Women executives earned about 56 per cent less on average than men executives and this pay gap widened even further for racialized women, who earned about 32 per cent less than non-visible minority women, according to a new study from Statistics Canada that underscores the sweeping disparities in Corporate Canada.
Translated into dollar figures, there was a $600,000 difference between the average woman executive’s income ($495,600) and the average executive man’s ($1.1-million). The average compensation for visible minority women was $347,100, while visible minority men took home $681,900.
The research included data from the Corporations Returns Act, which collects financial and ownership information on mid-size to large corporations, and census information from 2016.
In unpacking the gender divide at the most senior levels, researchers looked at marital status, number of children, education, backgrounds, sector of work, job title and professional networks.
One of the study’s most shocking findings concerned the number of racialized women in executive roles. There were so few Indigenous executives – both men and women – that Statistics Canada was limited in what could be reported over concerns about violating the individuals’ privacy. About 1 per cent of executives were Indigenous, although this group represents about 4 per cent of the working population. Most of the women Indigenous executives worked at large corporations.
Over all, about one in 10 women executives identified as a visible minority. The most common groups represented were South Asian and Chinese, with fewer executives being Black and Filipino.
Paulette Senior, the president and CEO of the Canadian Women’s Foundation, said the report’s findings were extremely concerning.
“It’s worse than I thought,” she said. “This makes me wonder what have we been doing? What have decision makers been doing in addressing [these issues] – whether it’s a leaky pipeline, or who is sitting at tables during hiring. What has been going on that this is the picture in 2021?”
Statistics Canada’s findings are in keeping with an analysis that The Globe and Mail conducted as part of its Power Gap investigation, which has been examining gender inequities in the modern work force. The series found that among women in the top 1 per cent of earners, just 3 per cent were racialized. In general, women were found to be outnumbered, outranked and out-earned by almost every measure examined.
Elizabeth Richards, who co-authored the Statistics Canada paper, said one of the most intriguing findings concerned companies that operate in Canada but are American owned. The researchers found that visible minority women were five times more likely than non-visible minority women to work at one of these American-controlled companies. The same trend – to a lesser degree – was also found with visible minority men, she said.
“That’s a key takeaway,” Ms. Richards said. “That to me says there’s some more country-specific influences that maybe we don’t fully understand and we should dig into further in future research.”
The analysts also examined the family status of the executives. Women were less likely to be in a relationship – about 80 per cent of women executives were married or in a common-law relationship, compared with 90 per cent of men – or to have children. When they did have children, they had fewer of them. About 36 per cent of women executives had two or more children, while about 44 per cent of men did.
The report also found that women executives were, on average, younger than the men – 51 years old compared with 54 years old respectively.
Economist Marina Adshade, an assistant professor with the University of British Columbia, said the finding about age was interesting and perhaps a clue as to the cause of the pay gap. In her own research, she’s found that women are retiring early, perhaps before they can fully reach their potential on the corporate ladder.
Prof. Adshade said that, as a country, the focus has been on keeping women with young children in the work force – which is important – but there hasn’t been enough attention paid to what’s happening at the other end of the career spectrum.
“We are starting to lose women in the work force at 45, 55, 65,” she said. “Why are women leaving the work force? … They have other caregiving responsibilities: caring for parents, spouses, grandchildren, for example. Older women are so undervalued that literally no one wants to think about why they’re not in the work force.”
Prof. Adshade noted that the average age of a senior manager in the federal government is 53, so if women are starting to retire at 45, it’s not surprising they are underrepresented at the top.
Another rationale for the executive wage gap that has been suggested is that women’s networks are smaller. Ms. Richards said that she and her co-author Léa-Maude Longpré-Verret were interested in seeing whether this held true with their dataset – it didn’t.
“There is some previous research that suggests that being connected to more executives leads to higher pay,” Ms. Richards said, “but what we found is that women actually had more extensive networks of colleagues.”
The reason is that women were more likely to sit on large boards with more members. On average, women directors were found to be connected to 7.5 colleagues through their board positions, while men were connected to 6.7 colleagues. Women were also more likely to be connected to other women directors.
Ms. Richards said that in their report, the goal was to quantify the extent of the imbalances in as many ways as possible, but the root causes will be for someone else to explore.
“Hopefully this provides some valuable information for other researchers,” she said. “We wanted to leverage everything that we could from the analysis and share our findings, but it is preliminary and it is exploratory so we would recommend that the academic business community or other researchers continue to really provide more insights in this space.”
While arguably Canada has done better than Australia in recent times, some unfortunate common elements in our early history, ranging from our anti-Indigenous policies and practices to immigration and wartime restrictions against minority groups.
And, a memory from a high school English class where we looked at utopias in literature, Thomas More “coined the word ‘utopia’ from the Greek ou-topos meaning ‘no place’ or ‘nowhere’. It was a pun – the almost identical Greek word eu-topos means ‘a good place’.”
Roman Quaedvlieg standing tall in his smart black suit — medals glistening, insignia flashing — looked every bit the man-in-uniform from central casting when he posed between then Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton on 1 July 2015 to launch a new paramilitary unit to protect Australia’s borders.
Australian Border Force was modelled on a similar agency created in Britain two years earlier but with a distinctive accent. Its Operation Sovereign Borders had changed the culture of military, policing and customs agencies in Australia as they were pushed out of their silos with a new shared priority: stop refugees arriving by boat.
Just 14 months earlier Scott Morrison, then the Immigration Minister, had announced the formation of the new armed and uniformed force, describing it as the “reform dividend from stopping the boats”.
