They’ve been called hot spots. It’s actually ‘code’ for social inequity

2021/05/12 Leave a comment

More analysis confirming COVID-related racial and other disparities:

People who live in Toronto and Peel COVID-19 hot spots are on average nearly twice as likely to be racialized and about four times more likely to be employed in manufacturing and utilities compared to those in the regions’ other neighbourhoods, a new analysis shows. 

New research from the Gattuso Centre for Social Medicine at University Health Network also highlights how residents of these hot-spot areas are, on average, more than twice as likely to work in trades, transportation and equipment operation and also more likely to meet low-income thresholds.

While the public has heard over the past year that racialized people, those with lower-income status and essential workers are bearing a disproportionate burden of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, the analysis from the Gattuso Centre highlights at a granular level who actually lives in the neighbourhoods hardest hit by the virus, how much money they make, and what they do for a living. 

“When we talk about ‘hot spot’ postal codes, what we’re really talking about is the structural determinants of health. Social inequities and the pathologies of poverty have been driving this pandemic,” said Dr. Andrew Boozary, executive director of the Gattuso Centre. “This is further evidence that life-saving measures need to get to neighbourhoods with the highest structural risks –– this at the very least means community leadership driving vaccine rollouts and better safety measures at workplaces.”

Using Census data, the social medicine team looked at demographics in Toronto’s 13 “sprint” strategy communities deemed most at-risk and compared it with the rest of Toronto’s forward sortation areas (the first three characters in postal codes). They also compared hot spots in Toronto and Peel with the remainder of neighbourhoods in those regions, and did a similar comparison of all of Ontario’s 114 hot spots with postal codes in the rest of the province.

In virtually every case, the most at-risk neighbourhoods had, on average, higher proportions of racialized individuals, those who meet low-income measures, people who work in manufacturing and utilities, and those employed in trades, transportation and equipment operation. 

For example, M3N, which includes Jane and Finch and Black Creek, has the most manufacturing and utilities employment, the sixth-highest proportion of people who meet low-income thresholds, the eighth highest employment in trades, transportation and equipment operation, and is the 10th most racialized community out of all postal codes in Toronto and Peel.

Similarly, L6R, in northern Brampton, has the most trades, transportation and equipment-operation employment, the fourth-most manufacturing and utilities employment and is the third-most racialized postal code out of all Toronto and Peel neighbourhoods. 

The only exception the researchers found was in the Ontario-wide hot-spot comparison, in which the percentage of people who work in trades, transportation and equipment operation in hot spots was slightly lower than non-hot-spot neighbourhoods.

“That’s the thing with this data, it also really shows the disparity. It really shows that no, we haven’t all been through the same experience with COVID,” said Sané Dube, Manager, Community and Policy with Social Medicine at UHN, using the example of someone who makes over $100,000 annually, lives in downtown Toronto and can pay for their groceries to be delivered.

“That is very different from the experience from the person who is making $30,000 in a grocery store, has continued to work the whole pandemic and lives in a certain part of the neighbourhood. There’s this idea that we’ve all had the same experience in this pandemic. We haven’t. This really brings that home.”

Laura Rosella, scientific director of the Population Health Analytics Lab at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and a collaborator on the analysis, notes that hot spots are vulnerable for different reasons, which is why connections between policy-makers and the communities are so important.

“The data kind of gives you that first layer, saying we need to pay attention here. Then it’s the conversations with the community that will tell you what the solutions are,” Rosella said. “The data alone won’t tell you what the solutions are. The community will.”

Michelle Dagnino, executive director of the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre, says that while she is not surprised by the data, many people, including many who work in social services, did not realize just how many people in vulnerable areas have continued to go to work throughout the pandemic. 

“I think there was a sense that there were going to be more workplace shutdowns than there ever actually ended up being. The definition of ‘essential’ just ended up being so broad in terms of these workplaces,” she said. 

“Effectively, all of our factory workers, whether they’re manufacturing glass panes or producing clothing or whether they’re delivering factory-made goods through Amazon distribution centres, they have been open the whole time. And the consequences of that in this third wave have led us to a situation where we have seen racialized, low-income workers dying because they’ve had to continue to go to work.”

Source: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/05/11/theyve-been-called-hot-spots-its-actually-code-for-social-inequity.html

 

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

‘Pandemic of hate’: Leaders, experts warn anti-lockdown protests linked to far right

2021/05/12 Leave a comment

Of note:

Online conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and protests against public health orders are helping to spread dangerous ideas laden with racism and bigotry, says a network monitoring hate groups in Canada.

The executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network said since last year people espousing hateful beliefs have linked themselves to conspiracy and anti-lockdown movements around the novel coronavirus.

“We have two pandemics: We have the actual pandemic and then we have this pandemic of hate,” Evan Balgord said.

“Things are kind of getting worse both online and offline … with maybe one pandemic, we have kind of a solution for, but the hate thing, we don’t have a vaccine for that.

Federal New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh was the latest on Monday to note a connection between anti-mask and anti-lockdown protests and far-right extremism.

His comments came as rallies against COVID-19 health orders are being staged across the country while many provincial doctors battle a deadly third wave of the pandemic.

“To brazenly not follow public-health guidelines puts people at risk and that is something that we’ve seen with extreme right-wing ideology, ” he told reporters.

These demonstrations have been met with frustration from some in the public over what they say appears to be a lack of police enforcement, and a few premiers have promised stiffer fines for COVID-19 rule-breakers.

The far right has become adept at integrating populist grievances into its own narratives and exploiting them to enhance membership, said Barbara Perry, director of the Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism at Ontario Tech University, in a recent interview.

As a result, members of the far right have turned up at virtually all of the recent anti-lockdown gatherings, “trying to lend their support to that movement, and thereby garner support and sympathy, or solidarity, with their more extreme movement,” she said.

Mr. Balgord said such events make for “fertile hunting” for new recruits because hateful ideas are not being policed, and once someone believes in one conspiracy theory, it’s easy to believe in others.

“We now have a greatly increased number of people who are coming into close contact with racists and bigots of all stripes with more conspiracy theories,” he said.

And more than a year into the pandemic, Mr. Balgord said, organizers behind anti-lockdown protests in Vancouver, Toronto and the Prairies know figures from the country’s “racist right” are involved in their movement.

More recently, he said, some protesters have started showing up with Nazi imagery to depict themselves as being persecuted by the government.

“The racist right that we monitor and the COVID conspiracy movement are inseparable from each other at this point. We monitor them as if they are the same thing because they involve all the same people,” Mr. Balgord.

He said the network’s information is based on what it observes and the far-right figures it follows, but there is a lack of data tracking how conspiratorial thinking around COVID-19 has moved across Canada.

After Mr. Singh’s comments, Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet played down the idea of a connection between the protests and far-right extremism, saying arguments suggesting a correlation were politically motivated.

“I am absolutely certain — absolutely certain — that people which have been involved in such discussions in the last hours and days know very well that there could be no link between … two things that should not be what they are, but are not related,” he said.

The NDP leader said he sees a link between those refusing to follow public-health advice and the ideologies of the extreme right because both show a disregard for the well-being of others and put people at risk.

“There is a connection, certainly.”

Mr. Singh said declining to listen to COVID-19 health orders is dangerous and needs to be called out.

Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi earlier called such demonstrations “thinly veiled white nationalist, supremacist anti-government protests” on Global’s “The West Block.”

