Delacourt: Perry Bellegarde has some advice for non-Indigenous Canadians

2021/07/06 Leave a comment

Good and relevant reflections:

Nearly seven years ago, when Perry Bellegarde took on the top job at the Assembly of First Nations, one of his major missions was getting Indigenous people out to vote in a looming federal election in Canada. 

“Closing the gap” was the rallying cry in the lead-up to the campaign of 2015, which put Justin Trudeau and his Liberals in power. Indigenous people would only see a difference in their lives, Bellegarde and the AFN argued, if they made a difference at the ballot box in this election. Nonparticipation in Canada’s democracy — too often the practice for Indigenous people — kept them as outsiders in the nation. 

The results were impressive. On-reserve voting shot up from around 48 per cent in 2011 to more than 61 per cent in 2015. Some reserves ran out of ballots. Bellegarde says that Indigenous people alone helped “flip” more than 20 ridings across the country that year. 

Thanks in part to those efforts, Bellegarde’s years as AFN chief have run roughly parallel with those of Trudeau; the prime minister who has made Indigenous issues a bigger priority than any of his predecessors. 

Sitting in his soon-to-vacated office in Ottawa this past week, with time ticking down to the end of his long reign as AFN national chief, Bellegarde smiles at the memory of that first year after he was elected chief in December 2014. 

It’s a long way from there to the here and now, when Bellegarde is preoccupied with almost the opposite problem. In 2015, his prime concern was getting Indigenous people engaged in politics and democracy. In 2021, it’s the non-Indigenous population of Canada that he wants to get mobilized, as he and other leaders wonder how to seize a moment gripping the nation. “What’s changed is that Canadians now have opened their eyes,” Bellegarde says, reflecting on the past month of discovery — or rediscovery — of the truth about residential schools and the hundreds buried in unmarked graves around the country. 

“There’s this discourse in Canada, like people are willing to open their eyes now and have a tough conversation and see the truth in history.” 

But here is the question for Bellegarde — what exactly are non-Indigenous people being mobilized to do? Seven years ago, voting was a tangible thing he could ask people to do to close that famous gap; something real, visible and measurable on election day. 

If it is true that non-Indigenous Canadians are in a mood to do something, anything to reckon with the brutal history of residential schools, what action is Bellegarde urging them to take? 

“This is what I tell you to do,” he says. “Read the (Truth and Reconciliation) Commission’s report and get familiarized with the 94 calls to action. … Lobby! Help lobby and advocate to your member of Parliament to end the boil-water advisories, help lobby to the Pope to come to Canada, to apologize for the role of the Catholic Church. Lobby to do the research and investigation into the missing children and all the residential school sites.” 

Politely, tactfully, I ask: is that it? We talk about how this long last year of the pandemic has also been an exercise in mobilization of individuals. Fighting COVID was literally in people’s own hands, following public health measures, from wearing a mask to accepting huge limits on work and social life.

If Canada is in a moment of reconciliation, it seems that somehow there should be an equivalent call for action to citizens on individual, hands-on terms. Is it enough to ask them to lobby their governments and politicians to do something? 

Bellegarde considers the question. Yes, he says, this can work on an individual level. 

“Learn about First Nations’ culture, language, and dance, First Nations foods. You know, integration can work both ways. And so that’s something that individual people can do.” 

The chief has just returned from his home province of Saskatchewan and a Sun Dance ceremony there and his conversation is laced with the importance of connections between all of creation: between land and “two-legged” creatures (that’s we humans;) between the Earth and the stars; between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. 

His talk of unity, ironically, comes just as the AFN is closing in on the last days of the election to choose his successor, which naturally is going to divide an organization that is notoriously fractious. Bellegarde’s main advice to his successor, whomever that turns out to be among the seven candidates, is simple. “AFN has to be united,” he says.

When I ask Bellegarde what his main job has been — managing the AFN or representing it to others, he doesn’t hesitate. Serving as a spokesman, he says, as the voice of the Indigenous community is clearly the priority for anyone who wants to lead this organization that says it speaks for more than 900,000 people living in 634 First Nation communities. 

“It has to be relevant. People need to see the relevancy of the AFN in order for it to be effective. We’re an advocacy organization and you advocate for policy and legislative change. And the most important thing you influence is that federal budgeting cycle every year.” 

It’s why he also smiles when presented with the familiar criticism — not unique to him, either — that this AFN chief got too close to the federal government, whose time in office has run in parallel to his own. Bellegarde has heard that before; so did the AFN chiefs who came before him. 

“You have to be able to communicate and collaborate and have access to the policy, legislative decision makers,” he says. “If you can’t do that, what good are you as a national team? How effective are you as national chief?” 

He also stresses that he is on good terms with all the federal political party leaders; not just Trudeau or his ministers. On the coffee table in front of him is a new pamphlet: an updated version of the “Closing the Gap” manifesto of 2015, which he’s been pressing into the hands of politicos of all stripes since 2019. It’s called “Honouring Promises” and runs to 16 pages of demands that the AFN wants to see in any party’s election platform. 

The whole debate around Canada Day and whether to celebrate it was not one on which Bellegarde wanted to take a side — not because it divided the political world, but because it was one on which chiefs of the AFN were not united either. It reminds him a bit of the debate around whether to vote in 2015. Some Indigenous people argued that elections — such as the one that may come again soon in Canada — have nothing to do with their own nations and democracy within them. None of their business — part of the non-Indigenous Canada so problematic through their history. 

Bellegarde has an easy answer for that. “I embrace dual citizenship,” he says. 

As he walks around the office that will soon belong to a new chief, he points out the photographs he will soon be taking down. There he is in Paris in late 2015, posing with Barack Obama while Trudeau takes a photo. They were all there for the talks that led to the Paris agreement on climate change Catherine McKenna, the minister who resigned this week and boasted that Paris agreement as one of her earliest victories, is in the shot too, as a newly sworn-in environment minister. In another photo on the AFN’s office wall, Bellegarde is posing with former finance minister Bill Morneau, focus of much of his lobbying efforts in the early years of the Trudeau government. 

He spoke to McKenna as she was resigning this week; both of them focused on turning a page. Not coincidentally, they both said they intend to spend the summer relaxing and considering what to do next. They are, in their own ways, snapshots themselves of an earlier era of Trudeau government. 

I ask Bellegarde how he’s changed since 2015. He has to think, then says: “I’ve learned to be more patient.” 

Source: https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2021/07/04/perry-bellegarde-has-some-advice-for-non-indigenous-canadians.html?li_source=LI&li_medium=thestar_politics

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She Struggled To Reclaim Her Indigenous Name. She Hopes Others Have It Easier

2021/07/06 Leave a comment

Of interest:

For as long as she can remember, Danita Bilozaze knew that the name on her birth certificate, “Danita Loth,” didn’t reflect her Indigenous identity.