The 70 year-old department had gained a new role: “Border Protection”. The old tags — “Multiculturalism”, “Citizenship” and “Ethnic Affairs” — were artefacts of other ages when population growth coupled with social cohesion had been the goal. The armed Border Force that had emerged out of the chrysalis of the old customs service, complete with new uniforms, ranks and insignia, on that mid-winter day was another sign of Canberra’s increasing preoccupation with security and militarisation.
He liked to reassure people that Australia would still be taking more than its share of refugees, but the proportion of overseas-born residents fell over the early years of his prime ministership. After decades of multiculturalism the Australian ear was once again being attuned to new arrivals as threat.
Taking it to the streets
By 2015, Australia’s proportion of overseas-born residents was nudging the all-time high of 30% reached in the 1890s, but multiculturalism was still a grubby word.
Without irony, Commissioner Quaedvlieg cut to the chase, reducing the new nearly 6,000-strong agency’s role to its essence: “to protect our utopia”. Decades before, the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin had elegantly demolished the idea of utopias, suggesting they were “a fiction deliberately constructed as satires intended to shame those who control existing regimes”.
A month after the launch of Border Force, its first big public exercise, Operation Fortitude, was announced. Officers were to walk the streets of Melbourne and seek proof of the right of residence of “any individual we cross paths with”. The warning was clear: If you commit border fraud you should know it’s only a matter of time before you are caught.
The residents of the Melbourne branch of “our utopia” fought back with a dose of theatricality, to prove Berlin’s point, and the joint operation with the Victorian Police was abandoned in a flurry of protests and press releases. Prime Minister Abbott declared, “Nothing happened here except the issue of a poorly worded press release”.
Within a couple of years, the uniformed commissioner from central casting had gone. The intent, however, remained clear. Immigration might be at an all-time high, but exclusion was still the key, and national security was at the centre of Australian public life.
Ills of the past and present
Deciding who could come and the circumstances under which they could enter the country has, as we have been again reminded during COVID times, been central to the management of the Australian utopia since 1901.
[…] idea of the perfect society is a very old dream, whether because of the ills of the present which lead men to conceive what their world would be like without them … or perhaps they are social fantasies – simple exercises in the poetical imagination.
Australia at the time of Federation was awash with bad poetry by mediocre poets. So if conceiving the nation as a utopia was an exercise of the poetical imagination, it was inevitably flawed.
The first step towards the creation of Australia’s white utopia was brutal and relentless. It depended on the humiliation and elimination, by design and neglect, of the million First Nations people who in 1788 still called the continent home as they had done for countless generations, managed with an elaborate, ancient patchwork of languages, social relations, trade and lore.
Although the Australian Constitution explicitly excluded them from the census, by the time the 3.7 million new arrivals became Australians in 1901, the First Nations population had been reduced, systematically and deliberately, to about 90,000 people.
The men who debated the legislation that would shape the new nation preferred to avert their eyes. They were not, however, ignorant of what had gone before.
Even in a world shaped by race there was argument, opposition and some shame. Months after Australia became legally, unequivocally white, the parliament debated whether to recognise the survivors who preceded them.
The senate leader and future High Court justice Richard O’Connor argued that just as the right to vote was being extended to women — because in some states, they already had the franchise — the same principle should apply to Aboriginal people who had the right to vote in four of the former colonies. “It would be a monstrous thing, an unheard-of piece of savagery”, he declared, “to treat the Aboriginals whose land we were occupying to deprive them absolutely of any right to vote in their own country”.
We are told we have taken their country from them. But it seems a poor sort of justice to recompense those people for the loss of the country by giving them votes.
This argument prevailed. White women and Maori were the only exceptions: “no aboriginal native of Australia, Asia, Africa or the Islands of the Pacific” could enrol to vote. Within its first two years, the parliament had failed two moral tests.
At the heart of the Australia embraced by those who met in Melbourne in the Federation Parliament was the idea of a model society populated by men like them. Utopian dreams had played out in many ways in shaping the new nation. A decade earlier, nearly 300 colonialists sailed to Paraguay in a flawed attempt to create a more perfect, and even whiter, society called New Australia.
Prime Minister Edmund Barton, in the middle of the first year of the century, firmly grounded the new nation in the “instinct of self-preservation quickened by experience”. Optimism tempered by fear.
What became known as the White Australia policy was necessary, he said, because “we know that coloured and white labour cannot exist side by side; we are well aware that China can swamp us with a single year’s surplus population”.
Future prime minister Billy Hughes spelt out the two steps of this dance when he candidly observed that having “killed everybody else to get it”, the inauguration of Canberra — which they considered calling Utopia — as the national capital “was unfolding without the slightest trace of the race we have banished from the face of the earth […] we should not be too proud lest we should too in time disappear. We must take steps to safeguard the foothold we now have”.
Fresh eyes
In 1923 Myra Willard — a recent graduate of the University of Sydney — paid Melbourne University Press to publish its first monograph, her book History of the White Australia Policy to 1920. She wrote with a contemporaneous eye.
The debates in the colonies before Federation were still close enough for the lines between them and the 1901 legislation to be thickly etched with detail. She grimly recounted the way each colony penalised and excluded “coolies” and “celestials”.
“The desire to guard themselves effectively against the dangers of Asiatic immigration was one of the most powerful influences which drew the Colonies together,” she wrote. She quoted with approval the now infamous speech by Attorney-General Alfred Deakin in which he described the principle of white Australia as the “universal motive power” that had dissolved colonial opposition to Federation. At heart, he declared, was “the desire that we should be one people and remain one people without the admixture of other races”.
The Australian utopia depended on a “united race”. This would be ensured by “prohibiting the intermarriage and association that could degrade”. As Deakin declaimed in September that year, “inspired by the same ideas and an aspiration towards the same ideals of a people possessing a cast of character, tone of thought … unity of race is an absolute essential to the unity of Australia”.
