Self-Described Racist Loses Pflugerville Teaching Job After Video Goes Viral

A teacher in one of the most racially diverse school districts in Central Texas lost his job this week after a viral video on Instagram showed him telling students, "Deep down in my heart, I am ethnocentric, which means I think my race is the superior one. ... I think everybody thinks that, they're just not honest about it."

Officials at Pflugerville ISD – with a student population that's about 16% Black, 48% Latino, 9% Asian, and 23% white – learned on Friday, Nov. 11, about what PfISD Superin­tendent Douglas Killian called an "inappropriate conversation" during an advisory class. By Monday, Killian said in a statement that the teacher was "no longer employed by Pfluger­ville ISD and we are actively looking for a replacement." National outlets including NBC, the New York Post, and others jumped on the story Monday.

The full context of the conversation is hard to hear as concerned students try to question the teacher throughout the clip, but if the Bohls Middle School teacher was trying to discuss implicit bias, that's not the message he got across. In the video, one student says, "I actually respected you for a while, but now I don't got no more respect for you."

The so-far unnamed teacher responds, "You know, you should have more respect because I'm honest."

Rhema Benjamin, an eighth-grader in the class, told KXAN that the conversation began when he walked in wearing a BLM sticker on his shirt and the teacher told him he couldn't come into his class wearing it, and then a student threw a pencil across the room. Rhema and a friend told the teacher they would have been in trouble for the same behavior, and then asked if the teacher was racist.

Killian's statement assured parents that the teacher's viewpoints do not "align with our core beliefs," apologizing on behalf of the district to parents whose students ended up in the viral video and to students and families for the "undue stress or concern" it caused. "We always do our best to ensure the safety of all students; we encourage them to be self-advocates and let an adult know when something is wrong, as they did in this situation. If you see something, say something."