Lindsay Shepherd
© Dave Abel/Toronto SunMilquetoast - the colour of evil.
Lindsay Shepherd is oppressed.

She's just not oppressed enough for some, it seems.

As the feminist SJW creed goes; being a poor fragile woman trapped in a culture of toxic masculinity entrenched by the hegemonic patriarchy, her status of perpetual victimhood is virtually assured. Yet, because she lacks so many of the other minority signifiers that would allow her to claim her rightful place atop the victim hierarchy, she has become the target of radical postmodern ideologues who inhabit the Canadian left, and who have begun spewing unabashed racism towards her on public television and social media.

What did Lindsay Shepherd do to incite such disdain and vehement vitriol from these peace-loving, inclusive and tolerant progressives?

She is Caucasian.

Her most heinous crime was being born with pale skin.

And it is precisely because she is so melaninly-challenged that, by default, her words carry no weight, her opinions have no value, her suffering is of no consequence, her very being is diminished, and her life is reduced to nothing but a pointless, pitiful exercise in undeserved middle-class privilege.

But perhaps we're getting ahead of ourselves. If you are unfamiliar with who Lindsay Shepherd is, or her particular circumstances and the ruckus she has caused, Macleans Magazine has published an in-depth article here.

In brief, Lindsay Shepherd is a teaching assistant in a first-year language course at Wilfred Laurier University in Ontario, Canada. Last month, she was called before a quasi-disciplinary committee - not unlike the Spanish Inquisition - and sternly reprimanded for showing her class a video clip of a Jordan Peterson debate regarding the use of non-standard pronouns by trans and non-binary people. It was a class about grammar, and pronouns were the subject of the day.

During her grueling 45-minute witch trial, she was harassed, bullied, intimidated, browbeaten and eventually brought to tears by her supervising professor and two other senior members of the University. These so-called professional 'superiors' accused her of being transphobic, creating a toxic climate for marginalized students, and breaking the law by being in violation of both the Canadian and Ontario Human Rights Code. All based on some anonymous student complaint, which was later revealed to never have existed at all.

Having the foresight and presence of mind to secretly record the meeting with her inquisitors, and then the courage to release the recording to the public, she was able to shine a spotlight on the dark, twisted, ideological underbelly that masquerades as education at the modern University. One of her three inquisitors, having been caught with his proletariat hands in the communal cookie jar, has since felt compelled to publicly apologize to Ms Shepherd, perhaps out of sincere contrition or perhaps for fear of rapidly becoming unemployed. Who knows?

This was followed by a written apology from the University President herself, who vowed to implement a fact-finding mission to get to the bottom of the whole sordid affair. Well, just this week the results from the inquiry came down and WLU President Deborah MacLatchy issued a statement stating that Lindsay Shepherd had been completely exonerated. Some highlights include:
There were numerous errors in judgement made in the handling of the meeting with Ms. Lindsay Shepherd, the TA of the tutorial in question. In fact, the meeting never should have happened at all. No formal complaint, nor informal concern relative to a Laurier policy, was registered about the screening of the video.
There was no wrongdoing on the part of Ms. Shepherd in showing the clip from TVO in her tutorial. Showing a TVO clip for the purposes of an academic discussion is a reasonable classroom teaching tool.
I have apologized to Ms. Shepherd publicly, as has Dr. Rambukkana, her supervising professor. The university has conveyed to her today the results of the fact-finding report, to make sure she understands it is clear that she was involved in no wrongdoing.
What is even more interesting, however, has been the overtly racist public reaction to Ms Shepherd's vindication, spurred by certain left-wing pundits, not only on social media, but also via appearances on the CBC, Canada's public broadcast channel.

The Usual Suspects

The Players
© unknownDr. Nathan Rambukkana (left), Dr. Rinaldo Walcott (centre), Vicki Mochama (right)
Dr. Nathan Rambukkana is the supervising professor of the language class in which Lindsay Shepherd was a teaching assistant at WLU. He is the gentleman whose voice can be heard on the recording and who compared the playing of professor Jordan Peterson's video clip to "a speech by Adolf Hitler." His valuable post-modernist contributions to the realm of academia include...
- Uncomfortable Bridges: The Bisexual Politics of Outing Polyamory
- Is Slash an Alternative Medium? "Queer" Heterotopias and the Role of Autonomous Media Spaces in Radical World Building
- Sex, Space and Discourse: Non/Monogamy and Intimate Privilege in the Public Sphere
- Taking the Leather Out of Leathersex: The Internet, Identity, and the Sadomasochistic Public Sphere
- From #RaceFail to #Ferguson: the digital intimacies of race-activist hashtag publics
...among others.

