Bullied into suicide? How to politically use a tragedy.

Untangling the campaign to use Richard Bilkszto's suicide to end diversity training in schools.

How do you instrumentalize a suicide?

This is the question that opponents to diversity and equity training within Ontario schools are asking themselves this week as news spreads about the death of Richard Bilkszto.

Here’s how their narrative goes: Bilkszto, a retired principal who returned to work on contract, attended a mandatory diversity training in 2021 hosted by the KOJO Institute. The training leader made a comment that is objectively true, Bilkszto challenged her and what ensued, say Bilkszto’s supporters, was bullying that resulted in Bilkszto taking his own life last week.

Bilkszto made a successful appeal to the WSIB for compensation for workplace bullying related to the session and its fallout and filed a lawsuit against the Toronto District School Board for not doing enough to protect him from the implication that he was being racist in the session.

The lawsuit was never actually sent to the TDSB and his lawyer, Lisa Bildy, said that she’s working with “the family” to decide what comes next. 

Bildy and Bilkszto weren’t just a lawyer and her client though. They were also comrades in a struggle against critical race theory, so-called wokeness and the transphobic fight to ensure that girls become women and boys become men. Bildy is an advisory member of a far-right organization Orwellianly called the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism and after the training, Bilkszto became a founding member of their Toronto chapter. 

A generous reading of this situation is that two like minded individuals found each other to help one another out: Bildy with Bilkszto’s troubles with the TDSB and Bilkszto to expand Bildy’s organization in Canada. 

However, the fact that this story ends in suicide makes the generous reading impossible. Bilkszto, 60, had no kids and no partner and is survived by his mother and siblings, according to his Globe and Mail obituary. Retired, he went back to work for TDSB as many retired principals do, and, clearly, he experienced mental anguish. Did his work with the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism bring him a modicum of mental peace? Or is this the story of a man who was exploited to promote an agenda in Canada and who was ultimately pushed over the edge? 

Regardless of the answer to these questions, Bilkszto’s suicide is now political fodder. 

In the National Post, columnist Michael Higgins, a white man, uses Bilkszto’s suicide to argue this: “The suicide of former school principal Richard Bilkszto is an appalling tragedy and a warning that unless we stand up to woke, moralizing, antagonistic bullies who seek to shame Canadians then we are all complicit in such deaths.”

Unless who stands up? To whom? To bullies who dare to, “describ[e] Canada as a “bastion of white supremacy and colonialism” where capitalism and the patriarchy were killing people. Canada was more racist that the U.S.,”? This is the key offending line that Higgins identifies as being what kicked off Bilkszto’s struggles. A debatable, uncontroversial assertion that is apparently so dangerous that Higgins believes that diversity training must go? And, are we seriously supposed to believe that Higgins, sitting atop his National Post column, has ever been bullied because he believes that Canada has no white supremacy and colonialism and patriarchy? 

Conservative activist Tasha Kheiriddin, who is also white, is similarly concerned with colonization. She writes, “But is this “decolonization” and anti-racism education improving interpersonal relations between teachers and students? In B.C., nine in 10 teachers report experiencing violence or bullying on the job. The aforementioned school district in Manitoba, Louis Riel, saw a 263 per cent increase in unsafe behaviour by students last year.”

Unlike Higgins who uses Bilkszto’s suicide to argue against wokeism in schools generally, Kheiriddin uses Bilkszto’s suicide to argue that money spent on diversity workshops should instead be spent elsewhere: “Instead of hosting DEI sessions to berate their staff, school boards should redirect funds to tutoring low-income students who need extra help. They should fund food programs for kids who are hungry so they can concentrate and learn. Physical education, which has been directly correlated with improving educational scores, should increase. Self-esteem is rooted in achievement, and that should be the goal for every student.” It’s the kitchen sink approach to the issue – the money spent on diversity training should be spent on literally anything else. Not sure if Kheiriddin knows how much a diversity training runs for but I would be shocked if tutoring and food programs could be covered by the same amount. But anyway.

The Toronto Sun’s Brian Lilley, who is a white man, used the suicide to argue that it shouldn’t have taken death for workplace training into racism to be “reformed,” borrowing the word from Ontario’s Minister of Education Stephen Lecce. Though in reading the column, “reform” seems to be a euphemism for scrapped altogether. Lilley puts the term anti-Black racism into scare quotes, as if he doesn’t believe that such a thing exists. 

As someone who has a Masters of Education that was specifically focused on white supremacy, colonization and the school system, it’s wild to see these rightwing columnists use Bilkszto’s suicide as a jumping off point to question whether or not colonization and anti-Black racism in schools is a problem, or worse, whether or not it even exists. It’s especially wild (no, not wild, offensive) when we consider the intersection of the youth suicide crisis among First Nations and Inuit children and how high school participation remains unacceptably low among these youth. 

Whether its these columnists or the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, what do they stand to gain by using this suicide to question whether or not decolonization has a place within our schools? Or to promote their perspectives that schools are “too woke” or whatever?

Well, as white people with some level of power, they stand to gain a lot. The school system is  Canada’s most potent location of social control and class formation. It isn’t by accident that schools played a key role Canada’s genocide. We white people materially benefit from a school system that systemically marginalizes Black and Indigenous children and youth (and staff) because it ensures that there will always be an underclass of people to justify low paid and precarious work, high-security prisons, police officers on every corner, and so on. 

And crassly, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism stands to gain more members, more profile and critically, more donations. Another reason why I find Bildy’s dual involvement in this so disgusting.

Bilkszto should still be alive today and it’s a tragedy that he is not. But as I learned long ago, no individual is ever the singular cause of someone’s suicide. Suicide is the result of a variety of compounding factors and blaming Kike Ojo-Thompson on Bilkszto’s suicide is a vicious, racist attack on someone who was doing a job she was hired to do. Bilkszto’s reaction could have been mitigated and he could have been helped. What would have happened if the people around him helped him out rather than pushing him to use his trauma to build their organization? 

We’ll never know. But when white commentators boil the complex factors that led to someone to take their own to a single person or event, we have to ask why: why are these people doing this? To what aim? And sometimes, the answer is obvious.