NANA AKUA: Teacher’s ‘blackophobia’ declare exhibits the tangle we’re in

If ever there was a sorry story for our occasions, it’s the saga of Andrea Mairs.

For these unfamiliar with the story, Ms Mairs is a black trainer who has received a discrimination declare after shedding her job.

Anyone studying that may assume that Ms Mairs had been victimised for the color of her pores and skin, and they’d not be incorrect: that certainly is what the tribunal panel to which Ms Mairs took a criticism in opposition to Manchester’s Kings Road Primary School dominated earlier this week.

Delve a bit extra deeply into this case, nonetheless, and it turns into altogether extra sophisticated, exposing the febrile territory through which we now discover ourselves in terms of addressing the thorny situation of race.

For whereas academics had certainly requested that Ms Mairs be faraway from the varsity, it was solely after a veritable slew of incidents through which she had frequently complained of racism.

Andrea Mairs (pictured) was let go from her job of 20 years in 2022 after six of her fellow employees claimed her ‘relentless complaining’ about racial points within the classroom left them feeling ‘intimidated’, an employment tribunal heard

Library books had been eliminated and artwork shows taken down on the premise of Ms Mair’s strongly said views, whereas her objection to a visiting magician referring to pupils as ‘little monkeys’ led to the phrase being banned – that’s proper, banned – all through the varsity.

So delicate to perceived racial slurs was this in any other case devoted and common trainer that she had even informed the varsity’s head that it was inappropriate for a black little one to put on a sticker with the phrase ‘blackcurrant’ on it.

Altogether, throughout her twenty years on the college, Ms Mairs raised complaints about 9 colleagues and likewise made allegations of a number of incidents she labelled ‘microaggressions’.

It was this that led fellow academics to make an official assertion of criticism in opposition to Ms Mairs, insisting they had been afraid to make use of the world ‘black’ in her presence due to the chance of being labelled racist. In flip, Ms Mairs instructed their incapacity to take action was an instance of ‘blackophobia’, illustrating their discomfort round a black colleague.

Does something extra completely present the horrible tangle into which we now have descended? We’ve received the purpose the place even a plain-speaking black girl like me hesitated at my keyboard earlier than I described Ms Mairs because the black girl she is.

Yet we can’t be remotely shocked, on condition that we now inhabit a tradition through which Critical Race Theory – a philosophy now underpinning educating in many faculties and disseminated by way of different public sector organisations – deems that racism is endemic and encourages everybody to view even the smallest interplay by means of the troublesome lens of race and white oppression.

This form of considering is broadly embraced by organisations just like the perennially woke BBC, which just lately deemed a comment made by presenter Fiona Bruce on Question Time offensive sufficient to require the wholesale elimination of the episode from its iPlayer service.

Andrea Mairs was employed as a trainer at Kings Road Primary School in Stretford, Manchester in September 2001

Bruce had referred to a member of the viewers as ‘the black guy in the middle’, main Left-wing ideologues to accuse her of deploying a horrendous racial slur, since she often identifies white members of the viewers by what they’re carrying.

Nana Akua argues that the refusal of Ms Mairs’ colleagues to make use of the time period has been weaponised in opposition to them

For this apparently horrible infraction Bruce needed to supply a honest apology.

I wrote on the time about how this demonstrated the best way a easy descriptive adjective – solely offensive if used alongside a hateful noun – had been demonised. I identified that the BBC’s resolution implied that the phrase ‘black’ was in some way at all times pejorative when deployed by a white particular person.

Now I discover myself shocked to seek out that the refusal of Ms Mairs’ colleagues to make use of the time period has been weaponised in opposition to them. You can’t win.

This state of affairs can be laughable, had been it not for the truth that occasions at Kings Road Primary have clearly induced widespread misery, each for Ms Mairs and her fellow academics. More essentially nonetheless, this sort of fuss does nothing to result in significant change.

I’ve little question Ms Mairs’ intentions are noble. But her job as a trainer is to coach, to not agitate.

I hope that she will put her victimhood apart and grasp the truth that to most of us – apart from these real racists who, sadly, nonetheless exist – black is nothing greater than a color.