Inside a DEI Training Led by Consultants Who Humiliated School Principal before His Suicide

In mid July, a former Toronto District School Board (TDSB) principal, Richard Bilkszto, took his own life in a story that made international headlines. According to a statement released by his lawyer at the behest of family members, Bilkszto’s bullying at the hands of equity consultants hired by the school district played a part in his eventual suicide.

Bilkszto’s reputation was destroyed in front of hundreds of fellow educators when KOJO Institute facilitators — including founder, Kike Ojo-Thompson — accused the venerated teacher of being an “apologist” for white supremacy during a training session conducted over Zoom. “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?” Ojo-Thompson shot back at Bilkszto after he challenged her assertion that Canada’s racial history resembles America’s.

Bilkszto went out on sick leave shortly after the incident and later prevailed in a workplace harassment suit against the district. But, according to his family, he never recovered psychologically from his public humiliation.

“Sadly, Richard experienced an affront to . . . [his] stellar reputation in the spring of 2021, causing him severe mental distress,” Bilkszto’s family lawyer said in a statement announcing his death.

While the recordings of Bilkszto’s encounter have yet to be fully released, National Review obtained more than ten hours of footage from four identical training seminars led by Ojo-Thompson in the neighboring York Region school district just two weeks before her interaction with Bilkszto.

Those sessions, which were attended by over 200 York administrators and provincial officials from the Ministry of Education, offer a glimpse of what Bilkszto experienced before sliding into a depression that culminated in his suicide.

The seminars took place within weeks of the York district enacting its “Dismantling Anti-Black Racism Strategy” which advocated the creation of “Black-affirming learning and working environments.”

‘Hard to Cancel People Who Affirm’

Ojo-Thompson wastes no time sharing her binary worldview with participants in her first seminar, “Naming and Disrupting Norms.”

“The entitlement to be comfortable — to be free from all the encumbrances in our mind and heart. . . . It’s an entitlement that marginalized people of every kind in our system never have. They literally have not had one day where they could be sort of free,” Ojo-Thompson tells the assembled administrators.

The comment prompted an elementary-school vice principal to raise a concern about a fellow educator who had some reservations during a recent staff meeting on anti-black racism. “I don’t know where to begin. I don’t know what to say and, if I say something wrong, I’m afraid to do that because that’s not my intention,” the teacher said.

Ojo-Thompson laughs off the vice principal’s anxiety, assuring her that, as long as she embraces an anti-racist worldview, she has nothing to worry about.

“So, in four sessions, let’s revisit that question,” she says, chuckling. She then tells participants to “start with themselves.”

“The cheat is,” Ojo-Thompson adds, “it is really hard to cancel people who affirm, acknowledge, and take account. The reason that we see this playing out as problematically as we do so regularly is because people deny, dismiss, and obfuscate as their first choice.”

Near the end of the session, a principal in attendance encourages her colleagues to have “the courage to go rogue” and potentially disregard district policy in an effort to dismantle racism.

“That’s just the way that I’m describing the idea of deviating from the temptation or the proclivity or the practice of compliance and migrating towards doing something that might not follow a process or protocols but that would be in service of the students that we’re trying to serve here.”

“Thank you. Awesome,” Ojo-Thompson responds.

The ‘Huge Problem’ of Democracy

While Bilkszto attended the KOJO Institute’s first seminar “without incident” according to legal documents obtained by NR, it was during the second session, “Racism, Anti-Black Racism and Racial Inequality,” that his brutal encounter unfolded.

When Ojo-Thompson led that seminar with York Region administrators, she challenged them to consider whether democracy is insufficient to redress racial wrongs.

“We have a problem because the people who experience racism, who understand its nuances, who understand how it operates and how to dismantle it, do not make up the numerical majority,” she says.

“But we’re committed to ‘democracy’: one person, one vote,” she adds. “What I’m saying to you is, when it comes to inclusion, we have to be prepared to question and challenge and potentially dismantle the way we make decisions in the first place. If we make decisions, one person, one vote, we’re probably not gonna get from where we are to where we think we wanna. . . . This is a huge problem.”

