Talk about honest to God racism!

In the name of "cultural competence" which (supposedly) will enable white middle-class teachers (nearly all of whom know who their fathers are) to be able to reach non-white inner-city students (most of whom won't know even what color their fathers are), teacher ed students in Minnesota are being required to repudiate the idea that anyone can get ahead on hard work, regardless of color, nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.

I don't even know where to start on this one. I'd say I thought it was hard to believe, but it simply is another example of the anti-American biases so endemic on college and university campuses today.

About six years ago, I had a student from an inner city in the Midwest. She was, of course, of the skin tone you'd expect. I never heard her mention a father. She had no clue that there was such a concept as a complete sentence, much less how to write one. She signed up for tutoring, and (on my recommendation) worked incredibly hard, bringing a 59.5% up to an 85%. I couldn't have been prouder, and I told her so.

A year later, she showed up in my cubicle, asking for help with a colleague's freshman comp II course. She was terribly frustrated, all the way to tears, because she thought she'd learned what she needed to know to make better than a D.

Turns out that, because she was a young (model-gorgeous) black woman from the inner city, her (leftist, liberal, feminist, white, gay, upper-class, guilt-ridden male) tutor had done most of her work for her, without her realizing that he wasn't really teaching her.

He didn't believe that she could work hard enough to get ahead on her own merits. Because she was from an inner city and black, she was doomed to fail without intervention.

(On a different, but related instance, her twin sister was hired on at a clothing store at a mall--just long enough to fulfill affirmative action minority quotas. Then she was fired.)

Two years later, I had another student, at a different school, also a black student from the inner city, accuse me of racism. He thought I was grading him harder on his papers because he was black. I asked him whether it was more racist to hold him to the same standards as his classmates, or to grade him easier, because where he was from and his skin color doomed him to failure. (His reaction was to announce, in shocked horror, that all of his high school teachers had been racist, and so was affirmative action.)

Two years after that, I had another black student (not one of mine, just one I was tutoring for the football program) call me racist for not appreciating one of my former students (who happened to be white) being insulted. I replied that it was far more racist to inject race into a conversation where it had no bearing, and that I didn't give a rat's ass whether my students were white or minority, but that I would defend them from bullying.

I'm honestly glad to be teaching online. I'm not racist. I don't give a damn what color anyone's skin is. All I care about is the effort they put forth in my class, their attitude, and their character.

After all, I'm not too many steps above white trash. And some of my family actively is white trash. I have no room to talk.