Richard Bilkszto Was Publicly Shamed for Being White

And his suicide offers a case study in the effects of sanctioned hatred

JANICE FIAMENGO

I’ll say it again. White Lives Don’t Matter. As white lives. – Dr. Priyamvada Gopal, Professor of English, Churchill College, Cambridge University.   

Richard Bilkszto was a Toronto school principal who never recovered from his colleagues’ betrayal after a diversity trainer called him out in 2021 for his “whiteness.” Bilkszto had been working as the contract principal at Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute, an adult and alternative high school, when he attended diversity training sessions conducted by the KOJO Institute. There, he was subject to repeated racial taunting by the Institute’s founder, Kike Ojo-Thompson.

Since his suicide just over a month ago, voices have been raised to praise Bilkszto for standing up against diversity ideology and to express shock that administrators failed to support him. Both lines of discussion sidestep the true extent of psychological crippling caused by the ideology of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Bilkszto’s tragedy, I will argue, was not that he was punished for resisting DEI ideology, but that he was never equipped to resist it in the first place. Having allowed it to affect his beliefs, self-identity, and the very foundation of his reasoning, he couldn’t endure the shaming it made possible. His abandonment by colleagues, subsequent depression, and ultimate suicide offer a paradigm for the deliberate undermining of white self-respect in North America today.

Diversity ideology illustrates Theodore Dalrymple’s contention in Our Culture, What’s Left of It (p. 172-73) that the purpose of propaganda is less to persuade than to demoralize by forcing people to assent to ideas they know or believe to be untrue. (For an able if lunatic summary of DEI ideology, see Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism.) DEI promotes belief in white hatred, white cruelty, systemic white privilege, and white obduracy; in the process, it redefines and destabilizes common words such as racism, equality, and diversity to lead adherents into a bewildering maze of self-contradictory assumptions and claims (for example, that even when black people are institutionally advantaged over whites, the system that advantages them is still white supremacist).

DEI boxes whites into a classic Kafka trap in which they must accept that they are infected by a social and personal evil so deep-rooted that they can’t even recognize it reliably. Thus, the only ethical response to claims of white racism by non-whites, no matter how dubious or outrageous, is to believe them. 

That’s almost exactly what DEI trainer Kike Ojo-Thompson, CEO of the KOJO Institute, told Bilkszto when he objected to her characterization of Canada as “a bastion of white supremacy and colonialism” that was even worse than the United States for black people. “Your job in this work as white people is to believe,” she said in one of the four sessions for which her company charged over $60,000. As a white man, Bilkszto was allowed to ask for clarification, she noted, but not to disagree with her, and his defense of Canada’s social system struck her as a typical white power-move: “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.” Another facilitator told Bilkszto that “If you want to be an apologist for the U.S. or Canada, this is really not the forum for that.” (Audio-clips of the session are available here.)

In the next session, Thompson continued her attack, alleging that Bilkszto’s comments were a “wonderful” example of the kind of anti-black “resistance” that white supremacists employ to shore up their privilege. She was delighted, she said, that participants in the seminar “all got to bear witness” to it (obviously not quite clear on the difference between “witnessing” and “bearing witness”) and she noted, with a laugh, that white supremacism “doesn’t get better than this” (a back-handed admission, one might think, that white supremacism was in rather short supply in that room). Two women supported her, one of them calling Bilkszto “the whiteness.”

In a country where white people had deeply-entrenched institutionalized power over non-whites, the interaction would surely have played out differently (actually, it’s hard to imagine it playing out at all). Bilkszto might have sat with a mocking smile, leaving his trainer to sputter impotently. He might have shrugged his shoulders or been aggressive. His bosses in the Toronto District School Board would undoubtedly have commiserated with him over the woman’s rudeness. Someone would certainly have spoken to Thompson, telling her to tone it down.

