A Century After The Race Massacre, Tulsa Confronts Its Bloody Past

2021/05/25 Leave a comment

Of note:

It’s been 100 years since the Tulsa Race Massacre — one of the worst episodes of racial violence in U.S. history. An armed white mob attacked Greenwood, a prosperous Black community in Tulsa, Okla., killing as many as 300 people. What was known as Black Wall Street was burned to the ground.

“Mother, I see men with guns,” said Florence Mary Parrish, a small child looking out the window on the evening of May 31, 1921, when the siege began.

“And my great-grandmother was shushing her, saying, ‘I’m reading now, don’t bother me,'” says Anneliese M. Bruner, a descendant of the Parrish family. But the child became more insistent.

“And so, my great-grandmother put down her reading and went to see what her daughter was talking about. And indeed, the street was populated with people with guns,” Bruner says. “Bullets were flying everywhere and they fled trying to reach safety at a friend’s home.”

Bruner is able to tell the harrowing story today because her great-grandmother Mary E. Jones Parrish, a teacher and journalist, survived and documented the massacre in her self-published memoir, Events of the Tulsa Disaster.

Sitting on her porch in Washington, D.C., Bruner flips through the pages of her family’s copy which she keeps carefully stored in a plastic bag.

“The book is a small red volume, hardcover, somewhat worn,” Bruner says. “The pages are a little brittle.”

In the book, Parrish described her heroic escape from the angry mob, and her risky return to Greenwood to document the truth of what happened. She included photographs and eyewitness accounts from others, and also recounted the myriad obstacles to rebuilding imposed by the city of Tulsa. In the appendix of the red hardcover, Parrish recorded the value of the property destroyed or taken, including her own two apartments, and the secretarial school she operated.

But the book is more than just a historical account. It’s also Parrish’s plea for America to live up to the promise of democracy.

“My soul cries for justice,” she wrote. “How long will you let mob violence reign supreme?”

Bruner believes her great-grandmother’s words are a message for the nation today amid the quest for a racial reckoning. She’s worked to get the memoir republished in conjunction with the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, The Nation Must Awake.

“How do you get past the trauma, the hurt, the pain, the fear, the chaos without truth?” asks Bruner, “and that is what Mary Jones Parrish brings — the truth.”

The scene was horrific a century ago when the armed white mob, fortified by law enforcement, descended on Greenwood, an all-Black district just north of downtown Tulsa. Two days of bloodshed and destruction ensued, by land and air. Despite efforts to protect their property, Black residents were outnumbered and outpowered. Eyewitnesses recalled the specter of men carrying flaming torches through the streets to set fire to homes and businesses. Then martial law, and the arrests and internment of thousands of African-Americans.

The massacre had been sparked by reports that a 19-year-old Black man had allegedly offended a 17-year-old white female elevator attendant. The murky incident got blown out of proportion by inflammatory newspaper accounts.

While events in Oklahoma over the next few weeks will seek to examine the legacy of the Tulsa Race Massacre 100 years later, it hasn’t always been that way. Historical records were mostly destroyed, and for decades it was called the Tulsa Race Riot, implying it was somehow a two-sided battle.

Tulsa — and the nation — have been slow to acknowledge the brutal reality of what happened back in 1921, and the lasting impact it’s had on Black families.

“This actually was something that was akin to an act of war where the country turned in on its own citizens,” says Tulsa descendant Annaliese Bruner.

In addition to the loss of life, there was more than $1 million in property losses which would amount to more than $20 million today. Before the massacre, the Greenwood district was considered one of the most affluent all-Black communities in the country, a mecca for African-American culture, business and prosperity.

“It was a community of self-sufficient people,” Bruner says. “They had a great sense of themselves and their place in the world — exercising their agency and full rights and responsibilities of citizenship.”

A heritage to be proud of, yet a heritage Bruner didn’t learn about until she was in her 30s, she says, when on a visit to her father in California, he gave her the little red book and revealed this part of her family’s history.

“I was speechless, stunned, amazed, proud, sad. I was grief stricken,” she says.

It helped explain some of the trauma in her family. For instance, her grandmother who escaped the massacre as a young child struggled with alcoholism.

Bruner, an editor in her early 60s, has been on coronavirus pandemic lockdown with her grown children over the last year, so they’ve had time to consider the legacy of Tulsa and the family’s heritage.

“To be the descendent of a survivor, and then for that survivor to have the presence of mind to write that down and to have the clarity of thought for it to be so detailed, so meticulously put together, is just the source of pride,” says Kevin Hurtt, Bruner’s 33-year-old son, a biologist and science teacher.

In earlier generations the story of Tulsa was rarely passed down from victims to descendants because of fear of retribution, and Bruner suspects perhaps even some shame for having endured such abuse. Hence the long-kept secret.

Bruner’s daughter, Portia Hurtt, is a 31-year-old lawyer. She finds it hard to contemplate that not only her family, but everyone who lived in Greenwood was disinherited from what their ancestors had built there.

“Looking back now, I know how the story ends,” she says, fighting back tears. “This can be a theme in African-American families where you have to do everything right. And if something comes along and derails you, that can reverberate through generations.”

Anneliese Bruner says that the country needs to be humble and acknowledge what the Tulsa Race Massacre did to African Americans, otherwise, there is no moving forward.

“There are people whose psyche is still affected generationally, trauma after trauma, after trauma just continues to build on itself,” Bruner says. “And none of it gets resolved if you’re in a system that sometimes has the unequal application of law and or opportunity.”

Bruner sees a toxic line from Tulsa to violence against Black people today, and says the same questions apply.

“Who’s going to be held accountable?” she asks. “Are reparations going to be made? Is there going to be any official admission of responsibility?”

In 1997 the state legislature created what was called the “Oklahoma Commission to study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921,” and it published its final report in 2001. It found that the city of Tulsa had conspired to destroy Greenwood.

“This Commission fully understands that it is neither judge nor jury. We have no binding legal authority to assign culpability, to determine damages, to establish a remedy, or to order either restitution or reparations,” commissioners wrote. Though the report also suggested that reparations to the Greenwood community “would be good public policy and do much to repair the emotional and physical scars of this terrible incident in our shared past.”

According to the commission’s report, the massacre destroyed some 40-square blocks in Greenwood. Nearly 10,000 people were left homeless as 1,256 homes were looted and burned down. And the thriving commercial district was destroyed — some of the finest Black-owned and operated businesses in the country, including hotels, restaurants, grocery stores, a theatre, a roller skating rink, hospitals and doctors’ offices, law firms, churches and realtors.

Commissioners suggested reparations such as direct payments to “riot survivors and descendants,” a scholarship fund and a memorial, among other things.

“When you talk about reparations, the challenge is that it means different things to different people,” Tulsa Mayor GT Bynum says.

“There is an acknowledgement that Black Tulsans have not had the same shot at success and a great life that white Tulsans have had over the last hundred years,” Bynum says.

Bynum, who is white, says while there’s public support for addressing disparities, resistance to cash reparations runs deep.

“Where does that come from?” he asks. “It would necessarily have to come from a tax levied on this generation of Tulsans and the idea of financially penalizing this generation of Tulsans for something criminals did 100 years ago, that’s a hard thing to ask.”

But survivors and their descendants are asking. A lawsuit against the city is seeking a host of reparations including financial compensation, tax abatement, mental health services, and restitution to include the redistribution of land to the families of Greenwood’s original landowners.

