An American professor and race-based activist was hired to deliver her schtick on the “Archaeology of Self” to interested Toronto District School Board (TDSB) elementary and high school students, parents and staff Tuesday.
The talk by Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz – a professor at Columbia University Teachers College and poet – was coordinated by the board’s Centre of Excellence for Black Student Achievement and TDSB’s equity department to mark International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
The Centre – one of the main ways the board segregates black students for specialized treatment – was established in June of 2021 just around the time Colleen Russell Rawlins was appointed as the board’s education director.
Sealey-Ruiz describes her expertise as that in the areas of radical literacy development, culturally responsive education, black girl literacies and black and Latinx Males.
She was booked to give three webinars at a cost of $7,500 CDN. Each webinar was an hour only.
She also makes it quite clear that she has just commenced “The Year of Yolie” – her sabbatical – which will no doubt provide more time for race grifting.
TDSB spokesperson Ryan Bird called her a “leading voice in racial literacy.”
According to her website her Arch(aelogy) of Self ™ is an “action-oriented process requiring love, humility, reflection, an understanding of history and a commitment to working against racial injustice.”
She claims that to sustain racial literacy one should ascribe to a model that includes the Arch of Self along with critical reflection, critical humility and critical love, among other things.
Her website includes promotion of her poetry book, “Love from the Vortex” which Sealey-Ruiz describes as an “archeological exploration on love and intimacy… her journey of finding and losing love over the span of three decades with six different men who came into her life at various times.”
(The paperbook cost is $14.99).
She is in fact a full-service race hustler who also sells “official Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz Love and Peace merchandise” on her website – ranging from t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, bags, fridge magnets, notebooks and buttons.
I’m not sure who is running the TDSB circus considering the ongoing revelations about the horrific violence in the board’s schools and the cries for help by a host of principals unable to contain it.
Three months ago, the violence came to ahead amid promises by Russell-Rawlins and her right -hand executive superintendent Jim Spyropoulos that safety was an issue of “great importance” and that their new plan – A Collaborative Approach to School and Community Safety — would add social workers and hall monitors to violent schools.
The two are the best definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Hugging thugs who disrupt schools and classrooms with no consequences for bad behaviour will accomplish nothing.
Meanwhile, the resource-strapped board sees no problem with hiring a U.S. race grifter to deliver mumbo jumbo – a race grifter, it seems, that has turned her messaging into an online store.
What possible use or help could such a speaker be to calm what has become an incendiary situation at the TDSB – most of it created by the bureaucrats and woke trustees themselves.
Yet our Premier Doug Ford and his weak education minister Stephen Lecce do nothing to put an end to this out-of-control nonsense.
Once again an Ontario school board is making a mockery of education while our politicians stand by and idly watch.
