“There’s no such thing as neutral education.”

— Paulo Freire

If the school year in September 2018 had begun under the cloud of a repealed modern sex-education curriculum in Ontario, cancelled Indigenous curriculum writing projects and $100 million cuts in school repairs, by early April the drumbeat of unrest had only escalated.

More than 150,000 students from over 700 schools across Ontario walked out to protest Premier Doug Ford’s plans to raise class sizes, have fewer teachers, ban cellphones in classes and mandate four online courses for high school students.

That month, Halton school board trustees told Lisa Thompson, then minister of education, in a letter that increased class sizes would inevitably lead to eliminating specialized courses that had fewer students, as they couldn’t be replaced online.

“Expected course offering losses will be felt most in classes with marginalized and at-risk students, upper-year arts, specialized math and skilled trades and technology courses, all of which are largely unsuited for the online environment,” they wrote.

Education in Canada — even though it’s administered provincially — is among the most vaunted in the world according to multiple metrics. It appeared in the top 10 for reading, math and science in tests on international assessments that the Programme for International Student Assessment conducts to measure educational performance among the OECD, a grouping of mostly rich nations. It also found children of new immigrants quickly reach the levels of achievement as their peers.

Yet, while the education system works for most students, it doesn’t work for all. Despite decades of concern, the system continues to fail the same marginalized groups — mainly Indigenous students and Black students.

This is why words like “equity” and “anti-oppression” have become part of the educators’ lexicon. But what do they mean? Are they merely the newest in a long line of buzzwords that trickle down from academics and armchair experts who never set foot in classrooms?

A white, male principal from the Toronto school board that gathers detailed race-based data on students said, “Talking of equity is an uncomfortable topic for people like me. Teachers mean well. If they thought someone was suffering due to an equity-related issue, they help them out.” He spoke on condition his name not be published.

The request for anonymity shows he knows his opinion is not officially acceptable, but it’s clear he doesn’t understand why. Here is how that kind of thinking obstructs change:

It centres issues of equity around the discomfort of people in positions of power.

It holds as true the fallacy that equity just requires teachers to be well-intentioned.

It confuses “equity” with “racism.”

In defining the word equity, Renu Mandhane, the chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, said, “We’re not talking about treating everyone the same. We’re talking about how you treat different people appropriately so that they can achieve equitable outcomes.”

Putting equity into operation requires practising education through an anti-oppression lens. An understanding of anti-oppression makes transparent the societal power structures that lead to some groups of people being valued and others being viewed as deficient.

School board equity plans tend to be at pains to point out the “unintended” or “accidental” biases of teachers. Yet, among the dozens of teachers who spoke to this reporter, not one appeared to be ill-intentioned.

Intentions — unless from open and overt bigots — are irrelevant. A deeper understanding requires focusing on the outcomes of oppression.

For instance, in looking at the racial makeup of the cast of a school musical, a school might find their choice of who gets to be the princess and who are the servants results in signalling messages of race-based inferiority.

“Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception,” writes James Baldwin in No One Knows My Name.

In Canadian society, that centre is whiteness.

It’s important to distinguish between whiteness and white people.

Whiteness is an academic term that describes social hierarchy by race. It’s the system that prescribes which beliefs, practices, habits and attitudes are the norm, and then enables the unequal distribution of power and privilege based on skin colour.

Whiteness would have simply been one of the pack of global dominant groups had it not been for colonization and cultural imperialism that posited it as the universal norm, the unbiased standard-bearer of our time, the representative of all that is good and decent and the inexorable outcome of progress and modernity.

How might this play out in school? I witnessed two examples. Last summer, a South Asian schoolteacher from Toronto said she would not go out in the sun, lest she become dark. In December 2018, a white TDSB teacher asked her class to draw sketches of kids playing in the snow. Then she helpfully instructed the students to colour in red cheeks.

An anti-oppression lens would help both teachers understand how their words centred on whiteness and marginalized dark-skinned children by linking normalcy and desirability to skin tone.

“White people” — not a biological term — are closest to this centre of power, with heterosexual, able-bodied, wealthy males at the apex. They benefit even if they don’t actively try.

The question, therefore, isn’t “Am I racist?” but “Am I a beneficiary?” This would take teachers away from defensiveness on race issues and help them objectively assess the psychological impact of their actions.

Race is anthropological fiction. Scientists who completed the Human Genome Project in 2003 found that genetically humans are more than 99.9 per cent the same. They found that there are likely to be more genetic variations between, say, two Europeans than a European and an African. Racism is the oppressive social outcome of that fiction.

White is the identity created by a series of laws from the Atlantic slave trade era to establish the dominance of European kidnappers over African labourers. Using fake science to show Africans as subhuman, it allowed for laws that would render the Africans landless and without human rights.

Who is white can shift from Anglo-Saxons and western Europeans to eastern Europeans, Jewish and Hispanic people.

