Uncanceling the Canceled

Educator Ed Roos, a casualty of DEI ideology

UNCANCELING THE CANCELED

Educator Ed Roos, a casualty of DEI ideology

Erec Smith

Even if DEI is dead (and that is a very big “if”), the suffering it has caused lives on. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, the kind that has been hijacked by Critical Social Justice (i.e., wokeness) have wreaked havoc in primary, secondary, and higher education. Though the current presidential administration has dealt it a heavy blow over the past year, it is not exactly time to breathe a sigh of relief. Like any war, even the winners must deal with the messy aftermath. DEI has done irreparable damage to many, especially educators who did not toe the illiberal line laid down by DEI faculty and administrators. We who wish to uncancel cannot forget about these educators, especially the exceptional ones. For many educators, the effects of DEI are still keenly felt. They haunt them profoundly.

Ed Roos

Ed Roos is one of those educators. As a teacher and administrator in Seattle, Roos was exceptional. He loved his profession and the students he taught. He started out in a predominately black school and immersed himself in the surrounding black community, where he created a men’s group. “I wanted to show them a better way out” he told me in an interview. “So, I brought in some men who were successful, had grown up in that neighborhood, and they came in and talked to the kids about a better path.” Roos was more than just a teacher; he was a community activist helping a community often suspicious of white men. But let’s not forget the success he had in his day job; after his arrival, his student’s test scores went up 30% in just a year. “We were always about empowering,” he said, “celebrating our differences and doing anything we could for the students.” The motto was, “Excellence Without Excuses.”

Roos was all about fostering inclusive and welcoming environments from his students. When he became a principal in a middle-class school in the same district, he made sure that multicultural education was a serious thing. “I told them I want it be public and visible,” he said. “So, we started to put up posters of African-American historians and inventors throughout time. We had Native-American art posted throughout our building. We were doing field trips to the Wing Luke Museum (Asian art and history museum) for the Asian community.” Roos did his best to make sure everyone felt included. “But at the same time,” he told me, “the district started to kind of go off the rails with DEI.”

I will not tell the whole story here. Roos has done that quite well on his own. But I will say that a black female teacher falsely accused Roos of punishing a young student by putting him in a cage. She did this as an act of revenge against Roos because she was reported to human resources for being egregiously late so often that Roos had to teach her classes for her. In reality, the “punishment” was Roos playing basketball with a student who needed to blow off steam, and the “cage” was the basketball court on which they played. However, the truth did not seem to matter. This false accusation became national news. NPR, The Washington Post, and The New York Post published stories about the bogus incident. Though Roos was eventually exonerated, the damage was done. The stigma of the accusation would not and has not subsided. Even his neighbors mistreated him and spread the lie. Years after losing the career he loved, Roos won a city dispute over a neighbor’s fence. Afterwards, a flyer that included his photo, address, and links to the false news stories was mailed to neighbors “warning” residents about him, and weaponizing the discredited news stories.

This sad story is made sadder by the fact that many have suffered similar fates from false or trumped-up allegations of oppressive discrimination. In an interview he gave me, Roos told of some others. I believe his words are worth quoting at length.

There’ve been other principals who have similar stories. One person was the 2014 Washington State Principal of the Year. He too was forced out of a position that he loved, a school that he had gone to as a kid, a community that loved him. It was just a pretty benign situation, but he gets forced out.

There’s another principal who I love to death. She was my principal at one time. She’s black also. She just went through a similar controversy, was accused of being discriminatory, but—and she is the best educator, by far, that I’ve ever met in my life. A mentor for me, a principal that coached me and held my hand when I needed it and pushed me when I needed it….it just doesn’t seem to matter—your race. I think what really matters is [that] you better go along with the narrative, or they’re coming after you.

I write this article for two reasons: to spread the word about Roos’ suffering and to implore us all to make sure this kind of thing cannot happen again.

One could say the tenet of “innocent until proven guilty” devolved under DEI into “guilty until proven innocent,” but this is worse than that. It is “guilty until proven guilty.” This is a side effect of a narrative that whiteness is inherently racist (a message Roos received frequently) and the concept of positionality: no white person can truly understand a black person, so anything he does is either dismissed or treated with suspicion. We cannot allow such blatant illiberalism to prevail. When one person’s uncorroborated word is all it takes to ruin a man, we are not staying true to the principle of fairness this country is supposed to uphold. I think Roos’ tragedy was not sparked merely by one person’s desire for revenge, but by an aggrieved subset’s desire for revenge, i.e., payback for years of true oppression in the form of slavery and Jim Crow laws.

The sad truth is that ruining the life of a white person who was doing excellent things for black students and non-students alike is not going to erase the evil things in America’s past. It will, however, taint our present and endanger our future as a nation. The shameless lie that derailed Roos’s commendable career punishes both Roos and the students he was helping. I’m willing to bet that his accusers’ lives have not improved as a result of this. There are no wins in this story, just varying degrees of loss.

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Erec Smith, previously Associate Professor of Rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania, is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and a co-founder of Free Black Thought. He has been a Writing Fellow for Heterodox Academy and a Senior Fellow for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. His scholarly and extra-scholarly research focuses on the rhetorics of anti-racist activism, theory, and pedagogy. His third book, A Critique of Anti-racism in Rhetoric and Composition: The Semblance of Empowerment, appeared in 2019, and his fourth book, The Lure of Disempowerment: Reclaiming Agency in the Age of CRT, appeared in 2022. He recently made his second appearance on the FBT Podcast here. Follow him and Free Black Thought on Twitter/X.