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-pandemic-of-hate-leaders-experts-warn-anti-lockdown-protests-linked-to/

Filed under Hate crimes, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , , , ,

Paris court tries anti-racism activist for statue attack

2021/05/12 Leave a comment

Of note. All societies and cultures have to face their histories, but in a manner that educates and improves understanding of their context and not simply dismisses historical figures without considering the times and their other contributions, good and bad:

A French activist for Black rights went on trial in Paris on Monday for defacing a statue of a historical figure from France’s colonial, slave-trading past, calling the protest a political act to denounce deep-seated racism.

Franco Lollia was on trial for spraying “state Negrophobia” in red paint on the pedestal of a statue outside parliament in Paris last June. The statue Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a 17th-century royal minister who wrote rules governing slaves in France’s overseas colonies.

Lollia told the court that, in his view, Colbert committed crimes against humanity. He said celebrating Colbert with a statue outside the National Assembly shows that the French state “is viscerally Negrophobic even today” and that the statue’s presence is “spitting in the face of all people who look like me.”

Lollia, who is Black, called the trial “an insult.”

“I am sad to see that history seems to be repeating itself and our voices are still not heard,” he said. “I am really disappointed that the justice system is still so blind.”

The trial coincided with France’s annual commemoration of the abolition of slavery. Lollia noted that the day isn’t marked with a national holiday, dismissing it as “a bone for a dog” that fails to adequately commemorate the horrors inflicted on millions of slaves.

The sweat-top and face mask that Lollia wore to the trial both had the words “Anti-Negrophobia Brigade” printed on them. Other words on the back of his T-shirt said “Negrophobia” is a “weapon of mass destruction that doesn’t admit its name” and exhorted: “Let’s arm ourselves to the hilt to fight it.”

The judge said video footage of the graffiti attack showed him hurling paint at the statue and spray-painting its base.

“It was a political act,” Lollia said.

The charge of defacing property is punishable by a fine or community service.

Lollia’s team argued that he acted in self-. His attorney Georges-Emmanuel Germany said the judge should consider France’s past as “a criminal state” in weighing Lollia’s act.

“You are not only the judge of the accused,” the attorney said. “You are also the judge of the of the victim” — meaning the French state.

Speaking outside the courtroom, Lollia said France’s colonial past is still feeding racial discrimination.

“Colbert is a major figure of this colonial past, this past where Black people were not recognized as human beings,” he said.

“The system itself is Negrophobic from the moment it doesn’t put into question the history,” he said. “France is capable of healing from its Negrophobia and from its state racism in general, but the French state must learn to face its history, and not only part of the history it likes.”

Source: Paris court tries anti-racism activist for statue attack

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Thirty years ago, he became the first Mountie to wear a turban. Here’s why he still worries about hate ‘in the shadows’

2021/05/11 Leave a comment

Good reminder of Canada coming to terms with a more open society and identities, even as the RCMP continues to face challenges in recruitment of women and visible minorities (Indigenous peoples are above their population share and labour market availability):

During a visit to Calgary in late 2019, Baltej Dhillon couldn’t resist paying a visit to Shoulder to Shoulder Militaria & Collectibles after his son-in-law told him what he’d spotted inside.

Behind a glass display case were a bunch of pins that had been produced three decades earlier, when Dhillon was caught up in a fierce national debate over whether the RCMP should allow Sikh officers — like him — to wear turbans on duty.

One pin showed an image of a turban-wearing Mountie with a cross through it and the label: “Keep the RCMP Canadian.”

Another pin showed a turban-wearing Mountie riding a camel. It was labelled: “Canada’s New Musical Ride.”

Stunned to see these “symbols of hate” still in circulation, Dhillon snatched up about $50 worth of the pins. When he went to pay for them, he says, he could sense a tinge of embarrassment from the store’s merchant.

“I am grateful to live in a country where expression is part of our freedom,” he told the Star.

“Propagating hate, however, is not.”

This month marks the 30th anniversary of when Dhillon graduated from the RCMP training academy and made history as the first Mountie to be permitted to wear a turban while on the job. Through a 2021 lens, some will find it jarring to think that such a simple thing could be a source of controversy, but the uniform policy change sparked heated discussion over the meaning of Canadian identity, as well as petitions and court challenges seeking to preserve traditional elements of the Mounties’ garb, such as the Stetson hat.

While Dhillon, of Surrey, B.C., says there’s no question attitudes have evolved over the past three decades, there remains much that has not. The Star discovered as much, recently, when it spoke to some of the people who fought against his right to wear the turban while in uniform three decades ago.

For his part, Dhillon said the continued circulation of the pins, the relatively recent debate over whether people should be allowed to wear face coverings during citizenship ceremonies and Quebec’s ban on government workers wearing religious symbols all show there’s still a lot of work to be done in “finding kindness and compassion in how we interact with each other.”

“We need to continue to be vigilant because that hatred is just in the shadows.”

In 1988, Dhillon was in his early 20s and figuring out what he wanted to do with his life.

His part-time work as an RCMP jail guard led him to apply to become a Mountie. He passed the initial application process but didn’t proceed further because he wasn’t willing to conform with the RCMP’s uniform policy, which required him to remove his turban, something he’d been wearing since he was 12.

“I’m not able to do that and cannot do that because of my commitment to my way of life and my articles of faith,” he says he told his recruiter.

Having been born and raised in Malaysia, where it was commonplace to see Sikh officers in law enforcement and armed forces, Dhillon says he had no inkling of the “great national debate” about to unfold.

In spring 1989, then-RCMP commissioner Norm Inkster recommended to the federal government a change in dress regulations to allow Mounties to wear turbans as part of their uniforms.

It sparked an outcry.

Three Calgary sisters from an RCMP family — Kay Mansbridge, Dot Miles and Gen Kantelberg — launched a petition calling for the preservation of the “distinctive heritage and tradition of the RCMP.”

“I don’t think we can give up our heritage just to pacify one religious group,” Mansbridge told the Calgary Herald at the time, adding that “chaos” would result when other minority groups demanded the right to wear their cultural garb.

The sisters insisted their petition — which gathered more than 200,000 signatures — was not fuelled by racism.

“I have friends who are East Indian,” Mansbridge told the Ottawa Citizen. “I even looked after their children.”

Meanwhile, some business owners saw potential to make money out of the controversy.

Herman Bittner of Langdon, Alta., produced a calendar containing a portrait of himself wearing a red serge, a turban and dark makeup on his face. He is identified as “Sgt. Kamell Dung” alongside the caption: “Is this Canadian, or does this make you Sikh?”

“I’m doing a job the politicians should be doing — they’re supposed to be representing the views of the majority,” he told The Canadian Press.

Two Calgary business owners — Bill Hipson and Peter Kouda — reportedly started mass producing pins that also mocked turban-wearing Mounties.

One of Kouda’s pins ended up in the collection of the Galt Museum & Archives in Lethbridge. According to the museum’s website, it depicts a Caucasian man surrounded by three visible minorities with the caption: “Who is the minority in Canada?”

As the controversy grew and respectful debate turned hateful, Dhillon said he could no longer remain the “quiet candidate.”

“I quickly realized there was a lot of ignorance and a lot of misinformation around the Sikh faith, the Sikh way of life, and there weren’t many spokespersons within the community that were able to speak to the issue from my perspective. So I took it upon myself to make myself available at that time.”

The debate found its way into the halls of Parliament in Ottawa.

“The RCMP cannot be frozen in time,” NDP MP Jim Karpoff told the House of Commons at the time. “Canada is an evolving multi-ethnic community and the RCMP should fully represent this.”

As part of the same debate, Louise Feltham, a Progressive Conservative MP from Alberta, asked: “If you make an exception for one group of people, where do you stop?”

