The Trickle-Up Theory Of White Nationalist Thought : NPR

2017/08/19 2 Comments

Good analysis of some of the more educated white nationalists and how they provide the intellectual underpinnings for the more blatant antisemitism, neo-nazism and racism seen as Charlottesville:

Jared Taylor was not in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday. But Taylor, one of the leading voices for white rights in the country, says it was clear what really happened at that rally.

“Anyone who wishes to speak in the name of whites is subject to the heckler’s veto,” said Taylor, founder of the white advocacy website American Renaissance. “There would have been no violence, no problems of any kind if people had not shown up as counterdemonstrators, many of them wearing helmets, wielding batons, wearing shields, shouting for the death of the demonstrators. … This is not something that was provoked by the presence of racially conscious whites. It was something that was provoked by people who hate any white person who has a racial consciousness.”

Two days later, President Trump, in one of his most controversial press conferences to date, described the events — at which hundreds of white protesters gathered for the so-called “Unite the Right” rally and after which a white nationalist sympathizer drove his car into a crowd, killing a counterdemonstrator — in a similar way.

“Let me ask you this,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. “What about the fact that [counterdemonstrators] came charging, with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do. … You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on another side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that. But I’ll say it right now.”

Taylor is among a group of educated, white-identity advocates who, critics say, normalize the ideas of white supremacy by couching them in language that doesn’t sound overtly racist. In doing so, those critics say, people like Taylor, authors Kevin MacDonald and Peter Brimelow, and “Unite the Right” organizers Jason Kessler and Richard Spencer sanitize racist tropes to make them palatable to a broad audience, including the upper reaches of the political mainstream.

“I think that it’s true that ultimately a lot of these ideas travel all the way from the farthest fringe of the political world, ultimately to the very top in some kind of form,” said Mark Potok, former editor of Intelligence Report, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s journal monitoring extremism.

The white protesters in Charlottesville came, among other things, to contest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. They were there, Taylor said, “to pursue their destiny free of the unwanted influence of others. This is not a hateful thing.”

Some wore swastikas. Others carried torches and Confederate flags. David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, made a speech. Videos from Friday and Saturday show marchers chanting: “Jews will not replace us!” and “blood and soil,” a Nazi slogan. Later, 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr. allegedly drove a car into a crowd, killing counterdemonstrator Heather Heyer.

Taylor called Heyer’s death “a terrible, murderous act” that “no one would defend.” He said he is not associated with “Unite the Right” and didn’t agree with the decision some people made to wear swastikas. As founder of American Renaissance, which he says is among the “many websites and organizations that speak in the name of whites,” Taylor claims that there is no place for bigotry or hate in his ideology.

But the ideas that people gathered to defend over the weekend — that the United States was founded as a white, Christian nation and should remain so; that white people face an existential threat by becoming a racial minority; that there are biological differences among racial groups that make some more intelligent and others more prone to criminality — those are ideas that Taylor has been working to legitimize for decades.

“All of these characters, Peter Brimelow, Kevin MacDonald, Jared Taylor, say they’re terribly opposed to violence and, of course, would never engage in that kind of a thing,” says Potok. “Well, that’s very nice and very fine and the words are very pretty. But the reality is that these people provide the ideological foundation for people who are not so careful in what they say and do. People who are actual terrorists.”

Potok and others say that Brimelow offers such an ideological foundation with his book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, and his website, VDARE, where he says he’ll publish “anyone who has anything critical to say about immigration, environmentalists, progressives, etc.”

On Saturday, Brimelow published his own take on the events in Charlottesville, calling it a “remarkable torchlight procession.” He has published articles by fellow white-rights advocates Spencer, Kessler and MacDonald.

Marilyn Mayo of the Anti-Defamation League once described MacDonald as the country’s “foremost anti-Semite, next to David Duke.”

MacDonald is the editor-in-chief of The Occidental Observer and a former professor who left California State University, Long Beach, after coming under fire for his controversial writings. He is also one of the directors of the American Freedom Party— an anti-gay, anti-feminist political party that supports deporting any American who became a citizen after 1965.

MacDonald is celebrated among neo-Nazis for a trilogy of books he published in the 1990s that trade in some of the most pernicious stereotypes about Jewish people, all under the guise of researching their evolutionary biology.

The difference between Duke and MacDonald, Mayo said, is that Duke was largely ostracized from mainstream society for his public racism, whereas MacDonald’s work was bolstered by the credibility of his university position.

MacDonald, she says, “couches his anti-Semitic views as legitimate intellectual inquiry. That’s something that might make him more acceptable to people.”

It’s hard to put numbers on how many people Taylor, Brimelow, MacDonald and others like them reach. The Internet provides a degree of anonymity to those who visit their websites. Membership in hate groups, Potok estimates, numbers around half a million people. But include those who believe that “the United States, as well as a lot of European countries, were created ‘by and for whites and ought to return to being that,’ ” he adds, and “you’re looking at a group of several million people, if not more.”

