So You Want to Talk About Race?

Be careful -- the Woke Stasi might report you for wrongthink!

Surely it isn’t even legal in Ontario to segregate students by race — especially for punitive purposes — when discussions don’t go as desired by a woke teacher???!

MY CANCELLED CLUB INITIATION

Last April, I was suspended from my teaching job after I spoke out at a (supposedly confidential) union meeting, during that part of the agenda when members are invited to bring concerns forward. I objected to a book purchased for teachers, a book that I consider a racist screed by a revolutionary ideologue. I believe that the majority of taxpayers would, and should, object to public money earmarked for education being spent to spread this writer’s noxious ideas. The book is called So You Want To Talk About Race and the writer’s name is Ijeoma Oluo.

As it turns out, when you want to talk about race but you’re not a social justice activist, even if you do so in the context of a confidential union meeting, you take a great risk. Because we are all now expected to supplicate to “woke” neoMarxist dogma. Everywhere in society now, but perhaps nowhere so much as in education, we find legions of midwit quasi-activists jumping at the chance to report thoughtcrime, hoping to instigate punishments and exile for those of us who are deemed enemies of the progressive cultural revolution.

The destruction of civil discourse and the demonization of dissidents who dare protest this new variety of left-wing authoritarianism is accepted and normalized by left-leaning leaders and bureaucrats. Our own Prime Minister recently stood in the House of Commons and accused all Canadians who support Freedom Convoy 2022 of being racists and Nazi sympathizers. He was fully supported by mainstream media in vilifying and slandering anyone supporting this large global protest against vaccine mandates —which, by the way, have just been declared “a gross violation of human rights” by the New Zealand High Court.

The result of the investigation of my behaviour was that the school board fired me at the end of June, after 19 otherwise uneventful years of employment as a secondary school teacher, one who, ironically, specialized in working with the very demographic groups they claim that I “hate”.

Before I explain what I said during that fateful meeting that led to my dismissal, I wish to make clear that no students or parents complained about my teaching, or my comportment outside of work. I was fired because first colleagues, and then the school board investigator and superintendents, didn’t like my political speech. Freedom of political speech doesn’t exist in Canada, and alarmingly often now, human rights legislation is being weaponized by the state to silence debate and punish anyone who is vocally anti-woke/anti-Marxist.

I successfully taught in several schools over the course of those 19 years. I did a stint as a major department head, and two years in an administrative role for a program in adult literacy and equivalent credit assessment. I specialized in working with at-risk, underprivileged youth and young adults. The schools I worked in were all inner city and/or multicultural environments. Everywhere I worked, I was effective, innovative, and a relatively popular teacher, known for being accommodating, using interesting materials relevant to my students’ lives, and paying careful attention to the particular learning needs of individual students, especially the ones with learning exceptionalities and histories of trauma and illness.

At one school, when the kids wanted to start a GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) group, they asked me to be the sponsor teacher.

Despite many years of success working with an extremely diverse student population, I was fired for social media “hate speech”. I am actively anti-woke in the online environment, but I don’t use my regular teaching name, or identify my place of work.

The board investigator slandered me as racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic — the standard litany of slurs thrown at anyone who dares to dissent against the prevailing “woke” dogma.

We are living through what is sure to go down in history as a major civilizational conflict/culture war, and it’s now clear that education systems throughout the west have been overtaken by the leftist-globalist agenda.

I haven’t been allowed to see the complaints, or learn the identities of my accusers. Complaining colleagues, in addition to failing to observe union confidentiality protocol, also broke a law — Teaching Profession Act 18 (1) (b) — because no colleague furnished me with a written statement of their adverse report. Their identities are being protected by the school board for reasons undeclared. According to what I know about the law, only teachers accused of sexual assault do not receive the protection afforded by 18 (1) (b), which seems designed to prevent vexatious reports and compel accusers to treat their peers with a modicum of respect and recognition of their basic human dignity.

MY UNION MEETING REMARKS

In the zoom meeting, I held up my copy of the book and said I objected to tax money being spent to purchase a copy of this book for every teacher. (It’s exceptionally rare, by the way, for the entire staff to receive a “gift” of a book.) I said that So You Want To Talk About Race is full of false accusations and unfounded claims against our society, and western civilization generally.

I fail to see how our educational leaders can justify purchasing and promoting a book that so vehemently condemns white people, and recommends discussion leaders segregate people by skin colour in order to protect PoC from being harmed by the opinions and ideas of white group members.

