Why promoting multiculturalism could increase support for the EU

2023/02/15 Leave a comment

Interesting study and linkage (may be more correlation than causation):

Many political parties combine pro-EU policies with critical stances toward immigration and multiculturalism. But are these two approaches contradictory? Drawing on a new study covering France and Germany, Natalia Bogado, Evelyn Bytzek and Melanie C. Steffens highlight that discourses emphasising the threat of cultural diversity can increase Euroscepticism among voters, while discourses promoting multiculturalism are associated with an increase in support for the EU.

Since the 1990s, the Leitkultur debate – ironically spearheaded by later Wilkommenskulturchampion, German Chancellor Angela Merkel – has been at the heart of discourses about immigration and asylum in Germany. In a nutshell, the debate is a body of discourses (more or less extreme) grounded on the notion that without a German guiding culture that everyone equally adopts (i.e. a culture into which everyone has been equally assimilated), German society would fall apart.

In other words, social cohesion and peace can only exist in conditions of complete cultural assimilation. Multiculturalism is thus disparaged as an unsustainable ideology that leads to a lack of social unity, violence, criminality, and even terrorism by those who have allegedly failed to adopt the cardinal tenets of the German culture. Accordingly, Merkel famously declared multiculturalism dead in 2010, and the notion that cultural diversity poses a serious threat to peaceful coexistence in Germany was a constant in her political rhetoric throughout her 16 years in power.

Beyond Germany and the Leitkultur, assimilation has dominated public debates about immigration and asylum in many European countries. In France, assimilationist discourses have been the leitmotif of the far-right populist Rassemblement National and the lifeline that secured electoral success for many centre-right candidates – famously, Nicolas Sarkozy, but others as well. Similarly, Brexit followed a campaign where immigration and the threat it allegedly poses to the British cultural identity were highly salient. Armed with a wide array of nationalist and assimilationist slogans, the UK Independence Party and the anti-EU factions of the Conservative Party were able to turn fears over national-identity loss and immigration into anti-EU votes.

Evidence from France and Germany

Brexit offered anecdotal evidence of the negative impact of assimilationist discourses that present immigration, asylum, and cultural diversity as a threat to the nation on support for the EU. In a new study covering Germany and France, we provide scientific evidence to support these assumptions.

Specifically, we found that reading electoral pledges (taken from the 2019 European Parliament election) such as “We must regulate immigration to preserve Europe’s cultural integrity” or “We must protect our European way of life and our Christian values under threat by unconditional migration,” decreased support for EU integration, identification with the EU and – particularly concerning in light of Brexit ­– increased intentions to vote to leave the EU.

Thus, our study evidenced that something as (apparently) innocent as expressing concern about cultural diversity threatening the integrity of national cultures and customs can fuel Euroscepticism and intentions to leave the Union. Conversely, reassuring voters of the benefits of multiculturalism and cultural diversity increased support for the EU.

Reading electoral pledges that emphasised the importance of promoting multiculturalism and respecting cultural diversity improved EU attitudes and reduced intentions to vote to leave the EU. Electoral pledges such as “We celebrate cultural diversity and want to make Europe a safe place for all” and “We are determined to defend the right of asylum and of migrants to live in Europe without having to abandon their cultural identities” had a positive impact on support for the EU, identification with the EU, and intentions to remain in the Union.

The way forward

In a context where Euroscepticism continues to grow, our research helps us to understand how politicians’ assimilationist messages can promote Euroscepticism. These findings have important implications for political and media discourse. Assimilation discourses are not exclusive to the populist far-right: many pro-EU centre-right parties have also emphasised the threat of cultural diversity in their immigration discourses.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel – who advanced a strong pro-refugee agenda, welcoming hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees and urging other EU countries to do the same – framed immigration and asylum almost exclusively in assimilation terms. In light of our findings, it is hardly surprising that during Merkel’s tenure, Germany saw the electoral rise of the Eurosceptic Alternative for Germany and the rise of radicalised groups like Pegida and others. Beyond Germany, our study highlights why, despite many politicians’ efforts to promote a pro-EU agenda, the persistence of assimilation discourses means that Euroscepticism will continue to grow among Europeans.

Furthermore, the echoes of Brexit still threaten the continuity of the Union, as exposure to information emphasising the United Kingdom’s sovereignty gains following its exit from the Union increases Euroscepticism and willingness to leave the EU. As such, the importance of adopting multicultural discourses when framing immigration and asylum for the future of the EU cannot be understated.

Additionally, our study offers further hope: in addition to promoting the benefits of multiculturalism, fostering an emotional connection to the EU can also protect the Union from the impact of assimilationist discourses. Unfortunately, data from the 2018 European Social Survey is not reassuring, as EU attachment remains moderate to low among Europeans. However, research has offered some avenues to promote EU attachment.

Recently, studies have found that policies like EU Cohesion Policy and the adoption of the euroincreased emotional attachment to the EU. Future research should continue to explore ways to achieve this longstanding goal of increasing Europeans’ attachment to the Union. At the moment, the Russian invasion of Ukraine represents a watershed moment for the EU to display its political, financial, and cultural leadership in the region and thus strengthen European citizens’ emotional attachment to the Union.

Source: Why promoting multiculturalism could increase support for the EU

Filed under Integration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

CSIS warned Trudeau about Toronto-area politician’s alleged ties to Chinese diplomats

2023/02/15 Leave a comment

Fortunately, the truth generally always emerges; unfortunately, it appears the PM and government didn’t take the warnings seriously:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and senior aides were warned on at least two occasions that government MPs should be cautious in their political dealings with former Ontario Liberal cabinet minister Michael Chan because of alleged ties to China’s consulate in Toronto, national-security sources say.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has a dossier on Mr. Chan that contains information on his activities in the 2019 and 2021 federal election campaigns and meetings with suspected Chinese intelligence operatives, according to the two security sources. The Globe and Mail is not identifying the sources, who risk prosecution under the Security of Information Act.

Mr. Chan, now deputy mayor of the city of Markham, told The Globe that he is a loyal Canadian and accused CSIS of character assassination, saying they never once interviewed him about his alleged involvement with the Chinese consulate.

“Your own statement to me about a recent briefing by CSIS to Prime Minister Trudeau, serves only to ignite xenophobia and cause continued, unwarranted and irreparable damage to my reputation and the safety of my family,” he said.

He added: “CSIS has never interviewed me regarding their false and unsubstantiated allegations. However, I am aware that they have conducted intimidating interviews with my friends and acquaintances and then instructed them to keep their mouths shut.”

Mr. Chan, 71, was elected as a regional councillor in Markham’s Oct. 24 election last year and, as the councillor with the most votes, he also became deputy mayor. In 2018, he retired from provincial politics, where his last post was minister of international trade for Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government. He has been a key organizer and fundraiser in Ontario’s Chinese-Canadian communities for the federal and provincial Liberal parties.

CSIS has observed Mr. Chan meeting in the past years with Chinese diplomat Zhao Wei, whom one source describes as a “suspected intelligence actor,” and Beijing’s former vice-consul-general Zhuang Yaodong. CSIS believes Mr. Zhuang handled security files out of the Toronto consulate, the source said. Mr. Zhao’s code-name for Mr. Chan is “The Minister,” the source said.