MacDonald said the organizers of Saturday’s rally had misstepped; that the swastikas and other Nazi symbols should have been banned. “Because that stuff is never going to appeal to a wide swath of white Americans,” he said. “It’s simply not. And you’re in a political arena. You have to do what’s possible and what sells. And so you have to be very cautious about that kind of thing. And I don’t think the organizers were.”

But as for the basic message from “Unite the Right,” MacDonald was on board. The marchers on Saturday were trying to convey “that whites should be able to have their own identity and a sense of their own interests like anybody else,” he says. White people in the U.S. may not be ready to accept that message now, he adds, but they will be in the future “as whites become more and more of a minority in the coming years. So I think we’re ahead of the curve.”

On that last point, MacDonald and Potok meet.

“We’re seeing the continuing normalization of these ideas,” Potok said. “I think there is a real kind of conveyor belt we have seen develop over the last few years, and even the last few decades.”

Ideas start in a tiny radical fringe group somewhere, he explains. And then they travel to larger and more moderate groups — but still outside the political mainstream.

“And then they are picked up by the Drudges of the world, by the Breitbarts of the world, by those kinds of websites and ‘news organizations.’ And within, it seems, minutes, they will then be picked up and exploited by certain politicians … It is terribly important not only to have people like Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow providing a kind of ideological foundation, but also critically important, I think, to have people like Donald Trump, who are essentially helping to mainstream and normalize these ideas.”

Accusations that Trump has been flirting with far right ideology have dogged him since before he was elected. During the campaign, Trump repeatedly distanced himself from people espousing white nationalism. He said multiple times that he disavowed the support of Duke and other white supremacists who endorsed his presidency.

But the president has been widely criticized since Saturday — by both detractors and supporters — for his responses to the events in Charlottesville. He first condemned the violence “on many sides,” then gave a more direct rejection of racists, “including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups,” but then followed that with even more controversy.

At Tuesday’s press conference, Trump clarified what he meant by “all sides.” And it sounded remarkably similar to something MacDonald said over the phone on Monday afternoon.

Here’s MacDonald on Monday:

“I’m not from the South. I understand they have a history and a heritage, and they don’t want to just throw it all out. But that’s what we’re going to see. And it’s not going to stop with General Robert E. Lee statues. It’s going to continue with Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, all those people, because they owned slaves, they will eventually be removed, I think. It’s just the beginning.”

And here is Trump on Tuesday:

“Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue of Robert E. Lee. … So this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”

Source: The Trickle-Up Theory Of White Nationalist Thought : Code Switch : NPR

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Survey Finds Correlation Between Perception Of Discrimination, Votes For Trump : NPR

2017/08/19 Leave a comment

Overall, not terribly surprising except for the dramatic shift among Republicans over the past two years:

The recent violence in Charlottesville, Va., amplified an ongoing struggle in America about who experiences discrimination and to what extent. Many of the white nationalists who rallied in Charlottesville, for example, feel that white people are discriminated against as much as, or more than, minority groups.

Questioning others’ experience of discrimination isn’t limited to fringe protest groups. Perceptions of discrimination vary heavily across the U.S. population as a whole, as a June study from the Public Religion Research Institute showed. And those differences tend to fall along partisan lines.

 

The survey found that a plurality of Americans — 42 percent — perceive “a lot of discrimination” against three groups: black people, immigrants, and gay and lesbian people. But the partisan gap is large: Sixty-one percent of Democrats believed this of all three groups, compared to 19 percent of Republicans.

PRRI broke down the numbers by state. When the states’ perceptions of discrimination are lined up against states’ votes for Trump in 2016, it shows a clear negative correlation — places where there was bigger perception of discrimination had a lower likelihood of voting for Trump. Reliably liberal California and reliably conservative Wyoming reside at opposite ends of the spectrum.

It’s a relatively strong correlation, with an r value of -0.69 (that’s a statistical measure that tells the strength of correlation on a scale of -1 to 1 — a measure closer to 1 or -1 means a strong linear relationship, while a measure closer to zero means a weak linear relationship).

And while states that tend to perceive less of this discrimination also tend to be whiter (85 percent-white Wyoming, for example), and white people also tend to perceive less discrimination against blacks and immigrants than other racial groups do, the white share of a state’s population does not correlate to the discrimination data as well as support for Trump does. The r-value between those two series is around -0.44.

The data don’t say anything about the direction of correlation (standard journalist disclaimer: “correlation is not causation”), but it’s easy to see how this relationship might exist. Trump, after all, made opposing political correctness one of his (literal) rallying cries. Wherever 2016 voters’ attitudes about discrimination came from — whether stirred up by Trump or brought on by outside forces (or both) — he certainly took advantage of these feelings.

