By Amber Crawford
A Florida middle school teacher has been placed on leave after a controversial TikTok video went viral of the white students in his classroom acting as servants to black students as part of their Black History Month activities.
Ethan Hooper, a 29-year-old sixth-grade teacher at Howard Middle School in Orlando, posted a disgusting TikTok showing white middle schoolers fanning and feeding their three black classmates, then bowing down to them.
In the TikTok, Hooper added the words “P.O.V. A Florida Classroom” and “Black History Month, the shortest month of the year.”
This was not the first inappropriate video posted by Hooper. An earlier video on the teacher’s TikTok showed Hooper and his students making fun of the ‘Stop WOKE Act’ that was passed in Florida in 2022.
This bill was meant to take ‘woke’ books and materials out of classrooms throughout the state, removing books that included pornography, CRT, and gender ideology.
In the video, Hooper goes through the classroom picking up books like ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘The Have U Give,’ joking that the books should be removed because they teach witchcraft and black history. He also pretended to take away all the dictionaries in his classroom and had his students recite “all books are banned.”
Not only was Hooper pushing his political and personal ideologies onto his students but he was using his students for his own personal gain on social media.
Families at the school complained about Hooper’s actions, saying that he used the 11 and 12-year-olds as “political props.”
“If one of the teachers was using my kid for political gain, that would upset me,” said CJ Johnson, a dad from Howard Middle School.
“What if I don’t believe in that, and, you know, that’s not what I’m teaching my kid,” Johnson added.
One of Hooper’s students, however, spoke out on his behalf, saying, “We all agreed to it. He [Hooper] didn’t really do anything wrong.”
After the videos gained online traction, Orange County Public Schools superintendent Maria Vazquez released a statement condemning the actions of the teacher and expressing her own outrage at the “inappropriate” videos.
History can be taught without demonstration. This teacher didn’t want to teach; he wanted to humiliate.
I hardly think MLK would ever approve of this sort of P.S. Liberal poppycock Will they still get a Pay Check? maybe they should deduct out 50%