In 2019, Mr. Chan had a number of meetings with Mr. Zhao that were described in a CSIS 2020 briefing package as “clandestine in nature” and were allegedly election-related, the source said. In that same year, CSIS observed Mr. Chan and an associate meeting with Mr. Zhao and Mr. Zhuang at a Chinese restaurant.

Mr. Chan said in his statement to The Globe that his meetings with Chinese consular officials are not unusual for politicians. He also said that he met frequently with consular officials from many Asian and Southeast Asian countries in 2019 relating to business activities abroad.

“Meetings to discuss business and trade between Consular officials and Canadians, politicians or otherwise, are a common practice,” he said. “Just in case you were not aware, I met a few days ago with the Deputy Consul-General from China in Toronto and Mr. Wei Zhao.”

The source said Mr. Zhao, who came to Canada in 2018, has also been observed meeting with a number of constituency staffers for Liberal MPs in Toronto, including an assistant for International Trade Minister Mary Ng. Some of those aides were asked by Mr. Zhao to keep their MPs away from pro-Taiwan events, according to the source.

CSIS Director David Vigneault flagged Mr. Chan’s return to public office during a fall 2022 briefing that he delivered to the Prime Minister and his national security adviser, Jody Thomas, on Chinese election interference. He cautioned that Liberal MPs should be vigilant in their dealings with Mr. Chan, according to two other sources. The Globe is not identifying them because they were not authorized to speak about sensitive matters.

In that same briefing, Mr. Vigneault said China’s consulate in Toronto had targeted 11 candidates from the Greater Toronto Area, a mix of Liberals and Conservatives, in the 2019 federal election, the sources said. But the sources said the CSIS director told Mr. Trudeau there was no indication China’s interference efforts had helped elect any of them, despite the consulate’s attempts to promote the campaigns on social media and in Chinese-language media outlets.

The Globe has previously reported that Mr. Chan had been on CSIS’s radar, stretching as far back as 2010, because of alleged close ties to the Chinese consulate. He had also been involved in community events with leaders of the Confederation of Toronto Chinese Canadian Organizations, considered one of the consulate’s unofficial lobby groups.

In a 2019 briefing for the Prime Minister’s Office, one of the national-security sources and a government source say, security officials also flagged Mr. Chan’s Chinese consular connections soon after he was recruited by Ms. Ng to serve as her campaign co-chair in that year’s federal election.

In the 2019 briefing, security officials told senior PMO staff, including Mr. Trudeau’s Chief of Staff, Katie Telford, that Mr. Chan should be on “your radar” and that “someone should reach out to Mary to be extra careful,” according to one source. That security briefing also dealt with foreign interference, tactics and Chinese tradecraft, the source said.

Ms. Ng told The Globe that no one from the PMO told her to steer clear of Mr. Chan, who also co-chaired her 2017 by-election campaign when she replaced veteran Liberal MP John McCallum. The Prime Minister opened the Markham-Thornhill riding for Ms. Ng, who had earlier served as his director of appointments, by naming Mr. McCallum as Canada’s ambassador to China.

Mr. Trudeau later fired Mr. McCallum after he criticized the American request for Canada to detain and extradite Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou.

In the interview with The Globe, Ms. Ng said that Mr. Chan never actually took up the role of campaign co-chair in 2019 because, she said, there were other capable volunteers to help.

“We were working with so many members of my community – the Chinese members of our community, Tamil members of my community, Muslim Canadian and Jewish Canadians – so really it was really a cross section of people. So the campaign, you know, it just was working as it was and I felt very supported by a lot of people who were on the ground,” she said.

She added: “I haven’t talked to Michael in quite some time.”

A confidant of Ms. Ng said the MP quietly dropped Mr. Chan as co-chair after public comments in the late summer of 2019 where he condemned Hong Kong pro-democracy demonstrators and supported China’s crackdown on them, attributing the protests to alleged manipulation by foreign actors. Mr. Chan agreed to step aside because he did not want his comments to reflect badly on Ms. Ng, the confidant said. The Globe is not naming the confidant, who was not permitted to publicly discuss the matter.

“Your statement to me regarding Mary Ng’s campaign is utterly false,” Mr. Chan said. He did not elaborate.

The confidant also said that Ms. Ng’s assistant, who used to work for Mr. McCallum, likely met Mr. Zhao at Chinese-Canadian community events, often frequented by Chinese consulate officials. He stressed, however, that Ms. Ng has avoided meeting Chinese consulate officials since she became Trade Minister in 2021. She became Minister for Small Business in a cabinet shuffle in 2018.

Ms. Ng received the necessary vetting to obtain a security clearance to serve in cabinet in 2018 when she became Small Business Minister.

In the 2017 by-election campaign, then Chinese consul-general He Wei gathered Chinese-Canadian media at the consulate and urged them to support her election, saying they needed a friend like Mr. McCallum in Ottawa, according to one of the security sources. Ms. Ng’s confidant said she was not aware of the intervention by Mr. He, now a senior official in China’s Foreign Ministry.

CSIS has repeatedly warned that China has been conducting foreign interference operations in Canada, including efforts to influence the political process.

On Thursday, Adam Fisher, CSIS director-general of intelligence assessments, told the House of Commons committee on procedure and house affairs that Beijing uses a variety of means to influence the political process, including attempting to get information from unwitting politicians.

“They are not necessarily relying on trained agents. They use cutouts. They use proxies. They use community groups. They use diaspora organizations and community leaders,” he said.

Cherie Henderson, CSIS assistant director of requirements, also noted that states like China will funnel money directly to proxies.

“They will use whatever avenue they can to achieve their objectives,” she told the committee, which is studying alleged Chinese interference in the 2019 election.

In June, 2015, Mr. Chan was the subject of a Globe investigation, which revealed that CSIS was concerned that the then-minister may have grown too close to the Chinese consulate in Toronto, prompting a senior official to formally caution the province about the minister’s alleged conduct in a 2010 briefing.

Around that time, then-premier Dalton McGuinty dismissed the CSIS warnings as baseless. When The Globe brought the allegations to Ms. Wynne in 2015, she also dismissed them. Mr. Chan wrote in 2015 that “there is a persistent theme that there is a perceived risk that I am under undue influence and that I am an unwitting dupe of a foreign government. This is offensive and totally false.” Mr. Chan has steadfastly denied the assertions made by Canada’s spy agency.

He brought a libel action against The Globe, but the case has not gone to court.

In his recent statement to The Globe, Mr. Chan said the 2015 article was “especially egregious and disheartening for someone like myself who has always put the interests of Canada and Canadians first and foremost, and who has a long, true record of exemplary public service.”

Source: CSIS warned Trudeau about Toronto-area politician’s alleged ties to Chinese diplomats

Filed under disinformation, foreign policy, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Canadian Heritage changes vetting process for anti-racism funds after nixing contract

2023/02/15 Leave a comment

Of note. This should catch most of the problems and the inclusion of reviewing social media activities is unfortunately necessary with respect to all forms of hate, whether antisemitism, anti-Asian, anti-muslim etc:

Canadian Heritage has changed the way it vets funding requests for community and anti-racism projects after it cut ties with an organization that was accused of antisemitism.

The federal government terminated a contract with the Community Media Advocacy Centre in September after it granted the group more than $122,000for projects to help combat anti-racism.

Ottawa has since attempted to recoup the funds, but has been unsuccessful in getting the money back, said Mala Khanna, an associate deputy minister at Canadian Heritage.

