God. I don’t even know what to say.
The article reads so strange…like describing a cult.
His stellar career took on a sour note after he was bullied in a diversity, equity and inclusion training session for Toronto District School Board (TDSB) administrators in 2021, according to a lawsuit Bilkszto filed in court. His sin, in the eyes of facilitators at the KOJO Institute, was his questioning of their claim that Canada was a more racist place than the United States. Canada wasn’t perfect, he said, but it still offers a lot of good. For the rest of the training session, and throughout a follow-up training session the week after, facilitators repeatedly referred to Bilkszto’s comments as examples of white supremacy.
That’s because it is a cult. No one could seriously claim that Canada was more racist than America.
We certainly have issues. And our treatment of several marginalized groups leave a bad taste in one’s mouth, but more racist?
What’s the value in even framing the situation as competitive? This man responded with a reasonable take for such a shit claim. This is another reminder for me to keep my mouth shut more often than not.
Yeah, certain areas of Canada may be more racist than certain areas of the US, and certainly racist in different ways towards different cultures, but it’s pretty hard to compare to the deep south where in some places they’d happily bring back slavery if they had the opportunity to do so.
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I’m trying to figure out what you mean by this. Is your experience that Alberta is a particularly racist province, more so than other provinces in Canada?
That’s how I understand it, and from my experience it’s accurate as well. Alberta is basically Kentucky or Alabama or something.
*edit but I don’t think that it’s worse than those places, definitely canada is not MORE racist, especially in general.
If you care to share, what has been your experience?
I have to say I am surprised by your top line assertion, but I’m open to change my mind if you have an argument you can substantiate here about the similarities between Alberta, and Kentucky or Alabama. I also don’t think comparing different cultures is necessarily productive if our goal is to deal with the real world effects of racism. I think racism exists in Canada and it’s something worth talking about and trying to address in our context.
Been there plenty of times, including earlier this year. I’d recommend visiting the Royal Tyrell Museum if you have the chance.
Any stark difference that you can see is projection. We’re peas in a pod.
Similar yes. Different, also yes.
We simply don’t have the same ingrained prejudices that America has. Ours are different and I would argue less so. After all we don’t have politicians that would openly state that slavery benefitted black people.
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Lol you’re a terrible human being.
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Of course we are.
We’re just not stupid enough to think our opinions will be unchallenged when they’re idiotic and/or contrafactual and/or hate-fuelled.
That’s equality, my friend. Your first taste of it apparently.
His sin, in the eyes of facilitators at the KOJO Institute, was his questioning of their claim that Canada was a more racist place than the United States.
I would like to see a less biased story about this. It’s sad what happened to this man, and I’m not even saying he did anything wrong, but I don’t buy that the above quote is all that happened.
KOJO absolutely does believe Canada is more racist than the US because it suits them. No evidence behind it though.
Went looking for sources and this is all I found on Ground…
Not exactly the balance you were looking for…
Edit: here’s another, slightly more sane reporting:
Wow. Just fucking wow. I really hope those administrators feel really proud of how much good they did. They were so inclusive in their equality training that they bullied a man to suicide. Fucking go them.
They are just going to hide and blame KOJO, even though they support what they say. Nothing will happen to either since he committed suicide. If they get sued, they will just pay and it will go away. Nothing will change.
Yeah, this is very disingenuous. He actually was a racist, and there is no established connection with his suicide. Many racists kill themselves often.
Did you know him personally?
Aside from his work as an educator, Bilkszto was an advocate. He was a member of the Toronto chapter of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), an advocacy organization dedicated to civil rights and anti-discrimination, which he took the lead in establishing. In education specifically, he was a member of SOS TDSB, an organization working to preserve the district’s merit-based admissions system for specialty programs (the TDSB recently began using a lottery system to admit students, to the ire of many).
“Richard Bilkszto was a great man,” read the statement of SOS TDSB. “He contributed so much to the fight for quality education, for fairness and a better school system, and we are all so much poorer for his loss. Our heart goes out to his family, friends, and the thousands of students and colleagues he knew, and loved, and who loved him in return.”
