Regg Cohn: Here’s what our Supreme Court got right about irregular migration

2023/06/21 Leave a comment

Good assessment:

Border crossing points are perennial flashpoints in Canada.

The Canada-U.S. boundary long ago emerged as an internal dividing line, pitting two premiers against the prime minister. Our traditionally undefended frontier — now heavily patrolled — also offered fodder for the political opposition in Parliament.

An attempt to bring order to the border disorder provided fresh ammunition for refugee rights advocates to fight it out in the courts. Their lawyers argued that we dare not return migrants to the U.S. because it’s simply not a safe space for the world’s refugees (news to those who keep trying and retrying to get in).

All of which makes the sudden unanimity of Canada’s Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the bilateral and controversial Safe Third Country Agreement so remarkable. If not necessarily surprising.

After years of litigation in the courts, and lengthy negotiation in two capitals, the improvised pathways that permitted migrants to enter Canada are now at a dead end. The country’s highest court ruled last week that the bilateral pact does not violate our Charter of Rights (setting aside one question on gender rights, to be retried by the lower courts).

The 8-0 decision was the culmination of bitter arguments about the border, political and legal. But it was also predictable and inevitable, because any other outcome would lead to an unsustainable and unrealistic free-for-all.

The fight over our frontier has been a battle on two fronts: first, the original 2004 agreement (contested in the courts); second, the subsequent flashpoints at unofficial pathways (like Quebec’s Roxham Road) not covered by the bilateral agreement — a loophole that allowed the Americans to refuse to take back so-called “irregular” migrants.

The logic behind the 2004 mutual border pact was that refugee claimants who seek asylum at official crossings were deemed to have found “safe harbour” wherever they set foot first, either America or Canada. That’s because migrants have no inherent right to cherry pick between the second or third country where they put down roots.

A bona fide refugee is fleeing war or persecution — not poverty or hopelessness at home. There is no provision for fine-tuning one’s final destination (or the process of refugee determination) merely because their second stop seems to some a hostile place.

Yes, Canada needs more people. But if we fail to maintain a clear distinction abroad between our regular immigration stream for selected applicants, and a regulated refugee stream for those who don’t necessarily qualify, then domestic support will atrophy.

Canadians, like people in other high-immigration countries, still want people to play by the rules. Never mind the cliché of “queue-jumpers,” Canada cannot countenance “country shoppers” without undermining the integrity of an already overloaded refugee determination system.

Critics argued that automatically sending applicants back to America subjected them to an arbitrary determination and detention system. The Supreme Court quite rightly countered that no system is perfect, and that America is a democracy where the rule of law still prevails, even if not always to our tastes; Canada is in no position to second guess every other quasi-judicial system in the world.

The political question that preceded this month’s court ruling arose over how to deal with the glaring loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement, by which the Americans would only take back people at official crossings. In the aftermath, tens of thousands of migrants detoured instead to Roxham Road and other unofficial pathways far from those border posts.

The surge in refugee claimants, while not massive by global standards, had an upward curve that was impossible to ignore. Shortly after winning power in 2018, Premier Doug Ford picked a fight with the federal government for failing to clamp down on the border crossings; more recently, Quebec’s François Legault pressured Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to close the bilateral loophole.

With COVID came a clampdown, as both the Americans and Canadians were loath to let an uncontrolled stream of migrants into either country. Post-pandemic, Washington belatedly recognized the benefits of restoring order — not to appease Ottawa’s concerns but to address its own insecurities about the tens of thousands of irregular migrants crossing from Canada into the U.S. Last March, Canada and the U.S. closed the loophole on unofficial crossings — and with it, shut down Roxham Road.

For all its faults, America’s refugee system cannot be upgraded or downgraded based on whoever is in power. Would critics of the U.S. change their view of our supposedly superior system if Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre one day becomes PM while the Democrats rule in Washington?

If America is such hostile territory, why do so many still risk the hazard of an irregular border crossing to the U.S., with Canada merely a way station? Let us not forget the deaths of eight migrants (from two families, one Romanian and the other Indian) trying to cross the St. Lawrence River into the U.S. at night earlier this year. Or the family of four from India’s Gujarat state that froze to death trying to cross the border from Manitoba into the U.S. in 2022.

Migrants are only human — they will take desperate actions to escape persecution or poverty at home, for which Canadians must show consideration with our refugee determination procedures. But the notion that Canada should countenance risky or merely irregular measures for those fleeing supposed uncertainty or misery in America has no serious foundation in refugee law or the Charter of Rights.

Source: Here’s what our Supreme Court got right about irregular migration

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Deputy minister left government weeks after Indigenous group privately called for his resignation, documents show

2023/06/21 Leave a comment

Cancel culture, Canadian government style…

A deputy minister’s recent departure from the federal public service occurred just weeks after a national Indigenous organization privately called for his resignation over an e-mail dismissing their description of colonialism as “a gross misreading of history.”

Timothy Sargent’s nearly three-decade career in the federal public service – which included representing Canada internationally on trade and finance files – ended without a public explanation in October when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a shuffle of deputy ministers.

The news release named a new deputy minister of Fisheries and Oceans, but made no mention of Mr. Sargent, who had been in that job since early 2019. Normally such news releases thank senior officials for their service if they are retiring or leaving for another position.

Internal e-mails and letters obtained by The Globe and Mail through Access to Information – as well as additional details provided by government officials – reveal his departure followed months of behind-the-scenes controversy over an e-mail he wrote in May, 2022.

Government officials told The Globe that Fisheries Minister Joyce Murray became personally involved in the matter, apologizing to the recipient of the e-mail and raising her deputy minister’s actions with Janice Charette, the Clerk of the Privy Council and head of the public service.

The controversy began in May when Mr. Sargent received a letter of invitation signed by Dawn Madahbee Leach, chair of the National Indigenous Economic Development Board, a small organization based in Gatineau supported financially by the federal government that provides advice to Ottawa on policy and ministerial appointments.

The letter invited Mr. Sargent to attend a luncheon hosted by Deloitte Canada to launch a National Indigenous Economic Strategy for Canada. The letter said “one of colonialism’s most nefarious objectives was the deliberate exclusion of Indigenous people from sharing the wealth of our country. This strategy is a path forward towards economic reconciliation that is both inclusive and meaningful.”