“It would be possible for the minister to take legal action,” she told a House of Commons committee on Monday.

That option has not yet been pursued, she said.

The federal government’s relationship with the group ended a few days after media reported that a senior consultant had posted what federal ministers described as antisemitic content on Twitter. The ministry decided to review its vetting process and says a new procedure is now in place.

Those applying for money will now have to put into writing that they will not espouse hate or discriminate, Khanna said.

Unlike before, the minister will have the power to immediately terminate a contract if its terms are violated. And staff involved with doling out funding have received anti-racism and antisemitism training.

Under the new vetting process, the government will also review the social media accounts of the staff of organizations that apply for government funding, Khanna said.

“Racism, hate and discrimination would make you ineligible for government funding, and requiring applicants to attest upfront themselves that they or anyone that is associated with the project will not engage in hate,” Khanna said.

“I think those are important lessons that we’ve learned.”

Michael Levitt, president and CEO of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre, said staff at the Canadian Heritage department need rigorous training so they can better understand and identify antisemitism.

“While we appreciate that Canadian Heritage has implemented new processes to prevent organizations and individuals who espouse antisemitic and racist views from receiving government funding, this can only be effective under certain conditions,” Levitt said in a written statement Monday.

He said it’s imperative that staff remain committed to real and meaningful action so that someone who promotes antisemitic views “never receives another cent of Canadian taxpayer money.”

Members of Parliament for the Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc Québécois were critical of Canadian Heritage for its approval of the contract in the first place, and then its delay in cancelling it.

“The concerns are very legitimate, and the fact this antisemitism was funded by the government, by the taxpayers, I find unbelievable,” NDP MP Peter Julian said at the heritage committee on Monday.

“We can’t have a federal government that takes that long to respond to egregious cases of hate being disseminated, whether that’s online or any other venue.”

Liberal MP Anthony Housefather said he raised concerns with the department in mid-July regarding social media posts by Laith Marouf, a senior consultant with the Community Media Advocacy Centre. The organization had been awarded government money to build an anti-racism strategy for Canadian broadcasting.

One tweet read: “You know all those loud mouthed bags of human feces, a.k.a. the Jewish White Supremacists; when we liberate Palestine and they have to go back to where they come from, they will return to being low voiced bitches of thier (sic) Christian/Secular White Supremacist Masters.’’

Marouf and his lawyer Stephen Ellis could not be reached for comment. However, Ellis previously told The Canadian Press that Marouf harbours no animus toward the Jewish faith as a collective group. He drew a distinction between his client’s tweets about people he calls “Jewish white supremacists” and Jewish people in general.

The department didn’t receive the tweet until Aug. 2, Khanna said, and it wasn’t until Aug. 20 that they suspended the contract. On Sept. 23, the contract was officially terminated.

“We could have moved faster. I wish we moved faster,” Khanna said.

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs said it is still waiting for other departments to adopt the same policies and practices.

“This is larger than one program and one organization. It is a holistic, all-of-government commitment that must be undertaken,” its president and CEO, Shimon Fogel, said in a statement.

Khanna said other government departments that issue grants and contributions have expressed interest in the work Canadian Heritage has done over the last few months. She said she has met with two other departments to discuss what they learned.

“I’m confident that the measures we put into place will make a difference,” she said. “If we were in such a situation again, I believe we would be able to move more quickly. Within a matter of days.”

Source: Canadian Heritage changes vetting process for anti-racism funds after nixing contract

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Mims: The AI Boom That Could Make Google and Microsoft Even More Powerful

2023/02/14 Leave a comment

Good long read. Hard to be optimistic about how the technology will be used. And the regulators will likely be more than a few steps behind corporations:

Seeing the new artificial intelligence-powered chatbots touted in dueling announcements this past week by Microsoft and Googledrives home two major takeaways. First, the feeling of “wow, this definitely could change everything.” And second, the realization that for chat-based search and related AI technologies to have an impact, we’re going to have to put a lot of faith in them and the companies they come from.

When AI is delivering answers, and not just information for us to base decisions on, we’re going to have to trust it much more deeply than we have before. This new generation of chat-based search engines are better described as “answer engines” that can, in a sense, “show their work” by giving links to the webpages they deliver and summarize. But for an answer engine to have real utility, we’re going to have to trust it enough, most of the time, that we accept those answers at face value.

The same will be true of tools that help generate text, spreadsheets, code, images and anything else we create on our devices—some version of which both Microsoft MSFT -0.20%decrease; red down pointing triangle and Google have promised to offer within their existing productivity services, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. 

These technologies, and chat-based search, are all based on the latest generation of “generative” AI, capable of creating verbal and visual content and not just processing it the way more established AI has done. And the added trust it will require is one of several ways in which this new generative AI technology is poised to shift even more power into the hands of the biggest tech companies. 

Generative AI in all its forms will insinuate technology more deeply into the way we live and work than it already is—not just answering our questions but writing our memos and speeches or even producing poetry and art. And because of the financial, intellectual and computational resources needed to develop and run the technology are so enormous, the companies that control these AI systems will be the largest, richest companies.

OpenAI, the creator of the ChatGPT chatbot and DALL-E 2 image generator AIs that have fueled much of the current hype, seemed like an exception to that: a relatively small startup that has driven major AI innovation. But it has leapt into the arms of Microsoft, which has made successive rounds of investment, in part because of the need to pay for the computing power needed to make its systems work. 

The greater concentration of power is all the more important because this technology is both incredibly powerful and inherently flawed: it has a tendency to confidently deliver incorrect information. This means that step one in making this technology mainstream is building it, and step two is minimizing the variety and number of mistakes it inevitably makes.

Trust in AI, in other words, will become the new moat that big technology companies will fight to defend. Lose the user’s trust often enough, and they might abandon your product. For example: In November, Meta made available to the public an AI chat-based search engine for scientific knowledge called Galactica. Perhaps it was in part the engine’s target audience—scientists—but the incorrect answers it sometimes offered inspired such withering criticism that Meta shut down public access to it after just three days, said Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun in a recent talk.

Galactica was “the output of a research project versus something intended for commercial use,” says a Meta spokeswoman. In a public statement, Joelle Pineau, managing director of fundamental AI research at Meta, wrote that “given the propensity of large language models such as Galactica to generate text that may appear authentic, but is inaccurate, and because it has moved beyond the research community, we chose to remove the demo from public availability.”

On the other hand, proving your AI more trustworthy could be a competitive advantage more powerful than being the biggest, best or fastest repository of answers. This seems to be Google’s bet, as the company has emphasized in recent announcements and a presentation on Wednesday that as it tests and rolls out its own chat-based and generative AI systems, it will strive for “Responsible AI,” as outlined in 2019 in its “AI Principles.”

My colleague Joanna Stern this past week provided a helpful description of what it’s like to use Microsoft’s Bing search engine and Edge web browser with ChatGPT incorporated. You can join a list to test the service—and Google says it will make its chatbot, named Bard, available at some point in the coming months.

But in the meantime, to see just why trust in these kinds of search engines is so tricky, you can visit other chat-based search engines that already exist. There’s You.com, which will answer your questions via a chatbot, or Andisearch.com, which will summarize any article it returns when you search for a topic on it.

Even these smaller services feel a little like magic. If you ask You.com’s chat module a question like “Please list the best chat AI-based search engines,” it can, under the right circumstances, give you a coherent and succinct answer that includes all the best-known startups in this space. But it can also, depending on small changes in how you phrase that question, add complete nonsense to its answer. 

