BIPOC or IBPOC? LGBTQ or LGBTQ2S+? Who decides which terms we should use?

2021/05/27 Leave a comment

Good discussion on names or labels, along with practical advice on their use.

I still stick with visible minorities as it is the term used by the employment equity act and thus Statistics Canada and other government data sources. I have largely shifted to using Indigenous peoples instead of Aboriginal peoples given that the government has taken some symbolic steps in that direction (eg., department names) without formally changing the language of the EE act.

And personally, while I understand that names and labels are important, I am more interested in what the data shows in terms of differences and similarities between and among groups than discussing terminology.

And sometimes new usage can be silly, e.g., pregnant people rather than pregnant women:

It does not take a degree to notice that the names for groups of people sharing a common skin colour, ethnicity, gender identity, disability or racial background change frequently — and how the grammar of these names also change. 

In many cases it is no longer acceptable to use a plain unadorned noun to identify someone from a marginalized group (this person is a(n) X). Nouns become adjectives (a disabled/homeless person) and those adjectives are then further embedded in modifying phrases (a person with disabilities/experiencing homelessness). 

Longer strings of adjectives are gathered into acronyms, which can be pronounced as one word (BIPOC), or initialisms, which cannot (LGBTQ+). The issue of which letters should be included along with the order in which they should appear may be debated (BIPOC vs. IBPOC, LGBTQ+ vs. LGBTQIA vs. LGBTQ2S+).

Capitalization may vary (black vs. Black, white vs. White, deaf vs. Deaf). Some of these new terms open up grammatical questions: should I ask my non-binary friend to introduce themselves or themself?

If you are the type of person who finds this baffling or intolerable, you probably hold the mistaken belief that names stay fixed over time, or at least that they should.

If, on the other hand, you are sincerely concerned with using the appropriate terms, you may wonder how to determine what is correct. Who is the person or committee invested with the power to decide which terms are the right ones and which should be put to rest? Who is the arbiter of contentious language? The answer, in the case of terms that refer to people, is the people to whom those terms refer. 

Use the description the person has chosen

On an individual level, it is common courtesy to ask someone what their name is with the intention of using that name for them. We do not meet a new person and decide what their name should be. If we have only seen their name written down we may also check the pronunciation, although we may discover that we are unable to reproduce it. And if we forget someone’s name or mispronounce it, most of us instinctively apologize. When people change their names, as women who marry sometimes still do, we endeavour to call them by their new name. 

This courtesy extends to the way we describe people. Taking nationality as an example, someone may have parents from one country (Iran), have been born in another (Great Britain) and have lived most of their life in a third (Canada). Whether that person thinks of themself as Iranian, British, Canadian or some hyphenated blend of the three is as much a personal choice as it is legally defined. Politeness dictates that we use the description the person in question has chosen.

Names and descriptions of groups of people are necessarily more complicated because groups can be smaller or bigger in size. Canadians can include Iranian-Canadians while Indigenous communities can include Anishinaabeg and Cree peoples. Asians are members of the BIPOC community and lesbians are members of the LGBTQ+ community. And all of these people can be members of multiple communities.

It is incumbent on us to use the level of granularity that fits the context and when unsure, ask the people we are introducing or speaking about how they want to be identified. Where group membership is contested (for example, should women include people who do not menstruate? Should people who menstruate be called women?) opting for a superordinate term (adults, humans, people) is one way for non-members to avoid taking a side.

Describing groups can be even more difficult

Descriptions of groups of people can also be complicated by the fact that group members rarely all hold the same opinion regarding what they should be called. 

Unanimity on virtually any issue is almost impossible to achieve. What do we call people who cannot agree on what to be called? If we are guided by politeness, we can check with a group member who we perceive to have influence or follow what seems to be the dominant usage of the moment. And courtesy goes both ways. If we use an outdated or disliked term in good faith, we are entitled to polite, not hostile, correction.

Politeness and courtesy are best practices when we use language as individuals. But some of us also speak or write as members of organizations. For example, teachers, professors, journalists, editors, politicians and policy writers all represent institutions that set standards for language use. 

While the use of an older-term-now-replaced can be excused at an individual level, it is unacceptable at the institutional level where power resides. Institutions do well to choose language carefully, to be prepared to change often and to be fully open about how decisions around language have been made. Language acknowledgement statements, to the effect that the language chosen may not be used by all communities and individuals, can highlight, in a positive way, that choices are never perfect and that they are contingent on time and place.

People are not organized into neat categories and the names of categories are never static. Language is fluid and always moving.

The sound of language change is the sound of people using language differently until the majority settles on one usage. The voices of people debating and arguing about which terms that apply to them are pejorative, inadequate, or inappropriate demonstrates the ways in which language choice matters deeply. It is a beautiful chorus and the best practice is to listen closely.

Source: https://theconversation.com/bipoc-or-ibpoc-lgbtq-or-lgbtq2s-who-decides-which-terms-we-should-use-159188?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20May%2026%202021&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20May%2026%202021+CID_21254e324be5b15705d6cb7002b1e42c&utm_source=campaign_monitor_ca&utm_term=BIPOC%20or%20IBPOC%20LGBTQ%20or%20LGBTQ2S%20Who%20decides%20which%20terms%20we%20should%20use

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New data provides a rare glimpse at ‘substantial’ Black overrepresentation in Ontario’s jails

2021/05/27 Leave a comment

Of interest:

Nearly one out of every 15 young Black men in Ontario experienced jail time, compared to one out of about every 70 young white men, and incarcerated Black people were more likely to live in low-income neighbourhoods, a new study of hard to come by race-based inmate data shows.

Using a snapshot of every Ontario inmate released in 2010, self-reported race data, home address data and 2006 census demographics, researchers from the University of Toronto, Ryerson University, McMaster University, St. Michael’s Hospital and ICES, a non-profit clinical research institute, have provided a rare glimpse at “substantial” Black overrepresentation in jails.

“The key thing here is really just the extent to which young Black men experience incarceration in Ontario,” said lead author Akwasi Owusu-Bempah. “It’s hugely troubling, especially in light of what we know about the consequences of criminalization, of incarceration for their futures and the futures of their families and their communities. We know what it does. Incarceration derails lives.”

The jail data, provided by the Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General, held details of 45,956 men and 6,357 women who were released from provincial correctional facilities, which house accused awaiting bail or trial, and offenders sentenced to less than two years.

Overall, 12.8 per cent of men identified as Black and had an incarceration rate of 4,109 per 100,000; 58.3 per cent identified as white, for an incarceration rate of 771 per 100,000, and 28.9 per cent as “other,” for a rate of 1,507 per 100,000.

“Other” includes Indigenous, another group vastly overrepresented in jails and federal prisons but not the focus of this study.

For women, the rates were much smaller for all groups but, overall, Black women were incarcerated at a rate of 259 per 100,000, white women had a rate of 96 per 100,000 and the rate for “other” was 248 per 100,000.

Young men between the ages of 18 and 34 had the highest rates of incarceration in all groups, but young Black men had rates ranging around 7,000 per 100,000, compared to about 1,400 per 100,000 for younger white men.

Neighbourhood demographic data gleaned from the forward sortation area of postal codes showed Black men and women were more likely to come from low-income areas of the province. Black men spent more days incarcerated than white men and had higher rates of being transferred to a federal prison.

“This study demonstrates that incarceration is heavily concentrated among young Black men who come from economically marginalized neighbourhoods,” concluded Owusu-Bempah, an assistant sociology professor at U of T, and co-authors Maria Jung, an assistant criminology professor at Ryerson, Firdaous Sbai, a doctoral sociology student at U of T, Andrew S. Wilton, an ICES researcher, and Fiona Kouyoumdjian, an assistant professor in McMaster’s department of family medicine.

At the root of the higher rates are “historical and contemporary social circumstances of Black people in Canada,” note the researchers. These include 200-plus years of slavery and anti-Black racism, and disparities in many systems, including education, employment, child protection and justice.

Black people experience higher rates of child apprehensions and school suspensions and expulsions, and are more heavily policed, the authors said in highlighting disparities found in numerous studies, and also groundbreaking reporting done by the Star around Toronto police arrest and charging patterns and carding, when police stop, question and document citizens in non-criminal encounters.

Lower incomes for Black people have resulted in Black families living in areas that are “underserved by transit, libraries, schools and hospitals,” and those neighbourhoods tend to have higher levels of crime and crime victims, and concentrated law enforcement, the paper notes, citing academic work done by David Hulchanski on Toronto.

In the United States, the “American experience” with race and incarceration “shows us that concentrated incarceration has negative consequences at the individual, family and community levels, including social problems relating to poverty, mental health, education, employment and civic involvement,” the researchers wrote.

That ends up distorting “social norms, leads to the breakdown of informal social control, and undermines the building blocks of social order which are essential for community safety,” the paper concludes.

The often claimed but false trope that Canada is better on race and racism than the United States is also examined at the outset of the paper, which is published in the journal Race and Justice.

While not directly comparable, the authors later note that 2016 data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics showed Black men were jailed in state and federal institutions each day at a rate of 2,417 per 100,000. In the Ontario study, the annual incarceration rate in 2010 for Black men was 4,109 per 100,000.

That, the authors wrote, helps to “contextualize the extent of Black over-incarceration in Ontario.”

Owusu-Bempah, in an interview, said that “when we think about mass incarceration and we think about this kind of concentrated incarceration as an American phenomenon, I think we can see very clearly here that the levels of overrepresentation that we see in the United States is here in Canada.”

The age of the Ontario data — now over a decade old — speaks to how rare it is to come across race-based Canadian data, the researchers noted in an emailed response to Star questions.

“While these data are from 10 years ago, our ongoing involvement in the criminal justice system indicates that the overrepresentation of Black people persists today,” said the research team. “We think that monitoring and publicly reporting on the overrepresentation of Black people on an ongoing basis is important.”

