Tom Blackwell - POSTMEDIA -Monday
A draft blueprint for teaching Grade 2 and 3 students about racism at an Ontario school board offers staff some eye-opening background information.
© Provided by National Post
A rally, promoted by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and in opposition to U.S. President Joe Biden, in the Brandon Township village of Ortonville, Michigan, U.S., on Nov. 20, 2021.
“Race is a made-up social construct to uphold European and white standards,” states the guideline , “and not an actual biological fact.”
The instructions go on to suggest teachers in the Hamilton Wentworth board be ready to discuss “the myth of white supremacy” and related topics with their primary pupils.
South of the border in a growing number of Republican states, such ideas would be considered literally unlawful, the target of new legislation that restricts how race is talked about in the classroom.
The concepts are often associated with critical race theory (CRT), a once-obscure school of academic thought that suggests racism is baked into laws and official policy — and that has become a red-hot battleground in America’s culture wars.
CRT has not only prompted legislation to regulate racism education in several states but is a frequent target on right-wing news channels and has been credited with helping Republican Glenn Youngkin win November’s race for Virginia governor.
“We are building the most sophisticated political movement in America — and we have just begun,” Chris Rufo, the conservative think-tank analyst credited with shoving CRT to the political front lines, wrote after Youngkin’s victory .
Meanwhile, the ideas — couched in sometimes-provocative social-science vernacular — have more quietly gained traction in Canada.
A few of the country’s largest school boards have adopted the language in their campaigns against discrimination, as have parts of the federal civil service in anti-racism training.
But even as critical race theory fills headlines in the U.S., its basic tenets are often misunderstood or misconstrued, merging with a more general opposition to addressing racism and other contentious social issues in American schools.
One typical example of those state laws bars lessons that cause students “discomfort, guilt (or) anguish” because of their race or sex.
And Rufo of the Manhattan Institute all but admitted CRT was being wielded as a political cudgel, tweeting in March that he was trying to make the phrase “toxic.” “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’” he wrote.
The “moral panic” that’s emerged around the issue in the U.S., at least, is no accident, says Joshua Sealy-Harrington, a professor and CRT scholar at Ryerson University’s Lincoln Alexander Law School.
“It’s a well-funded and well-orchestrated political campaign.”
At the same time, though, liberal American media sometimes dismiss criticism of the concepts out of hand, without exploring CRT’s more controversial elements.
And it’s not solely partisan strategists with their eyes on the non-stop U.S. election cycle voicing concern. Suzanna Sherry of the Vanderbilt University Law School in Nashville co-authored a book in 1997 — Beyond All Reason — that suggested CRT was an attack on Enlightenment ideals like merit and objectivity.
“My views on CRT remain similar but more negative now that it has spread beyond the ivory tower and into the population at large,” she said by email recently.
In Canada the concepts have sparked minimal controversy, and little discussion among the broader public.
Sujith Xavier, a law professor at the University of Windsor who applies CRT in his research , argues that Canadians have in a way long been exposed to the pillars underpinning critical race theory.
The familiar concept of systemic racism is closely related.
And policies like employment equity and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ equality section — which expressly permits affirmative action programs — respond to the concerns of critical-race theorists and have been part of Canadian law and even the constitution for years, he noted.
“It’s always been here,” says Xavier.
Video: Seeking Indigenous reconciliation through education (Global News)
Seeking Indigenous reconciliation through education
Even so, some Canadians might find its doctrines a challenging departure from more conventional approaches to racism. Or they might simply be wondering, “What is CRT, exactly?”
The theory emerged in the mid-1970s at Harvard University and other U.S. campuses, as academics concluded that advances brought about by the civil rights movement had stalled and new thinking was needed to combat “subtler forms of racism,” according to a leading primer on the topic by professors Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic.
One of the key tenets is that racism is “ordinary,” not an aberration, and that legal systems effectively promote the supremacy of white people over other races, even if their stated goal is equality.
Another is that colour blindness — the notion that everyone should be treated the same regardless of race — is itself a form of racism as it ignores the social and legal factors that can disadvantage people of colour. The Hamilton board’s draft Grade 2-3 lesson guidelines say their aim is to negate the “insidious” colour-blind practice “ by attempting to bring race into the conversation in primary classrooms.”
The theory also posits that race is not biological, but a social construct, again created by Europeans to assert their superiority and justify colonialism. Indeed, aside from the obvious physical differences, human genetics are identical between races, theorists note.
And CRT criticizes liberal notions like the merit principle and constitutional neutrality, saying they assume wrongly that people of all races are on a level playing field when applying for jobs, for instance, or encountering the legal system.
The degree to which the ideas have been implemented in the U.S. or anywhere else is a matter of debate. But after Rufo went on Fox News in September of last year to condemn the concepts, then-President Donald Trump banned federal funding of any programs that mention CRT, calling them “divisive, anti-American propaganda.”
