adult, the media and society terminology. I have welcomed the conversation from children but I still find primary schools, a majority ‘white’ staffed and stuffed institution.
Primary schools are an institution where a lack of diversity still anchors discomfort with an unfamiliar sounding name. I have found them a place where my name has been hijacked, whispered in staffroom corners, colonised and othered.
Primary schools, in my experience are majority mono-cultural and majority white institutions and, to put it metaphorically like a huge oil tanker, slowly floating toward a shifting destination under a constant moving horizon and I feel, during most of my teaching career, I have been treated as a ‘reluctant fundamentalist,’ a tolerated passenger.
I have spent thirty years being managed by a predominantly mono-cultural curriculum, being managed by an hidden straight-jacket educational structure and an institutional un-diverse work-force that I have never been able to fully grasp nor fully made my self understood. Teaching is challenging but teaching with a name like Ramon Mohamed has at times been a fabricated burden I have had to carry.
My cultural identity is not rigid. I have many traits that make my identity and not all are fixed. However, it’s tiresome and challenging to constantly be identified and having to self-identify in a school environment feels tribal and a space of exclusion. The school community has shifting patterns of cultural loyalties and staff rooms inculcate boundaries of ‘strangers’ not allowed. Schools mirror society but they can also be places that educate and challenge anti racist and discriminatory behaviours. I have received and carried the burden of bias and discrimination and having to in/voluntary explain who/why I am on a daily basis especially on supply.
It’s exhausting.
I have had to shift and manage my heritage, shift and manage my identity, shift and manage my culture, shift and manage my self-worth; manage, Ramon Mohamed, in primary school settings. I have had to negotiate educational places of acceptance and school belonging.
Looking back now I am sixty, it feels the school institution has tolerated me, labelled me. That the school as an institution has ‘othered’ me; that my presence in schools has caused members of the school community, discomfort. I have never really fitted in. Looking back, I have had a career with little or no role models. However, more recently I have noticed a restlessness on the cultural horizon and a change in direction in the wider school community.
Racism, discrimination and notions of belonging are concepts that that have meaning and have played a part in my well being and mental health in school institutions and, possibly, looking back, acted has an unconscious barrier to my moving up the school hierarchy.
I am though, with the power of social media, emboldened with the many anti-racist, South Asian Heritage, Black Lives Matter and Mixed-Race groups that have emerged over the past few years. These organisations are challenging cultures that promote negative identities and the absences of positive mixed-race role models, these groups challenge discriminatory education communities, curriculums and school institutions.
‘Without a struggle, there can be no progress,’ said Frederick Douglass.
I am reminded of Martin Luther King, ‘I have a dream……’
I hope a day will come when someone like ‘Mohamed’ will walk in to a school and be fully accepted, when their name is not a catalyst for unwarranted attention and problematic, when their name is not defined by others and their name offers no ‘other’ explanation and they are treated equally not labelled, ignored, patronised or having to repeat who, when, where and why they are? I hope a day will come when they are not identified and tolerated by society and an education institution as a side show or a benign abomination or a performing curiosity.
It’s been cathartic writing a few stories of my personal, mostly hidden, thirty-year, Mohamed/dual-heritage journey within the education system. I have written about my experiences of race and name discrimination before and during my teaching career. I have written a few examples of my truths and my personal observations. I have yet to meet another ‘Mr Mohamed’ in primary education. I am sure there are a few out there which still begs the question, why so few?
I am optimistic. I look forward and hope a new generation of diverse, multicultural, role model teachers are not othered and contribute with equity to a visible, accepted, normalised, non-discriminatory presence within primary school communities.
Ramon Mohamed