LTEC sends word of a Canadian teachers union newsletter calling for “Black-focused programming.” A key excerpt:
To accept the necessity of black-focused programs requires the acknowledgement of an uncomfortable truth: that the current system is not, in fact, value neutral — that it is, moreover, a white-focused system — and insofar as it has our support, we are part of the problem. That
COULD spark a backlash? I’ve got news for you – the backlash is already out there. But it’s very quiet.
The disgust at hiring policies that dictate hiring someone based on skin color as a way of preventing discrimination based on skin color is becoming widespread among the very nonhomogeneous white communities of the world. There is a quiet, simmering anger just below the surface, and when it finally explodes it won’t be pretty.
Aren’t you forgetting about Canada’s centuries of slavery and Jim Crow? Oh wait…
a black educator once recommended that black students be allowed to wander freely about the classroom instead of sitting in their chairs because of something inherent in black people that made us absorb information easier walking about. I’ve heard people say that so much emphasis should not be on reading but on listening and that lessons should be put to music for the benefit of blacks. all of this is terribly racist and I fear it is the sort of thing that people mean when they call for black focused programming. blacks can’t do math, science, english, the way whites and asians do so things should be changed around, standards lowered or eliminated to suit us. it’s degrading and racist.
and David, the fact of racism against blacks does not justify it against whites, if the aim is to reduce racism. no matter how much you or anyone may feel whites deserve punishment, they don’t feel like that. no human beings feel like that. again, i emphasize that if the aim is to reduce racism, current liberal policies are a mistake. if the aim is revenge, that’s different. but don’t expect people to like it. it’s one of the sad facts of life, one of the many sadnesses, that past sins cannot be made up for on a national or race wide level.
Anita,
When I was a novice TA at UC Berkeley, I got a lot of this stuff in TA training seminars and the like. Asians are shy and you have to coax them; Blacks are “oral,” &c. Then there was the “Teaching to Diversity” seminar I dropped into when I first started TA-ing, with a classic set-up: Here you are, teaching a section, and the students are behaving racially stereotypically, with those three women [Hispanic names] always giggling when they were there, but frequently all skipping class together, and those four men [Asian names] hardly saying anything, and then two dudes [generic Anglo names] always dominating the discussion. What do you, as TA, do?
Discussion went on for a bit, about how to deal with students who blew off class and how to get shy students into the discussion, and then one of the two moderators said, “Well here you’ve got these two white males dominating the discussion.” And I asked how he knew they were white, since we had only names, not races, and the names didn’t suggest race. And he blustered that “it was a reasonable assumption.” A Diversity Trainer that misses the point of his own exercise, and thinks it’s reasonable to assume that articulate and vocal students are white.
To those who’ve heard me tell that particular tale before, sorry. But it seemed appropriate to the thread.
One of the tragic things in Canada is that all discrimination is prohibited under UN human rights instruments that Canada has acceded to. Canada, by accepting discrimination, is violating the very UN instruments that Canadians look down on the US for not accepting.
According to Canadian Supreme Court rulings, the protections against all types of discrimination that are in the UN instruments are incorporated into the CHARTER OF RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS.
So Canada cannot live up to it’s own Consitution nor to it’s UN human rights commitments, yet these people consider themselves morally superior to Americans. The country is dysfunctional.