Instead, Bilkszto felt so deeply alone and unwell from the sessions that he took a weeks-long sick leave commencing the very next day. He had already seen a remark on Twitter supporting the leader for “modelling the discomfort administrators may need to experience in order to disrupt anti-black racism.” The comment signaled clearly that, in the eyes of a seminar attendee, he was an anti-black racist who had received a much-deserved dressing down. Though an investigation by the Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board  found that he had been bullied, it didn’t restore his damaged reputation or his job at Burnhamthorpe. He never recovered from the humiliation, jumping to his death from his 16^th floor apartment on July 13^th of this year.

The KOJO Institute released a statement calling the death a tragedy and offering condolences to Bilkszto’s family while also declaring that “This incident is being weaponized to discredit and suppress the work of everyone committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. While the coverage by right-wing media of this controversy is disappointing and led to our organization and team members receiving threats and vitriol online, we will not be deterred from our work in building a better society for everyone.”

Many who have written about Bilkszto’s suicide have portrayed him as a hero, someone who challenged diversity ideology. Jonathan Kay titled his Quillette tribute “RIP, Richard Bilkszto, a Toronto Educator Who Stood up to Woke Bullying and Paid the Price.” Writing in the National Post, Michael Higgins concluded his op/ed with an exhortation: “It is to be hoped that Bilkszto’s sacrifice serves as an example to others. And if we find ourselves not brave enough like Richard Bilkszto to stand up to the woke zealots, then let us pray we at least find the courage to stand next to people like him.” In fact, however, Bilkszto did not say a word in the sessions against any of the primary tenets of woke zealotry. He did not even disagree that Canada was systemically racist (his exact words were “Is there room for improvement—absolutely! Are we racist and everything—absolutely!”). He merely objected that Canada with its socialized medicine and publicly funded education system had come a long way on the path to equity. When Thompson challenged him to tell her what he was doing if not expressing his bigoted whiteness, he did not or could not answer.

Living in the insulated world of Canada’s public school system, he must at times in the ensuing years have wondered if Thompson was right.

As a teacher, vice-principal, and principal within the Toronto District School Board system, Bilkszto had almost certainly attended diversity sessions before this one. No administrator could have advanced through the ranks, as Bilkszto did, receiving the types of glowing reviews he received, who did not support and uphold diversity principles. Upon his retirement in 2019 (before he was hired back to work at Burnhamthorpe), the Toronto District School Board’s supervisory officer praised him for “excellence in equity, instruction, entrepreneurship, [and] student engagement.” 

We don’t know if Bilkszto ever sat silently while a white colleague was shamed and bullied, though that’s possible (and would be understandable given the magical thinking DEI ideology promotes). We do know that for years, he had worked within a system whose stated agenda dictated the type of interaction he eventually had with the diversity leader.

A 2019 “Vision for Learning” document posted by the Toronto District School Board affirms the core beliefs of “Equity and Anti-Oppression” as follows:

The voices and experiences of those who may be marginalized will be brought to the center of the discussion.

              We must acknowledge that systems and structures drive practice.

              Majority and minority are not about numbers.

              There is no such thing as neutral.

              While the intent may not be to harm, we must acknowledge impact.

Work is not about blame, shame, or guilt, but about our collective responsibility to close achievement and wellbeing gaps and raise the bar of excellence for ALL.

The list combines banality with absurdity. For anyone who thought Trans women are women represented the ultimate in surrealism, spend a few minutes contemplating Majority and minority are not about numbers and There is no such thing as neutral. All we need to know about the showdown between Kike Ojo-Thompson and Richard Bilkszto is contained in these koan-like utterances, which tightly interweave the utopian and the sinister as educators seek to allegedly “raise the bar of excellence for ALL” while also making clear that not all “voices and experiences” have equal value. A white boy at a school within the Toronto District School Board, no matter how much a minority and no matter what his experiences, will always be a member of the oppressor majority.

