‘Clearly there are stories we’re not telling’: Study seeks to improve diversity in news sources

2022/05/19 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see the results, hopefully with some qualitative analysis of the differences in perspectives covered. One can see some of this shift occurring in the CBC:

For all the prodding, encouragement and reminders, progress to improve the diversity of voices in news stories seems frustratingly slow.

Now a project involving national news agency The Canadian Press and Carleton University’s School of Journalism is hoping to get a better understanding of who gets quoted, and provide a catalyst for change.

CP has teamed with the journalism school to “identify, track and analyze” the choice of interview subjects by its journalists. The goal is to track the diversity of individuals — or lack of, as a news release pointedly notes — based on gender, race and ethnicity and other equity-seeking groups.

Joanna Smith, CP’s Ottawa bureau chief, is the impetus behind the work. The goal, she emphasizes, is not simply to diversify sources. The goal is the better journalism that comes when news coverage is truly representative.

“Over and over again, we are returning to the same sources in TV and journalism, the same largely white, largely male, largely institution-based” people, Smith said. “The idea of broadening the diversity of our sources is really about telling bigger and better and different stories.” 

(Disclosure: Torstar, the parent company of the Toronto Star, is a part owner of The Canadian Press).

Nana aba Duncan, who holds the Carty Chair in Journalism, Diversity and Inclusion Studies at the journalism school, said a journalist’s first choice for an interview is often someone they’ve worked with or someone they know. It’s likely that source is not from an under-represented group.

“Our first thought is what is the easiest and what is the quickest?” Duncan said. “Anything that has to do with change has to be intentional.”

That’s why research is vital to track who is being quoted — and who is being left out. “We absolutely have to do it or else it just doesn’t get done,” said Duncan, a former CBC broadcaster who is part of the project research team.

Duncan says it’s also important how those voices are framed and treated in the story. Are we engaging people for their expertise, such as economics or politics, or only for their race or gender? Where are these voices appearing in the story? Are they making the news or reacting to it?

“You may have an experience in which you are undermined or … your value is just not recognized. That has an effect,” she said. 

Professor Allan Thompson, the head of the journalism school, says the lack of diversity in news articles speaks to the “embedded bias” that exist in newsrooms and journalism.

To him, diversity is about fact-checking and accuracy. “Unless the sourcing reflects society, then it’s not accurate, even if all the words are verbatim,” Thompson said.

“We’re knitting some cloth that is the narrative of our society. If we’re only using one cross-section of voices, then clearly there are stories we’re not telling, there are perspectives on stories that we’re not capturing, and we’re just self-perpetuating our own version of a narrative,” he said.

Shari Graydon, director of Informed Opinions, has been working for years to get more women’s voices into news coverage. (The organization provides a searchable database of more than 2,200 women experts, so there’s no excuse for journalists to exclude them.)

Its online “Gender Gap Tracker” shows the percentage of female sources in online news coverage by major news outlets. It measures all stories, such as those filed by news agencies, rather than those written solely by an outlet’s own journalists alone. Over the last 12 months, sources quoted in stories on the Star’s website have been overwhelmingly male (74 per cent) versus female (26 per cent). 

Graydon said that a diversity of sources in news coverage is a hallmark of good journalism. “I really think awareness is not remotely enough,” she said, urging record-keeping as a precaution against the self-delusion one is doing better than they really are. 

Lasting change requires deliberate action. Journalists have control over the sources they choose to interview. As a start, they should review their last 10 stories. Who was quoted? Going forward, the objective is to cultivate more representative sources and track that work. 

Duncan emphasizes that media outlets must support such efforts. “It’s on the institution saying, ‘We care about this. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to spend money on caring about diversity and being intentional about it,’” she said.

This project, due to unfold over the coming months, promises to improve the diversity of sources used in CP articles, which would benefit all news organizations that rely on its coverage. I’m hopeful it will offer lessons all newsrooms can draw on.

Source: ‘Clearly there are stories we’re not telling’: Study seeks to improve diversity in news sources

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Greg Abbott Backs Immigrant School Policy That Helped Turn California Blue

2022/05/19 Leave a comment

Of note, political virtue signalling for the right, with risks of possible backlash. Proposal is intrinsically deplorable:

In 2001, then-Governor Rick Perry, a Republican, signed what was known as the Texas DREAM Act, providing in-state tuition rates to young undocumented students as long as they were state residents for three years, graduated from a Texas high school, and promised to apply for permanent residency.

Two decades later, immigration politics in Texas have been completely transformed. Governor Greg Abbott is now calling for the Supreme Courtto strike down the 1982 Plyler v. Doe ruling that forces states to pay for the education of undocumented children.

Speaking on a conservative radio show, Abbott said Texas already sued the federal government long ago over having to incur the costs of the education program.

“And the Supreme Court ruled against us on the issue,” Abbott said. “I think we will resurrect that case and challenge this issue again, because the expenses are extraordinary and the times are different than when Plyler v. Doe was issued many decades ago.”

