How Canada Clarifies Means to Diversity Goals in North Texan Schools

“That kid isn’t getting into a good college anytime soon. Poor idiot ruined his career.”

In the picture that invaded the local news that week, Idiot’s (not his real name) body and blurred-out face lounged against a school white board in profligate pride. A racist message aimed at the black community glared from the board in red expo marker. The message was short and mindless, boasting the N-word and a swastika.

That hateful message was a simple reiteration of the racial environment of my school. Everyday in those hallways, I recounted all the times my achievements were reduced to the fact that I am a ‘squinty-eyed Asian,’ my South Asian friends complained to me about being called a terrorist yet again, and most of all, black students had the N-word and commentary about slavery thrown at them.

But of course, as I sat back in my red classroom chair that afternoon and listened to students gossip about the incident, no one was talking about how the message harmed the black community at my school. Instead, people discussed how dear Idiot had ruined his life, had damaged the reputation of our highschool and had effectively spit on the college applications white seniors would send out that very semester. (They thought admissions counselors would take our white kids’ applications, see our high school’s name and think “Racist,” throwing that student to the bottom of the pile with all of the affirmative-action based rejects.)

Even if any of those observations had an ounce of validity to them, they missed the core issue in favor of somehow victimizing white people. The discussions that day reminded me of just how white-biased my community is. In my experience, anytime students complained about their encounters with racism, sexism or homophobia in my highschool, they were written-off as oversensitive and malicious whistleblowers just looking to pull the race, woman, or gay “card.” Whoever showed Idiot’s photo to the press was described the same way.

These experiences make me yearn for an education-based solution to racism that addresses unconscious bias, and in Southlake Caroll, a community just 20 minutes from my highschool, my hopes are being both developed and scrutinized. In response to their equivalent of Idiot White Board Boy (a group of students posting a video of them shouting the N word) Southlake Carroll ISD created a District Diversity Council and a Cultural Competence Action Plan (CCAP).

The CCAP outlines multiple strategies for combating racism in Southlake schools including hiring teachers from underrepresented groups, keeping record of offenses against the Student Code of Conduct (SCOC), and requiring student-led organizations to incorporate cultural competency practices, but unsurprisingly it is met with many adamant arguments against it.

These arguments however, create a persistent paradox leaving Southlake both theoretically and literally at a halt; (Southlake Families, as the dissenters to the CCAP have named themselves, sued the school board and raised over $112,000 to keep the CCAP from being proposed. (PAC Fundraiser.)) The “silent majority” that doesn’t want anti-bias education argues that they want equitable treatment for all students while simultaneously criticizing the CCAP for reasons that prioritize the experiences of white students and faculty. They demonstrate a lack of will to become better or deny that a real problem exists in the first place. While Southlake Families may argue that the CCAP is a far-left, radical and divisive overreach created by the school board, I would argue that the strength of the CCAP’s policies are the bare minimum required to make effective strides against the outcomes of racism. Southlake Families think that leadership under the current Student Code of Conduct will be enough to end racism, but what they fail to realize is that racism will continue to exist so long as the very biases and prejudices they argue with go untouched. Furthermore, a look at Ontario Canada’s Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy and its outcomes can refine specific policies within the CCAP and present solutions to the concerns of the dissenters in a manner that is removed from their paradoxical ideology.

At this point, before even getting to the ins-and outs of the CCAP and its policies, I’ve already placed a lot of blame on the dissenters’ biases and their consequent tendency to prioritize white lives, but what is meant by this is often misconstrued by people such as Southlake Families. I want to emphasize that that misunderstanding goes to motivate their flawed arguments rather than them simply being bad, ignorant and racist people. This phenomenon is best understood in one parent’s speech to the school board. The parent claimed that Southlake isn’t a racist community, but it is instead a community filled with citizens who “like it [there,] have worked hard for what they have earned” and “resent being called biased and privileged.” (Carroll ISD Board Meeting, Item 3 7:00–7:10). Painting the picture of hard workers against being bogged down by the ‘mean’ titles of ‘biased’ and ‘privileged’ set a meritocracy (a society in which hard work is directly correlated with auspicious outcomes) in conflict with teaching diversity. In other words, CCAP dissenters assume that when diversity programs aim to educate students about having bias and privilege, that those programs also teach kids to reduce their achievements to simple facts of skin color and origin to undermine their hard work.