“Today’s uniform depicts neutrality, impartiality, tradition, history and heritage. ”

But in March 1990, the government under Brian Mulroney announced it was moving forward with the dress code changes and an application form was created for Sikh officers wishing to be exempted from the standard headdress.

Dhillon graduated from the RCMP training academy in May 1991 and began working at the RCMP detachment in Quesnel, B.C.

Community reception at the time was mixed. When he walked into some bars to do sobriety checks, he was greeted as a hero. In others, he was greeted with boos.

“I would take it in stride,” he said. “I would take a bow, wave at them and make my way out. What more can you do?”

Dhillon says his staff sergeant greeted him icily on his first day on the job but when he retired a couple of years later, “He looks at me and says, ‘You’re like a son to me.’”

Meanwhile, a group of retired Mounties from Lethbridge — John Grant, Kenneth Riley and Howard Davis — along with Kay Mansbridge, filed a lawsuit seeking an order prohibiting the RCMP from allowing the wearing of religious symbols and a declaration that the commissioner’s actions were unconstitutional.

The plaintiffs, according to court records, asserted that when a religious symbol is allowed to be part of the RCMP uniform, the appearance of impartiality is undermined.

Outside the courtroom, the plaintiffs used far looser language.

“When they come over here why do they have to change it and make it the same way it is in their homeland?” Grant, one of the plaintiffs told Southam News. “Anybody that looks at it any differently in my opinion should get the hell out of Canada because they’re not good Canadians.”

The defendants argued the change in uniform policy was designed to remove a barrier to the employment of Sikhs in the RCMP and to reflect the multicultural nature of Canada.

In 1994, the Federal Court dismissed the lawsuit, concluding there was no evidence anyone had been deprived of their liberty or security by RCMP members wearing turbans, or had experienced a reasonable apprehension of bias.

The decision was upheld by the Federal Court of Appeal. The plaintiffs took the case to Canada’s highest court, which declined to hear it.

Laura Morlock, a lecturer at Ryerson University, spoke extensively with Dhillon for her PhD dissertation on religious diversity and dress at the University of Waterloo.

It’s interesting that when Dhillon started his RCMP career, he was accused of “threatening Canadian identity,” Morlock said. Now, when you do a Google image search of “Canadian multiculturalism,” Dhillon is among the results.

“Dhillon went from being an icon of threat to Canadian identity to becoming an icon of Canadian identity. ”

After taking part in high-profile investigations such as the Air India bombing and the serial killings of Robert Pickton and developing expertise as a polygraph examiner and interviewer, Dhillon retired from the force in 2019 and took on a new role as a staff sergeant with B.C.’s Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, overseeing a program that aims to reduce gun violence.

Prior to his departure, the RCMP relaxed some of its uniform and dress policies, allowing members to wear their hair in a bun, ponytail or braid, to grow out their beards and to display tattoos. They also removed the requirement that members have to seek exemptions to wear faith-based headdresses, including turbans and hijabs, a move welcomed by Dhillon.

“When you give someone an exemption, in essence what you’re saying is you’re not exactly the same as everybody else,” he said.

Another thing he has been heartened by is the number of people who come up to him during his public-speaking engagements who say they were once opposed to the uniform accommodation but have since changed their minds.

“That’s the hope — that there’s opportunity for people to grow,” he said.

Dhillon says he believes there are now a few dozen RCMP members who wear turbans across the country.

Many of the people who led the campaign opposing the RCMP’s uniform change have since passed away. The Star did, however, reach some of their surviving family members.

Mansbridge’s son, John, said the “sentiments of 30 years ago don’t necessarily match with some of the thoughts of today.”

“Some of the points that were being made back then may still be relevant, but they’re drowned out by louder voices. I don’t think any of us want to be part of that, quite frankly.”

“The courts spoke,” he added, “and I think that’s probably the end of the issue for all of us.”

Riley’s daughter, Diana, said she still feels “proud” of her father for taking a stand for something he believed in.

“The only thing I myself remember and still to this day feel very proud of is that Dad believed in something and he believed in it strong enough to take the government to court,” she said.

Her father and the others weren’t opposed to having a diverse force, she said.

“Inclusivity wasn’t the problem. It was flashing the superior garb.”

Hipson, one of the makers of the offensive pins, said he had no regrets about his actions, calling it a “fun time” and an exercise in free speech.

“That was a big highlight for me. I was doing quite well with the pins. When this controversy came, it just opened up another one. I kind of enjoyed it.”

Hipson chuckled as he recalled some of his pin designs.

“Most people were laughing at it. I guess some people took it serious.”

Asked if his position on Mounties wearing turbans had changed in 30 years, he said it hadn’t.

“I still don’t think they should get preferential treatment.”

Reid Moseley, owner of the Calgary collectibles store that Dhillon visited, said he was proud of his collection of “politically incorrect” pins.

“My business is a collectors’ paradise, so I have been told by many of my customers. It represents the true history of our country, through the exhibit and sale of physical reminders of where our country came from.”

It is “sad” that such ignorance persists, Dhillon said when informed of the comments.

“To veil the hateful pins with the thought that they somehow represent the true history of our country is irresponsible,” he said.

“They were symbols of hate in 1990 and they remain that today.”

And to suggest that the debate over the right to wear turbans in the RCMP was a “fun time” is demeaning.

Such sentiment, he said, belongs to someone who hasn’t grasped what it means to be Canadian.

Source: Thirty years ago, he became the first Mountie to wear a turban. Here’s why he still worries about hate ‘in the shadows’

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

In the fight against anti-Asian racism, advocates say federal funds a ‘good start,’ but more support needed

2021/05/11 Leave a comment

As always…:

The head of an organization tasked with combating racism in Canada says the group is building a collaborative strategy to tackle the issue, but some advocates say more government support is needed to directly address the rise of anti-Asian racism.

Mohammed Hashim, executive director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation (CRRF), said a centralized plan is needed to create real change, and that his group will consult directly with community organizations across the country to hear what supports are needed.

April’s federal budget allocated $11-million over two years to the CRRF to combat racism and empower racialized Canadians affected by racism during the pandemic. The budget document also specifies that the money can go towards establishing a “national coalition to support Asian-Canadian communities.”

Though many advocates see the funding as a positive step, some say the government is not doing enough to ensure the safety and well-being of Asian-Canadian communities.

“It’s a good start,” said Avvy Go, director of the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic, “but it’s just as important for the government to support organizations that have a more specific mandate to address anti-Asian racism as an issue.”

Amy Go, president of the Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice (CCNC-SJ), said she agrees the funding falls short. “Given that people’s lives are still being threatened – that we are still targeted, that we are being attacked and assaulted – hopefully the government would do more than just the $11-million,” she said.

A report released in March by the CCNC’s Toronto chapter and other advocacy groups found that 1,150 racist attacks against Asian-Canadians took place across Canada between March, 2020, and February, 2021, compiled from incidents reported to online platforms Fight COVID Racism and Elimin8hate. One thousand thirty-two incidents have been reported to date through Fight COVID Racism alone. Verbal harassment, targeted coughing and spitting, and physical aggression made up the majority of the incidents.

The CCNC-SJ’s Ms. Go said while the report presented a starting point for understanding anti-Asian racism during the pandemic, the incidents are underestimated because many cases go unreported. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg,” she said.

She added that the creation of a national coalition, as suggested in the budget, risks erasing the differences between Asian communities and not addressing their diverse needs and concerns. “We are not one monolith,” she said, adding that many heritages and backgrounds exist within Asian-Canadian communities.