From the stories her mother recounted to her, she knew that Catholic missionaries had changed her family’s name. Her great-grandfather, a man known as Lor Bilozaze, was written into priests’ logs as “Loth Bilozaze.” Government record books in Canada ultimately dropped the “Bilozaze,” and Loth became their surname.

She never felt a connection with that name. But “Bilozaze,” which means “the makers” in her native Denesuline language, she said, is integral to the preservation of her identity and culture as a member of the Cold Lake First Nations.

“It means everything to me because it lines up with who I am,” she said. “I am an educator, I am a teacher, I am a baker, I’m an artist. I’m always, always, forever making things. So when you have something that was taken away from your family, like your birthright or your name and you have a chance to make that right for future generations, it means everything to take back what is rightfully mine.”

“Loth Bilozaze,” the name of Bilozaze’s great-grandfather, was changed to “Lor Bilozaze,” according to a photocopied document found in the Provincial Archives of Alberta. “Bilozaze” was later dropped from government records.

Provincial Archives of Alberta

Last year, the 49-year-old began an emotional and frustrating nine-month-long journey to officially change her name.

new policy that promotes name reclamation promises that those following in Bilozaze’s footsteps won’t have to face the same hurdles.

A step toward reconciliation

Earlier this month, federal officials in Canada announced a new policy process that allows Indigenous citizens to restore their names on government-issued identification, including passports, for free until May 2026.

It’s unclear how many Canadians, 5% of whom are Indigenous, will pursue name reclamation under the new policy.

Frank Deer, a research chair and associate professor in Indigenous education at the University of Manitoba, says that most First Nations tribal members have lost their original Indigenous names to history as a result of forced assimilation and poor government record-keeping.

Among native people who can’t reclaim their names because of inadequate records, Deer says there’s a growing interest in acquiring new Indigenous names that carry a meaningful connection to their communities.

“Many are actually not reclaiming a lost name,” he says. “They’re simply claiming a name.”

A history of “cultural genocide”

The new policy implements a six-year-old recommendation from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It’s known as Call to Action No. 17: An appeal to all levels of government to allow residential school survivors and their families to reclaim names changed by the residential schools.

The policy was unveiled against the backdrop of last month’s harrowing discovery of the remains of 215 Indigenous children in a mass grave at a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia.

“It was a very harsh reminder that as a country, we have to come to grips with the fact that the residential school system was something that could have and did occur in a country that prides itself on our diversity and our relationship with Indigenous peoples,” Citizenship Minister Marco Mendicino told NPR.

Between 1830 and 1998, Canadian governments and churches separated more than 150,000 native children from their parents and confined them to mandatory boarding schools. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission said the effort amounted to “cultural genocide.” There — at Indian residential schools like Blue Quills in Alberta, which Bilozaze’s grandmother attended — students were given Christian names, had their hair cut and their clothes replaced with uniforms, suffered physical and sexual abuse, and punished for speaking their own languages.

The commission estimated that over 4,000 children died while at the schools. The shocking discoveries have continued. A week after leaders of Indigenous groups said that at least 600 bodies, mostly those of children, had been found in unmarked graves outside another shuttered residential school near Grayson, Saskatchewan, 182 more human remains were found near a another former church-run school in Cranbrook, B.C.

In March 2020, Bilozaze was as immersed as ever in that history of cultural erasure. She had just completed her master’s degree in education after studying the revitalization of Indigenous languages and the reclamation of native identities. Yet when she was awarded her degree, her diploma did not reflect her roots. She wanted it changed to her Indigenous name.

She met few who understood what reconciliation should look like

Bilozaze thought the commission’s call to establish a name reclamation policy would make the process easier.

Yet, at every step she described in getting her name changed, she found ignorance around reconciliation.

“Instead of just going and doing this work, I now have to educate people along the way,” she said.

Her first step began last September with a visit to get her fingerprints taken at the federal police station near her home in Comox Valley, British Columbia. A clerk asked her to explain why the fees should be waived for her application.

So Bilozaze pulled up documents on her phone and began teaching the clerk a history lesson.

“Then I went and I sat in my car and cried,” Bilozaze said.

She would go through nine months of delays, anguish and repeating her story. Altogether, application fees can run upward of hundreds of dollars. Eventually, through petitions, she managed to get most of the charges reimbursed.

By winter, her pursuit stalled. Her certificate of name change — the document she needed in order to make revisions on official IDs — was held up at the Land Title and Survey Authority. When the document did arrive in her mailbox three months later, it appeared singed and wrinkled — rendering it void.

“At that point, I’ve got nothing to prove who I am,” she said.

So she went through the process again. She proceeded to get her land title as well as her three university degrees changed to her Indigenous name.

Then came the passport. Instead of enjoying their spring break this year, the teacher and her daughter drove the three hours from their home in Comox Valley to a passport office in Victoria to get their names changed.

That’s where she met Samantha MacPhail, a supervisor at Service Canada’s Citizen Services Branch. For the first time in the entire process, Bilozaze says she started to see things turn around. An apologetic MacPhail gave Bilozaze’s application her full attention, Bilozaze said.

Following daily updates from MacPhail, Bilozaze finally got her official passport on May 26.

A harrowing journey offers a crash course on cultural sensitivity

MacPhail worked to ensure her colleagues could learn from Bilozaze’s experience. Bilozaze’s fight to legally change her name has provided a teaching opportunity for some 1,000 employees within Service Canada as a part of workplace training programs on reconciliation.

According to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, Bilozaze is the first person in the country to have her fees waived to get her passport changed to reflect her Indigenous name. Her 15-year-old daughter, Dani, is the second.

In an email last month, MacPhail thanked Bilozaze for letting her share her story, including on a call with leaders at the national level.

“Your story has continued to move others, both to tears and to action,” MacPhail wrote. “Because of your action and your bravery, Indigenous Canadians across the country will no longer walk into our offices and be met with a non-answer.”

Bilozaze said that other people in her Comox Valley community want to legally reclaim their names. “But of course, there’s fear,” she said on June 21, Canada’s Indigenous Peoples Day. “No one wants to have to push that hard.”

She’s a reluctant poster child in the protracted pursuit of Indigenous reconciliation. As Bilozaze said she told Service Canada when asked to share her experience: “If it’s going to help people like me, definitely use my story — only if it’s going to help those that are coming behind me to do the same thing.”