“Non-white” people can also benefit from the system at a little distance from the centre — so long as they “assimilate” by showing alignment with what whiteness stamps as normal, and so long as they limit the exhibition of their otherness in small, non-threatening doses.

Still, viewing oppression purely through a binary lens of white people and non-white people greatly misses the nuances of marginalization.

It’s not as if only white people are bigots and people with melanin — dumped into one monolithic group — are equity-minded non-bigots.

Depending on the identities that privilege us — gender, skin colour, class, caste, education, sexuality, ability, etc. — we can be oppressors as well as the oppressed in different contexts. Many of us have intersecting identities that interact with power in their own unique ways. Black as an identity occupies the densest of those intersections. Add Black to any identity and the marginalization magnifies instantly.

Just as no understanding of decolonization can begin without centring the voices of Indigenous peoples, no understanding of racism can begin without placing anti-Blackness at the centre of it. This is true even if neither the two forms of oppression nor the groups they affect are always separate or distinct.

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Since actions that dismantle these oppressions unravel the narratives that drive white supremacy, they benefit all people who are discriminated against.

This is why Jeewan Chanicka, who was Ontario’s first superintendent of equity, anti-racism and anti-oppression at the Toronto school board until recently, and appeared around the province urging educators to bring equity to the centre of education, had at least one recurring theme in all his talks: “What is necessary for some is good for all.”

Teachers who go to workshops on anti-oppression often ask for what to do next. But no to-do list would be effective unless teachers learn to stay in the uncomfortable zone of introspection. It’s not enough to know what oppression or whiteness means — teachers of all backgrounds have to critically assess their daily choices through this consciousness. They have to learn what they really think and what biases guide their actions.

They might, for instance, reflect on how often they mispronounce or avoid unfamiliar names, how often they mistake one racialized child for another.

Do they view students who don’t meet them in the eye as being shifty, because they think meeting eyes is a universal sign of honesty?

Do they use racially coded language such as “school safety” or “those children” or “those parents”?

Anti-Black racism, for instance, does not only come from acts of intentional cruelty such as the use of the n-word.

It can also be relayed by teacher indifference, undue impatience or disproportionate punishment.

It shows up in degrading comments about Black children’s hair and over-surveillance of their behaviour and even their clothes. (“Hoodies are a school safety issue.”)

It appears when teachers buy into tired stereotypes such as white students are all-arounders, East and South Asian students excel at science and math, and Black students are beyond redemption.

A Peel school board report on the perspectives of Black boys found that teachers tended to “play favourites” with South Asian students, whom they viewed as “model” students.

The stereotype masks much, including the myth of the model minority that erases the struggles of poorer or struggling South Asians.

But it is essentially anti-Black because it unfairly implies, “If they can do it, why can’t you?” It renders invisible the impact of intergenerational cycles of poverty and trauma that shape children’s lives.

Among students who are poor, experiences of discrimination can vary greatly. A child of refugees or immigrants who enjoyed some social capital in their home country has a greater chance of academic success — even if they live on a low income — than the child of a Canadian or Indigenous person shackled in generational chains of subjugation.

We inherit privilege, we inherit prejudices, we inherit trauma.

True equity aims to smash those intergenerational cycles.

Neither teaching nor learning happens in a vacuum. There is no social reset button when the school bell rings every morning. Neither educators nor students leave their personal and social experiences behind when they step into the classroom.

When both come from similar backgrounds, the student experience can be relatively seamless. But what happens when they don’t? The burden is on children to adapt to a way of life they have no other exposure to. They are assessed based on how quickly and closely they adhere to the white world standards imposed on them.

A key demand of equity is that it shifts that burden of bridging that gap to the adults.

In January this year, Chanicka, then the equity superintendent, was leading a half-day workshop at a Scarborough secondary school on goal setting for schools. He asked 45 east-end principals and vice-principals who had gathered to establish three goals for the school around achievement, well-being and equity.

“Because Black kids experience racism differently, I will, for instance, be asking what are you doing to reach out to Black kids,” he told them.

“A goal,” he said, “is the adult learning what needs to happen in service of children.”

What is being asked of teachers is not more niceness or compassion or a reinvigorated saviour complex or a need for all of us to get along. What is being asked is intentional strategizing against racism.

Education Without Oppression — the 2018-19 Atkinson series — examines the continuing marginalization of Black and Indigenous students in Canada. It analyzes the challenges and breakthroughs nationally and in the cities of Baltimore, Md.; Lucknow, India; and Napier, New Zealand.

Shree Paradkar , a columnist covering issues around race and gender, is the 2018-2019 recipient of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy. She is based in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @ShreeParadkar

Education Without Oppression — the 2018-19 Atkinson series — examines the continuing marginalization of Black and Indigenous students in Canada. It analyzes the challenges and breakthroughs nationally and in the cities of Baltimore, Md.; Lucknow, India; and Napier, New Zealand.

The Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy awards a seasoned Canadian journalist the opportunity to pursue a yearlong investigation into a current policy issue. The project is funded by the Atkinson Foundation, the Honderich family and the Toronto Star.