Once again, the anti-"hate" people are incredibly hateful. From 2024:
When Anti-Racism Training Becomes ‘Vexatious’ Abuse
"Richard Bilkszto (1963–2023) grew up in southwestern Ontario, the son of Polish-Canadian fruit farmers. His first job was in real estate. And he might have continued down that professional path had his best friend’s father not convinced him to try his hand at teaching, having (correctly) predicted that Bilkszto would be a natural fit in the classroom.
After
attending teachers’ college in upstate New York, Bilkszto eventually
found his way back to Canada. For the last three decades of his career,
the soft-spoken educator worked for the Toronto District School Board
(TDSB), at first as a classroom instructor, and then as a vice-principal
and principal.
Bilkszto’s professional philosophy was shaped by an early stint at an inner-city school in Buffalo, NY. There, he observed how a skilled and attentive educator could positively transform the lives of underprivileged children. Unfortunately, he also witnessed examples—including some in Canada, later in his career—that showed how racism and other forms of prejudice could alienate a troubled child from schooling altogether...
As
a gay man who’d come of age when homophobia was still common, Bilkszto
had a finely tuned antenna for bigotry. And he began gravitating toward
liberal causes early in life. Before moving to Toronto in the 1990s,
Bilkszto served as a riding-association president for the youth wing of
Canada’s left-leaning Liberal Party, and attended several of its
national conventions. Bilkszto was proud of his country, in large part
because he believed its political culture was tolerant and enlightened.
Ironically,
it was this appreciation of Canada’s progressive nature that caused him
to be smeared as a bigot during the last chapter of his career—a trauma
that haunted him until his death.
As widely reported
in mid-2023, two years after the fact, Bilkszto had been humiliated in
front of dozens of his fellow TDSB administrators during a pair of
online professional-development training sessions. These seminars,
conducted in late April and early May 2021, were led by Kike
Ojo-Thompson, a self-described “equity thought leader [who] is renowned for her work and expertise as an anti-racism and anti-Black racism educator.”
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training had been proving quite lucrative for Ojo-Thompson. TDSB documents indicate that she was paid $81,000 for this round of seminars alone. Her work with the TDSB and the nearby Peel District School Board (PDSB) earned her more than $300,000
during the pandemic—largely, it seems, in return for presenting
variations on the same four-part presentation series that Bilkszto
attended three years ago. And these were but two of the many Ontario
school boards that contracted with Ojo-Thompson’s self-operated company,
the KOJO Institute.
In an academic thesis published
in 1999, Ojo-Thompson described herself as the daughter of a
Trinidadian-born mother well-steeped in her country’s traditional
Caribbean culture; and of a Nigerian-born father passionately committed
to anti-racism, a cause that Ojo-Thompson herself eagerly took up while
still in high school...
While Ojo-Thompson once worked
briefly as a teacher for the PDSB, whose territory covers exurban
municipalities west of Toronto, most of her career has been connected in
some way with what would now be called DEI. From 2006 to 2014, she
worked for Peel Children’s Aid in a position described as “Senior
Manager, Diversity & Anti-Oppression.” Following that, she was
employed by the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies, with a
focus on promoting the equitable treatment of black families.
In her DEI consulting work, Ojo-Thompson came to exhibit an unusually aggressive rhetorical style, peppered with sweeping indictments
of Canada as a virulently racist society that’s urgently in need of
“disruption.” Her theories concerning education—and society more
generally—seem rooted in the psychological constructs she described in
her 1999 thesis, which cast traditional black societies as kind and
welcoming, in contrast to western societies such as Canada, which she
views as being contaminated by unrelenting racial hatred, due to a
malignant (though ill-defined) quality that Ojo-Thompson identifies as
“whiteness.”
And yet Bilkszto, while indeed white, hardly seems to have been a natural foil for Ojo-Thompson.
By
2021, he’d retired from his TDSB role as a full-time school principal,
but continued to fill in at schools that had temporary job vacancies...
But
Bilkszto’s attitude changed when he heard Ojo-Thompson repeatedly
describe Canada as a bastion of “white supremacy”—a description at odds
with his own experience and observations. When she launched into further
claims that Canada’s culture of white supremacism was even more
poisonous than that of the United States, he felt compelled to speak up
during the Q&A that followed the instructor’s prepared remarks.