“Basic Guideline #8” in this book advocates removing and segregating white group members who do not merely accept information as presented during discussions about race. Oluo believes that white students expressing any resistance to the tenets of “anti-racist” ideology should be silenced and removed to a whites-only space, because the only reason to talk about race is the therapeutic benefit it confers to non-whites traumatized by living in a “white supremacist society” (see image at top). 

Surely it isn’t even legal in Ontario to segregate students by race — especially for punitive purposes — when discussions don’t go as desired by a woke teacher???!

Suggesting teachers practice racial segregation if white students offer viewpoints that contradict the left wing “anti-racist” agenda should be enough to disqualify this book from being purchased with public funds. Yet many schools and boards use this book and promote its content — it is a very popular book club selection, especially in the many boards that have established “equity book clubs”.

So You Want To Talk About Race is full of contentious and ill-supported anti-western ideas and a lot of personal rage and hyperbole, which is typical of any CRT screed. It begs to be picked apart, its premises and conclusions debunked, and many reviewers have done exactly that. But within the education system, it is now virtually forbidden to subject woke texts to critical analyses (the application of standard academic conventions of analysis in search of objective truths, plausible interpretations, and reasoned judgements).

Inflammatory revolutionary diatribes are treated as above criticism, and western academic conventions themselves are now widely considered a form of white supremacist violence against minorities.

If it weren’t for cancel culture, western society wouldn’t be in its current state of fracture and disarray, because it’s quite easy for astute thinkers to point out fatal flaws in the critical social justice texts and frameworks that form the foundation of this cultural revolution. But within the very environments designed for this activity — education systems — people can no longer discuss flaws with this particular ideology without fearing for their reputations and/or livelihoods. The free market of ideas is now maligned as “white supremacist” in character.

Leftists have gutted western traditions of open discourse: debate, reason, objectivity, meritocracy… these are all under the guillotine in this cultural revolution.

Even non-white critics of CRT are slandered, often with racist slurs such as “uncle tom” and “the black face of white supremacy”. Indoctrination, sloganeering, appeals to emotion, and shallow recitation of dogma are the norm. Oluo grossly oversimplifies many important issues, and always reaches conclusions that excoriate white people, collectively. Her position is that western social, political, and legal systems are irredeemably unjust and worthy only of destroying.

Consider this passage from the book:

If I call a white person a cracker, the worst I can do is ruin their day. If a white person thinks I’m a nigger, the worst they can do is get me fired, arrested, or even killed in a system that thinks the same — and has the resources to act on it.

This passage reminds me of the many unsupported claims circulating (and being treated by many as gospel truth) about a plague of violence against black people perpetrated by white people. Such divisive and patently false statements are insidious and damaging, but this rhetoric is now being used shamelessly in the mainstream of society, even at the highest levels of our bureaucracy.

The Ontario Ministry of Education funds an organization called “School Mental Health Ontario”, and this organization publishes inflammatory rhetoric in their guidelines for discussing racial issues in the classroom. A memo sent to all Ontario teachers in the fall of 2020 stated the following:

In recent years, and increasingly in recent months, we’ve seen deaths and injuries to many Black women and men at the hands of violent police officers and White people.*

(*If you check the link, they have modified the language to make it slightly less inflammatory, so you won’t see the word “violent” there now, but the wording above is how it was originally published.)

Nowhere in the document is this claim — that violent police officers and white people are, of late, killing and injuring black people at alarming rates — supported with any evidence.

Ironically, a bit further into the document, teachers are instructed to avoid enforcing harmful stereotypes:

Share factual information and reduce the spread of rumours . . . Use language that is developmentally-appropriate for children, and ensure the information is based on facts. It is especially important to correct negative statements made or heard in the media about any specific group.

Apparently, the exhortation to be factual and watch out for slander against identity groups doesn’t apply when “negative statements” are about the identity group they call “white people”.

But this is the typical result when people are trained in critical race theory and other neoMarxist ideologies, which, as a matter of course, teach acolytes to believe that building a just society requires “positive discrimination” against “the dominant group”.

I am not a psychologist, but I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that the mental health of students and staff in Ontario is not being aided by left wing propaganda that portrays our society as lousy with “violent police officers and white people” who collectively lust for black blood!