The legislation was finally, if somewhat reluctantly, signed by Governor General Lord Hopetoun just before Christmas 1901. London was discomfited by the determination of the new nation to exclude and proposed amendments to save face with her imperial allies in Europe and Japan. Willard wrote in 1923, “Australia’s policy does not as yet seem to be generally understood or sanctioned by world opinion”. It was, she maintained, despite the negative connotations, really a positive policy that ensured Australia would be a productive global contributor of resources and supplies.
By the time the legislation passed, those with Chinese heritage were fewer than they had been in the 19th century. It did not take long before Indian residents who had lived in Fremantle for years, as British subjects, were denied the right to return to Australia after visiting their homeland. Those of German heritage, who made up about 5% of the population at the turn of the century, soon became pariahs — wartime internment was followed by the deportation of 6,000 Australians of German heritage.
Gough Whitlam revoked the policy as one of his first acts as prime minister.
“Right up to our election in 1972”, he recalled, “there had to be, from any country outside Europe, an application for entry referred to Canberra and a confidential report on their appearance […] The photograph wasn’t enough, because by a strong light or powdering you could reduce the colour of your exposed parts. It was said that the test was in extreme cases, ‘Drop your daks’ because you can’t change the colour of your bum’.”
For Michael Wesley, now deputy vice chancellor international at the University of Melbourne, and thousands of others, this meant that his Australian-born mother could return home with her Indian husband and brown babies without fear of deportation.
The echoes still resonate. Fast forward to this year, when the average time in immigration detention rose to 627 days and the then Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, describeddeporting New Zealand-born long-term Australian residents who had been jailed as “taking the trash out”.
The suite of bills passed in that first parliament — at least as much as the Constitution — determined the social nature of Australia for much of the 20th century. As Deakin said a couple of years after the White Australia policy was adopted, “it goes down to the roots of our national existence, the roots from which the British social system has sprung”.
By the time he was prime minister, the bureaucratic method of exclusion was even clearer: “the object of the [language] test is not to allow persons to enter the Commonwealth, but to keep them out”. John Howard could not have asked for a better crib sheet than the speeches of the Federation Parliament when preparing his 2001 election campaign.
Survival against the odds
That Australia has emerged as a cohesive multicultural society, with people drawn from hundreds of different countries — and increasingly from those that were once explicitly excluded — is a remarkable achievement. That the First Nations people have survived is in many ways even more remarkable.
But the foundation story of our notional utopia is still undigested and recurs unwittingly in policy language and political rhetoric, in legal and administrative practice and personal abuse.
The brutal speed and wilful political rejection of the Uluru Statement from the Heart would have shamed even the members of the Federation Parliament; the failure to turn enquiry into action on the oldest issue in the land — treaty, truth-telling and settlement with the descendants of those who have always been here — is unconscionable.
Methods of border control are now more likely to be couched in the convoluted small print attached to visas, employment conditions and bureaucratic processes, but at some level the old order prevails — there has been no national apology to those who were humiliated by the White Australia policy, no formal truth-telling to address these sins of the past at a national level. It has taken 23 years for the compensation recommended by Stolen Children inquiry to be parsimoniously granted.
Hands are thrown up in mock astonishment when another example of institutional or official racism, discrimination or maltreatment makes the headlines. Over a decade, the cost of detaining (and breaking) those refugees who felt compelled to leave their homeland reached double-digit billions. International criticism is once again worn with bravado as a badge of honour rather than a mark of shame. It was surprisingly easy to jettison 50 years of careful relationship-building with China.
Ever since those first debates in the Federation Parliament there has been a moral deficit in Australian politics, a reluctance to go back to first principles, to meaningfully make amends. Until this is addressed there will always be an action deficit. The big public health campaigns have not extended to addressing the lingering racism that has equally pernicious consequences.
No national political leaders rose to the defence of Adam Goodes when the 2014 Australian of the Year was called “an ape” and booed off the footy field. None came to the defence of Yassmin Abdel-Magied when she sought to contribute to public life. The response to the never-ending list of Aboriginal deaths in custody is couched in mealy-mouthed administrivia.
When Prime Minister Julia Gillard was battered by misogynist hectoring, the message to other women was clear: don’t get ideas above your station. Almost every week a woman dies at the hands of her intimate partner, but overwhelmed police seem powerless to help.
Our treatment of refugees attracts a global condemnation that is dismissed as readily today as it was in 1901. Behrouz Boochani will probably never set foot in the country he described so searingly in his much awarded No Friend but the Mountains, and despite public support, the Murugappans — the Biloela family — spent nearly three years in costly detention on Christmas Island.
Yet when the government banned Australian citizens and permanent residents who happened to be in India as COVID raged from returning home under threat of fines and jail terms, the outcry was impossible to ignore.
The brutality of the old ways still lives in the memory. A colleague recalled her traumatic fear, during the family’s first trip to India with their Pakistani-born father, that the White Australia policy would be reintroduced and they would be denied re-entry. It had happened to those returning to Fremantle Harbour a century earlier — and, astonishingly, again in 2021.
Utopia out of step
Public sentiment is at odds with that of those who are most committed to the old status quo. Survey after survey shows a populace willing to embrace change that means people are treated better. But there are few leaders willing to make the case, fearful of an imagined backlash, rather than embracing the need for big tough conversation. Transformation is left to the slow accretion of a new normal.
Tens of thousands turned up at the football waving “I stand with Adam” banners years before the AFL officially apologised to Goodes.
Those affronted by official treatment of refugees engage in endless protest campaigns, travel to detention centres, provide support and lobby. The Black Lives Matter movement has galvanised some of the biggest demonstrations seen in the country, despite COVID, and the calls for action on the unfinished business of the 33-old Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the other inquiries are becoming impossible to ignore.