In light of the report that the Supreme Court is set to strike down Roe v. Wade and reverse long-enshrined federal abortion protections, Democrats and activists privately worry that efforts like Abbott’s are not the fantasy they would have seemed just six months ago, but could actually become reality in the near future.

But they argue Abbott’s gambit could backfire, as a similar campaign did after the passage of California’s infamous Proposition 187 in 1994 signed by then-Governor Pete Wilson, a Republican, which denied public services to undocumented immigrants, including public education.

After all, “Prop 187,” which only survived five years, had unintended consequences. Not only did it fail in discouraging immigrants from seeking services, it also helped to create a mobilized Latino electorate that proved to be a major factor in turning California blue.

Mike Madrid, a longtime Republican strategist, worked in California GOP politics and considers Wilson a friend. But he says the fallout from Prop 187 could serve as a warning for Texas Republicans.

“The legacy of 187 was to create a generational voting bloc of Latinos against the Republican Party that would not normally happen,” Madrid said, adding that California was then experiencing the rightward shift Texas is experiencing now. “That changed substantially because of these attacks on the community. Once attacked, Latinos rally.”

In California, the Latino share of the electorate nearly doubled at the time and support for Republicans crumbled, a far cry from the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan garnered 48% of the Hispanic vote. When Bob Dole ran in 1996, he received a paltry 6% of the Latino vote.

Julissa Arce, an activist and author of the new book “You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation,” told Newsweek she was once an undocumented student in Texas when she lived in the state from age 11 to 21.

“Thank God no one was questioning how I got there,” she said. But fear was always present. “I never wanted to go talk to my counselor, afraid they might look at my documents.”

Abbott’s rhetoric creates an environment of fear, Arce said, particularly in a state where nearly 53% of public school students are Hispanic.

The end of the state educating undocumented kids would likely include echoes of the chaos of Prop 187, with school administrators having to ask children about the immigration status of their parents, and parents who have both undocumented and U.S.-citizen children pulling their kids from school.

Abbott has tacked to the right during his reelection campaign in an effort to energize his primary voters, often around issues concerning immigration and education. He sent buses of migrants to Washington DC, a message to the Biden administration to deal with a problem he feels it has made worse.

Last week, Abbott slammed the Biden administration for providing baby formula to immigrants in holding facilities, “as American parents scramble amid a nationwide shortage of the product.”

John Wittman, Abbott’s former communications director, told Newsweekthe Texas governor widely publicized moves are an effort to draw attention to the federal government’s shortcomings.

“I think the governor’s point is the federal government continues to fail in its responsibility of dealing with immigration, and Congress has failed for decades, so as a result states have had to deal with the fiscal responsibility of the issue,” he said. “The border and illegal immigration is something Texas has picked up the tab on.”

Arce called Abbott’s announcements “anti-immigrant sentiment and rhetoric” for a reelection campaign, but acknowledged “it feels different because he could really turn this into action as we’ve seen with Roe v. Wade, and this relitigation of things we thought had been settled.”

Source: Greg Abbott Backs Immigrant School Policy That Helped Turn California Blue

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Doyle: Tucker Carlson didn’t shoot anyone, but he’s monetizing white panic

2022/05/18 Leave a comment

Good column. Unethical business and financial strategy…

They’re lining up to condemn Tucker Carlson of Fox News and understandably so. That shooter, a self-declared white supremacist who killed 10 people in Buffalo, had reportedly posted an online manifesto espousing the Great Replacement theory, and Carlson is the biggest purveyor of that conspiracy belief.

The conspiracy theory is that non-white individuals are being deliberately brought into the United States (and other Western countries) to supplant white voters, in order to further a political agenda. It’s been around for decades, this crackpot theory, but Carlson is the one who mines it with cunning and determination. He’s touched on it often and sometimes been more brazen.

On one of his shows in April, Carlson said: “I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World. But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening, actually.”

Moral condemnation of Carlson is in order. He knows what he’s doing. (His use of key words is telling, and we note Pierre Poilievre aims anger at various “gatekeepers” while campaigning for the leadership of Canada’s Conservative Party.) But there’s context to take into account. First, Carlson is only the latest in a long list of demagogues in the United States who incite hate based on fear of non-white ethnicities. You don’t need to be a historian to be aware of Huey Long, George Wallace and Pat Buchanan. You don’t need to be a student of U.S. media to know that there is a through-line going back from Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh to Father Charles Coughlin, the “radio priest” who had an audience of tens of millions in the 1930s, peddling anti-Semitism and fear about immigrants being “foreign invaders.”

The American tolerance of demagogues who incite hate is an anomaly in Western countries. But the matter was settled decades ago when First Amendment rights were solidified by the courts and all kinds of commentary and assertions were allowed to participate in what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called, “the marketplace of ideas.”

Carlson is an entrepreneur in that marketplace, as is his employer, Fox News, mining white panic and other alarmist ideas for profit. It’s just business and it’s not new.