Mr. Hashim said the CRRF’s plan is to consult with local groups across the country to understand their needs, and also empower them to do their own work. The $11-million in funding will go towards researching and developing a strategy to combat racism, with a portion also allocated to community organizations.

“A Crown corporation is not going to solve racism,” he said. “It’s going to work in collaboration with community groups, who are deeply connected to the people that they serve.”

Xiaobei Chen, a sociology professor at Carleton University, said she wants to see the government invest in public education on the existence of anti-Asian racism and rising hate crimes against Asian-Canadians during the pandemic.

“People don’t think it’s serious,” Prof. Chen said. “People don’t think that it’s something that we actually need to think about, what we can do to actually invest seriously in solving.”

Investments to combat anti-Asian racism should take many forms, CCNC-SJ president Ms. Go said, adding that money isn’t the only thing Asian communities need from the government.

“We need to think more broadly – along the lines of the systemic policies that will bring about long-term change.”

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-in-the-fight-against-anti-asian-racism-advocates-say-federal-funds-a/

Filed under Hate crimes, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

China Targets Muslim Women in Push to Suppress Births in Xinjiang

2021/05/11 Leave a comment

Good long and disturbing read. But given all the accounts of Chinese government repression, not all that surprising. Time for more public shaming of the Chinese government, no longer extending speaking invitations to Chinese diplomats and boycotting the 2022 Beijing winter Olympics:

When the government ordered women in her mostly Muslim community to be fitted with contraceptive devices, Qelbinur Sedik pleaded for an exemption. She was nearly 50 years old, she told officials in Xinjiang. She had obeyed the government’s birth limits and had only one child.

It was no use. The workers threatened to take her to the police if she continued resisting, she said. She gave in and went to a government clinic where a doctor, using metal forceps, inserted an intrauterine device to prevent pregnancy. She wept through the procedure.

“I felt like I was no longer a normal woman,” Ms. Sedik said, choking up as she described the 2017 ordeal. “Like I was missing something.”

Across much of China, the authorities are encouraging women to have more children, as they try to stave off a demographic crisisfrom a declining birthrate. But in the far western region of Xinjiang, they are forcing them to have fewer, as they tighten their grip on Muslim ethnic minorities.

It is part of a vast and repressive social re-engineering campaign by a Communist Party determined to eliminate any perceived challenge to its rule, in this case, ethnic separatism. Over the past few years, the party, under its top leader, Xi Jinping, has moved aggressively to subdue Uyghurs and other Central Asian minorities in Xinjiang, putting hundreds of thousands into internment camps and prisons. The authorities have placed the region under tight surveillance, sent residents to work in factoriesand placed children in boarding schools.

By targeting Muslim women, the authorities are going even further, attempting to orchestrate a demographic shift that will affect the population for generations. Birthrates in the region have already plunged in recent years, as the use of invasive birth control procedures has risen, findings that were previously documented by a researcher, Adrian Zenz, with The Associated Press.

While the authorities have said the procedures are voluntary, interviews with more than a dozen Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim women and men from Xinjiang, as well as a review of official statistics, government notices and reports in the state-run media, depict a coercive effort by the Chinese Communist Party to control the community’s reproductive rights. The authorities pressured women to use IUDs or get sterilized. As they recuperated at home, government officials were sent to live with them to watch for signs of discontent; one woman described having to endure her minder’s groping.

If they had too many children or refused contraceptive procedures, they faced steep fines or, worse, detention in an internment camp. In the camps, the women were at risk of even more abuse. Some former detainees say they were made to take drugs that stopped their menstrual cycles. One woman said she had been raped in a camp.

To rights advocates and Western officials, the government’s repression in Xinjiang is tantamount to crimes against humanityand genocide, in large part because of the efforts to stem the population growth of Muslim minorities. The Trump administration in January was the first government to declare the crackdown a genocide, with reproductive oppression as a leading reason; the Biden administration affirmed the label in March.

Ms. Sedik’s experience, reported in The Guardian and elsewhere, helped form the basis for the decision by the United States government. “It was one of the most detailed and compelling first-person accounts we had,” said Kelley E. Currie, a former United States ambassador who was involved in the government’s discussions. “It helped to put a face on the horrifying statistics we were seeing.”

Beijing has accused its critics of pushing an anti-China agenda. 

The recent declines in the region’s birthrates, the government has said, were the result of the authorities’ fully enforcing longstanding birth restrictions. The sterilizations and contraceptive procedures, it said, freed women from backward attitudes about procreation and religion.

“Whether to have birth control or what contraceptive method they choose are completely their own wishes,” Xu Guixiang, a Xinjiang government spokesman, said at a news conference in March. “No one nor any agency shall interfere.”

To women in Xinjiang, the orders from the government were clear: They didn’t have a choice.

Last year, a community worker in Urumqi, the regional capital, where Ms. Sedik had lived, sent messages saying women between 18 and 59 had to submit to pregnancy and birth control inspections.

“If you fight with us at the door and if you refuse to cooperate with us, you will be taken to the police station,” the worker wrote, according to screenshots of the WeChat messages that Ms. Sedik shared with The Times.

“Do not gamble with your life,” one message read, “don’t even try.”

All her life, Ms. Sedik, an ethnic Uzbek, had thought of herself as a model citizen.

After she graduated from college, she married and threw herself into her work, teaching Chinese to Uyghur elementary school students. Mindful of the rules, Ms. Sedik didn’t get pregnant until she had gotten approval from her employer. She had only one child, a daughter, in 1993.

Ms. Sedik could have had two children. The rules at the time allowed ethnic minorities to have slightly bigger families than those of the majority Han Chinese ethnic group, particularly in the countryside. The government even awarded Ms. Sedik a certificate of honor for staying within the limits.

Then, in 2017, everything changed.

As the government corralled Uyghurs and Kazakhs into mass internment camps, it moved in tandem to ramp up enforcement of birth controls. Sterilization rates in Xinjiang surged by almost sixfold from 2015 to 2018, to just over 60,000 procedures, even as they plummeted around the country, according to calculations by Mr. Zenz.

The campaign in Xinjiang is at odds with a broader push by the government since 2015 to encourage births, including by providing tax subsidies and free IUD removals. But from 2015 to 2018, Xinjiang’s share of the country’s total new IUD insertions increased, even as use of the devices fell nationwide.

The contraception campaign appeared to work.

Birthrates in minority-dominated counties in the region plummeted from 2015 to 2018, based on Mr. Zenz’s calculations. Several of these counties have stopped publishing population data, but Mr. Zenz calculated that the birthrates in minority areas probably continued to fall in 2019 by just over 50 percent from 2018, based on figures from other counties.

The sharp drop in birthrates in the region was “shocking” and clearly in part a result of the campaign to tighten enforcement of birth control policies, said Wang Feng, a professor of sociology and expert in Chinese population policies at University of California, Irvine. But other factors could include a fall in the number of women of childbearing age, later marriages and postponed births, he said.

As the government pushes back against growing criticism, it has withheld some key statistics, including annually published county-level data on birthrates and birth control use for 2019. Other official data for the region as a whole showed a steep drop in IUD insertions and sterilizations that year, though the number of sterilizations was still mostly higher than before the campaign began.

In Beijing’s depiction, the campaign is a victory for the region’s Muslim women.

“In the process of deradicalization, some women’s minds have also been liberated,” a January report by a Xinjiang government research center read. “They have avoided the pain of being trapped by extremism and being turned into reproductive tools.”

Women like Ms. Sedik, who had obeyed the rules, were not spared. After the IUD procedure, Ms. Sedik suffered from heavy bleeding and headaches. She later had the device secretly removed, then reinserted. In 2019, she decided to be sterilized.