The letter was e-mailed to Mr. Sargent by public affairs consultant Isabelle Metcalfe on May 30, 2022.

Mr. Sargent responded the next morning with a one-sentence e-mail to Ms. Metcalfe and Mario Iacobacci of Deloitte.

“I shall certainly not attend an event which is premised on a gross misreading of history,” he wrote.

Ms. Metcalfe promptly forwarded Mr. Sargent’s response to Ms. Madahbee Leach, who then e-mailed Mr. Sargent that evening to express regret regarding his position.

“In the spirit of reconciliation, I would welcome the opportunity to discuss with you your response in an effort to salvage the opportunity for you to attend the event and learn,” she wrote on May 31.

About a month later, Mr. Sargent sent a two-page letter of apology to Ms. Madahbee Leach, dated June 29.

“I fully acknowledge that my response was inappropriate and illustrated a lack of awareness of and sensitivity to the many challenges and barriers, past and present, faced by Indigenous people to fully and equitably participate in Canadian society and the economy,” the letter stated. “I would like to make restitution for the harm that this has caused, both to the Department’s reputation but also to the fact that is exactly the kind of thing that points to systemic racism at the highest levels of government.”

The letter ended with a request for a meeting.

The documents show Mr. Sargent e-mailed a copy of the letter to Ms. Charette, the PCO Clerk, as well as Daniel Quan-Watson, the deputy minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, and Christiane Fox, the then-deputy minister of Indigenous Services.

“Colleague, you will find attached a letter I sent earlier today to Ms. Dawn Madahbee Leach expressing my sincere remorse over language used in a reply to an invitation to the launch of the National Indigenous Economic Strategy,” he wrote in the e-mail, which was released in a partly redacted form. “I also want to thank you for your support both over the past several years but also more recently through this time.”

On Sept. 9, the National Indigenous Economic Development Board (NIEDB) sent Mr. Sargent a new letter from Ms. Madahbee Leach, with copies to Mr. Trudeau, Ms. Charette, some federal ministers, the Assembly of First Nations, the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami and the Métis National Council.

The letter acknowledged Mr. Sargent’s letter of apology but said his original comments appear to be at odds with the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner’s Report, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and many Supreme Court of Canada rulings.

“Your response to our invitation is particularly shocking in that, as a senior official, it appears that you do not agree with, or believe in, the findings of these vital and fundamental documents. The boldness with which you confidently and openly shared your thoughts that we were presenting a ‘gross misrepresentation of history’ is a prime example of systemic racism at the highest levels of government,” she wrote.

The letter said the sincerity of his letter of apology “is greatly diminished” by the fact that it was only received after his superiors had been informed of the e-mail. It said that after careful consideration and after receiving input from a variety of Indigenous leaders, the NIEDB “firmly believes that a senior official holding the views that you have expressed should no longer serve in any capacity in the federal public service, or in any other government or affiliated entity.”

Mr. Sargent declined to comment on the issue when reached by phone Thursday at the Centre for the Study of Living Standards, where he now works as the deputy executive director. He is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

Prior to leading the Fisheries Department, he was the deputy minister of International Trade during the negotiation of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement. He has also worked as a senior Finance Department official with responsibility for the G7 and G20.

In response to questions from The Globe, Jeff Woodland, a spokesperson for the Fisheries Minister, provided a statement saying Ms. Murray was “deeply disappointed” to learn of Mr. Sargent’s e-mail.

“The comments were unacceptable and inappropriate,” the statement said, adding that Ms. Murray raised the issue with the PCO Clerk and spoke with Ms. Madahbee Leach “to apologize on behalf of the government and department.”

PCO spokesperson Stéphane Shank said an acting deputy minister assumed Mr. Sargent’s role as of late June, 2022, before a permanent replacement was named on Oct. 31. The PCO said Mr. Sargent submitted his resignation effective Oct. 12.

“PCO cannot comment on individual circumstances in accordance with the Privacy Act,” Mr. Shank said.

In an interview, Ms. Madahbee Leach said Mr. Sargent’s initial e-mail was unsettling and he never took up her invitation to discuss the issue directly. She said she felt Ms. Murray and her office handled the situation well.

“They were also very shocked,” she said. “When they see something in writing like this, it was quite something.”

Source: Deputy minister left government weeks after Indigenous group privately called for his resignation, documents show

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Barutciski: Quebec’s caution about immigration is a lesson for all of Canada

2023/06/21 Leave a comment

I wouldn’t necessarily characterize as this driven by ideology as much as misplaced emphasis on demographics and overall GDP growth, along with siloed approaches that ignore the impacts of high levels of permanent and temporary immigration across all levels of government. And if driven by ideology, it is more by economic ideology than anything else.

But the demographic impact on lower levels in Quebec compared to the rest of Canada is significant, as it is with respect to Indigenous peoples:

Plans to boost immigration levels in Canada are raising questions. The recent suggestion that Canada will become a country of 100 million inhabitants created controversy particularly in Quebec. Large increases in permanent and temporary residents at a time when there is a housing shortage suggests federal policy is increasingly influenced by ideology, in contrast to past pragmatic approaches.

Although temporary permits increased under the Harper government, they exploded under the Trudeau government. Quebec’s new French language commissioner recently pointed out the impact of large numbers of foreign students in Montreal, a city worried that the use of French is being replaced by a generic North American culture and its English language. As a key actor in the historic compromise that established the federation, Quebec’s concerns should be taken seriously by any Canadian committed to successful immigration outcomes.

Although Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has stated that the 100 million is not governmental policy, it is impossible to ignore the context. Immigration is simply a more sensitive issue outside the English-speaking world. European countries such as Germany and France are open to immigration, but they handle language and culture prudently because of their stronger sense of identity. For example, nobody in Hamburg would accept basic demographic shifts that result in the local population being born largely outside of Germany, let alone brag about this development as a symbol of openness to diversity. While inclusive Torontonians have been doing this for years, it is clear that Quebec’s sensibilities are closer to continental Europe’s than to the rest of Canada.

The modern version of the ambitious 100-million project has been debated for more than a decade. It was notably proposed as a geopolitical project that focused on the multi-faceted benefits of a larger demographic base. The idea was then appropriated by the Toronto-based advocacy group known as the Century Initiative. This influential group focused on economic liberalization and transformed the goal into a more one-dimensional project responding to issues such as labour supply.

