Trichur: TD raising the bar for corporate Canada by agreeing to racial-equity audit

2022/04/02 Leave a comment

Look forward to seeing the results as I assume TD will share these at least at the macro level:

It’s often said in the corporate world that “what gets measured gets done.”

That’s why one of Canada’s biggest companies is heeding the call of an institutional investor to become more rigorous about assessing the effectiveness of its diversity and inclusion policies.

Toronto-Dominion Bank TD-N +0.48%increase is believed to be the first chartered bank and one of the first public companies in Canada to agree to an independent racial-equity audit to provide a reality check of its progress on dismantling systemic discrimination across its North American operations.

A racial-equity audit – also known as a racial-justice audit, a racial-equity assessment or a civil-rights report – is an important tool that helps shareholders determine which companies are taking real action on combatting racism. These audits are conducted by third parties and cover a company’s employment, compensation and business practices, including how it sells products and services. Companies are then expected to publicize the findings and use the feedback to fix problems.

Dozens of public companies, including Amazon, AT&T and Goldman Sachs in the United States, have received shareholder proposals calling for racial-equity audits over the past year, according to a search of securities filings conducted on the financial-intelligence platform Sentieo.

Although more investors are advocating for these audits, some companies still oppose this type of accountability. That’s why the commitment made by TD Bank is noteworthy – it is raising the bar for the rest of corporate Canada.

TD made its decision after holding talks with the BC General Employees’ Union (BCGEU). Specifically, TD has agreed to hire a third-party law firm to conduct a racial-equity assessment of its Canadian and U.S. employment policies. It has also agreed to provide updated information about the assessment by June 30, 2023.

The details are still a bit fuzzy, but it’s progress, folks.

Diana Lee, vice-president of diversity and inclusion at TD, said the bank recognizes that “assessment and measurement are vital tools to create meaningful progress” toward racial equity.

“We are committed to use the results of this racial-equity assessment to inform not only our employment policies and practices, but also our future business practices in supporting Black, Indigenous and minority customers and communities,” Ms. Lee added.

Separately, regulators are also putting increased pressure on banks to ensure their business practices don’t create disparate outcomes for racialized people. In the U.S., for instance, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau plans stricter enforcement of fair-lending laws and a crackdown on digital and algorithmic practices that potentially discriminate against Black customers.

TD, of course, isn’t the only Canadian bank with significant U.S. operations. BCGEU, which has withdrawn its shareholder proposal at TD in light of the bank’s commitment, is putting other lenders and public companies on notice.

“We will continue doing everything in our power as investors to make sure that racial-equity assessments and audits become standard practice for public issuers and institutions in Canada. We will start contacting other chartered banks on this issue after the TD AGM,” BCGEU president Stephanie Smith said.

“The bottom line is, it isn’t enough for Canadian public issuers and institutions to talk the talk of diversity and inclusion by developing and announcing policies; investors deserve to know what impact those policies are having.”

Property and casualty insurer Intact Financial Corp., meanwhile, has agreed to “assess some internal practices” and to “enhance disclosure,” a company spokeswoman said.

Intact received a proposal from the Shareholder Association for Research and Education, a non-profit organization that represents institutional investors, said Kevin Thomas, SHARE’s chief executive.

SHARE, along with its clients, is interested in various employment issues affecting insurers but also whether their underwriting assumptions create unequal impacts for racialized people.

It takes a similar approach with asset managers, advocating for racial equity within companies but also pushing them “to address the potential impacts of investment decisions down the chain with investee companies,” Mr. Thomas said.

SHARE, meanwhile, says it has also filed proposals with companies Mondelez and Constellation Software.

Mondelez has yet to publish its proxy circular so its position on the proposal is not clear. However, Constellation Software has already opposed the idea in its filing, arguing that while it believes in an equitable and inclusive work force, “the Corporation’s interests, as well as the interests of racial diversity, equity and inclusion, are best served by its existing organizational structure and approach.”

Ridiculous. We all know who benefits from the status quo. And – here’s a big hint – it’s never racialized people.

“Every CEO these days will tell you they are committed to diversity and inclusion,” Mr. Thomas said. “For investors, a racial-equity audit is our way of testing whether management is blowing smoke or whether they are delivering on that promise. That tells us a lot about management quality, ethics and their ability to implement on the goals they set – all critical questions for their investors.”

Companies must hold themselves accountable for the public pledges they made to eradicate systemic discrimination after the police murder of George Floyd nearly two years ago prompted a massive public outcry.

That’s why TD deserves kudos for agreeing to a racial-equity audit. By taking this important first step, TD is putting pressure on other public companies to follow suit. Investors will be watching to see which ones step up next.