“The government had become so strict, and I could no longer take the IUD,’” said Ms. Sedik, who now lives in the Netherlands after fleeing China in 2019. “I lost all hope in myself.”

The penalties for not obeying the government were steep. A Han Chinese woman who violated the birth regulations would face a fine, while a Uyghur or Kazakh woman wouldface possible detention.

When Gulnar Omirzakh had her third child in 2015, officials in her northern village registered the birth. But three years later, they said she had violated birth limits and owed $2,700 in fines.

Officials said they would detain Ms. Omirzakh and her two daughters if she did not pay.

She borrowed money from her relatives. Later, she fled to Kazakhstan.

“The women of Xinjiang are in danger,” Ms. Omirzakh said in a telephone interview. “The government wants to replace our people.”

The threat of detention was real.

Three women told The Times they had met other detainees in internment camps who had been locked up for violating birth restrictions.

Dina Nurdybay, a Kazakh woman, said she helped one woman write a letter to the authorities in which she blamed herself for being ignorant and having too many children.

Such accounts are corroborated by a 137-page government document leaked last year from Karakax County, in southwestern Xinjiang, which revealed that one of the most common reasons cited for detention was violating birth planning policies.

Those who refused to terminate illegal pregnancies or pay fines would be referred to the internment camps, according to one government notice from a county in Ili, unearthed by Mr. Zenz, the researcher.

Once women disappeared into the region’s internment camps — facilities operated under secrecy — many were subjected to interrogations. For some, the ordeal was worse.

Tursunay Ziyawudun was detained in a camp in Ili Prefecture for 10 months for traveling to Kazakhstan. She said that on three occasions, she was taken to a dark cell where two to three masked men raped her and used electric batons to forcibly penetrate her. 

“You become their toy,” Ms. Ziyawudun said in a telephone interview from the United States, where she now lives, as she broke down sobbing. “You just want to die at the time, but unfortunately you don’t.”

Gulbahar Jalilova, the third former detainee, said in an interview that she had been beaten in a camp and that a guard exposed himself during an interrogation and wanted her to perform oral sex.

The three former detainees, along with two others who spoke to The Times, also described being regularly forced to take unidentified pills or receive injections of medication that caused nausea and fatigue. Eventually, a few of them said, they stopped menstruating.

The former detainees’ accounts could not be independently verified because tight restrictions in Xinjiang make unfettered access to the camps impossible. The Chinese government has forcefully denied all allegations of abuse in the facilities.

“The sexual assault and torture cannot exist,” said Mr. Xu, the regional spokesman, at a news briefing in February.

Beijing has sought to undermine the credibility of the women who have spoken out, accusing them of lying and of poor morals, all while claiming to be a champion of women’s rights.

Even in their homes, the women did not feel safe. Uninvited Chinese Communist Party cadres would show up and had to be let in. 

The party sends out more than a million workers to regularly visit, and sometimes stay in, the homes of Muslims, as part of a campaign called “Pair Up and Become Family.” To many Uyghurs, the cadres were little different from spies.

The cadres were tasked with reporting on whether the families they visited showed signs of “extremist behavior.” For women, this included any resentment they might have felt about state-mandated contraceptive procedures.

When the party cadres came to stay in 2018, Zumret Dawut had just been forcibly sterilized.

Four Han cadres visited her in Urumqi, bringing yogurt and eggs to help with the recovery, she recalled. They were also armed with questions: Did she have any issues with the sterilization operation? Was she dissatisfied with the government’s policy?

“I was so scared that if I said the wrong thing they would send me back to the camps,” said Ms. Dawut, a mother of three. “So I just told them, ‘We are all Chinese people and we have to do what the Chinese law says.’”

But the officials’ unwelcome gaze settled also on Ms. Dawut’s 11-year-old daughter, she said. One cadre, a 19-year-old man who was assigned to watch the child, would sometimes call Ms. Dawut and suggest taking her daughter to his home. She was able to rebuff him with excuses that the child was sick, she said.

Other women reported having to fend off advances even in the company of their husbands.

Ms. Sedik, the Uzbek teacher, was still recovering from a sterilization procedure when her “relative” — her husband’s boss — showed up.

She was expected to cook, clean and entertain him even though she was in pain from the operation. Worse, he would ask to hold her hand or to kiss and hug her, she said.

Mostly, Ms. Sedik agreed to his requests, terrified that if she refused, he would tell the government that she was an extremist. She rejected him only once: when he asked to sleep with her.

It went on like this every month or so for two years — until she left the country.

“He would say, ‘Don’t you like me? Don’t you love me?’” she recalled. “‘If you refuse me, you are refusing the government.’”

“I felt so humiliated, oppressed and angry,” she said. “But there was nothing I could do.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/world/asia/china-xinjiang-women-births.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Filed under foreign policy Tagged with , , ,

The War on Critical Race Theory

2021/05/10 Leave a comment

Good long read (The Atlantic also, The GOP’s ‘Critical Race Theory’ Obsession)

According to the right, a specter is haunting the United States: the specter of critical race theory (CRT).

On the eve of losing the presidency, Donald Trump issued an executive order in September banning “diversity and race sensitivity training” in government agencies, including all government “spending related to any training on critical race theory.” He was prompted, apparently, by hearing an interview with conservative activist Christopher Rufo on Fox News characterizing “critical race theory programs in government” as “the cult of indoctrination.” (President Biden ended the ban as soon as he took office.) In March Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, introduced a bill seeking to ban the teaching of CRT in the military because—he charges without argument or evidence—it is “racist.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis banned CRT from being covered in Florida’s public schools for “teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other.” Republican majority lawmakers in the state of Idaho prohibited the use of state funding for student “social justice” activities of any kind at public universities and threatened to withhold funding earmarked for “social justice programming and critical race theory.” Lawmakers in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Utah are following suit.

The exact targets of critical race theory’s critics vary wildly, but it is obvious that most critics simply do not know what they are talking about.

Similar attacks are afoot abroad. In Britain a government minister declared in October that the government was “unequivocally against” the concept, even though records show that the phrase “critical race theory” had never once been uttered in the House of Commons before that time. And a British government “Race Report,” commissioned by Boris Johnson in the wake of last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, was just released amidst considerable controversy for its reductive definition of racial discrimination as nothing but the explicit invocation of skin color. For the French, criticism of a “decolonial” turn in the academy is being invoked to do the sort of political silencing that CRT has been advanced to do by conservatives in the United States and Britain. (Never mind that decolonialization—as a term, a politics, and a field of study—was around well before CRT.) President Emmanuel Macron and his ministers have castigated the importation of “certain social science theories” from “American universities” for leading to “the ethnicization of the social question,” and prominent intellectuals have denounced discussions of race. Philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff, whose earlier work tracked the history of anti-Semitism, indicts contemporary anti-racist critics of the French state as guilty of “anti-white racism.” An assistant attorney general in Australia insisted an anti-racism program should not be funded because “taxpayer funds” were being used “to promote critical race theory.”

The attacks have also made their way to my office doorstep, probably due to my small contribution to the body of scholarship to which “critical race theory” actually refers—scholarship that first emerged several decades ago, not in the last few years, as a critical response to what was then known as “critical legal studies.” When I picked up my mail a few weeks ago, I found a thick hand-addressed envelope with no return address; the contents included an eight-page-long screed denouncing CRT as “hateful fraud.” The documents are copies of resources prepared by the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York (CACAGNY), which filed an amicus brief in the failed Supreme Court case challenging what the group characterized as discrimination by Harvard University against Asian American applicants. The materials echo essays sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, which calls CRT “the new intolerance” and “the rejection of the underpinnings of Western civilization.” The materials suggest a more coordinated campaign than many seem to have realized; I am surely not the only one who received this package.

