I recently travelled to Yellowknife to visit a friend, a talented journalist of Chinese descent who reports on business issues for a major northern newspaper. Over beers and bar food, we swapped stories about our industry, which is still dominated by white faces and colonial assumptions.

A white man sitting within earshot was clearly intrigued by our chat, and asked to join in. His reaction to our experiences of otherness in newsrooms and on social media was classically Canadian: “Well, at least it’s not as bad as in the United States!” I wonder when Canadians will stop setting such a low bar for race relations, and validate local experiences of discrimination that fall short of lynching, racist slurs, and white power salutes.

Many Canadians likely can’t imagine that the racial discord currently playing out at the University of Missouri could ever happen here. Black students voiced outrage after the school’s administration ignored numerous reports of racist harassment and exclusion on campus. Graduate student Jonathan Butler launched a hunger strike, and vowed to maintain it until school president Tim Wolfe resigned over his lack of response to student complaints.

Wolfe did step down, but only after several stars of the school’s football team threatened not to play as long as he stayed on (the school’s top administrator, Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin, also resigned over the controversy). That victory for black students and their allies has come at a serious cost: enraged white students and local residents have since initiated a fierce backlash, including online death threats and overt instances of intimidation on campus.

A 19-year-old white Missouri student was arrested this week after allegedly posting on social media that he would “shoot every black person I see” on the Mizzou campus. Black students have also reportedly been taunted by whites driving around campus, some with their faces covered. Many black students have failed to report to class, and some are vowing to transfer out of the school altogether.

For those who think this cannot happen in Canada, it has, and in living memory. A documentary film entitled The Ninth Floor, which recently debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival, chronicles an eerily similar black student uprising in Montreal in 1969 at Sir George William University (now Concordia), when that school’s administration failed to respond to allegations of a professor’s racist behaviour.

When black students and their allies barricaded themselves in a computer lab to protest the school’s inaction, the building mysteriously caught on fire. Montrealers who had gathered to witness the mayhem chanted “Let the niggers burn!” Dozens of students, including current senator Anne Cools, were beaten, arrested, and charged. Many students visiting from the Caribbean were deported for their roles in the protest. The origin of the fire that endangered dozens of students’ lives is still unknown.

The thread that links these incidents is indifference to reports of racism. Just as administrators told students at Sir George Williams they were exaggerating claims of discrimination, Wolfe repeatedly ignored students who tried everything to get his attention, including those who barricaded themselves in front of his car on campus (several of those students were arrested).

Perhaps Wolfe had a hard time believing the stories of overt racism students were reporting, including allegations by the student government president that a group of students in a passing vehicle shouted racist taunts at him. Our school isn’t that bad, Wolfe may well have comforted himself — other schools are surely worse. The haters who are now openly threatening black Mizzou students were always there; they simply became emboldened by Wolfe’s indifference, and inflamed by his eventual admission of fault.

How sad, then, that Canadians routinely congratulate ourselves that black students are not being taunted and threatened with death in their own schools, as if this absence of antagonism deserves praise. What a shame that we can only acknowledge racism once it is so dangerously unleashed, but that our inclination until that point is to ignore and downplay it, as Wolfe did.

In Yellowknife, where our bar mate dismissed our personal stories of oppression, aboriginal residents experience much higher rates of poverty and poorer health outcomes than the non-Aboriginal population. I don’t imagine these residents take comfort that their living conditions are, for example, not as bad as those of people living in Syria or South Sudan. When it comes to racial disparity and discrimination, “not as bad” is never good enough.

Desmond Cole is a Toronto-based journalist. His column appears every Thursday.