Source: TD raising the bar for corporate Canada by agreeing to racial-equity audit

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What Archaeologists Are Learning About the Lives of the Chinese Immigrants Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad

2022/04/02 Leave a comment

Similar to the experience of Chinese railroad workers in Canada:

The desert of far northwestern Utah stretches 60 miles from the arid border of Nevada to the saline-crusted shores of the Great Salt Lake. The terrain is exceedingly flat, punctuated only by the intermittent dry arroyo, rocky hill or volcanic cinder cone. Horned lizards and jack rabbits dart between thorny shrubs and scrawny box elder trees. Apart from the occasional cattle ranch or sheep-herding camp, the landscape appears desolate and lonely, forgotten in the expanse of geologic time.

But in a place called Terrace, identified today by little more than a single, bullet-ridden informational sign staked into the desert soil, a close look reveals a colorful story camouflaged in the sand. Scattered among dunes and tumbleweeds are small glass bottles, ceramic jars and abandoned wooden railroad ties, clues to a surprising history.

From outside a small excavation pit, Karen Kwan and Margaret Yee watch as a researcher carefully extracts a scrap of linen clothing from the buried ruins of a house. A few yards away, another researcher brushes dirt from a ceramic bowl intricately painted with bamboo and floral motifs.

Terrace was established by Chinese railroad workers in 1869, when construction crews were racing to connect the eastward and westward tracks of the railroad 70 miles from here at Promontory Summit. Eventually, simple wood structures rose on both sides of Main Street, housing hotels, clothing stores, restaurants, railroad machine shops, even a 1,000-volume library specializing in science, history and travel literature. Because water was scarce, engineers constructed an aqueduct from hollowed-out timber, funneling water from mountain springs that were miles away. At its peak, the town was home to some 500 residents, and it welcomed hundreds more each year, mostly rail and wagon-train travelers.

In 1903, Terrace burned in a fire, and after the railroad was rerouted 50 miles south—straight across the Great Salt Lake—the following year, the town was abandoned. But researchers have returned, seeing the ghost town as an ideal site to learn not only about the workings of a remote railroad town but especially about the immigrant community that thrived here. “Terrace had all the different activities that you would expect in a frontier town,” says Michael Sheehan, an archaeologist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. “But it wasn’t just a railroad town. It was a microcosm that offers a glimpse into class, ethnicity, even international relations.” For descendants of Chinese railroad workers, such as Kwan and Yee, the research also allows them to recover a part of their heritage that was thought lost to history. “Archaeology like this is important,” Kwan says, “because it puts the individual back into the picture.”

The dream of a single, continuous railroad that would unite America’s east and west coasts dates back to the 1830s, not long after the introduction of the country’s first steam locomotive. A transcontinental railroad would shrink a dangerous, cross-country wagon-train journey of six months or more to less than a week, and it would open vast stretches of the West to new settlement. But it wasn’t until 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, that Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Pacific Railway Act, which finally undertook to make that dream a reality. “There is nothing more important before the nation,” he’d once said, “than the building of the railroad to the Pacific.”

The legislation granted huge swaths of federal land and substantial funds to the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroad companies to connect Sacramento to the nation’s existing rail network terminus in Nebraska. Both railroad companies held ceremonial groundbreakings in 1863, complete with crowds, bands and parades, but the war prevented real construction from getting underway until 1865.

That spring, James Strobridge, the Central Pacific’s construction supervisor, put an ad in the Sacramento Union seeking 5,000 skilled laborers to begin blasting a path through the High Sierra. Given the job’s punishing conditions, no more than a few hundred people even replied, most of them, Strobridge later said, “unsteady men” who “would stay a few days . . . until pay-day, get a little money, get drunk, and clear out.”

Faced with a herculean project and no workforce, a railroad official named E.B. Crocker proposed a controversial plan to bring on a 50-person crew of Chinese workers who’d immigrated to California to mine for gold. According to Chris Merritt, an archaeologist and Utah state preservation official, most railroad officials believed the Chinese workers were “unskilled” and “too feminine for hard labor,” but the crew swiftly set records for rail laying. So the railroad dispatched recruitment emissaries to China’s rural Guangdong Province, which was then plagued by a civil war. “Southern China was in turmoil,” says Gordon Chang, a historian at Stanford University and the author of 2019’s Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad. “Wars, ethnic conflicts and economic insecurity were scourges, and young people were leaving to seek work and support their families from afar.”

Altogether, the Central Pacific Railroad hired an estimated 12,000 Chinese workers, some as young as 12. The Chinese workers, at that time the largest industrial workforce in American history, made up 90 percent of the Central Pacific’s total labor force. (The Union Pacific, by contrast, did not employ Chinese laborers.) But when Chang started looking into the subject as a young historian, in the 1970s, he was shocked to discover that he could find scarcely any information about them. Nearly all of the scholarship about the railroad’s construction centered on the European and American workforces. Chang has devoted much of his career to piecing together their history, and in 2012 he co-founded the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, which now includes the most comprehensive collection of historical documents and oral histories on the subject.

