The Toronto academy was bereaved in early July by the suicide of a 60-year-old principal, Richard Bilkszto, according to Canadian public radio CBC News. The man had filed a complaint a few months earlier against a private professional training organization that offers seminars on anti-racism: the KOJO Institute, founded and directed by Kike Ojo-Thompson, an ex-teacher turned anti-racism activist in the media.
According to Richard Bilkszto’s lawyer, his suicide is directly linked to an incident that occurred during a seminar in the spring of 2021 which the principal had attended. Kike Ojo-Thompson had accused him of being a white supremacist, a remark that would have deeply destabilized this civil servant known for his long career in education as well as his associative commitment against racism. The Canadian government has announced the opening of an investigation into the KOJO Institute.
This organization which offers training against discrimination and racism is one of the many private establishments which now offer training of this kind to companies or administrations. Richard Bilkszto participated in one of the webinars offered by the KOJO Institute, which is a partner of the Toronto academy, when he was substitute principal – he had just retired after 24 years in Canadian education . According to the complaint filed by the teacher and relayed in the Canadian press, during the seminar, the trainer Kike Ojo-Thompson would have insisted on the idea that there is a structural racism present in Canada – a thesis defended by the followers of the “critical theory of race”, this current of postcolonial ideas which denounces the unconscious racism of Western institutions.
According to the Daily Mail, Kike Ojo-Thompson allegedly claimed that Canada was an “even more racist country than the United States” because it has “never been accountable for its racist past towards black people”. Richard Bilkszto would then have intervened to express his disagreement with the words of the trainer (a black woman), who would have been annoyed by immediately responding: “We are here to talk about racism against blacks, but you, despite your whiteness, you think that you can tell me how things are going for black people in this country?
The principal’s complaint, filed several months after the altercation, then mentions that he wanted to start a de-escalation with his interlocutor, but one of the other participants in the seminar then told him that his remarks were “serious”. The following week, during the second session of the seminar, Kike Ojo-Thompson returned to the incident by explaining that the intervention of Richard Bilkszto “constitute (was) a concrete example of resistance, in support of white supremacism”.
These altercations would then have prevented Richard Bilkszto from continuing his work properly, and would have plunged him into a state of emotional anxiety because of which he was placed on sick leave. The charges against him were all the more difficult to receive as the man was known to have participated in inclusive programs in public education, and was a founding member of an anti-racist association, the Foundation Against Intolerance
Nevertheless, the Toronto Academy and the Canadian Minister of Education have announced that they take Richard Bilkszto’s accusations against the KOJO Institute seriously. Minister Stephen Lecce considered them “serious and disturbing”, and announced the opening of an administrative investigation, while indicating that his services will have to better control in the future the professional training provided to teachers “so that such incident does not happen again”.
The Journal de Montréal specifies that before the headmaster’s suicide, the school board of the academy had refused to take seriously the difficulties encountered by Richard Bilkszto following this seminar, and had ended up canceling his employment contract. Finally, according to the Daily Mail, the principal’s suicide prompted many Canadian teachers to call Richard Bilkszto’s lawyer to tell him of similar facts they experienced during training or anti-racism awareness campaigns.