Source: She Struggled To Reclaim Her Indigenous Name. She Hopes Others Have It Easier

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Nearly 200,000 Asian Americans scramble for citizenship under aging-out visa policy

2021/07/06 Leave a comment

Hard to understand why she never applied for citizenship but no reason why these cases should not have a straightforward process:

Pareen Mhatre was 4 months old when she came to the U.S. from India under her mom’s student visa. Since before she could crawl, Iowa City has been her home.

But as her 21st birthday approached, anxiety began to set in. She was about to “age out.” Under the rules of her H4 visa — which she got after her parents graduated and started working — she was only a dependent until 21. After that, she’d have to find another way to stay in the only country she’s ever known. Failing to do so would mean that what should be a happy milestone could lead to deportation.

“My immigration status has been a conductor of my life,” Mhatre told NBC Asian America. “I lived in India for four months when I was a baby. And the thought of going back is very scary for me. This is our home.”

Mhatre is among about 190,000 kids and young adults in the U.S. today for whom aging out of their families’ visas is a real concern, according to the Migration Policy Institute. There’s no clear path to citizenship and no easy route to staying, other than jumping from temporary visa to visa as their peers with permanent residency or citizenship carry on with school, work and life. Over the last few years, a coalition of 300 of these young people, 70 percent South Asian, are appealing to lawmakers to create a clear path to citizenship.

Last week, representatives from the advocacy organization Improve the Dream met with senior Biden administration officials and several members of Congress to push for executive action, new legislation and an amendment to the DREAM Act to include them. (The DREAM Act only applies to children who are undocumented.) Last week, Reps. Deborah Ross of North Carolina and Ami Bera of California, both Democrats, wrote a letter urging Biden to protect children of visa holders seeking to stay in the country.

“It’s a very simple vision that every child who grows up in the United States should have a path to citizenship,” said Dip Patel, 25, founder of Improve the Dream. “Children of long-term visa holders who grew up here and complete their education here don’t have a path to stay after aging out and face self deportation.”

One reason for the increased pressure on this issue right now is the coming of age of the children who arrived with their parents from India in the 1980s and ’90s. This swell of immigration came as non-European migrants began to take jobs in the U.S. and move with their families under the 1965 Immigration Act, said Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications at the Migration Policy Institute. From 1980 to 2019, the population of Indians in the United States grew 13-fold.

In school at the University of Iowa on the pre-med track, Mhatre applied for a student visa in June 2020. She submitted the application well in advance, and expected it to arrive by her 21st birthday in April. It didn’t. In limbo, a now-21-year-old Mhatre was forced to get a B2 visitor’s visa to avoid deportation. Her F1 student visa finally arrived only a couple of weeks ago.

The realities of her status also forced her to abandon her dream of being a pediatrician (only a few U.S. medical schools accept a small number of international students). It was a hopeless time in her life, she said.

“I felt like I had no purpose,” she said. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I was diagnosed with clinical depression, generalized anxiety disorder and panic disorder.”

As a kid, she wasn’t fully conscious of how her status differed from her peers, but all at once, it was hitting her. She had to follow the path of least resistance and find a field where she was more likely to get a job and a visa. Even though she’s found a new path for her degree, her immigration status means she’s never had an internship or work experience.

She knows she’ll have a college degree in under a year, but the concept of failing to get a job and having to return to India is still a worry. And in order to stay for now, visa kids like Patel and Mhatre have to prove they don’t intend to stay forever. To qualify for several types of temporary visas, applicants have to show proof of ties to their “home” country and say they don’t plan to pursue permanent residency in the U.S.

“We’ve lived here all of our lives,” Patel said. “It’s really hard to prove nonimmigrant intent, which is something that’s required for student visas and a lot of other temporary statuses as well.”

After years of phone calls and visits to lawmakers, they say a new bill provides a bit of hope. It will be introduced by Ross on Thursday and would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act “to authorize lawful permanent resident status for certain college graduates who entered the United States as children, and for other purposes.”

“For me personally, it’s really exciting,” Patel said. “I’ve had something that’s never made sense growing up. It’s an idea that I’ve always had: Why don’t they just create this? It’s great to see.”

Source: Nearly 200,000 Asian Americans scramble for citizenship under aging-out visa policy

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Pandemic Wave of Automation May Be Bad News for Workers

2021/07/05 Leave a comment

Interesting trend affecting lower skilled workers, one that will likely affect Canada and that needs to be taken into account by the immigration program in terms of levels and mix, particularly those in retail, hospitality, warehousing and manufacturing. This may also increase the productivity gap between Canada and the USA:

When Kroger customers in Cincinnati shop online these days, their groceries may be picked out not by a worker in their local supermarket but by a robot in a nearby warehouse.

Gamers at Dave & Buster’s in Dallas who want pretzel dogs can order and pay from their phones — no need to flag down a waiter.

And in the drive-through lane at Checkers near Atlanta, requests for Big Buford burgers and Mother Cruncher chicken sandwiches may be fielded not by a cashier in a headset, but by a voice-recognition algorithm.

An increase in automation, especially in service industries, may prove to be an economic legacy of the pandemic. Businesses from factories to fast-food outlets to hotels turned to technology last year to keep operations running amid social distancing requirements and contagion fears. Now the outbreak is ebbing in the United States, but the difficulty in hiring workers — at least at the wages that employers are used to paying — is providing new momentum for automation.

Technological investments that were made in response to the crisis may contribute to a post-pandemic productivity boom, allowing for higher wages and faster growth. But some economists say the latest wave of automation could eliminate jobs and erode bargaining power, particularly for the lowest-paid workers, in a lasting way.

“Once a job is automated, it’s pretty hard to turn back,” said Casey Warman, an economist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who has studied automation in the pandemic.

The trend toward automation predates the pandemic, but it has accelerated at what is proving to be a critical moment. The rapid reopening of the economy has led to a surge in demand for waiters, hotel maids, retail sales clerks and other workers in service industries that had cut their staffs. At the same time, government benefits have allowed many people to be selective in the jobs they take. Together, those forces have given low-wage workers a rare moment of leverage, leading to higher pay, more generous benefits and other perks.

Automation threatens to tip the advantage back toward employers, potentially eroding those gains. A working paper published by the International Monetary Fund this year predicted that pandemic-induced automation would increase inequality in coming years, not just in the United States but around the world.

“Six months ago, all these workers were essential,” said Marc Perrone, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers, a union representing grocery workers. “Everyone was calling them heroes. Now, they’re trying to figure out how to get rid of them.”

Checkers, like many fast-food restaurants, experienced a jump in sales when the pandemic shut down most in-person dining. But finding workers to meet that demand proved difficult — so much so that Shana Gonzales, a Checkers franchisee in the Atlanta area, found herself back behind the cash register three decades after she started working part time at Taco Bell while in high school.

