The timing of this piece is rather expressive in itself. Ten days is more than enough time to render most news items old hat.

Unless, of course, you’re Leo Groarke—who, for some reason, felt the need to weigh in on a municipal scandal some two months after the fact. On June 11th, the philosophy professor and former Trent University President decided to contribute his own two cents to the peanut gallery surrounding the mayor’s use of a racial slur in a guest lecture on March 19th.

In an opinion column in the Peterborough Examiner, Groarke submits the claim that “We need to understand the use/mention distinction of Mayor Leal’s use of the ‘N-word’.” His argument boils down to the notion that Leal was not using the word in his remarks during his guest lecture, simply mentioning it—that is, discussing the word as a thing-in-itself as opposed to actually employing its rhetorical use.

Now, there’s more than a few problems with this line of argumentation. Leo himself admits in his column that it’s a pedantic distinction, and while I think Groarke imagines this disclaimer bolsters his argument, I tend to think it does anything but.

More crucially, Groake claims that when he used the word, Leal was quoting Lyndon B. Johnson, and “the heart of the issue” (yes, he actually says that) is LBJ used the N-word, like, a LOT.

That’s self-evidently not what this is about. No one is disputing that Lyndon B. was quick to use “the Gamer Word" and that was and is a considerable stain on his complicated political legacy. 

The reason this was controversial was not because a dead guy said it in the 1950s, but because the (living) mayor of Peterborough, ON, said it to a class full of university students. Not only that, Leal was seemingly so convinced that this was a fine and normal thing to do that he didn’t bother to apologize to them for a week, and tried to avoid publicly admitting he’d done this until Arthur got our hands on a recording of him.

Groarke must know this if he reads the news. If not Arthur (we have a history) then at least the Examiner—who reported the same thing pretty much beat-for-beat. 

Of course, if Groarke reads the news he must also know that Leal wasn’t actually quoting Johnson (unless you take an extremely liberal view of what constitutes quoting). At best, the mayor was loosely paraphrasing a comment he himself admitted employed “language we would never use today,” and then shamelessly repeating it anyway.

The brilliant thing about the article in which I broke the mayor’s use of the word is that it just so happens to have the audio of him saying it embedded. You can hear the word straight from the horse’s mouth!

At no point does Leal stop to explicitly quote Johnson or directly attribute statements to him. While Leal says that “[Johnson] talked about poor n****rs and Mexicans that he taught Sunday school to,” you’ll note that he does not ever say “quote–unquote.”

Even if we take for granted the EXTREMELY charitable interpretation that Leal saying that Johnson “talked about” and then dropping a racial slur counts as equivalent to quoting him—in Groarke’s words, that “The mayor did not use it, but mentioned Johnson’s use”—it still begs the question of why he felt the need to do so.

Groarke claims that “No one should imagine that the mayor was aiming to use the word and make a derogatory, racist comment, or that he approves of Johnson’s racist attitudes,” but then WHY DID HE FEEL THE NEED TO USE IT? That word, specifically?

Need I remind you, this was in a business class. Leal’s comments, in context, have next to nothing to do with the rest of the content of his guest lecture. I should know—I’ve listened to its entirety.

Leal’s comments about LBJ come in the middle of a digression which is a strange, if otherwise glowing endorsement of the President’s political track record complete with a non-sequitur remark about the Civil Rights gains of his administration serving implicitly to exonerate his love of the N-word.

Why Leal felt the need to advance this point to a class full of second-year business students, you can search me, but even if he felt it necessary, surely he could have done so without saying the word itself?

Part of why Groarke’s article falls apart, to me, is that the word in question is so notorious for its venom that it can be referred to euphemistically without any ambiguity as to which word the euphemism refers. Groarke makes himself perfectly clear while saying “The N-word” throughout, so it stands to reason that Leal could have done the same. 

I mean, if Groarke is so intellectually committed to the position that saying the N-word is pretty much okay, why didn’t he simply spell it out in his article?

But, of course, he didn’t, because he knows better, and Leal did, because he doesn’t. 

Regardless of whether he believed it to be wrong, Leal still intentionally used the word over a lesser euphemism. Be it to eliminate a presumed ambiguity about said “language we would never use today,” or simply for dramatic effect, the mayor made the conscious decision to employ a racial epithet—knowing full well its racist connotations—and Leo Groarke thinks you’re stupid for being upset about that.

Why Groarke feels the need to relitigate the mayor’s use of the word at this moment in time is an interesting question in itself. At the beginning of his column, Groarke claims the fact that “the issues raised by our mayor’s intemperate comments to fellow councillors are coming to an end,” make it “a good time to address the issues raised by his other controversial remarks [read: saying the N-word to a class full of students].”

He is of course gesturing towards council’s deliberation of the mayor’s breach of conduct in threatening to “carve [Town Ward Councillor Alex Bierk] like a Thanksgiving turkey” (over pickleball, of all things), which is itself an interesting comparison that opens up its own can of semantic worms.

Council ultimately—if perhaps unpopularly, in the eyes of the public—decided not to discipline Leal in any way for his threats towards Bierk and subsequent alleged attempts to intimidate both Bierk and his wardmate Joy Lachica. If Groarke is drawing a comparison between that and the mayor’s racial slur usage, then what argument is he implicitly making?