In my experimentation, You.com would, more often than not, give a reasonably accurate answer, but then add to it the name of a search engine that doesn’t exist at all. Googling the made-up search engine names it threw in revealed that You.com seemed to be misconstruing the names of humans quoted in articles as the names of search engines.

Andi doesn’t return search results in a chat format, precisely because making sure that those answers are accurate is still so difficult, says Chief Executive Angela Hoover. “It’s been super exciting to see these big players validating that conversational search is the future, but nailing factual accuracy is hard to do,” she adds. As a result, for now, Andi offers search results in a conventional format, but offers to use AI to summarize any page it returns.

Andi currently has a team of fewer than 10 people, and has raised $2.5 million so far. It’s impressive what such a small team has accomplished, but it’s clear that making trustworthy AI will require enormous resources, probably on the scale of what companies like Microsoft and Google possess.

There are two reasons for this: The first is the enormous amount of computing infrastructure required, says Tinglong Dai, a professor of operations management at Johns Hopkins University who studies human-AI interaction. That means tens of thousands of computers in big technology companies’ current cloud infrastructures. Some of those computers are used to train the enormous “foundation” models that power generative AI systems. Others specialize in making the trained models available to users, which as the number of users grows can become a more taxing task than the original training.

The second reason, says Dr. Dai, is that it requires enormous human resources to continually test and tune these models, in order to make sure they’re not spouting an inordinate amount of nonsense or biased and offensive speech.

Google has said that it has called on every employee in the company to test its new chat-based search engine and flag any issues with the results it generates. Microsoft, which is already rolling out its chat-based search engine to the public on a limited basis, is doing that kind of testing in public. ChatGPT, on which Microsoft’s chat-based search engine is based, has already proved to be vulnerable to attempts to “jailbreak” it into producing inappropriate content. 

Big tech companies can probably overcome the issues arising from their rollout of AI—Google’s go-slow approach, ChatGPT’s sometimes-inaccurate results, and the incomplete or misleading answers chat-based Bing could offer—by experimenting with these systems on a large scale, as only they can.

“The only reason ChatGPT and other foundational models are so bad at bias and even fundamental facts is they are closed systems, and there is no opportunity for feedback,” says Dr. Dai. Big tech companies like Google have decades of practice at soliciting feedback to improve their algorithmically-generated results. Avenues for such feedback have, for example, long been a feature of both Google Search and Google Maps.

Dr. Dai says that one analogy for the future of trust in AI systems could be one of the least algorithmically-generated sites on the internet: Wikipedia. While the entirely human-written and human-edited encyclopedia isn’t as trustworthy as primary-source material, its users generally know that and find it useful anyway. Wikipedia shows that “social solutions” to problems like trust in the output of an algorithm—or trust in the output of human Wikipedia editors—are possible.

But the model of Wikipedia also shows that the kind of labor-intensive solutions for creating trustworthy AI—which companies like Meta and Google have already employed for years and at scale in their content moderation systems—are likely to entrench the power of existing big technology companies. Only they have not just the computing resources, but also the human resources, to deal with all the misleading, incomplete or biased information their AIs will be generating.

In other words, creating trust by moderating the content generated by AIs might not prove to be so different from creating trust by moderating the content generated by humans. And that is something the biggest technology companies have already shown is a difficult, time-consuming and resource-intensive task they can take on in a way that few other companies can.

The obvious and immediate utility of these new kinds of AIs, when integrated into a search engine or in their many other potential applications, is the reason for the current media, analyst and investor frenzy for AI. It’s clear that this could be a disruptive technology, resetting who is harvesting attention and where they’re directing it, threatening Google’s search monopoly and opening up new markets and new sources of revenue for Microsoft and others.

Based on the runaway success of the ChatGPT AI—perhaps the fastest service to reach 100 million users in history, according to a recent UBS report—it’s clear that being an aggressive first mover in this space could matter a great deal. It’s also clear that being a successful first-mover in this space will require the kinds of resources that only the biggest tech companies can muster.

Source: The AI Boom That Could Make Google and Microsoft Even More Powerful

Filed under Data, Other Tagged with , , , , ,

Nicolas: Claquer la porte 

2023/02/13 Leave a comment

Always interesting commentaries by Nicolas, and, given the variety of identities many of us have, of “slamming the door shut” rather than understanding and engaging:

Comme je suis liée au milieu universitaire, à la société civile puis au monde médiatique torontois, et du reste du Canada plus largement, depuis près de 13 ans, ma compréhension de notions comme le Québec bashing s’est nuancée au fil des années. On me permettra de partager ici quelques réflexions sur le sujet.

Notons que le concept de Québec bashing n’est pas utilisé ici de manière interchangeable avec la notion de « francophobie », qui regroupe un ensemble d’attitudes touchant directement les francophones qui sont en situation minoritaire, à l’extérieur du Québec. On pourra y revenir dans un autre texte.

Est-ce que « les Anglais nous méprisent et nous haïssent », comme l’avancent certains tribuns et autres fins sociologues peu réputés pour faire dans la dentelle ? La vérité, c’est que, tout comme la société québécoise s’est profondément transformée au cours des dernières décennies, le reste du pays n’est aussi plus ce qu’il était. Tout comme au Québec, donc, il y a ailleurs au Canada un clivage générationnel important entre ceux qui se souviennent des négociations constitutionnelles et des référendums, et ceux qui étaient trop jeunes. J’ai surtout été témoin, parmi les générations plus âgées, de deux attitudes principales.

La première est surtout nourrie par une lassitude : on n’a jamais vraiment compris (ou voulu comprendre) la différence québécoise, et on a l’impression que le Québec, politiquement, est une espèce d’enfant gâté qui utilise son poids politique dans la fédération pour ne pas jouer selon les mêmes règles que tout le monde. On a pu lire souvent, par exemple, que si Justin Trudeau n’a pas critiqué aussi vertement François Legault que Doug Ford pour leurs usages récents de la disposition de dérogation, c’est parce que le Québec fait l’objet d’un traitement de faveur.

La deuxième s’appuie sur une fascination parfois très sincère, parfois quelque peu fétichisée pour le Québec. Parce qu’on a encore un souvenir très vif de la fragilité de la fédération, une certaine élite canadienne exprime sa passion pour « l’unité nationale » par une curiosité particulière pour le Québec et son évolution.

Chez les plus jeunes (et les plus récemment arrivés au Canada), la question se pose autrement. Tant ici qu’ailleurs au pays, la question de « la différence québécoise » au sein du Canada a émergé politiquement pour les millénariaux et la génération qui les suit non pas par le débat sur la souveraineté, mais d’abord à travers toute la saga des accommodements raisonnables, puis par le débat sur la Charte des valeurs, le racisme systémique, les lois 21 et 96, etc.

Il y a une différence fondamentale — j’insiste, fondamentale — entre un jeune de Scarborough ou de Mississauga, immigrant ou enfant d’immigrant, qui n’entend parler politiquement du Québec qu’à travers le refus de sa classe politique de reconnaître le racisme systémique ou de nommer l’islamophobie, et un conservateur de l’Ontario ou du Manitoba rural qui a absorbé, un peu par osmose, les vieilles rengaines orangistes de ses aïeux. J’ai été beaucoup en contact avec l’un, par exemple, lorsque j’étais chargée de cours à l’Université de Toronto, alors que j’ai surtout vu l’autre sévir dans les sections commentaires de certains journaux.