“We really felt like there has to be another solution,” she said.

So Ms. Gonzales contacted Valyant AI, a Colorado-based start-up that makes voice recognition systems for restaurants. In December, after weeks of setup and testing, Valyant’s technology began taking orders at one of Ms. Gonzales’s drive-through lanes. Now customers are greeted by an automated voice designed to understand their orders — including modifications and special requests — suggest add-ons like fries or a shake, and feed the information directly to the kitchen and the cashier.

The rollout has been successful enough that Ms. Gonzales is getting ready to expand the system to her three other restaurants.

“We’ll look back and say why didn’t we do this sooner,” she said.

The push toward automation goes far beyond the restaurant sector. Hotels, retailers, manufacturers and other businesses have all accelerated technological investments. In a survey of nearly 300 global companies by the World Economic Forum last year, 43 percent of businesses said they expected to reduce their work forces through new uses of technology.

Some economists see the increased investment as encouraging. For much of the past two decades, the U.S. economy has struggled with weak productivity growth, leaving workers and stockholders to compete over their share of the income — a game that workers tended to lose. Automation may harm specific workers, but if it makes the economy more productive, that could be good for workers as a whole, said Katy George, a senior partner at McKinsey, the consulting firm.

She cited the example of a client in manufacturing who had been pushing his company for years to embrace augmented-reality technology in its factories. The pandemic finally helped him win the battle: With air travel off limits, the technology was the only way to bring in an expert to help troubleshoot issues at a remote plant.

“For the first time, we’re seeing that these technologies are both increasing productivity, lowering cost, but they’re also increasing flexibility,” she said. “We’re starting to see real momentum building, which is great news for the world, frankly.”

Other economists are less sanguine. Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that many of the technological investments had just replaced human labor without adding much to overall productivity.

In a recent working paper, Professor Acemoglu and a colleague concluded that “a significant portion of the rise in U.S. wage inequality over the last four decades has been driven by automation” — and he said that trend had almost certainly accelerated in the pandemic.

“If we automated less, we would not actually have generated that much less output but we would have had a very different trajectory for inequality,” Professor Acemoglu said.

Ms. Gonzales, the Checkers franchisee, isn’t looking to cut jobs. She said she would hire 30 people if she could find them. And she has raised hourly pay to about $10 for entry-level workers, from about $9 before the pandemic. Technology, she said, is easing pressure on workers and speeding up service when restaurants are chronically understaffed.

“Our approach is, this is an assistant for you,” she said. “This allows our employee to really focus” on customers.

Ms. Gonzales acknowledged she could fully staff her restaurants if she offered $14 to $15 an hour to attract workers. But doing so, she said, would force her to raise prices so much that she would lose sales — and automation allows her to take another course.

Rob Carpenter, Valyant’s chief executive, noted that at most restaurants, taking drive-through orders is only part of an employee’s responsibilities. Automating that task doesn’t eliminate a job; it makes the job more manageable.

“We’re not talking about automating an entire position,” he said. “It’s just one task within the restaurant, and it’s gnarly, one of the least desirable tasks.”

But technology doesn’t have to take over all aspects of a job to leave workers worse off. If automation allows a restaurant that used to require 10 employees a shift to operate with eight or nine, that will mean fewer jobs in the long run. And even in the short term, the technology could erode workers’ bargaining power.

“Often you displace enough of the tasks in an occupation and suddenly that occupation is no more,” Professor Acemoglu said. “It might kick me out of a job, or if I keep my job I’ll get lower wages.”

At some businesses, automation is already affecting the number and type of jobs available. Meltwich, a restaurant chain that started in Canada and is expanding into the United States, has embraced a range of technologies to cut back on labor costs. Its grills no longer require someone to flip burgers — they grill both sides at once, and need little more than the press of a button.

“You can pull a less-skilled worker in and have them adapt to our system much easier,” said Ryan Hillis, a Meltwich vice president. “It certainly widens the scope of who you can have behind that grill.”

With more advanced kitchen equipment, software that allows online orders to flow directly to the restaurant and other technological advances, Meltwich needs only two to three workers on a shift, rather than three or four, Mr. Hillis said.

Such changes, multiplied across thousands of businesses in dozens of industries, could significantly change workers’ prospects. Professor Warman, the Canadian economist, said technologies developed for one purpose tend to spread to similar tasks, which could make it hard for workers harmed by automation to shift to another occupation or industry.

“If a whole sector of labor is hit, then where do those workers go?” Professor Warman said. Women, and to a lesser degree people of color, are likely to be disproportionately affected, he added.

The grocery business has long been a source of steady, often unionized jobs for people without a college degree. But technology is changing the sector. Self-checkout lanes have reduced the number of cashiers; many stores have simple robots to patrol aisles for spills and check inventory; and warehouses have become increasingly automated. Kroger in April opened a 375,000-square-foot warehouse with more than 1,000 robots that bag groceries for delivery customers. The company is even experimenting with delivering groceries by drone.

Other companies in the industry are doing the same. Jennifer Brogan, a spokeswoman for Stop & Shop, a grocery chain based in New England, said that technology allowed the company to better serve customers — and that it was a competitive necessity.

“Competitors and other players in the retail space are developing technologies and partnerships to reduce their costs and offer improved service and value for customers,” she said. “Stop & Shop needs to do the same.”

In 2011, Patrice Thomas took a part-time job in the deli at a Stop & Shop in Norwich, Conn. A decade later, he manages the store’s prepared foods department, earning around $40,000 a year.

Mr. Thomas, 32, said that he wasn’t concerned about being replaced by a robot anytime soon, and that he welcomed technologies making him more productive — like more powerful ovens for rotisserie chickens and blast chillers that quickly cool items that must be stored cold.

But he worries about other technologies — like automated meat slicers — that seem to enable grocers to rely on less experienced, lower-paid workers and make it harder to build a career in the industry.

“The business model we seem to be following is we’re pushing toward automation and we’re not investing equally in the worker,” he said. “Today it’s, ‘We want to get these robots in here to replace you because we feel like you’re overpaid and we can get this kid in there and all he has to do is push this button.’”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/business/economy/automation-workers-robots-pandemic.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

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University research could point the way to more inclusive journalism

2021/07/05 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see the results of this analysis, particularly the evidence in contrast to perceptions:

How well does journalism reflect the diversity of the community? And what are the perceptions of that coverage?

The Diversity Institute at Ryerson University expects to provide some answers with research examining media coverage and its impact in shaping biases and perceptions.

The examination was inspired in part by the institute’s extensive work examining discriminatory workplace practices that, for example, limit gender and racial representation on corporate boards and in executive leadership positions.