In order to examine Ontario jail demographics, the researchers used gender and birthdates to link the provincial jail data to health administrative data held by ICES that was used in a 2018 study that looked at use of health care during incarceration and following release from jail. That study found the access rates of all types of health care were significantly higher for incarcerated people.

There is also a huge financial cost involved in jailing people. The Star has twice used inmate postal code data, length of incarceration data and daily cost of housing an inmate to show that in some Toronto city blocks, tens of millions of dollars are being spent to jail their citizens.

Preventing and reducing incarceration could free up money that could be reinvested in those neighbourhoods.

The authors of this report are part of a growing chorus of researchers, academics and advocates calling for more racially disaggregated justice data in Canada, which lags behind the U.S. and U.K.

More data around Canadian incarceration populations in provincial and territorial jails that identifies areas and groups experiencing high levels of incarceration, the paper concludes, “will help inform targeted initiatives to prevent criminal justice involvement” and “mitigate” the impacts on people and communities.

Source: New data provides a rare glimpse at ‘substantial’ Black overrepresentation in Ontario’s jails

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#COVID-19: Comparing provinces with other countries 26 May Update

2021/05/27 Leave a comment

The latest charts, compiled 26 May as overall rates in Canada continue to come down along with increased vaccinations.

Vaccinations: Minor relative changes, with Alberta moving ahead of British Columbia and Ontario, Atlantic Canada ahead of Italy and France.

Trendline charts

Infections per million: Alberta levelling off and upsurge in Manitoba is resulted in Prairie rate marginally more than Ontario.

Deaths per million: No significant change.

Vaccinations per million: Canadian vaccination rates have largely caught up to G7 less Canada with Quebec ahead.

Weekly

Infections per million: Prairies ahead of Ontario, driven by Manitoba.

Deaths per million: No relative change.

India

While there is undercounting in all countries as analysis of above average deaths indicate (e.g., The Economist’s Tracking covid-19 excess deaths across countries), this article on India is of particular interest.

The official Covid-19 figures in India grossly understate the true scale of the pandemic in the country. Last week, India recorded the largest daily death toll for any country during the pandemic — a figure that is most likely still an undercount.

Even getting a clear picture of the total number of infections in India is hard because of poor record-keeping and a lack of widespread testing. Estimating the true number of deaths requires a second layer of extrapolation, depending on the share of those infected who end up dying.

In consultation with more than a dozen experts, The New York Times has analyzed case and death counts over time in India, along with the results of large-scale antibody tests, to arrive at several possible estimates for the true scale of devastation in the country.

Even in the least dire of these, estimated infections and deaths far exceed official figures. More pessimistic ones show a toll on the order of millions of deaths — the most catastrophic loss anywhere in the world.

India’s official coronavirus statistics report about 27 million cases and over 300,000 deaths as of Tuesday. The country’s response to the pandemic has been further complicated this week by a cyclone that is battering India’s eastern coast, with winds of more than 95 miles per hour.

Even in countries with robust surveillance during the pandemic, the number of infections is probably much higher than the number of confirmed cases, because many people have contracted the virus but have not been tested for it. On Friday, a report by the World Health Organization estimated that the global death toll of Covid-19 may be two or three times higher than reported.

The undercount of cases and deaths in India is most likely even more pronounced, for technical, cultural and logistical reasons. Because hospitals are overwhelmed, many Covid deaths occur at home, especially in rural areas, and are omitted from the official count, said Kayoko Shioda, an epidemiologist at Emory University. Laboratories that could confirm the cause of death are equally swamped, she said.

Additionally, other researchers have found, there are few Covid tests available. Families are often unwilling to say that their loved ones have died of Covid. And the system for keeping vital records in India is shaky at best. Even before Covid-19, about four out of five deaths in India were not medically investigated.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/05/26/world/covid-vaccine-coronavirus-mask

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Guerrero: How to Fight White Supremacy by Inverting Stephen Miller’s Playbook

2021/05/26 Leave a comment

Not a bad list, one that can be applied more broadly than in the USA (as is already happening in Canada to an extent):

Former Trump White House senior adviser Stephen Miller played a significant role in mainstreaming white supremacy over the past five years, promoting virulently racist literature, organizing anti-immigrant round tables, crafting Trump’s most xenophobic speeches, and strangling legal pathways into the United States for nonwhite people.

He is continuing his white nationalist campaign through frequent guest appearances on Fox News, hawking the dangerous delusion of anti-white racism. And through his nonprofit, “America First Legal,” he is attacking the Biden administration’s small steps toward building a humane immigration system and a more equitable society, including efforts to diversify schools. President Joe Biden has been reluctant to scale back many of Trump’s white nationalist immigration policies as Republicans attack him in hysteria-inducing language Miller helped normalize, casting Biden as an “open borders” president responsible for an imagined “Third World invasion.”

What Biden’s team must understand is that the radicalized Republican Party is going to use immigration to attack him regardless of what he does. “Bottom line: the less Biden talks about the border, the more the GOP must,” Miller tweeted on April 29. The only way to neutralize this weaponization of immigration and to illuminate the threat of nativists’ war on brown and Black people is not through inaction on the Southwest border or a more intense crackdown (the Obama administration revealed the futility of that strategy), but rather to radically reframe the national conversation about immigration by inverting Miller’s playbook, which I document in my biography Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda.

Opponents of white supremacy, xenophobia, and racism must wrest control of the immigration debate from hatemongers, or else the immigration reform bill in Congress is doomed to fail, Democrats will lose the midterms elections, and white extremism will continue to spread, further endangering people’s lives and democracy. What follows is a handbook for how Biden’s team, lawmakers, journalists, and other public figures can co-opt Miller’s strategies to fight the spread of hate.

  1. Use vivid, visceral anecdotes about immigrants’ contributions to the United States in speeches, press releases, news articles, interviews, and more. One of Miller’s favorite techniques was to insert graphic descriptions of alleged migrant crimes into Trump’s speeches and documents. In Trump’s 2015 immigration plan, he described an “illegal” immigrant “breaking into a 64-year-old woman’s home, crushing her skull and eye sockets with a hammer, raping her, and murdering her.” The incident reappeared in a Trump speech. He repeatedly exploited the tragic death of Kate Steinle, and pressured the Department of Homeland Security to inundate the public with press releases about immigrant crimes, manufacturing the false impression that brown and Black foreigners commit more crimes than the native born. The demonization can be countered by highlighting much more common examples of immigrants contributing to the United States., while being careful not to caricature immigrants as superhumanly heroic or hardworking, which is dehumanizing in a different way. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas should issue press releases about acts of immigrant heroism as reminders of the full humanity and positive impact of immigrants, particularly nonwhite ones without legal status. Julia Ainsley’s 2020 NBC story, “Immigrant workers on Covid frontlines risk deportation to help save lives,” or the 2017 Univision story by Fernando Peinado and Anna Spelman, “The undocumented heroes never mentioned by Donald Trump,” are good examples.
  2. Hold press conferences, roundtables, and other reality-TV-style events that celebrate and inform about the above immigrant contributions to US national security, health, and the economy, while sharing accurate statistics. In the White House, Miller repeatedly helped organize anti-immigrant round tables, press briefings, and other streamed events in collaboration with law enforcement and lawmakers that cast immigrants as welfare-guzzling, diseased, and violent “animals,” including through the use of falsified statistics. It’s an old playbook that has been used time and again in the United States, notably with the vilification of Chinese immigrants in the 19th century: Spread falsehoods about unwanted foreigners bringing crime and illness, simultaneously stealing jobs, and draining public resources. Public figures should organize compelling events that inform about the true value of immigrants to public safety, health, and prosperity in partnership with law enforcement officers, lawmakers, and high-profile medical institutions and more. They should be entertaining, enlightening, and streamed to wide and diverse audiences.
  3. Promote literature, websites, and think tanks that center immigrants and refugees and depict them as they really are. Our storytelling industries, from publishing to media and entertainment, are still disproportionately white and male, resulting in a society with a seemingly bottomless capacity to empathize with white antiheroes, while dehumanizing complex brown and Black people. In 2016, Stephen Miller urged allies at Breitbart to promote the white supremacist dystopian book The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. Breitbart blogger Julia Hahn published an ode to the book, which tells of the destruction of the white world by brown refugee “monsters.” Demand for the book has sinceskyrocketed. Miller also recommended that Breitbartsource material from American Renaissance and VDare, white nationalist websites. He pulled policies from anti-immigrant think tanks funded by racist heiress Cordelia Scaife May in collaboration with white supremacist John Tanton, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which was designated as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Public figures should counter white supremacist propaganda by promoting literature and other content that conveys the truth about immigrants, such as Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s The Undocumented Americans and Reyna Grande’s The Distance Between Us. Remezcla has a list of the best books by Latin American authors that center the immigrant experience. The Center for American Progress and Migration Policy Institute are nonpartisan, and their websites can serve as resources for facts to counter anti-immigrant propaganda.
  4. Call anti-immigrant rhetoric what it is: a tactic of largely white elites to distract from the real problems they created for working people of all colors. At a 2016 Trump rally, Miller spoke of elites looking “down from their glass window condominiums at all of you,” before returning to his glass-window condominium. Anti-immigrant propagandists like Miller are elitists who politicize immigration to distract from their elitism and from policies and treaties that protect and expand their privileges. Trump bashed NAFTA as a “disaster” for American manufacturing workers, claiming that Mexico had been “spoiled” by the treaty, which had in fact displaced millions of Mexican farmworkers and devastated the southern country’s rural sector. During his administration, Trump used the anger he’d whipped up against the treaty to update it and change its name, not eliminate it, let alone address its biggest problems. Our nation’s storytellers, from Hollywood to Washington, must resist and expose attempts to use immigration to splinter working-class communities while enriching largely white male elites, often from both political parties.
  5. Forge alliances with other people in positions of power to accomplish the above goals and, crucially, to inspire hope. Miller’s mentor David Horowitz advocated stoking fear rather than hope. “Fear is a much stronger and more compelling emotion,” he wrote in a strategy paper that referenced the political utility of hate and other negative feelings, and encouraged Republicans to demonize their opponents. Miller forged strategic alliances with the right-wing site Breitbart and provocateurs such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, who recently endorsed a white supremacist conspiracy theory on air, to spread anti-immigrant and anti-liberal hate. From the time Miller was a teenager calling into The Larry Elder Showrailing against multiculturalism, he was cultivating relationships with powerful people to peddle hate. The opponents of hate must believe in hope, and leverage it in collaboration with one another. Part of leveraging that hope is embracing the reality that most extremists aren’t innately evil or cruel. While they pose a very real threat to national security, their reasons for being radicalized often aren’t simple. Some are vulnerable, isolated individuals dealing with trauma and other mental health issues. Sociopaths and swindlers manipulate them, giving them a false sense of purpose and meaning in the form of a scapegoat. Not all are irredeemable, demonstrated by the case of former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh, who was radicalized by Miller before realizing she had joined a dangerous movement. Some can be coaxed out slowly, with empathy, because we are stronger with people who have seen the light on our team.