What is new is the absence of truly mass media and entertainment. Carlson may only have a tiny fraction of the audience that Father Coughlin once had, but he’s stirring up what exists in the dark corners of the internet, mainly unseen. And there is very little to counter what Carlson is stirring up. The remaining remnants of mass-appeal news and entertainment outlets shine their lights on a sunlit America, not its dark subculture corners. Network TV and cable channels cling on to smaller audiences than before, and only live sports seem capable of engaging a mass audience. If there’s no mass audience, then the expectation of a mass revulsion at Tucker Carlson is futile.

A lot of Americans have no idea that Carlson might be connected to the mass shooting in Buffalo. You don’t have to be a TV critic to understand that Fox News now exists in a shattered landscape in which there is simply too much TV – more and more streaming services producing more content than anyone can catch up with, plus network TV, cable and an array of web services. There’s no national narrative, there are only sparks flying occasionally that briefly illuminate very dark spaces.

While Fox News monetizes white fear of change, other outlets monetize escapism. There have been few attempts to dramatize or illustrate the dangers of racist subcultures. One of the few, HBO’s Watchmen, was very powerful but probably had more critical accolades than it had engaged viewers. The same applies to HBO’s Lovecraft Country, and both present structural racism in the context of an alternative reality or the supernatural. The movies of Jordan Peele, Get Out and Us, treat racial paranoia with seriousness, but they are outlier entertainment in a world of Marvel superheroes.

One could take comfort in the fact that Grey’s Anatomy has been going for 18 seasons in part because it looks like the United States; the diversity of characters is striking and over the years it simply became steadily more and more inclusive. Right now, mind you, diversity is the devil that Fox News and Tucker Carlson are warning viewers about. And there’s more money to made from that in a media and entertainment landscape shattered beyond recognition. That’s the important context.

Source: Tucker Carlson didn’t shoot anyone, but he’s monetizing white panic

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Diversity of Asian Americans shatters the “model minority myth”

2022/05/18 Leave a comment

Interesting breakdowns that are comparable to some of the Canadian breakdowns (where we have the advantage of greater desegregation among Asian Canadians (South Asians, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Southeast Asians and West Asians):

Asian Americans hail from dozens of countries — and their experiences in America are starkly different depending on their origins.

Why it matters: This vast, diverse group is often lumped together under the “model minority myth” — the stereotype that all Asian Americans are well-educated, wealthy and successful.

  • If you look at averages, Asian Americans appear to be richer and better educated than the average American.
  • If you disaggregate the data, the model minority myth crumbles. We see high levels of poverty and below-average levels of educational attainment.

But because that data is seldom disaggregated, “Asian Americans have had to make the case over and over again that they suffer from racism and hostility and violence,” says Ellen Wu, a history professor at Indiana University.

The big picture: The U.S. Asian American population doubled from 2000 to 2019, hitting 22 million. Asians are the fastest-growing group in America — outpacing white, Black and Hispanic Americans and projected to pass 46 million by 2060, according to the Pew Research Center.

  • “They all have very different starting points,” says Neil Ruiz, associate director of race and ethnicity research at the Pew Research Center.
  • Consider, for example, an Indian immigrant who comes to the U.S. via H-1B visa for a high-paying gig at a tech company. That person will have a far easier time building generational wealth than a Burmese refugee coming to America to escape conflict, Ruiz says.

By the numbers: The median income of Asian households in the U.S is $85,800, and 54% have college degrees, per Pew.

  • But only three groups — Indians, Filipinos and Sri Lankans — fall above that household income. And college attainment for many groups is well below the average.

The stakes: “So many groups have been neglected and ignored,” says Quyên Dinh, executive director of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center.

  • “People are not always convinced that Asian Americans are a legitimate minority group that deserve to be included in affirmative action and diversity initiatives,” says Wu.
  • For example, 30% of Southeast Asians — a region encompassing nations like Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos — don’t have high school degrees.
  • “Because of the model minority myth, these students’ silence in classrooms is misinterpreted as understanding instead of a cry for help,” Dinh says.

What to watch: Activists and experts see a silver lining in the recent spikes in anti-Asian violence. “There is a new spotlight on the Asian American community,” says Dinh.

  • “Awful things have always happened,” Wu says. “But now Asians are collecting the data and recording what’s happening, and Asian journalists are amplifying these stories.”

Source: Diversity of Asian Americans shatters the “model minority myth”

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[Canadian] Military failing to remove barriers to diversifying ranks: ombudsman

2022/05/18 Leave a comment

Long-standing challenge:

Canada’s military ombudsman is joining the chorus of those accusing the Canadian Armed Forces and Defence Department of failing to address long-standing barriers to recruit and retain more women, visible minorities and Indigenous people.

Gregory Lick says in a new report that the military and department have adopted numerous initiatives over the last 20 years to increase the share of Armed Forces members who come from those underrepresented groups.