That said, it’s hard to separate Trump from Republicanism in general on this; a similarly strong correlation exists between this discrimination measure and a state’s share of Republican voters.

To Robert Jones, the founder and CEO of PRRI, it makes sense for perception of discrimination to be a partisan issue.

“I think that goes to a broader worldview thing of, it fits with a conservative bootstrap theory,” he said, ” ‘If you fail there’s no one to blame but yourself.’ ”

But one PRRI datapoint suggests that something shifted among Republicans between 2015 and 2017. Just two years ago, 46 percent of Republicans believed there was “a lot” of discrimination against blacks. As of this year, that figure was 32 percent. Among independents, however, that figure held steady between those two years (it went from 59 percent in 2015 to 58 in 2017), as it held relatively steady for Democrats (going from 80 to 77 percent).

And it’s not just PRRI’s data. A study on the 2016 presidential election found a “relatively strong indication that racism and sexism were more important in 2016 than they had been in previous elections.” The effects were particularly strong on the Republican side, with the impact of racism and sexism (as defined by the researchers) much stronger in 2016 voters’ choices than in 2012 or 2008, according to the survey by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and MacWilliams Sanders Communication.

Source: Survey Finds Correlation Between Perception Of Discrimination, Votes For Trump : NPR

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Laïcité: Lisée en «désaccord total» avec Coderre

2017/08/19 Leave a comment

More on Quebec Bill 62 debates:

Le maire de Montréal, Denis Coderre, tente «d’utiliser le statut de la métropole pour (se) soustraire aux lois de l’Assemblée nationale», ce qui fait craindre une «dérive malsaine», accuse le chef du Parti québécois, Jean-François Lisée.

Dans une lettre ouverte publiée sur Facebook jeudi et intitulée «Montréal fait partie du Québec», le leader péquiste reproche à M. Coderre sa sortie au sujet du projet de loi sur la neutralité religieuse de l’État, mercredi.

Le maire s’oppose à ce que législation s’applique à Montréal, plaidant que la métropole «est autonome et a sa gouvernance». Il rappelle que le gouvernement Couillard a promis d’accorder plus d’autonomie à la Ville – un projet de loi en ce sens a déjà été déposé – et de la consulter avant l’adoption de toute loi. Le projet de loi 62 risque de forcer la métropole à refuser des services aux citoyens, selon lui. Il fait allusion à la disposition visant à faire en sorte que les services publics soient donnés et reçus «à visage découvert».

Jean-François Lisée se dit «partisan d’une réelle décentralisation des pouvoirs et d’un statut pour la métropole», mais il croit que le maire va trop loin. «Je dois (…) exprimer mon désaccord total avec votre tentative d’utiliser le statut de la métropole pour vous soustraire aux lois de l’Assemblée nationale portant sur la laïcité et le vivre-ensemble. Monsieur le maire, Montréal fait partie du Québec. Les Montréalais sont membres de la nation québécoise», écrit M. Lisée, dont le parti est par ailleurs insatisfait du projet de loi 62 du gouvernement Couillard.

«Vos déclarations de cette semaine font craindre une dérive malsaine, ajoute-t-il. Souhaiterez-vous demain soustraire Montréal de certaines dispositions actuelles ou futures de la loi 101? Du Code du travail? Du Code criminel?»

Les arguments du maire sur «l’inapplicabilité» de certaines dispositions du projet de loi sont «valides», et seront soulevés par l’opposition au parlement. «Mais les décisions concernant l’avenir de la nation sont prises à l’Assemblée nationale. Montréal a droit au respect. L’Assemblée nationale aussi», soutient-il.

Le maire Coderre avait également critiqué le projet de charte des valeurs du gouvernement Marois.

Source: Laïcité: Lisée en «désaccord total» avec Coderre | Tommy Chouinard | Politique québécoise

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Proposed citizenship test guide will only mislead new Canadians: Tom Flanagan

2017/08/19 Leave a comment

Focused commentary by Flanagan on how Indigenous obligations are reflected in the current language of the draft new citizenship study guide (Discover Canada).

Surprising he did not mention the planned revision to the oath (TRC recommendation 94) that will include: “I will faithfully observe the laws of Canada including Treaties with Indigenous Peoples.”

The federal government is currently working on a revision of Discover Canada, the study guide for the test that immigrants must pass before obtaining citizenship. To judge from a recent Canadian Press story, the new manual will read like a Liberal campaign platform. Perhaps that’s not surprising, because the Liberals control the government. Maybe it’s even fair, because the Conservatives revised the manual in 2011, when they controlled the government. But it would be nice if those who are politicizing the Canadian citizenship manual would at least represent Canadian law accurately.