Christie Blatchford summed the situation up well in this story at the National Post:
As for Rambukkana's "open letter" to Shepherd, it is all I expected of a man who would invoke the spectre of Hitler to try to shut down an underling in a private meeting - craven, dissembling, revisionist.
Dr. Rinaldo Walcott is an associate professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and the director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Walcott was the Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies. Walcott's work focuses on Black studies, Canadian studies, cultural studies, queer theory, gender studies, and diaspora studies. He is 'out' as both queer and racist.

Here is his not-so-subtle tweet in response to Lindsay Shepherd's recent exoneration (notice how this tenured English professor spells the word "cries"), showing exactly how 'inclusive' he really is....


Lindsay Shepherd's response...


Dr. Jordan Peterson also weighed in...


Vicky Mochama is the national columnist for Metro News Canada where "she writes about race, gender, politics, culture and anything else she can get her brain around." She was invited onto CBC as part of a television panel to discuss important news-makers of 2017. Here is her lofty contribution when the discussion turned to the events at WLU...
"I think (Shepherd) exists," Mochama said in response to Ibbetson's choice, "But lots of people responded to her for the same reason they tend to respond ... that she is a young crying white girl."
You can watch the whole video here, starting around the 6:00 minute mark.

Lindsay Shepherd had this tweet in response...


Jordan Peterson had this to say about it...


And journalist Jonathan Kay added this...


But it was journalist Mark Bonokoski, in this Toronto Sun article, who perfectly sums up the absurdity of the situation...
There is little doubt I would be accused of all sorts of nasty things, including a racist, if I were to go on national public television and call Vicky Mochama "a young crying black girl."

So, I won't, although she is young, and she is black, and none of this should matter. Except it does in this case.

Isn't calling a young woman a "girl" also pejorative? And is all this somehow okay because Mochama is young, and black, and a "girl," and therefore such comments are acceptable coming from her?

Apparently so.
What is most disconcerting about this leftist backlash against a simple, unassuming university TA, whose only crime was to try and use a publicly-aired video clip to make her grammar class more interesting, is how hypocritical it all seems. Over and over and over again, all one hears from these social justice warrior types, is how racist everyone else is. How white-perpetrated racism against any and all 'persons of colour' is so embedded within our Western culture that it has become an integral part of their daily lived experience.

Maybe there is truth in this for some, but that's not the point, for this knife is sharp and it cuts both ways. If one truly wants to eliminate racism in the world, the first place to start is within ourselves. Examine your own thoughts. Pay close attention to your own behaviour. Identify and locate those patterns of belief that limit your own potential to be a truly whole human being. As Dr. Jordan Peterson likes to say: "sort yourself out!"

The ironic thing about being a racist is that it's not limited to just one race. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, which means that black- or brown-skinned people can be just as ignorant, just as prejudiced and just as racist as anyone else. The examples provided above are proof enough of that. When certain groups start creating imaginary monsters like the 'patriarchy' and 'white privilege', they risk alienating and making enemies out of others who might otherwise be their allies, or at the very least, probably not care much either way.

Part of the problem, it seems, is that SJWs and others of their ilk who have been indoctrinated at universities into the post-modern, neo-Marxist cult is that they need to play the race card in order to justify their own sense of helplessness, injustice and bitter resentment towards life itself. Without wholly identifying themselves as part of some marginalized group, they would be forced to take personal responsibility for their words and actions. Personal responsibility takes work, time, concentrated effort and no small amount of suffering. Why bother when one can easily become a victim and blame someone else? The path of least resistance will always be attractive to some.

If only Lindsay Shepherd were to begin identifying as a gender non-conforming transsexual Latino Buddhist with halitosis and club feet, then perhaps people like Dr. Rambukkana, Dr. Walcott, and Ms. Mochama might begin to see her as a real person whose ideas and input are valuable and above reproach.

Alas, to this day, Lindsay Shepherd remains white. She is also a female. She is also young, thin, attractive, Canadian, and happens to attend university. She is all these things and many more besides, but she cannot be, nor ever will be, completely defined by any one of these things. She has her own lived experience and has likely suffered pain and sorrow at the hands of bullies or mean people, as I'm sure everyone else in the world has too. She has also likely experienced joy and happiness with family and friends at school, work and play, just as you and I have experienced these things too.

Having true empathy for your fellow human beings with the realization that their individual experiences are unique and specific only to them, just as our experiences are wholly our own. But given that we share this world together, it is likely that what others have experienced, so too have we in a similar form. Putting oneself aside to try and really see how another person experiences life as an individual - regardless of race, gender, religion or other minority signifier that only serves to separate people into groups - is to see their true humanity. This is the only thing that can bring us together, because it is the only thing that is real.