If ever there was a sorry tale for our times, it is the saga of Andrea Mairs

Jan 19, 2024 by Jill

by Nana Akua, Daily Mail:

You can’t win. The black teacher who ‘saw racism everywhere’ – even when her colleagues’ desperately tried to AVOID being labelled a racist – sums up the tangle we are in.

If ever there was a sorry tale for our times, it is the saga of Andrea Mairs.

For those unfamiliar with the story, Ms Mairs is a black teacher who has won a discrimination claim after losing her job.

Anyone reading that might assume that Ms Mairs had been victimised for the colour of her skin, and they would not be wrong: that indeed is what the tribunal panel to which Ms Mairs took a complaint against Manchester’s Kings Road Primary School ruled earlier this week.

Delve a little more deeply into this case, however, and it becomes altogether more complicated, exposing the febrile territory in which we now find ourselves when it comes to addressing the thorny issue of race.

For while teachers had indeed asked that Ms Mairs be removed from the school, it was only after a veritable slew of incidents in which she had continually complained of racism.

Library books had been removed and art displays taken down on the basis of Ms Mair’s strongly stated views, while her objection to a visiting magician referring to pupils as ‘little monkeys’ led to the word being banned – that’s right, banned – throughout the school.

So sensitive to perceived racial slurs was this otherwise dedicated and popular teacher that she had even told the school’s head that it was inappropriate for a black child to wear a sticky label with the word ‘blackcurrant’ on it.

Altogether, during her two decades at the school, Ms Mairs raised complaints about nine colleagues and also made allegations of several incidents she labelled ‘microaggressions’.

It was this that led fellow teachers to make an official statement of complaint against Ms Mairs, insisting they were afraid to use the world ‘black’ in her presence because of the risk of being labelled racist. In turn, Ms Mairs suggested their inability to do so was an example of ‘blackophobia’, illustrating their discomfort around a black colleague.

Does anything more perfectly show the terrible tangle into which we have descended? We’ve got the point where even a plain-speaking black woman like me hesitated at my keyboard before I described Ms Mairs as the black woman she is.

Yet we cannot be remotely surprised, given that we now inhabit a culture in which Critical Race Theory – a philosophy now underpinning teaching in many schools and disseminated via other public sector organisations – deems that racism is endemic and encourages everyone to view even the smallest interaction through the troublesome lens of race and white oppression.

This kind of thinking is widely embraced by organisations like the perennially woke BBC, which recently deemed a remark made by presenter Fiona Bruce on Question Time offensive enough to require the wholesale removal of the episode from its iPlayer service.

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