Source: How to Fight White Supremacy by Inverting Stephen Miller’s Playbook

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USCIS: Citizenship agency eyes improved service without plan to pay

2021/05/26 Leave a comment

Canada also needs to modernize its citizenship program (https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/april-2021/amid-languishing-numbers-canadas-citizenship-process-needs-to-be-modernized/), including full integration into the GCMS modernization project):

Less than a year after being on the verge of furloughing about 70% of employees to plug a funding shortfall, the U.S. agency that grants citizenship, green cards and temporary visas wants to improve service without a detailed plan to pay for it, including granting waivers for those who can’t afford to pay fees, according to a proposal obtained by The Associated Press.

The Homeland Security Department sent its 14-page plan to enhance procedures for becoming a naturalized citizen to the White House for approval on April 21, It involves U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of Homeland Security and has been operating entirely on fees, without funding from Congress.

The plan describes short- and long-term changes that reflect “a realistic assessment of our aspirations and limitations,” including more video instead of in-person interviews with applicants, authorizing employees to administer citizenship oaths instead of having to rely on federal judges, and promoting online filing to reduce processing times.

Homeland Security says it can all be done without the approval of Congress, where consensus on immigration has proven elusive for years.

Taken together, the changes mark a complete break from the Trump administration, when the agency focused on combatting fraud and adjusted to shrinking immigration benefits, such as ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to shield young people from deportation.

The plan also seeks to give potential U.S. citizens the benefit of the doubt. For instance, it specifies that an immigrant who mistakenly registers to vote in U.S. elections before becoming a citizen won’t be punished. Doing so now can lead to deportation or criminal charges, likely ending a person’s chance for citizenship.

The issue has been in the spotlight amid a recent surge in automatic voter registration and former President Donald Trump’s repeated unsubstantiated claims that millions of people voted illegally in 2016. Last year, Illinois’ automatic voter registration program mistakenly registered hundreds of people who said they weren’t U.S. citizens. At least one voted.

The document that aims to improve the citizenship process is designed to “encourage full participation in our civic life and democracy” and to deliver services effectively and efficiently.

It doesn’t provide cost estimates for any of the proposed changes, though some measures appear designed to save money as well as achieve efficiencies. It also acknowledges success depends on long-term financial stability, which includes asking Congress for money.

Under the plan, the agency would continue subsidizing the costs of becoming a citizen to make sure the process is available to as many people as possible. Guidelines on fee waivers would be consistent and transparent, it said.

The administration “recognizes that the cost of fees can be a barrier to certain individuals filing for naturalization and is committed to providing affordable naturalizations,” the document reads. “This will mean that other fee-paying applicants and petitioners will continue to subsidize this policy decision to ensure full cost recovery.”

The White House and Homeland Security Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Fiscal challenges came to a head last summer when the agency threatened more than 13,000 furloughs to tackle a projected $1.26 billion shortfall. But a few tense months later, it said it didn’t need the money after all and would end the year with a surplus. The agency’s then-acting director, Joseph Edlow, said application fees rebounded more than expected as offices reopened from coronavirus shutdowns and contracts were reviewed for cost savings.

The anticipated shortfall first surfaced in November 2019, when the agency proposed major fee increases — well before COVID-19 threatened finances.

The budget whiplash raised doubts about how the agency’s finances deteriorated so rapidly then suddenly recovered. Ur Jaddou, who was nominated by President Joe Biden in April to lead the agency, was among those with questions.

Jaddou, who served as the agency’s chief counsel under President Barack Obama, said in October that the agency needed a financial audit. She questioned some changes under the Trump administration, including justification for a major expansion of an anti-fraud unit and a requirement, since abandoned by Biden, to reject applications that left any spaces blank.

“It really is a bunch of bureaucratic red tape,” she said when discussing the agency’s financial woes.

Fees were set to increase by an average of 20% last October but a federal judge blocked them days before they were to take effect. The fee to become a naturalized citizen was set to jump to $1,170 from $640. Fee waivers were to be largely eliminated for people who could not afford to apply.

Other Trump-era fee changes that were stopped included a first-ever charge to apply for asylum of $50. Asylum-seekers would also have to pay $550 if they sought work authorization and $30 for collecting biometrics.

The wait to process a citizenship application grew to more than a year by the end of Trump’s presidency from less than eight months four years earlier.

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In Fight Over 1619 Project and Nikole Hannah-Jones, White Ignorance Has Been Bliss—and Power

2021/05/26 Leave a comment

Of note, particularly the historical reminders and context:

Hell hath no fury like a white conservative confronted with the unvarnished history of slavery and racism in America.

For nearly two solid years, right-wing reactionaries have been apoplectic over the 1619 Project, a journalistic exploration of the indelible impact of Black enslavement on these United States put together by New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. The same angry mob has also attacked a heretofore obscure, four-decades-old analytical methodology for understanding the institutionalism of white supremacy and anti-Black racism called Critical Race Theory.

The white conservative rage has been prolific, producing two House bills seeking to ban CRT and other “anti-American and racist theories” along with legislation in about a dozen states. The Trump administration put out its own 1776 Report, meant to “correct” the 1619 Project—which the American Historical Association called “simplistic” and full of “falsehoods, inaccuracies, omissions, and misleading statements.” Now the mob is vilifying Pulitzer Prize-winner Hannah-Jones, getting the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill to cravenly retract a tenured position offer, replacing it with a five-year professor of practice contract.

All of these efforts obviously aim to re-center the white supremacist historical fable that roughly 350 years of slavery and Jim Crow were unfortunate—but inconsequential—events in an America of full equality of opportunity, where any difference between the races could only be a result of Black laziness and white superiority. That fairy tale speaks volumes about how desperately reliant white supremacy is on maintaining white ignorance. You just can’t have one without the other. It’s that embrace of ignorance that lets these racists ignore the long tradition of mandated white ignorance they’re now trying to extend into the future.

“White ignorance,” according to NYU philosopher Charles W. Mills, is an “inverted epistemology,” a deep dedication to and investment in non-knowingthat explains white supremacy’s highly curatorial (and often oppositional) approach to memory, history and the truth. While white ignorance is related to the anti-intellectualism that defines the white Republican brand, it should be regarded as yet more specific. According to Mills, white ignorance demands a purposeful misunderstanding of reality—both present and historical—and then treats that fictitious world-view as the singular, de-politicized, unbiased, “objective” truth. “One has to learn to see the world wrongly,” under the terms of white ignorance, Mills writes, “but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority.”

To challenge that epistemic authority with uncomfortable but verifiable facts about race and racism guarantees the wrath of those who are otherwise quick to claim “facts don’t care about your feelings.” The 1619 Project has required tweaks and corrections. But the wholesale discounting of the initiative by white conservatives, who ignored the sloppy, error-filled 1776 Report, is more than a classic display of hypocrisy. It’s a testament to how deeply critical white ignorance is to white supremacy.

In reality—not the manicured “reality” of white supremacist historical delusion, but bonafide existence—historical fact has always hurt the feelings of white supremacists. In response, they have consistently used self-serving lies of omission to make themselves feel better. Were they less averse to historical truth, today’s white conservatives might already know this.

They’d perhaps be aware that the United Daughters of the Confederacy—the white Southern ladies group that put up most Confederate monuments, including one explicitly lauding the Ku Klux Klan—released a 1919 manifesto in all but name demanding “all authorities charged with the selection of textbooks for colleges, schools and all scholastic institutions” across the South only accept books depicting the Confederacy glowingly. Conversely, those books that correctly identified Confederate soldiers as traitors or rebels, rightly located slavery as the central cause of the Civil War, depicted the figure of the “slaveholder as cruel or unjust to his slaves,” or “glories Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis,” were to be rejected. The UDC ordered school librarians to deface books that were insufficiently praiseful of the Confederacy by scrawling “Unjust to the South” on the title page. Well into the 1970s, these rules dictated the history lessons taught to Southern children, both Black and white. The group’s rewriting of history to make slavery benign, Black resistance invisible, and white terror no biggie—also known as the ahistorical Lost Cause myth—is being re-engineered for this moment.

Modern complaints about so-called “cancel culture” and political correctness are also linked to white ignorance, allowing the know-nothings who wield it to deny the harms of whiteness while turning themselves into victims of overly aggressive Black declarations of personhood. Across the 1940s and ’50s, the NAACP campaigned to purge racist language from history books, targeting passages that extolled the KKK and references to enslaved Black folks as happy “Sambos.” In response, the Washington Post dismissed their concerns as “humorless touchiness,” an old-timey way of calling them snowflakes. One WaPo editorial stated that to “insist that Negroes be given equal rights with other citizens is one thing. To insist that their particular sensibilities entitle them to exercise a kind of censorship is quite another.”