It’s since become a rallying cry for Republicans across America, with Youngkin quickly outlawing CRT in schools, saying “what we won’t do is teach our children to view everything through the lens of race.”
In Ontario, at least, some large school boards have recently taken on ideas that form part of critical race theory, though largely without referencing the term.
Two of those boards — in Toronto and neighbouring York region — did not respond to requests for comment. But their initiatives appear partly driven by statistics that show poor outcomes for Black students, whose rates of high school suspension and dropping out are as much as twice those of white students.
“Racialized children are living in a white supremacist culture, where all aspects of themselves are devalued,” states a Toronto District School Board tip-sheet for parents on discussing racism with their children. “So it is essential that this culture is deconstructed and challenged every day.”
An elementary teacher in the board said the system has promoted teaching of such concepts especially forcefully since the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year.
“This is all we talk about at staff meetings, pretty much,” said the teacher, who is not authorized to discuss the matter and asked not to be named. “There’s an extreme concern that the curriculum be focused on anti-colonialist perspectives.”
The York Region District School Board — Canada’s third largest — covers similar ground in the Dismantling Anti-Black Racism Strategy it launched last year.
“Ontario’s public education system has evolved within an historical context of white supremacy, colonialism and anti-Black racism,” it says , “all of which have been woven into the fabric of school board policies and practices.”
In support of those statements, the plan documents a relatively little-known aspect of Ontario’s history: how legislation passed in 1850 and not repealed until 1964 allowed white-controlled school boards to set up segregated — usually sub-standard — Black schools. The last such segregated school closed only in 1965 — 11 years after the U.S. Supreme Court Court’s historic Brown vs. Board of Education decision ruled segregation in America was unconstitutional.
The anti-racism training materials for Global Affairs Canada employees include an eloquent column from a deputy minister of partly Chinese descent. He catalogues a heart-breaking array of racist episodes, from being called “chink” countless times to repeatedly having customs officers question whether he was Canadian — even though he carried a Canadian diplomatic passport.
But the material also reflects the CRT notion of a white-supremacist system, saying that “to justify the idea of a white race, every institution was and is used to prove that race exists and to promote the idea that the white race is at the top of the racial hierarchy and all other races are below.”
Only white people can be racist: Inside Global Affairs' anti-racism course materials
'No dissent is allowed': School board bars teacher from raising concerns over transgender books
Another slide lists what it calls the “characteristics of white supremacy culture,” including perfectionism, sense of urgency, worship of the written word, power hoarding, individualism and objectivity.
Skeptics see peril in such ideas.
Teaching children history with all the racist blemishes is a good thing, says Patrick Luciani, a former executive director of the public policy-focused Donner Canadian Foundation . But he worries that CRT proposes a facile solution to complex problems.
“Why are incarceration rates higher for young black men than white? It’s easy to simply say we basically live in a world that is fundamentally and structurally based on racism,” said the book author and opinion writer for The Hub. “If you simply believe that one thing, you don’t have to go any further. And that’s dangerous.”
To the extent that CRT attacks values like objectivity and objective merit, said Sherry, “it’s extremely dangerous to democracy, to community and to progress.”
But Canadian academics who study and uphold critical race theory say it simply reflects reality — that legal, political and educational systems have clearly resulted in different treatment of certain races. Indigenous people, for instance, are far more likely to end up in prison than other Canadians, have worse educational outcomes and, in many cases, can’t even access clean drinking water. Black men in Toronto stand a higher chance of being shot by police and lower odds of making it to college or university.
And more recently, data indicate that Black and other non-white Canadians have been at greater risk of contracting and dying from COVID-19.
Xavier says it all flows out of this country’s history, from the Indigenous residential schools with their inter-generational impact, to the experience of enslaved people who fled to Canada in the 19th Century, only to encounter more racism here.
“There is a wonderful history but then when these people arrived, the Canadian state treated them as second-class or third-class citizens,” he said. “If we were really to look at the Canadian system, it was built around oppression — some people were more valuable than others.… If we don’t take stock of what happened, how do we move forward?”
The merits of the theory aside, though, Luciani questions the wisdom of imparting critical race ideas to young, highly impressionable children.
“They haven’t formed the faculty of any kind of critical analysis,” he said. “I don’t know what the sociological ramifications of that are, but they can’t be good.”
The Toronto teacher says she’s seen pupils crying “because they were told by administrators that they were essentially colonizers.”
Sealy-Harrington counters that teaching about English and French imperialism in Canada is not the same as telling children they’re colonizers themselves.
Meanwhile, he says, the school system is hardly the first racial influence on young people.