The Chinese workers carried out an exceptional feat. After blasting and cutting through granite in the Sierra Nevada, they expediently laid track across the Great Basin. Chang and other historians attribute their success in part to the diversity of their training. Before migrating to the United States, many Chinese workers were architects, blacksmiths, woodworkers, cooks, doctors and farmers. Their varied skill sets allowed crews to function as miniature communities, capable of tackling complex problems encountered along the railroad grade—not only problems of engineering, such as building railroad trestles, but also maintaining large field camps in the remote desert. It also enabled crews to acquire much-needed supplies, such as cookware, medicine and even food, often imported from China at a cheaper price than could be obtained by the railroad company or in nearby towns, which gouged prices for immigrant workers.

This communal cooperation was critical, because Chinese crews were routinely marginalized, subjected to poor treatment, racist oversight and negligible support from their employers. According to the Central Pacific’s own disclosures, white workers earned $35 a month on top of full room, board and equipment. Chinese workers, by contrast, earned a salary of $30 and nothing else. “Not only were they paid less than their white counterparts,” Chang says. “They also had to pay for their food, supplies and medicine, all of which the railroad company provided to white workers.” What little money the Chinese workers saved, they sent back to their families. Despite these challenges, Chinese crews completed 690 miles of track to meet the Union Pacific builders at Promontory, Utah, in May 1869. “Without employing Chinese workers, the meeting at Promontory Summit would have never happened—period,” Merritt says. Yet not a single Chinese employee was welcomed at the Promontory ceremony.

After the railroad was completed, thousands of Chinese workers stayed on as employees of the railroad. They were forced to live on the edges of railroad towns and larger cities. White mobs repeatedly attacked Chinese neighborhoods. In Rock Springs, Wyoming, 28 Chinese coal miners (all former railroad workers) were killed in an attack that drove hundreds more from town. In Los Angeles, 18 Chinese residents were lynched in a single day, including at least one child. Reno, Nevada’s Chinatown was burned to the ground twice in 30 years. “Almost every Chinese community in the western United States in the 19th century suffered destruction,” says Chang. “Fire and forced expulsion was their lot.” In formal censuses, the U.S. government often recorded Chinese immigrants living in railroad towns simply as “Chinaman” or ​“Chinawoman” in place of their names. They were barred from obtaining citizenship, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited further immigration, which prevented many railroad workers from reconnecting with their families.

Those who returned to China faced challenges of their own, sometimes preferring not to speak about their experiences. In time, personal histories recorded in diaries or letters home were lost, or were likely destroyed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in 1966, when such documents could have been branded as anti-nationalist and disloyal to the Communist government.

Between the community’s exclusion in the United States and the upheaval it faced in China, its history slowly vanished. Of the 12,000 Chinese workers employed by the railroad, researchers have identified the names of just a few dozen. Still, their impact on establishing Chinese communities across the American West is unmistakable. Shortly before the start of the railroad project, census records estimated that there were 34,933 Chinese immigrants living in the country. By the time the railroad was completed, the population had nearly doubled, as family members joined relatives in places like Terrace or in other newly formed Chinese communities. By 1880, 105,465 Chinese immigrants had settled in the United States, forming anchors for many of the modern-day Chinatowns found today across the West.

Source: What Archaeologists Are Learning About the Lives of the Chinese Immigrants Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad

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Tiger Mom Amy Chua offers solutions to America’s toxic political tribalism

2022/04/01 Leave a comment

Incredibly shallow commentary, largely divorced from the extreme political polarization in the USA and the various players in stoking such polarization:

Despite a dangerous torrent of toxic partisanship, America’s undergirding values remain exceptional and can be leveraged to overcome the tribalism threatening it, “Tiger Mom” and Yale law professor Amy Chua said Tuesday at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

Chua staked out an independent, centrist and optimistic position while she scolded divisive voices on the American right and left. Her talk was the sixth and final BYU forum of the school year on “Creating the Beloved Community.”

She earned applause for her praise of the pluralistic benefits of the missionary program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which sponsors BYU. The crowd of 1,834 in the Marriott Center also gave her a final standing ovation.

“America is changing,” she said. “There’s no going back. We are in a period of renegotiating and rediscovering our collective identity. We are struggling to arrive at a national identity that is capacious enough to resonate with and hold together as one people Americans of all sorts — old and young, immigrants and native born, urban and rural, descendants of slaves as well as descendants of slave owners.”

“I think,” she added, “we all need to be much more protective of American’s special national identity, and this is a lesson that both the left and right need to take to heart.”

Chua said the United States alone among world superpowers fits her definition of a supergroup. The term denotes a country with a strong, overarching national identity that simultaneously allows for strong, smaller subgroup identities based on ethnicity, religion, linguistics or race.

“The fact that as a constitutional matter, our national identity is ethnically and religiously neutral makes the United States as a country uniquely equipped to overcome the challenges of political tribalism,” she said. “Having said that, we are at a perilous moment.”