Let’s put it this way: The mayor faced no consequences for threatening one of his colleagues. Groarke says that we need to understand that Leal didn’t actually use the N-word, i.e. “It wasn’t that bad actually,” ergo: is Groarke trying to say that Leal should get away with that too?

Sure, it’s a slippery slope fallacy, but that’s what happens when you bring shit pop philosophy into newspaper opinion columns. Two can very easily play that game, Leo.

The thing is, Leal seems to have gotten away with it already. He has at least done so to the degree that old caucasians feel comfortable going to bat for him in a public forum.

Leal has also ignored pretty much all criticism directed towards him about the controversy, and has declined to offer any further apology since that initial statement on April 8th. I very much doubt that he needs Groarke’s help at this point.

Which, reader, is why it’s so interesting to me that Groarke has decided to weigh in at all. I mean, why even choose to open this can of worms? Why feel the need to school us peons with his knowledge of formalist rhetoric afforded to him by his Doctorate of Philosophy?

It speaks, I think, to a certain political climate that a white man has the courage to step forward and say “Using the N-word is not racist, actually—it’s just about context,” especially when he himself qualifies the word as intrinsically racist in the same article.

There’s something about how Groarke couches his argument as a piece of friendly intellectual debate between himself and a colleague from Waterloo, who asked him “why Peterborough did not understand the use/mention distinction,” that just really gets to me. 

It’s emblematic of the biggest frustration I’ve had with this scandal after I broke the initial story in April, that being: old, white people have made it all about them. In Groarke’s, Sylvia Sutherland’s, and countless other white boomers’ defences of the mayor, the focus is consistently on Leal’s character and not his actions. 

The log line on Groarke’s article says that “Attempts to expose racism require that one provides evidence of it,” but one will note that “exposing racism,” was never the stated intent of my article, or anyone else’s reporting on this.

In that first article, never did I call Jeff Leal a racist. Never, even, did I in any way question the mayor’s character. I quoted several sources, sure—including Trent University—who explicitly called the language the mayor used racist but none said, in as many words, “Jeff Leal is a racist,” let alone “Jeff Leal is a bad person.”

The people coming to the mayor’s defence are largely arguing in bad faith, because the mayor’s character has never been the subject of litigation here. The question of whether Leal is a racist or a bad person may be worth asking in light of his actions, though they’re questions the media left largely for the public to draw their own conclusions to.

The question the media posed was whether or not Leal made use of a word we as a society recognize to be tied up in a history of racial discrimination, which is something we can demonstrably prove through audio recording that he unequivocally did.

Leal’s defenders have been gently nudging the direction of the conversation away from that fact in the weeks precipitating the news breaking, gradually eroding a discussion of provable facts into the more vague and less interesting “is Jeff Leal a good guy?” to which more than one person who’s been to a barbecue with him says “yes!”

Which, again, is not what this has ever been about. I’m sure the mayor is a very good family friend. I’m sure he was nice to you at your high school graduation party. The mayor has been nice to me as well, but that should not compromise my ability to do my job.

My job is to report the facts, and the fact is: he said it. No ifs, ands, or buts. 

You might think that makes him a racist. You might think it doesn’t. But why, must I ask, do you feel entitled to make this conversation about you? 

Why are we stuck discussing the kind of person you believe Leal to be? It’s slimy, bad faith debating, and frankly the kind of thing you should know better than to engage with if you’re—I don’t know—a tenured philosophy professor.

If we have to make this a conversation of character, and of feelings, it’s perhaps worth noting that the feelings being talked about for the last two months are largely those of white people.

My article, the one which broke the news of which word exactly the mayor used, explicitly uses the angle of student’s responses to that incident. Specifically, multiple Black students spoke to me and my colleague about their disappointment in the mayor’s actions.

Their frustration was clear, and their demands were simple: a better apology from the mayor, and a more decisive response from the university going forward. 

They didn’t really get either.

Weeks later, the Trent Central Student Association (TCSA) organized a demonstration outside of City Hall alongside the Afrocentric Awareness Network of Peterborough and Community Race Relations Committee calling for an apology and the mayor’s resignation.

Black students and community members shared their frustrations with me about their perception that the mayor refused to take responsibility, and both the university and his fellow councillors refused to hold him to account.

Protesters impressed to me the degree to which the mayor’s actions made them feel shunned within the local and university communities. These are the voices who matter in a story like this, though reading the news, you’d think that popular consensus is the mayor is a nice guy who did nothing wrong, because that is the consensus among sexagenarian Examiner columnists.

Groarke may think he’s doing us all a favour by contributing his coveted take to this discussion, injecting nuance into a debate that he explicitly claims the public has failed to properly understand, but it’s worth considering the ramifications of his actions.

He is a public figure, a professor at and former President of the university where this incident orginially occured. He may have taught some of the students who were in the class to which Leal delivered his lecture. Some of them might take his classes in the future.

What kind of example does he think it sets for his students to see him debating the semantics of the mayor using a racial slur in the Examiner? Does he think it will inspire his students? Does he think it will bolster their confidence that they are welcome at Trent?

It seems to me a supreme instance of putting one’s foot in it. 

Nobody asked for Groarke’s opinion on this, and the one he submitted only serves to reveal his own biases towards or outright ignorance to the complexity of the situation.

Why, then, did he feel the need to present it?