According to The Canadian Press, the draft revision says, “Today, Canadians, for example, can own their own homes and buy land thanks to treaties that the government negotiated.” But a moment’s reflection shows that this statement can’t be correct. Land-cession treaties have never been negotiated in the Atlantic provinces, most of Quebec, and most of British Columbia. Yet, Canadians can own homes and buy land in those provinces, just as they can in Ontario and the Prairie provinces, where land-cession treaties were signed with First Nations.

The ability of Canadians to own land and homes depends upon grants of land from the sovereign. In the English legal tradition, sovereignty includes the title to land, which the sovereign can subsequently grant to individuals or corporations. Modern Canadian sovereignty rests upon earlier French and British sovereignty, founded upon discovery, (occasional) conquest, establishment of governments able to enforce territorial boundaries and administer law and recognition by other sovereign states.

Even while recognizing Indigenous land rights, including full ownership in certain circumstances, the Supreme Court of Canada has consistently upheld Canadian sovereignty as the basis of the Constitution. Chief Justice Antonio Lamer in Van der Peet phrased this as “the reconciliation of the pre-existence of aboriginal societies with the sovereignty of the Crown.” From the beginning, French, British and Canadian sovereigns have made grants of land upon which our system of private land ownership has developed. Those grants did not depend upon prior negotiation of treaties with First Nations, otherwise there would be no private property today in much of Canada.

Ironically, private property in land does not exist on most Indigenous reserves today. That deficiency in the Indian Act is only one of the many ways in which the property rights of First Nations have been abused. But mistakes in that area do not mean the private-property rights of other Canadians depend upon treaties.

Another misleading statement in the revision is this advice to new Canadians about their legal obligations: “Obeying the law, serving on a jury, paying taxes, filling out the census and respecting treaties with Indigenous Peoples are mandatory.” But treaties were legal agreements between the Crown (advised by cabinet) and First Nations (represented by their chiefs). They imposed obligations on the Crown to set aside land and provide assistance of various types. But they don’t impose any specific obligations upon citizens other than the general obligation to obey the law, which incidentally is also imposed upon First Nations by the text of the treaties.

These wording changes, if the government follows through with them, won’t have any immediate legal effect. But we should be clear about what’s happening. In the past election campaign, the Liberals made many irredeemable promises to Indigenous voters, such as adopting the United Nations Declaration of Indigenous Rights. Now, instead of impossible legal changes, they are offering words – and words matter in the long run. As the great philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote, “Words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon with them, but they are the money of fools.” These foolish words will tend to make new Canadians, and indeed all Canadians, feel like interlopers in their own country.

Source: Proposed citizenship test guide will only mislead new Canadians – The Globe and Mail

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Obama’s viral tweet is wrong: Research shows babies are totally racist

2017/08/18 Leave a comment

The article and cited research is considerable more nuanced than the headline – babies prefer the familiar (bias) unless exposed to diversity from the beginning:

In what soon became the world’s most liked tweet, former president Barack Obama this week responded to a white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia by posting a famous quote from South African leader Nelson Mandela.

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion,” reads the quote, which is pulled from Mandela’s 1994 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom.

Two subsequent tweets then finish the quote, “people must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love. For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

The quote is a nice sentiment, but it doesn’t quite line up with science. According to a growing body of infant research, racism is often a default setting for babies. Tolerance, not racism, is what needs to be hammered into young minds.

“Parents do not teach children to be biased,” said Kang Lee, a human development researcher at the University of Toronto.

Lee said that while a racist parent can exploit a child’s innate biases, most children will organically begin to dismiss other races soon after their birth.

Mandela was correct in that no baby is born with inherent prejudices. But at around six months, the average infant will automatically begin to distrust anything that looks and sounds different than their parents.

“Because most of us are born into monoracial environments we start to show preferences for own-race individuals, and then we start to show biases,” he said.

The baby begins to associate positive things, such as happy music, with their own race. Sad music gets associated with other races. Foreign languages and accents, meanwhile, sound scary and unfamiliar.

“If they hear English, they prefer English — they don’t like people who speak French,” said Lee.

Much of Lee’s research has focused on tracking the eye movements of young children to gauge their racial preference. A June study exposed infants to images of ethnically diverse faces, and discovered that the babies spent most of their time looking at the faces that most resembled their parents.

“Caucasian infants look longer at Caucasian faces than at other-race ones,” it read, adding “when the same Caucasian and Asian faces are shown to Asian three-month-olds … they look more at the Asian faces.”

Documented in numerous other studies around the world, it’s been called the Other Race Effect, the inability of infants to distinguish the faces of ethnicities they aren’t used to.

Spontaneous outpourings of childhood racial bigotry can sometimes emerge on the first day of preschool. In a February article in Today’s Parent, a Toronto parent expressed horror that her four-year-old son stopped playing with black children and declared his sudden dislike for NHLer P.K. Subban.