There is much to be learnt from First Nations people. Their survival and generosity is an inspiration that needs to be taken seriously and acted upon. Without righting this foundational wrong, this country will be forever stuck on a political treadmill, running but going nowhere.
Art speaks volumes
It is striking that one of the most important Aboriginal artists to have captivated the world came from a place called Utopia. Hers was the land of the Alyawarr people for millennia before its brief life as a cattle station. It is a place as impoverished as any of the remote settlements in northern Australia, returned to their traditional owners with only grudging support from the state. But the semi-arid country is the source of dreaming and a culture that speaks to the world when brought to life on canvas. Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s paintings are displayed in galleries, palaces and private collections around the world.
They are more than great works of art. It is what Australian art always aspired to be. In the words of the influential Aboriginal scholar and advocate Marcia Langton, Emily’s paintings
[…] fulfil the primary historical function of Australian art by showing the settler Australian audience, caught ambiguously between old and new lands, a new way to belong in this place rather than another […]
Creating a utopia, or at least an aspiration to do better, requires more imagination and courage than our current system of professional politics permits.
It needs more art and better faith. Politics, like everything else, is now in thrall to corporate modes of organisation and communication.
The emphasis is on the mission (to get elected) and KPIs (to deliver on promises). The headline of every corporate plan is the “vision”. It is always the hardest thing to define. But without a vision, any plan is meaningless. Our utopia needs a new vision, one not tinged by shame. The old ones have failed the test of time.
This is an edited extract of Facing foundational wrongs — careful what you wish for, republished with permission from GriffithReview73: Hey Utopia!, edited by Ashley Hay.
Of note, particularly the significant increase of the number of people reporting they were more than one race. In Canada, the category “multiple visible minorities” is minuscule, less than one percent of the total population and only three percent of visible minorities (2016 census):
The United States grew significantly more diverse over the past decade, as the populations of people who identify as Hispanic and Asian surged and the number of people who said they were more than one race more than doubled, the Census Bureau reported on Thursday.
Overall population growth slowed substantially over the past decade, but the growth that did occur — an increase of about 23 million people — was made up entirely of people who identified as Hispanic, Asian, Black and more than one race, according to the data, the first racial and ethnic breakdown from the 2020 census.
The white population declined for the first time in history. People who identify themselves as white on the census form have been decreasing as a share of the country’s population since the 1960s, when the United States lifted strict ethnic quotas aimed at keeping the country Northern and Western European.
That drop, of 2.6 percent, was driven in part by the aging of the white population — the median age was 44 in 2019, compared with 30 for Hispanics — and a long-running decline in the birthrate. Some social scientists theorized that another potential reason for the decrease was that more Americans who previously identified as white on the census are now choosing more than one race.
The single biggest population increase was among people who identified as more than one race, a category that first appeared on census forms 20 years ago, and now is the fastest-growing racial and ethnic category.
People who identify as white now make up 58 percent of the population, down from 64 percent in 2010, and 69 percent in 2000.
The data also showed that just under a majority of people under the age of 18 checked boxes other than white — multirace, Hispanic, Asian, or Black — a milestone that is the result of a substantially more diverse younger American population. A decade ago, 65 percent of children were white. Overall, the number of Americans under the age of 18 declined, partly an effect of the drop in the birthrate, according to William Frey, chief demographer at the Brookings Institution.
Thursday’s numbers provide this census’ first picture of changes in the American population below the level of states.
The five largest cities in the country are now New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix. Philadelphia is now the sixth largest city, bumped from fifth by Phoenix, which was the fastest growing of the top 10 largest cities. Its population rose by 11.2 percent.
The Villages, a retirement community in Florida, was the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country over the decade.
The data, charting which parts of the country have seen growth and decline, have a practical use in politics. They are the basis for redistricting, a process in which state legislatures redraw voting lines based on changes in their states’ populations.
The new data show that Hispanics accounted for about half the country’s growth over the past decade, up by about 23 percent. The Asian population grew faster than expected — up by about 36 percent, a rise that made up nearly a fifth of the country’s total. Nearly one in four Americans now identifies as either Hispanic or Asian. The Black population grew by 6 percent, an increase that represented about a tenth of the country’s growth. Americans who identified as non-Hispanic and more than one race rose the fastest, jumping to 13.5 million from 6 million.
And in what appears to be a big shift in how Hispanics think of their racial identity, one third of Hispanics reported being more than one race, up from just 6 percent in 2010. That means that Hispanics are now nearly twice as likely to identify as multiracial than as white.
Hispanic origin is counted as an ethnicity, and is a distinct category from race. But Hispanics can also check race boxes.
Richard Alba, a sociologist who has studied demographics and the fluidity of racial categories, said the rise in multiracial Americans was a logical extension of the substantial mixing that has been happening for years in the United States.
Among Asians and Hispanics, more than a quarter marry outside their race, according to the Pew Research Center. For American-born Asians, the share is nearly double that.
The jump in the multirace category is partly to do with the Census Bureau collecting more detailed data, Professor Alba said, and analyzing answers more deeply. He said he believed that part of the decrease in the white population was people switching from the category of white to the category of more than one race.
“The census is doing a much better job at reflecting the growing complexity of the population,” he said. “They are really trying to acknowledge that the world is changing out there.”
The nation has been growing more diverse for decades, but recently the pace has accelerated. Non-Hispanic white people accounted for 46 percent of population growth in the 1970s, 36 percent in the 1980s, 20 percent in the 1990s, but just 8 percent of the growth in the first decade of this century and now zero in the 2010s.
Immigration is a force that has bolstered the American population, and boosted the economy, bringing a younger work force that is helping support a growing older population.
