Where is the history of people of colour?

I am looking forward to Troy Deeney's  documentary on Channel 4 tomorrow. In a preview in the current Radio Times, he bemoans the fact that: "in all my time [at school] I heard plenty about Tudors and Stuarts but can't remember being taught any history about people who looked like me." As a result of commissioning a YouGov survey of teachers at 1,000 UK schools, he learned that: "52 per cent of teachers believe the school system has a racial bias, while only 12 per cent feel empowered to teach diverse topics." As a result, he launched a petition calling for the mandatory teaching of BAME histories throughout the curriculum. He has met and continues to communicate with the English Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi. (But why not Scotland and Wales, nations to whom education is devolved? He would surely find a sympathetic ear in Jeremy Miles, the Welsh government's Minister for Education.)

I contend that his beef is part of a wider failing in English and Welsh education. We don't teach social history and we don't teach world history. It looked for the period after I left secondary education through the 1960s and 1970s that progress was being made on the first front. Then under Margaret Thatcher there was a reversion to kings and queens and princes, especially English ones. It is clear from the testimony of Deeney's Radio Times article that the Blair/Brown years saw no change.

If world history had been taught, we would have learned of the great empires that rose and fell in south Asia as well as that of China. We would also have learned that the pharaohs were not the only emperors on the continent of Africa. From Ife to Asante there were great kingdoms in the west. In southern Africa, the kingdom of Zimbabwe endured from the time of the Anglo-Saxons to just before the first great transatlantic voyages. (If the history of Europe of the 19th and early 20th centuries had been taught, we might not have had Brexit, but that's another story.)

It does not help the recognition of African achievements that the continent's tradition of history is an oral, rather than a written one, but that is a poor excuse for their neglect in a liberal education environment. 

If the history of ordinary people had been taught, Troy Deeney would have learned that there were many people who looked like him on the streets of London - and possibly of other cities - in the days of the Tudors and Stuarts. They aroused no comment, enmity or disparagement. There was no "colour problem". Indeed, the outstanding person of colour from the literature of the period, Othello, was a figure of respect. That respect became fear in the case of the Barbary pirates who were a menace to the south coast at that time, but the fear was probably as much of the violence of their attacks, their foreignness and of Islam as of the colour of their skins. 

So what changed? Colonialism and slavery. These two evils have prejudiced the way we majority Westerners look at people of colour. We are, in government, only just overcoming the psychological block of promoting descendants of the "subject races". In Troy Deeney's own domain of football, there are few black managers, and the ones who have been most successful have been foreigners, like Ruud Gullit, rather than people from our own colonial heritage. It will be a long time before our prejudices cease to rule our assessment of other people. One hopes that Troy Deeney's documentary will be a step along that path.