From this, there was a recognition of the media’s influence on perceptions and stereotypes, which have a “profound” effect on people’s assumptions about others, said Wendy Cukier, the institute’s director and a professor of entrepreneurship and strategy at the university’s Ted Rogers School of Management.

“Every single aspect of diversity and inclusion in the workplace or in the education system pointed to broad cultural stereotypes and biases that get embedded in organizations and shape the way individuals think and behave,” she said.

“The media is one of the most important carriers of values and culture. And it has a profound impact on these stereotypes and assumptions and biases, or it can help challenge them,” Cukier said.

The project, tentatively titled “Media Bias and Under-represented Groups,” will analyze the online news of selected outlets and their representations of those who are Indigenous, Jewish, Muslim, Black and racialized. Focus groups with identified groups will glean perceptions of media coverage and its impact on their identities.

The research will identify areas of misrepresentation, under coverage or coverage that reinforces negative stereotypes. The objective is to make journalism more representative and inclusive.

Working on the project are Mohamed Elmi, the institute’s director of research, and Ruby Latif, research associate, Media Bias Project lead. Both have experience examining how media shape stereotypes.

Elmi was involved with the Black Experience Project, an extensive study published in 2017 that examined what it was like to be Black in the Greater Toronto Area. In a survey done for the project, respondents cited inaccurate media portrayals of the Black community that exaggerated involvement in criminal activity, or depicted them as uneducated or lacking ambition. Few saw what they considered to be accurate portrayals of Blacks as leaders or individual success stories.

“When you’re looking at the media, they only saw people who look like them portrayed in a negative light, not necessarily as an expert or some commentator on a particular subject,” Elmi said.

Latif’s own research focused on Muslim women and organizations. That work and research since has noted how the Muslim community was being “othered,” she said.

“It’s putting somebody in another light, that they’re not part of the in-group … showing that they’re not the same or they don’t have similar values, like Canadian values,” said Latif, who is a regular contributor to the Star’s opinion section.

The deaths of a London, Ont. family — run down last month during an evening walk because they were Muslim, according to police — has underscored those concerns.

The role of mass media in amplifying racial divides is well-documented. The Ontario Human Rights Commission notes, for example, that racism “is communicated and reproduced through agencies of socialization and cultural transmission such as the mass media (in which racialized persons are portrayed as different from the norm or as problems).”

Cukier says progress has been made, notably in the wake of last year’s murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. “But I’m not sure if mainstream reporting and editing and the kind of power structure has shifted that much,” she said.

Floyd’s death prompted a reckoning among institutions on race, racism and diversity. For media outlets like the Toronto Star, it means examining how well the paper reflects the diversity of the community it serves, in both the journalists who work in the newsroom and in its coverage.

Breaking stereotypes and ensuring stories are representative requires effort in all parts of the editorial process, from decisions on which stories to cover, the language used in those stories, the people chosen for interviews and the selection of pictures. Each is a subjective decision — and a chance to make coverage more inclusive.

Researchers emphasize that media portrayals too often perpetuate stereotypes. Another issue is journalists only seeking out racialized individuals to talk about issues of diversity and race, rather than their fields of expertise, be it finance, law or science. “They’re not featured as experts in whatever their field is … I would argue that just reinforces a certain kind of marginalization,” Cukier said.

The Trust Project, a global group of media outlets that includes the Star, rightly sets out diverse voices as one marker of trusted news: “Are some communities or perspectives included only in stereotypical ways, or even completely missing?” And the Torstar Journalistic Standards Guide states, “Inclusiveness is at the heart of thinking and acting as journalists.”

The Star has worked to ensure that the diversity of the community is reflected in its stories. Journalists are encouraged to bring new voices to their story-telling. It makes for better-informed journalism and improved civic discourse. No doubt that remains a work in progress.

This research project promises to be an important road map to how the Star and other media outlets can do better.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/public_editor/2021/07/02/university-research-could-point-the-way-to-more-inclusive-journalism.html

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Biden Administration Unveils Strategy to Remove Obstacles to US Citizenship – Boundless

2021/07/05 Leave a comment

Of note the more pro-active outreach:

The Biden administration unveiled Friday a comprehensive strategy involving numerous government agencies to remove obstacles facing immigrants eligible for U.S. citizenship.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said in a statement that the agency “is committed to empowering immigrants to pursue citizenship and the rights and opportunities available to them as they embark on their journey.”

The government laid out its plans to reduce barriers to naturalization, including:

  1. Outreach: Create a working group with various government agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Social Security Administration, U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, and the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as state and local governments, to notify immigrants when they’re eligible to apply for citizenship.
  2. Partnerships: Expand national, regional, and local partnerships to raise awareness around naturalization. Examples of the types of partnerships include teaming up with the United States Postal Service (USPS) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to provide citizenship information at post offices and ports of entry.
  3. Citizenship Education: Relaunch and expand a citizenship awareness and education campaign. Initiatives include creating new multilingual learning materials, increasing outreach to military families and rural communities, and posting more social media content about citizenship-related events, the application process, and study materials.

USCIS said it also plans to collect information on the nationality, age, sex, and zip codes of immigrants eligible for naturalization, and provide this anonymous data to local governments and community organizations seeking to improve outreach to those eligible for citizenship.

Given the massive naturalization interview and oath backlogs, USCIS said it would also continue searching for solutions to speed up the process.

“As the nation recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, we will seek to responsibly hold in-person events and to use the creative solutions we have already been employing to connect with communities using technology,” said the agency.

Source: Biden Administration Unveils Strategy to Remove Obstacles to US Citizenship – Boundless

Report: full report

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Douthat: The Excesses of Antiracist Education

2021/07/05 Leave a comment

On trying to find a balance and the risk of simplistic dichotomies, in contrast the the more varied realities and situations:

In my last column I tried to describe part of the current controversy over race and K-12 education — the part that turns on whether it’s possible to tell a fuller historical story about slavery and segregation while also retaining a broadly patriotic understanding of America’s founding and development.

In this column I will try to describe the part of the controversy that concerns how we teach about racism today. It’s probably the more intense debate, driving both progressive zeal and conservative backlash.

Again, I want to start with what the new progressivism is interested in changing. One change involves increasingly familiar terms like “structural” and “systemic” racism, and the attempt to teach about race in a way that emphasizes not just explicitly racist laws and attitudes, but also how America’s racist past still influences inequalities today.

In theory, this shift is supposed to enable debates that avoid using “racist” as a personal accusation — since the point is that a culture can sustain persistent racial inequalities even if most white people aren’t bigoted or biased.