Still, she found room for optimism while she spoke in front of four screens depicting a blue sky with a U.S. flag backlit by a bright sun.

She said tribalism is hard-wired in human biology, that once people connect, they cling to and protect that connection. Tribalism can lead to unconscious bias and memory distortion and lends itself to schadenfreude — pleasure at the missteps or misfortune of others.

She outlined three reasons the United States is experiencing toxic division between its political tribes.

The first is a vast demographic transformation that will result in a nonwhite majority by 2050, according to U.S. census estimates.

“As a result in America today, every group feels threatened,” Chua said. “It’s not just the minorities anymore who feel threatened. Whites feel threatened. Over half of white Americans feel that they are now subject to more discrimination than minorities. And this is not just a Republican thing.”

“Studies show,” she added, “that it’s exactly when groups feel threatened, that’s when they retreat into tribalism. That’s when they close ranks, become more insular, more us-versus-them and more defensive. That’s why we are seeing a new kind of really explicit identity politics today on both sides of the political spectrum.”

On the right, she said, are openly xenophobic white nationalist movements. On the left are openly anti-white movements.

“There’s a growing number of bestselling books, and training programs right on the campus where I work, in which whites are demonized and asked to feel guilty and bad about themselves just for being white.

“The result is more and more resentment and distrust all around.”

The second and third reasons for increasing tribalism are the amplifying factor of social media and the divide between what Chua called coastal elites and working-class heartland Americans.

“Each side sees the other side as evil, un-American and not even worth talking to,” she said.

Those factors are putting tremendous strain on America’s status as a supergroup, Chua said.

“The good news is that we don’t have to choose between having a really strong, group-transcending, collective identity and multiculturalism. We can have both,” she said.

She offered what she called three concrete suggestions for America to overcome tribalism.

First, Americans on both ends of the political spectrum need to protect a strong national identity true to America’s constitutional ideals and historical values, she said.

She placed progressives on dangerous ground when they take a scorched-earth approach to American history and ideals, calling it a land of oppression founded on genocide, ideas she commonly hears at Yale.

Equally dangerous rhetoric exists on the right, she said.

“America cannot remain a supergroup if we start defining our national identity, for example, through our immigration policy in terms of whiteness, or Anglo-Protestant culture, or Christianity or any other term that is not inclusive of all colors and creeds,” Chua said. “To do so would be a movement in the direction of ethno-nationalism, away from what it is that makes us special as a nation whose identity is rooted in principles and ideas, not blood.”

Her second suggestion is to experiment with initiatives to help Americans see each other as fellow Americans, such as incentivizing American young people to spend a year serving other Americans in a different part of the country.

“We really need to do some work to bridge that deep chasm between the coasts and the heartland,” she said.

Chua held up the missionary program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as an example she called inspiring.

“I understand, of course, that the Mormon mission is first and foremost an experience of religious consecration and sacred service,” she said. “But at the same time, it’s also a wonderful example and a successful example of an experience of civic engagement in which Mormons from one country, say the United States, live and interact with people from completely different ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds in a way that opens one’s eyes and broadens one’s perspective.”

Her third suggestion is to improve American history and civics education.

“I think we need to think very hard about how we can teach our children U.S. history in a way that tells the truth while still conveying the idea of America as a special nation,” she said. “It is really important that we no longer teach our children a whitewashed version of American history, but I think it’s also important not to overcorrect, which I worry is what we are now doing.”

For example, she noted that hundreds of students and faculty at the University of Virginia signed a letter saying they were offended when the university’s president quoted Thomas Jefferson, the school’s founder.

“George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave owners, but they were also political visionaries who helped give birth to what became the most inclusive form of governance in world history,” Chua said.

Chua is the author or co-author of several books, including the international bestseller “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” “The Triple Package” and “Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations.”

Source: Tiger Mom Amy Chua offers solutions to America’s toxic political tribalism

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RCMP’s ‘bias-free’ training and policies fall short, watchdog says

2022/04/01 Leave a comment

Of note. The importance of assessing what works and what doesn’t, in the context of a corporate culture that is hard to change:

The RCMP has introduced training and policies to rid its ranks of racism and other forms of bias — but until it starts tracking allegations it won’t know whether the plan is actually working, says a new report from the national police force’s civilian watchdog.

The Civilian Review and Complaints Commission (CRCC) conducted a review of what the RCMP calls its “bias-free policing model,” a training model meant to ensure equitable delivery of services.

“The RCMP’s national bias-free policing policy is inadequate, insufficient and unclear,” reads the report released Wednesday.

“When police actions are viewed as unfair or biased, the legitimacy of law enforcement suffers.”

RCMP policy states that employees are not to engage in racial profiling. That’s a “laudable” goal but it’s “too narrow,” the CRCC said.

“Profiling based on religion, ethnic origin, or other prohibited grounds is equally as harmful and to be avoided,” the CRCC wrote. “This should be clearly stated.”

