Juno News - July 06, 2020


Mandatory anti-racism training for students？


Episode Stats

Length

4 minutes

Words per Minute

143.42549

Word Count

709

Sentence Count

36

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary


Transcript

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
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.