“We’re really trying to get solutions and justice that’s going to change these socio-economic statistics that we’ve been living with for the last 100 years,” says Tulsa attorney Damario Solomon-Simons.

He’s the founder of the Justice for Greenwood Foundation, and represents the three known living survivors of the Race Massacre, who testified before Congress last week. A House Judiciary subcommittee is revisiting legal and policy measures to compensate survivors, their descendants, and Tulsa’s greater Black community.

Solomon-Simmons believes the pushback on reparations is rooted in the country’s historical notion of race, and the view, dating to slavery, that Black citizens aren’t entitled to the same rights as white citizens.

“It is a remnant of a badge of slavery,” Solomon-Simmons says. “Anybody that does not believe in truth, justice and reparations for the people of Greenwood, then you don’t believe in truth, justice and equity — period.”

He says part of the difficulty in getting the white establishment on board in Tulsa is that their families directly benefited from the massacre, and in some cases participated in it.

“They don’t want to discuss the real aspects of it,” he says. “Because then they’re talking about their fathers, their grandfathers, their uncles.”

Earlier this month, in a controversial move, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission removed Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt from the panel after he signed legislation that would ban the teaching of certain concepts about race in state schools. Commission members were vocal in their opposition, arguing the law would undermine efforts to teach Oklahoma’s race history, including the truth about what happened in Tulsa.

For descendant Anneliese Bruner, coming to terms with that truth is the key to accountability. A belief she says was reinforced as she watched the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, happening just a few miles from her home.

“It was a frightening prospect,” she says. “Knowing what I know about what happened in Tulsa when, as my great grandmother called it, King Mob was in charge.”

Bruner says the nation, and in particular Black Americans, should not be living with that same fear 100 years after the Tulsa Race Massacre.

Source: A Century After The Race Massacre, Tulsa Confronts Its Bloody Past

Filed under Racism Tagged with ,

IRCC Evaluation of Language Training Services

2021/05/25 Leave a comment

Of interest, particularly the differences between settlement service language training clients and non-clients, the greater effectiveness of employment-focussed language training and the overall impact of the socio-demographic profile of clients and non-clients:

This report presents the findings of the evaluation of Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada’s (IRCC) Language Training Services. The evaluation was conducted to provide an in- depth assessment of this major program and considered issues of program effectiveness, covering the period from 2015 to 2018.

The Evaluation of the Settlement Program (2018) highlighted the need to further assess the different success factors and approaches to language learning. While language training is helping newcomers improve their language ability, progression was shown to vary by skill (i.e., reading, writing, listening and speaking), as well as client characteristics, which pointed to the need for a greater understanding of progression across skills. As such, the evaluation recommended an in- depth examination and thorough analysis to provide fulsome outcomes results and specific recommendations for improvements to the Department with the aim of improving language training effectiveness.

The language learning services have been evaluated, focusing on two key areas. The main focus was to better understand language skills improvement – what works for whom and under what conditions, with a view to determining the specific characteristics that influence language skills improvement. The secondary area of focus was to examine whether the language learning framework is adapted to address newcomers’ needs.

Summary of conclusions and recommendations

Based on the evidence analyzed, it was found that language learning services are designed to be flexible and effective in meeting the diverse needs of newcomers and to support their progression. The findings also show that language progression for newcomers is mostly positive, but there are differences between clients and non-clients with respect to likelihood of progression. While clients were seen to progress at the same pace as non-clients when assessed in the short term, using an objective measure, clients appeared to progress more than their non- client counterparts when assessed on a longer timeframe using a subjective measure. It was also found that some components of language training are associated with a greater likelihood of newcomers improving their language skills, such as full-time language training and multi-level classes, while others lowered chances of progression, such as continuous intake classes.

Furthermore, when assessing other settlement outcomes, the evidence indicated that:

  •   clients of general formal language training use official languages less frequently than non- clients, while formal language training focused on employment were using it significantly more than non-clients.
  •   clients of formal language training, and clients who took both formal and informal language training, are more likely to report an increase in the frequency of use of official languages.Although not a direct objective of language training, employability remains a primary concern for clients. The evaluation carefully analyzed this theme and assessed the impact of language training on various labour market outcomes. Clients of general language training used English or French at work less frequently and were less comfortable using official languages than non-clients, however taking language training focused on employment contributed to making these gaps smaller. Also, clients often had poorer labour market outcomes than non-clients on the short to medium term. The analysis showed that a large part of the difference in employment outcomes between clients and non-clients could be attributed to socio-demographic profiles of individuals (e.g., education, age, gender, year of admission). This suggests that taking language training is not necessarily a cause of poorer labour market outcomes, but rather that clients and non-clients may have different characteristics that explain their outcomes on the labour market. Furthermore, the evaluation found that employment outcomes of clients do not vary greatly based on how language training is delivered, language training focused on employment generally had a positive impact on employment outcomes, and taking language training during core hours was associated with less favourable results.

While the client progression and their labour market outcomes show mixed results, it should be noted that language learning services correspond to the diversity in clients’ need and IRCC- funded language learning services are designed in a manner to be conducive to language improvement for newcomers.

In response to the findings from the evaluation, this report has grouped the recommendations into two main themes. First, the evaluation proposes three recommendations around the topic of outcomes measurement. Second, the evaluation recommends improvements to the program to foster success. To this end, the evaluation proposes seven additional recommendations to further support clients, instructors and program stakeholders.

Source: https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/ircc/documents/pdf/english/corporate/reports-statistics/evaluations/E4-2018_LanguageTrain_Eng.pdf

Filed under Immigration, Integration Tagged with , ,

When they came to power in 2015, the Trudeau Liberals promised to ‘build a government that looks like Canada.’ Now those words have slowly been transformed into actions

2021/05/25 Leave a comment

Nice profile of a former IRCC colleague and her leadership in anti-Black racism both within IRCC and more broadly.

The percentage of visible minority executives is incorrectly stated at 4.6%, not the 11.1% in the latest employment equity report (for the numbers, see https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/october-2020/what-new-disaggregated-data-tells-us-about-federal-public-service-diversity/):

As she watched the George Floyd story and anti-Black-racism movement unfolding worldwide last summer, Farah Boisclair emailed her colleagues at Canada’s immigration department and called a town-hall meeting to talk about racism.

“I was going through a lot of emotions showing up to work. There’s a global movement and it was plastered all over the media, but no one was talking about it at work,” says Boisclair, director of the anti-racism task force at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

“Part of me saddened, part of me frustrated. Why isn’t anybody saying anything? That’s when I woke up and said, ‘You are a leader. You have the power. You have people who work with you, who look like you and who may be feeling a certain way, like you.”

With the blessing of her boss, she made her first presentation to more than 300 of her colleagues on topics such as experiences of microaggression, white privilege and racism.

Boisclair, whose mother is Haitian and father Guyanese, is now a member of the Federal Speakers’ Forum on Diversity and Inclusion, a platform where public servants share their lived experience with colleagues and management.

Trying to have a conversation about race and racism is tough, let alone at work in a professional setting. However, it’s one of the many initiatives the federal government is banking on in its attempts to make strides in creating and promoting a diverse and inclusive public service.

Earlier this year, with little fanfare, the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat unveiled the government’s priorities to increase diversity in hiring and appointments within the public service — a commitment that was reaffirmed in the federal budget in April.

