The University of Toronto presents the friendly face of western racism

The racialists of programs within the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education are undermining the idea that people should be treated as individuals instead of representatives of their race.

Real scientists, as opposed to some "social" scientists, understand that racial differences are insignificant. There are often more genetic similarities among people of different races than those within the same racial group. Racism is the result of learned behaviour based on cultural and ideological prejudice rather than supposedly meaningful differences in human physiological characteristics.

For most of the 20th century and all the 21st, civilized societies have been trying to move away from the backwards-thinking of categorization by race. Martin Luther King Jr's dream that his "children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" is, for much of the western world, no longer just a hope but a reality. Those who categorize people primarily by race within our culture have been largely ostracized and ridiculed.

Racialists may differ in their ideas of "racial superiority", yet despite the overwhelming scientific and societal rejection of their theories, there are still bigots who view "race" as the defining human characteristic.

This sometimes manifests in ideas within "critical race theory" such as that of "privileged races" who bear a collective guilt for such "privilege."

This ideology dehumanizes people as being representatives of their racial group, and so insists on quotas, rather than treating each man and woman as an individual.

One might think that an ideology that that promotes the concept that how you look is more important than who you are would be dismissed and held in contempt at institutions of higher learning. That is not the case at U of T's OISE, which has an entire program devoted to that belief and awards post-graduate degrees in it.

The graduates of that and similar programs in Canadian universities go on to teach and influence generations of students. One recent example of the type of thinking advanced by OISE is a new thesis produced there, saying that the objection by western feminists to the forced clitorectomies of Kenyan women is motivated by racism and "the pleasure of whiteness."

OISE's programs accept regressive ideas which propose, on the altar of cultural relativism, that barbaric primitive practices have equal merit to those of the post-Enlightenment west. Simultaneously, they are attempting to affirm that the color of your skin defines who you are. They look at everything through the prism of race, and produce a distorted image, such as that which condemns the effort to prevent female genital mutilation as being racially impelled.

OISE promotes these ideas with the help of your tax dollars. Whether OISE's race theories help or harm society and  if they should be taught in Canadian universities are questions the public has a right to ask and maintains a strong interest in having answered.