Yet two important constituencies were absent from the early stages of the Century Initiative’s deliberations: Quebec and Indigenous peoples. Their concerns about demographic submersion were ignored. This was the “diversity is our strength” approach within a Toronto-centric worldview that emphasized certain economic benefits while excluding other perspectives.

Congruence with the agenda of progressive ideologues was just a matter of time. As soon as Trudeau came to power in late 2015, some cabinet members pushed for a massive increase in immigration. In the burgeoning atmosphere of identity politics, anyone opposed to increased immigration could be accused of racism. Trudeau’s first minister of immigration, John McCallum, proved to be a moderate voice to the extent that the increases in overall immigrant numbers under his watch were a fraction of what was advocated by some other cabinet ministers. He even expressed reservations, acknowledging the risk that newcomers would converge on the country’s largest urban centres, thereby creating the impression of saturation which could in turn undermine public support for future increases.

Yet Trudeau’s ideological instincts tend to align more with establishment thinking in Toronto than in Quebec City. A clash with Quebec was inevitable given that it has more difficulty attracting immigrants who can integrate within its distinct francophone society. While steady increases may be possible, as recently suggested by Premier François Legault, demographic submersion is a real threat if the rest of Canada enjoys population growth that largely outpaces other G7 members.

The underlying tension results from English-speaking Canada’s overconfident multicultural policy, which allows the short-term welcoming of massive numbers of immigrants while dismissing potentially destabilizing effects of long-term demographic shifts. Just as for Quebec, this may prove to be an existential issue for Indigenous people who risk carrying even less weight in overall population numbers and accompanying political representation.

Any national party genuinely committed to unity should consider these challenges if the vast country is to remain pro-immigration. With regard to Quebec’s hesitations, it would help national cohesion to understand the challenges faced by francophone jurisdictions that are competing with the Anglosphere for immigrants from around the world. Condescension in relation to the specific integration difficulties experienced by Quebec is misplaced.

After all, no country has ever transformed its demographic base in such a way that the numerically dominant ethnic group voluntarily cedes its leading position to migrants invited from culturally diverse places. Canadians could be reassured that the transformation is not driven by ideology if the unique nature of this societal experiment were to be acknowledged and openly debated.

Michael Barutciski is coordinator of Canadian Studies at Toronto’s Glendon College, York University. He spent the spring in both Quebec and Germany comparing migration policies.

Source: Barutciski: Quebec’s caution about immigration is a lesson for all of …

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Chinese, Vietnamese students caught up in college-admission scam, Ottawa says

2023/06/20 Leave a comment

Some useful data:

Students from China and Vietnam have been caught up in an immigration scam affecting Indian students involving fake acceptance letters to Canadian colleges, the federal immigration department told MPs.

Immigration Minister Sean Fraser told the Commons committee on citizenship and immigration that eight Indian students ensnared in the fraud have already been deported. But they could return to Canada “if they demonstrate that their intention to come to Canada was genuine and that they were not complicit in fraud.”

Mr. Fraser this week granted a reprieve from deportation to students who were unknowingly involved in the scam. They will be granted temporary residency permits while a task force investigates their cases to see if they were innocently duped or complicit in the immigration fraud.

The task force will look into the cases of 57 Indian students with bogus admission letters to Canadian colleges and universities who have been issued with removal orders, and 25 are going through the deportation process, deputy minister Christiane Fox told MPs on the immigration committee last Wednesday.

Ten Indian students found to have fake admission letters to colleges have left Canada voluntarily.

Ottawa launched a probe into 2,000 suspicious cases involving students from India, China and Vietnam earlier this year. It found that around 1,485 had been issued bogus documents to come to Canada by immigration consultants abroad, she said.

Although 85 per cent of the students affected by scams were from India, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada had also uncovered evidence of fraud affecting Chinese and Vietnamese students.

Ms. Fox said 976 of the students had been refused entry to Canada after their letters of acceptance from colleges were found to be fake, while 448 had their applications to come to Canada approved.

The deputy minister told the committee of MPs that around 300 of these students would have their cases individually investigated by the new task force. Others of the 448 who had their applications approved have been found to have been linked to “criminality.”

In the Commons last Friday, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said the students had been “defrauded by shady consultants who gave them fake admission letters.” He said the newcomers should be given work permits while they wait for their applications for permanent residence to be processed.

Also on Friday, Conservative MPs called for overseas immigration consultants who duped the students to be blacklisted and all their files, including those in the past, to be reviewed.

“Every consultant or agent who scammed these international students should have the files they worked on reviewed to protect the victims and proactively inform them,” said Tom Kmiec, Conservative immigration critic. “Any consultant or agent who committed fraud should be barred and their names should be logged with IRCC to prevent future fraud.”

Saskatoon Conservative Brad Redekopp, who also sits on the immigration committee, urged the federal government to immediately start checking the files of overseas consultants found to have issued bogus documents. He told The Globe and Mail it was a problem that, while Canadian immigration consultants had to register and were subject to standards, overseas consultants did not face similar checks.

Ms. Fox said the department was already looking into the files of consultants found to have issued fake letters of acceptance to Canadian universities.

Mr. Fraser said the department had found that multiple consultants had been involved in the scam involving fake admission letters as part of study permit applications. He said the government was conducting hundreds of investigations to “bust fraudsters.”

In 2018, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada introduced a new program to verify letters of acceptance to colleges, he said. But he added the department deals with hundreds thousands of applications a year and it would be hard to manually verify every admission letter. He hoped that new efforts to clamp down on overseas scams could be aided by technology, but it also required the co-operation of foreign authorities.

He said he understood the situation was extremely distressing for students facing deportation, after being duped by “bad actors,” and their well-being was paramount.

The task force will look at whether they finished their studies or started work in Canada soon after they arrived.

Source: Chinese, Vietnamese students caught up in college-admission scam, Ottawa says

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Blaming immigration for the country’s housing crisis disguises the real problem, analysts say

2023/06/20 Leave a comment

In denial. Not the only reason for the housing crisis but definitely a significant contributing factor:

It’s an argument that comes up time after time whenever there is a discussion about the housing crisis that plagues Metro Vancouver or anywhere else in Canada.

If Canada can’t house the people who already live here, we should stop letting more people into the country.

On Friday, the country’s population hit 40 million, with nearly all of last year’s growth due to immigration. The federal government has signed on to allow up to 500,000 newcomers into Canada annually by 2025.