Collecting and breaking down its employee data by disability, ethnic backgrounds and executive roles, and ensuring the statistics are made public;

Launching the Centre for Diversity and Inclusion to lead and keep track of departments and agencies in their efforts to address systemic racism and boost diversity representation through collaboration with diverse community groups;

Revamping the government’s existing mentorship program and starting a sponsorship program to groom civil servants from under-represented groups into leadership and executive roles in their organizations; and

Setting up a speakers’ bureau, to help raise awareness about diversity and inclusion within the public service through a roster of speakers who share their experience across departments and ministries.

“There is good momentum across the government and a desire to make significant progress on diversity and inclusion,” said Paule-Anny Pierre, executive director of the new Centre for Diversity and Inclusion.

“Our actions will help ensure that decisions, initiatives and programs across the public service foster and promote a workplace that is respectful, diverse and inclusive, that represents the population it serves and that enables each employee to feel valued and contribute at their full potential.”

There’s a lot of work to be done to boost diversity in the public service, especially among those in the leadership roles. The latest government data shows visible minorities made up only 4.6 per cent of all executives and Blacks accounted for 1.6 per cent in those roles. [Note: Correct figure is 11.1 percent]

The 2020 Public Service Employee Survey, its results released in May, also added new questions to measure employees’ perceptions of anti-racism in the workplace.

Almost 80 per cent of the 188,786 respondents said they would feel free to speak about racism in the workplace without fear of reprisal and felt comfortable sharing concerns about issues related to racism in the workplace with a person of authority.

Born and raised in Ottawa, Boisclair said no one around her worked for government. However, a co-op opportunity with the federal government while studying finance at the University of Ottawa opened the door for her.

In her 13 years with the government, she has worked in various departments, including Industry Canada (now Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada), Natural Resources Canada and Infrastructure Canada.

On many occasions, she said, she would find herself one of the few or the only person who was a visible minority in her teams.

“I felt hyperaware of myself in these environments. I was constantly like, ‘Be careful what you say, be careful what you do, be careful how you interact.’ With that, I think, I held myself back a lot (in terms of) speaking up on my ideas and my thoughts,” said Boisclair.

“It’s very much like: ‘I’m here to do a job. They’re going to tell me what to do and I’m going to do it.’ … I knew I was different from the others. You don’t want to stick out too much. You try to go along to get along.”

As a Black woman, Boisclair said, she has experienced microaggression at work many times and felt invisible in board rooms.

“I will be joined by a white colleague, a woman around the same age, same group in level, both managers from the same team. I remember the treatment of my colleague when I was working with her for three years, it was very different,” she recalled.

“When we’d go to meetings together, I felt like it’s her race and even the standard of beauty in the North American context, she got very different treatment, more eye contact, more interaction with her. It’s hard and you don’t want it to get into your head.”

The experience, she said, made her feel less important and less valued.

Although the faces in the rank and file of the federal public service are changing, she said all her managers, until now, were predominantly white.

Periodically, Boisclair would have a mentor in her department but only recently was she assigned a Black woman as her official sponsor at work.

“It’s really important to have mentors from different groups and genders, because they each offer different perspectives and each can relate to you on different levels,” she said.

“I have had mentors who professionally give you really good advice but when it came to some of those deeper conversations about race and my identity in the workplace, that’s a bit tough with the white mentors,” she noted.

Dahabo Ahmed Omer, a policy development and employment equity expert, says mentorship/sponsorship and speakers’ bureau initiatives are important tools in building understanding and trust in order to create awareness and cultural change within the organization.

A former human resources specialist with the federal government herself, Ahmed Omer said government mandates, strategies and practices are set by senior leaders who play a key role in the building of an inclusive public service.

“There’s the history of slavery, anti-Indigenous racism. You build trust by listening actively and by implementing solutions that directly come from the community,” said Ahmed Omer, now the executive director of BlackNorth Initiative, an effort led by the Canadian Council of Business Leaders Against Anti-Black Systemic Racism.

“The voices of the most marginalized have to be at the forefront.”

Organizations must pick the right mentors, give access to as many mentees as possible and make sure the under-represented groups have opportunities to apply what they’ve learned so they can seize those opportunities when they arise at work, she noted.

From reviewing staffing plans to budget priorities and resource allocations through a diversity lens, Ahmed Omer said the effort must be “deliberate” and she is liking the federal plan she has seen so far.

Boisclair said she is grateful to have a sponsor at work, who gives her pointers in her career development, sends her articles to inspire and equip her, expand her network and champion her in the immigration department, which had 8,500 employees in 2020.

Last year, after seeing her anti-racism presentation with her staff, her sponsor invited her to speak to a couple of dozen deputy ministers from different departments in October. Since then, she has done about 25 townhalls within the federal public sector to share her experience and stories.

These conversations are difficult, said Boisclair, because they are “too raw” for a lot of people.

“You are talking about deep, deep, deep emotions, trauma and, in a lot of cases, some people just don’t know how to deal with emotions in the workplace. When some of the people are sharing some of the more intimate experiences, it’s hard,” she said.

“A lot of people don’t want to deal with the feelings of guilt. People don’t like to get uncomfortable,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense for them. Why would I put myself in an uncomfortable position?”

The experience from these candid conversations has also been refreshing and empowering.

“At the time, I was feeling like, I’m just tired of putting on a filter. I need to show my lived experience as a woman, as a Black person, as a Canadian, the full essence of who I am. That doesn’t often happen at the workplace for racialized people,” said Boisclair.

“I have had these dialogues for many, many years in close circles at home. You would never, never have these conversations at work. For me, it’s time to open people’s minds up to the reality of systemic racism and the harmful impacts of it.”

While these conversations, along with the mentorship/sponsorship program, can drive awareness of racial understanding and organizational cultural change, Ryerson University professor Wendy Cukier says disaggregated data can provide the barometer to identify gaps and measure results.

“We need good data to tracking things like what works and what doesn’t work. We need to apply the same gender and diversity lens to how government spends money and who it’s serving. There’s the inward piece but also the outward reaching piece,” said Cukier, founder and academic director at Ryerson’s Diversity Institute.

“It’s not that anybody deliberately puts up bars or gates, but you need the data to see if certain segments of the population are applying for jobs in my department and what I can do to increase engagement.”

The latest statistics on employment equity populations published by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat provide a glimpse at the diversity representation of the federal public service:

Overall, visible minorities made up 656 or 4.6 per cent of all executives;

Black people made up 96 or 1.6 per cent of all executives;

Indigenous peoples made up 239 or 4.1 per cent of all executives;

There were 1,387 persons with disabilities working in administrative support, which was 7 per cent of all these employees; and

People who are blind or visually impaired made up 767 or 0.4 per cent of all employees.

“Leaders have to represent the people they are leading, otherwise they are not going to be very effective. When organizations have leaders who look like the people they are leading, they have higher levels of engagement,” said Cukier.

“People tend to associate with people who look like them. If you’re from a racialized population, you are less likely to have a social network that will help you understand the unspoken rules that will mentor you and promote you at work.”

Cukier said the dominant group in the workforce should not feel threatened fearing that the progress for their under-represented peers will be made at their expense, given the civil service is full of boomers, many of them will be retiring in the near future.

“There is a huge challenge in digital and technological transformation in the public sector, which has one of the most acute skill shortages. This is not a question of new people pushing the established group out, this is a question of meeting concrete need for skills and new thinking,” she said.

“It doesn’t make a lot of sense to rely on the same kind of people if your goal is to drive transformation. We know there’s a strong link between diversity and innovation.”

Quebec MP Greg Fergus, parliamentary secretary to Treasury Board President Jean-Yves Duclos, agreed.