The moves followed several human-rights decisions and the passage of employment equity laws, amid a growing disconnect between the makeup of the military, predominantly composed of white males, and the rest of the country’s population.

Yet the ombudsman found those initiatives resulted in little progress on increasing representation from underrepresented groups, with the military consistently falling far short of its own targets.

“I am adamant that in order to not repeat the same mistakes, the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces need to do things differently,” Lick said in a statement Monday.

“Fresh and creative thinking is required. Rehashing former initiatives simply will not cut it. Period. We will continue to monitor developments within the defence community in order to inform our own next steps on this matter.”

The ombudsman’s report comes weeks after a panel of retired Armed Forces members released the results of its own review, which took the military to task for not acting on dozens of previous studies and reviews of racism in the organization.

The scathing anti-racism report, which followed a yearlong review ordered by then-defence minister Harjit Sajjan, also accused the military of not doing enough to detect and prevent white supremacists and other extremists from infiltrating its ranks.

Lick’s review, also requested by Sajjan, looked at efforts to increase the share of women, visible minorities and Indigenous people in the Defence Department and military since becoming subject to employment equity laws in 1997 and 2002, respectively.

It specifically noted the military’s failure to make any real progress toward its various targets, which include having 25.1 per cent of all Armed Forces members be women, 11.8 per cent be visible minorities and 3.5 per cent Indigenous people.

“Despite the CAF’s efforts over the past 19 years, the percentage of women members stagnated until 2019, when a one-per-cent increase brought that representation level to 16 per cent of all CAF members,” the report reads.

“The limited increase in Aboriginal peoples (2.8 per cent) and visible minority members (9.6 per cent) has not been sufficient to keep up with Canadian demographics,” it adds.

The report goes on to note that not only has the Armed Forces failed to achieve its targets, but that those targets have been repeatedly criticized by the Canadian Human Rights Commission and others as far too low given the country’s changing composition.

The Defence Department reported more success in terms of diversifying its civilian workforce, but nonetheless faced many of the same challenges.

The ombudsman reported that his office had received 931 complaints relating to recruitment and 879 complaints involving promotions or career advancement since 2010. Another 189 workplace discrimination complaints were received.

“While designated employment equity groups did not submit all these complaints and not all would have been deemed to be unfair, these numbers show that the DND and CAF face challenges to the provision of fair and equitable employment,” he wrote.

The ombudsman noted numerous barriers to the recruitment of Armed Forces members from the designated groups had been reported over the years, including language requirements, security-clearance delays and a lack of representation among recruiters.

The review also noted that because military personnel have to start at the bottom and work their way up, fixing the recruitment process is a critical first step. Concerns were nonetheless also identified around retention and promotions.

Lick emphasized the importance of addressing the problem given what he described as a growing need for a diverse force that reflects Canadian society and is able to operate in new and innovative ways.

“With the CAF currently operating at a deficit of approximately 10,000 to 12,000 regular and reserve force members and thousands of positions unfilled in the civilian ranks, a crisis is slowly emerging,” he said.

“Critical to the ongoing success of the DND and the CAF is ensuring that people of diverse backgrounds consider a career in these organizations and see themselves reflected in their mandates.”

While past reports and reviews have proposed a number of measures to address the problems, Lick echoed the anti-racism panel’s findings about a lack of action, saying: “It is unclear whether the CAF has implemented all these initiatives.”

Although Defence Minister Anita Anand was given four weeks to respond to the ombudsman’s report before its public release, Lick said he had yet to receive a response. The Defence Department did not immediately comment Monday.

Source: Military failing to remove barriers to diversifying ranks: ombudsman

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Statistics Canada: Portrait of the social, political and economic participation of racialized groups

2022/05/18 Leave a comment

No real surprises in this useful overview but important to have:

In response to Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy, Statistics Canada’s Centre for Gender, Diversity and Inclusion Statistics is releasing an initial set of 13 data tables on social inclusion. Nearly 100 indicators can now be used to examine various socioeconomic facets of racialized groups. 

The concept of racialized population is measured with the ‘visible minority’ variable in this release. ‘Visible minority’ refers to whether or not a person belongs to one of the visible minority groups defined by the Employment Equity Act. The Employment Equity Act defines visible minorities as “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour” (for more details, please refer to Note to readers). 

These indicators provide valuable information to develop policies to combat racism and discrimination, and they reflect the agency’s commitment to greater insights through the use of disaggregated data. The new data sheds light on the unique experiences of racialized Canadians, whether they immigrated to Canada or were born in the country.

The indicators published today are organized into a wider framework of themes for measuring social inclusion within Canada’s diverse population. The themes are the following: participation in the labour market; civic engagement and political participation; representation in decision-making positions; basic needs and housing; health and well-being; education, training and skills; income and wealth; social connections and personal networks; local community; public services and institutions; and discrimination and victimization.