Despite the dramatic slowdown in immigration at the end of the decade, the proportion of U.S. residents born in foreign countries is still at its highest point since the last big immigration wave around the turn of the 20th century.
Immigrants who have arrived in more recent years have largely been from countries in Asia and Latin America and have tended to settle in large cities, like New York and Los Angeles.
But over time, Hispanic and Asian immigrants and their children have fanned out broadly across the country, to smaller towns and rural areas.
That migration has helped support the numbers of people in rural places: Over the past decade, rural places lost both Black and white residents — their populations in those places each dropped by about five percent — but the numbers of people who identify as Hispanic and Asian continued to rise. In 2000, Hispanic and Asian residents made up just 6 percent of the rural population. Now it’s nearly 10 percent.
But that increase was not enough to stem the tide out of rural places, which ultimately lost population over the decade, a change from the previous decade, when rural places made modest gains.
The biggest winners in population growth were suburbs and retirement communities in the South and the West. In counties considered to be retirement destinations, the population jumped by 17 percent.
Industrial cities in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions saw the biggest population losses, places such as Saginaw, Flint and Detroit in Michigan; Gary, Ind.; and Youngstown, Ohio.
The counties that have changed the most demographically over the past decade tended to be places that started out overwhelmingly white. Counties like Luzerne in Pennsylvania and Forsythe in Georgia are among the biggest gainers of diversity since 2010. Also high on the list are two counties in North Dakota, Cass and Ward, and Livingston Parish in Louisiana.
Now, about 98 percent of Americans live in a county with an increasing number of Latinos, and 95 percent live in a county where the Asian population is on the rise. Diversity is rising in 19 out of every 20 counties.
Still, growth slowed dramatically, even for Hispanics and Asians, driven in part by declining birthrates, as well as a drop in immigration. For example, the population of Asian people grew at just half the rate of the previous decade, when it rose by about 43 percent. Growth in the Hispanic population had an even steeper decline.
Growth in the Black population slowed too, but was still broad. All but nine states gained Black residents and the Black share of the population went up in 32 states. While half the nation’s population growth occurred in the South, 70 percent of Black population growth occurred in those states. The vast majority of the Black population growth was suburban. It increased by 6 percent overall but 12 percent in suburban neighborhoods.
And in a new twist likely to draw demographers’ attention, the Black population fell in Black-majority neighborhoods but rose in neighborhoods where Black people made up less than 10 percent of the population.
The white population may have declined nationally, but it grew in certain parts of the country. As in previous decades, the vast majority of white population growth occurred in neighborhoods that were mostly white to begin with — largely exurbs at the outer edges of metro areas.
Nearly three dozen states lost white population and all but the District of Columbia, which is treated as a state for statistical purposes, saw the share of white residents drop.
Race may be socially constructed but the understanding of it has important political effects. One change that has been politically resonant has been the shrinking share of the white population, with the right seeing the shift as a threat and the left celebrating it as a kind of demographic destiny in which growing numbers of people of color will vote for Democrats.
Professor Jiménez, whose county, Santa Clara, in California, became minority white more than 20 years ago, said these two views are most common among highly politicized Americans, and that most people don’t notice diversity.
“You go to places that have been majority-minority for a long time and the diversity is banal — it’s not like everyone has bumper stickers saying celebrate diversity,” he said. “It’s not something they celebrate or panic over. It’s mostly just a fact of life.”
Less antisemitic than against certain Israeli government policies and practices IMO:
An exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester that addresses violence used by Israeli forces against Palestinians has been accused of antisemitism by a UK-based legal organisation that advocates for Israeli causes.
Devised by the Turner Prize-nominated artist research group Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies (until 17 October) examines how power structures shape the air we breathe, surveying instances across the globe—including Israeli military action in Palestine and the West Bank—to show the toxic environmental effects of chemical warfare such as tear gas and bomb clouds.
An introductory text to a film in the exhibition begins: “Forensic Architecture stands with Palestine” and continues to outline experiences of “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinian neighbourhoods by “Israeli police and settlers”. It continues stating that the Palestinian liberation struggle “is inseparable from other global struggles against racism, white supremacy antisemitism, and settler colonial violence”.
In response, Daniel Berke, the director of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), a Manchester-based legal charity supporting Israel, has written to the vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester, to which the Whitworth belongs, claiming that the exhibition’s language seems “designed to provoke racial discord”.
Of chief concern, Berke writes, is the impact of the show on Jewish people in Manchester, citing reports of a marked upswing in cases of antisemitism in the UK following a period of increased violence in Gaza in May.
Installation view of Cloud Studies at Whitworth Gallery, ManchesterImage: Courtesy of Forensic Architecture and Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester
Due to the fact that the Whitworth is connected to a public university, the letter states, the institution is legally bound by the Public Sector Equality Duty, a set of guidelines created under the 2010 Equality Act. The UKLFI claims that the exhibition infringes upon some of the act’s mandates, including the “elimination of discrimination, harassment and victimisation”, and the consideration to “foster good relations between different communities”.
UKLFI further cites an email written by the artist Daniel Mort, also seen by The Art Newspaper, that criticises the Whitworth’s “one-sided” curatorial stance, saying: “The exhibition text is presented as fact without any context and is full of inaccuracies and omissions—not least in the absence of any mention of Hamas who escalated both the unrest within Israel and the Gaza hostilities.”
Mort also challenges the “dangerous conflation of Israeli policy and action with colonialism and white supremacism. “This kind of simplistic view, when presented on a gallery wall in a semi-educational guise, is all too often accepted without question by visitors who may have little in-depth knowledge of a given situation. As such it is extremely divisive,” he says.
However, the Israeli-born director of Forensic Architecture Eyal Weizman defended the exhibition. Speaking to the Jewish Chronicle he said: “We did not report on the rockets, nor did we report on the reason that the rockets were fired, in the dispossession of Palestinian families in Jerusalem and the tear gassing of al Aqsa Mosque”, he said.