“You don’t make this a ‘I win, you lose’ kind of equation. It’s not an ‘either or.’ It’s a ‘both and.’ We all benefit by growing the pie. We’re better together,” said Fergus. “This is not about cutting anybody’s career short. This is about building a more resilient public service.”

Source: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/05/23/when-they-came-to-power-in-2015-the-trudeau-liberals-promised-to-build-a-government-that-looks-like-canada-now-those-words-have-slowly-been-transformed-into-actions.html

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , , , ,

Hong Kongers are jumping at the chance to immigrate to Canada

2021/05/22 1 Comment

Likely to increase further:

A Canadian government program to help Hong Kongers immigrate to this country in the wake of Beijing’s crackdown on the former British colony has received more than 5,700 applications in its first three months, roughly triple the number that usually apply in a full year.

The federal initiative to help Hong Kongers study and work in Canada was opened for applicants in February. It included a three-year open work permit for recent Hong Kong graduates or those with a history of work experience in areas Canada might value, as well as a new pathway to permanent-resident status for those who end up coming here.

Since then, there have been more than 5,640 applications for work permits and 86 applications to extend existing work permits, Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino’s office announced Thursday.

The applications represent a significant jump from the interest shown in recent years from Hong Kong through other programs. Alexander Cohen, press secretary to Mr. Mendicino, said Canada typically received about 1,500 to 2,000 work-permit applications from Hong Kongers annually in recent years through other comparable immigration programs.

An exodus from Hong Kong has been expected since the Chinese government imposed a national security law on Hong Kong in June, 2020, ostensibly to target secession, subversion and terrorism, but with vaguely defined offences that critics say effectively criminalize dissent and opposition to the Chinese Communist Party’s rule.

Canada and Western allies have criticized China’s clampdown as a violation of the international treaty it signed in which Beijing had pledged to allow local autonomy and civil rights to continue for 50 years after the 1997 handover.

“Canada shares the grave concerns of the international community over China’s national security legislation and strongly supports the right to peaceful protest, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. At this difficult moment, we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the people of Hong Kong,” Mr. Cohen said in a statement.

Vancouver-based immigration lawyer Richard Kurland said the applications represent a big uptake from Hong Kong.

“That’s an outstanding number of work permits. Hong Kongers are beginning to vote with their feet,” he said.

He expects a steady stream of out-migration from the Asian financial hub in the years ahead.

Records show Hong Kongers have already moved billions of dollars to Canada. Last year, capital flows out of Hong Kong banks and into Canada reached the highest level on record, with about $43.6-billion in electronic funds transfers recorded by FINTRAC, Canada’s anti-money laundering agency.

The United Kingdom has announced a pathway to British citizenship for Hong Kongers who were born before the 1997 handover and qualify for British national (overseas) status. Britain is offering them the right to live, study and work in the country for five years and eventually apply for citizenship. As many as 2.6 million Hong Kongers are eligible and British authorities have estimated as many as 200,000 will embark on this path to citizenship.

A crackdown on civil rights in Hong Kong that accelerated in 2020 amid the global pandemic has steadily eroded the territory’s political and social freedoms that were unique in China, a legacy of the territory’s years under British control. Earlier this year, Chinese lawmakers approved changes to Hong Kong’s electoral system, further reducing democratic representation in the city’s institutions and introducing a mechanism to vet and screen politicians’ loyalty to Beijing.

Cherie Wong, executive director of Alliance Canada Hong Kong, said the work-permit initiative has helped resettle many Hong Kongers but she also wants Canada to offer a dedicated path for political refugees from the former British territory.

She said only a select group will qualify for the Canadian work-permit program but there is a far bigger share of the population that wants to leave Hong Kong. Ms. Wong cited a September, 2020, poll by the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies that found more than 43 per cent of Hong Kongers polled said they would be inclined to emigrate if given the opportunity.

Ms. Wong noted the Hong Kong government, under direction from Beijing, has passed new regulations coming into force Aug. 1 that give authorities the right to bar people from leaving the city. This, she warned, could lead to a humanitarian crisis.

“Authorities will have the ability to issue an exit ban on anyone and that’s a great opportunity for them to close the border,” she said.

“Hong Kong is in the second year of this humanitarian crisis. Canada has done little to support Hong Kongers fleeing persecution; rather we have only offered a work-permit program targeted at postsecondary graduates. It is not humanitarian relief, we need urgent actions prior to August.”

The Canadian government has resisted creating a special refugee stream for Hong Kong, saying applicants can use existing channels.

At last count, Canada has granted asylum to 18 Hong Kong prodemocracy activists, according to the New Hong Kong Cultural Club, a group of Canadian supporters of democracy in Hong Kong that has branches in Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver. These refugees are all people who travelled to Canada before COVID-19 pandemic travel restrictions hit.

Ms. Wong said many Hong Kongers who would like to seek refuge from the crackdown in Hong Kong are prevented by COVID-19 travel restrictions from journeying here to apply for asylum.

Source: Hong Kongers are jumping at the chance to immigrate to Canada

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Delacourt: Justin Trudeau isn’t fighting his father’s battles in Quebec. But maybe we should

2021/05/22 Leave a comment

Of note:

Justin Trudeau issued no statements on Thursday to mark the 41st anniversary of Quebec’s first referendum on sovereignty.

So the prime minister’s comments from earlier this week — on Quebec’s bid to unilaterally declare itself a nation in the Constitution — will have to stand as his remarks on how far Canada has travelled from that fateful moment on May 20, 1980.

“Our initial analysis …. (is) that it is perfectly legitimate for a province to modify the section of the Constitution that applies specifically to them and that that is something that they can do,” Trudeau told reporters on Tuesday.

There is no way to view those remarks in isolation from the signature battle of his father’s career, much as the current prime minister tends to resist the historical comparisons.

Forty-one years ago this week, Pierre Trudeau was soberly, cautiously celebrating the victory of federalism against the forces that wanted to make Quebec a separate nation, with words such as these:

“To those who may wish to recreate in this land those old nationalistic barriers between peoples — barriers of which the world has been trying to rid itself — I say, we Canadians do not have to repeat the mistakes of the past,” Pierre Trudeau said in a statement after 59.5 per cent of Quebec voted “no” to a bid to embark on separation from Canada.

“All of us have the opportunity to show the whole world that we are not the last colonials on earth, but rather among the first people to free themselves from the old world of nation-states.”

That old world has re-emerged in 2021 with a twist in the form of Quebec’s new language law, which has been presented — and disturbingly accepted by Trudeau and other political leaders — as a none-of-your-business bit of provincial housekeeping. Just keeping the French language alive, drive on, nothing to see here.

I’ve mentioned already how Justin Trudeau bristles at constant comparisons to his father (as many sons would, to be fair).

Back in the summer of 2019, Trudeau was sitting on a patio in Ottawa during a pre-election social event for MPs and candidates. He was repeating a line he was fond of uttering back then: “Unlike my father, I like campaigning.”

I could not resist. I said we knew how unlike his father he was, but how was he similar? Trudeau gave it some thought, then talked about how he felt his father’s influence when provoked to fight. He mimicked the posture of a boxer, chin up, ready to pounce. “Like my dad, I just want to get in there,” he said.

No such impulse emerged with Quebec’s latest language gambit, which Trudeau apparently sees not as a provocation but “perfectly legitimate.”

Nor has this Trudeau assumed the ready-to-pounce stance over the far more egregious Bill 21, which has placed outrageous limits on the rights of religious expression for minorities in Quebec. “It’s before the courts,” Trudeau says whenever asked, while assuring Canadians, as he did again on Tuesday, that his government is mindful of protecting minorities.