This article provides an overview of social inclusion of racialized populations under the two themes: civic engagement and political participation, and representation in decision-making positions. It looks at key indicators of participation in community groups and organizations, representation in senior management, and voting in elections and political engagement. The analysis focuses on the seven largest racialized groups in Canada: South Asian; Chinese; Black; Filipino; Latin American; Arab; and Southeast Asian Canadians.

The findings show that while the rates of civic participation of racialized Canadians are generally similar to the rest of the population, their representation in management positions is considerably lower, and their voter turnout and political engagement are somewhat lower compared with other Canadians. There are also important differences amongst the racialized groups on these measures of social inclusion.

Source for full report with tables: Portrait of the social, political and economic participation of racialized groups

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Let Actors Act

2022/05/17 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

Adrian Lester, a British actor from Birmingham and the son of two immigrants from Jamaica, was nominated last week for a Tony Award for his performance in “The Lehman Trilogy” as Emanuel Lehman, one of the German-born Jewish founders of the fallen investment behemoth Lehman Brothers. Lester, like the other actors in the three-man play, takes on several parts, including female characters and at one point, a thumb-sucking toddler.

There has been no outcry about a British actor of African descent playing a German Jew, nor was there any fuss when he played Bobby, a character traditionally performed by white actors, in a London production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company,” for which he won an Olivier.

And why should there have been? It’s called acting.

There was no protest either about Lester’s co-star Simon Russell Beale, born to British parents in what was then British Malaya and a former chorister at St. Paul’s Cathedral, playing a German Jew. Adam Godley, the third actor in the play, is Jewish in real life, but he’s also gay — not so in the play. Again, it’s called acting, and Beale and Godley were also nominated for Tony Awards last week.

And yet countless actors have been criticized for playing people they do not resemble in real life.

Earlier this year, Helen Mirren was lambasted for portraying Golda Meir, a former prime minister of Israel, in a forthcoming biopic even though she’s not Jewish — engaging in what is now called “Jewface.” In a recent interview defending Mirren, Ian McKellen (who incidentally has played everything from a wizard to a cat) asked, “Is the argument that a straight man cannot play a gay part, and if so, does that mean I can’t play straight parts?” He went on: “Surely not. We’re acting. We’re pretending.”

Daring to take on parts different from oneself didn’t always kick up a storm. Back in 1993 when Tom Hanks played a gay character in “Philadelphia,” he was hailed as brave for taking on homophobia and won an Oscar. Today, his performance no longer plays so well in some quarters. “Straight men playing gay — everyone wants to give them an award,” the performer Billy Porter complained in a 2019 actor’s round table. Yet many of our best gay, lesbian and bisexual actors — Jodie Foster, Alan Cumming, Kristen Stewart, Nathan Lane — have won awards for straight roles without even a murmur of complaint.

What we are effectively saying here — without ever, heaven forbid, saying it out loud — is that it’s OK for actors from groups considered to be marginalized — whether gay, Indigenous, Latino or any other number of identities — to play straight white characters. But it’s not OK for the reverse.

Such double standards may not trouble you. But if it’s a problem that a “miscast” actor — one who differs in identity from the character — takes a role away from a “properly cast” actor when there are already fewer roles for underrepresented or marginalized groups, then why not condemn Simon Russell Beale for taking a job from a Jewish actor? Why no outcry every time a 40-something actress bends biology to play the mothers of 25-year-old actresses, robbing older actresses who more plausibly fit the part?

If, however, the real problem is actors not being able to understand what it feels like to be part of a demographic group or to have a sexual orientation outside the confines of their own experience, then none of these actors should be able to play anyone unlike themselves. In other words, no one should ever be allowed to play a part.

Hollywood has wisely moved on from the offensive extremes of blackface and Shylock stereotypes, “queeny” stock gay characters and Mickey Rooney’s embarrassing turn as a Japanese landlord in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” There is plenty of room in the middle without ricocheting to the other undesirable extreme.

It’s not that strict typecasting should never happen; it can yield rewarding opportunities for both actors and audiences. Behold the deaf performers in the Oscar-winning “Coda.”

But deaf performers can also act movingly in a musical like the 2015 Deaf West revival of “Spring Awakening,” which featured them in roles that were originally performed as hearing characters and performed simply as characters, neither explicitly hearing nor deaf, but transcendently human in their expression.

Likewise, in a recent revival of “Oklahoma!” Ali Stroker, who uses a wheelchair, was able to fully embody Ado Annie, who spends much of her time in the movie and previous stage versions swishing away from her suitor, Will Parker, just as Daniel Day-Lewis once captured, with extraordinary sensitivity in “My Left Foot,” the wheelchair-bound writer and painter Christy Brown.

Good actors are able to find a way to portray people who are not like themselves, whether on the surface or well below, which is what differentiates them from those of us who could barely remember our lines in a fourth-grade production of “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Acting is a feat of compassion and an act of generosity. Those capable of that kind of emotional ventriloquy enable audiences to find ourselves in the lives portrayed onscreen, no matter how little they may resemble our own.