Weizman also pushes back against claims that the show would lead to an increase in antisemitism in Manchester, adding: “I disagree with those that say so: like anti-Palestinian racism, we oppose and condemn antisemitism, and wrote it in our statement.”
The letter from UKLFI adds that Weizman is “banned from the US on security grounds”, and “opposed the internationally recognised definition of antisemitism”.
In a statement shared with The Art Newspaper, a spokeswoman for Forensic Architecture says: “As evident in our 10 years of work—in both the form and content of our investigations into settler colonial violence around the world—we work with communities to oppose all forms of anti-Palestinian racism, fascism, white supremacy, and anti-Semitism.”
A spokesperson for the Whitworth tells The Art Newspaper that the gallery “takes the concerns expressed very seriously and is in discussions with relevant community groups and exploring as a priority steps that may be taken to address the concerns which have been raised regarding aspects of the exhibition.”
“We do understand that this particular work is challenging and can be difficult and that it may cause strong reactions from those who disagree with its content. Any suggestion that this is in some way discriminatory is a real cause for concern for the Whitworth Gallery which holds dearly its commitment to a zero tolerance of all forms of racism.”
This incident marks the latest run-in between UKLFI and the Whitworth. Last month, the gallery was forced to remove a statement posted on its website following an intervention from UKLFI. UKLFI claimed that the statement, made in solidarity with Palestine, was “divisive” and “likely to cause fractions” at a vulnerable time for the Jewish community.
Protests by communities affected by prejudice, discrimination and racism appear to be on the rise, as evidenced by the Black Lives Matter, and the Indigenous-led Cancel Canada Day and Land Back advocacy movements. These are in response to deaths by Black people and Indigenous youth in police custody, and anti-Muslim, anti-Asian and anti-Semitic hate incidents and crimes in both Canada and the United States.
At the same time, there has been greater understanding amongst most Canadians regarding systemic issues and broader support of individuals and groups most affected. But government and societal responses have been largely reactive, involving symbolic measures such as summits, funding and communications initiatives.
Why aren’t current approaches working? These types of targeted initiatives generally preach to the converted, and thus have limited reach and impact. They often understate the diverse experience within communities, and how racism intersects with gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic ancestry, mixed identities and class. The problems are complex and multi-faceted, and there are no easy or quick solutions. Summits, conferences and even parliamentary hearings are designed for the short-term, and do not commit the time and resources for in-depth examination and discussion of fundamental issues.
While these approaches respond to the community and political needs, a deeper examination of the common issues across all groups and a more integrated approach is needed.
Racism is a concern in Canada, present and future, given the rapidly increasing Indigenous and immigrant-origin population. An in-depth and independent examination of the issues, challenges and possible solutions is needed, and there must be broad consultations and engagement with all affected groups.
What would be some of the requirements for such an enquiry?
Canada has changed dramatically since 1963, and an enquiry would have to address the impact of today’s increased and more varied diversity. Immigrant source countries have shifted away from Europe, which was the source of 61.6 per cent of recent immigrants in 1971, compared with 11.6 per cent in 2016. Christian affiliation declined from 78 per cent of immigrants who arrived prior to 1971 to 47.5 per cent of those who arrived between 2006 and 2011. One-third of those arriving between 2001 and 2011 identified as Muslim, Hindu, Sikh or Buddhist. LGBTTQ issues were not discussed in the 1960s, and the major gap in employment equity legislation and reports is an indication of this silence, even though these groups have become more visible and accepted. And more Canadians have complex, mixed identities, reflecting this increased diversity within and between different groups.
Essential aspects of an enquiry
While it should be established by the government, the enquiry’s deliberations and recommendations should also be independent and nonpartisan.
It needs to have a broad mandate that includes research, independent studies and public consultations on barriers to inclusion. We have more than enough research and data by sociologists, political scientists and economists regarding the socio-economic, education and health disparities of different groups.
However, more interdisciplinary research and analysis by social psychologists, neuroscientists and policy-makers is needed on how bias and prejudice form, which groups are most vulnerable and why, and the most effective ways to counter prejudice, discrimination and hate.
It would need to have an adequate budget and resources to fulfill its mandate, comparable to other major commissions.
It would have to adopt a broad intersectional lens, not looking at individual groups in isolation but at the inter-relationships among gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic ancestry, mixed identities and class. It would have to look at minorities and majorities within each group and the degrees of inclusion and exclusion within and between them.
The consultations would have to be designed to go beyond the normal advocacy groups, and include more diverse and marginal voices to help break down the silos and identify commonalities. It is important to recognize that Canadians are affected by immigration and diversity in different ways, depending in part on their socio-economic status, workplace and education. And while this is not without risk, the consultations need to include individuals and groups that have some discomfort with increased diversity or have been negatively affected by immigration.
The enquiry must look not just at bias, discrimination and racism between the “mainstream” majority and minority groups, but also at that between visible, religious and gender minority groups. In other words, it must break away from the simplistic dichotomy that has mostly characterized the current diversity and inclusion discourse, which does not adequately reflect Canada’s present and projected diversity.
Practical solutions and approaches should be the focus; ones that can be implemented by governments and organizations over time; and where progress can be tracked, measured and reported. The tracking of the progress of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action could provide a model.
Canadians, long-established and newcomers alike, are increasingly coming to terms with our legacies of injustice against Indigenous peoples, as well as against racialized, religious, LGBTTQ, and other minorities. Despite considerable progress in removing legislative and other barriers to inclusion, the effects of these legacies linger in ongoing inequalities and inequities.