Les deux posent, lorsqu’ils en ont l’occasion, des questions que l’on peut sentir empreintes d’une méconnaissance profonde de la société québécoise dans toute sa complexité et ses nuances. Mais les postures de base et les dynamiques de pouvoir qu’elles sous-tendent ne pourraient être plus diamétralement opposées. Je ne peux pas répondre à mon étudiante qui se préoccupe de l’impact des débats identitaires québécois sur le reste du climat politique canadien — et donc, en fin de compte, sur sa propre sécurité, comme s’il s’agissait de la réincarnation de James Wolfe prêt à revenir brûler nos villages avec son armée.

Cette différence, on est trop peu nombreux à la saisir au Québec. Pour la faire, il faudrait que ceux qui commentent ces questions se sortent eux-mêmes, un tant soit peu, de leur propre lassitude, indifférence, et ignorance du Canada dans toute sa complexité et ses nuances. Depuis le temps que je parcours la 401 dans un sens comme dans l’autre, il y a au moins une chose qui m’apparaît claire : dans ce pays, le sens de la caricature a toujours été parfaitement bilingue.• • • • •

Dans le contexte, on me demande parfois pourquoi je reste dans le dialogue avec le reste du Canada, ou pourquoi je ne claque pas la porte d’un média qui a déjà publié des opinions douteuses sur le Québec dans le passé. Serais-je ainsi complice du Québec bashing ?

La réponse, c’est que je suis une Québécoise francophone de même que je suis une femme, une personne noire et une personne queer. Si je croyais opportun de claquer la porte de toutes les salles de rédaction qui publient des opinions qui viennent heurter mon vécu personnel et familial tant sur le plan de la langue, de la race que du genre, je ne travaillerais plus nulle part, dans aucune langue. Personnellement, je préfère ne pas hiérarchiser les différents aspects de qui je suis, et tente de rester cohérente dans ma manière de réagir à toutes les attaques.

On en comprend que l’impatience, le brûlage de pont et le claquage de porte, donc, sont surtout des réflexes politiques partagés par les personnes socialisées comme majoritaires au sein de leur société. Il faut avoir le luxe, en quelque sorte, de savoir qu’on peut toujours éviter les dialogues difficiles en se repliant vers un monde où les normes sont pensées pour nous. Remarquons enfin que les francophones des autres provinces ont, de manière générale, développé une culture de la résistance politique très différente de celle qui s’affiche souvent au Québec.

Source: Nicolas: Claquer la porte 

Filed under Interculturalisme, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Khan: How a Quebec current affairs show offered a model for how to talk about Islamophobia

2023/02/11 Leave a comment

Good example:

It has been a bruising two weeks, to say the least, in Quebec. Here, there has been strong reaction to the Justin Trudeau government’s appointment of Amira Elghawaby as Canada’s Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia, with a mandate of providing outside advice and guidance to the federal government.

But Ms. Elghawaby’s previous writings pertaining to Quebec set off a firestorm in the province. In a 2019 opinion piece, she and co-author Bernie Farber cited a poll in saying that “the majority of Quebeckers appear to be swayed not by the rule of law, but by anti-Muslim sentiment” in their support for Bill 21, which restricts certain public-sector employees from wearing religious symbols while on the job.

Now, this has unleashed calls for her resignation from four provincial and two federal political parties, in spite of her sincere apology for the hurt caused by her words; some have even called for the abolition of the position itself. In response to these accusations of Quebec-bashing and contempt for the people of Quebec, there have been counter-accusations of Islamophobia for the treatment of Ms. Elghawaby, as well as for Bill 21. It’s as if the two solitudes have been shouting at each other, which has only tragically entrenched them in their positions.

So it was bold for Radio-Canada to enter the fray with a televised debate around these very issues, on the popular current affairs show Tout le monde en parle, hosted by the brilliant Guy A. Lepage. The guests were Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin, the former mayor of Gatineau, Que., and Boufeldja Benabdallah, a co-founder and spokesman of the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec, where six Muslim worshippers were murdered in 2017.

But while the two men differed on a number of issues, they did so respectfully, with nuance, humour and a heartfelt appeal for mutual understanding.

Mr. Pedneaud-Jobin, who is now a columnist for La Presse, had penned a piece on the suffering of the Quebec people under the yoke of the Catholic Church. His great-grandmother died at the age of 34, following her 13th pregnancy, of which eight had come to term; his grandmother gave birth to 11 children, after which her priest had blessed her for “doing her part.” These were the days when the Church controlled much of the state and the lives of Quebeckers, and according to Mr. Pedneaud-Jobin, the harms it perpetrated far outweighed the good. A friend of mine likens that era to present-day Iran. This is why a generation of Quebeckers is averse to religion – especially any foray into government.

For Mr. Pednault-Jobin, Bill 21 is a compromise, in that it is not an outright ban on all government employees. He also explained that in Quebec, collective rights are more prominent than in the rest of North America, where individual rights hold sway. One may not agree, but this was useful – and necessary – in understanding why people support the law.

For his part, Mr. Benabdallah eloquently shared his appreciation for the Quebec people, the vast majority of whom have extended kindness to the Muslim community since the 2017 murders. He said he was “devastated” by Ms. Elghawaby’s comments – they didn’t reflect his own experience – but as a man of peace, he believes she should be given the opportunity to prove herself, since she has apologized. As for the laïcité, Mr. Benabdallah agreed that religion should have no influence on government affairs, but he took issue with Bill 21. If it was as benign as its supporters claim, he said, there would have been no need for the province to use the notwithstanding clause to shield it from both the Canadian and Quebec Charters.

On the question of the representative job itself, Mr. Pednault-Jobin drew from his mayoral experience, arguing that money spent on local, on-the-ground programs would be far more effective than funding a federal post. He also preferred a position that would combat all forms of discrimination. As a counterpoint, Mr. Benabdallah pointed out that 11 Muslim Canadians have been murdered in three separate attacks over a four-year period, and that anti-Muslim sentiment has not stopped, making the specificity necessary. But he did also agree with the need for an office to combat antisemitism.

And so it went: a palette of ideas, offered up for reflection with much wisdom and from cooler heads. This juxtaposition of opposing views, served in a humane manner to enhance understanding and respect, should be a model for discussion of other contentious issues. In this way, there is an opportunity for a gradual rapprochement amidst colliding histories within our human family. We don’t need to shout past each other; we need to listen.

Sheema Khan is the author of Of Hockey and Hijab: Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman.

Source: How a Quebec current affairs show offered a model for how to talk about Islamophobia

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Ndiaye: Voici pourquoi il est difficile – et peu souhaitable – de « fermer » le chemin Roxham

2023/02/11 Leave a comment

We will see what the SCC rules. But not convinced that the shutting or Roxham Road would have a minimal impact on numbers. The reason why over 95% choose Roxham is because of its convenience, relatively low risk and accessibility. Some are likely to weigh the risks accordingly and thus results in fewer irregular arrivals:

« Fermer » le chemin Roxham a été invoqué à maintes reprises ces dernières semaines, tant par des chroniqueurs que des élus, créant même un imbroglio entre la ministre québécoise de l’Immigration, Christine Fréchette, et son propre gouvernement caquiste. En 2022, un record de 50 000 demandeurs d’asile sont passés par le désormais célèbre chemin, qui relie la Montérégie et l’État de New York.

