In the days since the suicide of Richard Bilkszto, Canada’s public square has continued down its dark path. There have been no voices coming from the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) sector within the management consulting industry expressing condemnation, regret or even concern for the abuse and harassment that drove Bilkszto to suicide. Nor have voices from within Woke civil society or its political class shown leadership in calling for a re-evaluation of the practices that destroyed his life, the workplace harassment, the social shunning, the public smearing, what the Stasi, East Germany’s feared secret police, called “Zersetzung.”
Instead, our national broadcaster is running stories suggesting that the real harm is that people are questioning the DEI sector and that people having a bad opinion of this industry is a far worse harm than an individual being tormented to death over a period of years. And state-funded activist groups have adopted the talking points developed by the first Bush presidency to defend Clarence Thomas for his sexual harassment of Anita Hill calling criticisms of the DEI trainer who repeatedly berated Bilkszto with false accusations a “lynching.”
Jonathan Kay and other Canadian critics of DEI and the Wokeness it slings are doing a good job of pointing out the ghoulish nature of a media, political class and civil society that is spending its time dancing on Bilkszto’s grave rather than looking in the mirror. In fact, as podcaster Russell Barton has suggested, it seems that the goal of these Zersetzung campaigns is, in fact, the target’s suicide.
Lost in this maelstrom is the actual dispute that led to Bilkszto’s harassment and ultimate death, an increasingly contested question for Canadians: the politics of race in Canada’s past, especially the nineteenth century. The original attack on Bilkszto took place during a session in which DEI trainer Kiki Ojo Thompson made a false historical claim, that Canada’s past was more racist than that of the United States and that Canada was implicated in and actively facilitated the practice of the chattel slavery of black people in the nineteenth century.
I grew up in a black family and many of the stories around our dinner table were not just of racially-motivated discrimination and violence our ancestors experienced in the nineteenth century but of discrimination and violence people at the table had, themselves experienced in the past and present. I would never suggest that Canada was a country free of racism at any time.
But equally important in the stories that were told around our dining room table were those of the struggle to escape slavery, segregation and inequality in America by traveling north and west. My maternal grandfather had migrated first north from Boston to Halifax and then West, to Winnipeg, Prince Albert and finally, Vancouver, to start a new life in a less racist place, without laws that singled-out black people for special persecution. Our family’s participation in the Great Migration was part our larger involvement in the freedom struggle.
My great grandfather’s people were escaped slaves who escaped from the Fugitive Slave Law onto the Sioux Reservation and then migrated across the border to Canada. Our collective memory, damaged by a lack of education, financial stability and the traditions of stable family systems, all underpinned by the legacy of slavery,
That means, unfortunately, that we do not know whether John Armstrong Howard’s people were among those spirited out of the reach of the American federal government by Harriet Tubman, one of the greatest heroes Canada has ever known.
Tubman was a key leader of a system known as the Underground Railroad, a network of safehouses throughout the United States that would hide escaped slaves help bring them to Canada. Tubman risked life and limb; she risked herself being re-enslaved by making multiple trips into slaveholding America and personally leading people like my ancestors to freedom.
The Barack Obama speech that changed the course of the 2008 US Presidential election, “Yes we can,” made reference to those courageous former slaves and abolitionists as epitomizing the fight for freedom.
But in the “narrative” offered by the DEI industry, which is populated not by historians or sociologists but by management consultants, Tubman cannot exist. Or if she existed, she was patsy, a fool, a chump leading slaves not to freedom but to an even more racist hellhole than the one they escaped. Bilkszto’s sin, fundamentally, was in asking a historical question in the implied question, “how do you explain Harriet Tubman?”
What people seem to fail to understand is that, just as genderwang’s apologists are typically selected from groups most harmed by genderwang, i.e. homosexuals and young women, the selection of racialized spokespeople for DEI functions as a smokescreen for its profoundly white supremacist ideology.
DEI’s re-narration of history, in which time is divided between the present, when the first good white people ever to have existed are heroically confronting their sinful past, and that benighted past in which all white people were evil, ignorant murderous racists. Because, the core assumption of DEI is not that gays and lesbians, racialized people, women and the working class fought for and gained freedoms but rather that one day, today, white people decided to be good and gave women and minorities their rights.
At the core of Wokeness is the assumption that white people are amoral supermen and the sole authors of history. Everyone else is a bystander or a victim, a powerless patsy or an ignorant chump. There is no room for Tubman in the DEI “narrative” because she is a black woman who made history, who freed people, who led them to a better life in the past. And, for all its own racism, its own lack of respect for democracy, Victorian Canada welcomed Tubman and applauded her work.
That is why DEI consultants are all over the various Pride months, weeks and days (in BC 71 of the 365 days in our calendar are an official celebration of one minority sexual or gender identity or another) but they are curiously silent during Black History Month because, fundamentally, the belief that black people have made history contradicts the central claim on which the Wokeness on which their industry relies is premised.
The Trudeau government has plenty of heritage money to invest in commemorating the mistreatment of racial and sexual minorities in the past, the church of Tubman attended, Canada’s first black church, founded in 1814, and from which she raised funds from Canadian abolitionists to fund her expeditions, is in danger of falling into disrepair. Designated by a simple, humble plaque, repairs are left to local congregants. Our Woke federal government does not want to draw attention to moments in the past when black and white Canadians came together to fight racism and to recognize the leadership of a black woman in that fight.
Richard Bilkszto’s suicide is an atrocity, a stain on our society. But what got him singled-out for persecution should worry us very much too: the erasure of Harriet Tubman and the heroes of the Underground Railroad from our history.