“The question is not whether or not we should expose children to race. Given their inevitable exposure, it’s how should we educate them about race,” said the Ryerson professor. “Basic psychology will tell you that children learn about race at a young age.… This isn’t some Marxist conspiracy theory. This is literally just true.”
“Race is a made-up social construct to uphold European and white standards,” states the guideline , “and not an actual biological fact.”
The instructions go on to suggest teachers in the Hamilton Wentworth board be ready to discuss “the myth of white supremacy” and related topics with their primary pupils.
South of the border in a growing number of Republican states, such ideas would be considered literally unlawful, the target of new legislation that restricts how race is talked about in the classroom.
The concepts are often associated with critical race theory (CRT), a once-obscure school of academic thought that suggests racism is baked into laws and official policy — and that has become a red-hot battleground in America’s culture wars.
CRT has not only prompted legislation to regulate racism education in several states but is a frequent target on right-wing news channels and has been credited with helping Republican Glenn Youngkin win November’s race for Virginia governor.
“We are building the most sophisticated political movement in America — and we have just begun,” Chris Rufo, the conservative think-tank analyst credited with shoving CRT to the political front lines, wrote after Youngkin’s victory .
Meanwhile, the ideas — couched in sometimes-provocative social-science vernacular — have more quietly gained traction in Canada.
A few of the country’s largest school boards have adopted the language in their campaigns against discrimination, as have parts of the federal civil service in anti-racism training.
But even as critical race theory fills headlines in the U.S., its basic tenets are often misunderstood or misconstrued, merging with a more general opposition to addressing racism and other contentious social issues in American schools.
One typical example of those state laws bars lessons that cause students “discomfort, guilt (or) anguish” because of their race or sex.
And Rufo of the Manhattan Institute all but admitted CRT was being wielded as a political cudgel, tweeting in March that he was trying to make the phrase “toxic.” “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’” he wrote.
The “moral panic” that’s emerged around the issue in the U.S., at least, is no accident, says Joshua Sealy-Harrington, a professor and CRT scholar at Ryerson University’s Lincoln Alexander Law School.
“It’s a well-funded and well-orchestrated political campaign.”
At the same time, though, liberal American media sometimes dismiss criticism of the concepts out of hand, without exploring CRT’s more controversial elements.
And it’s not solely partisan strategists with their eyes on the non-stop U.S. election cycle voicing concern. Suzanna Sherry of the Vanderbilt University Law School in Nashville co-authored a book in 1997 — Beyond All Reason — that suggested CRT was an attack on Enlightenment ideals like merit and objectivity.
“My views on CRT remain similar but more negative now that it has spread beyond the ivory tower and into the population at large,” she said by email recently.
In Canada the concepts have sparked minimal controversy, and little discussion among the broader public.
Sujith Xavier, a law professor at the University of Windsor who applies CRT in his research , argues that Canadians have in a way long been exposed to the pillars underpinning critical race theory.
The familiar concept of systemic racism is closely related.
And policies like employment equity and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ equality section — which expressly permits affirmative action programs — respond to the concerns of critical-race theorists and have been part of Canadian law and even the constitution for years, he noted.
“It’s always been here,” says Xavier.
Video: Seeking Indigenous reconciliation through education (Global News)
Seeking Indigenous reconciliation through education
Even so, some Canadians might find its doctrines a challenging departure from more conventional approaches to racism. Or they might simply be wondering, “What is CRT, exactly?”
The theory emerged in the mid-1970s at Harvard University and other U.S. campuses, as academics concluded that advances brought about by the civil rights movement had stalled and new thinking was needed to combat “subtler forms of racism,” according to a leading primer on the topic by professors Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic.
One of the key tenets is that racism is “ordinary,” not an aberration, and that legal systems effectively promote the supremacy of white people over other races, even if their stated goal is equality.
Another is that colour blindness — the notion that everyone should be treated the same regardless of race — is itself a form of racism as it ignores the social and legal factors that can disadvantage people of colour. The Hamilton board’s draft Grade 2-3 lesson guidelines say their aim is to negate the “insidious” colour-blind practice “ by attempting to bring race into the conversation in primary classrooms.”
The theory also posits that race is not biological, but a social construct, again created by Europeans to assert their superiority and justify colonialism. Indeed, aside from the obvious physical differences, human genetics are identical between races, theorists note.
And CRT criticizes liberal notions like the merit principle and constitutional neutrality, saying they assume wrongly that people of all races are on a level playing field when applying for jobs, for instance, or encountering the legal system.
The degree to which the ideas have been implemented in the U.S. or anywhere else is a matter of debate. But after Rufo went on Fox News in September of last year to condemn the concepts, then-President Donald Trump banned federal funding of any programs that mention CRT, calling them “divisive, anti-American propaganda.”
