TORONTO

A medical textbook that calls black people's hair thick and kinky and Asian hair smooth and silky exemplifies Eurocentric teaching materials at Ontario's colleges and universities, a forum exploring campus racism heard yesterday.

Such textbooks are woefully inadequate when it comes to teaching how to care for visible minority patients, nursing student Liana Salvador, 24, told the panel as it launched provincewide hearings.

"They use white as the reference point and everyone else is pigeonholed or extra,'' said Salvador, a student at Ryerson University, who cited an example from one textbook that discusses hair type.

"Just the way that it's written and the language that it's written in often can encourage stereotyping.''

Committees need to be struck that have broad representation, including students, when it comes to the selection of teaching materials for post-secondary programs, she told the panel.

The forum at George Brown College was the first of several the Ontario chapter of The Canadian Federation of Students will be holding across the province before the end of April.

The concept was born from another task force that, two years ago, examined the needs of Muslim students. Federation representative Hildah Otieno said incidents of Islamophobia were identified at campuses across the province, but so too were incidents of racism and discrimination involving other religions and ethnicities.

"We're trying to look at individual acts of racism, discrimination and hate, and see how that impacts those racialized students, faculty and staff on campus,'' Otieno said.

"But we're also going to try and look at the systemic way in which institutional structures may be affecting the same people.''

Although the focus of the panel's work is racism, Canadian Arab Federation president Khaled Mouammar -- who was invited to speak at the news conference -- instead focused his comments on what he called the problem of private funding to universities.

Institutions are "susceptible to blackmail'' because private donors put pressure on them to "curtail and muzzle freedom of expression and freedom of speech,'' he said.

Mouammar, did not offer any concrete examples when asked.

He made headlines earlier this week after Immigration Minister Jason Kenney threatened to slash the Arab federation's funding, a move that came after Mouammar called Kenney a "professional whore'' for criticizing the presence of Hamas and Hezbollah flags at anti-Israel rallies in Toronto.

Later, the panel heard that the name-calling and graffiti that often go hand-in-hand with racism are still alive and well on campus.

Last year, the Black Student's Alliance at York University had n- - - - - and "go back to Africa'' written on its office door on Martin Luther King Day. At Ryerson, the bulletin board belonging to the East African Students of Toronto was set on fire.

"I find it really upsetting and pointless, and I think people that write that stuff down don't realize the impact,'' said Mike Auksi, a 27-year-old Ojibway from Lac Seul First Nation.

The Ryerson social work student told the panel about hateful epithets he's seen scrawled on bathroom walls.

"It impacts me even if it isn't myself that's being targeted.''

The hearing appears next at the University of Toronto, and has other stops scheduled in Kingston, Ottawa, and Sudbury. A meeting will take place at the University of Guelph on March 12. The federation hopes to have a report completed in the fall.