Ces demandeurs d’asile évitent les postes-frontières officiels entre le Canada et les États-Unis en raison de l’entente sur les tiers pays sûrs, signée en 2002 et entrée en vigueur en 2004. En vertu de cette entente, « les personnes qui entrent au Canada à un point d’entrée terrestre ne sont toujours pas admissibles à présenter une demande de statut de réfugié, et seront renvoyées aux États-Unis à moins qu’elles ne satisfassent à l’une des exceptions prévues dans l’Entente ».

Il y a en effet peu de chances qu’un demandeur d’asile puisse invoquer des persécutions aux États-Unis, un pays considéré comme « sûr ». De fait, sur les 62 113 demandes encore en instance devant la CISR en septembre 2022, seulement 274 considéraient les États-Unis comme pays de persécution.

La question qui se pose est la suivante : est-ce que l’entente sur les tiers pays sûrs pourrait être appliquée tout au long des 8 891 km qui nous séparent des États-Unis, afin de limiter le passage de ces demandeurs d’asile empruntant le chemin Roxham et d’autres chemins alternatifs ?

Du point de vue opérationnel, la réponse est non. Pas plus que le Québec ne peut fermer le chemin Roxham, car c’est le gouvernement fédéral qui a la compétence pour gérer les frontières canadiennes.

Par ailleurs, le Canada est soumis à des obligations résultant de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés : il ne peut renvoyer les demandeurs d’asile vers un pays où il existe un risque de torture. En vertu du droit international, le Canada a aussi ratifié la Convention relative au statut des réfugiés et la convention contre la torture, qui implique ce principe de non-refoulement à toute personne risquant la torture, des traitements inhumains ou dégradants.

Professeure de droit des migrations à l’UQÀM, je suis directrice de l’Observatoire sur les migrations internationales, les réfugiés, les apatrides et l’asile (OMIRAS). Je propose ici un survol de ce que disent les lois internationales sur l’accueil de réfugiés.

Devant la Cour suprême

La saga judiciaire pour invalider l’entente sur les tiers pays sûrs a débuté en 2007 devant la Cour fédérale, ensuite devant la Cour d’appel fédérale, et s’est finalisée en 2009 par un rejet de la Cour suprême.

Depuis 2020, avec l’arrivée de dizaines de milliers de demandeurs arrivant des États-Unis par des points d’entrée non officiels, une nouvelle demande a été introduite par Amnistie internationale, le Conseil canadien des Églises, le Conseil canadien pour les réfugiés et des demandeurs d’asile afin de faire invalider l’entente. À la suite de plusieurs aller-retour devant la justice, une demande d’autorisation d’appel a été introduite. Le 16 décembre 2022, la Cour suprême a accepté de recevoir la cause et de réviser l’entente. Il faudra donc attendre la décision de la plus haute juridiction canadienne sur la validité ou non de l’entente

Un droit garanti en droit international

Le Canada accueille un nombre infime des demandeurs d’asile dans le monde. Le HCR les estime à plus de 4,9 millions. À eux s’ajoutent les 25 millions de réfugiés et plusieurs autres millions de déplacés internes. La plupart vivent dans les pays limitrophes de leur pays d’origine, comme la Jordanie, la Turquie ou le Liban, au Moyen-Orient, la Colombie, en Amérique du Sud, ou l’Ouganda et le Kenya, en Afrique (continent qui accueille le plus grand nombre de réfugiés).

Ultimement, le Canada est obligé de laisser les gens disant fuir des persécutions présenter leurs demandes d’asile, un droit garanti par l’ONU. Toutes ces demandes d’asile doivent être jugées recevables avant d’être transmises à la Section de protection des réfugiés, compétente pour examiner les demandes de protection internationale au Canada. Si les demandes remplissent les critères, les personnes seront reconnues comme des réfugiées au Canada.

Migrants irréguliers et demandeurs d’asile

Il y a présentement un amalgame entre migrations irrégulières et accueil des demandeurs d’asile. Pour ces derniers, l’entente sur les tiers pays sûrs leur permet d’arriver au Canada à travers le chemin Roxham (à leurs risques et périls). L’invalidation de l’entente permettrait aux personnes disant fuir des persécutions de présenter leur demande d’asile en toute sécurité au Canada, quel que soit leur lieu d’arrivée. Notons que des organisations de défense des migrants, dont Amnistie internationale, relatent des pratiques qui enfreignent les droits humains des demandeurs d’asile aux États-Unis.

Pour les migrations irrégulières, le Canada dispose d’un Programme d’aide mondiale aux migrants irréguliers (PAMMI) et des dispositions législatives pour éradiquer l’immigration irrégulière. Le Québec devra continuer la collaboration avec le gouvernement fédéral afin de lutter efficacement contre les migrations irrégulières notamment en ciblant les causes réelles de ces déplacements (inégalités économiques, changements climatiques, conflits et violences dans le monde).

D’autres chemins ouvriront

Le chemin Roxham présente des enjeux complexes. Mais il faut le situer dans son contexte mondial, avec la présence de plus de 100 millions de personnes en exil dans le monde.

Devant l’afflux de plus en plus de réfugiés, plus de 68 % des Québécois souhaitent la fermeture du chemin Roxham. Les pressions sur le système se font grandissantes. Il en coûte 20 millions de plus par mois à Québec en prestation d’aide sociale, notamment en raison du fait que le Québec accueille 64 % de ces demandes d’asile au Canada et que le Canada tarde à délivrer des permis de travail.

Malgré cela, il n’est pas pertinent de fermer le chemin Roxham, car d’autres points d’entrée le remplaceront, exposant les demandeurs d’asile à davantage de risques et de dangers. L’exemple de l’Union européenne est révélateur : dès qu’une route se ferme, d’autres encore plus dangereuses s’ouvrent et le nombre de personnes décédées ou disparues grimpent. À cela s’ajoutent les multiples violations des droits humains dont font l’objet ces millions d’hommes, de femmes et d’enfants fuyant les guerres et les persécutions.

Source: Voici pourquoi il est difficile – et peu souhaitable – de « fermer » le chemin Roxham

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

ICYMI – Hébert: Justin Trudeau’s anti-Islamophobia disaster reveals a government dangerously out of touch with voters

2023/02/11 Leave a comment

Of note, searing yet valid:

By appointing Amira Elghawaby as his lead representative on the Islamophobia file, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has thrown the equivalent of a political grenade into his Quebec trenches.

The damage to his party and to the cause she is tasked with advancing could be consequential.

Here is an early assessment.

At week’s end, Elghawaby’s appointment had been disavowed by most of the leading figures of Quebec’s political class.

The ranks of those who believe Trudeau should reconsider his choice extend well beyond the fans of Quebec’s controversial law on securalism and its attending ban on religious vestments in selected public service workplaces.

Take former NDP leader Thomas Mulcair. Throughout his tenure, he had been a top Quebec anti-Islamophobia advocate.

His uncompromising defence of religious and minority rights has come at some political cost. In the 2015 election, his denunciation of the Conservatives’ so-called niqab ban took a toll on NDP fortunes in Quebec. 