It’s since become a rallying cry for Republicans across America, with Youngkin quickly outlawing CRT in schools, saying “what we won’t do is teach our children to view everything through the lens of race.”
In Ontario, at least, some large school boards have recently taken on ideas that form part of critical race theory, though largely without referencing the term.
Two of those boards — in Toronto and neighbouring York region — did not respond to requests for comment. But their initiatives appear partly driven by statistics that show poor outcomes for Black students, whose rates of high school suspension and dropping out are as much as twice those of white students.
“Racialized children are living in a white supremacist culture, where all aspects of themselves are devalued,” states a Toronto District School Board tip-sheet for parents on discussing racism with their children. “So it is essential that this culture is deconstructed and challenged every day.”
An elementary teacher in the board said the system has promoted teaching of such concepts especially forcefully since the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year.
“This is all we talk about at staff meetings, pretty much,” said the teacher, who is not authorized to discuss the matter and asked not to be named. “There’s an extreme concern that the curriculum be focused on anti-colonialist perspectives.”
The York Region District School Board — Canada’s third largest — covers similar ground in the Dismantling Anti-Black Racism Strategy it launched last year.
“Ontario’s public education system has evolved within an historical context of white supremacy, colonialism and anti-Black racism,” it says , “all of which have been woven into the fabric of school board policies and practices.”
In support of those statements, the plan documents a relatively little-known aspect of Ontario’s history: how legislation passed in 1850 and not repealed until 1964 allowed white-controlled school boards to set up segregated — usually sub-standard — Black schools. The last such segregated school closed only in 1965 — 11 years after the U.S. Supreme Court Court’s historic Brown vs. Board of Education decision ruled segregation in America was unconstitutional.
The anti-racism training materials for Global Affairs Canada employees include an eloquent column from a deputy minister of partly Chinese descent. He catalogues a heart-breaking array of racist episodes, from being called “chink” countless times to repeatedly having customs officers question whether he was Canadian — even though he carried a Canadian diplomatic passport.
But the material also reflects the CRT notion of a white-supremacist system, saying that “to justify the idea of a white race, every institution was and is used to prove that race exists and to promote the idea that the white race is at the top of the racial hierarchy and all other races are below.”
Only white people can be racist: Inside Global Affairs' anti-racism course materials
'No dissent is allowed': School board bars teacher from raising concerns over transgender books
Another slide lists what it calls the “characteristics of white supremacy culture,” including perfectionism, sense of urgency, worship of the written word, power hoarding, individualism and objectivity.
Skeptics see peril in such ideas.
Teaching children history with all the racist blemishes is a good thing, says Patrick Luciani, a former executive director of the public policy-focused Donner Canadian Foundation . But he worries that CRT proposes a facile solution to complex problems.
“Why are incarceration rates higher for young black men than white? It’s easy to simply say we basically live in a world that is fundamentally and structurally based on racism,” said the book author and opinion writer for The Hub. “If you simply believe that one thing, you don’t have to go any further. And that’s dangerous.”
To the extent that CRT attacks values like objectivity and objective merit, said Sherry, “it’s extremely dangerous to democracy, to community and to progress.”
But Canadian academics who study and uphold critical race theory say it simply reflects reality — that legal, political and educational systems have clearly resulted in different treatment of certain races. Indigenous people, for instance, are far more likely to end up in prison than other Canadians, have worse educational outcomes and, in many cases, can’t even access clean drinking water. Black men in Toronto stand a higher chance of being shot by police and lower odds of making it to college or university.
And more recently, data indicate that Black and other non-white Canadians have been at greater risk of contracting and dying from COVID-19.
Xavier says it all flows out of this country’s history, from the Indigenous residential schools with their inter-generational impact, to the experience of enslaved people who fled to Canada in the 19th Century, only to encounter more racism here.
“There is a wonderful history but then when these people arrived, the Canadian state treated them as second-class or third-class citizens,” he said. “If we were really to look at the Canadian system, it was built around oppression — some people were more valuable than others.… If we don’t take stock of what happened, how do we move forward?”
The merits of the theory aside, though, Luciani questions the wisdom of imparting critical race ideas to young, highly impressionable children.
“They haven’t formed the faculty of any kind of critical analysis,” he said. “I don’t know what the sociological ramifications of that are, but they can’t be good.”
The Toronto teacher says she’s seen pupils crying “because they were told by administrators that they were essentially colonizers.”
Sealy-Harrington counters that teaching about English and French imperialism in Canada is not the same as telling children they’re colonizers themselves.
Meanwhile, he says, the school system is hardly the first racial influence on young people.
“The question is not whether or not we should expose children to race. Given their inevitable exposure, it’s how should we educate them about race,” said the Ryerson professor. “Basic psychology will tell you that children learn about race at a young age.… This isn’t some Marxist conspiracy theory. This is literally just true.”
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