Bravo to those actors who do that well. Bravo to the talented Adrian Lester, who makes you forget the color of his skin, his nationality and his religion — and gives himself over entirely to his performance. There is no reason for any actor to apologize for exercising and reveling in his craft.

Source: Let Actors Act

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How prejudice rooted in an ancient social system has migrated from India to Canada

2022/05/17 Leave a comment

Seeing more accounts of caste discrimination here and in the USA:

When Gurpreet Singh packed his bags last fall and arrived in Ontario from India, he soon learned there was one thing some fellow Indians in Canada hadn’t left behind in their home country — their prejudices.

The human resource management student at Durham College in Oshawa, Ont., said he is viewed as an outcast in the ancient South Asian social structure known as the caste system, but faces more discrimination from Indians in Canada than he did in India.

“I have been here for roughly five months and I have faced it in a way more aggressive or aggravated form in this country from my own Punjabi community,” Singh said. “They beat their chest with pride that they come from this caste or that caste.”

India is a main source of immigrants to Canada. It’s also a huge pipeline for international students both to Canada and the United States, and some universities are taking note of concerns around discrimination based on caste.

California State University, the largest four-year public university system in the U.S., specifically added caste to its non-discrimination policies in January. In Ottawa, the academic staff association at Carleton University passed a motion in November to include caste-based discrimination in its policies.

Singh recalled a conversation with an acquaintance in Oshawa that shocked him after she used a casteist slur to address him.

“I confronted her that you’d be behind bars if you were in India right now … The girl who uttered that word acted as if she didn’t know anything, why it’s offensive, etc.,” Singh said. “To put it in her brain in the easiest possible way, I equated the word with the N-word.”

He said it was “strange” that she knew the N-word was a slur for Black people, “but even after living in India for 23 years, she had no idea, or at least pretended to have no idea, about the thing she just said so casually.”

The Hindu caste system divides people into four sub-communities based on ancestry — Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras — and the caste of a person can often be identified by their last name. The four main castes are further divided into 3,000 castes and 25,000 sub-castes.

The caste tradition transcends religion. Many Indians with Hindu lineage whose ancestors adopted Sikhism or Christianity retained their last names, and their caste designations.

Singh belongs to a scheduled caste, members of which are also known as Dalits. According to the caste system, scheduled castes are outcasts and do not belong to the social order.

According to the 2011 census, scheduled castes made up for 16.2 per cent of the Indian population. From 2018 to 2020, India’s National Crime Records Bureau recorded 50,202 registered cases of crimes or “atrocities” against scheduled castes. Activists from the community have long fought against caste oppression.

Singh’s last name was originally Badhan, which indicated his caste. He stopped using it, even on official documents, but he said in Canada he’s been asked for his full name so people could identify his community.

“I have had to hide my identity a number of times,” Singh said. “I had to lie twice. I told them I come from the Jatt community and my surname is something else because I felt that I might be isolated, and no one wants to feel that way when you are so far away from home.”

Casteism can cause harm

Chinnaiah Jangam, an associate professor in the department of history at Carleton University and an advocate for the rights of people from scheduled castes, believes casteism can hurt immigrants long term.

“A student or an employee coming from these backgrounds will not feel comfortable to express their own identity and they won’t feel comfortable being themselves,” said Jangam, who is the author of Dalits and the making of modern India and spearheaded the push to add caste to the anti-discrimination policies of Carleton’s academic association.

Meera Estrada, the Toronto co-host of the pop culture show kultur’D on Global News radio, was born in Canada but said she was aware she was a Dalit since childhood. She often hid her identity because other people of Indian background looked down on her community.

She recalled going to Gujarati language classes and people asking what samaj, or community, she belonged to. “And people were quite proud in saying which group they belong to, but it was always the Brahmin group or the so-called upper caste,” Estrada said.

India passed a law in 1955 to abolish “untouchability,” a term once used to describe the practice of ostracizing scheduled castes. But Estrada believes the social stigma against Dalits remains, something that became more apparent to her in her 20s.

“Aunties in mandirs [temples] trying to play matchmakers would always say, ‘Oh, this is a good boy from a good family.’ The implication there was that he is from a higher caste, and I would just feel like if that is the equivalent of good, who am I? Am I not good?”

Brahmin-only group

One matchmaking Facebook group, the Samast Brahman Society of Canada, has 4,100 members. The group’s description says its “goal is to unite all Brahmins under one roof while they can serve in all other Brahmin organizations.”

Source: How prejudice rooted in an ancient social system has migrated from India to Canada

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Australia: Only 8% of candidates in the federal election come from diverse backgrounds

2022/05/17 Leave a comment

Sharp contrast with Canada where 18.2 percent of candidates in the 2021 election were visible minorities:

Of the more than 1,200 candidates in the federal election running for the House of Representatives, just 100 (8%) come from backgrounds other than Anglo-Australian, according to lists compiled by the Asian Australian Alliance and the Centre of Multicultural Political Engagement, Literacy and Leadership (Compell). There are a further 38 diverse candidates running for the Senate.

