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A beloved educator was branded as a bigot in a series of DEI sessions. The Free Press reveals the details—and exclusive audio—from a story of public shame.

Kike Ojo-Thompson, a diversity trainer in Toronto, was explaining to her class of 200 or so public school administrators that Canada is a much more racist country than the United States.

“Canada is a bastion of white supremacy and colonialism,” Thompson said to a sea of nodding heads squeezed into Zoom. “The racism we experience is far worse here than there.”

It was April 26, 2021, and Thompson was leading attendees through a session on systemic inequity.

Thompson acknowledged that this might be hard for Canadians to accept, explaining that Americans “have a fighting posture against, at least, the monarchy. Here we celebrate the monarchy, the very heart and soul and origins of the colonial structure.”

It was at that point that Richard Bilkszto, the principal of Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute and Adult Learning Centre, put his hand up. (Burnhamthorpe is a high school that caters mostly to students in their twenties who previously dropped out.) Bilkszto had trained in the United States, he was a devout progressive, and he was mystified by Thompson’s comments.

“I just wanted to make a comment about the Canada–U.S. thing, a little bit of a challenge to it,” Bilkszto offered.

Citing Canada’s public schools, tax regime, and socialized healthcare system, and no doubt drawing on his own experience teaching in a predominantly black high school in Buffalo, New York, he said: “We’re a far more just society.”

There was a momentary silence. None of the other attendees waded in.

Then Thompson, who is black, laced into Bilkszto, who is white.

“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—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,” she said.

Bilkszto shut up.

That seemed like the end of that.

In fact, it was just the beginning of Bilkszto’s harrowing, two-year descent into an ordeal of public shaming and isolation that ended only when he took his life last month. ...

In the wake of Bilkszto’s death, Ari Goldkind, a Toronto attorney, said the DEI consultants—and all the businesses, nonprofits, and school districts that hire them—are now “on notice” that these training sessions “can have horrendous, real-world consequences.”

“There’s a real possibility here that, moving forward, the DEI training session becomes much more litigious, with attendees who feel put upon or hurt or maligned, dangerously maligned—meaning they’re ostracized or rendered unemployable—striking back in court,” Goldkind said. “That’s the lesson of this tragedy, that people are sick and tired of being isolated and cast out from polite society because they have the gall to ask a question or challenge the orthodoxy.”