Bill 21 is what Quebec does with loopholes and escape clauses in the Constitution. It used the notwithstanding clause to pull off that legal feat of discrimination against minorities. So what plans does it have for the unilateral declaration of nationhood? Is this Trudeau not curious? Provoked?

This is not a column about Trudeau failing to be his father’s son, which he himself wants us to know. The pandemic, not tension with Quebec separatism, will be the signature moment of this Trudeau’s career. When separatism is mentioned in the current context, it’s as likely to come from the West, where this idea of unilateral nationhood declarations might well be seen as a good idea on some bad day in the future.

It was fascinating to go back on Thursday and look at the video of Pierre Trudeau reacting to the federalists’ victory 41 years ago. There was no triumphalism; barely a smile, even. He talked of how he couldn’t stop thinking about the roughly 40 per cent who said “yes” to separation, and what they needed to make them feel more inclined toward Canada.

A new constitution was his proposal — this would be the same one that Quebec has refused to sign but now wants to amend. Trudeau’s old friend and adviser, Gerald Butts, saw the irony in that on Twitter this week, asking whether the plan to amend the Constitution means that it’s now accepted in the province.

The current prime minister is definitely not seeing Quebec’s latest gambit through the long lens of history. Not the same thing, his advisers are saying. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. We owe it to our Constitution’s rich history to read the fine print of what Quebec is proposing.

Source: Justin Trudeau isn’t fighting his father’s battles in Quebec. But maybe we should

Filed under Government Tagged with , , , ,

Foundation raises $1 billion to fight anti-Asian hate

2021/05/22 Leave a comment

Real money:

A foundation launched by prominent Asian American business leaders earlier this month said Thursday it has raised more than $1 billion to support Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.

The announcement from The Asian American Foundation, or TAAF, came minutes after President Joe Biden signed legislation aimed at curtailing the rise in hate crimes against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in the United States.

Sonal Shah, the foundation’s president, and TAAF board members were also at the White House, where they briefed administration officials, including domestic policy adviser Susan Rice. They discussed how the foundation plans to spend the $1.1 billion in donations to fight back against hate crimes directed at these communities, according to a statement from the foundation. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris dropped by the meeting to express their support, the foundation said.

Thursday’s news builds on the foundation’s prior announcement that it had raised $300 million from its board members and other donors. More donors have since pledged contributions to its “AAPI Giving Challenge,” an initiative to bring additional funding to Asian American and Pacific Islander organizations that have traditionally been neglected in philanthropy.

“TAFF was founded to close critical gaps of support for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and end the longstanding underinvestment in our communities,” said Shah, who previously served as a deputy assistant to former President Barack Obama. ”Today’s historic announcement should send a clear signal to the 23 million AAPIs living in this country that TAAF and our AAPI Giving Challenge partners are here to upend the status quo in favor of a better, brighter future for AAPI communities.”

The Asian American Foundation has said its giving will focus on supporting organizations and leaders measuring and challenging violence against Asian American and Pacific Islanders; developing a common data standard that tracks violence and hate incidents; and helping create K-12 and college curriculums that “reflect the history of Asian American and Pacific Islanders as part of the American story.”

Members of the foundation’s advisory council, including CNN host Lisa Ling and actor Daniel Dae Kim, virtually joined the White House meeting alongside representatives from donors, including Mastercard and the MacArthur Foundation.

Separately, TAFF is producing a TV special designed to expand support for Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. The program, called “See Us Unite for Change — The Asian American Foundation in service of the AAPI Community,” will air Friday on multiple channels, including MTV, BET, VH1 and Comedy Central.

Source: Foundation raises $1 billion to fight anti-Asian hate

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Budget funds tackling anti-Asian racism a ‘symbolic’ move, says expert, but foundation’s plans still in flux

2021/05/22 Leave a comment

Of note (significant for the CRRF as previous governments have not provided such funding if memory serves me correctly):

A “groundbreaking” boost to the Canadian Race Relations Foundation to help address the rise of anti-Asian racism is a welcome and “symbolic” investment, says one expert, but details of how it plans to spend the $11-million remain up in the air.

The federal government’s 2021 budget, tabled on April 19 by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland (University-Rosedale, Ont.), earmarked $11-million for the foundation over two years, starting in 2021-22. Funds are designed to help the Crown corporation “scale up” its capacity and establish a “national coalition to support Asian Canadian communities.” A fund to support “all racialized communities directly impacted” by a spike in racist attacks during the pandemic will also be created, according to the 724-page document.

Mohammed Hashim, executive director of the foundation (CRRF), said the group is currently working on creating an anti-Asian racism strategy that it hopes to launch in the fall.

“We recognize that there is no one Asian community. There are many Asian communities, and we need to be able to work with all of them to make sure we’re doing things that are appropriate within each of those,” said Mr. Hashim. The summer will be filled with “a ton of consultations” with groups doing anti-Asian racism work, which will help inform “what a coalition could look like.”

By the fall, the foundation plans to release its organizational strategy in full, detailing different grant streams that will be available to external groups. Work is still underway internally to determine how much of the funding will be set aside to boost the foundation’s capacity—though Mr. Hashim said a “good portion” will be dedicated to ensuring the corp can “function as a national entity”—and how much will be handed to organizations fighting Asian racism. Membership of such a “coalition” is also still being discussed, he said.

Bill C-30, the government’s budget bill, has not yet passed and is being studied by the House Finance Committee. The Senate Finance Committee also launched a pre-study of the legislation.

Mr. Hashim, who was named to the post for a five-year term last fall, underscored the significance of the boost, noting it’s the first time the Crown corporation has seen money earmarked as a line item in the budget. Typically, the organization has relied on its endowment income and fundraising, but Ottawa’s “groundbreaking” investment will go toward helping it “embolden” its programming, he said.

The foundation, which falls under the portfolio of the Heritage department, “can play a national leadership role in anti-racism efforts,” said Mr. Hashim, adding the allocation signals the government has “confidence” in it to become just that.

Avvy Go, a director with the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic in Toronto (CSALC), agreed it’s a “good thing” that anti-Asian racism has been listed as a budget item for the first time, as it carries “symbolic” weight.

“But my question is whether $11-million is really enough. The Asian community is a very large community,” she said. According to the 2016 census, nearly 1.8 million people of Chinese origin alone live in Canada, amounting to five per cent of the population. For the Asian diaspora, that figure could climb to just under 20 per cent, she predicted. “So maybe $11-million, if we think of it as seed funding, that’s OK. But if that’s the total amount going forward, then we’ll probably fall short in addressing the complexity of the problem,” she said.

While she supports a coalition being formed, Ms. Go said funds need to be directly and quickly shared with groups that have “very strong track records” with members of the community, including hers and the ChineseCanadian National Council for Social Justice (CCNC-SJ).

“These organizations, some are run by volunteers, so if funding stops, some of the work may have to stop,” she said. “So it would be good for the government to continue to support them.”

The CCNC-SJ recently launched a campaign urging the public to “open its eyes” to anti-Asian racism, which includes a two-minute video that can be shared on social media. It features prominent members of the Asian community, like environmental activist David Suzuki, ice skater Patrick Chan, and Ms. Go herself.

Last year, the CCNC-SJ and South Asian Legal Clinic helped launch an online tool encouraging the public to log their experiences of racism. Heritage provided more than $300,000 for the project to help Ottawa in its efforts to tackle false and misleading information, and the racism and stigma that follows.