It took the longest student strike in U.S. history, held in 1968 at San Francisco State College, to finally get collegiate ethnic studies, which have been under attack ever since. To wit, in 2010, Arizona legally banned Mexican American Studies until a judge forced the state to overturn the unconstitutional policy, while the perennial fight over textbook history in Texas led to textbooks that in 2015 featured a section titled “Patterns of Immigration,” stating “the Atlantic slave trade from the 1500s to the 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” In addition to a bill to prohibit the teaching of the 1619 Project currently making its way through the Texas legislature, conservatives in the state are trying to ensure minimal mention of slavery or anti-Mexican discrimination in textbooks and pushing legislation to create an 1836 Project to “promote patriotic education.”

“Do you want our Texas kids to be taught that the system of government in the United States and Texas is nothing but a cover-up for white supremacy?” State legislator Steve Toth reportedly asked his Congressional colleagues.

And here, Toth is doing what white conservatives actually do with surprising frequency, which is screaming the supposedly quiet part. It’s an admission that by merely telling the whole story and including all the facts, the long and carefully maintained narrative of white innocence—a kind of perpetual white alibi—is disrupted. White ignorance is basically just a “refusal to recognize the long history of structural discrimination that has left whites with the differential resources they have today” creating a fake “equal status and a common history in which all have shared, with white privilege being conceptually erased.” The intentional know-nothingness of white ignorance “serves to neutralize demands for antidiscrimination initiatives or for a redistribution of resources.” Instead, it holds that “the real racists are the Blacks who continue to insist on the importance of race.”

So we have Florida Gov. Ron Desantis declaring the 1619 Project is “basically teaching kids to hate our country and to hate each other based on race,” and Tom Cotton, who performatively introduced a bill last year to ban the 1619 Project in schools, complaining the initiative paints the U.S. as “a systemically racist country” instead of “a great and noble country founded on the proposition that all mankind is created equal.” Earlier this month, during a press conference for the Stop Critical Race Theory Act, co-sponsor Dan Bishop called the academic theory “a smokescreen for racism” and a “divisive ideology that threatens to poison the American psyche.” Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who of course was also there added, “These are the things that we overcame in the civil rights era and I’m so proud that we did.”

White conservatives only get real into anti-racism lip service when the reality of white racism threatens to blow up their spot. That’s surely why in April, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sent a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona labeling the 1619 Project “activist indoctrination that fixates solely on past flaws and splits our nation into divided camps.”

“My view—and I think most Americans think—dates like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Civil War are sort of the basic tenets of American history,” McConnell said in remarks earlier this month. “There are a lot of exotic notions about what are the most important points in American history. I simply disagree with the notion that the New York Times laid out there that the year was one of those years. I think that issue that we all are concerned about—racial discrimination—it was our original sin. We’ve been working for 200-and-some-odd years to get past it. We’re still working on it, and I just simply don’t think that’s part of the core underpinning of what American civic education ought to be about.”

That sure is a long-winded way of advising folks to stick to the white supremacist storyline. McConnell is unwittingly offering an example of how, as Charles Eagles writes, “the powerful can make decisions that actually “strive for a goal of stupidity,” rather than for genuine education. Under the guise of protecting children, imposing an engineered ignorance protects the privileged by preserving the status quo and by releasing leaders from responsibility… Too much knowledge could lead to troubling questions and a loss of control of the classroom, and the elite feared the unknown results.”

The price for not adhering to those rules is that white conservatives (give it up for The Real Kings of Cancel Culture, everybody!) will do all they can to have you blackballed, legally banned, discredited and defamed. Jay Schalin, of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a right-wing think tank that led the charge against Hannah-Jones, maligned the 1619 Project as mere “political agitation”—inadvertently suggesting he already knows the horrors of American slavery and racism are reasons to be furious. Schalin and his co-conspirators, to protect white ignorance, went after Hannah-Jones. It all brings to mind yet more ignored history, cited by Mills, about how the terms of enslavement included that “Blacks were generally denied the right to testify against whites, because they were not seen as credible witnesses, so when the only (willing) witnesses to white crimes were Black, these crimes would not be brought to light… Moreover, in many cases, even if witnesses would have been given some kind of grudging hearing, they were terrorized into silence by the fear of white retaliation.”

Silence was the end goal then, and it’s the goal now, as a means of preserving white ignorance—which is to say plausible deniability. But the work of Hannah-Jones and folks like Kimberlé Crenshaw, an architect of CRT (and so much more) are undoing myths that are difficult to perfectly assemble without the cracks showing.

“If Black testimony could be aprioristically rejected because it was likely to be false,” Mills notes, “it could also be aprioristically rejected because it was likely to be true.”

Source: In Fight Over 1619 Project and Nikole Hannah-Jones, White Ignorance Has Been Bliss—and Power

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , , ,

Is it time to move Ottawa out of Ottawa?

2021/05/26 Leave a comment

Valid question given experience over more than a year with remote work. Some colleagues who are still working have indicated much easier to engage the regions given everyone on the same platform, rather than the Ottawa folks meeting in person and regional staff being on a telephone conference call.

And of course, the broader question of what percent of public servants, or what percentage of their time, requires physical presence compared to working remotely, along with the associated (but often overstated) management challenges:

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in much of the federal public service shifting to remote work. Ottawa invested in telecommunications and found new ways for employees to work effectively from far-flung locations.

The transition was sufficiently successful that the federal government is considering continuing some remote work, possibly reducing its office rental spaces.

This raises the question — if work doesn’t need to be done in Ottawa-area offices, does it need to be done in Ottawa at all?

The centralization of federal jobs

Canada has more than 300,000 federal employees, with over 230,000 in core public administration (CPA) and just under 70,000 employed in separate agencies like the Canada Revenue Agency. 

The proportion of agency jobs concentrated in the National Capital Region, which includes Ottawa-Gatineau and surrounding areas, has declined since 2016. The opposite is seen with CPA jobs. The concentration of CPA employees was only 33 per cent in 1995, but was up to 46 per cent in 2020. 

graph shows the number of federal public service jobs in the capital region
The number of federal public service jobs in the Ottawa region, according to the Government of Canada Open Data Portal. Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2020

Most CPA workers are skilled knowledge workers. These are good jobs. It is time for more federal jobs, including CPA jobs, to decentralize.

The case for decentralization

Research suggests decentralizing public service jobs reduces costs, strengthens national security by spreading government functions across the country and reduces cynicism toward government. 

Decentralization also distributes the economic benefits of the public sector across the country. According to one 2019 British study, “the arrival of 10 civil service jobs in an area spurs the creation of about 11 jobs in the private sector,” including professional service jobs like law and consulting.

Most importantly, it gives federal governments more ability to directly engage with communities. Regional voices within government increase as career opportunities are more accessible to qualified people nationally. Advocacy and community groups across the country enjoy a more level playing field to engage in the policy process. 

This increased geographic diversity of voices working within and connecting with government can result in improved strategic policy advice. 

Creating a national strategy

Now is the perfect time to make a serious effort to decentralize Canada’s federal jobs.

The COVID-19 remote work experience demonstrates the remarkable potential of technology to overcome distance. We have learned how efficiently we can use technology to reduce unnecessary travel and connect easily across the country. We must use the disruption of the pandemic to rethink what jobs and services need to be in Ottawa at all.

We can expect growing calls for this in Canada’s economic recovery, particularly from Alberta. Just before the COVID-19 shutdown, four MPs identified the centralization of federal headquarters as an example of systemic unfairness towards Alberta. A few months later, Alberta’s Fair Deal Panel recommended western premiers request “a distribution map of federal civil servants across Canada and a list of federal government agencies and decision-making bodies that can be recommended for relocation to Western Canada.” 

Recent surveys find decentralizing jobs may be publicly popular. The 2021 Viewpoint Alberta survey, which included over 800 respondents in Alberta and Saskatchewan, found strong support for increasing federal jobs in each province.

Similarly, the 2021 Confederation of Tomorrow survey of more than 5,800 Canadians found almost three-quarters (73.5 per cent) support “moving more government offices from Ottawa to other cities in the country so that more Canadians would have access to jobs in the federal public service.” 

A graph shows support for moving federal public service jobs out of the Ottawa area.
Support for moving federal public service jobs out of the Ottawa area. Confederation of Tomorrow 2021 Survey, Author provided

The time for action is now. In fact, Canada faces an immediate decision regarding the location of the new Canada Water Agency. While the decision process has yet to be announced, Regina and Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., are already vying for the agency headquarters. Other cities may also be planning to do so.

Canada already has experience in decentralizing federal jobs, including moving the National Energy Board headquarters from Ottawa to Calgary and creating regional Canada Revenue Agency tax centres. These serve as precedents for a bold new strategy.

Moving forward on a national strategy

To be sure, decentralization faces political challenges. As the benefits of job decentralization are long-term and the challenges are immediate, politicians more focused on the next election might be disinclined to take up the task.

Vested interests are loud. Strategies are needed to address relocation costs, including staff turnover and the associated loss of experience, though remote work options can reduce these.

A national strategy is required. The United Kingdom’s Places for Growth program will move thousands of London jobs, including policy advisory roles, to 13 regional hubs over the next decade and could provide ideas or a blueprint. 

Canada might also consider efforts to shift civil service work out of national capitals in Mexico, Norway, South Korea, Denmark and Malaysia. 

The COVID-19 remote work experience suggests that distance is not insurmountable for federal government work. No one is suggesting that public servants work from home forever, but the public’s business does not always have to be done in Ottawa. Let’s use this as an opportunity to rethink how we distribute federal work across Canada.

Source: https://theconversationcanada.cmail20.com/t/r-l-tlidhrg-kyldjlthkt-o/

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Canadians of Italian origin find justice in apology for internment during WW2

2021/05/26 Leave a comment

Somewhat one-sided account in favour of the apology as the more authoritative and critical analysis by Roberto Perrin, Enemies Within: Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad, not cited (other recent critical view by Michael Petrou, The harm done by Justin Trudeau’s apology to Italian -Canadians might require an apology of its own):

After decades of digging through archival material and talking with the relatives of people of Italian origin detained in Canada during the Second World War, Montreal historian Joyce Pillarella says Canada’s long-awaited apology gives her family and others the moral justice they have been waiting for.

