The decolonize movement is in trouble, and not from outsiders. In a recent installment of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education’s (OISE) Indigenous Educational Research Centre speaker series, Dr. Andrew B. Campbell—known widely as Dr. ABC—delivered a talk titled “My Journey to Self-Decolonization in Emancipatory Pedagogy and Freedom Dreaming in Education.” Dr. ABC managed to do the impossible: he colonized the land acknowledgement.
The moment land acknowledgements became interchangeable with intersectional racial grievances is the moment that the ridiculousness of virtue politics was exposed.
A few minutes into the webinar, the talk spiraled into what could only be described as a masterclass in intellectual narcissism and racial essentialism. Dr. ABC claimed that if you're a person of color who feels comfortable in this system, you’re “not okay—you are colonized.” Those who don't share his worldview aren't just misguided; they’re enabling white supremacy. “If your Blackness makes white people comfortable, you need to check your Blackness,” he declared, dismissing Black scholars and educators who reject his radical doctrine. Whiteness, in his framing, is a haunting, often invisible force to be exorcised—and those who fail to perform the proper rituals are cast out.
At every turn, Dr. ABC centers himself: his struggle, his success, his politics. The more you listen, the more you realize his activism has nothing to do with uplifting others—it’s uniquely designed to obtain power. And in today’s education system, his kind of activism is the vanguard.
Dr. ABC is no fringe academic. He is highly regarded in his Assistant Professor position on the Master of Teaching Program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and directs the Centre for Black Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. His activist education style is widely sought after for professional development by Ontario educators, and his books and workshops shape teacher training across the province. In this talk, however, he lays bare a worldview that demands a political transformation of the entire educational system.
“If you feel free, if you feel that you are okay in this system,” Dr. ABC says early in the lecture, “you are not okay. You are colonized,” in a statement that insists on allegiance. According to Dr. ABC, emancipation requires hostility framed as joy. “Decolonizing the mind means rejecting comfort. Comfort is colonization. If you’re comfortable, you’ve made peace with the oppressor.” If you’re not with us, you’re against us, apparently.
The talk revolves around what Dr. ABC calls “freedom dreaming”—a phrase meant to evoke idealistic alternatives to the current system. “Freedom dreaming is about creating new systems. But if you’re still benefiting from whiteness, you’re not ready to dream,” he says.
Throughout the presentation, Dr. ABC launches into demands for racial purity. “I do not stand in solidarity with Black folk who perpetuate whiteness,” he declares. To be Black and not embrace his political vision is, by his reckoning, to be complicit in white supremacy. It’s a chilling standard—one that effectively disqualifies dissenters of color from legitimacy. “If your Blackness makes white people comfortable, you need to check your Blackness,” he insists.
The philosophical foundation of the talk rests on the claim that all social institutions are inherently colonial and racist. The educational system, rather than being a means of instruction, is cast as an oppressive mechanism that upholds a “White” standard. “High expectations,” Dr. ABC suggests, are themselves a colonial artifact. In traditional education, a high expectation might mean every child is encouraged to meet and exceed shared standards. But under the anti-racist lens of Culturally Relevant and Responsive Pedagogy (CRRP), “high expectations” mean something else entirely. The standard itself is the enemy. Expectations for each child must be recalibrated according to their identity—race, sexuality, gender, class—so that no external colonial (he means “White”) metric of success can be imposed. This hyper fixation on skin colour—called race consciousness— is distracts from the very purpose of education—teaching kids to read, write, and do math! According to the Ontario Human Rights Commissions 2022 Right to Read report, CRRP is the main cause of declining reading achievement in Canada and negatively impacts the most marginalized children the most. In essence, activist teachers are hurting the very children they’re claiming to be helping.
Rejecting shared standards extends to teaching practices as well. Dr. ABC speaks often of “Black pedagogy” and “Black ways of knowing,” asserting that Black students must be taught differently because of their cultural identity. The implication is that classrooms must become sites of racialized instruction, where each child’s racial identity dictates not just content but method. “There are doctors out there who are practicing culturally relevant and responsive medicine,” he notes approvingly. The idea that even healthcare might be stratified by race is floated as a triumph of anti-racist ideology.
Education is merely one front in a broader revolutionary project. “You could replace education for any other industry,” he says. “Nursing, medicine, law… Doesn’t matter.” The goal is what Marxist scholar Paulo Freire calls the perpetual revolution.
The cumulative effect of Dr. ABC’s rhetoric is a pedagogy that sells his brand of personal identity grievances as collective liberation, ideological purity as professional requirement, and far-left revolutionary politics as academic excellence. His charisma is undeniable—preacher-like in delivery, assured in tone. But the message is divisive: a call for educators to abandon neutrality, to replace instruction with activism, and to judge their success not by what students learn, but by how effectively they “disrupt and dismantle” the system.
Dr. ABC’s is training the next generation of teachers, shaping equity ideology, and redefining the very purpose of education. But his vision of inclusion is a red herring, more akin to an ideological purification test cloaked in the language of virtue. In a society grappling with polarization, the rise of such figures should prompt serious reflection: not because we fear open discourse, but because we should be deeply concerned when dissent itself is framed as complicity—and when education becomes the battleground not for knowledge, but for control.
“(A) pedagogy that sells his brand of personal identity grievances as collective liberation, ideological purity as professional requirement, and far-left revolutionary politics as academic excellence.”
Nailed it.
Look - I mean really LOOK - at the scope of institutional capture in Canada’s public education (OISE in this case, which heavily influences ‘best practices’ in the teaching profession across the country and even beyond) and grasp just how racist and divisive this ideology is when implemented. And yet we Canadians expect those indoctrinated by it to now rally support and ‘defend’ the national flag and what it represents! You cannot have it both ways!
This post is what critical thinking and legitimate criticism looks like in action. This is what a real education should produce: how to think well.
OISE once again demonstrates the fraudulence of every academic program with the word “studies” in its name.