Still, this kind of vision would, on its own, face inevitable conservative resistance on several grounds: that it overstates the challenges facing minorities in America today; that it seems to de-emphasize personal responsibility; that it implies policy responses (racial quotas, reparations) that are racially discriminatory, arguably unconstitutional and definitely threatening to the white middle class.

But the basic claim that structural racism exists has strong evidence behind it, and the idea that schools should teach about it in some way is probably a winning argument for progressives. (Almost half of college Republicans, in a recent poll, supported teaching about how “patterns of racism are ingrained in law and other institutions.”) Especially since not every application of the structural-racist diagnosis implies left-wing policy conclusions: The pro-life and school choice movements, for instance, regularly invoke the impact of past progressive racism on disproportionately high African-American abortion rates and underperforming public schools.

What’s really inflaming today’s fights, though, is that the structural-racist diagnosis isn’t being offered on its own. Instead it’s yoked to two sweeping theories about how to fight the problem it describes.

First, there is a novel theory of moral education, according to which the best way to deal with systemic inequality is to confront its white beneficiaries with their privileges and encourage them to wrestle with their sins.

Second, there is a Manichaean vision of public policy, in which all policymaking is either racist or antiracist, all racial disparities are the result of racism — and the measurement of any outcome short of perfect “equity” may be a form of structural racism itself.

The first idea is associated with Robin DiAngelo, the second with Ibram X. Kendi, and they converge in places like the work of Tema Okun, whose presentations train educators to see “white-supremacy culture” at work in traditional measures of academic attainment.

The impulses these ideas encourage take different forms in different institutions, but they usually circle around to similar goals. First, the attempt to use racial-education programs to construct a stronger sense of shared white identity, on the apparent theory that making Americans of European ancestry think of themselves as defined by a toxic “whiteness” will lead to its purgation. Second, the deconstruction of standards that manifest racial disparities, on the apparent theory that if we stop using gifted courses or standardized tests, the inequities they reveal will cease to matter.

These goals, it should be stressed, don’t follow necessarily from the theory of structural racism. The first idea arguably betrays the theory’s key insight, that you can have “racism without racists,” by deliberately trying to increase individual racial guilt. The second extends structural analysis beyond what it can reasonably bear, into territory where white supremacy supposedly explains Asian American success on the SAT.

But precisely because they don’t follow from modest and defensible conceptions of systemic racism, smart progressives in the media often retreat to those modest conceptions when challenged by conservatives — without acknowledging that the dubious conceptions are a big part of what’s been amplifying controversy, and conjuring up dubious Republican legislation in response.

Here one could say that figures like Kendi and DiAngelo, and the complex of foundations and bureaucracies that have embraced the new antiracism, increasingly play a similar role to talk radio in the Republican coalition. They represent an ideological extremism that embarrasses clever liberals, as the spirit of Limbaugh often embarrassed right-wing intellectuals. But this embarrassment encourages a pretense that their influence is modest, their excesses forgivable, and the real problem is always the evils of the other side.

That pretense worked out badly for the right, whose intelligentsia awoke in 2016 to discover that they no longer recognized their own coalition. It would be helpful if liberals currently dismissing anxiety over Kendian or DiAngelan ideas as just a “moral panic” experienced a similar awakening now — before progressivism simply becomes its excesses, and the way back to sanity is closed.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/opinion/antiracist-education-history.html

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What unconscious bias training gets wrong… and how to fix it

2021/07/05 Leave a comment

Good overview on the latest research and lessons. Main conclusion, no quick fix, has to be part of ongoing training and awareness:

Here’s a fact that cannot be disputed: if your name is James or Emily, you will find it easier to get a job than someone called Tariq or Adeola. Between November 2016 and December 2017, researchers sent out fake CVs and cover letters for 3,200 positions. Despite demonstrating exactly the same qualifications and experience, the “applicants” with common Pakistani or Nigerian names needed to send out 60% more applications to receive the same number of callbacks as applicants with more stereotypically British names.

Some of the people who had unfairly rejected Tariq or Adeola will have been overtly racist, and so deliberately screened people based on their ethnicity. According to a large body of psychological research, however, many will have also reacted with an implicit bias, without even being aware of the assumptions they were making.

Such findings have spawned a plethora of courses offering “unconscious bias and diversity training”, which aim to reduce people’s racist, sexist and homophobic tendencies. If you work for a large organisation, you’ve probably taken one yourself. Last year, Labour leader Keir Starmer volunteered to undergo such training after he appeared to dismiss the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement. “There is always the risk of unconscious bias, and just saying: ‘Oh well, it probably applies to other people, not me,’ is not the right thing to do,” he said. Even Prince Harry has been educating himself about his potential for implicit bias – and advising others to do the same.

Sounds sensible, doesn’t it? You remind people of their potential for prejudice so they can change their thinking and behaviour. Yet there is now a severe backlash against the very idea of unconscious bias and diversity training, with an increasing number of media articles lamenting these “woke courses” as a “useless” waste of money. The sceptics argue that there is little evidence that unconscious bias training works, leading some organisations – including the UK’s civil service – to cancel their schemes.

So what’s the truth? Is it ever possible to correct our biases? And if so, why have so many schemes failed to make a difference?

While the contents of unconscious bias and diversity training courses vary widely, most share a few core components. Participants will often be asked to complete the implicit association test (IAT), for example. By measuring people’s reaction times during a word categorisation task, an algorithm can calculate whether people have more positive or negative associations with a certain group – such as people of a different ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender. (You can try it for yourself on the Harvard website.)

After taking the IAT, participants will be debriefed about their results. They may then learn about the nature of unconscious bias and stereotypes more generally, and the consequences within the workplace, along with some suggestions to reduce the impact.

All of which sounds useful in theory. To confirm the benefits, however, you need to compare the attitudes and behaviours of employees who have taken unconscious bias and diversity training with those who have not – in much the same way that drugs are tested against a placebo.

Prof Edward Chang at Harvard Business School has led one of the most rigorous trials, delivering an hour-long online diversity course to thousands of employees at an international professional services company. Using tools like the IAT, the training was meant to educate people about sexist stereotypes and their consequences – and surveys suggest that it did change some attitudes. The participants reported greater acknowledgment of their own bias after the course, and greater support of women in the workplace, than people who had taken a more general course on “psychological safety” and “active listening”.

Unfortunately, this didn’t translate to the profound behavioural change you might expect. Three weeks after taking the course, the employees were given the chance of taking part in an informal mentoring scheme. Overall, the people who had taken the diversity course were no more likely to take on a female mentee. Six weeks after taking the course, the participants were also given the opportunity to nominate colleagues for recognition of their “excellence”. It could have been the perfect opportunity to offer some encouragement to overlooked women in the workplace. Once again, however, the people who had taken the diversity training were no more likely to nominate a female colleague than the control group.