Pillarella started learning more than 20 years ago about the struggles of the more than 600 people who were interned when she found a postcard sent from her grandfather who was confined at a camp near Fredericton, N.B.

She then started combing through Canada’s national archive before she started talking to the families of those affected.

“When I was starting to do cold calls to try to find families, a lot of people didn’t want to talk to me,” she said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

“What I realize now is that they didn’t want to talk because they felt insignificant, their story was insignificant. They were afraid of being judged wrongly. There was the shame of the story.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is set to deliver a formal apology in the House of Commons Thursday for the internment of Canadians of Italian background during the Second World War for several years at three camps in Petawawa, Ont., Minto, N.B., and Kananaskis, Alta. The apology is not expected to come with individual compensation.

Justice Minister David Lametti, the first Canadian justice minister of Italian heritage, said the internment happened following an order-in-council that was promulgated by the then-justice minister Ernest Lapointe, and it resulted in taking hundreds of people of Italian origin from their families and declaring about 31,000 as “enemy aliens.”

“Not a single person was ever convicted, and in addition, people weren’t afforded due process,” he said in an interview.

“There wasn’t anything other than the fact that their name may have appeared on a list somewhere.”

Pillarella said the Canadian government asked the RCMP to prepare lists of Canadians of Italian heritage after Italy invaded Ethiopia in the mid-1930s.

She said Italian-Canadians had to do a lot of their business through the Italian consulates at the time.

“People had to be sympathetic with the consulate or at least appear to be, because otherwise they’re not going to get anything done,” she said.

Lametti said people were put on RCMP lists for having made donations to the Italian Red Cross or for being members of certain labour groups.

“It is true that the Fascist Party did have organizations in Canada but, in the 1930s, they were popular,” he said. “It didn’t mean that people were disloyal to Canada. In fact, Italian-Canadians generally were very much disappointed when Italy joined Germany in that war effort.”

Joan Vistarchi, whose father Salvatore Vistarchi was interned between June 1940 and March 1943, said the RCMP arrested her father in his Montreal apartment without giving him any reason.

“He was put on a train, and he didn’t know where he was going. Nobody would say where they were going, but he ended up in the Fredericton internment camp in New Brunswick,” she said.

Vistarchi noticed as a child her father would remain very silent on June 10 every year. She asked her mother what was wrong with her dad but her mother would wave it off by saying, “I just don’t think he’s feeling well today.”

When Vistarchi became a teenager, she learned that her father’s sadness on June 10 was because he was detained on that day.

“It was kept pretty silent for a long, long time, and then, only little pieces came out,” she said. “To his dying day, (my father) wondered why was he imprisoned or put in an internment camp.”

Pillarella contacted some 150 families across Canada to collect the stories of the people who were interned during the war.

She said the suffering of the women and the children left behind could be even greater than that of the men who were detained in internment camps.

“For the women in the 1940s, there were big families usually, I mean it was common (to have) six, seven, eight children. The breadwinner was gone,” she said. “Taking care of a household in the 1940s was a big, big job. … It’s not like today where we have appliances.”

She said families of Italian origin were stigmatized as “state enemies” and had to battle to survive as kids had to get pulled out of school, and women ended up finding domestic work on top of taking care of their big families.

“People didn’t want to hire Italians. They didn’t want to rent to Italians,” she said. “There were people that were afraid to help (Italian-Canadians) because they thought ‘Oh my god, the RCMP is watching. My husband’s gonna get interned also.”

Cinna Faveri said her father, Rev. Libero Sauro, was interned in September 1940 and was released in December of the same year. Four of his seven sons were serving in the Canadian military at the time.

Two of her brothers were airmen serving in England, and another one was a signalman fighting in Italy and Holland, she said.

She said her family, unlike most in the Italian community in Canada, was comfortable talking about what happened.

“Whenever I mentioned it to anybody, my close friends, my new friends, anybody, they’re shocked,” she said.

“They don’t know it. Nobody knows about it.”

Lametti said it’s critical to share the stories of these families through commemoration and education.

“We’re sorry,” he said, adding his message to families was “as your parents made sure that this stood as something that would make you better Canadians, we’re hoping to tell your story, so that all Canadians can be better.”

Faveri said the apology is necessary even if it’s too late.

“It’s far too late in coming. But, because for historical reasons, it has to come, even if it’s late.”

Vistarchi said the apology is important because the names of people who were interned are going to be cleared, and the descendants will be given some kind of closure.

“However, I really feel in my heart of hearts, as much as I really am grateful for this apology, that it would have been nice if one, at least one, of these internees had been alive to hear this. They’re all dead,” she said.

“Those are the ears that should have heard this apology.”

Source: Canadians of Italian origin find justice in apology for internment during WW2

Filed under Historical Recognition, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications

2021/05/25 Leave a comment

One of the more significant articles I have seen recently, highlighting the need for countries and societies to adapt to declining populations. While traditional immigrant receiving countries like Canada, Australia and the USA can blunt the decline somewhat, they will also feel the effects on an aging population.

Just as in climate change where adaptation and reduction strategies are both needed, relying only on immigration, as Canada largely does, to mitigate (slow down) the decline, will not address successfully the longer-term trends.

Politicians, policy makers and stakeholders need to devote more attention to other policy responses beyond simply increased immigration. After all, declining populations in most of our source countries may make Canada relatively less attractive in economic terms:

All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history that will make first-birthday parties a rarer sight than funerals, and empty homes a common eyesore.

Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can’t find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks.

Like an avalanche, the demographic forces — pushing toward more deaths than births — seem to be expanding and accelerating. Though some countries continue to see their populations grow, especially in Africa, fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else. Demographers now predict that by the latter half of the century or possibly earlier, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time.

A planet with fewer people could ease pressure on resources, slow the destructive impact of climate change and reduce household burdens for women. But the census announcements this month from China and the United States, which showed the slowest rates of population growth in decades for both countries, also point to hard-to-fathom adjustments.

The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized — around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old. It may also require a reconceptualization of family and nation. Imagine entire regions where everyone is 70 or older. Imagine governments laying out huge bonuses for immigrants and mothers with lots of children. Imagine a gig economy filled with grandparents and Super Bowl ads promoting procreation.

“A paradigm shift is necessary,” said Frank Swiaczny, a German demographer who was the chief of population trends and analysis for the United Nations until last year. “Countries need to learn to live with and adapt to decline.”

The ramifications and responses have already begun to appear, especially in East Asia and Europe. From Hungary to China, from Sweden to Japan, governments are struggling to balance the demands of a swelling older cohort with the needs of young people whose most intimate decisions about childbearing are being shaped by factors both positive (more work opportunities for women) and negative (persistent gender inequality and high living costs).

The 20th century presented a very different challenge. The global population saw its greatest increase in known history, from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000, as life spans lengthened and infant mortality declined. In some countries — representing about a third of the world’s people — those growth dynamics are still in play. By the end of the century, Nigeria could surpass China in population; across sub-Saharan Africa, families are still having four or five children.

But nearly everywhere else, the era of high fertility is ending. As women have gained more access to education and contraception, and as the anxieties associated with having children continue to intensify, more parents are delaying pregnancy and fewer babies are being born. Even in countries long associated with rapid growth, such as India and Mexico, birthrates are falling toward, or are already below, the replacement rate of 2.1 children per family.

The change may take decades, but once it starts, decline (just like growth) spirals exponentially. With fewer births, fewer girls grow up to have children, and if they have smaller families than their parents did — which is happening in dozens of countries — the drop starts to look like a rock thrown off a cliff.

“It becomes a cyclical mechanism,” said Stuart Gietel Basten, an expert on Asian demographics and a professor of social science and public policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “It’s demographic momentum.”

Some countries, like the United States, Australia and Canada, where birthrates hover between 1.5 and 2, have blunted the impact with immigrants. But in Eastern Europe, migration out of the region has compounded depopulation, and in large parts of Asia, the “demographic time bomb” that first became a subject of debate a few decades ago has finally gone off.

South Korea’s fertility rate dropped to a record low of 0.92 in 2019 — less than one child per woman, the lowest rate in the developed world. Every month for the past 59 months, the total number of babies born in the country has dropped to a record depth.

That declining birthrate, coupled with a rapid industrialization that has pushed people from rural towns to big cities, has created what can feel like a two-tiered society. While major metropolises like Seoul continue to grow, putting intense pressure on infrastructure and housing, in regional towns it’s easy to find schools shut and abandoned, their playgrounds overgrown with weeds, because there are not enough children.

Expectant mothers in many areas can no longer find obstetricians or postnatal care centers. Universities below the elite level, especially outside Seoul, find it increasingly hard to fill their ranks — the number of 18-year-olds in South Korea has fallen from about 900,000 in 1992 to 500,000 today. To attract students, some schools have offered scholarships and even iPhones.

To goose the birthrate, the government has handed out baby bonuses. It increased child allowances and medical subsidies for fertility treatments and pregnancy. Health officials have showered newborns with gifts of beef, baby clothes and toys. The government is also building kindergartens and day care centers by the hundreds. In Seoul, every bus and subway car has pink seats reserved for pregnant women.

But this month, Deputy Prime Minister Hong Nam-ki admitted that the government — which has spent more than $178 billion over the past 15 years encouraging women to have more babies — was not making enough progress. In many families, the shift feels cultural and permanent.

“My grandparents had six children, and my parents five, because their generations believed in having multiple children,” said Kim Mi-kyung, 38, a stay-at-home parent. “I have only one child. To my and younger generations, all things considered, it just doesn’t pay to have many children.”

Thousands of miles away, in Italy, the sentiment is similar, with a different backdrop.