“He had been obsessed with P.K. since age two. Suddenly, he refused to wear his P.K. jersey or sleep with his P.K. doll,” said the mother, whose name was not used in the story.

Another of Lee’s tests exposed seven-month-olds to a video of a human face that would gaze at different corners of the screen, after which pleasing images of animals would appear in those corners.

Across the board, babies were more likely to trust the face’s “predictions” if it matched their own race — even if the faces were wrong.

An image showing the video presented to infants, in which pictures would appear at corners of the screen in sync with the gazes of a face.

Of course, the outcomes of these kinds of tests are much different for babies who grew up around other races.

An illuminating 2006 study out of Tel-Aviv University exposed three-month-olds to a gallery of black and white faces. Caucasian Israelis favoured white faces and African Ethiopians favoured black faces. However, Israeli Ethiopian babies — who lived in predominantly white surroundings — showed no preference for either.

“Early preferences for own-race faces may contribute to race-related biases later in life,” read the study.

Lee has been trying for 10 years to gauge the implicit biases of babies from mixed-race households, but even in Toronto, Lee’s lab has not been able to recruit enough mixed-race babies to study.

Raising a child free of racism is generally a simple matter of getting the children accustomed to other races. Lee compared it to how sushi gained a hold on the North American palate.

A combo picture shows portraits of newborn Israeli babies on October 31, 2011 at the maternity ward of the Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital in Jerusalem.

Critically, said Lee, the children must never be told that the figures they’re seeing are a different race than them.

A white child should be exposed to public figures like Barack Obama, for instance, but without parents explicitly specifying that Obama is a black man.

“If you do that, you actually increase the racial biases, even if you’re talking about positive things — this is the mistake we’ve been making,” Lee said.

In a recent study, Lee and fellow researchers tested the theory on children in a Chinese preschool.

In one test, children were asked to look at non-Chinese faces and match one of the faces with a portrait they were provided.. In another, children were asked simply to sort the non-Chinese faces by “white” and “black.”

“Individuation training significantly reduced Chinese children’s implicit racial bias against Blacks and Whites, but mere exposure did not,” the study found.

South African President Nelson Mandela takes the oath 10 May 1994 during his inauguration.

Mandela’s quote was taken from a section of his autobiography that describes his inauguration following South Africa’s first free elections after decades of apartheid. Even during his 27-year imprisonment, Mandela said that he never doubted such a day would come.

“I always knew that deep down in every heart there is mercy and generosity,” he wrote.

This sentiment is indeed finding footing in science.

At Yale University’s Infant Cognition Center — run by Saskatchewan-raised researcher Karen Wynn — tests keep showing that babies are inherently moral beings who understand the difference between right and wrong.

The only trick is getting those babies to show kindness to the babies who don’t look like them.

As Paul Bloom, a collaborator with the centre wrote in a lengthy piece for The New York Times, “our initial moral sense appears to be biased toward our own kind.”

Source: Obama’s viral tweet is wrong: Research shows babies are totally racist

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BC college faculty feel pressure to ‘pass’ students with poor English | Vancouver Sun

2017/08/18 Leave a comment

Conflict between universities and colleges as a business versus maintaining standards?

Veteran college English instructors are routinely receiving passionate, imploring pleas for passing grades from the international students who increasingly fill their classes.

The foreign students’ emotion-filled emails and in-office appeals, often issued in jumbled English, invariably aim to cajole faculty at Langara College and other institutions into giving them a break, so they will be able to move on from their mandatory courses in English literature.

The foreign students often maintain their entire future depends on passing the English course.

Langara College has experienced a five-fold rise in foreign students since 2014, but two English literature and composition instructors say the college’s over-reliance on international fees is not working for many high-stressed foreign students, their anxious offshore parents or for shortchanged domestic students.

Langara College English instructors Peter Babiak and Anne Moriarty are among a small number of Canadian higher education officials who are ending their silence to raise concerns about the expanding business of international education, which now brings 130,000 foreign students to B.C., mostly Metro Vancouver.

“I do feel sorry for the (international) students, of course, but that’s not really the point. When I assign grades, presumably I need to be objective and not let emotions get in the way,” says Babiak, who has been teaching at Langara since 2002.

Like many faculty at universities and colleges, Babiak and Moriarty feel pressure to wave through the full-fee-paying foreign students, especially in mandatory first-year English literature courses, even if they lack fluency in English.

“There is a booming industry dedicated to helping students jump through English-language hoops, which teachers like me everywhere work hard to defend. Being part of this is weighing heavily on my conscience,” said Moriarty.

Langara Provost Ian Humphreys, however, said Tuesday “there is no pressure on faculty to pass students who are not yet achieving learning outcomes.”