According to a report from the Australian Human Rights Commission, 21% of Australians have a non-European background and 3% an Indigenous background. Over 300 ancestries were identified in the 2016 census.

Less than 40% (458) of House candidates are women, with the majority of both diverse and female candidates running as challengers in safe or fairly safe seats.

The most commonly self-identified occupations of House candidates – aside from existing members of parliament – are managers, retirees and businesspeople. Some unique occupations listed by only a single candidate include a showman, firearms dealer, humanitarian and a carbon farmer.

Although the lists are largely crowdsourced via public statements and may not be comprehensive, as the Australian Electoral Commission does not release extensive data on candidates’ backgrounds, they nevertheless highlight a troubling lack of diversity in the electionwhich “is not representative of multicultural Australia”.

Most diverse candidates are challenging safe seats

Of the 100 House candidates identified as having backgrounds other than Anglo-Australian, just three are incumbents in safe seats: the Coalition’s Ian Goodenough and Labor’s Linda Burney and Peter Khalil. Labor’s Cassandra Fernando is contesting in Wills, where the incumbent Labor MP Anthony Byrne is retiring.

The majority of diverse candidates identified (57%) are challengers in safe or fairly safe seats. There are five diverse candidates in marginal seats currently held by their parties, including Dave Sharma, Marion Scrymgour, Gladys Liu, Anne Aly and Ken Wyatt.

Tharini Apolline Rouwette, the CEO of Compell, says the makeup of parliament and the candidates isn’t reflective of Australian society. “Our parliament is not representative of multicultural Australia, hence why we need diversity in parliament and also to normalise people of colour in leadership roles,” she says.

“There’s about 4% of people of colour in parliament today which is hardly reflective of the Australian population that is increasingly becoming multicultural. The information collected, together with my follow-up surveys/interviews will hopefully be the beginning of a long journey towards collecting information that will inform us as to what we need to do to get more people of colour elected in government.”

More candidates in marginal seats are women

Men make up over 60% of the 1,204 candidates in the AEC list, according to data compiled by Ben Raue at the Tallyroom. There are four non-binary candidates and two whose gender is unknown.

Both major parties have more male than female candidates, but a slightly higher percentage of Labor candidates are women.

Women make up a disproportionate share of candidates in marginal seats – they represent 38% of all candidates, but 41.6% of candidates in marginal seats. Some 263 women (56%) are running as challengers in safe or fairly safe seats.

Occupations

Guardian Australia compiled a list of occupations from the AEC candidate list, identifying around 254 unique occupations – an approximation, since there can be a number of names for the same occupation, and some candidates wrote expansive job titles such as “finance” or “business”.

Aside from member of parliament, lawyers, directors, consultants, managers, retirees and the unemployed are among the biggest occupations for candidates in the major parties. Some candidates who quit their jobs to contest the election are listed as unemployed.

The most common occupations for Coalition members are lawyers and directors (nine each), followed closely by consultants and managers. Union officials and unemployed are the top occupations for Labor candidates.

Students and retirees make up the top occupations for the Greens. Managers and businesspeople top the list for the United Australia Party, and retirees is the most common occupation listed for One Nation.

Source: Only 8% of candidates in the federal election come from diverse backgrounds

Filed under Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with ,

Why Canada’s plan to criminalize Holocaust denial could be unconstitutional — and redundant

2022/05/11 Leave a comment

Good discussion of some of the issues involved.

Reminds me of Holocaust denier David Irving suing Deborah Lipstadt for libel in her book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, and the legal strategy involved which ensured that she herself would not take the witness stand to maintain the focus on Irving:

Sidney Zoltak, who has spent a significant part of his life recounting his experiences as a child survivor of the Holocaust, says he’s not sure how he would characterize the effort by some to deny the historical genocide.

“I don’t know what to call it … whether it’s a crime, a shame, a lie — what would be more appropriate,” said Zoltak, 91. As a child, he, along with his family, escaped the Jewish ghetto set up by Nazis in his Polish hometown and went into hiding.

“But what kind of a crime it is, I am not a legal person, not a lawyer, so I wouldn’t know how to legislate that.”

Yet, that’s what the federal government will attempt to do, and join several countries in Europe, including Germany, that make Holocaust denial a crime. However, like any legislation that seeks to curb expression, it could be subject to Charter challenges.

‘Probably unconstitutional’

The Holocaust refers to the state-sponsored initiative by the Nazi government during the Second World War that led to the murder of more than six million Jews and millions of others, such as Roma. 

The government’s plan to criminalize denial of those events — outside of private conversation — was first unveiled inside this year’s 280-page federal budget. Along with a number of initiatives to fight antisemitism, including $20 million for a new Holocaust museum in Montreal, the budget also revealed the government’s intent to amend the Criminal Code. Currently the Criminal Code makes it illegal to communicate statements in public that wilfully promote hatred against any identifiable group.