Source: Blaming immigration for the country’s housing crisis disguises the real problem, analysts say

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Muslims opposed to LGBTQ curricula for their kids aren’t bigots

2023/06/20 Leave a comment

A justification from the Dean of an Islamic Centre to provide some context to Canadian and American protests and highlighting an alignment among the religious right across religions. Ingenuous to argue that it is not political given today’s environment:

We are witnessing a unique and welcome phenomenon: Muslims in the West are at the forefront of a social movement that transcends any one faith or ethnicity. For those following the news, protests led by parents have erupted across the United States and Canada against school boards that wish to teach schoolchildren content about the acceptability of LGBTQ lifestyles.

While parents of all ethnicities and religions are involved, Muslim parents have been playing a central role in all of these cases, both as organisers and protesters, and their highly visible presence is creating waves on social media.

It is understandable for parents to be concerned. In Maryland, for example, a school district has approved books that discuss homosexuality and transgenderism as normal realities for children as young as three years old. This is state-sponsored ideological indoctrination of toddlers who can barely form complete sentences, much less think critically.

Parents have a God-given duty and legal right to provide moral instruction and guidance to their children. This includes the right of parents and their children to reject ideologies that contravene their beliefs.

Yet, supposedly secular institutions like public schools are now dictating that students must accept and affirm LGBTQ ideology, at times with the threat that if they refuse to do so, they “do not belong” in their country, as one teacher in Edmonton, Canada, recently said to a Muslim student.

As Muslims, we refuse to be coerced into believing something our faith categorically condemns. This is not a political stance. It is a moral principle.

A recent statement I helped draft, titled “Navigating Differences: Clarifying Sexual and Gender Ethics in Islam”, has been signed and endorsed by more than 300 Islamic scholars and preachers across North America. In this document, we explicitly and clearly lay out the non-negotiable, normative Islamic position on sexuality and gender ethics.

We believe this statement will allow Muslim parents, educators, students and professionals to establish their right to hold their religious views without fear of legal reprisal. All too often, those who wish to live in accordance with mainstream, family-based morality are accused of being bigoted and “homophobic” if they refuse to endorse LGBTQ events. Many suffer social repercussions for holding such beliefs.

Worse still, children are expected to attend events in which drag shows and other actions deemed immoral by many people of faith are showcased.

This statement seeks to be a reference point to demonstrate to school boards and employers why Muslims must preferably be excused from activities that contradict our religious ideals.

The statement is explicitly non-partisan and states that the signatories are “committed to working with individuals of all religious and political affiliations to protect the constitutional right of faith communities to live according to their religious convictions and to uphold justice for all”.

Despite such clear declarations of non-partisanship and though the protesters, from Maryland to Ottawa, have insisted they are asserting moral agency rather than political allegiance, certain groups insist on turning this into a partisan issue.

Those who have committed themselves to a left-wing liberal ideology (including some progressive Muslims) are outraged and ashamed of anything short of the full affirmation and acceptance of all LGBTQ demands. They point to our own experience of oppression as a Muslim minority and say we should thus show reciprocity to other marginalised groups, even as LGBTQ advocates often refuse to show the same sensitivity on issues we hold sacred.

The fact that conservative media outlets have provided a platform for Muslim parents to share their grievances is supposedly conclusive proof that these protesters, and all of us who oppose the teaching of the LGBTQ agenda in schools, are aligning themselves with the far-right, including white supremacists. That is simply not the case.

To be sure, the sudden friendliness of politically-conservative groups and media outlets towards Muslims is indeed tempting some in the community to rush to forge new alliances with the political right after previously flirting with the left. They are making a mistake. Again.

Muslims across North America should firmly root their moral values in their faith, not in a specific political ideology. To understand why this distinction is so critical, we ought to heed a lesson from our recent past.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Islam in North America faced an existential crisis. Muslims were widely portrayed as the enemy. Scholars were deported. Bearded Muslim men and hijabi women were harassed, randomly questioned and detained at airports. Many worshippers avoided praying in masjids and some Muslims even changed their first names. The reality of Muslims in North America in the first decade of this century was one of fear, anxiety and extreme alienation.

The open hostility of the North American political right towards Islam and Muslims sharply contrasted with the comparatively sympathetic left. As a matter of pragmatic political (and in some cases, literal) survival, Muslims flocked to the liberal political parties of Canada and the United States. These left-wing institutions gave Muslims the best chance to survive against anti-Muslim forces largely represented by the conservative right. But embracing the left meant accepting an entire package of causes, some of which aligned ideologically with Islamic ethics (such as combatting racism), while others did not (such as the legalisation of certain drugs).

Many Muslims began approaching politics not as a tool but as an ideology. They felt motivated to resolve the cognitive dissonance between their political commitments and their religious beliefs, even if it meant radically reinterpreting the faith to allow for such accommodation.

Some progressives who identified with Islam began claiming, for the first time in our 14 centuries of scholarship, that the Quran has been misunderstood and that in its correct interpretation, it endorses alternative sexual lifestyles and sanctions same-sex marriages.

To be clear, Islamic law differentiates between a desire, which is in itself not sinful, and the deed, which could be a sin. Those struggling with same-sex desires but wishing to abide by Islamic law are our full brethren in faith and deserve all the love and rights of believers. They stand in contrast to those who flout Islamic law and take pride in disobedience. Muslim politicians and influencers, in particular, should be careful not to make religious claims on behalf of our faith.

In an authentic narration, Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) says: “believer is not bitten from the same hole twice”. Muslims who are rightly indignant about the moral decay sweeping our society in the name of inclusivity ought to be cautious not to be a pendulum that swings from one extreme to another.

Our politics is not our ideology and our ideology is neither left nor right. Our ideology is centred in our unshakeable faith, grounded in our immutable creed, and firmly rooted in the timeless words of God and the teachings of His final Messenger. We are a “Middle Nation” and, as the Quran says (2:143), our role is to be moral exemplars for mankind.

Yasir Qadhi Dean of The Islamic Seminary of America and Resident Scholar of East Plano Islamic Center

Source: Muslims opposed to LGBTQ curricula for their kids aren’t bigots

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Egypt Spars With Dutch Museum Over Ancient History

2023/06/20 Leave a comment

Of interest, cultural appropriation dispute and the complexities of history and identities.