In
his brief comments, Bilkszto referred to Canada’s thicker social safety
net, its more generous funding of public schools, as well as the
impressions that he’d gained while working with at-risk children on both
sides of the border. “We’re a far more just society,” he concluded.
It
was a point that most Canadians, and possibly even Americans, would
regard as not only uncontroversial but obvious. Yet, as the subsequently
released recording
of the session indicates, Ojo-Thompson seemed infuriated by Bilkszto’s
critique, and accused him of being motivated, at least indirectly, by
white supremacist bigotry.
Subsequent
events would show that this wasn’t an isolated outburst from
Ojo-Thompson. During another 2021 training session, this one taking place in the Ontario city of Sarnia, Ojo-Thompson angrily cut short her training contract
with the municipality after several trainees had—much like
Bilkszto—taken issue with her description of Canadian society. In both
cases, Ojo-Thompson seems to have interpreted disagreement as a racist
attack directed personally at her.
“What
I’m finding interesting is that, in the middle of this COVID disaster,
where the inequities in this ‘fair’ and ‘equal’ healthcare system have
been properly shown to all of us, you and your whiteness think that you
can tell me what’s really going on with black people,” she told
Bilkszto. “Like, is that what you’re doing? ’Cause I think that’s what
you’re doing. But I’m not sure, so I’m going to leave you space to tell
me what you’re doing right now.”
None
of the other TDSB administrators participating in the Zoom call came to
Bilkszto’s defence. The only intervenor was another KOJO facilitator,
self-described “decolonization, anti-racism and equity professional” Andrew Snowball, who began piling on against Bilkszto.
“I
hate to disagree with you [Bilkszto] in this forum, but it’s just not
relevant, what you are bringing up. Unfortunately, the experiences of
Indigenous, black, and racialised students in the TDSB in probably
whatever school you lead are just not good enough. And that’s just the
reality. So, I think if you want to be an apologist for the US or
Canada, this is really not the forum for that.”
Before
wrapping up the session, Ojo-Thompson mockingly compared Bilkszto to a
“weed,” and joked about how she needed to get the “weed whacker out.”
The
most charitable interpretation of Ojo-Thompson’s attack on Bilkszto is
that she acted impulsively, or had perhaps temporarily misunderstood the
tenor of his remarks. But it’s difficult to reconcile that theory with
her behaviour during the seminar that followed, a week later. In that
session, Ojo-Thompson doubled down on her shaming of Bilkszto (albeit
without naming him in this instance). She boasted that her smackdown had
modelled the manner by which everyone should act when similarly
“accosted by white supremacy.”
In
addition to being identified as an agent of white supremacy, Bilkszto
was described as a source of “resistance,” who stood in the way of
social progress due to his “whiteness.”
As
during the previous session, none of Bilkszto’s colleagues spoke up in
his defence. In fact, one participant, Sheryl Robinson Petrazzini, then
the TDSB’s Executive Superintendent, publicly praised Ojo-Thompson for
“modelling the discomfort” that a TDSB administrator—by which she meant
Bilkszto—“may need to experience in order to disrupt ABR [anti-black
racism].”
For good measure, Robinson Petrazzini, who was subsequently named Director of Education for the nearby Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB), then went on social media to announce
that Bilkszto (whom she did not name, but whose identity would have
been obvious to anyone familiar with the underlying events) had abetted
“harm to Black students and families.”...
Thanks
to Ojo-Thomspon, Snowball, and Robinson Petrazzini, the word now spread
throughout the TDSB rumour mill: The school board had a full-on racist
principal on its hands, and his name was Richard Bilkszto.
Bilkszto went on sick leave, understandably consumed by anxiety and shame. The TDSB failed
to renew his contract, and Bilkszto never returned to work. Instead, he
would spend the last two years of his life trying to clear his name.
In
this respect, Bilkszto was successful, as a Google search of his name
will indicate: Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB)
investigated Ojo-Thompson’s actions, and determined that Bilkszto was
owed lost pay from the TDSB due to mental stress. More importantly, the
WSIB formally concluded
that Ojo-Thompson’s behaviour “was abusive, egregious and vexatious,
and rises to the level of workplace harassment and bullying,” and that
she’d intended to “cause reputational damage and to ‘make an example’”
of Bilkszto...
