Juno News - July 06, 2020


Mandatory anti-racism training for students？

Topics
mandatory anti-racism courses
Mentioned
Africaville
A ＂Made In Canada＂ Approach Street checks and carding is not racist

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

143.43

Word count

709

Sentence count

36

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Lindsay talks about the growing demand for a mandatory anti-racism course at Canadian universities, and why she thinks this is a good idea. She also talks about her own experience with racism in school and how she was taught about racism in schools.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 A couple of petitions are circulating right now demanding that universities institute mandatory
00:00:10.120 anti-racism courses for all students. Now, online petitions can really be a hit or miss,
00:00:16.340 but in a climate where everyone is currently hypersensitive about racial issues and with
00:00:22.780 our education system that says the customer is always right and we want student tuition money,
00:00:28.340 so we'll do whatever the students want. This means that students, when they're demanding a mandatory
00:00:34.680 anti-racism course, it is very feasible that at least a couple universities will go along with
00:00:41.100 this. One such petition is addressed to the University of Ottawa and Carleton University,
00:00:46.320 and all of these petitions that I'm bringing up have at least 10,000 signatures. So this petition
00:00:51.620 that is addressed to the University of Ottawa and Carleton University is asking for a mandatory
00:00:58.180 anti-racism course for all degrees at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University.
00:01:03.820 And in their description of their online petition, they don't even really extrapolate
00:01:07.900 on why that might be necessary. They just kind of assume that it is necessary. The petition says,
00:01:14.120 it is time to stand up for marginalized students attending your institutions. There is one for the
00:01:21.160 University of Toronto as well, but the description of the online petition is very sparse. And then there
00:01:29.560 is one student at Ryerson University who actually wants to make an anti-racism course mandatory for high
00:01:36.520 school students. So this one is addressed to the Ontario Ministry of Education. Part of it reads,
00:01:43.000 our current primary and secondary education programs do not address the existence of racism in Canada
00:01:49.780 in the past and in the present. Without educating students on the full extent of the history of
00:01:55.080 racism and cultural assimilation in the past, we are perpetuating a continual cycle of colonialism
00:02:01.520 today. Now what's interesting here is how the person who started this petition, this student at
00:02:08.480 Ryerson, she frames it as a lack of education. I don't know about you, but I went through the public
00:02:14.460 school system in BC. And I 100% remember learning all about residential schools, injustices towards
00:02:22.600 Indigenous people. We learned all about Africaville in Nova Scotia. We learned about the Chinese head 0.96
00:02:28.840 tax, Japanese internment camps. I remember in grade 10 watching the 2004 movie Crash, which is about racial
00:02:37.700 tensions and injustices. And one of the main themes involves police. So even though that was that was a film
00:02:43.580 from over 15 years ago, very topical to today. And so when I hear this argument that, you know, there's just
00:02:51.760 nothing about residential schools, there's nothing about historical racism in the education system, I think
00:03:00.840 maybe these people just don't remember. And so when I was learning about all this in school, I don't have
00:03:07.680 any memory of it being dogmatic. So from what I recall, when we learned about these historical
00:03:14.120 injustices, like the Chinese head tax, Africaville, and residential schools, they were not steeped in
00:03:22.120 ideology with terms like white privilege and white fragility and systemic racism. We just learned what
00:03:29.800 happened. And we knew it was wrong. So but feel free to share in the comments, what your experience was,
00:03:37.960 what you can remember, and how long ago it was not to be too cynical. But I just see these mandatory
00:03:45.240 anti racism courses, as a way of employing academics, or you know, people with master's degrees who
00:03:52.440 specialized in social justice and identity studies. It's just a way of perpetuating their industry, and
00:03:59.160 giving themselves work, because there are only so many diversity officer jobs to go around. And of
00:04:05.720 course, yes, they want to spread their ideas, and instill their ideas about white privilege and white
00:04:12.200 fragility and systemic racism. So while it might sound relatively harmless to have a course called race and
00:04:19.400 ethnicity studies, or anti racism 101, we must understand that they don't want these courses instituted for the
00:04:27.160 purpose of fact based information transmission. They want to use these courses to promote very specific
00:04:36.120 views on topics like white privilege and systemic racism. And they want to promote their agenda of how
00:04:44.040 to right historical wrongs. And they want to give themselves jobs. I'm Lindsay Shepherd with True North.
00:04:51.640 Thanks so much for watching.