I remember I once made the mistake of telling an Egyptian diplomat that I found Egypt and Iran both the most sophisticated societies in the Mid-East, intending it as a compliment (I have lived in both) and she was horrified by the comparison:

A new Dutch museum exhibit declares, “Egypt is a part of Africa,” which might strike most people who have seen a map of the world as an uncontroversial statement.

But the show at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden goes beyond geography. It explores the tradition of Black musicians — Beyoncé, Tina Turner, Nas and others — drawing inspiration and pride from the idea that ancient Egypt was an African culture. The exhibit is framed as a useful corrective to centuries of cultural erasure of Africans.

What might sound empowering in the United States and thought-provoking in the Netherlands, however, is anathema to Egypt’s government and many of its people, who have flooded the museum’s Facebook and Google pages with complaints — occasionally racist ones — about what they see as Western appropriation of their history.

Many Egyptians do not see themselves as African at all, identifying much more closely with the predominantly Arab and Muslim nations of the Middle East and North Africa, and many look down on darker-skinned Egyptians and sub-Saharan Africans. And some feel that it is their culture and history that are being erased in the Western quest to correct historical racism.

The exhibit “attacks Egyptians’ civilization and heritage” and “distorts Egyptian identity,” a member of Parliament, Ahmed Belal, said in a speech on May 2, soon after the exhibit opened and around the time similar fireworks erupted over a Netflix docudrama portraying the ancient Greek-Egyptian queen Cleopatra as Black.

Within weeks, perhaps aware of the appeal to its nationalist supporters, Egypt’s government acted. The authority that oversees all things ancient Egypt informed the Leiden museum’s team of archaeologists, including the show’s half-Egyptian curator, that they could no longer excavate in Egypt. Until then, Dutch Egyptologists had been working in the ancient tombs of Sakkara since 1975.

“If you don’t respect our culture or our heritage, then we will not cooperate with you until you do,” said Abdul Rahim Rihan, an Egyptian archaeologist who leads a group called the Campaign to Defend Egyptian Civilization.

Suggestions that ancient Egypt is a cultural ancestor of modern-day Black people are central to some forms of Afrocentrism, a cultural and political movement that arose to push back against often racist, colonialist ideas about supposed inferiority of African civilizations to European ones. Black people, in this telling, could be proud of their roots in the ancient kingdom that built some of the world’s greatest splendors.

But for Egyptians, it all adds up to a wounded sense that, just as Westerners plundered antiquities like the Rosetta Stone from Egypt and hogged the credit for discovering them in centuries past, they are once again seizing control of ancient Egypt from Egyptians themselves.

The museum exhibit, “Kemet: Egypt in Hip-Hop, Jazz, Soul & Funk,” looks at how Afrocentrism has played out in music. Beyoncé and Rihanna have adorned themselves as Nefertiti, the ancient queen of Egypt; Nina Simone said she believed she was Nefertiti reincarnate; and Ms. Turner once sang about being Queen Hatshepsut — an ancient Egyptian pharaoh — in a past life.

The cover art for Nas’s 1999 album “I Am …” sculpts his features into King Tutankhamen’s famous golden mask. Miles Davis, Prince and Erykah Badu have all borrowed inspiration from the pharaohs for lyrics, jewelry and more.

“Kemet,” the ancient Egyptians’ word for their country, even commissioned an audio tour in Dutch, English and Arabic narrated by Typhoon, a Dutch rapper, as well as a new song by the Dutch rapper Nnelg about his connection to ancient Egypt.

Typhoon acknowledges on the tour that the musicians’ perspectives are “not the only way to think about ancient Egypt,” but he goes on to present the exhibit nonetheless as a correction of history.

“Although television programs and films in the Netherlands and in the U.S. often project only a certain image of Egypt to the public, dark-skinned people lived there as well, both in the past and the present,” he says.

The show, whose curator, Daniel Soliman, is half-Egyptian, appended a statement to the exhibit’s description online in response to the “commotion” on social media. It said it was seeking to explain “why ancient Egypt is important to these artists and musicians and from which cultural and intellectual movements the music emerged.”

Representatives for the museum declined to comment beyond the statement. But those defending the show have pointed out that most of the critics have not visited it.

For Egyptians, just how touchy this subject is became clear during the controversy over Netflix’s “Queen Cleopatra” series, when an Egyptian lawyer called for banning the streaming service in Egypt and the government dismissed the show as a “falsification of Egyptian history.”

Part of their anger may also stem from colorism: Some Egyptians tend to identify light skin with the elite, perhaps the result of age-old beauty standards that prize light skin and of centuries of rule by lighter-skinned conquerors from Europe and Turkey.

Egyptians’ fury centers in part on one Afrocentrist idea, by no means embraced by all who subscribe to Afrocentrism, that the Arabs who invaded Egypt in the seventh century displaced the true African Egyptians.

“This is an attack on the Egyptian identity,” said Dr. Rihan, the Egyptian archaeologist. “It’s not about skin color,” he added. “When you say things like that,” he said, “you’re taking the Egyptians out of their own history, against all evidence.”

Dr. Soliman began working on excavations in Egypt as a student before joining the museum. He is one of the leaders of the museum-affiliated team that normally spends weeks each year in the village of Sakkara, just south of Cairo, excavating tombs of the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis.

Unlike European- or American-led archaeological digs of the past — witness the photographs of Howard Carter’s famous discovery of King Tut’s tomb — the Leiden archaeological team is careful to highlight the contributions of Egyptian workers, featuring them prominently in photographs and online diaries about each season’s excavations. Those efforts are in keeping with a growing trend in Egyptology toward giving Egyptians, once overlooked in the study of their own country’s history, more prominence in the field.

But that mattered little after word of Dr. Soliman’s exhibit spread.

The Dutch museum appeared slightly stunned by the tone of the social media criticism, noting that, while it welcomed “respectful dialogue,” racist or offensive comments would be removed.

Scholars tend to study ancient Egypt as a part of the Mediterranean world, with cultural and political links to Greece and Rome, as well as with Nubia, which roughly coincides with modern-day Sudan.

Though there is no scientific consensus on ancient Egyptians’ appearance or ethnic ancestry, many classicists say it is inappropriate to talk about race in that era at all, given that the ancients did not classify people as we do now.

