White Terror: New lunacy from the race-baiting fanatics at OISE

Over at the blog Blazing Cat Fur, a fine job has been done keeping us informed of the self-serving, hypocritical idiocy coming from our future generation of would-be educators. A current example comes from a Shaista Patel, who defines herself as a Muslim feminist. Evidently being a Muslim feminist doesn't mean criticizing Islamic misogyny, forced marriages, gender apartheid, or honor killings in Muslim cultures. It means being a Muslim who criticizes genuine Muslim feminists like Irshad Manji while telling white Canadians that they are evil oppressors and occupiers of Native land. 

So it only seemed fitting to take a look at what's going on at Ms. Patel's home at that toxic pedagogical wasteland of Marxist proselytizing, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).  

OISE - occupying and colonizing Native land since 1973

The Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (SESE), a notoriously academically inept program at OISE, produced two anti-Semitic theses in 2010.  One of which was condemned by Ontario's Minister of Citizenship and was roundly mocked as thoroughly incompetent as to suggest, as the National Post's Jonathan Kay ironically put it, that OISE is the type of place where you could get a "course credit for setting up an anti-Israel facebook page."  That same program then produced a thesis declaring that western feminists opposed to female genital mutilation are lascivious racists motivated by an obsession with genitalia and "the pleasure of whiteness."  

Sociology and Equity Studies became such a humiliation that OISE recently changed the department's name this year to "Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice Education." The name suggests the same insidious indoctrination is happening in the new department, but with the hope that subsequent alumni are alleviated of some of the stigma attached to its predecessor. 

However, we still can get perverse entertainment from SESE, which has a few academic dregs in the form of theses leftover from the old auspices. One of which is a remarkable representation of the deplorable race-baiting identity politics that pervades the thinking at OISE.  

It is a doctoral thesis called White Terror, Canada's Indian Residential Schools, and the Colonial Present: from Law Towards a Pedagogy of Recognition. In the name of so-called anti-racism, it perpetuates the despicable idea that people are merely constructs of their skin color with a collective identity and responsibility, rather than distinct individuals. In fact, its author, Leslie Thielen-Wilson, actually states that, "the European ideology of possessive individualism.., and the ontological force of property.. to which it gives rise, is one important element to this racial power network and its productive force. "    

The thesis is a reflection of the fatuous, simplistic, and effectively racist doctrines spouted by its thesis adviser, Sherene Razick. Pronouncing from her comfortable perch at OISE, the grounds of which occupy an acre of once-First Nations land which is now some of the most valuable real estate in Canada, Razack pompously teaches that Canada "is a white settler society and that we live in an ongoing colonial project."  

That type of stereotyping, which sits like a grotesque Rumpelstiltskin of thought in the mental crevices of critical race theorists, presumes that every white person is a privileged racist as an inevitable consequence of their skin color. It says that a poor worker who immigrated from Poland or the Ukraine, which had no part in the English and French colonization of Canada, is a privileged oppressor and colonizer. Whereas a tenured University of Toronto professor who is an immigrant from Iran or Pakistan, makes over a hundred thousand dollars a year, gets one of every seven years off for paid sabbatical and a lucrative pension among other privileges, is an oppressed victim and does not share in the collective white guilt of colonization. 

Smugly thinking they are cloaked in the inviolability of their self-proclaimed victimhood, OISE's poobahs exhale malefic manifestos from their mushroom thrones. Their clouded ideology encourages more and more immigration from third world countries, many of which have inherently racist, violent cultures. If immigrants have white skin and are from Europe, they add to the `crime` of  "occupation" and "colonization" of Canada, but at the University of Toronto's crown jewel of education studies, developing world immigrants they inanely refer to as "racialized" get colonizer exemption status. Because quite a few OISE professors teach that race is the primary determining factor of a collective guilt and accountability, which places them in  philosophical agreement with Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.  

In her thesis,  Ms Thielen-Wilson writes with palpable self-abasement, " I am a Canadian of European descent, a Euro-Canadian, a white settler, white.  I agree with Alfred that settlers must be forced into a reckoning of who (and perhaps what) we are before we can be held accountable for colonial violence (past and present) and before we can attempt to embark upon anti- or  non-colonial relationships with Indigenous peoples in the present." 

One could mix a justifiable dread of how Thielen-Wilson might intend to force such a "reckoning" upon Euro-Canadians (a terrifying image is conjured of Mao or Pol Pot's forced reckoning of their less enlightened subjects) with the comfort that, with the exception of her Women's Studies students at Western University,  she is unlikely to ever be in a position to force anyone to do anything. But when she writes, "I suggest that this reckoning...requires that Euro-Canadians understand that we are part of a white collective body...and that this collective body continues to engage in practices (often violent, always vile).." it is a frightening reminder of the shameful racism and denial of individuality with which OISE conditions its students. More frightening is that its graduates go on to teaching positions in schools and universities and form school board curricula.  

If you think this critique of OISE as racist is rhetorical hyperbole, then consider for a moment what the reaction would be if Ms Thielen-Wilson had substituted another skin color for 'white' in her statements. If she had written that Indo-Canadians or Native Canadians were part of a brown or red collective body that engages in practices, often violent, always vile, she would likely be charged with a Hate Crime.

Perhaps someday OISE's teachers will recognize that regardless of our skin color; red, black, yellow, brown, white, whatever, we are are individual human beings responsible for our own actions, neither culpable for nor ennobled by the acts of others with whom we have little in common other than pigmentation. Regrettably, that day seems far off at OISE's radical departments, be they old or in the new guise of Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice Education. For now, that institute remains a disgrace and embarrassment to the field of education. 

UPDATE:
Discussing this post with Brian Lilley on Byline on Sun News Network:





For more, see Brian's post at Lilley's Pad