In his Montreal Gazette column this week, Mulcair argued Elghawaby, a former Star columnist, was the wrong person for the job. That is also the position of the provincial Liberals, the party with the most diverse base. (Mulcair then stated in a subsequent column he was willing to accept her apology at face value. The Quebec Liberals did not.) 

No one in Quebec seriously expected Trudeau to appoint a special representative on anti-Islamophobia who was a supporter of Bill 21. But, by the same token, few expected the prime minister to appoint someone who had burned her bridges with Quebecers on her way to this new role.

A lot of the media commentary this week has focused on Elghawaby’s misrepresentation of a poll to shore up her assertion that most supporters of Bill 21 are Islamophobic.

But chances are her apology for an ill-thought-out column would have found more takers if it had not been part of a larger pattern.

The latter suggests either an abysmal ignorance of Quebec history or a blatant indifference to Canada’s less-than-glorious past treatment of its francophone minority.

In a since-deleted tweet, Elghawaby wrote that assertions to the effect French-Canadians had been oppressed and seriously discriminated against under the British rule made her want “to throw up.”

Coming from someone who lives in Ontario — a province that once outlawed any teaching in the French language — that’s a rich comment.

Should she develop an appetite for facts, Trudeau’s representative may want to acquaint herself with the findings of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. Alternatively, she might want to read up on the deportation of Canada’s Acadian community.

But whether she does or not, it will likely be too little, too late.

Given her baggage, it will be hard for Elghawaby to be much of an asset to Quebec’s anti-Islamophobia forces.

Moving on to Trudeau. He and his Liberals have just been on the receiving end of the biggest Quebec backlash of his tenure as prime minister. 

By all available indications, the prime minister was only aware of some of Elghawaby’s musings about Quebec prior to her appointment. He may not have been briefed about the vomit tweet.

What is certain is that, notwithstanding any after-the-fact apology, anyone who had cavalierly dismissed the historical grievances of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples would not have been appointed to a federal bridge-building role. 

It sometimes seems the due diligence approach of this Prime Minister’s Office to the vetting of high-profile appointments is to dismiss potentially inconvenient facts rather than dig into them.

On that score, the most glaring example remains Julie Payette’s elevation to the role of governor-general. 

In this case, the tendency seems to have been compounded by a serious PMO disconnect from Quebec.

If there is someone on Trudeau’s staff with a solid Quebec antenna and the influence to draw attention to red flags, he or she must have taken January off.

And if such a person does not currently exist, prudence would have required turning instead to his Quebec ministers for advance feedback on the planned appointment.

Judging by the stunned reaction of the prime minister’s Quebec lieutenant, Pablo Rodriguez, that did not happen.

This latest mess comes on a week when an Abacus poll found the Conservative party with a solid lead on the Liberals in national voting intentions. 

For months, all polls have shown that, among the larger provinces, Quebec was most responsible for keeping Trudeau’s party competitive with the Conservatives. The Liberals can only hope that won’t change as a result of this week’s events.

In the larger picture, the Abacus poll found that 75 per cent of Canadians do not believe the current government is focused enough on the top-of-mind cost-of-living crisis. The numbers on health care were not much better for the government.

Against that background, a Liberal week spent on the defensive on the divisive front of identity politics can only drive home the opposition’s message that on the issues that matter most to voters these days, Trudeau’s government is missing in action.

Source: Hébert: Justin Trudeau’s anti-Islamophobia disaster reveals a government dangerously out of touch with voters

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

McWhorter: Police Brutality Is Not Always About Race

2023/02/11 Leave a comment

A reminder:

The brutal killing of Tyre Nichols by Memphis cops horrified and infuriated many Americans, not least because it was another in what has been an endless litany of Black men and boys killed by police officers in America: George Floyd, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown and literally thousands of names less well known. There is one confounding detail in Nichols’s death, however. The five policemen who mercilessly beat the life out of him were all Black.

Thus, to understand the full tragedy of Tyre Nichols, it is important to ask hard questions about the culture and behavior of police officers — including grappling with the fact that whatever role race played in Nichols’s death, it was more complicated than the racist-white-cop-kills-Black-man framework into which we typically sort such horrific episodes. One possibility that needs further exploration is the role that poverty plays in determining the victims of police killings — a characteristic that overlaps with but is obviously distinct from race.

Much of the conversation about police violence in recent years has been through a lens of systemic racism, white cops and antiracism reform goals. But a man (or a woman) who is killed by a police officer merits our attention and response, regardless of the race of either victim or killer. There has long been a theory afoot that hiring more Black cops would result in fewer shootings of Black civilians. But there is little evidence that this intuitive solution has any meaningful effect. (It’s worth noting here that there is substantially more readily available data regarding the race of victims of police violence than that of the perpetrators.)

More than one study has suggested that the difference in likelihood between white and Black cops killing Black people is much smaller than one might suppose. Expert observers on the subject regularly concur, and it is a commonplace in Black community discussions that one cannot necessarily expect any particular clemency from Black officers in tough situations. The Memphis Police Department is 58 percent Black and has a Black police chief; that did not prevent the horrific acts of violence perpetrated on Nichols.

As Duane Loynes Sr., an assistant professor of urban and Africana studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, told The Los Angeles Times’s Jaweed Kaleem, “Here’s a dirty little secret: Studies indicate that Black officers are just as brutal and at times even more brutal against Black bodies as their white counterparts.”

The point is not that we don’t have a grievous problem but rather that the problem is not exclusively racist white cops. It’s cops, period. (An important note: When it comes to nonlethal mistreatment, as opposed to police shootings, studies demonstrate the existence of outright racial bias. This is very much a problem but a very different problem from police killings.)

The way we are trained to view the situation is understandable but outdated. As recently as the 1970s and 1980s, cops killed people — Black and white alike — at much higher rates in major cities than they do now, as the criminologist Peter Moskos has shown. I grew up in the Philadelphia of that era, where Mayor Frank Rizzo openly condoned cops’ brutality against Black people. By morbid coincidence, I saw the gruesome videotaped beating of Nichols shortly after I rewatched Melvin Van Peebles’s pioneering 1971 film “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.” In the movie, Van Peebles plays a Black man on the run from racist white cops whose shameless, bloodletting brutality roughly corresponded to what some Black people of the period actually experienced. A lot of time has passed since then, but the way we discuss police brutality against Black people today can sometimes make it sound as if there is no difference between the situation Van Peebles depicted — of marauding, openly racist cops — and the one we face today.

Yet white Americans are also killed by police officers in appalling numbers — many more, overall, than Black Americans, owing to the fact that the latter make up only about 14 percent of the U.S. population. In 2022, The Washington Post’s database on cop killings documented that of 755 victims whose race was known, 225 were Black and 389 were white.

Because casual and sometimes lethal violence against Black people by cops is part of our shameful and still recent national narrative, names like those of the victims I cited earlier sometimes become national news stories. But the media rarely even covers police killings of white people, which don’t fit so neatly into that existing narrative.

So we largely missed the story that in 2015 in Paradise, Calif., a white officer, Patrick Feaster, shot a white man, Andrew Thomas, as he was getting out of the S.U.V. he had crashed during a pursuit, even as Thomas’s wife lay gravely injured on the ground at the scene. The parallel with what happened to Nichols is ghastly, as is that between Floyd’s murder and what happened in 2016 to Tony Timpa, a white man in Dallas. Although Timpa had requested police officers’ help because he was off his medication, he was killed when they pinned him to the ground as he called out desperately. It was recorded on the officers’ body cams. Members of Timpa’s family have contacted me wondering why the media had so little interest in what happened to him; last year, the officer who had pinned him was promoted.