Modern-day Egyptians, like the dialect they speak, descend from a family tree of many branches. Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks and Albanians all conquered Egypt centuries ago. Circassians arrived as slaves, Levantine Arabs and Western Europeans as businesspeople. Nubians still live in southern Egypt.

But it is Islam and the Arabic language that predominate now, uniting Egypt with the mostly Arab and Muslim Middle East and North Africa rather than with the rest of the continent it sits on.

“Egypt is in a category of its own,” said David Abulafia, a Cambridge University historian who studies the ancient world. “With the lumping of everyone together, nuance has often been lost in the way African history is presented, as a bloc.”

But for Typhoon, the Dutch rapper, Egyptian exceptionalism feeds on discredited European theories that were “used to determine which ancient cultures were deemed important and thus couldn’t belong to Africa,” he says in the audio tour.

Such theories, he says, “separated ancient Egypt from its African context.”

Source: Egypt Spars With Dutch Museum Over Ancient History

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How the U.S. Census Penalizes Arab Americans

2023/06/20 Leave a comment

Interesting history to the lack of a Middle Eastern and North Africa (MENA) category (in Canada, Arab and West Asian) and the reasons why needed:

The exact number of Middle Eastern residents in the United States is unclear, with estimates ranging from 1.8 to 3.7 million people. The uncertainty is not primarily due to undocumented immigration, poor data maintenance, or limited survey reach, but how the U.S. Census Bureau classifies individuals of Middle Eastern descent. While federal demographic databases typically include five categories (Hispanic, non-Hispanic White, African American/Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, and American Indian or Alaska Native), those of Middle Eastern ancestry do not fit neatly into any of these groups. The federal government and the U.S. Census Bureau address this concern by classifying white as “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.”

This categorization originated from the 19th-century wave of Arab immigration when being classified as white in the United States provided clear advantages such as access to citizenship, legislative programs, and governmental employment. Arab immigrants campaigned to avoid being categorized as Asian, and arguments were made based on Social Darwinism and Christian superiority, as the majority of the initial immigrants were Christian Arabs. They argued that if Jesus, who was from the same region, was the son of God and at the top of the social pyramid alongside Anglo-Saxons, then Lebanese and Syrian immigrants were also white.

This theory faced legal challenges in 1909 when George Shishim, a Lebanese American police officer in L.A. County, arrested the son of a prominent lawyer. The lawyer and his son argued that Shishim, due to his Asian race, was not a U.S. citizen and had no right to arrest U.S. citizens. At the time, Shishim argued, “If I am Mongolian, then so was Jesus, because we came from the same land.” Arab American community leaders rallied around Shishim and hired attorney Byron C. Hanna. In response to the argument, Judge Hutton of the Superior Court of Los Angeles ruled that Shishim was eligible for citizenship and that Lebanese and Syrians belonged to the “white race.” This classification gradually extended to all individuals of Middle Eastern and North African descent across the United States.

While this classification initially benefited Arab Americans, it presented challenges in policy formulation as the United States embraced multiculturalism. Arab individuals are not commonly viewed as white and often have different socio-cultural backgrounds. These differences have significant policy implications. For example, if policymakers or researchers wanted to study alcohol consumption prevalence among Arab residents in California, public health data would not provide specific categories for Arab and European respondents. This lack of differentiation makes crafting effective policy increasingly difficult. Sociology professor Kristine J. Ajrouch, who studies Alzheimer’s disease among Arab Americans, faces this difficulty in her research. “[The current classifications] make it very difficult to identify Middle Eastern and North African individuals or those of Arab ancestry.”

The current categorization prevents Arab Americans from accessing policy programs designed for minority groups. Minority-owned businesses often receive specific advantages in government contracts through local, state, and federal programs. Despite being a minority group, Arab-owned businesses do not benefit from these programs. Legislative actions, such as Executive Order 13769, labeled the “Muslim travel ban” by critics 0f the former Trump administration, which disproportionately impacted travel from many Arab countries, have targeted Arab communities, raising the question of whether Arab Americans are viewed and treated as white. Samer Khalaf, President of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, believes otherwise, arguing, “We’re counted as ‘white,’ but we’re not treated as ‘white.’ We have the ‘no-fly’ lists, and we’re subjected to heightened security wherever we go.”

However, there is a possibility of change in the 2030 Census, as it might include a “Middle Eastern or North African” option. During preparations for the 2020 Census, researchers concluded that a MENA category “helps respondents to more accurately report their MENA identities.” However, a lack of approval from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during the Trump administration prevented the implementation of this plan. In 2021, the Biden administration confirmed that it had reviewed the proposal. If the OMB approves a MENA classification before the finalization of the 2030 Census, it could appear on the nationwide survey for the first time in U.S. history.

Racial categorization is an ever-evolving concept in the United States, and the classification of white has often been contentious. However, beyond symbolic portrayals of group identity, this categorization has significant legislative implications. Not tracking the unique cultural, linguistic, and social patterns found in Arab communities hinders the creation of effective policy. Cities and states across the United States must act and include a Middle Eastern and North African racial option on official surveys in order to pursue effective legislation.

Source: How the U.S. Census Penalizes Arab Americans

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No One Ever Made the Case for Reparations Better Than Reagan

2023/06/19 Leave a comment

And it was under Conservative PM Mulroney that Canada also issued an official apology and payments for Japanese internment in Canada, along with the creation of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation:

Today, as Californians consider a reparations package that could reach $800 billion to pay for the harm the state has done to its African-American population on matters ranging from over-policing to housing discrimination, there’s a pro-reparations argument that needs to be revived. It’s that made by Ronald Reagan 35 years ago.

With California’s Task Force to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for African Americans getting ready to submit a draft of its report to the state legislature by late June, Reagan’s argument has become more relevant than ever. “For here we right a wrong,” Reagan declared in 1988, as his second term as president was nearing its end. Reagan spoke these words to mark his signing of a bill designed to provide restitution for the World War II internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry.

At a time when those making the case for reparations are accused of being woke, we forget the heartfelt case for payments combining restitution and reparations that Reagan made without fearing he would lose his credentials as a political conservative.

The decision to remove Japanese Americans from their homes during World War II reflected long standing anti-Asian prejudices. The Roosevelt administration contended that Japanese Americans posed a danger to the country in case of a Japanese attack on America’s West Coast. But there was no comparable treatment of German Americans or Italian Americans despite the United States also being at war with Germany and Italy.

