Is teaching kids about racism scary? Exploring the critical race theory bogeyman in Ontario

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This article was published 31/01/2022 (1385 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Florida bill banning schools and businesses from making white people feel “discomfort” when they teach about discrimination.

A Georgia teacher asking fourth-graders to write a letter to the seventh U.S. president, Andrew Jackson, on how removing members of the Cherokee Nation would help America grow and prosper.

Texas schools pulling books by dozens of Black authors off library shelves.

What a short-lived reckoning on race this has been. Eight states have passed legislation to restrict the teaching of racism and bias in public schools. Another 20 have introduced legislation, or plan to.

A manic panic has taken root in the U.S. over supposed critical race theory (CRT) teachings in education, and on the pretext of banning it, conservatives, cheered on by erstwhile free-speech warriors, are simply limiting conversations on racism and anti-Blackness in particular.

Because Canadians tend to be faithful copycats of American toxicity, we can rest assured a subtle pushback is underway here, too. One way to prevent it from taking hold in education is — education. School boards mandating Black studies in the curriculum would not only validate Black lives in school but also show everyone why such opposition is unnecessary.

We are not there yet, which is why a new course on Deconstructing Anti-Black Racism being taught in a couple of dozen Ontario schools feels not so much like progress, in this moment, as resistance.

It’s a Grade 12 course that was developed in 2020 by four Black teachers at Toronto’s Newtonbrook Secondary School in response to student inquiries in the wake of the global reckoning. The Toronto District School Board approved and published it, thus opening it up for use by other school boards. It is being taught in about 17 schools, the board said.

“Students are becoming increasingly aware that the idea of ‘soft racism’ that we have here in Canada is not soft. It is just as painful. It’s just as hurtful and it’s just as damaging,” says Toronto teacher Monique Willacey, who will be teaching the course for the first time to students at Riverdale Collegiate Institute next semester.

She hopes to begin with the fundamentals; the difference between non-racism and anti-racism, between racism and anti-Black racism. Address questions such as: “Don’t we just address this when we look at multiculturalism? Don’t we just do this when we look at diversity? We already know about bias and discrimination. So why do we need to learn that in specific relation to anti-Black racism?”

The Toronto board’s own human rights report last year, its first, found the board has a “serious racism problem.”

Racism was the most frequently cited human rights violation, followed by disability. In the 2018-19 school year, 64 hate activity reports were filed. The following year the number spiralled to 312. “Incidents citing anti-Black racism exceeded all other incidents reported by a wide margin,” the report said. Antisemitism and homophobia also rose at an alarming rate.

“We are at a complex and critical juncture in public education and navigating resistance to achieving anti-racism and equity,” said the Toronto school board’s director, Colleen Russell-Rawlins.

Conservative Americans are lashing out against critical race theory, falsely claiming it attributes racism to all white people as individuals. In fact, the theory, which is a framework of legal analysis, is based on the premise that race is not natural and that racism is embedded in social institutions.

CRT is one of the frameworks that inform this course, Monique Willacey says. Let’s take a look at how dangerous this theory is.

In this final week of the Grade 12 semester, Ottawa occasional teacher Raj Doobay, who taught the course at Woodroffe High School, was awaiting feedback from his students. It was, he says, “one of the best classes I’ve had the opportunity to teach,” and “a very humbling experience.”

The course is student-centred, meaning the students decide what they want to learn and what they don’t want to learn.

“What they didn’t want to learn is the tokenization thing that happens, and you’re going to see it next month, Black History Month, where, you know, teachers are putting in the pictures of Martin Luther King and we learn all of the stuff that happens in America while ignoring the real stuff that’s happening in Canada,” Doobay says. “They want to talk about real racism and how to deal with it.”

One of the themes of his course was From Act to Action.

At any given moment there is an imminent possibility that yet another Black person is going to be shot by the police, Doobay says, so the class explores ideas such as: how do you fight effectively? “It’s one thing to go out and, you know, march, protest. What are you doing behind the scenes? How do you network and build with your community? How do you engage professional organizations and how do you fight in a way that they can’t write us out of the story?”

One student from Haiti did a project on how French colonialism affected the Haitian trajectory.

A Cambodian student made a powerful presentation with history and research along with the story of the choice her grandfather made to sacrifice his life, to save the rest of the family from being killed by the Khmer Rouge.

A dance teacher taught West Indian dances as students traced roots of music created in Africa. How, for instance, Yoruba roots influenced West Indian music that in turn influenced music in Brazil, and how all that transforms into Beyoncé’s music.

Sessions with guests foster curiosity and build community. In Toronto, where teachers say they were recently encouraged to only have pre-recorded sessions, the board confirmed that teachers of this course could invite guest lecturers for live online sessions.

Neither Doobay nor Willacey, who has previously discussed issues of racism in other classes, has ever received parent complaints, and both credited their school community for supporting them.

“This course isn’t about finding the right answers or wrong ones. This course is about challenging our thinking and opening our minds to the fact that this world isn’t perfect and we’re working really hard to improve it,” Willacey told students in an introduction video.

Scary stuff, indeed.

Shree Paradkar is a Toronto-based columnist covering issues around race and gender for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @ShreeParadkar