Help us fight anti-Black racism at #YorkU!

The Justice for Prof. Aimé Avolonto campaign urgently needs your financial support in our fight against anti-Black racism at York University.

 

Prof. Avolonto is a Black professor in the Department of French Studies at York's Glendon College. Since 2018, he has filed four complaints at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO) regarding his experience of anti-Black racism, discrimination, harassment, and reprisal in the workplace.

Prof. Avolonto's allegations remain before the HRTO and have yet to be proven or tested.

 

In the last year, his case has become one of the most widely discussed examples of systemic anti-Black racism in Canada’s post-secondary sector. The more his case has become public, the more other cases of anti-Black racism at York University have come to light.

 

But cases like these, even in situations where complainants are willing to fight to the very end, don’t always succeed because they simply lack the resources required to win. Until now, Prof. Avolonto has single-handedly financed his legal defence.

 

By contrast, York University has been able to rely on two legal teams: York University’s in-house counsel and external counsel at McCarthy Tétrault, a high-profile law firm that York has retained since 2019. York President Rhonda Lenton and other administrators are named respondents in one of Prof. Avolonto’s human rights complaints.

 

On legal costs alone, the York administration has likely spent hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars in trying to deny that a Black professor experienced anti-Black racism at York University.

 

And all of this has been paid for with public money, at our collective expense.

 

While the administration has been able to draw on seemingly unlimited public resources, Prof. Avolonto has been paying for his own counsel at Franklin Law , a small progressive human rights and employment law firm in Toronto whose motto is “fighting injustice at work.”

 

If Prof. Avolonto’s case is going to have any chance of winning, we need to level the playing field.

 

To that end, we have taken on this urgent task of generating the resources that Prof. Avolonto’s legal team needs to win.

 

Our immediate goal is to fundraise a total of $50,000 before the end of 2021.

 

The full amount collected by this fundraiser will go to Franklin Law to cover expenses related to Prof. Avolonto’s HRTO complaints. *

 

As support builds for Prof. Avolonto's case, the York administration is attempting to prevent his human rights complaints from being heard at all. At the administration's instruction, York’s lawyers are aggressively pursuing an arbitration process they hope will have the effect of indefinitely postponing (“deferring”) all four of his complaints.

 

And as public scrutiny intensifies, the York administration has recently requested a blanket publication ban on anything related to Prof. Avolonto’s case.

 

We must not allow this cover-up to continue any further. We must ensure that the York University administration is held accountable for the years of anti-Black racism, discrimination, harassment, and reprisal that Prof. Avolonto experienced.

A win for Prof. Avolonto will be a win for everyone else at York who has made a complaint about anti-Black racism and has been silenced or faced retaliation.

 

But we need resources to win. And your support can help make the difference between a worthy case and a winning one!