According to a longtime friend of Bilkszto who spoke to Quillette following
his death, fellow TDSB principals had warned him that—based on similar
episodes of DEI-related shaming and mobbing they’d observed—any effort
to defend himself might backfire. Even discussing his underlying
commitment to anti-racism was risky, they said, as it might be decried
as an attempt to play the role of “white saviour.”
Such warnings were hardly irrational—and, in at least one case,
proved prescient. This being mid-2021, much of the Canadian media
establishment, like its American counterpart, was still providing
heavily sympathetic coverage of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.
But by 2023, when Bilkszto’s story finally did make it into the public
sphere, the cultural tide had turned somewhat, as BLM’s reputation had
been tarnished by financial scandals, and the stigma against critiquing
anti-racist activists and DEI bureaucracies had begun to ebb. Indeed,
Bilkszto’s “egregious and vexatious” treatment at Ojo-Thompson’s hands
went viral internationally,
as a symbol of the bullying now being meted out in some quarters in the
name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. One British newspaper
headlined its 5 August 2023 report
about Bilkszto, “Bully DEI trainer… is heard LAUGHING as she taunts
beloved gay school principal… for questioning her woke diktats—as crony
[Robinson Petrazzini] who held no-whites school meetings is also identified.”
Despite
receiving sympathetic press treatment, however, Bilkszto never fully
recovered from his 2021 humiliation. On 13 July 2023, a year ago today,
he committed suicide at age 60—just a week after Canada’s National Post newspaper first reported that he was seeking to take the TDSB to court.
It’s always difficult for third parties to know why someone chooses to take his or her own life. But according to his family, Bilkszto’s decision related to the false accusations of racism he’d endured during his TDSB anti-racism training.
One
reason why Bilkszto remained so anxious in the months following his
ordeal is that Robinson Petrazzini steadfastly refused to delete her
tweeted accusation that Bilkszto was somehow a racist menace to the
TDSB’s black students.
Documentation obtained by Quillette in
2023 demonstrated that it took Robinson Petrazzini eight months to take
down the tweet in question, despite repeated appeals from Bilkszto’s
lawyer. The fact that Robinson Petrazzini not only escaped punishment
for defaming one of her TDSB colleagues, but in fact was rewarded with a
subsequent promotion to the role of Education Director of a
neighbouring school board, showed Bilkszto that the attacks against him
were being encouraged, or at least tolerated, at the highest
administrative levels governing Ontario public education.
Other documents obtained by Quillette indicate
that Ojo-Thompson’s lucrative TDSB anti-racism training contract was
personally approved by the school board’s then-Associate Director of
Equity, Well-Being, and School Improvement, Colleen Russell-Rawlins—and
rushed through the required approvals processes in a manner that at
least one in-house accounting functionary noted, in writing, seemed unusual.
The documents also indicate there was no competitive bidding, which may help explain the high price tag. This was a sole-source contracting process: Aside from the KOJO Institute, no other DEI training company seems to have been considered.
In a section of the TDSB documentation requiring signing officers to
explain their use of a sole-source bidding method, Russell-Rawlins (or
one of her subordinates) simply pasted in boilerplate promotional text that had been plagiarised directly
from the “About KOJO Institute” section of Ojo-Thompson’s corporate
website, without bothering to correct grammatical errors contained in
the original text...
If
Russell-Rawlins suffered any professional consequences for her role in
recruiting Ojo-Thompson, they’ve not yet been publicly reported. Just a
few months after Ojo-Thompson delivered her TDSB anti-racism lectures in
Spring 2021, in fact, Russell-Rawlins was promoted to the role of TDSB Director of Education.
(Earlier this year, Russell-Rawlins announced her retirement, following a
three-year tenure marked by other scandals connected to her
social-justice agenda, including a mismanaged student census aimed at advancing “Quantitative Critical Race Theory”; a teardown of the merit-based selection system used by the TDSB’s popular specialty schools; and a book-club ban of Nobel Prize laureate Nadia Murad’s 2017 memoir, The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State, on the claim that the Yazidi refugee’s words might promote Islamophobia.)