Humphreys said he is proud that Langara “is an open access institution that serves a diverse student population – both domestic and international – that has a high proportion of English language learners.” He says the college’s grads have a strong success rate when they transfer to other institutions or the job market.

Moriarty, however, said that even though many of the foreign students work hard in their technical, business and computer courses, many also leave their mandatory English literature course to the end of their multi-year programs, knowing their English is weak.

Both Babiak and Moriarty also agonize over how classroom discussions in English literature courses are often severely restricted because of language barriers. It means, he said, students who seriously want to study novels, linguistics and composition don’t get as much high-level interaction as they could.

Source: BC college faculty feel pressure to ‘pass’ students with poor English | Vancouver Sun

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Immigration tribunal to audit long-term detention practices

2017/08/18 Leave a comment

Needed:

The Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) will conduct what it calls an independent audit of the long-term detention of non-citizens, after two court rulings in the past three weeks found detainees may be denied basic fairness.

The audit, to be completed this fall on a sample of cases from closed files, comes after Ontario Superior Court Justice Edward Morgan likened a refugee claimant’s treatment at the hands of adjudicators to that of Joseph K in Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial. The claimant was detained off and on for 17 months in a maximum-security provincial jail, even though he had done nothing wrong, the judge said in a ruling on Monday.

The IRB oversees the detention-review system, conducted by members of its Immigration Division – civil servants paid between $89,112 and $101,892, very few of whom are lawyers. More than 6,200 refugee claimants and permanent residents have been detained in fiscal year 2016-17, of whom more than 400 have been inside for more than 90 days. Reasons include being a danger to the public, of uncertain identity or a flight risk.

One of those, Ricardo Scotland, a 38-year-old single father from Barbados, went before Justice Morgan and was released on a writ of habeas corpus – a declaration that his detention was unlawful. He had been held as a flight risk and had been convicted of no crimes. At his last detention review before he asked Justice Morgan for his freedom, the Canadian government told the Immigration Division that it supported his release. But the adjudicator still refused to grant it.

Subodh Bharati, a lawyer who represented Mr. Scotland, said he welcomed the audit, but questioned how independent it would be. He said that, at a minimum, Immigration Division members need basic legal training on the principles of fundamental justice and the importance of procedural fairness.

“As Mr. Scotland’s case has clarified, there are fundamental problems that will require substantive change,” he said in an e-mail. “I hope that this audit is a starting point of more thorough overhaul which includes consultations with detainees and immigration lawyers.”

Audrey Macklin, a University of Toronto law professor, called the audit a positive and long overdue step by the IRB to initiate internal reform, after external pressure. “These [pressures] have variously exposed detention decisions as procedurally unfair, arbitrary, incompetent, unnecessary, and indifferent toward the value of liberty, the best interests of children and the needs of people with mental-health problems,” she said.

She said the audit should examine the qualifications, background and competence of Immigration Division adjudicators, “especially in relation to their capacity to understand, interpret and apply the relevant law.” It should also examine whether the adjudicators “genuinely apply the rule that the burden is on the state to justify ongoing detention, not on detainees to justify release.”

The announcement of the audit also follows a July 25 ruling by the Federal Court in Ottawa, in response to a constitutional challenge to the detention-review system brought by a Jamaican immigrant who had been in Canada since he was 8. As an adult, he amassed multiple criminal convictions and was detained for five years while Jamaica confirmed his nationality.

The Federal Court said the laws as written are not inherently flawed, but there may be shortcomings in how the Immigration Division applies them.

Justice Simon Fothergill set out several “minimum requirements” for the system, such as that the burden of showing why someone should be detained is always on the government, and that the adjudicator must always consider alternatives to detention. Also, the total time in detention should be “reasonable in all of the circumstances.”

The IRB said in a news release on Wednesday that “while recognizing that Immigration Division members make thousands of well-reasoned decisions each year, often in challenging circumstances, the gravity of these decisions – determining for example whether or not an individual will continue to be deprived of their liberty – requires the IRB to be proactive in identifying and pursuing opportunities for improvement.”

Source: Immigration tribunal to audit long-term detention practices – The Globe and Mail

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ICYMI – Dear white nationalists: It’s not unfair, this is how equality works: Balkissoon

2017/08/18 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

The idea that certain light-skinned people – currently called “white,” though a multisyllabic name like “Cvjetanovic” might not always have made the cut – deserve more than their fair share, dates back centuries.

It’s documented at least as far back as 1493, when a papal bull known as the Doctrine of Discovery decreed that any land not inhabited by Christians was open to European settlement. This was used to justify the attempted genocide of Indigenous people across the Americas, concurrent to the enslavement of millions of Africans and before the invasions of India and China, to name two places.

