‘It’s okay to be white’ posters seen in Saskatoon

SASKATOON Tony Kaye was in the middle of a busy afternoon on Wednesday when a sign with text printed in a font he recognized caught his eye.

He took a closer look. The poster said “It’s okay to be white.”

Earlier this week, an identical poster was taped to the University of Alberta’s Native Studies building, and in Boston, Cleveland and Maryland in the U.S.

Kaye took a photograph of the Saskatoon poster, then took it down and threw it into a nearby trash bin. He called his wife, who said it was terrible.

Someone later asked him for the photo of the sign and shared it online. He considers the posters a kind of trickery, Kaye said in an interview.

“The slogan’s appearance is part of a current, coordinated attempt by white supremacists to hijack Canada’s foundational, liberal democratic belief in equality, human rights and multiculturalism to gain support from the majority population of Canadian life who doesn’t see how structural inequalities or basic Imperial history has shaped the western world, even into our little corner in supposedly peaceful and polite Canada,” he wrote in a Facebook comment.

The “It’s okay to be white” campaign appears to have originated on the night of Oct. 27 in a discussion thread on 4chan, an image board website where most users post anonymously.

Someone there encouraged people to make “signs like this” pop up on Halloween night on college campuses around the world. University campuses seem like “alt-right gold,” the person who started the discussion thread wrote.

“We are doing this for the pure reaction from the left, to one simple statement. This will reveal them as hypocrites to all normies, in the boldest manner imaginable,” the thread reads.

“Racism is a slow-moving beast,” Kaye said, adding that in today’s world, these sorts of things tend to happen on the internet, but it was disturbing to see it brought to the real world.

“If putting it up was an act of propaganda, then “taking it down is an equal step,” he said.

“I guess I can only hope to keep doing the right thing.”

TONY KAYE This ‘It’s okay to be white’ poster was found at the corner of 20th Street W. and Second Ave. in Saskatoon. It’s part of a campaign that started on a discussion board on 4chan.