By Don Urquhart, Times-Chronicle

Four young Oliver students are taking a firm stand against the hate-filled racist and anti-mandate rant by a woman at the Southern Okanagan Secondary School (SOSS) on Friday which has brought both messages of support and hate, including death threats.

The Times-Chronicle spoke with Tennessee, Kamryn and Kai on Sunday, all grade 12 students at the high school. They’ve chosen to only use their first names out of fear of repercussions. Their friend and fellow Grade 12 Indo-Canadian student who was the target of the racist attack is not being named because she fears for her safety and that of her family. 

The now-viral video making its way around the world has racked up over one million views in the course of just Saturday, and clearly shows the woman verbally abusing the Grade 12 students with racist comments and even calling them c**ts. 

The three have kept in close contact with their victimized friend. I ask Tennessee how her friend is doing. “She is doing . . . I don’t want to say she’s managing, I don’t want to say she’s okay because after that how can you be okay?” the 17-year old says.

“But we’re all showing her a lot of support. My whole school, the students, are showing her a lot of support but she is feeling really anxious from what she’s told me just because she doesn’t want this to affect her life.”

Kai adds that they saw her today (Sunday) and a lot of what is being communicated, including a spot on the Global television network, is being channelled through these three friends. 

“She’s been kind of speaking through us,” Kai says. “She spoke to us and told us what to say and a lot of what we said in the interview were her words restated because for us white-passing people we don’t have that big of a risk to do that, so really Kamryn, Tennessee and I have been out here using our voices and it’s really powerful I think, the amount of attention that we’ve got.”

The three friends have garnered a lot of attention, far beyond the Okanagan Valley.  Tennessee says a lot of hateful messages have come through social media, but there’s more support than hate. 

For Kai, who has 30,000 followers on TikTok, it’s a similar situation but even more sinister. 

“I posted something about it and I got hundreds of DM’s [direct messages] with death threats telling me this is not my fight to fight and I don’t know anything about it.” 

“Grown adults have told me that we’re teenagers and we don’t need to worry about it but I feel like a lot of people say that just because we’re young we don’t know as much or our efforts don’t matter as much. But I think they matter more because we are the future nobody is gonna make change for us.”

The student body has rallied en-masse around the victim and her supporters, even doing a “deep dive” to find what they believe to be the woman’s Facebook page which identifies her as living in Alberta and originally from Germany. As far as they know the woman has no connection whatsoever to the school. 

Kai says the three of them originally engaged the protesters, trying to reason with them, asking why they were protesting at a school. “We asked them ‘what do you want’ and ‘can you guys leave, you’re in front of a school, you look dumb.”

Things went south quickly, however. “They were yelling at us to take off our masks and the whole group was like ‘you’re just a bunch of sheep you’re wearing your masks take them off’ and they were making fun of us for wearing them.”

Kai adds that the woman walked up to her and spat on her shoes. “This lady came up to me and spat on my shoes and then just walked away, it was gross.” 

Kai responded by yelling at the woman and then “the people started just ganging up on us.” 

Tennessee who recorded the whole encounter on her phone says the protesters arrived 30 minutes before school ended and congregated where the younger kids in the school get picked up. “They told students to take off their masks so everyone just started fighting back,” she says. 

The young woman of colour can be seen standing up to the racist bully in the video. The bully then presses her on whether she knows how goods get into Canada via trucking. The student replies that it doesn’t matter how goods get here if the safety of the community is threatened by disregarding the mandates.

“This woman, the blonde lady was asking my friend who is Punjabi if she even had the right to live in Canada and was telling her to go back to her country.” In a bizarre twist, the woman then proceeded to tell the Indo-Canadian student that she was the one who was racist. 

“All of us started screaming as loud as we could because we were so infuriated by it and it was so enraging to experience it and she proceeded to yell in our faces and call us c**ts,” Tennessee says.

At a certain point, she feared the woman was going to become violent. “She was saying nasty things to us and at one point I actually thought she was going to get physical with us because she was so close to doing that. It was the most awful thing ever.”

“I don’t really have any words to describe it,” says Kamryn. “We’re just so aggravated at why they would come to a school and the woman came out calling my friends the ‘C’ word and said those racist things to my other friend. 

“We were all in shock it’s just so horrific and all the other protesters were like a metre away at most and half of them had a little grin and just watched and didn’t say anything,” she says with clear disgust.

“They allowed it to happen and some of the parents had little children with them so even as a parent watching a woman speak to a child like that and not say a thing . . .” she falls silent, words escaping her.

Kamryn says the other parents who were protesting (some of whom the trio know to be parents of fellow students) came to them afterwards saying the woman wasn’t with them. “It was just so aggravating,” Kamryn says. “Just because you didn’t know she was going to be there, but she’s there for the same reason you are and you allowed her to say these things.”

“By coming to the school you gave her a platform to say those things and by coming to the school you’re allowing these extremists to say those things and act that way,” she says directing her scorn on those parents. “They’re just enabling it. So you don’t get to say, ‘oh she’s not part of it she’s not with us,’ that doesn’t matter.”

Tennessee adds: “There were parents there with the protesters. I’m in Grade 12 and my friends are in Grade 12 and there were other Grade 12 students with their families watching this happen with the racist girl and they were just sitting there laughing at us. None of the protesters there removed this lady, none of them said ‘ok let’s go’, none of them stepped in and said anything,” she says incredulously.

“It just makes me so angry and so disgusted and so embarrassed for them, the fact that they gave us no support was truly disgusting.”

After the incident, the four huddled with other students to try and make sense of what happened. “We’re all standing together some were crying. I wasn’t crying but my heart was racing and we honestly just looked at each other like ‘what just happened?’

“And we just talked it out with her [the victim] and our other friends who weren’t fighting were trying to make us laugh and help us. Kamryn and I were just yelling about it, we were just so angry so it definitely took a while.”

Kai on the other hand had to get on the school bus and was so angry they were shaking.

“I was so angry that I could not control things that came out of my mouth and even now I have such a deep sense of anger that came over me I can’t even remember most of the things I said at her.”

“I’m pretty sure almost all of us were shaking especially our friend that was targeted. We were shaking it was like really shocking especially for like 2022 and in Canada which is supposed to be one of the most inclusive and kind countries.”  Kai adds that there’s no secret that racism is “very prevalent but having it happen while I was there it was very eye-opening I would say.”

For Kamryn, the anger continued at home, but at a certain point, it turned into pride. “I was extremely angry after it happened and there was a lot of yelling at my house!”

“I was ranting just getting it out on my system but right now I feel a lot of pride in my school and my friends just the way we as children spread this message and others are re-posting and we’ve gotten a hold of people in the media and I think that just shows how children are able to bring light to this.”

According to Tennessee, the school told the students that anyone who wanted to come inside the school and talk about the incident was welcome to. She adds that the Vice-Principle of SOSS followed up by text on Saturday. 

Times-Chronicle will have further coverage on this story.