Confessions of a Toronto high school teacher

This is an interesting piece I picked up by a recently retired teacher:

I distinctly remember hearing teachers railing against then Conservative Ontario Premier Bill Harris – overt political propaganda in the classroom. When my own students asked me, during the height of tensions between his government and the teachers’ unions, what my feelings were about Harris, I replied that I didn’t think it was appropriate for me to use the classroom to advocate my political views. Their response was, “All our other teachers do.” My colleagues railed against Bush senior over Kuwait and Bush junior about Hurricane Katrina . . . some considered their desks to be their political pulpits, something that I, as a conservative, would not dare have done.

But nothing matched the Board’s approach to racism, which was, essentially, to vilify white people – I know that sounds extreme, and they would deny it, but I can demonstrate it, and will.

At one school, a group was brought in to give a presentation to the student body in an assembly and then fan out into the classrooms to indoctrinate the students further. Their presentation consisted of a number of skits that showed discrimination in action.

After three or four of these, I started to keep score. If it concerned something sexual orientation, the heterosexual was “the bad guy”; racism, the white guy; sexual harassment, the male . . . without fail. And it occurred to me: a new stereotype was being created and advertised – the white, able-bodied, heterosexual, anglophone male.

And what will happen when Toronto becomes majority non-white, as the demographers tell us will happen? Whites will face discrimination, fueled by generations of educators and other politically correct sources telling non-whites that whites discriminate against them.

I went to – in fact, was forced to attend – a workshop on racism, in which I and my fellow teachers were told that the only people who could, by definition, practice racism were whites because racism, by definition, equals discrimination plus power, and whites are the only group that has power.

That’s circular logic combined with a definition that you won’t find in Oxford or Webster. When I pointed out that the then director of the TDSB was black, I was informed, straight-faced, that he was the exception, and so, in short, did not count. 

The overall effect of this is to create and foster a stereotype of white people as being racist to non-whites, while non-whites are incapable of being racist, which fosters antipathy towards whites who, quite rightly, resent that – hardly a formula for reducing racism.

What little true racism exists in our society, of course, exists on all sides. I have seen black students show prejudice against Asians, Asians against blacks, aboriginals against whites . . . like I said, it’s on all sides.

I once had to deal with a group of black girls who were playing loud music in the hall, disturbing students in the Library. The hall monitor, who was also black, asked me to help because the girls would not listen to him.

When negotiations failed, I simply unplugged their boom box. One of them started screaming at me. My ears literally hurt because she got so close and so loud. She called me a “fucking white racist”.

For this, she received a one day suspension – one day! I asked the vice-principal what discipline he would have handed out if a large white male student had screamed obscenities at a small black female teacher, calling her a “fucking black” anything. The only answer I got was a glare.