The grassroots initiative, which also partnered with other national groups, produced  preliminary results, reporting 138 cases between February and May 2020, with the vast majority (110) registered in May. (At the time, officials said the tool would be in place at least into 2021, and it still appears to be active.)

In the council’s final report, released in March, the organization found most of those who used the tool to report incidents felt they were being scapegoated for the pandemic. A total of 643 incidents were logged, 73 per cent of which included verbal harassment, 11 per cent that involved physical aggression or unwanted contact, and 10 per cent that involved being coughed or spat at. The budget frames the $11-million to the CRRF as an investment in recognition of this “especially disturbing trend.”

Keep the door open for more funding, says expert

Ms. Go’s group is among the “important partners” that will be consulted in the summer, said Mr. Hashim. “This is a groundbreaking investment for the organization from the federal government, and I think it’s one that we’re hoping to rise to the challenge to prove the organization deserves long-term funding,” he added.

To help inform its work on the file, Mr. Hashim said the group is hoping to take part in a virtual national summit on anti-Asian racism, organized by the University of British Columbia. (That event is from June 10 to 11, with the first day open to the public and the second day reserved for “sector leaders.”)

Mr. Hashim said he’s well aware that groups have been working on the ground for years. “There’s a lot of community groups that have a lot of interest in this and we don’t want to get ahead of them by saying, ‘This is what we’re going to do,’ ” he said. “They are certainly leading the charge and we want to make sure we are working in tandem with them.”

As the foundation works to iron out details for its funding, there appears to still be a gap in the government’s overarching anti-racism strategy, unveiled in June 2019.

Last summer, Ms. Go noted this blueprint does not carve out specific efforts to tackle anti-Asian sentiments, though it does make reference to anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, Islamaphobic, and anti-Semitic discrimination. The recent budget does not outline any new funds for this strategy, but Ms. Go said she hopes “the door is still open.”

Over the last year, her group has been talking about the uptick in reported incidents with the anti-racism secretariat, which was established through the strategy and is headed by Peter Flegel. The feds appear to be working toward a definition of anti-Asian racism, she said, which could help “guide” work under its overall strategy, including the creation of specialized funding streams. “I’m hoping that as these conversations continue, there will still be an opening for the government to think about other streams of funding,” she added.

Ottawa ‘behind the eight ball,’ says Kwan

NDP MP Jenny Kwan (Vancouver East, B.C.) said there are “a lot of unknowns” about how the foundation will spend its money, and pressed Ottawa to step up in a “key area” and directly assign funds to non-government organizations.

“The fact of the matter is, they have the trust and relationships with the people on the ground and they can also break down the cultural and language barriers,” she said. Ms. Kwan, who was born in Hong Kong, said she is worried the money will be project-based or temporary, instead of “dedicated, stable, and predictable funding” for the groups to better tackle anti-Asian racism.

“We can’t expect NGOs to be doing this work off the side of their desk,” said Ms. Kwan, adding she wondered why the feds took the route of providing the foundation with money instead of what “it normally does,” which is dole out funds directly to groups. (The overarching anti-racism strategy falls under Heritage, with the department responsible for evaluating and accepting proposals through its various funding streams.)

While the pandemic has seen a rise in anti-Asian hate and reported incidents, “it’s not like this is new to us,” said Ms. Kwan. “It’s always been here, and it comes and goes in different cycles at different times. Some sort of incident or some sort of interaction might spur some activities,” she added. Ms. Kwan recounted herself being subjected to such incidents, at times hearing the virus being referred to as the “Kwan-avirus.”

“Right from the beginning, this was happening. People were being attacked. So the government’s been talking about it for a year, about how to define anti-Asian racism? And they still haven’t figured it out?” she said. “That makes me want to weep.”

It’s clear the government is “behind the eight ball,” said Ms. Kwan, when anti-Asian racism is not captured in the feds’ overall strategy and it’s still talking about defining it. The timeline of “deliverables” is also up in the air, like when the funds will start flowing from the foundation to the groups.

Former Liberal Senator Vivienne Poy, whose appointment in 1998 made her the first Canadian Senator of Asian ancestry, said the foundation’s funds could go toward outreach efforts to younger Canadians.

“Racism is learned. Nobody is born with it,” said Ms. Poy, who spearheaded a motion designating May as Asian Heritage Month, which was ultimately adopted by the Senate in 2001.

“They can spend hours and hours consulting with whatever group, but the most important thing” is unlearning on the part of perpetrators, said the retired Senator, and helping them “learn about the positive sides of different cultures” to better understand the people they are attacking are Canadians too. “You can’t legislate and pass laws telling people how to behave.”

Source: Budget funds tackling anti-Asian racism a ‘symbolic’ move, says expert, but foundation’s plans still in flux

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Opposition leaders want juror demographic data to help fight systemic biases

2021/05/21 Leave a comment

Needed:

A lack of information on the race, gender and age of jurors hinders the fight to address systemic racism and other inequities in the criminal justice system, federal opposition leaders and others say.

While studies in the United States show juror race and age have a marked effect on trial verdicts, Canada collects no data allowing similar research here, The Canadian Press reported recently.

New Democrat Leader Jagmeet Singh, who practised law in Ontario, expressed surprise at the data gap. Having evidence of jury makeup would help lawmakers make more informed decisions about improving the selection process, he said.

Singh said he would like to see laws and practices put in place to ensure juries represent the community, adding he would work with provinces and territories to see demographic information collected.

“The goal should be first identify: Are our juries reflecting the population, and if not what we can do to improve the demographics,” Singh said in an interview. “Better juries, better laws that all have the goal of justice and fairness in mind.”

Similarly, Green party Leader Annamie Paul said a clear picture without jury data on race, gender and occupation among other things is impossible.

“Lack of collecting this data is going to be one of the key barriers to truly dismantling systemic racism within our criminal justice system,” Paul said. “You can’t create legislation, really effective legislation, without this information.”

Sen. Kim Pate, a longtime advocate for justice reform, said collecting disaggregated data — information that does not identify individual jurors — would help understand jury selection and its impact.

“Concerns regarding the lack of this type of data are a recurring theme with nearly every criminal law bill considered by the Senate,” Pate said.

Conservative and Bloc Quebecois leaders Erin O’Toole and Yves-Francois Blanchet did not respond to requests for interviews.

The Prime Minister’s Office referred questions to Minister of Justice David Lametti, who said via a spokesman the government was on board with collecting information that would help address the overrepresentation of Indigenous people and racialized people who end up behind bars, which could include scrutinizing jury makeup.

As one example, David Taylor pointed to the federal-provincial-territorial National Justice Statistics Initiative, which sets goals and objectives related to justice data. Relevant deputy ministers have endorsed the collection and analysis of Indigenous and race-based data as a priority for the initiative, he said.

In addition, the recent budget earmarked $6.7 million over five years for Justice Canada to improve the collection and use of demographic data, while Statistics Canada would receive $172 million over five years for its “disaggregated data action plan.”

“Effective policy requires good data,” Taylor said. “This investment will support the use of advanced analytics so that we can better tailor interventions and improve social outcomes for different groups of people.”

Canada’s chief statistician, Anil Arora, said Canadians have long been reluctant to collect demographic information but people have come to understand the impact it can have in crafting solutions.

The government now wants to collect demographic information in a systematic way, including addressing gaps related to the justice system, Arora said. Statistics Canada can access data through the justice initiative, he said.

“What we need to do now is to align the disaggregated data at the source of collection, or at least be able to link it to other data sources, to get at what is the profile, whether it’s somebody serving on the jury (or) part of the judicial system itself,” Arora said.

“The country needs this type of information, so that it can see what’s going on sooner and it can react sooner, and it can take decisions.”

Source: Opposition leaders want juror demographic data to help fight systemic biases

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Who Gets to Wear a Headscarf? The Complicated History Behind France’s Latest Hijab Controversy

2021/05/21 Leave a comment

Of note:

The head of French President Emmanuel Macron’s political party withdrew support late last week for one of the party’s own candidates, Sarah Zemmahi, after she wore a headscarf in a campaign poster.

Stanislas Guerini, one of the co-founders of Macron’s centrist Republic on the Move party (LREM), took to Twitter to critique Zemmahi, an engineer who is running for her local council, for wearing her hijab, a religious head covering worn by some Muslim women, in a promotional image.

“Wearing ostentatious religious symbols on a campaign document is not compatible with the values of LREM,” Guerini wrote, after a prominent far-right politician shared the photo. “Either these candidates change their photo, or LREM will withdraw its support.”

While Zemmahi has not yet responded to Guerini’s statements, he received pushback from others in the party. LREM lawmaker Naima Moutchou defended Zemmahi on Twitter, calling Guerini’s criticism “discrimination,” while fellow LREM politician Caroline Janvier called out Guerini’s response in a scathing tweet.

“Undignified. Running after (far-right) votes will only allow their ideas to prevail. Enough is enough,” she wrote.

The conflict over one woman’s choice to cover her head comes in the wake of controversy surrounding an amendment passed by the French Senate last month that would ban girls under 18 from wearing the hijab in public. As part of a proposed “anti-separatism” bill, it was presented alongside amendments that would also prevent mothers from wearing hijabs on their children’s school trips and would ban the “burkini,” a full-body swimsuit.

While some French politicians have defended the amendment as a reinforcement of the country’s adherence to secularism, others have slammed it as yet another instance of part of an ugly strain of Islamophobia in the nation, which is home to the largest Muslim population in Western Europe—a population that has experienced increased discrimination in recent years, in the wake of terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists in recent years and the rise of far-right politics. One 2019 report found that 44.6% of the country considered Muslims a threat to French national identity, while a government survey from the same year listed that 42% of Muslims (other studies put the figure at 58%) reported experiencing discrimination due to their religion, a number that increased to 60% for women who wore a headscarf.

But understanding why the hijab is the site of so much controversy in France also requires understanding the deep history behind the debate.

While the proposed legislation still needs to be approved by the lower house of French Parliament before it can become a law, it’s already drawn significant backlash from many Muslim women around the world, who see the law as not only xenophobic and discriminatory, but an attack on their agency—a sentiment that has grown over the years as French politicians have argued that laws restricting religious symbolism are in service of women’s empowerment and public safety.On social media, the hashtag #HandsOffMyHijab has become a rallying cry to protest the amendment, started by Somali-Norwegian model Rawdah Mohamed, who used the phrase in a now-viral Instagram post to call out the potential ban. It’s since garnered support from the likes of U.S. congresswoman Ilhan Omar and Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad.

“How can you have a discussion about my identity, and not include me?” Mohamed told TIME. “I don’t think politicians are the ones who are supposed to define what it means to be a Muslim woman.”

France’s history with headscarves

Scholars trace France’s focus on Muslim head coverings and the women who wear them back to the country’s imperial past in North Africa and the Middle East—particularly in Algeria.

“Banning the hijab is about colonialism,” Alia Al-Saji, an associate professor of philosophy at McGill University, tells TIME. “French colonization of Muslim countries was often about controlling and managing populations that were of diverse religions… The hijab is a way of clearly showing that you are Muslim, which is colonially constructed as being opposed to colonialism. But it’s also a site of potential resistance.”

French colonization in Algeria began with an invasion in 1830 and was characterized by violent genocide, settler colonialism and a series of shifting laws called the “indigénat,” which, among other things, determined who could be a French citizen. Al-Saji notes that these laws were influential in emphasizing difference for the Muslim majority in Algeria; for example, while Jewish Algerian natives were recognized as French citizens in 1870 with the Cremieux Decree, Muslim Algerian natives were not eligible for French citizenship unless they renounced their religion and culture and adopted a French identity.

Inherent in the colonial attitude is the belief that one’s “civilization”—its language, its values and its practices—is an improvement on the lives of those who are colonized. This belief manifested itself drastically in the attitude toward Algerian Muslim women, who were seen as both oppressed and exotic. Under this mindset, their “liberation” could become the moral justification for imperialism’s violent casualties.

This dynamic is perhaps best illustrated during the Algerian War of Independence, when a series of public unveiling ceremonies were organized in 1958. During these ceremonies, many of which were arranged by the French army, Algerian women removed their haiks (traditional wraps worn by North African women) or had them removed by European women, before throwing them to the ground or burning them. Often, speeches were given afterwards in support of the French and the emancipation of Muslim women.

While these highly-publicized ceremonies were framed as spaces of empowerment for Muslim women, other accounts of this history tell a different story. In his book, Burning the Veil: The Algerian War and the ‘Emancipation’ of Muslim Women, 1954-1962, Neil MacMaster notes that some of the women who took part in these ceremonies were very poor, recruited from high schools or, in some cases, pressured to participate with threats to their safety and that of their families. In one harrowing case, when the army could not find a Muslim woman to lead the ceremony, they enlisted Monique Améziane, a young woman from a wealthy and pro-French family who had not previously worn a veil or heik, to speak—in exchange for sparing the life of her brother, whom they had already arrested and tortured.

The symbolic power of the veil during this time, however, was not only recognized by the French, but also by those fighting for Algerian liberation. In his essay Algeria Unveiled, Frantz Fanon makes the case that the veil can be a tool of anti-colonial resistance and a way of limiting access to oppressors, going so far as to call it a “bone of contention in a grandiose battle.”

During the war, the veil also became a literal tool of resistance. Some female freedom fighters for the National Liberation Front used haiks to conceal weapons and classified information; after this tactic was discovered, they used unveiling to their advantage, adopting European dress as a way to fly under the radar of the French.

How the veil has been reclaimed—and weaponized

Within France, at the intersection of gender, ethnic and religious identities, the Muslim veil or head covering took on new significance in the 20th century. Because of the popularity of orientalist art during this time, the veil already had stereotypes of the foreign and forbidden. But veiling was no longer just a physical marker of religious or cultural difference—it was also seen as an affront to assimilation, a visible symbol of resistance to colonization.

This meaning was intensified by the state’s staunch espousal of a unified French cultural and social identity, in opposition to multiculturalism. This belief can be traced all the way back to the French Revolution, which has also been credited with planting the seeds for laïcité, France’s principle of secularism. Although laïcitéoriginated in a 1905 law about the separation of church and state, it has been used in recent years as the driving force behind the anti-hijab policies.

In 2004, Muslim headscarves were among the array of religious symbols banned from being worn in French public schools. And in 2010, the country prohibited full-face veils like niqabs in public spaces like streets, parks and public transportation, becoming the first European country to enforce a nation-wide ban and even launching a government campaign that proudly stated, “the Republic is lived with an uncovered face.”

This sentiment took on a new irony at the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 when France mandated mask-wearing in public spaces, while still banning Muslim face coverings.

“Muslim women who wear the hijab have always been on the receiving end of Islamophobia for their visible identity,” Nazma Khan, the founder of World Hijab Day, told TIME. “Simply put, the proposed hijab ban is a systematic vilification and discrimination against Muslim women in hijab.”