During a question-and-answer period later, a local principal said Ojo-Thompson’s comments had “illuminated” that “consensus . . . is really problematic.”

“What is she saying about democracy? How dare she? Doesn’t she understand what democracy is? How good it’s been to the planet?” Ojo-Thompson says, playing the role of her critics.

“Sure, but two things can be true at the same time: Democracy has been helpful in some contexts and, in this context with regards to anti-racist change, organizational change, it is harmful as long as we are continuously working within spaces where the numerical majority does not represent those who are impacted by the experience.”

As part of the seminar, Ojo-Thompson runs participants through an exercise on “powerful unexamined ideas” focusing on “legacies” which supposedly established “the location of wealth, power, and status” of white people. According to Ojo-Thompson, the pernicious effects of colonialism, slavery, patriarchy, religious universalism, and capitalism created a global racial hierarchy of dominant and oppressed groups.

“That is why globally, today, in 2021, you can drop a white person in the center of the Congo and — while they may be numerically minoritized — they will be dominant in power because the establishment of whiteness as an ideal and whiteness as dominant globally.”

Several employees of the KOJO Institute, including Ojo-Thompson, declined to speak with NR despite several phone calls, numerous emails, and even a visit to their publicly listed business address. York Region declined to comment on this piece either.

The specter of white supremacy doesn’t end there, Ojo-Thompson warns. “This is why there is no such thing as reverse racism. Let me say that one more time: This is why there’s no such thing as reverse racism. There is no legacy that established it as anything less than ideal to be white. Nowhere on the planet is it anything less than ideal to be white.”

A school principal then connects surging suicide rates among the white working class to lost power and prestige: “Folks who identify as white who haven’t been able to maintain some of the privileges of that dominant caste . . . has led to increased suicidality.”

Ojo-Thompson goes on to argue that, while there is a need for a black vanguard to instill anti-racism within institutions, some black people might not be up to the job.

“We make that mistake so often that racialized people automatically know and so we give positions of leadership and assume and hope and presume that they assume and presume that they’re gonna do right by racialized people,” Ojo-Thompson says.

“The truth of the matter is the ‘legacies’ have done their job and it sometimes takes racialized people a whole lifetime to fight — fight colonialism, fight white supremacy — just enough to be remotely proud of themselves, their identities, their bodies, and where they come.”

Ojo-Thompson returns to this thread minutes later to demand “lighter skin” people carry their fair share of the burden in remaking institutions along anti-racist lines.

“The lesson here is that we need to be naming, particularly those of us who say are of African descent, but are lighter-skinned and whose phenotypical features are more like whiteness. We need to be using that proximity to whiteness to the benefit of disrupting anti-black racism.”

“Because it is the Africa in you that is being excluded, that is being damned, that is being problematized,” the diversity expert adds. “For example, when I am amongst light-skinned black people, and I may be the only dark-skinned person, it is not uncommon for me to hear really what amounts to anti-African sentiments.” When such people speak about beauty, skin, and hair, Ojo-Thompson confesses, they often are parroting “vestiges of white supremacy.”

Ojo-Thompson then launches into the segment that led to Bilkszto’s career destruction.

“People in Canada have a posture of ‘we are better and we’re different.’ The U.S. had slavery and we freed slaves. Well, we didn’t free slaves. We had the underground railroad,” she says before contradicting herself in the next sentence. “But, first and foremost, we had 206 years of slavery.” Ojo-Thompson also falsely claims that Canadian slaveholders were compensated following abolition.

Marcel Trudel, a notable Canadian historian, found that barely over 4,000 slaves lived across the vast Canadian expanse between 1671 and 1834 when the practice ended, two-thirds of whom were indigenous. In 1960, just two-tenths of one percent of Canadians were black. By 2021, only 3.5 percent of Canadians identified as black, the vast majority of whom are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants.

Canada’s inability to confront its legacy is the reason “we can’t even talk about anti-black racism without people getting fragile and clutching pearls,” Ojo-Thompson says.

“There has to be deference. If we’re gonna do this work, there has to be deference for what black people say,” she adds, before stipulating that black people who disagree with her philosophy shouldn’t necessarily be listened to. “More importantly, because of what I said before about the colonial project and how not every black person is gonna be prepared to do the right thing, we have to be deferential to what the [anti-racism] framework says.”

