Teacher Says That Making Kids Behave in Class is 'White Supremacy'

Source - A Virginia high school teacher is under fire for calling efforts to make kids behave in class “the definition of white supremacy.”

Josh Thompson, an English teacher at Blacksburg High School, posted a since-deleted TikTok video ...

The teacher called the techniques that help reduce disruptive student behavior “white supremacy with a hug.”

“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,” he said in the video. 

“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,” Thompson claimed.

“So if we’re positively enforcing these behaviors, we are by extension positively enforcing elements of white culture,” he claimed with a smug smile."

Well there ya go. Learn something new every day. There was a time when you might have thought that white supremacy was the ideas espoused by the National Socialist Party or the Ku Klux Klan or racist ideologies like that. But what do you know unless you're down there in the trenches every day like Josh Thompson. Seeing first hand the insidious and pervasive racist oppression inherent in asking children to behave in school. You live and learn.

But I can understand if the concept is a little confusing. Because we've always defined white supremacy - and hang on, because here is where it gets complicated - is the idea of thinking that whites are supreme. Better than everyone else. But Mr. Thompson is here to remind us all that ... what, exactly? That you can't ask non-whites to behave? Is that it? He's saying that he believes "sitting quietly," "following directions" and being "in your seat" is something you can't expect other ethnicities to pull off? Have I got that right? So it's his learned opinion that "just sitting quiet and being told stuff and taking things in in a passive stance" is too big an ask of anyone except for Whitey? 

That is quite a philosophy. Not that I agree with it. In fact, it's straight up deranged. But maybe if he'd care to elaborate instead of just deleting the video. For instance, what ethnic groups does he think exactly can't be expected to listen in school? Sri Lankans? South Koreans? People from Ivory Coast? Brazilians? Japanese? Cubans? Egyptians? First Nation people from Canada? South Africans? Mexicans? Aborigines from New Zealand? We really could use some specifics here because it seems like any time I'm watching a news segment or a documentary about any country other than the United States, the kids are dressed in school uniforms, happy, incredibly well-mannered and kicking the ever-living snot out of American schoolkids in every single subject. Including, by the way, English. And I've yet to see one where the teacher told the class, "I'd ask you to be quiet so you and everyone around you can learn. But since that sort of behavior is only for the Caucasians, you might as well have at it. Do your worst." 

But I guess I'm just letting my own bias show. As my father (typical white guy) used to say yell whenever one of us would get less than a perfect grade in conduct, "Even a MORON can sit there with his hands folded and his mouth shut and get an A in conduct!" Which is a line I repeated early and often when my own kids were getting detention, notes sent home, and the teacher conferences were punctuated with little euphemisms like "Well, he's got quite an audience in this class." If only I and my sons had teachers like Mr. Thompson, we'd have known how evil it was to ask kids to mind their manners and learn stuff. Now I know better.