In Capracotta, a small town in southern Italy, a sign in red letters on an 18th-century stone building looking on to the Apennine Mountains reads “Home of School Kindergarten” — but today, the building is a nursing home.

Residents eat their evening broth on waxed tablecloths in the old theater room.

“There were so many families, so many children,” said Concetta D’Andrea, 93, who was a student and a teacher at the school and is now a resident of the nursing home. “Now there is no one.”

The population in Capracotta has dramatically aged and contracted — from about 5,000 people to 800. The town’s carpentry shops have shut down. The organizers of a soccer tournament struggled to form even one team.

About a half-hour away, in the town of Agnone, the maternity ward closed a decade ago because it had fewer than 500 births a year, the national minimum to stay open. This year, six babies were born in Agnone.

“Once you could hear the babies in the nursery cry, and it was like music,” said Enrica Sciullo, a nurse who used to help with births there and now mostly takes care of older patients. “Now there is silence and a feeling of emptiness.”

In a speech last Friday during a conference on Italy’s birthrate crisis, Pope Francis said the “demographic winter” was still “cold and dark.”

More people in more countries may soon be searching for their own metaphors. Birth projections often shift based on how governments and families respond, but according to projections by an international team of scientists published last year in The Lancet, 183 countries and territories — out of 195 — will have fertility rates below replacement level by 2100.

Their model shows an especially sharp decline for China, with its population expected to fall from 1.41 billion now to about 730 million in 2100. If that happens, the population pyramid would essentially flip. Instead of a base of young workers supporting a narrower band of retirees, China would have as many 85-year-olds as 18-year-olds.

China’s rust belt, in the northeast, saw its population drop by 1.2 percent in the past decade, according to census figures released on Tuesday. In 2016, Heilongjiang Province became the first in the country to have its pension system run out of money. In Hegang, a “ghost city” in the province that has lost almost 10 percent of its population since 2010, homes cost so little that people compare them to cabbage.

Many countries are beginning to accept the need to adapt, not just resist. South Korea is pushing for universities to merge. In Japan, where adult diapers now outsell ones for babies, municipalities have been consolidated as towns age and shrink. In Sweden, some cities have shifted resources from schools to elder care. And almost everywhere, older people are being asked to keep working. Germany, which previously raised its retirement age to 67, is now considering a bump to 69.

Going further than many other nations, Germany has also worked through a program of urban contraction: Demolitions have removed around 330,000 units from the housing stock since 2002.

And if the goal is revival, a few green shoots can be found. After expanding access to affordable child care and paid parental leave, Germany’s fertility rate recently increased to 1.54, up from 1.3 in 2006. Leipzig, which once was shrinking, is now growing again after reducing its housing stock and making itself more attractive with its smaller scale.

“Growth is a challenge, as is decline,” said Mr. Swiaczny, who is now a senior research fellow at the Federal Institute for Population Research in Germany.

Demographers warn against seeing population decline as simply a cause for alarm. Many women are having fewer children because that’s what they want. Smaller populations could lead to higher wages, more equal societies, lower carbon emissions and a higher quality of life for the smaller numbers of children who are born.

But, said Professor Gietel Basten, quoting Casanova: “There is no such thing as destiny. We ourselves shape our lives.”

The challenges ahead are still a cul-de-sac — no country with a serious slowdown in population growth has managed to increase its fertility rate much beyond the minor uptick that Germany accomplished. There is little sign of wage growth in shrinking countries, and there is no guarantee that a smaller population means less stress on the environment.

Many demographers argue that the current moment may look to future historians like a period of transition or gestation, when humans either did or did not figure out how to make the world more hospitable — enough for people to build the families that they want.

Surveys in many countries show that young people would like to be having more children, but face too many obstacles.

Anna Parolini tells a common story. She left her small hometown in northern Italy to find better job opportunities. Now 37, she lives with her boyfriend in Milan and has put her desire to have children on hold.

She is afraid her salary of less than 2,000 euros a month would not be enough for a family, and her parents still live where she grew up.

“I don’t have anyone here who could help me,” she said. “Thinking of having a child now would make me gasp.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/world/global-population-shrinking.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

For more conventional thinking, see the Foreign Affairs article by , which is similar to the arguments of the Century Initiative, Irving Studin and others. Only at the end does the author acknowledge that “quality” (e.g., human capital, skills etc) matter as much if not more than numbers):

The United States’ global preeminence owes a great deal to demographics. After the collapse and fragmenting of the Soviet Union, the United States became the world’s third most populous country, behind the giants China and India. By comparison to other developed countries, the United States maintained unusually high levels of fertility and immigration—a phenomenon I termed “American demographic exceptionalism” in these pages in 2019. Since the end of the Cold War, the overall American population and its number of working-age people (between the ages of 20 and 64) have grown more rapidly than those of other developed countries—and faster, too, than those of rivals China and Russia. Growing working-age populations boost national productivity in economies run by governments that can successfully develop and tap human resources. For modern welfare states, the slower aging of the population forestalls some of the fiscal burdens built into current arrangements.  

To the extent that crude demographic trends matter in world affairs, they have been running to the United States’ advantage for some time. But big changes are underway. The initial returns from the U.S. 2020 census and the reports about last year’s birth totals offered sobering news: with the slowdown of population growth and steady declines in national fertility, the United States now seems to be charting a less optimistic demographic path, one leading to a grayer and less populous future.   

The United States may be losing its advantage and becoming less exceptional as Americans choose to have fewer children. To the degree that lower birthrates signal diminished popular confidence about the future, the drop-off in fertility warrants attention and perhaps concern. Slower population growth could also have troublesome longer-term implications for Washington’s pay-as-you-go entitlements for senior citizens and other social welfare programs. But a look under the hood of the latest population data and projections suggests that there is no immediate reason to be alarmed about the country’s prospective international standing. The United States will remain in a strong demographic position with respect to its competitors for decades to come.

DECELERATION AND DECLINE

The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 “headline” numbers formally ratify something demographers already knew: the United States’ population growth has been decelerating steadily since 1990—and is now at the slowest recorded tempo in the country’s history, apart from the Great Depression era. Between 2010 and 2020, the U.S. population grew by an estimated 7.4 percent. That is a distinctly slower rate of growth than that of the previous decade, when the United States’ population grew by just under ten percent.

Interestingly—some would say surprisingly—immigration does not seem to have much to do with this slowdown: indirect indications suggest net immigration amounted to about a million people a year over the 2010s, roughly the same level as in the previous decade. Rather, changes in birth and death trends explain the shift. “Natural increase”—the total number of births minus deaths—averaged 1.7 million annually for the decade between 2000 and 2009 but just 1.2 million between 2010 and 2019. In 2019, the year before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, it fell below 900,000, the lowest annual sum on record since at least 1933, when the United States’ nationwide birth and death registration system was completed.

The falloff in U.S. natural increase in the 2010s was partly due to an increase in annual deaths—an entirely predictable result of the aging of the overall population. But the slump in births played a greater role. Birth totals in 2019 were down by over half a million from their all-time high of 4.3 million in 2007, just before the Great Recession.

Total fertility rates—a measure of births per woman per lifetime—tell the American childbearing story on a more human scale. For the two decades leading up to the Great Recession, the United States’ total fertility rate averaged just over two births per woman. Between 2007 and 2019, however, the U.S. rate dropped from over 2.1 (just above the level for long-term population replacement) to 1.7, below replacement level. That was the lowest rate ever recorded for the United States—until now. The provisional birth figures for 2020 indicate another four percent drop, to about 3.6 million,  implying a 2020 national total fertility rate of around 1.64—more than 20 percent below replacement level.

The available data document a substantial and remarkably widespread fertility reduction since the Great Recession. Demographers are wary of supplying definitive reasons for such changes. Economic concerns may play a part, with some blamingthe high costs of child-rearing for their reluctance to have more children or any children at all. Younger generations may also have different priorities and cultural attitudes from those of their predecessors; the rising cohort of millennials, who make up most of today’s population of childbearing ages, is decidedly less religious and also less sanguine about the future.

AN ENDURING ADVANTAGE

But the demographic future remains relatively bright for the United States. The 2020 census results seem far from harbingers of doom, especially when placed in a broader context. Take, for instance, some of the low-end projections of future U.S. population growth. The UN Population Division’s “low variant” models are instructive: these assign the United States a total fertility rate below 1.4 for the second half of the 2020s—a nationwide average lower, in other words, than that of any single U.S. state in 2019—and an even lower rate during the 2030s and 2040s. Even with this strikingly low fertility rate, the projected U.S. population would still rise for the next generation, peaking in 2047 at just under 350 million people, where it would roughly remain through 2050. The number of working-age people would likewise rise modestly during the next quarter century in this scenario—to a projected 2050 level about five percent higher than the corresponding total for 2020.

As that exercise demonstrates, the 2020 census results should not cause a “depopulationist” panic. Even with extreme and unrelenting sub-replacement fertility levels, the United States’ total population and working-age population are on course to keep growing. Continuing migration and the “population momentum” built into the United States’ current demographic structure (as rising cohorts move into age groups currently occupied by comparatively smaller cohorts) would push the overall U.S. population and working-age population to higher totals for at least another generation.

As a result, the United States will likely retain a demographic edge over other great powers. China, Japan, Russia, and the countries of the European Union have all had sub-replacement fertility rates for much longer than the United States. Their current fertility levels are all lower than that of the United States. And their populations are all older than the U.S. population today. (China has the most youthful population of those other powers, but its median age has already exceeded that of the United States.)

The United States’ most recent year of achieving replacement-level fertility was 2008. By contrast, Japan and the EU fell into sub-replacement fertility in the 1970s, China and Russia in the early 1990s. Although the United States’ surfeit of births over deaths has been steadily dwindling for over a decade, deaths have outnumbered births in the EU since about 2012, and Eurostat projects the combined population of the 27 EU member states will begin shrinking around 2025. Japan has had a surplus of deaths over births since 2007 and a continuously shrinking population since 2011. Russia has seen nearly 14 million more deaths than births since the fall of the Soviet Union.