To make white people feel bad about being white, however, is not the purpose of teaching bias and privilege within the diversity curriculum. Bias and privilege, in this context, simply means that by power of majority and representation, white people have disproportionate influence on how institutions are run and how issues are regarded. Referring back to my school’s incident, this reality can be easily understood because even though Idiot drew a pretty-universally understood racial slur on a board, white experience was discussed and sympathized with the most. The intention of teaching bias and privilege at this point then, is to always put the focus where it is due, legitimize the minority experience, and validate emotional consequences.

If dissenters were made to understand this intention instead of being over-defensive about their achievements where attacks really are not being made, perhaps they’d lack motivation for their arguments against CCAP policy in the first place. For example, Southlake families argues against objective 5.4 and 5.5 in the CCAP which aim to “increase the diversity of teachers and staff with particular focus on attracting underrepresented teachers.” (CCAP, 12.) On their website, Southlake Families argues that these objectives, “inhibit the ability to always hire the most qualified teachers by prioritizing race over experience.” They portray diversity as a threat to quality teaching under the assumption that an underrepresented-group teacher would always be hired over a white one, even if the white teacher had outstanding qualifications. They focus on the loss of a hard worker, but miss the possibility that underrepresented group teachers could have equal credentials, and at the same time, enable students to make intimate connections with different backgrounds, diminishing prejudice at its cause: lack of exposure. They also ignore the possibility of a “quality” teacher as regarded by the school board, being simply a teacher who demonstrates a will to talk about diversity. These types of connections could inherently boost teaching value in the world-minded classroom.

To clarify, in saying all this I do not mean that white teachers are inherently less valuable because they do not have a minority background (many of the white teachers and professors in my life have introduced me to diversity concepts in a productive manner) but rather that in suburban North Texas especially, where people promote the idea that all success is a function of merit, they tend to be less inclined to have real world discussions that validate the feelings of minority students. This idea is reinforced by a Canadian journal entitled “What Should Preservice Teachers Know about Race and Diversity? Exploring a Critical Knowledge-Base for Teaching in 21st Century Canadian Classrooms,” by Benedicta Ebgo, which is written in response to shortcomings of the Equity and Inclusive Education strategy in Canadian Classrooms. Ebgo asserts that “Without a critical knowledge-base about race and diversity, […] orientation towards orthodoxy means that preservice teachers will be less positioned to support and empower students from racialized backgrounds.” (Ebgo, 26.) This orthodoxy stems from a “meritologic ideology that fails to take into account how schools contribute to inequality in society” (Ebgo, 25.) In other words, in Canada, under an already established focus on diversity, it is already known that teachers who are less willing to grapple with diversity because of their ideological preoccupations with meritocracy, run the risk of perpetuating the estrangement of minority students in their school system. Such preoccupations could still govern the way teacher candidates run their classrooms if perspectives on diversity are not factored into hiring decisions, so it is critical that the CCAP’s attraction of underrepresented teachers, or at least teachers who are willing to have real talk about diversity, remains in place. Similarly, as discussed in previous paragraphs, meritocratic ideology still governs the way the community overall looks at race, so if the school board does not place authority figures to diminish this ideology, how can we expect students to have the resources to truly empathize with disparities?

Moving from the basic ideological barriers to implementing an effective anti-racism strategy, it is important to note that I am not saying the attribution of the CCAP to overreaching leftism is merely the blabberings of an unthinking biased entity; In fact, I think Southlake Families is right to take some issue with objective 3.1.2 of the CCAP which expresses a desire to “Establish a process for documenting, reporting and tracking SCOC offenses” (CCAP, 9.) The process proposed involves putting disciplinary history relating to microaggressions into the permanent online student record.

