On May 5, an American, Tim Wise, was
a keynote speaker at the Toronto District School Board’s (TDSB’s)
Futures Conference on Equity and Inclusive Education.
Wise is a card-carrying member of the
American far left who doesn’t believe Israel has any right to exist. Moreover, he frequently writes for
the far left magazine Counterpunch.
This magazine also
publishes articles by the Holocaust denier Israel Shamir, by Gilad Atzmon who
suggests that “maybe Hitler was right,” and by James Petras who believes that
the “Zionist power configuration” controls America.
Strange company for a man who calls
himself an anti-racist. But in truth, Wise’s mission is to emphasize racial
divisions, not bridge them, and on May 5, he lectured Canadian teachers
about the evils of “white privilege.”
In his essays, Wise explains white
privilege thus: “The concept is rooted in the common-sense observation that there can be
no down without an up.” Or if blacks are
underprivileged, whites must be “overprivileged.”
To illustrate, Wise gives a laundry list of supposed white privileges,
including “not having to worry about triggering negative stereotypes, rarely
having to feel out of place, not having to worry about racial profiling, etc.”
Note that these privileges are defined negatively. Obviously,
stereotyping is wrong. But how does not being stereotyped amount to a
privilege? Or if blacks are deprived of dignity, are we to understand that
whites must have too much of it, as if there’s just so much human dignity to go
around?
Of course some people do come from a privileged background. I’d say that
President Obama’s kids have a leg up on most people – and good for them! Life’s
too short to worry about other people’s luck.
But the notion of white privilege is disconnected from any actual
privilege. The claim is that ordinary, fair-minded and hardworking Canadians
have more than they deserve – but only if they’re white.
A poor white kid with a single mom on welfare may not have breakfast,
but theoretically he has a whole knapsack of privileges: male privilege, hetero
privilege, ablest privilege – you name it.
Theorists of privilege fall into such absurdities because they discard
individuals and see only groups; thus if some whites have been racists, all
whites – you, me and our grand kids – are accountable for it.
So, for example, in “Of National Lies
and Racial America,” Wise writes: “For most white
folks, indignation just doesn’t wear well.”
Why? Because whites are morally
compromised by the “genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of
Africans.” Obviously, no whites living today committed these crimes but other
white people did and so, by the raced-based logic of privilege, whites today
bear the responsibility.
Unfortunately, inviting Wise isn’t a
one off for the Toronto District School Board. Much worse, the Board
incorporates the notion of privilege into the curriculum with learning
resources such as the “GLSEN Jump Start Guide: Examining Power, Privilege
and Oppression.”
The literature on white privilege notes that students resist the
concept. Sociologists Dan Pence and Arthur Fields write: “White students often react to in-class discussions
about white privilege with a continuum of behaviors ranging from outright
hostility to a ‘wall of silence.’"
Pence and Fields never consider that
the students may correctly perceive themselves to be under racist attack.
The GLSEN guide recommended by the
Toronto Board instructs teachers to solicit confessions from students about
“the times that they have been oppressive or have used their privilege over
someone else.”
Doubtless, our kids find it hard to
come up with suitable sins. To help them, the guide gives an example: planning
“a trip together without recognizing that one member of the group cannot afford
to participate.”
That may not sound like oppression to
me and you, but it’s all grist for teaching our kids that they’re part of a
system of oppression that has produced every crime from slavery to genocide.
The GLSEN guide observes that students may feel guilty. What a surprise!
Things may get worse. Professors at
the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and the departments of
education at York and Ryerson universities are busily lecturing student
teachers on the ideology of white privilege.
This hit the news back in 2010 when
the media noticed that OISE had granted a student a master’s degree for a
thesis denouncing Jews as privileged and racist and Holocaust education as a
Zionist plot. (Read the Toronto Star's report on the scandal here,
Werner Cohn's essay here,
and his follow-ups here.)
It should come as no surprise that
theorists who divides people into oppressed and oppressor groups, into good
races and bad should put Jews in the bad column, particularly as the further to
the left one goes, the more common it is to find people examining race through
the lens of oppression and privilege.
As a parent of two kids in a Toronto
public school, I'm glad to say that Toronto School Board truly does support
equality for all our students, regardless of race, religion or sexual
orientation – and
usually gets things right (though certainly not always).
But because it does support equality,
the Board must expel the notion of white privilege.
P.S. If Tim Wise has ever given two
minutes thought to Canada, it’s not evident from his writings, but no one
should doubt his talents as a speaker. At the TDSB’s Futures Conference, he
reportedly compared being a person of colour to a disability, castigated Canadians
for pervasive racism, and received a standing ovation.
You can read a report on his talk here.
Also, it was Richard K over at Eye on a Crazy Planet who broke the story about
Tim Wise speaking at the TDSB's Future's Conference. Be sure to read his
original piece here.
A slightly shorter version of this
piece was originally published in the Jewish Tribune and on Harry's Place in Britain. To read more of my opinion pieces,
visit my other blog here.