What do all these attacks add up to? The exact targets of CRT’s critics vary wildly, but it is obvious that most critics simply do not know what they are talking about. Instead, CRT functions for the right today primarily as an empty signifier for any talk of race and racism at all, a catch-all specter lumping together “multiculturalism,” “wokeism,” “anti-racism,” and “identity politics”—or indeed any suggestion that racial inequities in the United States are anything but fair outcomes, the result of choices made by equally positioned individuals in a free society. They are simply against any talk, discussion, mention, analysis, or intimation of race—except to say we shouldn’t talk about it.

section separator

Among CRT’s critics little distinction is drawn, in particular, between the academic disciplines of critical race theory and critical race studies. Critical race theory refers to a body of legal scholarship developed in the 1970s and ’80s, largely out of Harvard Law School, by the likes of Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Mari Matsuda, and Charles Lawrence, III, among others. Though varied in their views, what unites the work of these scholars is a shared sense of the importance of attending explicitly to race in legal argument, given the perpetuation of racial and other hierarchies through the structure of colorblind law instituted after the Civil Rights Act of 1965. The framework has since been taken up, expanded, and applied more generally to social discourse and practice. As a jurisprudential and social theory it is open to critique and revision, even rejection with compelling counterargument—all notably absent from the current attacks.

CRT functions for the right today primarily as a catch-all specter lumping together “multiculturalism,” “wokeism,” “anti-racism,” and “identity politics”—or indeed any suggestion that racial inequities in the United States are anything but fair outcomes.

Critical race studies, by contrast, encompass a broader, more loosely affiliated array of academic work. Some far more compelling than others, these accounts have been taken up, debated, and indeed sometimes dismissed in the expansive analysis of race and racism in and beyond the academy today. Very little holds all of these accounts together beyond taking race and racism as objects of analysis. Two radically divergent books, for example—Isabel Wilkerson’s latest bestseller, Caste, and Oliver Cromwell Cox’s classic, Caste, Class, and Race (1948)—share little in common, though both would be recognized as works in critical race studies.

In conservative accounts, the two authors most commonly cited as CRT’s principal exemplars are Ibram X. Kendi, who trained not in law but in African American Studies (he is CRT’s “New Age guru,” according to the Heritage Foundation), and Robin DiAngelo, a professor of education. Neither is a critical race theorist in the traditional legal sense, and Kendi’s popularizing of some work on race shares little with DiAngelo’s reductive account of what she calls “white fragility.” Other screeds also dismiss philosophers Angela Davis and Achille Mbembe as “scholar-activists” (as if there is something damning about the title). Of course, there is no evidence anywhere of either ever claiming anything resembling that “everyone and everything White is complicit” in racial oppression, or that “all unequal outcomes by race . . . is the result of racial oppression,” as the CACAGNY documents put it.

According to the CACAGNY screed, CRT claims that “you are only your race” and that “by your race alone you will be judged.” The theory of intersectionality—first elaborated by Crenshaw—belies the point, of course, arguing that race operates along with other key determinants of social positioning such as class, gender, disability, and so on. Nor do I know of any serious CRT scholar who would endorse the CACAGNY qualification that, in intersection “with other victimization categories” like gender, “race is always primary.” The point of intersectional analysis is that conditions and context dictate what the primary and exacerbating determinants of inequality and victimization are in specific circumstances. Indeed, one of Crenshaw’s seminal contributions to CRT scholarship specifically criticized the limitations of a “single-axis framework,” including those that focus on race to the exclusion of a supplementary “analysis of sexism.”

Another measure of the ideological dishonesty can be found in the cheapness of these screeds’ intellectual genealogies. According to CACAGNY, CRT simply substitutes “race struggle” for “class struggle” in the work of “such hate promoters as Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Schmitt, Marcuse, Foucault, and Freire.” Apparently critics cannot be bothered to imagine sources other than white men. For them there was no Frederick Douglass, no W. E. B. Du Bois, no Zora Neale Hurston, Fannie Lou Hamer, or Frantz Fanon, no Aimé Césaire, Alain Locke, or Charles Hamilton Houston, no Stokely Carmichael, Charles Hamilton, or Audre Lorde—and on and on. Their list of progenitors is instead plainly meant to conjure “neo-Marxist” bogeymen, the association with Marxism or socialism the surefire means to parodic conservative dismissal. Needless to say, I have not seen any mention, let alone analysis, of the substantive body of literature on racial capitalism and racial neoliberalism.

The conservative attacks weaponize colorblindness in an effort to neoliberalize racism—to reduce it to a matter of personal beliefs, rather than structural injustice.

A small circle of conservative outlets appears to be responsible for the bulk of the messaging. One of them is City Journal, a voice of the Manhattan Institute long committed to defending and defining the conservative and anti-anti-racist values of the day. The Heritage Foundation, decades-long coordinator of attacks on progressive critical thought, provides the cement, insisting that CRT “seeks to undermine the foundations of American society”—implicitly admitting the racism at the country’s basis. The groups Campus Reform and Turning Point USA weaponize these criticisms to spy on faculty and students across the country they take to be too liberal for the national good. Freedom of expression is cancelled for all but those shouting their agreement with them. National Review gets in on the act by publishing a dismissive review of what they take to be the founding texts of whiteness studies—three decades after those texts were published. These are contemporary extensions of the practices conducted by David Horowitz’s Freedom Center over the last couple of decades; all that is new are the terms of indictment. The critics, NGOs and politicians alike, are mobilizing the very tactics for which they excoriate CRT.

City Journal has published a growing number of articles attacking CRT, many by Rufo—a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the Discovery Institute, best known for its unstinting advocacy of intelligent design. Rufo pits a self-styled disenfranchised right against a supposedly out-of-control government set to impose dogma on the unsuspecting:

critical race theory . . . is an almost entirely government-created and government-sponsored ideology, developed in public and publicly-subsidized universities, formulated into policy by public bureaucracies, and transmitted to children in the public school system. The critical race theorists and their enablers at the New York Times and elsewhere want the right to enshrine their personal ideology as official state dogma. They prioritize the “freedom of the state” over the “freedom of the individual”—the prelude, whether deliberate or accidental, to any totalitarian system.

The ideological dishonesty is almost too obvious. Bell, Crenshaw, and others would be surprised to hear it was the government that created CRT. And the irony of the accusation of individual freedoms being sacrificed to the state will not be lost on those noting the current undertaking by these vigorous conservative efforts to impose its ideology on the state. The truth is that the only high-level coordinated campaign attempting to “enshrine” a view of CRT “as state dogma” is a dismissive one. It is the French president who has echoed Heritage Foundation publications and webinars. It is the British prime minister who has authorized a Race Report committed to downplaying racism in society along with the history and legacy of slavery. And it is conservative state governors and politicians in the United States who are acting to legislate bans.

The attacks on CRT and CRS often center examples of egregious “anti-racist” practices, attributed usually to K–12 school classrooms or student groups on university campuses. As with Rufo, decontextualized quotes and positions are often lifted from academic publications; Dinesh D’Souza honed such practices to an art in the 1990s. While many, if not all, of the targeted claims are peripheral to much of CRS and all but missing from CRT, critics attribute their occurrence to the impact, influence, or implication of CRS commitments.

It is true that anti-racism today has been turned into something of an industry. But an honest critique of CRT would take issue with its actual assumptions, logic, and conclusions.