The RCMP says it allows officers to rely on “relevant information” as part of a criminal investigation. That phrase should be explained and expanded on in RCMP policy to rule out bias, the CRCC wrote.

The RCMP’s public complaint system and its internal code of conduct both lack a category to cover allegations of bias. Allegations of discrimination, for example, could be lumped together under categories covering “act[ing] with integrity, fairness and impartially” or “discreditable conduct.”

The commission said that without proper accounting, it’s unable to determine if any Mounties face allegations of bias.

Source: RCMP’s ‘bias-free’ training and policies fall short, watchdog says

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The invasion of Ukraine is making life difficult for right-wing populists

2022/03/30 Leave a comment

Reality dawns, hopefully marking a permanent shift:

It was the sort of crowd you might expect on Amsterdam’s Leidseplein, around the corner from the Bulldog Palace marijuana café. Several dozen demonstrators—awkward young men, middle-aged couples and ageing hippies—turned out on March 13th to support Forum for Democracy (fvd), a far-right populist party that thinks covid is a hoax and blames Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the West. A DJ played electronic dance music atop a trailer festooned with posters of Thierry Baudet, the fvd’s leader, a dandyish Eurosceptic with a phd in legal philosophy. The party has five seats in the Netherlands’ 150-seat parliament.

Soon Mr Baudet’s ally, Willem Engel, a dreadlocked salsa-dance instructor and covid-sceptic internet influencer, took the stage. “We cannot let ourselves get dragged into a war,” said Mr Engel, denouncing Dutch shipments of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine’s defenders. The media, he said, was whipping up hatred towards Russians just as the Nazis had towards Jews. (“Ach, the media”, tutted a woman in the crowd.)

Source: The invasion of Ukraine is making life difficult for right-wing populists

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Employment Equity Act Review: My submission

2022/03/29 Leave a comment

ee-act-consultations-2022-1Download

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International efforts to combat Islamophobia require more than lip service

2022/03/28 Leave a comment

Like so many UN resolutions…

Greater failure is with respect to lack of meaningful action on China and its oppression of the Uyghurs:

Earlier this month, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution designating March 15 as the International Day to Combat Islamophobia. 

Lauded by some, criticized by others, it remains to be seen whether such a move will actually have an impact on the millions of people worldwide who face state-sanctioned discrimination, oppression, and genocide. 

“Today UN has finally recognized the grave challenge confronting the world: of Islamophobia, respect for religious symbols & practices & of curtailing systematic hate speech & discrimination against Muslims. Next challenge is to ensure implementation of this landmark resolution,” tweeted Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister.

The resolution calls on the international community — governments, civil society, the private sector and faith-based-organizations — “to organize and support various high-visibility events aimed at effectively increasing awareness of all levels about curbing Islamophobia.”

The date of the annual commemoration holds significance as the tragic anniversary of the rampage on two mosques in Christchurch, N.Z. in 2019. The perpetrator was a far-right terrorist and white supremacist who livestreamed the first of his two mass shootings on Facebook. He killed a total of 51 worshippers.

The brutality of those attacks was a clear example of the devastating consequences of Islamophobia, a phenomenon that has reached “epidemic proportions,” according to a 2021 report by the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief. 

“Following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and other horrific acts of terrorism purportedly carried out in the name of Islam, institutional suspicion of Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim has escalated to epidemic proportions,” reads the report’s introduction. “Numerous States — along with regional and international bodies — have responded to security threats by adopting measures that disproportionately target Muslims and define Muslims as both high-risk and at risk of radicalization.”

Irrational fear of Muslims writ large has been used as an excuse to clamp down on civil liberties around the world, provide unequal treatment to Muslim migrants and refugees, as well as utilized as a pretext to implement genocidal policies in various places including in China and in Myanmar. In India, home to the second largest population of Muslims in the world, the situation has become dire.

In a recent TIME magazine article titled “Is India headed for an anti-Muslim genocide?” Debasish Roy Chowdhury, co-author of “To Kill A Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism,” provided a bleak assessment.

“Indian social media today is filled with videos of self-appointed protectors of Hinduism calling for the lynching of Muslims — an act so common that it hardly makes news anymore. High-profile Hindu supremacists are seldom booked for hate speech. Muslims routinely face random attacks for such ‘crimes’ as transporting cattle or being in the company of Hindu women. Sometimes, the provocation is simply that somebody is visibly Muslim. As [President Narendra] Modi himself has told election rallies, people ‘creating violence’ can be ‘identified by their clothes.’”

In February, schools in a state controlled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), banned female students from wearing hijabs. This followed the passage of what Human Rights Watch described as “a slew of laws and policies that systematically discriminate against religious minorities.” Protesters have been killed. 

Not surprising then that the Indian government opposed the UN resolution on Islamophobia. France, also accused of violating the human rights of its Muslim population, similarly pushed back.