Yeah…He sounds like such a racist.
Proof that he was racist?
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Sickening.
The guy was a class act, voiced his opinion, and then got fucking HAMMERED by his board.
Completely awful
This guy was absolutely right. If you don’t believe me, spend some time in the Southern US, where slavery was once a hallowed institution, desegregation was fought against tooth and nail, and racism continues to be deeply engrained into the collective psyche.
Sounds more like he chose the easy way out after being confronted with their biases.
It’s amazing how everyone takes the opinion columns like gospel.
Explains why people think that BLM burned down half the states.
Hard to feel bad about someone more interested in whataboutism than they are understanding other people problems.
How is that a whataboutism?
How is questioning the validity of a statement not trying to understand other people’s problems?
Not that I trust NatPo, but there isn’t any other info (that I have seen) that points to this man being a white supremacist.
The conflict arose after Ojo-Thompson is alleged to have suggested that Canada was more racist than the U.S., in part because Canada has “never reckoned with its anti-Black history” in the way the U.S. has.
Bilkszto, who previously taught high school in Buffalo, N.Y., disagreed with the statement. He said it would be “an incredible disservice to our learners” to suggest the U.S. is a more just society than Canada.
Bilkszto’s lawsuit alleges Ojo-Thompson reacted “with vitriol.”
“We are here to talk about anti-Black racism, but you in your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on for Black people?” she said, according to Bilkszto’s lawsuit.
Bilkszto claims he tried to de-escalate the situation, admitting there was anti-Black racism in Canada but argued that the evidence suggests “we are a far more just society” than the U.S.
At this point, according to Bilkszto’s lawsuit, another KOJO facilitator intervened, saying what Bilkszto was bringing up was not relevant.
The facilitator allegedly said if Bilkszto wanted to be “an apologist” for Canada or the U.S. the session was “not the forum for that.”
Another session was held a week later. At the beginning of the session, according to Bilkszto’s lawsuit, Ojo-Thompson referred to what happened the previous week and described it as a “real-life” example of resistance in support of white supremacy.
Bilkszto claims in his lawsuit that the statement, among others, implicitly referred to him as a racist and white supremacist.
The Star had begun reporting on the lawsuit prior to Bilkszto’s death.
In a July 7 statement, the KOJO Institute said it disputes many of the allegations in Bilkszto’s lawsuit against the TDSB, “including the descriptions of interactions with KOJO Institute staff which paint an inaccurate and incomplete picture” of what happened in the sessions.
They said it would be “inappropriate” to comment further since the matter was before the courts.
YMMV on whether it was whataboutism or not, but regardless, it was pretty clearly not malicious, and it’s a shame that the distress over the incident led him to suicide considering his positive record in the schooling system.
My personal reading of the very limited information is that this was a clash of personalities and priorities rather than malice on either side. The principal probably came in expecting that a DEI seminar would be about methods to make students from minority backgrounds feel more included; the speaker presumably felt that the point of the session was to develop the tools examine one’s own biases and reduce the implicit prejudices of our society and ourselves.
Thus, when the conversation turned to personal and societal biases, the principal felt unexpectedly attacked (as those who appreciate their societies often feel in such unexpected conversations) and became defensive. The speaker, on the other hand, probably took the defensiveness, without any context to ground it in, as some chud playing dumbass games and playing argumentative in a session they were forced to be in, and reacted with understandable hostility. The other facilitator seemed to recognize this to some degree by pointing out that the point wasn’t to play apologist for one country or the other.
If you are more interested in arguing that we aren’t as bad as the States, than learning about your potential aggressions, you only care about your own feelings.
I shouldn’t have to tell you that making sensitivity training into massaging your ego is a shitty look for a lib
Fucking what?
What a disgusting, trash-human fucking take.
Really glad most people don’t think like you or the world would be an even shittier place.