As for China (as I noted in Foreign Affairs back in 2019 and again this year), the working-age population is already in decline; depopulation is set to commence within the coming decade—perhaps much sooner—and the country is on a path toward extremely rapid population aging, with all that implies for economic performance and domestic social need. The particulars of China’s future demographic course will become clearer when the details of China’s 2020 census are divulged—but Beijing’s unexplained month-long delay in announcing even summary findings from the count suggests official displeasure with those results. Among other unpleasant demographic surprises, the Chinese Communist Party has seen births plunge since the suspension of the regime’s harsh one-child policy in 2015. China’s still imperfect vital registration system tallied almost 18 million births in 2016, but the 2020 census reports only 12 million births in 2020. That extremely low reading may reflect the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic (a crisis the regime insists it has always had well under control)—but as demographers learn more, they may find that China’s demographic slide is progressing even more rapidly than they thought.

Of all the presumptive great powers, only India stands to see greater and more rapid total population and working-age population growth than the United States over the coming generation and to remain a more youthful society than the United States. As is well known, in just a few years India will displace China as the world’s most populous country and will surpass China in working-age population shortly after that. But India is now entering sub-replacement fertility, too: UN estimates suggest India’s under 20 population is already declining, and India’s working-age population could peak before 2050.

QUALITY, NOT JUST QUANTITY

The dip in fertility in the United States does suggest that clear-cut U.S. demographic exceptionalism may be over, at least for the time being. The United States will likely surrender its place as the third most populous country in the world to Nigeria at some point before 2050. But it will remain a fairly young and vital society, at least with respect to other developed countries and to competitors such as China and Russia.

Nevertheless, U.S. strategists and policymakers should not take too much comfort in this fact. Raw population numbers won’t on their own strengthen the United States in its competition with others. The United States must also maintain its edge over competitors in developing human capital—a lead that has been dwindling for decades. Revitalizing health, education, and other facets of the country’s human resource base is an urgent task in its own right—and will pay geopolitical dividends.

Source: https://link.foreignaffairs.com/click/23941018.88243/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZm9yZWlnbmFmZmFpcnMuY29tL2FydGljbGVzL3VuaXRlZC1zdGF0ZXMvMjAyMS0wNS0yNC9hbWVyaWNhLWhhc250LWxvc3QtaXRzLWRlbW9ncmFwaGljLWFkdmFudGFnZT91dG1fbWVkaXVtPW5ld3NsZXR0ZXJzJnV0bV9zb3VyY2U9ZmF0b2RheSZ1dG1fY2FtcGFpZ249QW1lcmljYSUyMEhhc24lRTIlODAlOTl0JTIwTG9zdCUyMEl0cyUyMERlbW9ncmFwaGljJTIwQWR2YW50YWdlJnV0bV9jb250ZW50PTIwMjEwNTI0/5e19405c52ba1e34bd567ea3Cc9732586

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , , ,

The two pandemics of anti-Black racism and COVID-19 are tied together

2021/05/25 Leave a comment

Long, somewhat rambling read, stronger on the diagnostique than policy responses.

I would argue more inequality/inequity than anti-Black racism given the groups affected (see https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/24/briefing/vaccination-class-gap-us.html with respect to vaccines but applies more generally):

It has been a year.

Almost one year ago, on May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. Protests ignited in Minneapolis and then spread quickly to cities across the United States and around the world, withestimates indicating that these were the largest, most diverse and longest-lasting protests in North American history.

They heralded a massive shift in public support for Black Lives Matter, bringing the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism and calls to defund the police into broader public consciousness. Although police officers are rarely held to account for the deaths they cause while on duty, Mr. Chauvin was charged and convicted by a Minneapolis jury of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and manslaughter.

But without the viral video of Mr. Chauvin’s public killing of Mr. Floyd,recorded by a 17-year-old child who to this day has nightmares about being unable to help, the outcome would likely have been very different. The original statement by the Minneapolis police department indicated that Mr. Floyd resisted arrest and was handcuffed by officers, who then noted that he “appeared to be suffering medical distress,” without mentioning an inkling about Mr. Chauvin’s deadly use of force.

The trial revealed that Genevieve Hanson, an off-duty firefighter trained in CPR, begged the officers on the scene to let her help and was rebuffed, as were other bystanders. Law enforcement professionals, including Minneapolis police chief Medaria Arradondo, broke the usual blue wall of silence to make the case that Mr. Chauvin’s actions were excessive and unwarranted.

Throughout the trial, Mr. Chauvin was depicted as a rogue officer who disobeyed his training and disregarded established protocol. A bad apple who went too far.

It has been a year. More than a year, in fact, of living through, with, in fear of and in spite of COVID-19. The initial lockdown in March, 2020, was followed by a brief summer respite and then another, deadlier resurgence of the virus beginning in December, 2020, more contagious variants, and the imposition of stricter curfews and stay-at-home orders, depending on where in Canada you live.

The pandemic has revealed a national crisis in long-term care, initiated talk of vaccine passports, demonstrated the precarious labour conditions of low-wage, “essential” workers, generated outbreaks among vulnerable homelessand incarcerated populations, catalyzed mass evictions, forced a mass exodus of more than 200,000 women from the Canadian labour force, brought working parents and other caregivers to the brink of exhaustion, and multiplied the negative mental health effects of social isolation for school-age children.

Even as vaccinations finally roll out, we do not know what the long-term effects of this pandemic will be on our economy, our politics or our social fabric.

In all that we’ve lived and lost this past year, we cannot think of these two phenomena – anti-Black racism and COVID-19 – as separate. Both are global, though nationally textured. Both had the potential to be mitigated by decisive government action or accelerated by epic government failure. Both are simultaneously individualistic and systemic. Both have exposed the cracks in our national moral consciousness about the definition of the common good. And both are existential threats that fuel death, degradation and destruction within our sociopolitical ecosystems.

But the two pandemics are not just similar, they are interlocking, and have wrought havoc on racialized communities across the continent.

Despite the assertions by some politicians that the virus “does not discriminate,” it is now settled scientific wisdom that the burden of disease in the COVID-19 pandemic in North America disproportionately falls on racialized communities.

National data collected in the United States shows that Hispanic/Latino communities are overrepresented in COVID-19 case counts, and Black Americans are overrepresented in deaths because of the disease. It is a bitter irony that, upon his death, it was revealed that Mr. Floyd had tested positive for COVID-19.

While similar national-level data does not exist in Canada, the patchwork of local health units and provinces that have decided to track racial disparities in COVID-19 rates tell a similar story. In Toronto, Black residents are 9 per cent of the population, yet represent 14 per cent of COVID-19 cases and 16 per cent of hospitalizations. The case rates for South Asian/Indo-Caribbean communities and Latin American communities are two to three times higher than the average rate across the city, respectively.

The virus is brutal in its efficiency – it feasts on the social fissures created by the mistreatment of, and divestment from, racialized communities

We now know far more about the mechanisms of this divestment than we did a year ago. The separation of our labour forces into those whose employers provide the flexibility to work from home, and those who are “essential,” demonstrate how intertwined race and class are in deciding who lives and who may die in this pandemic. To be an “essential” worker in 2021 is counterintuitive: The products of one’s labour are invaluable, but employers and policy makers alike treat the workers themselves as disposable.

The comforts that have made urban, middle-class life bearable during this upheaval – two-day shipping from online retailers, curbside pickup from grocery stores, open daycares, and take-out delivered hot and fresh via food delivery apps – operate by exposing an underpaid and predominantly racialized work force to the virus, often without proper protection or additional compensation.

Canada’s caregiving professions are right at the heart of this distressing hierarchy. Personal support workers and nurses, many of whom are Filipino women and who are working under Canada’s Caregiver Program, have been blamed for infecting patients despite the harrowing working conditions caregivers experience on the front lines of the hardest-hit sector of our society: long-term and in-home care.

Once exposed to the virus, these workers are often forced to continue to work because most provinces do not offer paid sick leave, and the Canada Recovery Sickness Benefit offered by the federal government creates a series of barriers to accessing minimal financial support.

These contradictions and binds are evidence of what researchers have termed Canada’s colour-coded labour market on red alert. Gaps in wealth, employment rates and average employment income between racialized and white Canadians are persisting or deepening.

Beyond inaction, the two pandemics expose how politicians scapegoat certain communities to avoid taking responsibility for the social and political problems the lawmakers’ incompetence has exacerbated.

From Ontario Premier Doug Ford blaming “international students” and lax border controls for a third wave of COVID-19 that emerged, in large part, from industrial and manufacturing settings, to Alberta Premier Jason Kenney using assumptions of South Asians recklessly holding big family gatherings in Calgary to explain case bumps in the city, politicians across the country find it easier to blame the racialized “other” than to reckon with their own policy decisions.

Even leaders of the Atlantic provinces, vaunted internationally for their management of the pandemic, have leapt at the opportunity to harangue Black residents for alleged breaches in public health orders – even when they have no official basis to do so.

The rationale behind this discriminatory framing appears to be simple: It works. The public (or at least the portions of the public these leaders envision as their supporters) respond to the protective, coercive powers bestowed upon policy makers in a public-health crisis so long as there is an enemy toward whom they can direct frustration and blame for this chaos.

We see this trend taking hold in the rise of anti-Asian hate in Canada, and especially in British Columbia, where nearly one out of every two people of Asian descent experienced at least one racist action in 2020.

By making the never-ending series of lockdowns a manifestation of the personal failings of a few interlopers, these leaders direct attention away from the social, medical and political institutions we have allowed to erode. The racialized other becomes the imagined vector of disease, masking compounding policy failures that have been decades in the making.

These stigmatizing narratives are also reflected in the ways Black and Indigenous patients, in particular, are treated in our health systems. Joyce Echaquan, an Atikamekw woman, suffered racist abuse from hospital staff in Saint-Charles-Borromée, Que., as she lay dying. This atrocity emerges from the continuing violence of internal colonialism, which is premised on a racial calculus that considers the lives of Indigenous peoples to be less valuable than those of settlers.