“Time and again we have seen the French authorities use the vague and ill-defined concept of ‘radicalization’ or ‘radical Islam’ to justify the imposition of measures without valid grounds, which risks leading to discrimination in its application against Muslims and other minority groups,” said a spokesperson with Amnesty International last March. 

If an international day to combat Islamophobia is to have any meaning, it will require governments around the world to hold each other accountable.

Source: International efforts to combat Islamophobia require more than lip service

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McWhorter: Vocabulary imposed from on high sometimes just can’t catch on

2022/03/26 Leave a comment

Before the Canadian government considers embracing the US term BIPOC in its review of the Employment Equity Act, a useful reminder that it is no better than visible minorities in terms of how people see themselves, beyond academics and activists:

“BIPOC” has been with us for a few years now, and a certain verdict would appear to be in. Beyond academic and activist circles and some corners of social media, the acronym, which stands for “Black, Indigenous and people of color,” seems to strike most as rather peculiar. Clumsy, even. The Black academic and San Francisco Examiner columnist Teresa Moore wrote that the term “means well, but I want it to go away,” calling it “a solution to a problem that hadn’t needed solving,” a “‘New Coke’ of a word.”

I agree. Yet this does not mean that the term is, in itself, a mistake or a failure.

To be sure, the term has major problems, despite the good intentions of those who have broadcast and embraced it. The “POC” part is a frustratingly broad category, implying that Latinos and Asians (umbrella terms that are, perhaps, also too broad) constitute a coherent set — not to mention one that is somehow separate from Black and Indigenous people denoted by the “BI.” And “BI” is confusing, in that the term sounds at first as if it refers to bisexual people. Then, even when we are clear that it doesn’t, “BI” still sounds like a prefix of some kind, leading one to wonder just what a “POC” is. When spoken, “BIPOC” sounds like pocks who are bi in some way. And in English at least, “pock” doesn’t sound much like a person. Or, to my ear, if it did refer to a person, it would be in derision: “You pock!”

Although this isn’t how the term actually emerged, “BIPOC” sounds like one in a bunch of names thrown out amid a brainstorming session but never taken seriously, passed over in favor of something better that came up later. And that’s just it: “BIPOC” emerged — or, at least, broadly gained traction — not via a gradual consensus but via abrupt imposition amid the racial reckoning that began two springs ago, when many Americans were determined to renew our commitment to approaching race and racism in constructive ways.

Now, this kind of imposition does not automatically prevent a term from catching on. The problematizing of the term “master bedroom,” out of a sense that we should retire “master” as a relic of plantation slavery, arose from the same impulse as the usage of “BIPOC” and seems to be a success: “Master bedroom” is becoming non grata among some adjuncts of the real estate industry. Issues relating specifically to Black people seem particularly likely to dig a term in, as we also saw with how quickly “African American” caught on around three decades ago.

However, we are not merely passive supplicants at the mercy of prelates imposing lexical fiats from on high. Not everything settles in. For example, we are seeing that proposals for group names are less likely to be embraced when imposed from outside the group itself. When the Rev. Jesse Jackson called for the use of “African American,” his status and authority in Black America were roughly equal to Oprah Winfrey’s today. “African American” would have been much less likely to get around if it had been proposed by academics or lesser-known activists.

That kind of imposition from the outside has meant that “Latinx,” a gender-neutral alternative to “Latino” and “Latina,” is hardly used by the people it purports to refer to. In 2020, Pew Research found that only 3 percent of Latinos use the term. “BIPOC” isn’t doing much better. Too often, we take terminology proposals from academics and journalists as if we will henceforth be penalized — even if only socially — for going against their prescriptions. But their suggestions do not automatically affect language as it is used by ordinary people making themselves understood casually and comfortably.

It can seem that way because academics and journalists do a disproportionate amount of public writing and talking. For example, I suspect that normal people will continue saying “master bedroom”; I certainly will. Thus, there is no need to bristle at the proliferation of “BIPOC” as some kind of glowering fiat. Very few BIPOCs use it, and as Amy Harmon reported last year for The Times, in one national poll, “more than twice as many white Democrats said they felt ‘very favorably’ toward ‘BIPOC’ as Americans who identify as any of the nonwhite racial categories it encompasses.” And that is unlikely to change.

Again, this doesn’t mean “BIPOC” is a failed term. It has simply become part of a burgeoning register of English favored primarily by certain professors and political activists. This is no more a problem than another register, the academese favored by many scholars of literature and the social sciences. People of this realm have a way of writing and even speaking to one another on academic subjects that seems almost exotic to the outsider. For example, the renowned critical theorist and University of California, Berkeley, professor Judith Butler was granted first place in the journal Philosophy and Literature’s tongue-in-cheek bad-writing contest in 1998 for her prose in a 1997 essay, “Further Reflections on Conversations of Our Time,” that included this passage:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

I find it a little facile to dismiss this genre, even in jest, as simply bad writing. Its practitioners intend it as studiously objective and precise. And the main thing, despite how unaesthetic this writing may be, is that it has no effect on how most of us communicate. It’s an in-group practice that people look upon from the outside with a certain bemusement. It is a jargon.

People who refer to hegemony and structural totalities have a jargon. These days, there is what we could call, yes, a woke jargon. That is where “Latinx” and “BIPOC” live. These terms are not mistakes or misfires in not being taken up by most of the people they refer to, then. Who, after all, has an issue with there being jargons?

As Sandra Garcia reported for The Times in 2020, Sylvia Obell, a host of the podcast “Okay, Now Listen,” said, “We are asking for a lot of things, and being called BIPOC is not one of them.” She added, “Stop making decisions for us without us.” She need not worry: The decision cannot be, and will not be, forced on her or anyone else. People will be referred to as BIPOC among a certain contingent who, like all contingents, have ways of speaking that signal membership in their group and dedication to the group’s fundamental commitments.

There isn’t a thing wrong with that, but the rest of us can — and will — happily continue speaking and writing of Black people, Latino or Hispanic people, Native American or Indigenous people, people of South Asian or East Asian descent and all the other kinds of people, including, if we please, people of color.

Source: Vocabulary imposed from on high sometimes just can’t catch on

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Organization of Islamic Cooperation Accused of Ignoring Uyghur Muslims in China

2022/03/26 Leave a comment

Indeed. Much easier to other countries than China despite the ongoing oppression and indeed genocide of Uyghur Muslims:

A U.S. declaration that China has committed genocide and crimes against humanity against its mainly Muslim minority in western Xinjiang province appears to have had little impact on the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which this week honored Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at a high-level forum.

Invited by host Pakistan, Wang attended the 48th session of the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers in Islamabad as a special guest and spoke at the summit opening. He followed up Thursday with a surprise visit to Afghanistan, whose Taliban-led interim government is eager for Chinese investment and support.

The confluence of events was distressing to the Campaign for Uyghurs, a Washington-based rights group, which condemned both Wang’s attendance at the summit and OIC’s silence on China’s treatment of its Uyghur minority, including mass incarceration in so-called reeducation camps.

“It was appalling to see that Pakistan invited Wang Yi as a ‘guest of honor,’ while Uyghur Muslims do not have the right to identify as Muslims or practice Islam,” Campaign for Uyghurs said on its website.

According to Hasan Askari, an international affairs analyst, Pakistan’s invitation to the Chinese foreign minister at the OIC summit as an observer is part of an OIC tradition that allows the host country to invite high level diplomats from non-member OIC countries.

The U.S. accused China of genocide and crimes against humanity in the Muslim majority Xinjiang region in western China, including forced labor, sterilization of Muslim women and arbitrary detention of more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims in internment camps.

Beijing denies the allegations and says people of all ethnic groups live happily in Xinjiang.

The OIC summit addressed the plight of Rohingya Muslims as well as Muslims in Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories, Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere, but mostly ignored the Uyghur genocide in China, the Campaign for Uyghurs said.

Only Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu brought it up.

“In China, Uyghurs and other Muslims have difficulties protecting their religious rights and cultural identity,” Cavusoglu said at the OIC meeting. “Is it right to ignore the situation of the Uyghurs?”

Turkish politicians are usually the most outspoken defenders of Uyghur rights among Muslim politicians, said Robert Bianchi, professor of international law at the University of Chicago, because of their ethnic and cultural ties throughout Central Asia.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party “is particularly sensitive to demands from right-wing nationalists who are junior partners in his governing coalition,” Bianchi said. “He can’t survive without their support, so he often agrees to accept more Uyghur refugees and to speak out against Chinese repression.”

At the summit, Wang said that his country pledged to provide 300 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to Islamic countries.

According to Abdulhakim Idris, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Uyghur Studies, many Muslim-majority countries receive billions of dollars from China in the name of financial investment.

“By receiving billions of dollars from China, these countries are not only forced to remain quiet on the genocidal atrocities against Uyghur Muslims in East Turkistan but also commanded from Beijing to do whatever the PRC wants,” Idris told VOA, calling Xinjiang by the Uyghurs’ preferred name of East Turkistan.

Source: Organization of Islamic Cooperation Accused of Ignoring Uyghur Muslims in China

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

Australia: Multicultural media is a strong engagement lever, not a gimmick

2022/03/25 Leave a comment

While from a multicultural marketing perspective, still valid:

In the land of public relations, everybody aims for tremendous reach. Most of the time, that means mainstream media. However, communicators often forget that the type of audiences you reach matter – the old “quality versus quantity” debate.

As a communicator, it confuses me when others in my field palm off multicultural media as insignificant. This outdated contention does a great disservice to the Australian landscape and means that crucial audience segments are not being met with messages.

Multicultural media can achieve something that mainstream media cannot. It provides and caters to a range of diverse voices and communities, and those with different backgrounds – such as migrants who now mistrust mainstream news – are more likely to engage with media appropriately tailored to the unique aspects of their lives.

The global pandemic reminded us that culturally, linguistically, and religiously diverse communities don’t engage with – or trust – media in the same way as other audiences. Australia’s history of mis-representation, racist and dangerous reporting has created widespread scepticism toward conventional news channels. Examples are never far away: consider the racialising of Melbourne’s “African gang problem”, where the media have consistently targeted and vilified the South Sudanese community, eliciting an “Apology of the Year” recognition by ABC TV’s Media Watch. Such media efforts create a dangerous potential to tarnish communities, encourage further discrimination and violence, and disastrously impact social cohesion.

Multicultural media has often been labelled a small initiative, lacking the style of mainstream reporting – it is underfunded, and usually run on a volunteer basis. It’s seen as a “cute” service for nostalgic migrants, as a means of segregating people into cultural ghettos of communication, or simply tacked on as a “nice to have” on communications plans.

However, this is a gross misrepresentation of the powerful force that is multicultural and community-focused media.

Media that is community-focused and community-centric is developed in an appropriate, respectful, and impactful fashion. Through mediums like print, radio, videos and online news, community initiatives are translated to the right audiences.

Community initiatives employing these mediums are used to discuss problems, and offer solutions faced by diverse communities, with adequate consideration for their cultural, linguistic and religious backgrounds and values. Through an array of opportunities, multicultural media allows you to connect meaningfully and effectively with different groups in a way that mainstream media cannot, or will not.

So, the next time you are planning a communications campaign, consider the following.

1. Australia is a country rich with diversity and culture, it is an oversight to not cater towards the many communities within our country.

Australia has a long history of multiculturalism and is now home to Australians who identify with over 270 ancestries. Over 7 million people identify as coming from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Over one quarter of Australia’s population was born overseas. This rich, culturally diverse population is one of our greatest strengths in illustrating successful and harmonious multiculturalism. Australia has one of the highest numbers of migrants in the world and the highest immigration rates – accounting for 30 per cent of the world’s population, the greatest proportion among western countries.

Multicultural media dates back to the 1800s in Australia: the first non-English language newspaper published in Australia was a bi-lingual German newspaper. Subsequently, there were radio commercials in the 1900s that led to the foundation of the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). Their contemporary tagline, Six Billion Stories and Counting, reflects the value of SBS’s extraordinary efforts to the Australian multicultural media landscape for its cultural and creative diversity.

Today, the multicultural media landscape has expanded to over 100 community radio stations, in over 100 languages and media organisations from different cultural and religious groups, that broadcast news in print and online, in English and other languages.

2. Multicultural media is a tremendous opportunity for mindful and appropriate messaging.

Multicultural media channels have developed historically to become more mindful, influential, dynamic and pervasive in the Australian media landscape. It ensures that there is more authenticity in stories and media reporting.

Community-focused outlets and channels can facilitate a sense of belonging and social cohesion among first and subsequent generation-migrants, and drive further connection between migrants of CALD backgrounds and other social groups, especially in their local communities.

Over time, multicultural media outlets have taken matters and public affairs into their own hands, finding ways to tell their stories in their own words, empowering their community by speaking up for themselves.

Years ago, the narrative was only one viewpoint. Today, multiple viewpoints, perspectives and opinions are now shared across print, radio, video, and online, underscoring the importance of freedom of speech, and our privilege to have it in Australia.

By providing diverse and unique communities with trusted media, we can ensure that they don’t miss crucial information, while highlighting to the general Australian public that different cultures and communities face various issues – from systemic racism and discrimination – to limited access to vital resources.

3. Multicultural media fills in the gaps that mainstream media overlooks.

Through multicultural media, we are provided the opportunity to access untapped networks comprising organisations, initiatives and – most importantly – people. There are entire audiences rich in cultural diversity, background and history that aren’t consuming or appearing in mainstream news. Incredible stories are getting missed, important audiences are being ignored, and your campaign efforts are lacking a more well-rounded, inclusive and holistic approach to communications.

Off the back of the pandemic, it is unsurprising that Australians are gradually becoming more selective in their news, turning away from mainstream sources. Globally,only one in two people trust the media, with this metric in Australia experiencing one of the biggest drops over the last year.

It’s thus undeniable that community-specific media wields a unique power. Its unbiased, sincere, nuanced and grassroots reporting means that more Australians will opt for such channels. It offers a significant and meaningful contribution to the Australian media landscape.

As multicultural media continues to expand rapidly, the quality and content of these outlets has been noticed nationally in the last decade. The Australian government, in each state, has Multicultural Media Awards to showcase excellence in sharing stories and news in multicultural media outlets operating on limited budgets. The awards recognise the valuable contributions from multicultural media platforms that promote a united, harmonious and inclusive society.

Source: Multicultural media is a strong engagement lever, not a gimmick

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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