Now that Richard Bilkszto is dead, the actions of his colleagues and superiors have been critically scrutinized. How awful, most assert, that so few stood up for a decent man in his time of need. But why should anyone be the least surprised or even dismayed that so many of Bilkszto’s colleagues acted as they had been trained to act, as they had been told for years was the only legitimate anti-racist way to act? Everyone present at the session (and in the school system generally) would have been fully aware of the impossibility of joining with Bilkszto to oppose a black woman’s claims about her oppression. DEI ideology is adamant that her experiences, quite inaccessible to whites, have been too often silenced, ignored, and denied by the white majority. To support a white man in his (salutary) “discomfort” is the last thing an anti-racist person should do.

In his op/ed about Bilkszto’s suicide, Michael Higgins found it “not surprising” that Bilkszto went on sick leave for seven weeks immediately following the two shaming sessions. Perhaps it isn’t surprising. But it certainly highlights an alarming frailty in Bilkszto that would have been almost unimaginable in any other era but our own. Even 20 years ago—let alone 50—it would have been incredible to think of a well-respected collegiate principal so wounded as to become seriously ill after a disagreement during which a graceless and bombastic woman browbeat him into silence. The incident suggests the degree to which white identity (especially white male identity) has been under concerted attack in the past decade and more. Far from exhibiting a sense of racial superiority, many white people have been hectored into a conviction of complete abjection. One can’t help but conclude that “white fragility,” in DiAngelo’s contemptuous phrase, is less a “problem” to be overcome than the actual goal of diversity ideology. At the very least, DEI requires white people to paranoically second-guess their every statement, decision, or action in a manner no other race is required to do.  

 

The surprise in this story, then, was that Bilkszto acted at all, that he uttered a single contrary word, mild as it was. Perhaps he regretted having done so almost immediately, given that he did not pursue his challenge to Thompson. The relative timorousness of his intervention should not obscure its truth-seeking and courage. Lacking the necessary strength and conviction, however, it was not enough to enable a good but weakened man to stand up against his tormentors, and he became their defenseless victim.

What little evidence is available suggests that Bilkszto had for some time been exploring doubts about the ideology he had lived under and promoted. A few months before his suicide, he had appeared on the TVOntario program The Agenda, hosted by Steve Paikin, to argue against the decision by the Toronto District School Board to create a lottery system for “diverse applicants” to special school programs. No longer would students be admitted to the programs solely on the basis of demonstrated talent. Some number would now be admitted simply because they had applied and were “diverse” (one of the absurdities of the ideology’s new coinages is that a single person can be “diverse”). It was courageous of Bilkszto to appear on this program to argue against the lottery system. But he had evident difficulty finding an appropriate logic to defend his position.

Backed into a corner by the unimpeachably progressive Steve Paikin, Bilkszto could only repeat unconvincingly that “equity and merit” could coexist—though he couldn’t say how (because they can’t). He could not bring himself to say that in a contest of equity and merit, merit must ultimately win. He was even uncomfortable using the word talent, falling back on more equitable words like passion instead. His main argument was that the promotion of equity should begin sooner in the education process so that it wouldn’t need to be so blatantly enforced at the application stage. He was attempting to break out of the progressive mindset without the philosophical tools to do so. In time, he might have succeeded, but he couldn’t, or didn’t, give himself the chance.

Once one has accepted diversity postulates—accepted, for example, that all whites are racist, and that racial discrimination is wrong except when it is implemented against white people to create “a better society for all” —it becomes difficult to think clearly because of the weight of self-loathing, confusion, and longing for redemption that have been mobilized against the unwilling “oppressor.” Having spent years believing, trying to believe, or trying not to be overly bothered by the idea that a school system should promote equality of outcomes and that “achievement gaps” can and must be closed, Bilkszto was caught within an ideology that both inspired and did violence to his best instincts. No wonder, then, that when he lost his public identity as an anti-racist educator, he couldn’t bear it. The damage was done to him not only during the training session, but in the years before.

White lives do matter as white lives. Until we stop embracing anti-white ideology, we leave too many individuals with no defense against the bullying that contributed to Richard Bilkszto’s death.

Source: The Fiamengo Files