A teachers’ union chapter in Ontario recently voted to weight member votes differently based on race, in order to always ensure that 50% of the votes represent “racialized” members, no matter how many of them are voting. In this case, the disenfranchisement of white members was deemed acceptable to the majority. Yet I really don’t think that it's advisable, and maybe not even legal (in accordance with our constitutional rights), for a union to conduct business this way.

The people in a constant state of outrage about “systemic discrimination” are busy erecting their own discriminatory systems, and their indoctrination has led them to believe that this is a virtuous activity.

But I digress. Let me get back to the widely promoted writer Ijeoma Oluo and her ideas about how we should address issues related to race. Oluo wrote another book called Mediocre, and the entire purpose of that book is to degrade white men. In this book, she makes claims such as  “the most brutal of white male privileges is the opportunity to live long enough to regret the carnage you have brought upon others”. I don’t personally know any white men who engage in human carnage, and I am guessing parents would rather not have their children being taught by people who have embraced such rhetoric.

As a parent of three myself, I have been appalled at social justice messaging like this coming out of our schools. I am happy to report that homeschooling undertaken in an attempt to protect kids from left wing indoctrination is on the rise. Bureaucrats should be paying attention to that trend.

Oluo openly advocates for revolutionary rebellion against the system she so hates, as seen in the passage below. This is from a 2016 interview the writer conducted with a Chinese American activist, in the aftermath of the killing of a Black man by a Chinese police officer — an incident which the two activists, not surprisingly, mutually decided to blame on white people — just as activists now blame “whiteness” for a scourge of violent attacks on Asians by Black criminals:

Ijeoma: At least we’ve established that we don’t hate each other. Fuck this system takes up all your damn time.

WE COULD HAVE BEEN BURNING SHIT DOWN THIS WHOLE TIME.

I feel like we need to commit to ridding ourselves of White Supremacy while we rid the system of it as well. Like, I trust you to actually work on that in your community. I think you can trust me to work on that in mine.

But maybe only 10 percent of the day. 90 percent dedicated to burning down the system and rocking out.

source: https://seattleglobalist.com/2016/02/25/ijeoma-oluo-jenny-yang-peter-liang-akai-gurley/47865

Does our chaplaincy team who chose this book, and the administration who approved its purchase, openly advocate for violent revolution against the state? I am guessing not. So, did they even do enough homework to know that left-wing revolution, even if it's violent, is the political agenda of this writer whom they financially and morally support?

Moving on from Oluo and her awful book, I also objected to the overall leftist politicization of our workplace in recent years, caused by the adoption in education circles (and beyond) of CRT framework and other radical neoMarxist social justice frameworks.

These ideologies and their frameworks aren't just presented as theories, as possible perspectives (which would be fine), their tenets are taught as a new orthodoxy: as accepted truths, required beliefs, instructions for action/activist behavioiur. Teaching K-12 students that they must become left wing activists to be good people is… just plain abusive and manipulative.

I complained that the workplace environment has become toxic, a culture of intimidation for someone like me who objects to the new dogma. I even mentioned that I had chosen the union meeting to bring up my concerns because it was the only “safe space” I knew of to do so — although I was clearly wrong about that.

Reactionaries are not welcome in schools now. We can't get hired, and we can easily get fired. As I mentioned before, this is a culture war, and the neo-Marxist revolutionaries have ideologically colonized the territory of education.

As an example of the politicization and intimidation occurring in the workplace, I mentioned that administrators on the public payroll are now commonly featuring the BLM logo in their email signatures (this was the case with both my campus principal and my union chapter president). The BLM organization — and this is according to their own leadership — is a militant, left wing “power-building body” with a Marxist revolutionary agenda. The founder, Patrisse Cullors, has openly declared all of this. She proudly declared “we are trained Marxists” in a video interview that can easily be found online.

I wonder how many educators in our ahistorical society know what it actually means to be a “trained Marxist”? Anyone who doesn’t understand Marxist theory and political strategy really should not be in a position to force on underlings advocacy for BLM and their agenda. And anyone who does understand Marxism, and still forces this group and their agenda on others, should be considered an extremist advocating on behalf of violent revolutionaries.

It is entirely disingenuous to say that BLM the movement and BLM the organization are not one and the same. The vast majority of people in the movement have vigorously supported the organization. That has started changing since the organization's recent fracturing and the mutiny of many chapters, and their loss of charitable status in many jurisdictions due to corruption and fraud, but countless schools and organizations still promote BLM activism and charitable donations, and post links to BLM web sites and resources in their “anti-racism” materials.