Along the way, we’ve all been led to believe that a slew of inequalities are equally justified, even “natural.” These hierarchies are maintained through unjust laws and untold violence, but also deep patterns of belief.

These include who is deserving of police censure versus protection: at least 155 people were arrested at protests in Ferguson, Mo., after an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was shot to death by police. The arrest total in Charlottesville, where heavily armed vigilantes converged to protest the removal of a statue, currently stands at four.

They’re also about who deserves stability, let alone power and influence: Just seven years ago, Maclean’s magazine ran a cover story titled “Too Asian,” blaming overly studious East Asian students for displacing white kids from their rightful place at Canadian universities.

Most recently, hatemongers such as U.S. President Donald Trump, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and Canada’s Breitbart-wannabe site, The Rebel, have whipped up hysteria about everything from a black U.S. president to an array of genders to female-only viewings of Wonder Woman. Having been raised to believe in their own entitlement, white people are also taught to fear those of us here to “take it away.”

This delusion has been millennia in the making. It’s rewritten history so that cruel men such as Lee and Cornwallis are venerated as heroes, while black female mathematicians who launched shuttles into space were, until very recently, erased.

Flipping that script is simply the truth, but to many white people, it feels unfair. It feels violent, and so deserving of violence.

I get it, Mr. Cvjetanovic, the undeniable structural truth of global white supremacy isn’t entirely evident in your day-to-day life. You just want to preserve what you have: respect, opportunity, money and power. The bloody spoils of an old and infectious evil.

Source: Dear white nationalists: It’s not unfair, this is how equality works – The Globe and Mail

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Neutralité religieuse: Montréal et Québec disent non | Le Devoir

2017/08/18 Leave a comment

Ongoing debates. As in the past, Quebec municipalities where most new Canadians live, have the most concerns regarding the Bill:

Les Villes de Montréal et de Québec ne veulent pas être assujetties au projet de loi sur la neutralité religieuse. Le maire Denis Coderre refuse de se faire dicter ce qu’il doit imposer à ses employés.

La ministre de la Justice, Stéphanie Vallée, a étendu la portée du projet de loi 62 en déposant un amendement à l’ouverture de son étude détaillée mardi.

L’article le plus discuté de cette pièce législative stipule que les services publics doivent être offerts ou reçus à visage découvert. Une disposition controversée qui prévoit tout de même des exceptions, puisqu’une personne peut faire une demande d’accommodement pour un motif religieux.

« Ce n’est pas le gouvernement, quel qu’il soit, qui va nous dire comment vont se vêtir nos employés, comment on va rendre nos services », a affirmé M. Coderre mercredi matin.

La métropole est concernée au premier chef, puisqu’une partie significative de sa population est immigrante. Le maire de Montréal a dit craindre que les nouvelles règles forcent la Ville à refuser des services à certains citoyens : « Quand quelqu’un qui a un niqab arrive avec ses enfants, on va lui dire : “Tu ne rentreras pas dans l’autobus ?” ou bien “On ne te donnera pas les services ?” »

L’amendement prévoit en effet que la « neutralité religieuse » doit s’étendre aux élus municipaux et aux employés des villes, ainsi qu’aux travailleurs, visiteurs ou utilisateurs des musées et des transports en commun.

Mardi, la ministre Vallée n’avait pas voulu « analyser chaque cas d’espèce ». La mise sur pied d’un comité de travail regroupant représentants du milieu de la santé, de l’éducation et des municipalités est prévue entre l’adoption de la loi et son entrée en vigueur.

Plusieurs aspects demeurent en effet « nébuleux », a quant à elle affirmé la mairesse de Longueuil, Caroline St-Hilaire.

Invitée à commenter l’assujettissement au projet de loi 62, Mme St-Hilaire a dit ne pas être en mesure d’en « cerner tous les tenants et les aboutissants », même s’il apparaît qu’il aura « des impacts significatifs sur nos institutions ».

D’accord sur certains aspects

Sur le fond de la question, le maire Coderre a réitéré qu’il est d’accord avec l’obligation pour les employés de l’État de fournir des services à visage découvert.

Quant à la Ville de Québec, elle répète qu’elle a fait connaître son désaccord sur la question de l’assujettissement à la loi. Dans une lettre adressée à la ministre Vallée en novembre 2016, le maire Régis Labeaume écrivait qu’il refuse « que l’on refile la patate chaude aux municipalités en leur demandant de faire respecter des règles qui s’avèrent inapplicables ».

L’Union des municipalités du Québec (UMQ) compte remettre ce dossier à l’ordre du jour de la prochaine réunion de son conseil d’administration. L’UMQ n’avait pas participé à la commission parlementaire l’automne dernier, préférant ne pas prendre position et s’en remettre à ses membres.

La Ville de Québec déplore en outre le fait de n’avoir été consultée qu’après la rédaction du projet de loi, de ne pas avoir pu participer à son élaboration.