It is true that anti-racism today has been turned into something of an industry. But “diversity training,” “racial equity,” “systemic” and “institutional” racism, and indeed “anti-racism” itself are not the inventions of CRT; all but diversity training predate it. Like “diversity” over the past decade and “multiculturalism” before that, critical race theory is being made the bag now carrying the load long critical of racism. The foolishness sometimes said and done in its name—including some genuinely wince-worthy—is being used as a sledgehammer to bash any effort to discuss and remedy racial injustice. Attempts to turn these into a manual, largely by those looking to advance personal, professional, or pecuniary standing, are doomed to ridicule, which in turn unleashes the conservative caricatures.

Critics such as Thomas Sowell, taking CRT reductively to claim that racism alone disadvantages Black people, counter that education is a major enabling factor in Black advancement. On the face of it nothing objectionable there. But in blaming Black people for lesser educational attainment, they pay no attention to deep, structurally produced inequities in public school funding. They ignore historical lack of access translating into cross-generational disadvantage. They sideline racially disproportionate class differences enabling a greater proportion of wealthier white students to receive after school tutoring and not have to work to put themselves through college. The conceptual narrowing of “racism” in the British Race Report—limiting it to the beliefs of individuals—engages in the same sleight of hand.

An honest critique of CRT would take issue with its actual assumptions, logic, and conclusions, not blame it for policies, programs, and practices—or for that matter, attributed premises and principles—it had no hand in formulating or implementing. “CRT,” a Heritage webinar asserts, collapsing the good and the bad of CRS with CRT, is “leading to cancel culture.” Not only politicians but political fundraising campaigns are using these explicit terms to advance their cause. Controlling the narrative, rather than honest critical debate about the sources and remedies of racial injustice, is defining the agenda.

section separator

What conclusions can we draw from these developments?

First, the coordinated conservative attack on CRT is largely meant to distract from the right’s own paucity of ideas. The strategy is to create a straw house to set aflame in order to draw attention away from not just its incapacity but its outright refusal to address issues of cumulative, especially racial, injustice. In a perverse misuse of Martin Luther King, Jr., colorblindness remains the touchstone of clearly uninformed conservative talking points on race. As critics such as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Patricia Williams, and myself, among many others, have long pointed out, colorblindness—the individualizing response to structural and systemic racial injustice par excellence—hides the underlying structural differences historical inequalities reproduce.

The strategy is to create a straw house to set aflame in order to draw attention away from the right’s outright refusal to address cumulative, especially racial, injustice.

Second, the conservative attack on CRT tries to rewrite history in its effort to neoliberalize racism: to reduce it to a matter of personal beliefs and interpersonal prejudice. (Even in this case, you will search in vain at The Federalist, National Review, Fox News, the Daily Caller, and Breitbart News for coverage of a recent story in which a group of white high school students “auctioned” their Black peers on Snapchat.) On this view, the structures of society bear no responsibility, only individuals. Racial inequities today are at worst the unfortunate side effect of a robust commitment to individual freedom, not the living legacy of centuries of racialized systems. The British Race Report shares with the 1776 Project this project of historical erasure. The problem is not the actual histories of slavery, racial subjugation, segregation, and inequity but, as historian David Olusoga observes, how those histories are represented, taught, and mobilized for contemporary ideological purposes. Hence the attack on work spelling out the historically produced social conditions establishing ongoing racist systems—especially the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which is explicitly dismissed as the product of CRT thinking.

Third, race has always been an attractive issue for conservatives to mobilize around. They know all too well how to use it to stoke white resentment while distracting from the depredations of conservative policies for all but the wealthy. Conservatives see their worldview under threat of being eroded; Tucker Carlson now openly alludes to the white nationalist “replacement” conspiracy theory, the fear of white people being diminished and displaced by Blacks, Latinos, and immigrants. “Whiteness,” James Baldwin wrote, is “a metaphor for power.” At a time when the power, privileges, and indeed numbers of the GOP base are under pressure, the conservative assault on CRT is only the latest effort to maintain white domination—economically, politically, and legally.

section separator

There is no simple toolkit for the critical analysis of racism. Pointers and rules of thumb may help, but they are not and never will be a substitute for mass popular organizing to create a more just world.

CRT and more nuanced work in CRS offer an invaluable resource for this work. They take seriously what the conservative attack too readily looks away from. They try to account for what it is in our culture, in the social infrastructure and institutional shaping and the order to which they give rise, that reproduces the undeniable inequality, the lived violence and trauma, that people of color experience in the United States and Europe, however variously.

At a time when the power, privileges, and indeed numbers of the GOP base are under pressure, the conservative assault on CRT is only the latest effort to maintain white domination.

Conservative critics of CRT not only have no serious response to these tragic injustices; instead they belittle the very suggestion that they ought to have one. Willed away are the lives of those they would rather not admit are fellow citizens. Heritage calls instead for a narrative of upliftment and hope. Wiping the slate of history clean, they insist that formal equality under the law—never mind how recently or imperfectly realized—vitiates any claim of enduring injustice. Whatever the unfairness of the past, this thinking goes, individuals are now free to make of their lives what they will.

If we are to learn one thing from this highly orchestrated assault on CRT, it is that this alternative narrative is not a sincere expression of hope: it is a cynical ploy to keep power and privilege in the hands of those who have always held it. Meanwhile, the outcome remains what Marvin Gaye sang about a half century ago: “Brother, brother, brother, there are far too many of you dying.”

Source: The War on Critical Race Theory

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Are the gaps in labour market outcomes between immigrants and their Canadian-born counterparts starting to close?

2021/05/10 Leave a comment

Another important and good analysis from Statistics Canada, highlighting some improvement in economic outcomes from “two step” immigrations (temporary residents transitioning to permanent residency):

Earlier studies have well documented the expanding earnings gap between new immigrant workers and their Canadian-born counterparts during the 1980s and 1990s. However, significant policy changes in immigration selection and settlement have been introduced since the early 2000s, and the employment rate and entry earnings among new immigrants have been improving in recent years.

Little research has been undertaken to examine whether the earnings gap between new immigrant and Canadian-born workers has recently started to close. This paper compares the employment rate and the weekly earnings of immigrant and Canadian-born workers throughout the 2000s and 2010s. It is based on information from the censuses from 2001 to 2016 and information from the Labour Force Survey from 2015 to 2019. Analyses are conducted for new immigrants (in Canada for 1 to 5 years), recent immigrants (in Canada for 6 to 10 years) and long-term immigrants (in Canada for over 10 years).

Over the 2000-to-2019 period, the employment rate for new and recent immigrant men grew faster than for Canadian-born men, and the relative employment position of new immigrant women also improved slightly. The earnings gap between immigrant workers and Canadian-born workers with similar sociodemographic characteristics widened between 2000 and 2015, with both years posting similar national unemployment rates.

In the late 2010s, there was some improvement in the earnings gaps for immigrant men and women relative to their Canadian-born counterparts. This improvement may be related to the rising demand for labour during these years, since relative labour market outcomes for immigrants tend to improve during expansions and to deteriorate during contractions. It may also be related, in part, to the increased tendency to select economic immigrants from the pool of temporary foreign workers. This has been shown to improve both entry earnings and longer-term earnings.

Source: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2021004/article/00004-eng.htm

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Alarm as German anti-maskers co-opt Nazi resister Sophie Scholl

2021/05/10 Leave a comment

Of note:

Sophie Scholl, the German resistance figure executed by the Nazis who was born 100 years ago on Sunday, has become an emblem of courage and a national hero for many.

But the legacy of the young woman sentenced to a brutal death for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets has recently been co-opted by Germany’s anti-lockdown movement, to the dismay of historians and the Jewish community.