For local context, in case anyone reading this doesn’t believe that BLM in Canada embodies this same militant left wing character as American BLM, let me introduce you to one founder of BLM Toronto, seen below.

Yusra Koghali, despite publishing a prayer to Allah to help stop her from killing white people at a political rally, and despite posting to her social media account many noxious racist “Nation of Islam” beliefs and threats of violence such as those seen in the image below, was given a civic leadership award by Mayor Tory at Toronto City Hall, and congratulated by Councillor Wong-Tam for “making us uncomfortable”.

Koghali accepted the award but indicated she has no interest in running for office, because her only goal is “black liberation”.

Moderate conservatives and libertarians like me are being depicted as political extremists merely for arguing that we should stop the woke madness and return to honouring the highest ideals of our nation and western civilization. Yet it’s not me but the “anti-racists” who are quite clearly the radical extremists. I told my colleagues in that meeting that my views are not radical, that I am a centre-right, classical liberal type of thinker, and that I am not alone in believing that enormous damage is being caused by the influence of CRT and other related ideologies that feed “cancel culture” conflict and manufacture outrage.

I said the problem has grown so large that a host of new organizations have been formed to counteract the deleterious effects of “wokeness”. I mentioned two organizations, FAIR (Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism) and Counterweight, both offering alternatives to CRT and developing non-partisan methods and content to deal with today's challenging social issues. I told colleagues that such initiatives are backed by large contingents of reputable and high achieving academics, journalists, etc. representing many diverse perspectives. I named Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Steven Pinker as two of these thinkers, two public intellectuals whose work and thought I admire.

No one aside from the union representative in charge said anything to me during the meeting. The union rep called me after the meeting to let me know that several people called her to complain. When I asked what they complained about, she said, “Oh, you know — that you're racist”. That was on a Friday afternoon. The following Monday morning, the administration placed me on suspension pending investigation, and they fired me at the end of June.

The colleagues who complained behaved in a vexatious, unprofessional, and politically motivated manner, but no one will hold them accountable, and indeed many in today’s society are celebrating such people as paragons of virtue in our “progressive” new world order. After all, as the woke like to say, “if you’re not actively anti-racist, then you’re racist!” Wokeism absolutely commands left wing political activism, and no age is considered too young to start indoctrinating citizens into understanding their duty in this regard.

Social justice ideologues and demagogues are installing new systems of mind control that clearly amount to child abuse. This is how they advance “critical collective consciousness”. We have seen revolutionaries use this strategy to gain and maintain power countless times throughout history. Just because this isn't a time of mass bloodshed doesn't mean we aren't suffering through a revolution. It's a “soft revolution”, largely advanced via bureaucracy.

So You Want To Talk About Race, is at heart a radical, revolutionary book. It recommends teachers use racial segregation to silence and shame white people who dissent against “anti-racism” dogma. It is still topping bestseller lists, and is promoted by schools and school boards everywhere. Oluo would likely be happy to know that I have been removed from the discussion at my workplace. But I am hoping to find a much larger audience now that I am free of that stifling environment.

The right of citizens to dissent against critical social justice ideology is not upheld in our bureaucracies, even though every citizen is, technically, supposed to be free to engage in society's political processes according to our creed and conscience. I know of several people who have been suspended and fired for anti-woke speech since my debacle began — feels like I hear of a new cancellation every week. Weaponizing human rights legislation against conservatives, Christians, libertarians, classical liberals and the like will surely land the government in a mess of legal trouble. Groups of persecuted non-woke are quite likely to meet the criteria for class action suits, since our bureaucrats now clearly practice systemic discrimination for the political advantage of the left wing.

This bears repeating constantly until we reclaim our systems from leftist ideologues: a foundational aspect of left wing “praxis” (activism) — and a political strategy that we have seen in every communist revolution in history — is the indoctrination of citizens to believe that the achievement of a just society requires collective allegiance to a new ideology as well as persecution of dissidents and advocates of “the old ways”.

Revolutionaries train citizens to believe it is virtuous and in support of the common good to report dissidents, in order that the politburo may punish them for wrongthink and purge them from the commons. I lost my job — and my family its income — because I exercised my god-given freedom of conscience in order to shine a light on systemic injustices and inequities occurring as a result of the radical political partisanship now plaguing our bureaucracies. I regret nothing. I will always stand against indoctrination of children and fellow citizens, and stand up for free will and individualism.