Teacher Branded ‘Condescending’ For Claiming Making Kids Behave Is ‘White Supremacy’

A teacher has come under fire for posting a TikTok suggesting that making kids sit down in class enforces ‘white supremacy.’

An English teacher at Blacksburg High School in Virginia, apparently shared the now-deleted video criticising techniques used to reduce disruptive behaviours in school, arguing that controlling children’s behaviour was a part of ‘white culture’.

He said:

It’s things like making sure that you’re following directions, and making sure that you’re sitting quietly, and you are in your seat – and all these things that come from white culture.

The idea of just sitting quiet and being told stuff and taking things in in a passive stance, is not a thing that’s in many cultures. So if we’re positively enforcing these behaviors, we are by extension positively enforcing elements of white culture.

According to the teacher, techniques like those being introduced at schools serve to ‘keep whiteness at the center – which is the definition of white supremacy’.

As well as being condemned by conservative commentators as ‘insane’ and a ‘poster boy for woke’, some have argued that the teacher’s views serve to reinforce stereotypes of badly-behaved Black children, with one teacher writing, ‘Any notion that behaving and following directions are inherently white traits disgusts me. It highlights the bigotry of low expectations that permeates the Education system. Black and Brown students are capable and should not be held to separate standards.’

However, some have said that the teacher’s comments raised important questions about the behavioural system, with one person tweeting, ‘Bridging it with white supremacy is reaching, sure, but questioning its conformist bias and inherent faults is not.’

In a statement, Montgomery County School District said that the teacher was ‘entitled to their personal belief regarding any division program’, but added that ‘the statements made by this teacher do not reflect our… program or the behavioral expectations that we have of students in our schools’.