A review of the record shows that this wasn’t the first time
Russell-Rawlins and Ojo-Thompson had crossed paths professionally. While
Russell-Rawlins was performing her short stint as interim Education Director for the PDSB
between August 2020 and August 2021, her board hired Ojo-Thompson to
run what appears to have been a similar multi-part lecture series,
styled as “Anti-Black Racism Training for Leaders in Education.”...
All
this was part of a larger trend in Ontario that played out during late
2020 and 2021, as a number of the province’s school-board education
directorships were turned over to incoming administrators with
professional backgrounds rooted in DEI. This cohort included not only
Russell-Rawlins at TDSB and Robinson Petrazzini at HWDSB, but also
Curtis Ennis at Halton District School Board (HDSB) and Waterloo Region District School Board Education Director jeewan chanicka (who spells his name with lower-case letters because, according to a sympathetic 2022 media profile,
“he identifies with his Polynesian Indigenous spirituality and says
that he doesn’t give more importance to himself than his surroundings,
including animals, bodies of water and trees”).
Other
boards that became clients of the KOJO Institute during this period
included HDSB, Dufferin-Peel Catholic School Board, Halton Catholic,
Thames Valley, and York Region District School Board (YRDSB). As
discussed in detail below, the latter hosted Ojo-Thompson in April 2021,
shortly after kicking off its “Dismantling Anti-Black Racism Strategy,”
which advocated
for the creation of “black-affirming learning and working environments”
as well as a “culturally relevant and black-affirming curriculum.”
Amid this flurry of new hires and anti-racism directives in Ontario, it
is perhaps unsurprising that Ojo-Thompson’s high fees and questionable
teaching methods didn’t receive more scrutiny. TDSB public announcements
and internal documents from this period routinely described anti-racist
training as an “urgent” school-board imperative—one that everyone on
staff was expected to wholeheartedly support.
Once
ensconced as TDSB’s Education Director, Russell-Rawlins seems to have
become consumed with a survey project aimed at measuring the scope of
racism within her school board. While that project was botched by her staff and later abandoned, the initiative reflected her apparent fixation on rooting out ideologically suspect elements on staff. A 12-page PDSB policy
on “Discriminatory Slurs and Statements in Learning Environments,” put
into force under her stewardship in March 2021, went so far as to
promote a dedicated snitch line that educators were required to use if
they overheard problematic language among their colleagues. (The
document urged staff to “Save the Reporting Email [Address] to your
Desktop for easy and immediate access.”)
These
“mandatory reporting” requirements apply to all staff members who
“become aware of [allegedly] discriminatory slurs and statements”
through “social media, in conversation between colleagues or with
students, in staff rooms or staff meetings.” Section 5 of the policy
specifies that “Failure by any School Staff, including Teachers,
Principals, Vice-Principals, Superintendents and all other School Staff,
to comply… may be seen as Condoning the use of discriminatory slurs and
statements in PDSB’s learning environments.”
But
while Russell-Rawlins has been an especially vigorous ideological
enforcer, at both PDSB and TDSB, she is far from alone. Many of the
Ontario public school teachers who spoke to Quillette for
this article were aware of at least one instance in which a co-worker
had been investigated on suspicion of saying or writing something
alleged to have been racially insensitive. One teacher commented
ruefully that many classrooms now seem to have two teachers—the one who
is teaching, and the one who is “at home, being investigated for
racism.”
To cite one recent example: a principal, vice-principal, and teacher at John Fisher Junior Public School in Toronto were placed on home assignment for fifteen months based
on false accusations that they’d locked up a six-year-old black child
on school premises—despite the fact that both police and the local
Children’s Aid Society had already cleared all concerned of wrongdoing.
Like Bilkszto, the accused principal never returned to work.
(The exoneration of these educators was heavily criticised by an
oft-quoted activist group known as Parents of Black Children—PoBC—which
has regularly promoted allegations of racism at Toronto-area schools.