“We did our best to design a training that would be effective,” Chang tells me. “But our results suggest that the sorts of one-off trainings that are commonplace in organisations are not particularly effective at leading to long-lasting behaviour change.”

Chang’s results chime with the broader conclusions of a recent report by Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which examined 18 papers on unconscious bias training programmes. Overall, the authors concluded that the courses are effective at raising awareness of bias, but the evidence of long-lasting behavioural change is “limited”.

Even the value of the IAT – which is central to so many of these courses – has been subject to scrutiny. The courses tend to use shortened versions of the test, and the same person’s results can vary from week to week. So while it might be a useful educational aid to explain the concept of unconscious bias, it is wrong to present the IAT as a reliable diagnosis of underlying prejudice.

It certainly sounds damning; little wonder certain quarters of the press have been so willing to declare these courses a waste of time and money. Yet the psychologists researching their value take a more nuanced view, and fear their conclusions have been exaggerated. While it is true that many schemes have ended in disappointment, some have been more effective, and researchers believe we should learn from these successes and failures to design better interventions in the future – rather than simply dismissing them altogether.

For one thing, many of the current training schemes are simply too brief to have the desired effect. “It’s usually part of the employee induction and lasts about 30 minutes to an hour,” says Dr Doyin Atewologun, a co-author of the EHRC’s report and founding member of British Psychological Society’s diversity and inclusion at work group. “It’s just tucked away into one of the standard training materials.” We should not be surprised the lessons are soon forgotten. In general, studies have shown that diversity training can have more pronounced effects if it takes place over a longer period of time. A cynic might suspect that these short programmes are simple box-ticking exercises, but Atewologun thinks the good intentions are genuine – it’s just that the organisations haven’t been thinking critically about the level of commitment that would be necessary to bring about change, or even how to measure the desired outcomes.

Thanks to this lack of forethought, many of the existing courses may have also been too passive and theoretical. “If you are just lecturing at someone about how pervasive bias is, but you’re not giving them the tools to change, I think there can be a tendency for them to think that bias is normal and thus not something they need to work on,” says Prof Alex Lindsey at the University of Memphis. Attempts to combat bias could therefore benefit from more evidence-based exercises that increase participants’ self-reflection, alongside concrete steps for improvement.

Lindsey’s research team recently examined the benefits of a “perspective-taking” exercise, in which participants were asked to write about the challenges faced by someone within a minority group. They found that the intervention brought about lasting changes to people’s attitudes and behavioural intentions for months after the training. “We might not know exactly what it’s like to be someone of a different race, sex, religion, or sexual orientation from ourselves, but everyone, to some extent, knows what it feels like to be excluded in a social situation,” Lindsey says. “Once trainees realise that some people face that kind of ostracism on a more regular basis as a result of their demographic characteristics, I think that realisation can lead them to respond more empathetically in the future.”

Lindsey has found that you should also encourage participants to reflect on the ways their own behaviour may have been biased in the past, and to set themselves future goals during their training. Someone will be much more likely to act in an inclusive way if they decide, in advance, to challenge any inappropriate comments about a minority group, for example. This may be more powerful still, he says, if there is some kind of follow-up to check in with participants’ progress – an opportunity that the briefer courses completely miss. (Interestingly, he has found that these reflective techniques can be especially effective among people who are initially resistant to the idea of diversity training.)

More generally, these courses may often fail to bring about change because people become too defensive about the very idea that they may be prejudiced. Without excusing the biases, the courses might benefit from explaining how easily stereotypes can be absorbed – even by good, well-intentioned people – while also emphasising the individual responsibility to take action. Finally, they could teach people to recognise the possibility of “moral licensing”, in which an ostensibly virtuous act, such as attending the diversity course itself, or promoting someone from a minority, excuses a prejudiced behaviour afterwards, since you’ve already “proven” yourself to be a liberal and caring person. 

Ultimately, the psychologists I’ve spoken to all agree that organisations should stop seeing unconscious bias and diversity training as a quick fix, and instead use it as the foundation for broader organisational change.

“Anyone who has been in any type of schooling system knows that even the best two- or three-hour class is not going to change our world for ever,” says Prof Calvin Lai, who investigates implicit bias at Washington University in St Louis. “It’s not magic.” But it may act as a kind of ice-breaker, he says, helping people to be more receptive to other initiatives – such as those aimed at a more inclusive recruitment process.

Chang agrees. “Diversity training is unlikely to be an effective standalone solution,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be an effective component of a multipronged approach to improving diversity, equity and inclusion in organisations.”

Atewologun compares it to the public health campaigns to combat obesity and increase fitness. You can provide people with a list of the calories in different foods and the benefits of exercise, she says – but that information, alone, is unlikely to lead to significant weight loss, without continued support that will help people to act on that information. Similarly, education about biases can be a useful starting point, but it’s rather absurd to expect that ingrained habits could evaporate in a single hour of education.

“We could be a lot more explicit that it is step one,” Atewologun adds. “We need multiple levels of intervention – it’s an ongoing project.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/25/what-unconscious-bias-training-gets-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it

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Marche: If Canada wants to be healthy and decent and prosperous and stable, it needs to face its demons

2021/07/03 Leave a comment

One of the better commentaries. A friend suggested “the good, the bad and the ugly” which just about sums it up:

No country can be realistic about itself. Nations live by myths, both in the sense of collective stories that give meaning, and in the sense of lies. Ordinarily, the myths permeate the background of national life, unobserved and assumed. There are days when the myths go on display, like Canada Day, when everyone goes out and waves flags and talks about how lucky they are to live here. 

Then there are other days when the myths shatter, like when investigators discover the bodies of 751 Indigenous children in unmarked graves. This year the myth-displaying and the myth-shattering have come very close together, almost simultaneously. 

Canada is far from alone in finding an uncomfortable duality surrounding the stories it tells itself, a confusion of pride and horror. There’s a strange contradiction at play all around the world: The more successful a country is the less likely it is to celebrate itself. 

Anyone who has visited Germany over the past seventy years will have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of historical memory to be consumed. Germans reckon with the evils of their past in a continuous way. It’s not just Holocaust memorials and museums. There are over 75,000 stumbling stones in Germany, small brass plaques on the streets each identifying a separate national disgrace — a family sent to a concentration camp, a business burned to the ground. Their confrontation with horror, their humility in facing it, has had serious political consequences. It is no coincidence that Germany has become the world’s leading democracy, one of the most stable, prosperous and decent nations in the world. They have put the spiritual work in. 