While many Canadians are reaching out and supporting communities that experience hate, the increase in hate crimes and incidents against individuals and groups indicates we cannot be complacent.
Reducing the influence of the more extreme groups that undermine social inclusion and cohesion would be a key aim. Developing practical recommendations to do this would be an important first step.
As we saw with Quebec’s Bouchard-Taylor Commission, there is a risk that a broad enquiry will provide space for those with more xenophobic views. However, not allowing any space for those with immigration and diversity concerns would mean missing those who need to be reached.
Canada depends on immigration to address an aging population, and it also needs to provide better opportunities for younger Indigenous populations, so a comprehensive national enquiry is needed to ensure that we have the evidence-based knowledge to reduce bias, prejudice and discrimination so all Canadians, whatever their origin, ancestry or religion, can fully participate and contribute.
Good and legitimate question, unfortunately almost rhetorical in nature:
Another day, another heartbreaking headline.
There have been so many about the “two Michaels” and Robert Schellenberg, Canadians locked away in China who appear to be political pawns in a game we cannot win.
I knew diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig when I worked as a correspondent in China. Since his arrest in late 2018, there has been a permanent twist in the pit of my stomach. I know my friend will likely spend a large part of his life in jail.
So please believe me when I say my intention in pointing out an uncomfortable truth that underlies the saga of the detained Canadians isn’t to diminish the tragedy of seeing any life treated as political leverage by Beijing.
But the truth is we should have seen this coming. And we chose not to.
Kovrig and Michael Spavor, a Canadian entrepreneur, were both arrested in China days after Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou was detained in Vancouver. She comes from a powerhouse Chinese family. Her arrest has been seen as an insult by Beijing and officials have made it clear they will not release the men unless Meng walks free.
On Jan. 14, 2019 — a month after the Meng arrest — a court in northeastern China summoned Schellenberg to a hasty one-day retrial. The Canadian was already serving a 15-year prison sentence, having been found guilty of joining a methamphetamine-smuggling operation. In an unusual move, authorities welcomed foreign journalists into the courtroom to watch the retrial, suggesting China wanted the world to watch as the court upgraded his sentence to death. On Monday, Schellenberg lost his appeal.
Three years ago, this harrowing combination of “hostage-taking” and “death-threat” diplomacy seemed to take Canada and the wider Western world by surprise. This was because until then, it had been widely ignorant of the many times China had taken foreigners of Asian descent as political prisoners.
But in fact, Schellenberg isn’t even the only Canadian to receive a death sentence on drug charges following Meng’s arrest.
I’m ashamed to admit that before researching this column, I had missed the news that three other Canadians were sentenced to death within two years of Meng’s arrest. Ye Jianhui, Xu Weihong and Fan Wei all face death.
They are Canadians, but they aren’t white.
Other forsaken Canadians behind bars in China have included those of Asian origin, such as Sun Qian, a Falun Gong practitioner who was arrested in Beijing in 2017 for her involvement with “heretical religious organizations,” and Huseyin Celil, a Uyghur Muslim, who was seized by local police in 2006 while visiting his wife’s family in Uzbekistan and sent to China at the request of Chinese authorities.
Little is known about Celil’s case, including what crime, if any, he was charged with; officials have only said he will remain in jail until 2036. A family representative told me it has been gutting for Celil’s loved ones to see the outpouring of global calls for the two Michaels’ release and clemency for Schellenberg when Celil has been all but forgotten.
China-focused experts in Australia and in Europe have previously told me that while they were familiar with Beijing’s human rights abuses, they found the treatment of the two Michaels and Schellenberg particularly shocking.
To be frank, I think the news rattled so many people because, until that point, most of Beijing’s political prisoners had been of Asian descent. Now, here were three white men sitting in jail cells, with no access to lawyers and no ability to speak with their families. To other white people, they were “relatable.”
The cases blew up the status quo. Suddenly, there was widespread international public pressure on democratic governments to do something.
But if it weren’t for these cases, I’m certain that most countries would’ve continued to largely ignore the cases of foreign political prisoners in China.
In recent decades, Canada and many other nations had routinely employed a kind of dual-track diplomatic approach with Beijing. The two sides would discuss trade and business matters more or less independently from any other issue.
On the one hand, Canadian leaders would publicly condemn China’s ongoing abuses and advocate for the rule of law. On the other hand, as the Asian country’s wealth grew, Canadian leaders would go on trade missions, attend economic summits and arrange bilateral state visits in hopes of striking trade or investment deals.
When trade was the focus, human rights and the rule of law usually wouldn’t come up at all.
Western societies have mishandled or simply ignored Beijing’s actions out of narrow self-interest — eager to tap into the country’s wealth, quick to turn away from the true face of the regime. Decades of wilful misinterpretation have, over time, become our complicity in the toxic diplomacy and human rights abuses China engages in today.
Now that urgent and concerted international action is needed to save the lives of Canadians in China, world leaders are certain to continue to do too little too late.
College campuses need stronger cultural competency when designing mental health access outreach, as racial and ethnic minorities increasingly forego access to care, according to data from the University of California, Riverside.
The study, published in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, particularly recommended college campuses look at the shared cultural values between Asian and Latinx students, two populations that researchers said often go without needed mental healthcare.
“This means counselors can identify a culturally sensitive, value-driven approach to encouraging greater participation in campus mental health services, instead of focusing only on students’ ethnicity in their outreach efforts” Kalina Michalska, the study’s senior author and a UCR psychology researcher, said in a statement.
Currently, about three-quarters of Asian students and 65 percent of Latinx students go without needed mental healthcare, the researchers reported. Those staggering figures could be due to cultural differences, like commitment to family obligations and interdependence that could make the burden of stigma stronger for Asian and Latinx students.