The amendment would “prohibit the communication of statements, other than in private conversation, that willfully promote antisemitism by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust.”

But while many advocates welcome the legislation, some legal experts question its constitutionality.

“I think it’s problematic to criminalize Holocaust denial,” said Cara Zwibel, lawyer and director of the Fundamental Freedoms Program at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. “That’s not to say that that kind of expression is not harmful. But the truth is, we don’t criminalize lying for the most part.”

“I think if it adds things that sort of go beyond the narrow definition of what the court has said is hate speech, then it’s probably unconstitutional.”

‘Reliable predictor of radicalization’

The news was welcomed by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, which said the amendment would “provide the necessary legal tools to prosecute those who peddle this pernicious form of antisemitism.”

“Denying the Holocaust is a reliable predictor of radicalization and an indication that antisemitism is on the rise,” Gail Adelson-Marcovitz, chair of the national board of directors of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, said in a statement.

Record levels of antisemitism took place in Canada in 2021, according to an annual audit by Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith. The number of violent incidents toward Jews last year increased by more than 700 per cent.

Sarah Fogg, a spokeswoman for the Montreal Holocaust Museum, said while the organization was surprised to see such a measure in a federal budget, they welcomed the news as an “important step.”

“It’s a really meaningful legislative effort to combat antisemitism,” she said. “I think this this sort of makes that link really obvious between Holocaust denial and antisemitism.”

Putting the Holocaust on trial

But Zwibel warned the legislation could give Holocaust deniers a platform.

She cited the case of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel, who was tried twice in the 1980s for publishing the pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth At Last. Although convicted, Zundel was eventually acquitted when the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the country’s laws against spreading false news as a violation of free speech.

His trials also put the Holocaust on trial, with the crown bringing in Holocaust researchers and survivors to support their case, while the defence put noted Holocaust deniers on the stand.

“What being prosecuted did for [Zundel] was give him a big platform and basically allow him to parade a bunch of witnesses in court to try and prove that the Holocaust didn’t happen and have the government put survivors before the court. It’s atrocious,” Zwibel said.

Zwibel also suggested there could be problems with how the amendment would define terms such as “condoning’ and “downplaying” in relation to the Holocaust.

“There’s a lot of different questions to try and figure out what would be caught here.”

Geneviève Groulx, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, said ultimately, the courts will assess what words like “downplay” mean

“But generally it is understood to encompass actions that try to make (something) appear smaller or less important than in reality and to minimize (something). A court would have to conclude that the downplaying wilfully promotes antisemitism,” she said in an email.

Richard Moon, a University of Windsor law professor whose research focuses on freedom of expression, said any such law that restricts speech will likely be challenged at some point to determine whether that limitation can be justified under Section 1 of the Charter.

But Moon questioned whether the proposed amendment would add anything to what is already covered in the Criminal Code, other than to potentially specify or clarify in some way.

“So one possibility, it’s not actually doing anything new,” he said.

“The way this is framed, it sounds like someone being prosecuted under it, the prosecution would have to establish what they already have to establish under the existing Criminal Code.”

Zoltak and his family were some of the lucky few to survive the Holocaust. His family was on the run for two years, staying with different villagers, forced to change locations every few months. They eventually found one Polish family that hid them for 14 months in an underground bunker, where they did not see daylight for half that time.

When they were liberated and returned home, only 70 Jews remained in their village from the 7,000 prior to the war.

“We know a number of nations around the world have made Holocaust denial a crime,” Zoltak said. “And they have been living with that for quite a while. And it works for them. And why should we be shying away from that?”

‘Has to be bulletproof’

Bernie Farber, chair of the Canadian AntiHate Network, said while any tool that can deal with antisemitism is worthwhile, the legislation will have to be carefully thought out.

“It has to be kind of bulletproof in terms of the constitutionality test,” he said. “I think it’s all going to be in the wording of the  legislation.

“I accept this in principle. I think it’s a long time coming. But people do have the right to be stupid and offensive. And if people want to say that the Holocaust didn’t happen, that’s kind of their business. But that said, we know that these are, antisemitic dog whistles. And it’ll be really important in terms of the wording of the legislation on how it traces back to antisemitism.”

Zoltak and his family were some of the lucky few to survive the Holocaust. His family was on the run for two years, staying with different villagers, forced to change locations every few months. They eventually found one Polish family that hid them for 14 months in an underground bunker, where they did not see daylight for half that time.

When they were liberated and returned home, only 70 Jews remained in their village from the 7,000 prior to the war.

“We know a number of nations around the world have made Holocaust denial a crime,” Zoltak said. “And they have been living with that for quite a while. And it works for them. And why should we be shying away from that?”

Source: Why Canada’s plan to criminalize Holocaust denial could be unconstitutional — and redundant

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust Tagged with ,

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