Reagan’s speech is one that few want to recall because of the racism it calls attention to, but the speech is a lesson in how to deal with history we would like to have back. At the speech’s core lies Reagan’s belief that, while we cannot undo the wrongs of the past, we can mitigate their continuing impact.

In his address to the nation in 1988, Reagan managed to apologize for government wrongdoing and argue that his apology left America stronger. “So what is most important in this bill has less to do with property than with honor,” Reagan declared. “We reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law.”

The timing of Reagan’s speech is noteworthy. It came decades before the Supreme Court in 2018 explicitly repudiated the Roosevelt-era Supreme Court’s 1944 Korematsu decision sanctioning the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. In words that echo Reagan’s, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. described Korematsu as “morally repugnant” and “gravely wrong the day it was decided.”

Prior to 2018 the strongest legal dissent from the Korematsu decision was the “confession of error” that the Justice Department issued in 2011 when it acknowledged the misleading role the Solicitor General had played in 1944 in defending the internment of Japanese Americans.

Reagan began his 1988 speech by describing the cruelty of the internment that the government was now seeking to redress. He spoke of thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry being removed from their homes and placed in makeshift internment camps solely because of their race.

The rush to internment began on February 19, 1942, 73 days after the United States entered World War II when President Franklin Roosevelt issued Order 9066. The order came with so little planning that for a time Japanese-American families were interned in the horse stables at Santa Anita race track. In his address Reagan believed it was important not to sugarcoat the emotional and economic impact of internment.

The redress for Japanese Americans interned during World War II has meant tax-free payments of $20,000 to more than 82,000 claimants as a result of the 1988 act. The total amounts to over $1.6 billion.

Reagan was not put off by the cost of restitution, which in fact falls short of the amount of money lost by the men and women interned in the 1940s when put in current dollars. At the heart of Reagan’s speech was his belief that “no payment can make up for those lost years.”

Thirteen years after Ronald Reagan’s White House speech, the National Japanese-American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II opened in Washington on June 29, 2001. Unlike the memorials on the National Mall, the National Japanese-American Memorial does not immediately draw attention to itself. The memorial sits just north of the Capitol on a small triangle of land at the intersection of New Jersey Avenue and D Street.

The 33,000 square-foot park and plaza that hold the memorial invite contemplation. Designed by Washington, D.C. architect Davis Buckley, the memorial, like Reagan’s speech, makes a point of being direct and elegiac about the injustices it addresses. On one of its walls are the names of the 10 internment camps where Japanese Americans were held during World War II, and at the center of the memorial is a bronze sculpture, “The Golden Cranes,” by Nina Akamu, whose grandfather died in an internment camp. Her sculpture consists of two cranes struggling to break free of the barbed wire that entangles them.

“The burden of righting a historic wrong sanctioned by the government does not simply fall on those responsible for the wrong at the time it was committed.”

Ronald Reagan was not able to attend the opening of the Japanese-American Memorial, but he is present there. Words from his 1988 speech are inscribed on the edge of the memorial pool.

Reagan concluded his speech by recalling the time he attended a 1945 medal ceremony in Orange County, California, at which World War II General Joe Stillwell honored a Japanese-American military hero of the war in Europe with a posthumous Distinguished Service Cross. Reagan’s role at the 1945 medal ceremony, like that of the other celebrities there, was a minor one, but decades later, he saw his presence at the ceremony worth addressing.

In doing so, Reagan was not just personalizing his speech. He was making clear a lesson in continuity that is easy to forget: the burden of righting a historic wrong sanctioned by the government does not simply fall on those responsible for the wrong at the time it was committed. It falls on a state or nation owning up to its past.

Nicolaus Mills is author of Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964—The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America. He is professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College.

Source: No One Ever Made the Case for Reparations Better Than Reagan

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As Juneteenth Goes National, We Must Preserve the Local

2023/06/19 Leave a comment

Interesting commentary, noting that “something’s lost, but something’s gained” in the creation of a national holiday:

It’s been two years since Juneteenth became a federal holiday, one we can celebrate together as a nation. The signing of the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law in 2021 was an expression of real progress in the collective understanding of Black struggle that reinforced our national ideals of liberty and dignity. But I confess my ambivalence. I am worried about what official national recognition might do to what has always been a community-based holiday.

My own memories of Juneteenth, like those of so many others, are distinctly local. They are rooted in a sense of place.

When I was young, that place was Eden Park, high on the hills along the Ohio River in Cincinnati, where I would spend the day contentedly with my mother and the many other families who attended. Years later, after I formed a family of my own with my spouse (who is not Black or Midwestern, but Native American from Montana), discovering where Juneteenth events were held, who organized them and who turned out was like holding a black light to the invisible-inked map of the present and past African American community.

When we moved to Ann Arbor, Mich., to start jobs at the university there, we kept an eye out for the flyers popping up on market bulletin boards and wooden street posts. Following these notices like a marked trail, we wound up at a park in a neighborhood near the Huron River and railroad tracks. The celebration we found there was small and free of charge, with clusters of families gathered to cook out, listen to music on boomboxes and enjoy the summer day outdoors. We felt welcome and accepted.

The location of this small event, it turned out, was an old Black neighborhood that was changing over time as residents from different racial backgrounds and income levels moved in for the river views. But even amid this demographic flux, the area retained its historic character. It was here that Black University of Michigan students who faced housing discrimination near campus in the late 1800s and early 1900s could rent rooms in boardinghouses and where older Black homeowners still had vast lots where they cultivated thick gardens full of emerald collard green rows. If it had not been for that Juneteenth event, my husband and I would have missed the historic and communal character of this neighborhood, the place where we went on to buy our first home in the city two years later and rock our infant twins to sleep.

Juneteenth festivities have long represented tucked-away spaces, deeply local, somewhat surprising and fitted to the variances of Black life in America. They have supported micro-cultures of Black crafts and local economies of neighborhood enterprise, fostering the kind of community exchange that will be most sustainable in the future. Whether they are rural or urban, their local specificity, and their hiddenness from those who would misunderstand their gravity, have made Juneteenth events special and enduring.