On the surface level, this seems like a good idea, after all, the types of racist behavior described by parents in Southlake necessitates disciplinary action that dissolves racist ideology to prevent further race-associated trauma. An example of such behavior is reported by Robin Cornish, a mother of five black children who she says were harassed daily in Southlake schools. After her husband died of a heart attack at age forty, she reports, a student told her child that she would be “voting for Obama because [his] dad was dead and she [would] need welfare” (Hixenbaugh.) Not only does this comment lack basic human decency in regards to sensitivity to death, but it is also coded with multiple racist and classist ideas. The kid assumed that because Robin Cornish was a black woman, she would vote for black, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama in desperation to relieve an assumed socioeconomic ‘inferiority.’ Because of the synthesis made between blackness, political preferences and socioeconomic status, it is clear that the speaker harnesses a deeply racist perspective that can only be contained if the student is weaned off those ideologies. In this sense, it is easy to say that the consequences for this behavior should be severe or even permanent.

However, documenting behavioral lapses in a permanent record is not the sophisticated approach required to truly handle the problem. In their discussion of Objective 3.1.2, Southlake Families makes a somewhat compelling argument:

“Permanently penalizing children for unintentional verbal or nonverbal actions is unconscionable. This police state culture discourages open and honest dialogue among students as children learn about each other, their cultures, similarities and differences. It does the opposite of celebrating diversity. (CCAP page 9).” (Southlake Families.)

Southlake Families are right in the sense that permanent consequences that are made to brand a student even after they leave secondary school is an overreach, and I believe that it can not only “discourage open and honest dialogue among students” but also foster resentment that will stay with students even after they graduate from Southlake schools. If the student who uttered a microaggression were to, for example, not make it into a college, they then might attribute the rejection to a mark on their permanent record. At that point it would be easy to blame diversity-oriented programs for one’s own failure. There is only that thought,

“Damn, I said one thing one time when I was young and stupid and those diversity police kept me from my dream.”

While this sounds very theoretical, it is actually the same type of resentment that is used to call people who report racism, sexism and homophobia malicious whistleblowers within my highschool. The blame is put on perceived ‘oversensitivity’ rather than on internal race issues. Resentment, therefore, is counter productive when we are trying to get people on board with diversity plans. It reflects a desire to reprimand students in a sort of ‘eye for an eye,’ approach by ‘cancelling students’ for hurting minority students instead of providing them the resources to grow out of racist behavior and encouraging dialogue for healing.

Saying all this, the non-answer Southlake Families offers in alternative: simply continuing to use the current Student Code of Conduct, is not a viable solution either, as it does not provide colored students a safe platform to report acts against them and does not make conscious effort to track the existence of racism in Southlake. Instead, the District Diversity Council should keep the core essence of objective 3.1.2 by keeping a general record of as many microaggressions or other race-related offenses as they can detect all while implementing the more educational focuses of the CCAP and eliminating the permanent student record aspect. This way, administration can provide a safe space for marginalized communities to express their concerns, reduce the consequences of having a biased white majority, hold students accountable where it is due, and most importantly have an idea of the outcomes of diversity education to make future edits to diversity education where they are due.

The importance of monitoring progress is established in another review of Canada’s Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy. Public Policy worker, Peter John Mitchell observes that, “there is no standard measurement of effectiveness [for the strategy] that will be applied across the province,” and as a result, the Ministry fails to “[quantify] the results” which keeps Canada from realling knowing if the goals of “reducing achievement gaps and increasing confidence in public education” are actually being met (Mitchell, 5.) Furthermore, the CCAP is right in establishing a discipline system that could be used as a measure of effectiveness for the education programs, and the success could be monitored in other areas as well.

In essence, diversity curriculum, due to varying ideologies within human nature, is always vulnerable to incomplete arguments that distract from its core intentions of eliminating racism. To make sure that diversity curricula can actually be effective in this sense, we must look past our own biases and while minding the theoretical scenarios those biases create, prioritize what actually occurs in reality when types of diversity policy are enacted. When we can examine diversity curricula for what they are, we eliminate the ‘what if’s’ and are remobilized into actually reducing abuse and creating a more suitable environment for all students.

Works Cited:

Egbo, Benedicta. “What Should Preservice Teachers Know about Race and Diversity? Exploring a Critical Knowledge-Base for Teaching in 21st Century Canadian Classrooms.” Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education, journals.library.ualberta.ca/jcie/index.php/JCIE/article/view/16945.

“September 14, 2020 School Board — Carroll ISD, TX.” School Board Video(s) — Carroll ISD, TX Video Archive, Sept. 2020, carrollisdtx.swagit.com/play/09142020–814.

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