Ojo-Thompson then explains her carrot-and-stick approach to anti-racism, arguing that those who resist her worldview should be punished while those who embrace it should be rewarded with professional advancement.

“Next comes enforcement. Don’t be shocked. It’s coming. And after that is consequences,” she says. “But the good news is that there could also be [a] reward. Your leaning into this could lead to your promotion. Your leaning into this could lead to you being seen as a good quality staffer. But if you don’t understand that, you will be understood as not a good one. You will be understood as being problematic and you will be shown outward; door.”

“I’m here to say the [Black] community is fed up and done with it. So, I hope my extraness in this moment was useful to landing the point.”

Wrapping up the second class, Ojo-Thompson runs through a cursory overview of slavery before introducing a radically new definition of lynching and accusing the York school district as well as the provincial public education system, more broadly, of “state-sanctioned violence.”

“We do lynchings in many, many, ways. Most of you were thinking of a lynching as the noose around neck and hanging from a tree,” she says. “Lynching is anytime you’re coming for a group targeting a group to their demise. And we see that happening in school boards across Ontario. Multiple school boards are lynching African descent people on a regular basis. Slowly little drips and drops of lynchings here and there. That is state-sanctioned violence.”

‘White Supremacist Terrorism’

In KOJO’s third seminar, “Whiteness, White Supremacy and Organizational Culture,” the following week, Ojo-Thompson argues that those who question her philosophy or pushback in any way are themselves “bullies.”

After one principal in attendance explains how she’s had a hard time convincing her colleagues to embrace anti-racism, Ojo-Thompson suggests that such people are engaged in “anti-intellectualism.”

“Oooh, there’s a lot of white fragility happening here. Lots of anxiety happening and I understand that,” says a white administrator, recounting her experience dealing with pushback from colleagues at a recent meeting.

When another administrator shares a similar experience in which she became distressed because colleagues remained silent throughout her presentation, Ojo-Thompson launches into a tirade about how those who question anti-racism are really just bullies.

“Let’s cut the crap,” she says. “She was sweating. She felt insecure. She felt afraid. . . . What does that behavior remind you of?” As participants begin throwing out various suggestions, one woman zeroed in on what Ojo-Thompson was fishing for: “bullying!”

“Yes, yes, yes,” the equity consultant says with a mix of relief and exasperation. “You were being bullied. It was white supremacist terrorism.”

“They don’t care,” Ojo-Thompson reaffirms. “They’re not leaned into the change work.”

She then compares ambivalence toward anti-racism to ambivalence toward sexual violence, arguing that school administrators would never “tolerate” silence during a meeting on combatting sexual assault.

“You think we would tolerate 50 minutes of silence? Unfathomable. Unfathomable. We need to start calling a thing a thing. Let’s be very clear, that resistance was more than just resistance. That was actually bullying,” Ojo-Thompson says confidently. “Oh yeah, you were bullied. You were bullied and we need to start calling a thing, a thing. That’s quite a violent response. . . . We need to understand how white supremacist that was.”

The exchange opens up the floodgates. Another principal confides that she experienced the exact same reception. “We struggled through silence. We met with silence and now I’m struggling with your expression of ‘white supremacist terrorism,’” the woman says prompting Ojo-Thompson to laugh in approval.

“I’m being slightly hyperbolic in the word ‘terrorism.’ Intentionally though, to suggest that you are meant to feel terrified. You are meant to feel like this is too hard. I’m not gonna do it anymore.”

Wrapping up the lesson, Ojo-Thompson offers one final perspective. “Nobody’s holding white people accountable. White people don’t hold white people accountable. Racialized people don’t hold white people accountable,” she says as the session draws to a close. “When it comes to white supremacy and our boards, I mean, our boards are rampant with white supremacy.”

Before signing off every call, Ojo-Thompson issues a parting thanks for a “great session.”

“You should feel proud. Do something nice for yourself. If you like red wine, have some. If you like a steak, eat some. If you like bubble baths, have one.”