The best-known Juneteenth locale and origin story is the one that has given the holiday its name, originating in Galveston, Texas, with Major General Gordon Granger’s June 19, 1865, announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, issued two years earlier. His announcement informed enslaved people, who had been denied information as well as their rights, that freedom had come. In other parts of the country, Black communities celebrated what they called Emancipation Day, keyed to a different historical timestamp. Most often, this day commemorated the end of slavery in the West Indies in 1833 (effective August 1834).

Many Black communities along the Atlantic seaboard celebrated Emancipation Day. Among them was Boston’s longstanding, politically active population, which, the historian Jacqueline Jones has shown in her new book, “No Right to an Honest Living,” was made up of free families extending back to the end of slavery in Massachusetts in the 1780s, freedom-seekers and recent refugees from the South and immigrants from the Caribbean. Boston’s Emancipation Day tradition has re-emerged under the banner of Juneteenth as local organizations like the Museum of African American History celebrate the holiday in the heart of the historic Black community situated around the African Meeting House on the narrow lanes of Beacon Hill.

On the island of Nantucket, a petite slip of fog-dipped land beyond Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, M.A.A.H. is extending this Juneteenth observance. There, Juneteenth will be celebrated in the historic building of another African Meeting House, which will have a bicentennial anniversary in 2025. A Black and Wampanoag whaling community built the structure as a multipurpose church and school in a neighborhood called New Guinea in the 1820s. As one of the oldest buildings constructed by a free Black community in this country, Nantucket’s African Meeting House has just been awarded a capital project grant from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The celebration of Juneteenth on Nantucket will highlight the precious history of a place where people of African and Indigenous descent joined together as families and made a living off the bounty of the sea.

Two thousand-plus miles west of Massachusetts, Montanans will also observe a refashioned Juneteenth holiday this year. Perhaps like Nantucket and the Massachusetts Cape and Islands, Montana is largely imagined by the rest of the country as a white place (with only a glancing acknowledgment of the significant Indigenous populations and histories there). But Montana also has a long and complex Black history, which has only recently been reconstructed through a multimedia project of the Montana Historical Society.

A handful of Black fur traders crossed into the Rocky Mountain West in the mid-19th century, but most African Americans migrated to Montana after the Civil War. In the 1870s and 1880s, Buffalo Soldiers of the Ninth and 10th Cavalry Regiments and the 24th and 25th Infantry Regiments moved west to man forts. Black women sometimes accompanied their soldiering husbands and at other times arrived with white officers or white families to work as domestics. As the Black population grew in Montana in the late 19th century and early 20th century, tens of thousands of people formed communities in or near cities such as Havre, Great Falls, Butte and Helena. There they followed the demonstrated pattern of African American priorities, erecting schools and churches and developing practices of mutual aid. Some of these Black newcomers married into Indigenous families, navigating dual and triple allegiances. As the historian Anthony Wood has detailed in his 2021 book “Black Montana,” African American residents in the city of Butte celebrated Emancipation Day with a pilgrimage by train into the snow-peaked mountains, where they enjoyed picnics, fun and frivolities.

In the Great Plains states of Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota and Wyoming, Black residents gathered to observe Emancipation Day, too. These were people who had moved from the cotton-belt and rice-field South to form rural settlements on acreage opened through the U.S. Homestead Act of 1862 (a law that distributed ill-gotten Native lands). As shown in a research project led by Richard Edwards at the University of Nebraska Center for Great Plains Studies, African Americans in the region ritualized emancipation as a communal act of remembrance.

Celebrations across the Great Plains and in Montana most likely commemorated not the well-known Galveston, Texas, moment, or even the British West Indies moment, but instead a closer, regional history: August of 1865, later formalized in the Treaty of 1866, when African-descended people owned by Native Americans of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in nearby Indian Territory (present-day eastern Oklahoma) were freed from bondage.

In 2023, for the second year in a row, the Montana Historical Society, in partnership with the Holter Museum of Art and the Myrna Loy theater, will host a free Juneteenth festival, drawing on a local history of diversity and perseverance. Based in Helena, these activities include a trolley ride (reminiscent of those Butte train rides more than a century ago), a tour of Black historic sites, a documentary film about an 1897 cross-country journey by Black soldiers of the 25th Infantry to test whether bikes could replace horses, a dance, food and a teenage art workshop.

Juneteenth celebrations mounted by groups on the ground grow out of these rich histories, help us to recognize them and illuminate pathways toward greater understanding and connection where people live, work and visit.

But the day’s new national recognition has brought a level of commercialization that threatens to eclipse these local celebrations, in all their wondrous specificity. Today we can find Juneteenth T-shirts aplenty at Walmart, a Juneteenth makeup sale courtesy of an online boutique and apparel on Etsy boasting the ironic claim “Culture Not for Sale” in Kwanzaa colors. In just two years, we’ve already seen examples of how this kind of rapid commercialization can go awry. In 2021 Target had to admit that a Juneteenth display of hot sauce, Kool-Aid and watermelon “missed the mark,” and Walmart apologized in 2022 for making and marketing Juneteenth ice cream.

When we allow corporations and distant event planners to hijack Juneteenth, we lose the texture of these various places and their particular commemorations. We share the responsibility to prevent that.

In the middle of the Civil War, in October of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln inaugurated Thanksgiving Day (in a proclamation written by Secretary of State William Henry Seward, after long-term lobbying by the writer and editor Sarah Josepha Hale). We know this Thanksgiving vision was exclusionary, advancing what the historian David Silverman has described as a false narrative about Indigenous and English settler relations. But over time, the practice of the holiday has had the unifying impact of bringing people of diverse heritages together around a shared identity and a meal, creating a sense of both commonality and intimacy. Resisting homogenization and commodification, Thanksgiving gatherings orient toward relationships. Families, friends and neighbors converge in homes, churches, community centers and shelters for unhoused people to break bread and express gratitude, a ritual of connection.

With care and concerted effort, the Juneteenth holiday might rival Thanksgiving as a new communal ritual, highlighting the value of shared freedoms as our workweek tempo slows and personal rhythms align, even as we notice and cherish the treasure of each distinct celebration. In these right-size gatherings in parks, on blocks, at town greens and city squares, we can gain so much more than kitschy displays and logo T-shirts — loneliness dispelled, neighborhoods sustained and a torn national fabric slowly darned from the inside out.

For the sake of our history and maybe our country, we should let a thousand Juneteenths bloom.

Source: As Juneteenth Goes National, We Must Preserve the Local

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