Similarly, the death of Mireille Ndjomouo at the hands of attendants who disregarded her basic medical needs is indicative of a clinical context in which Black women are ignored and mistreated. The message sent, implicitly or explicitly, is that Black and Indigenous people are unruly and in need of control in clinical settings, lest we cause havoc as we perish.

Adding to this messaging is the choice by some jurisdictions to avoid collecting race-based health data about COVID-19 to support targeted interventions and vaccination programs in the communities hardest hit by the virus. This occurs despite demonstrable evidence to suggest that collection of race-based data prompts equity-oriented decision-making at a local level.

Instead, support for racialized communities is often left to advocates, clinicians and other professionals on the front lines of battling the virus who have long recognized that a race-conscious approach to health promotion and vaccine distribution will be key to breaking the pandemic’s hold on communities across the country.

The systematic neglect that afflicts Black communities in particular prompts a sense of distrust in public-health systems that is reflected in the much-debated “vaccination hesitancy” that Black Canadians show. One look at community-centred vaccination clinics in Upper Hammonds Plains, Rexdale or Montreal-Nord shows that the work of dedicated doctors, nurses, social workers and community volunteers disrupts these facile narratives.

When people feel heard and cared for, they show up to get vaccinated in droves. Far too often, however, these community voices are disregarded to no one’s benefit.

The two pandemics have also exposed how quickly policymakers turn to policing and punitive measures as a response to any kind of challenge. Mr. Floyd’s murder, as well as the police-involved deaths of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Rodney Levi and Chantel Moore that occurred in the subsequent months, are part of a perpetual backdrop of violence committed by police forces against Black and Indigenous people.

It is worth noting, as many have, the origins of the police in slave patrols of the 19th century and that the original purpose of the RCMP – then the North-West Mounted Police – was to remove Indigenous peoples from their traditional territories.

But the police are deadly to Black and Indigenous people in the here and now, and that alone is a solid foundation for recent calls to defund – and abolish – the police. These sustained and vigorous organizing efforts have made significant advancements across North America: from removing resource officers from schools in Peel Region and an $11-million cut over two years to the police budget in Edmonton, to a 33-per-cent cut to police budgets in Austin, Tex.

Despite these important milestones, however, policy makers have tended toward either maintaining or increasing police budgets. In Minneapolis, talk of abolishing the police force has given way to modest cuts and accusations of obstructionism by the mayor. Meanwhile, city councils in Halifax, Saskatoonand Winnipeg all increased police budgets, while Calgary’s council gave the police more money than they were seeking.

That these budget increases emerged during COVID-19 despite unforeseen opposition indicates how much the pandemic has facilitated the radical expansion of police surveillance across the country, complete with “snitch lines” that encourage citizens to report their neighbours for protocol violations.

This shift toward “policing the pandemic,” as detailed by Alexander McClelland, an assistant professor of criminology at Carleton University, and Alex Luscombe, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, illuminates the racialized framings that underpin the enforcement of public health emergency legislation. Using police officers to enact orders under the pretext of protecting public health has worked in Hamilton to suppress dissent in tent cities against those very same forces, while enforced curfews in Montreal have led to fines for workers who are deemed to be flouting the rules – even if they carried authorization letters with them.

This approach looks less like health promotion as outlined in the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, signed at an international conference organized in collaboration with the World Health Organization in 1986, and more like the deepening of a web of carceral institutions that abolitionist activists have warned us about for years.

We see a similarly troubling expansion of these carceral powers under the pretext of public health within Canada’s prisons. While some provinces wisely decided to release low-risk offenders at the behest of advocates to prevent devastating COVID-19 outbreaks in jails, prisoners in federal facilities have been subject to extended COVID-prompted “isolations” that may breach international standards for torture.

Not only have these cruelties proven ineffective to mitigate the sweeping outbreaks in many federal facilities, but they are also an outcome of the insufficient preventative measures taken in federal institutions to prevent the spread of the virus in the first place.

In times of crisis, it is intuitive for the citizenry to tacitly assent to restrictions that might otherwise seem like government overstep. A year ago, the idea of mask mandates, group size restrictions or curfews seemed ludicrous. And yet, here we are; the legitimacy of these measures is contrived from their careful design and the democratic promise that they are to be universally applied, limited in scope and temporary in nature.

But there is an acute danger to the amplification of carceral logics, punitive measures and police authority: It is far easier to expand power than it is to contract it. Even if we are able to conquer COVID-19 in the foreseeable future, it is unlikely that newfound police powers will be readily or willingly relinquished. “Power concedes nothing without a demand,” Frederick Douglass said in 1857. “It never did and it never will.”

Finally, the two pandemics raise an unavoidable moral question of how we understand social solidarity and the common good. COVID-19 has exposed not just cracks in our social fabric, but chasms.

The policy decisions that have been made during this moment of crisis were about much more than public health. They were, at base, about how we see ourselves as a collective, what we think we owe each other, who deserves to be protected, who should be shown care and concern, who must repel state violence and economic exploitation at every turn, and who must try to fend for themselves.

From the earliest days of the first wave, governments asked us for individual sacrifice for the common good. We changed our lives to protect this imagined community of people we have never seen or met. Our children didn’t go to school, we lost jobs, we didn’t get to bury our loved ones – all in the name of the common good.

And then we watched the video of George Floyd being tortured for eight minutes and 46 seconds. We collectively bore witness to a public lynching in the year 2020, committed by those sworn to protect and serve the common good.

One year ago, cities erupted as ordinary people took to the streets, in protest of the revelation, new to some, familiar to others, that the “common good” is commonly racist. For a moment, it seemed as though a racial reckoning, 400 years in the making, was at hand. For a moment, there was a spark of understanding that though public health and public safety are core functions of government, they frequently involve responses by the state that do more harm than good.

For a moment, there was wider recognition of the duplicitous treachery of a benign discourse of multicultural nationalism while vulnerable populations were immobilized or unable to shelter in place. For a moment, the reckoning seemed possible and then even likely, the public’s captivation genuine and sincere, as if the collateral damage of the pandemic wrought a collective aspiration that we might be able to substantiate a different kind of world on the other side of these entwined tragedies.

But it is now a year later, and we’ve been here before. These moments nearly always prove to be temperamental and temporary.

White American support for Black Lives Matter peaked at 43 per cent last June; that support has now dipped back down to around 37 per cent, the same level as when Mr. Floyd was still breathing. A full 50 per cent of white Americans currently oppose the movement altogether. The rebellions wrought by ordinary folks taking to the streets have been monetized and commodified.

Hollow statements against some kind of amorphous conceptualization of systemic racism have become an effective marketing strategy. Our collective memory of the uprisings has been sanitized to be more palatable to moderates, profitable to the professional class, and sanctioned by the same levels and forms of state power that continue to simultaneously ravage and neglect Black lives and communities.

Sure, steps have been taken and declarations made. Last month’s federal budget announced the government would take steps to fight systemic racism and empower communities. The same document provided an additional $75-million over the next five years to the RCMP to combat systemic racism, even as many are coming around to the idea that the police cannot be reformed, and racism cannot be extracted from the protectorate of the social order.

This is the core tension between a year of tentative and cautious optimism and the well-earned pessimism borne from decades of disappointment with just how fleeting these moments can be.

The two pandemics are interlocking, existential crises, but only one has been treated with the level of urgency required to make a real difference. The onset of COVID-19 was met with the mobilization of the scientific community, accelerated vaccine development, the advent of complicated provincial response systems and on-the-ground co-ordination of entire communities to ensure accessible testing and orderly vaccine distribution. With a little more than a year of decisive action, unprecedented investment, and individual and community sacrifice, we are turning a corner.

The same is not true of the other pandemic, 400 years in the making and still a formidable, resilient and deadly force. Anti-Black racism, and the white supremacy that underpins it, is an existential threat to us all. It fosters social, economic and ecological ruin through division and exploitation. It requires as transformative and all-encompassing an effort to disrupt it as did COVID-19.

The two pandemics were not spontaneous, or even unprecedented, really. Anti-Black racism did not “erupt” in the past year and cannot be resolved by book clubs, equity, diversity, and inclusion trainings and task forces, or good intentions. White supremacy operates at the core of our society and has done so for centuries. We’re not out of the woods; not by a long shot.

When COVID-19 strikes, individuals do not recover easily. Some have damaged organs or permanent lung problems, while others have mental-health issues that arise from the grief, loss, isolation and fatigue. Even for those who have not been ill, our lives have been forever altered.

The new variants of COVID-19 continue to mutate, transform and defy our efforts to bring an end to the pandemic. The toll on human life in this country – 25,000 dead, 1.2 million recovered and 1.3 million currently sick – weighs heavily on our collective consciousness.

The durability and long-term effects of the disease, the way it exposes the precarity and vulnerability of human life, the way it seeps into your mind, body and soul and messes with how you live, breathe, walk, act and exist in the world – this is also the delirious trickery of racism.

There will be no return to normal, after this. Besides, as the incomparable poet Dionne Brand wrote last summer, what kind of person would mourn the normalcy that killed Mr. Floyd? After a year, we are still in a moment of flux, but also a moment ripe with potential.

This is what the late sociologist Stuart Hall might have called a “politics without guarantees.” We cannot be certain that what will emerge in this reconfigured, postpandemic world will be any kinder or more egalitarian than any previous iterations.

There is nothing that guarantees the moral arc of the universe will ultimately bend toward justice. Overcoming the two pandemics will require struggle and vigilance; building the world we envision will take more than a year.

Tari Ajadi is a PhD candidate in political science at Dalhousie University.

Debra Thompson is an associate professor of political science and Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University and author of the forthcoming book The Long Road Home.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-two-pandemics-of-anti-black-racism-and-covid-19-are-tied-together/

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

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