At a demonstration in April, one woman had a placard featuring a picture of Sophie Scholl draped on string around her shoulders.

“The real damage is done by those millions who want to ‘survive.’ The honest men who just want to be left in peace,” it read — words famously pronounced by the resistance campaigner.

Even one of her nephews, Julian Aicher, has prominently spoken at corona skeptic demonstrations, including on a stage decorated with white roses — evoking the name of Scholl’s resistance group.

In a country where right-wing extremism is seen as the number one threat to security, and where a record number of xenophobic and anti-Semitic crimes were recorded in 2020, historians say the misappropriation of Scholl’s memory is deeply alarming.

Some also warn that democracy itself is being attacked at a time when living witnesses of World War II have dwindled significantly in numbers.

“By trivialising the Holocaust and dictatorship, these activists are endangering democracy,” said Ludwig Spaenle, Bavaria’s anti-Semitism commissioner.

– Fourth favourite German –

On February 22, 1943, Scholl and her older brother Hans, both members of a small resistance group called the White Rose, were beheaded in the Stadelheim prison in Bavaria following a summary trial.

They had been found guilty of distributing pamphlets on the grounds of Munich University, having converted to the resistance after being exposed to the horrors of the Third Reich as members of Nazi organisations in their teens.

Sophie Scholl, born on May 9, 1921, has become the most famous face of the resistance movement, with surviving photos showing her distinctive cropped hair and determined smile.

Hundreds of schools and streets now bear her name, and in 2003 she was named the nation’s fourth favourite German behind Konrad Adenauer, Martin Luther and Karl Marx.

The country’s political class also like to evoke the memory of the young biology student who stood up to the Nazis.

Annalena Baerbock, the Green party’s candidate to become Germany’s next chancellor after Angela Merkel retires in the autumn, has named Scholl as one of her “heroes”.

Carola Rackete, the former captain of the Sea-Watch 3 migrant rescue ship, has said if Scholl were still alive, she would be part of the Antifa left-wing political movement.

But at the other end of the political spectrum, the far-right AfD also claimed in 2017 that Scholl would have given them her vote.

And now the resistance campaigner’s image has been hijacked by protesters against coronavirus restrictions in Germany, who have often sought to compare themselves with victims of the Nazis.

– ‘Vaccination makes you free’ –

Some protesters have been seen wearing yellow stars similar to those Jews were forced to wear under the Nazis, carrying the words “not vaccinated”.

Others have worn concentration camp uniforms and carried placards with the words “Impfen macht frei” (“Vaccination makes you free”), a reference to the “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work makes you free”) inscription at the entrance to Auschwitz.

“I feel like Sophie Scholl, because I’ve been active in the resistance for months,” one protester told a rally against virus restrictions in Hanover in November, leading to widespread condemnation.

“Followers of conspiracy theories like to imagine themselves as victims, while demonising and delegitimising the democratic field,” Samuel Salzborn, the city of Berlin’s point man on anti-Semitism, told AFP.

According to Jens-Christian Wagner, a German historian who specialises in the Nazi era, the appropriation of Sophie Scholl by the anti-mask movement shows a loss of “historical awareness” among parts of the German population.

There are “almost no remaining witnesses” to the Nazi era, Wagner told AFP.

“They can no longer defend themselves when they are instrumentalised or when the far right rewrites history and the present by reversing guilt. It worries me,” he said.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has said it will monitor the “Querdenker” (Lateral Thinkers) movement, a particularly vocal anti-lockdown group, over concerns it poses a threat to democracy and has ties to right-wing extremism.

Source: Alarm as German anti-maskers co-opt Nazi resister Sophie Scholl

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Ottawa to create new system to tackle delays in processing immigration applications

2021/05/08 1 Comment

Needed modernization:

Ottawa says it will create a new digital platform to help process immigration applications more quickly after the COVID-19 pandemic underscored the need for a faster shift to a new system.

The federal government pledged in the 2021 budget to spend $428.9 million over the next five years to deliver the platform that would gradually replace the existing case management system.

The new platform will launch in 2023 to improve application processing and provide more support for applicants, the government said.

Alexander Cohen, a spokesman for Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino, said the new system is part of a wider shift towards digital platforms across the department and government.

“(This new) platform will ensure that our immigration system can efficiently handle the increasing number of cases,” he said. “It will reduce the use of paper applications and be simpler and easier for applicants.”

Robert Falconer, a researcher at the University of Calgary School of Public Policy, said the processing rate of permanent residency applications has been declining over the last six years.

Falconer said an analysis of government data shows that the number of received permanent residency applications was 34 per cent higher than the number of finalized applications last year.

In 2019, he said, that figure was 21 per cent.

Cohen said intake of applications has significantly increased over the past few years.

“There are just more applications than ever before and so we’re only going to process as many applications as there are spaces for in the (immigration) plan.”

The department has launched an online application portal that allows some permanent residency applicants to apply digitally, Cohen said.

While the portal will eventually expand to all permanent residency programs, it is now available to a random selection of applicants in seven programs, he said.

Falconer said there are around 120 immigration programs in Canada and close to half of them require applicants to fill out paper-based applications.

COVID-19 restrictions probably made it more challenging for immigration officers to process applications, especially paper-based applications, he said.

He said officers would have to travel to a central receiving location to pick up the applications or find a way to have them mailed securely to their homes.

Falconer added the government has recently created several new programs under the economic immigration class, including one to allow Hong Kong residents to immigrate to Canada and another to enable temporary residents including international students to apply for permanent status.

“Using the economic class as a catch-all, when there’s already a lot of paper-based applicants, I think, can put a lot more stress and confusion and complexity on economic class immigration officers,” he said.

“Each new public policy, there are going to be specific requirements there, and the more requirements we have for officers, the slower it means the applications will (be processed).”

Improving the integration between the federal immigration system with the provincial nomination systems should also be a priority, Falconer said.

“We have 10 different provinces, each with their own paper-based application processes or electronic systems,” he said.

“Alberta for a long time — my home province here — their provincial nomination system was purely paper-based. But then, in the past couple years, they decided to integrate their provincial nominee system with the Canadian federal government system.”

He said almost half of all immigrants who arrive in Canada under economic class programs come through sub-provincial programs.

“The actual larger issue here, I would say, is actually federalism, and maybe to align the provincial and federal governments on the issue of immigration,” he said.

Andrew Griffith, a former director of citizenship and multiculturalism at the Immigration Department, said it has tried to simplify the process recently by allowing more online transmission of documents.

“These changes are not that easy to implement overnight,” he said.

Griffith said Ottawa’s promise to spend close to a half billion dollars to put in place a new immigration application processing system will be an interesting one to watch because implementing big IT projects presents challenges for the government.

The department should find ways to get rid of any duplication and overlap that may exist in the current immigration system, he said.

“Do we need all those steps? Can some of these steps be automated? Can we use (artificial intelligence) to make determinations?”

Cohen said the immigration department launched in 2018 two pilot projects using computer analytics to help immigration officers triage some online visa applications.

“This computer analytics technology analyzes data and recognizes patterns in applications to help identify routine and complex cases,” he said.

“The goal is to help officers to identify applications that are routine and straightforward for thorough but faster processing, and to triage files that are more complex for a more extensive review.”

He said all decisions on every application are made by a visa officer in all cases and the department’s artificial intelligence tools are not used to render decisions.

“We’re always looking to leverage technology to improve the process for Canadians and those who wish to come here.”

Source: Ottawa to create new system to tackle delays in processing immigration applications

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →