Taliban vows to purge education system of anything ‘against Islam’ as Afghan folk singer shot dead

2021/08/31 Leave a comment

No surprise:

The Taliban is planning to purge Afghanistan’s education system of all elements that are “against Islam”, according to an official, as activists and campaigners warn of a return to authoritarian rule in the country.

Speaking on Sunday, interim higher education minister Abdul Baqi Haqqani criticised the current education system that was founded by the international community, claiming that it had failed to adhere to religious principles.

“[The] world tried to take religion out of scientific education, which harmed the people,” Mr Haqqani said.

He added that “every item against Islam in the educational system will be removed”.

Mr Haqqani’s comments came as reports of the killing of an Afghan folk singer in a mountain province raised fresh concerns about the threat to human rights in the country as the Taliban works to form a new government.

The family of Fawad Andarabi said he was shot dead by a Taliban fighter in the Andarabi Valley (after which he was named), an area of Baghlan province some 100km (60 miles) north of Kabul.

“He was innocent, a singer who only was entertaining people,” his son said. “They shot him in the head on the farm.”

Mr Andarabi played a bowed lute, known as a ghichak, and sang traditional songs about his birthplace, his people and Afghanistan as a whole.

Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesperson, told reporters that the insurgent group would investigate the incident, but he could not provide any details on it.

In response to the killing, Amnesty International secretary-general Agnes Callamard said: “There is mounting evidence that the Taliban of 2021 is the same as the intolerant, violent, repressive Taliban of 2001.

“20 years later, nothing has changed on that front.”

Although the Taliban has claimed that it will lead a more moderate government in Afghanistan, many fear that women and religious minorities will once again face severe restrictions and oppression under the group’s rule.

On Sunday, former officials and lecturers at Afghan universities called on the insurgent group to maintain and upgrade the country’s education system instead of dismantling it.

Former minister of higher education Abas Basir told a conference on higher education, held by the Taliban, that starting over would be repeating a mistake made by previous governments.

“Let’s not reject everything, starting a new system: we should work more on what we already have,” Mr Basir said.

Mr Mujahid has said that a full cabinet for the new Taliban government will be announced in the coming days, with governors and police chiefs already appointed in all but one of the country’s 34 provinces.

The insurgent group is appealing to the US and other western nations to maintain diplomatic relations after the withdrawal of foreign troops is complete.

However, the UK has warned that relations will only be maintained if the new government respects human rights and allows safe passage for those who want to leave Afghanistan.

Source: Taliban vows to purge education system of anything ‘against Islam’ as Afghan folk singer shot dead

Filed under Radicalization, Religion Tagged with , ,

Latif: Tokenistic photo ops are no longer enough in this election campaign

2021/08/30 Leave a comment

Of note:

This campaign feels a bit strange for me.

I’m not as engaged as I have been in the past, when I was involved with all the federal Liberal campaigns since the 2004 election. I started off as a field organizer, and soon found my niche in community engagement, mobilizing diverse communities. Although I enjoyed my time in politics, I’ve since paused my involvement to pursue other passions, including my academic work. Taking this step back has allowed me to reflect on my efforts, and the progress made in engaging diverse communities in federal elections. 

Nearly two decades after that 2004 campaign, it’s disheartening to see political parties in this election still using the same old tactic of photo ops, unaccompanied by real policy change. But one thing is different this time around: communities are noticing. 

A recent OMNI Filipino report showed Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole coming out of Jollibee (a Filipino multinational fast food chain) in Edmonton. Community advocate Monica De Vera voiced a sentiment that could apply to any of Canada’s diverse communities: “It’s very easy for a politician to go to a Filipino establishment, instead of passing policies that help Filipino people.” 

When I was working in politics, community engagement was about celebrating cultural diversity. I spent my time doing work that would be seen as performative today, such as having politicians attend community celebrations, placing celebratory messages in newspapers on religious holidays, and bringing members of Parliament to mosques, gurdwaras and synagogues. At the time, “showing up” was important; today, it’s no longer enough.

I got so good at my political outreach work that I was actually referred to as the “Jason Kenney” of John Tory’s 2014 mayoral campaign. I didn’t enjoy the comparison, as I prided myself on the authenticity of my community work based on my lived experience, and believed Kenney was insincere. I couldn’t understand why members of so many communities applauded Kenney’s efforts, nor why the media would call him a “kingmaker.”

During his time as minister of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism, Kenney was dubbed the “Minister for Curry in a Hurry,” as he would often show up to Eid celebrations and dragon boat races. But the Conservative party he campaigned under pitted communities against each other, putting regressive policies like the “barbaric cultural practices” hotline in place.

The hypocrisy continues. After the 2017 Québec City mosque attack, Kenney — then a candidate for leadership of Alberta’s United Conservative Party — was quick to speak about his support of religious freedoms on social media. But in his previous role as the immigration minister, he did the opposite and “dictated” a niqab ban at Canadian citizenship ceremonies. This is yet another example of political leaders using rhetoric to win votes in the name of diversity. 

In a recent interview with the Straight, Vancouver-Kingsway NDP incumbent Don Davies decried the candidacy of Liberal Virginia Bremner, a Filipina-Canadian, as containing an “element of opportunism” because of the riding’s diverse demographics. Is it “opportunism” to have candidates that reflect our communities? Davies has since apologized, but the damage is done. Bremner responded via Twitter: “To claim that I lack agency to make my own decisions is sexist, racist, and rife with white privilege. It is an insult to me and all women and women of colour in politics.”

Back in 2004, people from marginalized communities didn’t even think we had an entitlement beyond a simple visit from our leaders. Now, communities expect real tangible change; we speak out and we run as candidates.

Over the past year, we’ve seen the Black Lives Matter protests, a terrorist attack against a Muslim family in London, Ont., anti-Asian violence, and the unearthed bodies of thousands of murdered Indigenous children. And yet, dismantling systemic racism and discrimination is still not the focus of the campaign trail.

Ruby Latif is a Toronto-based community mobilizer, Liberal strategist and a contributing columnist for the Star.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2021/08/29/tokenistic-photo-ops-are-no-longer-enough-in-this-election-campaign.html

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Canada is in the midst of a ‘hate crime crisis.’ Why aren’t federal leaders talking about it?

2021/08/28 Leave a comment

To be fair, the NDP platform does while the Conservative platform does not (still waiting for the official Liberal and Green platforms, will go through the PPC platform in the next few days):

New data shows that in 2019 Canadians self-reported an estimated 223,000 incidents they felt were motivated by hate — an extreme contrast to the number of incidents reported to police that same year.

According to data pulled from Statistics Canada’s 2019 General Social Survey, around 130,000 of the self-reported incidents were deemed violent by the person reporting the event, while reports of non-violent acts, including vandalism and theft of household and personal property, accounted for around 94,000 incidents.

The self-reported numbers dwarf the 1,951 incidents that police investigated as hate crimes in 2019, with the discrepancy between the numbers raising questions about how much is being reported to officials and the magnitude of hate in Canada.

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, the organization that first requested the data from Statistics Canada and shared it with the Star, attributes the gap partly to communities which may be fearful of police, as well as a failure to properly label incidents as ones motivated by hate.

The organization has called on all federal parties to put in place an action plan to address what it calls the “hate crime crisis.”

And on the campaign trail itself, political leaders criss-crossing the country and candidates canvassing the streets aren’t immune.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who encountered racist remarks during the 2019 campaign and faced them again in recent days, said Wednesday that the “climate of hate” in Canada makes people feel like they don’t belong.

“I don’t focus on myself when it comes to those moments. But I do think about the rise of hate that a lot of people have to face. I think about kids growing up with a rise in anti-Asian hate,” said Singh, sharing the story of a Chinese constituent who warned her mother to stop going on evening walks.

“I’m worried about people from the Muslim community, who are worried because of the attacks on Muslims,” he said. “I’m worried about anti-Semitism. We’ve seen attacks on synagogues, attacking and targeting Jewish people.”

On Thursday, Liberal candidate François-Philippe Champagne tweeted several images of his campaign vehicle and election signs after they were vandalized that morning. Two swastikas were spray-painted on one sign, which features images of Champagne and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau.

Fellow Liberal candidate Anthony Housefather also shared a photo of his defaced election signs earlier this week.

“Each day of the last week, Nazi symbols have been drawn on my posters. This antisemitism will not stop me but it can easily deter good people from entering politics,” Housefather tweeted, denouncing similar acts of vandalism that have appeared on other candidates’ campaign materials.

Mustafa Farooq, CEO of the National Council of Muslim Canadians (NCCM), called the incidents “atrocious” and “disturbing”.

But he also questioned why political leaders have yet to materially address Canada’s “influx of hate” during their election events.

“It’s incredibly odd to me that this has not become a major question on the campaign trail,” he said.

In the wake of the London, Ont. attack that left four members of a Muslim family dead, the national council released more than 60 policy recommendations aimed at tackling hate, including the creation of a hate crime accountability unit in each province that would improve the way incidents are processed, investigated and monitored.

Source: Canada is in the midst of a ‘hate crime crisis.’ Why aren’t federal leaders talking about it?

Filed under Hate crimes, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Fatima Syed: Focusing on Maryam Monsef’s comments on the Taliban is a distraction from what Canada should care about: protecting Afghan lives

2021/08/28 Leave a comment

Good and needed commentary on Monsef’s remarks, providing the cultural context for her her use of “brothers”:

If you watch the video of Tuesday’s ministerial meeting close enough, Maryam Monsef looks down at her prepared remarks and pauses before she calls the Taliban “brothers.”

“I want to take this opportunity to speak to our…” Monsef pauses. Her lips quiver. Her face flinches. “…brothers, the Taliban.”

At that moment, I knew exactly what she meant. I also knew exactly what she was about to suffer next, and I sensed from her pause that she might have too.

As a Pakistani-Canadian (with no actual brothers), I have called many men around me “brother,” or “bhai” in Urdu. My older male cousins, my older male friends, shopkeepers, taxi-drivers, and, yes, even government officials who are from India or Pakistan.

It is as Monsef said, “a cultural reference” (although, I would have said “cultural practice.”) I can’t give you an English equivalent because there is none. There are many cultures and communities across the Middle East and Asia that use the term “brother” in varying ways as a term for any male who is older than you, above you in rank, or in a position of power. While no two cultures are the same even if they contain many similarities, that’s the simplest way I can put it.

It’s how we all talk. We — Arabs, Afghans, South Asians and more — address people not just by name but how they are in relation to us and our place in society.

Most Canadians watching Monsef’s remarks would not have known any of this. For all the pride we have in this country’s multiculturalism and diversity, we don’t actually care to learn enough about one another’s cultures, traditions and practices — things that make this so-called melting pot of a country.

If we did, we’d understand why Monsef, an Afghan refugee who has more experience with the Taliban than me and most of us, used the term “brothers” when referring to the Taliban.

Instead, speaking on that national stage, it became obvious that it was a bad choice of words used in the wrong context, the wrong setting and the wrong moment in time and for the wrong audience.

I am troubled by Monsef’s word choice; she is a federal cabinet minister who should’ve been more careful. But I’m much more troubled by the way Canadians responded to her.

In minutes, the political right used this moment as a way to disparage the Liberal party in the midst of an election campaign with Islamophobic comments and graphics. Fear-mongering against the Muslim community started almost immediately. And as exhausting as it is, I must once again note, religion does not equal culture; they are separate and distinct (and we should probably have a mandatory class on that in every school and university across Canada.) “Sharia law” was trending on Twitter. The word “deport” was being used way too freely across the Internet. Monsef — again, a refugee who escaped the Taliban — was called a terrorist by many online.

Canadians did what they always do when a racialized cabinet minister makes a mistake or does something they don’t understand or goes against the “normal” way of things: they vilified Monsef and othered the community she belongs to at a moment when they need all of us the most. And they did all this on the day we learned that there were an estimated 223,000 self-reported hate crimes in Canada in 2019, and less than 1 per cent were captured in police-reported statistics.

I can’t imagine the strength Monsef would have needed to gather to look up at the camera during her remarks and implore the Taliban — the very group she was lucky enough to escape — to protect her former countrypeople and any family members, friends and neighbours still in Afghanistan. I can’t imagine what was going through her mind when she looked up at the camera during Tuesday’s meetings and kept her gaze squarely there to ask the Taliban to “stop the violence, the genocide, the femecide, the destruction of infrastructure.”

It doesn’t matter whether you agree with her politics or the words she used. We need Maryam Monsef now more than ever. In theory, she is the champion of those still waiting to escape or return to this country — the country we tout as a safe haven for all.

Canada, there’s work to do — and demanding the resignation of a federal cabinet minister whose culture you don’t understand isn’t on the to-do list.

You can help sponsor a family. You can help advocate for faster immigration processing times. You can donate to the various groups trying to help the almost 1,000 Afghans that have arrived in Canada in a rush, who need homes, mental health support, friends and care.

Attacking Monsef, dismissing and denouncing her culture will only create an unsafe and unwelcoming environment for new Afghan refugees. If Canada truly is the diverse, accepting society we think it is, it’s far past time we start acting like it and learning about one another.

On Thursday, Canada announced that its mission had officially ended in Kabul. A few hours later, explosions rippled near Kabul’s main airport, resulting in U.S. and civilian casualties.

A lot of Canadians are about to become “brothers” to Afghans who have lost theirs or are leaving them behind. They need us.

Fatima Syed is a Mississauga-based freelance journalist and host of The Backbench, a podcast about Canadian politics. Follow her @fatimabsyed.

Source: Focusing on Maryam Monsef’s comments on the Taliban is a distraction from what Canada should care about: protecting Afghan lives

Filed under foreign policy, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

The Worldwide Effort to Bar Chinese Immigration

2021/08/27 Leave a comment

Review of The Gold Rushes and Global Politics:

In his classic treatise on American pauperdom, “How the Other Half Lives” (1890), Jacob A. Riis, a Danish carpenter turned journalist and photographer, opines, “The Chinese are in no sense a desirable element of the population,” and “they serve no useful purpose here.” Ascribing his own failure in penetrating the inner soul of New York’s Chinatown to proverbial Oriental inscrutability, Riis asserts that each Chinese in America, unlike European immigrants, is “a homeless stranger among us.”

In hindsight, these racist statements from a progressive social reformer may sound shocking, but as Mae Ngai shows in her meticulously researched book, “The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics,” views like Riis’s actually represented the prevailing sentiment toward Chinese, not just in the United States but throughout the Anglophone world in the 19th century. Tracking the migration of Chinese to California, Australia and South Africa, Ngai, a professor of history at Columbia University, locates the beginnings of Chinese communities in those far-flung gold-producing regions, where they faced marginalization, violence and exclusion from self-described “white men’s countries.”

The so-called Chinese Question (at the time thorny social issues were called questions: the Negro Question, the Jewish Question, the Woman Question and so on) boiled down to this: Are the Chinese a racial threat to white, Anglo-American countries, and should Chinese be barred from them?

Excavating rich deposits of the past, Ngai has certainly made striking discoveries. She ties the Chinese Question to a pivotal period in the 19th century that saw the ascendence of British and American financial power spurred by gold production, colonial dispossession and capitalist exploitation. Born out of an alchemy of race and money, the history of the Chinese communities in the West, Ngai cogently argues, were not extraneous to the emergent global capitalist economy but an integral part of it.

However, making the Chinese Question central to global politics and economics is not the most noteworthy accomplishment of Ngai’s important book. From John Bigler riding the issue of Chinese exclusion successfully to the first California governor’s office in 1852 to the role that the Chinese Question played in the landmark 1906 victory by the Liberal Party in Britain, not to mention modern politicians who routinely bash China as a vote-getting ploy, Ngai’s narrative recounts events that sound all too familiar today. The Chinese became mere pawns in a cynical political game.

Ngai not only shows that anticoolieism was foundational to Western identities of nation and empire, she also demonstrates the many ways that the Chinese communities were themselves agents of change, not slavish coolies or passive victims of abuse and discrimination. Facing violence, harassment and institutionalized inequality, they looked within their own communities — forming huiguans (associations) and tongs (secret societies) when denied justice in a courtroom, building networks to the homeland when marginalized by mainstream society, seeking alternative means of influencing local politics when denied citizenship and the right to vote. Woven into these poignant and stirring stories of communal building are Ngai’s colorful profiles of little-known individuals like Yuan Sheng, Lowe Kong Meng and Xie Zixiu — “representative men” who rose to wealth and power from their humble origins in the mining camps. She describes as well accused murderers and petty criminals who tried to defend themselves in pidgin English but did not stand “a Chinaman’s chance.”

To be sure, the narrative pace is somewhat uneven and Ngai is not always successful in keeping a balance between her dry data and her storytelling. Still, her book is a deep historical study, and a timely re-examination of the persistent Chinese Question in America and elsewhere.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/books/review/the-chinese-question-mae-ngai.html

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Calls by Operation Black Vote Canada for increased representation in elections are going unanswered by party leaders

2021/08/27 Leave a comment

Never understand why these kinds of advocacy and calls do not include any data, even though this is fairly easy to obtain given work by a number of researchers.

2019 numbers to provide the most recent baseline: 50 Black candidates, 6 Black MPs. A partial explanation lies in the relative dispersion of Black Canadians in contrast to other groups (e.g., Canadian Sikhs, Chinese Canadians) that are more concentrated.

There are 21 ridings with 10 percent or more Black Canadians (2016 data) – https://multiculturalmeanderings.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/vm-ridings-black-10-percent.pdf:

Earlier this year, Parliament unanimously voted to designate Aug. 1 as Emancipation Day across Canada, commemorating the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.

While we have made progress in the almost 200 years since the first Emancipation Day, we still have a lot to do to eradicate the systemic racism that remains deeply embedded in our institutions. To do so, we must ensure that we have diversity and inclusion at decision-making tables at every level of government.

As part of its advocacy efforts, Operation Black Vote Canada (OBVC) engaged the leaders of the major political parties with elections occurring over the next 12-18 months to call for the implementation of strategies to increase the meaningful participation of Black candidates in upcoming races.

Leaders are responsible for setting the tone, priorities and direction of the campaigns their parties will run. With this authority comes both the opportunity and the responsibility of ensuring that the slates they present to voters reflect the makeup of Canada. To this end, we have asked party leaders to commit to three things:

  • Working with local electoral district associations to help nominate Black candidates in ridings with past records of success, or “winnable” ridings.
  • Ensuring that Black nomination candidates have equal access to lists, information and data to further their campaigns.
  • Ensuring that nominated Black candidates receive equally full support of their party structure throughout the election cycle, including fundraising support, leader engagement and access to all relevant data.

While we received responses from every party leader in Nova Scotia, we are still awaiting replies from the Ontario PC party, and all of the party leaders in Quebec. Despite our efforts, the only federal party to respond to date is the Green party.

Over the past year, we have heard from corporate and political party leaders that they are committed to increasing diversity in all workplaces.

The path to building a diverse caucus is paved with a diverse slate of candidates. As part of our commitment to advocate for the election of Black Canadians of all political affiliations across Canada, OBVC will continue to hold leaders and political parties to account for the lack of representation of Black Canadians at all levels of government. Black representation matters to us, and to Canada. It should matter to political party leaders as well — we know that a broader pool of lived experiences helps inform and develop public policy that reflects the needs of Canadians.

Black communities must demand that our interests and or voices are adequately represented at all decision-making tables. In the current and upcoming elections, we are asking all voters to choose wisely, looking at all the platforms and the track record of each party — including who they choose to nominate.

Ultimately, it’s up to us all to vote for a party that reflects the best interests of you, your family and your community.

Velma Morgan is the chair of Operation Black Vote Canada. She is an advocate for gender and cultural diversity in politics.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2021/08/20/calls-by-operation-black-vote-canada-for-increased-representation-in-elections-are-going-unanswered-by-party-leaders.html

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How CBC is diving deeper when it comes to newsroom diversity

2021/08/27 Leave a comment

While promotional, some interesting data of diversity within the CBC, both in the newsroom as well as management, highlighting the relative under-representation of the different visible minority and Indigenous groups. Also some interesting analysis regarding the diversity of people being interviewed (but not the thought diversity that is harder to measure and assess):

Soon after the news broke about the discovery of unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, we convened a small group of our leaders and Indigenous journalists from across the country to act as an advisory committee for the CBC division of News, Current Affairs and Local.

We knew the story would only grow. There would be more discoveries in many different parts of Canada in the months ahead. We knew there was important accountability and investigative journalism to be done, building on years of excellent work tracking Truth and Reconciliation in Canada. (See Beyond 94, for example.)

We were also aware of the pain and trauma our journalism could create, not only for survivors and their families, but for our own staff with ties to this terrible legacy.

The committee was quick to identify areas in which we could support our staff. We rolled out a special edition of our “Reporting in Indigenous Communities” training course to about 30 leaders and assignment editors involved in deploying people to cover the story. We connected with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University to create a training program specific to the residential school story that will help our journalists understand trauma and how to approach people in affected communities, while also managing their own mental well-being.

And we created a dedicated residential school unit to ensure sustained, focused investigative journalism in the months ahead. The unit created an email tip line, wherearethey@cbc.ca, which received more than 200 messages in the first few weeks. It now has a toll-free number: 1-833-824-0800.

That early and proactive impulse to set up a committee and regularly consult with our Indigenous staff as this difficult story emerged resulted in greater sensitivity and understanding — and ultimately better, more nuanced journalism.

It’s a good example of what’s possible when a news organization like ours embraces the call for greater racial representation, equity and inclusion in everything it does, at every level. It’s a step forward on a long journey, with many more steps and undoubtedly years of hard work still to come.

We are 15 months into the cultural and social revolution sparked by the murder of George Floyd. As I’ve written before, this revolution swept news organizations the world over and resulted in some profound self-reflection about how we hire and promote, our core journalistic values and who defines them, and the stories, voices and perspectives we include — or exclude — as we cover the news.

To be clear, we started this important work long before May 2020 in many parts of our organization. We have always had a duty and responsibility to authentically portray this country and, as a result, the root of nearly every inclusion challenge we face are four key questions: Who’s at the table? Who’s speaking? Who’s missing? Who’s deciding?

Here’s a brief update on some of the work happening at CBC News, Current Affairs and Local to keep us on the path forward:

Newsroom diversity survey

We are participants in the Canadian Newsroom Diversity Survey led by the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ). The results, expected this fall, will offer a comparative analysis of the gender and racial makeup of at least 170 news organizations in Canada.

CBC/Radio-Canada is an industry leader when it comes to tracking and reporting on equity and staffing, having done so since the 1980s. As a federally regulated Crown corporation, CBC reports annually on our overall staffing composition per the Employment Equity Act, but many of us want more detail.

Are we reflective of Canada’s demography in the voices you hear, see or read each day? What about behind the scenes? Does management look different from part-time staff? Can we get more detail about specific racial groups as opposed to broad Employment Equity Act definitions such as “visible minority” or terms like “people of colour”?

We saw a great opportunity to get some of these answers in the CAJ initiative.

The measurement is imperfect. For instance, our numbers — a now-outdated snapshot in time as of December 2020 — come from self-declarations on a “cultural census” that we ask staff to complete. Many employees are captured under the broad equity definitions, but they have not completed the cultural census declaration for various reasons, which means we are forced to report many “unknowns” when asked for specific information about ethnocultural identity. Our gender data is binary (CBC is in the process of changing that to include non-binary). Biracial and multiracial staff may self-identify with one or more of the available categories in the survey. How should they be more accurately represented?

Still, the data will offer a baseline and provide some clarity on where we need to focus our recruitment and promotion efforts as a news organization. Here are few of the topline results for CBC’s journalism division, with more detail to come in the CAJ release this fall:

On gender, our newsrooms skew female at all levels: senior leadership is 54 per cent female and 46 per cent male; journalists are 56 per cent female and 44 per cent male; supervisors are 59 per cent female and 41 per cent male; part-time staff are 60 per cent female and 40 per cent male.

Of senior newsroom leaders in management positions, 22 per cent are people of colour or Indigenous. Here are a few graphs that show breakdowns in more detail:

Journalists (full time):

Journalists (part time):

Supervisors:

Senior leadership:

* Notes on Senior Leadership: As this is a relatively small group of leaders, we addressed inconsistencies in the CBC cultural census data with what we know to be our leadership. We tallied leaders identified under one of the five ethnic categories and grouped everyone else under uncategorized. 

JSP and inclusion

We are also months into a review of how our Journalistic Standards and Practices (JSP) — the framework that guides our journalism — are interpreted through the lens of inclusion. A staff-led consultation led to 65 recommendations. We are moving immediately on 20 action items and continuing consultations on the rest. Among the biggest commitments included in that first set of 20:

  • We will create an advisory group involving Black, Indigenous and journalists of colour to support the JSP office.
  • We will create a separate staff advisory committee with representation from various communities to consult and support ongoing changes to our internal language and style guide.
  • We will reinforce that lived experience and being a part of any one community does not constitute a conflict of interest when covering those communities. We will remind all that we value lived experience and community connections in our journalists because it helps us to broaden and deepen our journalism.
  • We will continue to hire and promote representation at all levels of our organization, including leadership and decision-making roles. We will exceed 55 per cent representation for new hires from three equity deserving groups (people of colour, Indigenous peoples and people with disabilities) in the year ahead.

Content tracking

In addition, more than 25 CBC journalistic programs have been involved in a staff-led content-tracking pilot project that tracks who appears on our airwaves and websites. Each team aims to identify at least three aspects: gender, race/ethnicity and whether or not the subject is speaking about their race or ethnicity. We are also tracking people who have publicly identified themselves as non-binary. Additional customized questions, such as the role of the guest on the program, can be added by the teams participating in this content-tracking project.

The results provide a baseline; a check on our assumptions and intentions around gender and racial equity. We learned, for example, that of nearly 5,000 guests counted across all the participating programs, 60 per cent were male. Hard numbers like that give our teams direction and ensure they course-correct. One consumer program saw that male experts appeared more often than females, for example, and the team made a concerted effort to bring more female guests onto their show.

We learned that 64 per cent of Indigenous guests and story subjects who appeared in our programs during the pilot spoke about their race and ethnicity, compared to 34 per cent of Black guests and story subjects. There is no right or wrong with these figures, considering how prominent the story of the Indigenous experience in Canada has been in recent months of news coverage. But the data forces us to self-reflect and discuss how we should incorporate the perspectives and experiences of these equity-deserving groups in all stories we are doing, beyond just issues related to aspects of their identities.

We aim to make this project a permanent, consistent practice across News, Current Affairs and Local. The staff leading this change have done extensive research and have years of experience in content tracking in Canada. They have already been asked to share their learnings with other newsrooms with similar efforts, including the BBC, NPR and many more.

What’s next?

We’ve come a long way. We have a long way to go.

The goal is clear: We will deepen our journalism and relevance to Canadians by broadening the perspectives at all levels of our organization and in the stories we tell.

Those four fundamental questions continue to guide us: Who’s at the table? Who’s speaking? Who’s missing? Who’s deciding?

Because as Canada’s public broadcaster, with one of the most trusted news services in the country, it is critical we are authentically and truly representing this country and all of its diversity.

Source: How CBC is diving deeper when it comes to newsroom diversity

Filed under Aboriginal, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Blogging break

2021/08/19 Leave a comment

Travelling. Will resume with next COVID-19 weekly update

Filed under Multiculturalism

The word ‘racism’ doesn’t appear anywhere in the Conservative party’s campaign platform

2021/08/19 Leave a comment

Notable and significant:

Discrimination against visible and religious minorities in Canada has been hotly debated during the year leading up to this summer’s federal election, but the issue gets scant mention in the campaign platform released by the Conservative party this week.

The words “racism” and “antisemitism” do not appear anywhere in the party’s 160-page policy platform, which largely focuses on the fallout and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Nor are there any references to Black Canadians.

And in the aftermath of the deadly June attack targeting a Muslim family in London, Ont. — which saw Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole calling for “urgent action” to support Canadian Muslims — the term “Islamophobia” is missing, too.

The omissions are somewhat at odds with the opening notes of the platform, in which O’Toole writes that it is “time for Conservatives to take inequality seriously, because that’s becoming more of a problem in our country,” and says that Canada is a society where “everyone can fulfil his or her potential.”

It also doesn’t address last year’s nationwide call for racial justice, sparked by a reckoning over police brutality targeting Black and Indigenous people.

Instead, the document tackles discrimination and bridge-building through the lens of international human rights and foreign policy, rather than grappling with its existence in Canada.

Among a handful of proposals, the Conservatives would establish an Office of Religious Freedom and Conscience that advises cabinet ministers “on threats to international security, engages in diplomacy to religious communities, and informs Canadian international development programs to promote freedom, pluralism, religious coexistence and tolerance.”

The Conservatives are also promising to appoint the country’s “first Muslim ambassador and first ambassador to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation” to help engage with the world’s Muslim-majority nations.

The party also wants to see the creation of an international human rights advisory committee, made up of a “broad range of cultural and religious communities in Canada” to advise the government on issues abroad.

Mustafa Farooq, CEO of the National Council of Canadian Muslims, said that while the platform is “light” on addressing domestic Islamophobia, it does offer some encouraging promises.

The Tories acknowledged, for example, their support for the Muslim minority Uyghur population in China, and said they would boost funding and expand the accessibility of the Ottawa’s security infrastructure program, which helps protect places of worship and other institutions from hate-motivated attacks.

“Certainly, I would have liked to see clear articulations about … what they’re going to be doing to challenge Islamophobia through clear policy promises and commitments,” Farooq said.

On the other hand, the New Democrats — the only other major federal party to release its policy promises — are running on a platform that has dedicated an entire plank to confronting racism and other forms of discrimination, though the details are vague.

The NDP document emphasizes the rise in hateful incidents facing Muslim, Jewish and Black Canadians, along with Indigenous people. The party is promising to enact a national action plan to “dismantle far-right extremist organizations” and address “white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups.” The NDP is also pledging to better identify and catalogue hate-related incidents and how they are handled within Canada’s justice system.

The collection of race-based data, reviewing employment discrimination and addressing the overrepresentation of Black and Indigenous people in the federal prison population also factor into the NDP plan.

Both the NDP and the Conservatives, however, have pledged to counter online hate, with the New Democrats seeking to convene a national working group on the issue and the Tories promising to criminalize statements that encourage violence against other groups while protecting non-violent forms of speech and criticism.

The two parties have also put forth specific reconciliation plans focused on addressing the injustices wrought by the residential school system, self determination, economic development and improving access to clean drinking water.

Source: The word ‘racism’ doesn’t appear anywhere in the Conservative party’s campaign platform

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

Why Racial Inequities Still Persist in Health Care

2021/08/19 Leave a comment

Likely fewer disparities in Canada given medicare but some commonaliyies:

Two decades ago, only 9 percent of white Americans rated their health as fair or poor. But 14 percent of Hispanic Americans characterized their health in those terms, as did nearly 18 percent of Black Americans.

In recent years, access to care has improved in the wake of the Affordable Care Act, which reduced the number of uninsured Americans across all racial and ethnic groups. But the racial health gap has remained, according to a series of studies published on Tuesday in the journal JAMA.

A dismal picture of persistent health disparities in America was described in an issue devoted entirely to inequities in medicine. The wide-ranging issue included research on spending and patterns of care, comparative rates of gestational diabetes and the proportion of Black physicians at medical schools.

The journal’s editors committed to a sharper focus on racism in medicine after a controversy in June, in which a staff member seemed to suggest that racism was not a problem in health care. The ensuing criticism led to the resignation of the top editor and culminated with a pledge to increase staff diversity and publish a more inclusive array of papers.

“The topics of racial and ethnic disparities and inequities in medicine and health care are of critical importance,” Dr. Phil B. Fontanarosa, interim editor in chief of JAMA, said in a statement. He noted that JAMA has published more than 850 articles on racial and ethnic disparities and inequities in the past.

The new issue offers studies on disparities in the utilization of health care services and in overall health spending. Together, the findings paint a portrait of a nation still plagued by medical haves and have-nots whose ability to benefit from scientific advances varies by race and ethnicity, despite the fact that the A.C.A. greatly expanded insurance.

The racial health gap did not significantly narrow from 1999 to 2018, according to one study whose author said it was tantamount to “a comprehensive national report card.”

“We’re failing,” added Dr. Harlan Krumholz, the study’s senior author.

“If our national goals are to improve the population’s health and promote more health equity, then we have to admit that whatever we’re doing now is not doing the trick,” he said. “This should wake us up, and spark us to think of new and better approaches.”

Other studies in the journal teased apart factors that may be contributing to the gap, including different patterns of care-seeking. White Americans, for example, are more likely than members of minority groups to visit primary care physicians and specialists in the community, rather than a hospital or emergency room.

Source: Why Racial Inequities Still Persist in Health Care

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

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