Following the TDSB announcement that no wrongdoing had been found at
John Fisher, PoBC complained that investigators hadn’t applied “an
anti-black-racism lens.” In July 2023, the same group collaborated with
Ojo-Thompson in a bid to rehabilitate her professional reputation amid
the backlash following Bilkszto’s suicide. It later emerged that Ojo-Thompson had been one of the group’s board members, though her name had been scrubbed from the group’s site without explanation.)...
Most of the educators who spoke with Quillette
for this article are, as Bilkszto was, originally sympathetic to the
social-justice messaging that Ontario school boards began vigorously
proselytising in 2020. Over time, however, they became concerned that
this rhetoric, often communicated through esoteric academic jargon,
seemed detached from the real needs of TDSB students, black or
otherwise.
Even
now, more than three years after George Floyd’s death, TDSB-directed
professional-development efforts continue to focus on the dissemination
of anti-racist tracts, including one 2024 instalment titled, Facilitating Critical Conversations: A Teaching Resource for Challenging Oppression. Among
the “core beliefs” advanced by the document is that “education is a
colonial structure that centres whiteness and Eurocentricity, and
therefore it must be actively decolonized.” (Three of the four authors are billed as experts in hip hop music—including one specialising in “Hip Hop as Critical Relevant Responsive Pedagogy.”)
One of the educators who spoke with Quillette
about her experiences was “Margaret,” a veteran teacher with York
Region District School Board, whose territory is situated north of
Toronto, extending through the satellite cities of Vaughan, Markham, and
Richmond Hill.
Like
other teachers interviewed for this article, Margaret didn’t want her
real name used, due to fears of professional repercussions. Not so long
ago, someone in her position might have relied upon her union to ensure
that she wouldn’t be punished for voicing concerns about school-board
policies. But many Ontario teachers’ unions are now heavily invested in
the same aggressive DEI policies championed by their members’ employers.
At least one union, part of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, even racially gerrymandered its internal voting system in 2021 to allow extra votes for non-white members (going so far as to produce an animated video
justifying the move). In another case, the then-Equity Chair for an
Ontario elementary teachers’ union—a woman named Sara Savoia—publicly
demanded “consequences” for a fellow teacher whom she accused of transphobia.
Margaret describes the DEI seminars she’s been asked to attend as
cultish propaganda sessions, in which instructors demand that audience
members scour their minds for evidence of subconscious racism. By way of
example, she showed Quillette
an image from a virtual event conducted during the 2021–2022 academic
year. The graphic is emblazoned with bold-text refrains to be repeated
by audience members in the style of ritualised affirmations featured at
addiction-recovery programmes—as in, “I will accept that the institution
of Education is an instrumental tool for maintaining and furthering the
ideology of White Supremacy.” (Just in case anyone in the audience
should require evidence to back up such propositions, a caveat informs
them, “It is not the responsibility of people with intersecting
marginalized identities to prove this.”)
A
prevalent theme in these materials, borrowed from the idiom of
psychoanalysis and consciousness-raising self-help retreats, is that
audience members should be expected to tolerate—and even welcome—psychic
pain; on the premise that such suffering is a necessary step toward
casting out the comforting self-delusions that uphold white supremacy.
As
Ojo-Thompson’s attacks on Bilkszto show, this claim is effectively
unfalsifiable, since any expressed objection is taken as proof that the
dissenting party has been thrown into an emotional crisis—exactly as the
instructor had intended. And to such extent that the dissident fails to
resolve this (welcome) crisis in an ideologically correct manner, it is
assumed that he or she must simply be too lazy, stubborn, or racist to
pay the psychic price of liberation.
“Zack”
is a younger YRDSB teacher, in his early thirties. He reports that most
of the professional-development (PD) instruction he’s received in
recent years has been related in some way to racism. And most of that,
he reports, has been specifically focused on anti-black racism, despite
the fact that blacks represent only about 4.3% of Canada’s population. (By comparison, more than 19% of Canadians self-describe as being of Asian descent.)
“Courtney,” another YRDSB teacher, puts things more bluntly: “Ever since the pandemic, anti-black racism has been the
priority. [Most] of our professional-development staff meetings are
about anti-black racism. It sometimes seems like it’s all they talk
about.”