The Collective against Islamophobia in France, a non-profit that was forced by the French government to dissolve in 2020 in a move that Human Rights Watch called a “threat to basic human rights and liberties,” reported in 2019 that 70% of Islamophobic hate speech and acts in France were directed at women.

To advocates, the intense focus on a physical marker of otherness, along with the rhetoric touting women’s empowerment, can distract from what’s really at stake: what they see as France’s attempt to control citizens, as territorial residents were controlled in the past.

“If it was about giving Muslim women more agency, then in that case, you could let them or let all women wear whatever they wanted,” says Al-Saji. “But It’s actually about controlling what women wear and how they appear and what gets seen and that their bodies are seen, this kind of colonial male desire, that constructs Muslim women as trapped and pawns of their culture and needing to be unveiled.”

Source: Who Gets to Wear a Headscarf? The Complicated History Behind France’s Latest Hijab Controversy

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

How imperial hopes for the Commonwealth led to British citizenship being redefined along racial lines

2021/05/21 1 Comment

Interesting history of the policies and policy objectives:

It’s just over a year since the government released the Windrush Lessons Learned Review, an attempt to come to terms with the Windrush scandal. Recommendation six of the Review states among other things that Home Office staff should ‘learn about the history of the UK and its relationship with the rest of the world’. Meanwhile, recommendation eleven states that the Home Office should make sure its staff ‘understand the history of immigration legislation’. Policy reviews don’t usually redirect to history in such a definite way, and we should pay attention to the fact that this one does.

As it turns out, the connections and correlations between immigration laws and Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world in the post-war era are many and strong. The legal architecture (a mix of immigration law and nationality law) at stake in the Windrush scandal did not begin with the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts. Nor did it begin with Theresa May’s tenure as home secretary. The story is much bigger and more intrinsic to Britain’s gambit in the post-war world. This story began in 1948 and was largely complete by 1971 (a year mentioned 35 times in the Review). Fifty years ago this year, the 1971 Immigration Act was the legislative culmination of Britain’s struggle against its own nationality law, and began Britain’s modern immigration system.

The 1948 British Nationality Act set the tone for post-war Britain. It was greeted by a New York Times headline that declared ‘British empire gets new nationality act’. In other words, the act might have been named the British Imperial Citizenship Act. The 1948 act created a single, non-national citizenship around the territories of the British Isles and the crown colonies. It was momentous because it gave rights of entry and residence in Britain to millions of non-white people around the world on the basis of their connection to existing crown colonies or independent Commonwealth states. These citizenship rights were given to  ‘citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies’ – the forerunner to what is now called British citizenship – and to ‘Commonwealth citizens’.

The true motivations behind the 1948 Act were squarely imperial – namely, keeping the colonies and Commonwealth unified at the level of nationality, and keeping a soon-to-be-republican India in the Commonwealth. Yet, despite the fact that Britain’s formal empire was all but over by 1965, successive governments refused to dismantle these imperial structures of British nationality and citizenship, instead passing immigration laws as so many bandages on nativist wounds as the imperial heartland became home to more and more non-white migrants.

There was something strange going on here: immigration laws were targeting citizenship rights provided in British nationality law. Bizarrely, it was the post-war immigration laws (in 1962, 1968, 1971), not British nationality law itself, that dictated who ‘belonged’ in Britain, both politically and legally. At the level of British nationality and citizenship, decolonisation did not begin in Britain until 1981 and the British Nationality Act of that year. In other words, British nationality and citizenship remained imperial throughout the age of decolonisation.

These confusions intensified in the late 1960s. Worried about South Asian British citizens in East Africa migrating to Britain, a Commonwealth Office official wrote to his colleagues in 1967 that ‘we had obviously made a big mistake’ in passing the 1948 Act, which was equivalent to ‘handing out British citizenship to large numbers… Having made this mistake, we have somehow now got to pay for it’. Most of the South Asians in Kenya facing majoritarian policies in the late 1960s held an identical citizenship to Labour prime minister Harold Wilson himself and an unrestricted legal right of entry to Britain. The 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act was designed to block their entry and left them with ‘the husk of citizenship’, as the home secretary put it in a key Cabinet meeting. This was the first time that an immigration law had been levelled at British citizens per se, and left them stateless in reality, despite their still being described as British citizens in law.

Three years later, the 1971 Immigration Act was an attempt to bring order to Britain’s immigration system. By placing the administrative burden of proof on individuals themselves, it also laid the foundation for the Windrush scandal. The 1971 Act created a peculiar new concept – a ‘patrial’, a term that referred primarily to a person’s birth in or ancestral connection to the territories of the British Isles. The home secretary himself admitted that he was not quite sure how to pronounce the archaic word. It was the patrial who now commanded the right of entry (now called ‘right of abode’) in Britain. Because patriality now served to grant rights of citizenship (entry and residence), this effectively detached citizenship rights from both citizenship of the UK and Colonies and Commonwealth citizenship. Being a patrial meant that you ‘belonged’ in Britain. As Violet Bonham Carter, daughter of Henry Asquith and grandmother of Helena Bonham Carter, put it in a House of Lords debate during this period, ‘a belonger usually has a white face’. The Economist, meanwhile, described the word patrial as ‘a nasty piece of tribal jargon’.

This was indirectly a tiering of British citizenship (citizenship of the UK and Colonies) and Commonwealth citizenship along racial lines, allowing in practice white settlers to ‘return’ to Britain but keeping out non-white migrants. Tanzania’s prime minister, Julius Nyerere described British immigration policies as ‘decadent racism’. Swaran Singh, India’s minister of external affairs, lambasted the ‘racial overtones’ of the proposed 1971 Act in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian parliament, adding that it ‘introduces the concept of “patrials” as a privileged category’. In Port of Spain, the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Williams, subsequently condemned Britain’s ‘open unadulterated and ambiguous racialisms’. But the most devastating criticism came from the veteran Indian diplomat, Apa Pant, then the Indian high commissioner to the UK. Pant intervened with home secretary Reginald Maudling, telling him that the ‘concept of “patrials”’ was ‘unmistakably racialist’ and ‘breaks up the Commonwealth into white and non-white’. Its provisions on police registration would make ‘the already tense police-immigrant relation more tense and intolerable’, while those on employment turned the working migrant into ‘virtually a “brown/black” slave labourer’. This was to say nothing of the executive powers of deportation attendant on the 1971 Act.

Britain suffered a significant reputational cost at the hands of its exclusivist immigration laws, including at the European Court of Human Rights in 1973. Why did Britain create such laws without dismantling the imperial structures of the 1948 British Nationality Act? The answer is that the 1948 Act was a constitutional pillar of what various officials, diplomats, and politicians hoped would be a British-led imperial Commonwealth – a vehicle by which to contend in the making of the post-war world. To dismantle the 1948 Act was to give up on the imperial promise of the post-war Commonwealth.

‘There is in the Commonwealth a complex of links, not only political, but economic, educational, administrative and professional’, wrote Commonwealth Office officials in 1967. The Commonwealth was ‘a special asset which could give Britain a position of central importance in the world in, say, the last two decades of this century, out of proportion to her comparative economic and military strength’. Britain wanted to have it both ways: a grand Commonwealth based on a perceived ‘Anglocentricity’ abroad and exclusivist immigration laws at home.

Source: How imperial hopes for the Commonwealth led to British citizenship being redefined along racial lines

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