Contrast Germany with Britain. On June 25, British schools celebrated “One Britain One Nation Day” in which the Education Secretary encouraged all school age children to sing the “Strong Britain, Great Nation” song. “We are British and we have one dream,” it begins, and the chorus which repeats itself ad nauseam is “Strong Britain, Great nation!” The sheer creepiness of the totalitarian esthetic is grotesque. But I honestly felt sorry for the British after I heard “Strong Britain, Great Nation.” Somebody had to commission that piece of music. Somebody had to compose it. Somebody’s children had to sing it. It’s so humiliating for everyone involved. 

England has chosen to decline in a fit of make-believe Imperialist nostalgia, embodied perfectly by Prime Minister Boris Johnson. In 2016, 44 per cent of Britains agreed with the statement that the British Empire was “something to be proud of.” Through Brexit, they have paid a heavy price for their comforting myths of their own magnificence: a sharp decline in global influence, a shrinking economy and the instability of the Union itself. The contrast between the rhetoric and the reality is growing ever more extreme: Five years after their great splurge to “take back control,” they don’t even have control over shipments of sausages to Northern Ireland. I guess that’s why they need to sing ridiculous hymns to their own strength. 

It’s not that the Germans are somehow better people than the English. It’s not that Germany doesn’t have its own problems with nationalism. It’s that Germany has chosen to reckon with its own history problems rather than pretend them away. In the case of America, the matter is starker: Four years of “Make America Great Again” have led to a political system in mid-collapse. Hollering for American greatness led to suffering American catastrophe. 

What all of this shows is simple enough intellectually if hard to grasp emotionally: If you want your country to be healthy and decent and prosperous and stable, you should want it to face its demons. “I think Canada is a great historical achievement,” Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said recently. “It is an imperfect country, but it is still a great country, just as John Macdonald was an imperfect man but was still a great leader.” Kenney was not exactly wrong (the full text of his remarks is far more nuanced and reasonable than the reaction to the sound bite clips would lead anyone to believe) but, to me, the frame of his question is a false dichotomy: Every country is imperfect just as every person is imperfect. Facing the imperfections is what patriotism looks like, not turning away from them. The celebration and the confrontation must occur together to be meaningful.

Quite apart from the political future of Canada’s relationship to Indigenous communities, the process of truth and reconciliation is essential for our own survival. Every former residential school in this country should be a museum. Every school age child should visit one. These locations are the very black diamond of our national evil. We must face them not because we hate Canada but because we love it. The honour of this country is at stake, and Canadian honour is worth fighting for. It is our duty to fight for it. 

Four hundred thousand people are going to move to Canada next year. That’s not a myth. That’s a fact. They’re not moving here for the weather. There is a great deal in Canada that is lovable, but love comes at a cost. Let’s celebrate this country, but quietly this year. Let’s celebrate, but remember.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/analysis/2021/07/01/if-canada-wants-to-be-healthy-and-decent-and-prosperous-and-stable-it-needs-to-face-its-demons.html?li_source=LI&li_medium=thestar_recommended_for_you

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Mahmud Jamal’s nomination to Canada’s Supreme Court scores a win against the name barrier

2021/07/03 Leave a comment

Of note:

A few years ago, frustrated that I kept being detained at airports just because my name bore a resemblance to someone who was on a terrorist watchlist, I decided to adopt a middle name.

At the time, I struggled with what name I should choose. I thought long and hard about taking an Anglo-Saxon one, so as to appear less threatening to airport authorities. However, the thought of having to change an integral part of myself in order to live my life without unnecessary incursions based on the notion that I posed a danger irked me inside. Why should I have to do it, when others don’t? This is a dissonance that I imagine most immigrants or children of recent immigrants face as they navigate their professional lives. How much of your cultural heritage do you keep? And what is worth shedding as you attempt to move up the rungs of Canadian society?

So rather than anglicizing my name, I adopted the Arabic middle name Majid, after my maternal grandfather Abdul-Majid. At the time, I knew my decision could actually attract more scrutiny at airports, rather than less. It also provided another opportunity for others to misspell, mispronounce or generally feel uncomfortable saying my name.

That prospect was ingrained in my mind, as those were all experiences I underwent growing up as a South Asian-Canadian in the relatively small and homogeneous city of St. Catharines, Ont., where even well-meaning people struggled to say my name in what would be considered its “authentic” Arabic pronunciation. I found myself too shy to correct them – either out of a sense of fear or, otherwise, because I didn’t deem myself important enough to canvass a conversation around my name and, more essentially, my parent’s culture and ancestral history.

But with the accumulated baggage of life deep in the recesses of my mind, I felt some sense of vindication when Mahmud Jamal was nominated recently to the Supreme Court of Canada. Upon his appointment, he will be the first person of colour to serve on our country’s highest court.

With Justice Jamal’s appointment, as well as other recent high-profile appointments – including the selection of Reem Bahdi as the next dean of the University of Windsor’s law school – we are starting to see the erosion of both name and colour barriers in the upper echelons of the legal profession. Even the most reticent and conservative lawyers will now have to come face to face with a sitting judge who does not look like anyone from the past. 

Moreover, they will be forced to write and pronounce Justice Jamal’s name (correctly, I hope) under a new dynamic in which a member of a racialized minority group now occupies a seat of power.

For most of us who come from racialized communities, the authority that Justice Jamal will exercise from the high court is not the overwhelming reality of our existence. Rather, in Canada, we are often placed in hierarchal relationships in which an individual with an Anglo-Saxon name occupies the more authoritative position. 

So when our names are pronounced incorrectly, confused with someone else’s or even neglected, we find ourselves biting our tongues so as to avoid upsetting the status quo. This was my childhood reality and, for many, a lifelong one. This scenario has become exhausting and increasingly depressing as we await the promised inclusiveness of the country we or our parents chose.

Just as I refused to anglicize my middle name, my wife and I chose an “ethnic” name for our son when he was born two years ago. We were not ignorant of the realities we grew up in and that persist until today with regard to pronouncing and, by inference, accepting foreign-sounding names. As such, we chose a name for him that could be pronounced by the array of ethnic communities that compose our great land without the sense of trepidation that I have always thought those around me have felt. But erasing our ancestry altogether was not an option. And for us and others in our position, the nomination of Justice Jamal stands to makes us more comfortable in our shoes, not afraid to express our cultural identities all the while attempting to break whatever glass ceilings remain.

The choice that I made to affirm my roots through my middle name was a difficult one. It required concerted thought and effort. Thanks in part to the appointment of a man whose name is making history, my son will not have to take the same pains to reconcile his heritage and his ambitions.

Hassan M. Ahmad is a law professor at the University of Ottawa.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-mahmud-jamals-nomination-to-canadas-supreme-court-is-a-win-for/

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