In
some cases, school-board administrators have repurposed the
social-justice messaging surrounding Canadian Indigenous issues as a
means to promote black-focused equity mantras. Many Ontario teachers are
now required to recite something called an “African ancestry statement ”—a newly appropriated variation on Indigenous land acknowledgements. One representative example
from the Halton Catholic District School Board voices acknowledgement
for “the generations of people of African descent who were forcibly
brought to this land and displaced around the world as a result of the
Trans-Atlantic slave trade.”
While
such gestures may be well-intentioned, they reflect a flawed
understanding of Canadian history. The highest number of slaves who ever
lived in pre-Confederation Canada was about 4,000 (approximately two
thirds of whom were Indigenous). No slave ships ever
brought enslaved Africans to the St. Lawrence Valley, and the British
banned slavery more than three decades before Canada came into existence
as an independent country. The vast bulk of Canada’s current black
population originates with immigrants who freely moved to Canada in the
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
“It’s
basically my job to take the ‘progressive’ anti-oppressive,
anti-colonial, DEI policies from the [school] board and figure out how
to pass them on to the staff,” reports “Timothy,” a School Success head
with Peel District School Board. “How I ended up here is a newsworthy
story in itself. Suffice it to say that I’ve sold pieces of my soul, and
what redemption I may find [will be in leaking] these [PDSB] policies
to people who are able to speak out.”...
During
an audience-participation interlude, Ojo-Thompson asks educators what
steps they can take to become “anti-oppressive” teachers. Most of the
responses leave Ojo-Thompson unimpressed—until a vice-principal piques
Ojo-Thompson’s interest by announcing, “I’m going to say something
different.”
“I
think what was required in [my] body was to learn how to speak in a
code of whiteness,” says the senior administrator, a white woman. She
then goes on to state that educational tools “steeped” in whiteness are
used to assess teaching competency.
While
it isn’t clear what the educator means by “whiteness,” the tone of her
comment dovetails with Ojo-Thompson’s general belief that the polite
conventions of Canadian professional life mask an existential power
struggle between anti-racists and racists. And so everyone in the
audience needs to pick the right side—or else live with the knowledge
that they are on the wrong side of history...
Ojo-Thompson then (falsely) claims that public authorities in what is
now Canada compensated slave owners for their economic losses following
Britain’s passage of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. By this rewriting
of history, she contends, abolition was, paradoxically, a mark of shame...
In
fact, there is no evidence that authorities in what is now Canada paid
off anyone for giving up what few slaves existed in the territory. But
if anyone in the audience regarded her history lessons with skepticism,
they certainly weren’t saying so. In fact, a vice-principal took this
juncture as an opportunity to commend Ojo-Thompson, declaring that “we
need to have these conversations from K to 12.”
Ojo-Thompson
clearly agrees, telling the audience that her precepts should inform a
top-down programme of “enforcement monitoring, tracking, evaluation,
[and] performance management” at their school boards...
There then follow more history lessons about Canada, which Ojo-Thompson
now suggests was once the site of a full-blown slave economy comparable
to that of antebellum Kentucky or Virginia...It’s not clear what inspired this fictional tale of Toronto being
constructed by slaves. But, for perspective, one researcher found that
there were exactly fifteen black people living
in the colonial town of York (which later became Toronto) in 1799,
roughly thirty years before the British abolished slavery in Canada...
Ojo-Thompson
them moved through a thumbnail history of the twentieth century,
whereby the racism that informed chattel slavery has been embedded not
only in modern Canadian institutions, but also—by her apocalyptic
description—“globally, and in your synagogue, mosque, church, your
child’s daycare, the Grade One classes, the Grade 12 classes.
Everywhere at all times, the legacies are being upheld.”
Even black success stories
comprise evidence of racism, Ojo-Thompson contends, because “the black
kid who is defined as a leader also tends to be the black kid who can
perform whiteness the best.”
When the class finishes and the audience drifts away, one participant, a
school principal, speaks to Ojo-Thompson on a one-on-one basis. On the
Zoom recording, the white woman can be heard saying, “I want to thank
you. I think I’ve done a lot of my own unpacking sitting here in my
white body and doing this work.”...
The main theme of Ojo-Thompson’s third and fourth classes is that
Canadian society isn’t just racist, but comprises a full-on “white
supremacist system”—much like South Africa under apartheid, the American
Deep South during the Jim Crow era, or even Nazi Germany...
Raising the moral stakes, Ojo-Thompson even goes so far as to suggest
that her own physical well-being may depend on the willingness of her
audience members to follow her anti-racist teaching: “As a black woman
in this province, I cannot express enough, how much you taking this up
is a matter of life or death. It’s absolutely a matter of liberation for
our community that you all will decide to do this.”
One might think that casually comparing Canada to Hitler’s Germany would
arouse pushback from the assembled school administrators who comprise
Ojo-Thompson’s audience. But as at other junctures, the only audience
comments are from administrators eager to demonstrate their agreement,
often by using the same opaque jargon favoured by their instructor...
Eventually,
a male educator speaks up—one of the few men to participate. He doesn’t
tell a story or offer self-deprecating pieties, but rather voices his
concern that his fellow staffers back at his school may take a casual or
even dismissive view of the transformative anti-racist lessons he’ll
soon be preaching to them.
At
this, Cecil Roach, the Superintendent of Equity and Engagement for
YRDSB, jumps in to reassure everyone that “we have clear accountability
measures built into the strategy… This work will not stop and we’ll be
leaning into the work and ensuring that folks are held accountable for
the results that are expected.”
“I
have to tell you,” he adds, “the [Ontario] Ministry [of Education] is
also working on an anti-black racism strategy that all districts are
going to be expected to implement along with accountability measures
that could be determined by things such as appraisals.”
This
leads Ojo-Thompson into a discussion of the best way to deal with
“resistance tactics”—including the “dominance culture traps” that she
lists as (1) the presumption of neutrality, (2) meritocracy, and (3)
neoliberalism.
These ideas, Ojo-Thompson tells her audience, comprise a destructive “vortex” that surrounds us everywhere...
Other
listed evils include “colourblindness,” fear of political correctness,
and the practice of acting as a “devil’s advocate” when conversing with
anti-racists. The bottom left-hand corner of the graphic features yet
another pledge for audience members to recite and internalise, this one
aimed at ensuring they will “continue to learn about the water and how I
reinforce it, and how I benefit from white supremacy—even if I am
against it.”
Perhaps
the most shocking claim relayed by Ojo-Thompson to these YRDSB
educators is that they are all employed by a white-supremacist
institution...
Several
participants voice their agreement. No one asks why this supposedly
white supremacist entity, the YRDSB, had enlisted Ojo-Thompson to
lecture its employees—at considerable cost—about the evils of the same
racist creed that supposedly comprises its mission. (No doubt, the
YRDSB’s 15 current trustees
would be shocked to hear Ojo-Thompson’s disturbing news, especially
given that at least half of them, including the chair, are either Asian
or black.)
As
she closes, Ojo-Thompson instructs the white audience members on how
best to demonstrate their gratitude when someone—such as Ojo-Thompson
herself—informs them that they are racist.
“If
someone comes to you, and gives you the gift of correction, thank them,
honour them. [Say] ‘Thank you so much for telling me. I am so sorry,’”
she says. “Invite them to tell you this again… And again and again and
again.”
A
number of audience members then obediently express their appreciation
to Ojo-Thompson, including one who exalts the instructor’s “learning and
integrity.”
Despite
all her dark visions of racist dystopia, the instructor sounds
genuinely happy as she receives thanks from these grateful admirers—the
“us” she’s craved since her teenage years.
Clearly, this is Kike Ojo-Thompson’s place in the sun."
Related:
Jonathan Kay on X - "Kike Ojo-Thompson—whose false accusations of racism against Richard Bilkszto preceded his suicide, and whose DEI style was subsequently denounced as “abusive, egregious & vexatious” by WSIB—is now Human Capital” partner at @DeloitteCanada, charged with workplace “transformation”"
Jonathan Kay on X - "new FOI documents in regard to @DeloitteCanada “Human Capital” expert Kike Ojo-Thompson—via the Ontario education ministry, re: Richard Bilkszto (R.I.P.). Including: her letter to Lecce, claiming that her vexatious attack on Bilkszto (falsely linking him to white supremacy) was merely a "teachable moment.” Also, another Toronto teacher wrote Lecce to say s/he had an identical experience with Kojo."