Le cabinet de la ministre de la Justice affirme cependant que plusieurs échanges avec Québec et Montréal ont eu lieu, notamment des conversations entre Mme Vallée, M. Labeaume et M. Coderre.

L’amendement au projet de loi 62 a été adopté à l’unanimité par les parlementaires mardi lors de l’étude détaillée.

Source: Neutralité religieuse: Montréal et Québec disent non | Le Devoir

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The uproar about the anti-diversity memo may turn out to have been a good thing for Google – Recode

2017/08/17 Leave a comment

Good business perspective on diversity and tech by Steve Herrod, a managing director at General Catalyst:

The outpouring of emotional responses to a now-fired Google engineer’s internal memo about diversity and hiring practices can be painful to read. But contrary to what you might think, this controversy may turn out to have been a good thing for Google — and for every engineering team. I’m glad it’s calling out the myth that only coding prowess matters, and that backchannel gripes about diversity in tech are now out in the open.

I helped grow VMware’s stellar engineering team from 30 to more than 3,000, and I’m now an investor in the next generation of startups. Scaling a team is a complex, nuanced process. It requires diligence, perseverance and open discussion of ideas.

Today’s engineering teams are nothing like the old stereotype — a bunch ofloner nerd boys who grew up playing video games and tinkering with code by themselves in their parents’ basements. To build successful products, you need a diverse group of personalities: People with strong customer empathy, others who can innovate on user experience, still others with the “brown thumb” for finding bugs before they ship, and those who take pride in fixing those bugs for good. And the personalities you need to hire will change as you grow to 10, then 100, then 1,000 engineers.

No engineer works in solitude today — even a code ninja is part of a team. That’s why you also need people who can keep track of product priorities and schedules, who can make difficult trade-offs, and who have the people skills to keep team members focused on the goals and deadlines that matter. Technical teams also need people who can interface with marketing, sales, operations, human resources, customers and everyone else so that the company, as it grows bigger, stays headed in the right direction. “Soft skills” are just as critical as coding chops.

For a company to scale successfully, its engineers not only must be the best hires, they need to be given paths to develop the aforementioned skills and to grow according to their abilities and interests. And it’s up to technical management to incentivize that development and to establish the best ways to measure that growth.

You need to make moving the company forward a requirement for individual advance. You might set growth milestones for engineers to reach, including some that get them away from their screens and into more extroverted, public roles — publishing papers, giving presentations at conferences and mentoring new team members.

At VMware, we gave cash bonuses for having a paper accepted to present at a top-tier conference, just as we did for patent filing. The pure technical achievement was given the same weight as being able to clearly define and present those technical ideas to a qualified and questioning audience. We also made mentorship an explicit qualification for promotions up the technical ladder. Individual contributors are important, but those who can effectively share knowledge and help shape the skills of more junior technical staff are just as critical.

As a manager, you must send a strong signal that communication and organizational skills are equally as important as technical skills, especially as the team grows too big to all know one another. Needless to say, you must set a strong example for this balance as well. VMware created a parallel management career track alongside the technical track, and made clear there was no stigma in switching from one to the other and even back again.

Why do communication skills matter so much? Diversity of ideas is what leads to innovation. Software companies in particular — built on new abstract concepts — take pride in encouraging employees to speak their minds, even when their co-workers resent it. “Everything is up for question and debate,” Google’s SVP of People Operations, Laszlo Bock, asserted not long ago. Free-speech culture and its blowups — familiar to everyone on open source software projects — are the foundation of great software companies.

But this also requires a culture of mutual respect. The loudest complaints on both sides of the ongoing showdown share common themes: My co-workers don’t respect me. My co-workers don’t take me seriously. My co-workers enjoy saying things they know make me feel unwelcome. The challenge for leaders is to maintain openness and respect in parallel as three engineers become 30, then 300, then 3,000.

A successful team is diverse, driven, communicative, vocal … and often argumentative. Imagine a world where everyone shuts up and does their job as assigned. Where you get ahead by not rocking the boat. Where you learn to nod in agreement with the common wisdom. Where there’s never a workplace spat and “disrupt” is a slogan rather than a verb. Those are the companies that have been run off the Internet, one after another, over the past two decades.

If you want to build the next Google, you’ll need to create a company that fosters this kind of open dialogue — including complaints about the dialogue that results. The larger your company gets, the more it will matter. You’ll need to hire a broad range of people and guide them to grow together — even when they fight.

At some point, we’ll be glad everyone has stopped holding back their feelings about diversity conflicts in tech. Remember when Yahoo’s Peanut Butter Manifesto was considered a scandal? Finally we’re talking about the real issues.

Source: The uproar about the anti-diversity memo may turn out to have been a good thing for Google – Recode

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