A common response here is to note that nevertheless, police officers kill unarmed Black people at more than three times the rate they kill unarmed white people and that this disproportionate rate of Black killings demonstrates that racism affects whether cops kill. But this assumption seems oversimplified. One reason is that poverty also helps determine whether — and in what way, with what results — one encounters the cops.

The police are called to, as well as directed to, poorer neighborhoods more often than to middle-class or affluent ones. Poverty can nudge a person into criminal activities — including intrinsically violent ones, such as the illegal drug trade — that are far more likely to lead to dangerous encounters with cops. It is also not an accident that so many of these gruesome killings by cops happen when someone flees after being stopped because he already has an outstanding warrant. Such warrants are frequently outstanding as a result of poverty.

And in a striking parallel, unarmed Black people are not only more than three times as likely as white people to be killed by a cop but also more than twice as likely to be poor. In 2021 the poverty rate for white Americans was 8.1 percent, while for Black Americans, it was 19.5 percent.

We could propose that the match between these statistics bears no relevance to the issue of police violence and racism and dismiss them as a coincidence. But this would be willfully resistant to examining the significance of patterns in a way that no one would even venture in drawing parallels between, for example, poverty rates and obesity.

Police killings of unarmed or unthreatening American citizens are a national disgrace and one that requires action. But action requires comprehension, and the simplest explanation — “racist white cops kill Black people” — is clearly often not the correct one.

Source: Police Brutality Is Not Always About Race

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , ,

Usher: The EDI Hiring Bulge

2023/02/10 Leave a comment

Good analysis and myth destroying by Alex Usher:

A couple of days ago on the website Minding the Campus, a product of the National Association of Scholars (one of those Alan Bloom-loving revere-the-classics, free-exchange-of-ideas, but no-not-those-kinds-of-idea outfits) a research associate named John Sailer posted a list of academic jobs that were being advertised at The Ohio State University (you have to include the “the”. It’s a rule.) as an example of “political activism.”  Here’s the meat of the post:

[OSU’s] RAISE initiative (extends to fields that have little connection with DEI. The university is currently seeking three STEM professors—in chemistry, mathematics, and physics—who will “study issues relevant to educational equity.” One cluster hire on the social determinants of health includes roles in medicine, nursing, and engineering. Successful candidates for these jobs must show “a demonstrated commitment to diversity and inclusive excellence” and submit “a brief DEI narrative describing commitment to improving inclusive excellence” and demonstrating how their research focuses on “improving health equity.”

Many of Ohio State’s humanities jobs, meanwhile, now focus exclusively on race. The history department currently lists just two positions: “Contemporary African American History” and “African American History to 1820.” The Department of Comparative Studies lists three: “Indigenous Knowledge,” “Race, Science, and Technology,” and “Race and Health Equity.” The Department of French and Italian is hiring only one professor, an “Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies with a specialization in Black France.”

The university’s indigenous studies cluster hire—which is independent of the RAISE initiative—includes a role in “Indigenous Feminisms,” calling for a professor who will study “gendered and sexualized disparities alongside the dispossessions of settler colonialism” and “the potentials of women- and two-spirit or queer-led innovations in preserving embattled minority and colonized food/health/body/eco cultures.” Another role in the cluster is more novel, “Indigenous Siberian Studies,” a scholar in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures who will “explore questions about indigenous people’s knowledges and cultural practices” related to “race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, im/mobility, health, food, and environment, in imperial/post-imperial, communist/post-communist, or comparative contexts.”

The argument here is an anti-EDI one, but it is different from the ones you usually see.  It is not “EDI is unjust reverse discrimination” as much as it is “EDI is changing and perhaps perverting the nature of academic disciplines.”   The argument was pitched to specialists, claiming that their specialty is changing and perhaps leaving them behind. 

So, has OSU been “captured” by people who want to make it Subaltern U?  Well, in the first place, caution is warranted because we don’t have a good picture of how many jobs are up for grabs at OSU.  The article refers to about 10 positions. My guess is that OSU – which is the fourth-largest institution by enrolment in the United States and over 2,000 permanent faculty members – hires over 100 academic staff a year.  Question number one about this set of examples therefore is: “how representative is this list?”  And if it represents just 10% of new staff, then why should anyone consider it a big deal?

In the second place: ask yourself whether all these positions are misguided in the way Sailer charges.  A French department that doesn’t cover francophone Africa would be very limited, given that’s where over half of all French-speaking people live.  Physics departments that aren’t looking for people who can lead outreach and support programs for Black students are increasingly rare these days.  Specializations in Indigenous Siberian Studies might sound a bit obscure, but there’s any number of Indigenous studies programs focusing on North America, so it’s not obvious to me why offering similar treatment to indigenous cultures in Russia is illegitimate from an academic POV, unless you start from the perspective that certain cultures aren’t worth studying (there is, admittedly, a question about whether a position in Indigenous Siberian Studies located in Columbus, Ohio will bring in the necessary students and research dollars to pay its way, but that’s the department Chair’s call). 

In any event, colour me unpersuaded that the examples Sailer draws on to represent a wave of “misguided priorities” at the institution.  The job descriptions are much less radical that the author seems to think, and there’s no sense here of whether the author is cherry-picking (for what it’s worth, the OSU program through which these scholars are being hired was designed to bring in 50 scholars between 2020 and 2030, which at an institution the size of OSU is peanuts).  It read like cherry-picking and not of a particularly sophisticated variety.  But what was interesting to me is the number of twitter accounts from people I would normally qualify as pretty sensible tut-tutting about “the state of academia” exposed by this piece.

And I kind of get it.  If one isn’t quite alive to the extent of selective argumentation going on here (at most universities, 10 appointments is a pretty big fraction of annual hiring), and one interprets this kind of change as being “the shape of things to come”, then one might conclude that a wide variety of academic fields are being threatened with radical change in the sense that the focus of inquiry is changing completely (e.g. from France to Africa in the case of the French Studies, from Moscow to Siberia in the case of Russian studies).  And loyalty to discipline is a consistent theme amongst academics. It’s not difficult to see why something that seemed to be an attempt to alter disciplinary foci might seem threatening.

But the evidence that this is a permanent shift is thin.  Academia goes through cycles.  Right now, the cycle is one where many institutions, across a wide range of disciplines, are either trying to reach out to undergraduates from under-represented groups, or incorporate non-Western perspectives, or both.  This is a long and ongoing process, mainly because demand for scholars who can do such outreach or conduct effective research in these areas presently outstrips current supply.  It is not about making universities totally devoted to Subaltern studies (though this is pretty clearly what the author of this piece wanted readers to think); it is about a one-time Big Push to make sure under-represented students and previously neglected areas of studies have a larger place in the academy – sufficiently large, in fact, that maintaining strength in these areas no longer requires special hiring initiatives but is “par for the course”. That’s necessarily going to create a “bulge” in hiring to bring numbers up to that level: significant in the short-term, but less so in the long-term.

Anyways, if you’re tempted to get angry or despondent about a hiring story like this, just remember: it’s very likely that the extent of the phenomenon is inflated, and even to the extent it is not, the duration of the phenomenon is probably limited too. 

Source: The EDI Hiring Bulge

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