An Oklahoma teacher was caught on tape saying the words, “to be white is to be racist, period,” in a lecture on “how to heal the racial divide.”
A student in his class at Norman North High School recorded his lecture after she was offended by what he had said, saying that the point of his lecture was that all white people are racist, KFOR reported.
“Half of my family is Hispanic so I just felt like, you know, him calling me racist just because I’m white… I mean, where’s your proof in that,” she said.
The lecture started with a video on the “Mistreatment of Native Americans” before the teacher goes on to say, “Am I racist? And I say yea. I don’t want to be. It’s not like I choose to be racist, but do I do things because of the way I was raised?”
“I felt like he was encouraging people to kind of pick on people for being white,” the student said.
Dr. Joe Siano, the superintendent of Norman Public Schools, released a statement in response to the issue:
Racism is an important topic that we discuss in our schools. While discussing a variety of philosophical perspectives on culture, race and ethics, a teacher was attempting to convey to students in an elective philosophy course a perspective that had been shared at a university lecture he had attended. We regret that the discussion was poorly handled. When the district was notified of this concern it was immediately addressed. We are committed to ensuring inclusiveness in our schools.
“You start telling someone something over and over again that’s an opinion and they start taking it as fact,” the student said. “So I wanted him to apologize and make it obvious and apparent to everyone that was his opinion.”
The teacher has not responded to KFOR’s requests for comment and has not released a public statement on the matter. There is no word on whether the teacher has been disciplined.
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