That is not to mention the social determinants of health, like racial bias or financial barriers, keeping Asian and Latinx students from accessing mental healthcare as often as their White peers.
Through surveying about Asian and Latinx culture, as well as about perceptions about mental healthcare access, the researchers were able to determine they were right, at least about cultural differences.
The survey 25- and 35-question surveys for Asian and Latinx students, respectively, highlighted a culture of deference to one’s family that could dissuade students from accessing mental healthcare for fear of stigma or shame.
Additionally, the stronger a student reported cultural beliefs in interdependence, the less likely they were to signal a need or a likelihood to access mental healthcare. For these students, support in one’s family and social circle was deemed essential for addressing mental health issues.
Importantly, the researchers could not draw a direct link between a student’s desire to honor her culture with a conscious decision not to access mental healthcare. However, the surveys did suggest some links between cultural attitudes and mental healthcare access that differ somewhat for White students of Western descent.
This comes as US institutions, like colleges, are becoming increasingly diversified. At UC Riverside, about a third of the students are Asian and 41 percent are Latinx. Campuses like UC Riverside need to account for multiculturalism in numerous ways, including as it relates to health and mental healthcare.
“Given the increasing diversity among U.S. college students, there is an urgent need for universities to develop proactive and culturally informed programs designed to improve mental health support for students, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds,” Michalska said.
Although Michalska and her team did not outline specific steps for building culturally competent patient outreach strategies, they did note that understanding cultural beliefs about interdependence and support through family would be important for understanding how to better tailor mental healthcare efforts on college campuses.
And in doing so, colleges can help ensure better and more equitable patient access to care, the researchers concluded.
Of note. Wonder if there are compable studies for Canada:
For an entire year that involved emergency room visits, legal proceedings, involuntary unemployment and the death of loved ones, Mehran Nazir struggled with a depressive episode. He would find his mind flooded with self-destructive thoughts. He’d faintly hope his plane from Newark to San Francisco would crash or that he would doze off at the wheel of his car and end up in a fatal accident.
The normally extroverted Nazir would lie paralyzed in bed for hours doing nothing, not wanting to speak with family and canceling plans with friends.
It came to a head when Nazir found himself on the brink of suicide. In his darkest moment, he drafted a will and decided where it would happen.
Eventually, Nazir found comfort in journaling. And when he shared his writings online, he quickly found that other Muslims shared his struggles.
“I realized that this is not something that is unique in my history,” Nazir told NPR. “This was not a random occurrence.”
Nazir was right. U.S. Muslims are two times more likely to have attempted suicide compared with other religious groups, according to a study published last month in JAMA Psychiatry. Nearly 8% of Muslims in the survey reported a suicide attempt in their lifetime compared with 6% of Catholics, 5% of Protestants and 3.6% of Jewish respondents.
“Anecdotally and in clinical settings, we’re definitely seeing an uptick in suicides and suicide attempts,” Dr. Rania Awaad told NPR. She’s the director of the Muslim Mental Health & Islamic Psychology Lab at Stanford University and a researcher on the study.
At the heart of these numbers are several issues
Researchers attribute the high suicide attempt rate to two factors: religious discrimination and community stigma — both of which, they say, prevent Muslim American communities from seeking mental health services.
Earlier this year, a murder-suicide involving a Muslim family in Allen, Texas, sent shock waves through the community. Brothers Farhan Towhid, 19, and Tanvir Towhid, 21, both of whom reportedly battled depression, made a pact to die by suicide and kill the rest of their family so they wouldn’t have to live with the grief. Since then, public discussions on mental health, trainings on suicide response and healing circles have taken on new urgency.
“We have a very long way to go,” Awaad said. “There is just the beginning of a discussion that is happening now.”
There’s still a community stigma surrounding mental health
Naureen Ahmed, now 39, remembers how her family would visit her mother, Seema, at a psychiatric hospital. But the family never openly discussed why she was there.
Some days, Seema would sing along to Bollywood music at home wearing red lipstick. Other days, she’d walk around the house brandishing knives — or jump out of the car on the highway, threatening to kill herself.
Ahmed, a social butterfly at school, was hesitant to invite friends over because she never knew which side of her mother she would get that day.
It wasn’t until she was 25 that Ahmed finally learned why her mom acted that way: she had bipolar depression and schizoaffective disorder, her grandparents told her.
“It was difficult to say it out loud, this secret that I had held inside my entire life,” Ahmed told NPR.
Of the many factors that prevent families or individuals from seeking mental health treatment, stigma is “perhaps the most significant,” according to a 2013 study that looked at the cultural backgrounds of Muslims.
“If you believe that your mental illnesses will bring shame on you or your family, then you tend to stay silent about it,” said Dr. Farha Abbasi, founder of the Muslim Mental Health Conference. Through the conference, hosted by Michigan State University for 13 years, Abbasi hopes to destigmatize mental illness within the Muslim community using open dialogue.
After Ahmed’s mother died in 2012, she created SEEMA to support families like hers who are shamed by the stigma of mental illness, are isolated by their communities or are suffering alone.
SEEMA, launched in 2018, hosts support groups with licensed therapists at community centers and mosques and awareness workshops highlighting the importance of mental health and how to care for someone struggling with a mental illness.
“We need to have these conversations to destigmatize and bring awareness because people think that they’re alone,” Ahmed said.
Religious discrimination makes them more vulnerable
Abbasi, who has studied the impact of growing Islamophobia on Muslims’ mental health, says she was not surprised by the results of the Stanford study.
“Right now, the exposure to toxicity is making us more vulnerable,” Abbasi told NPR.
U.S. Muslims were more likely to report suicide attempts than those from Muslim-majority countries, according to the Stanford study. As a religious minority in the U.S., Muslims are highly vulnerable to religious discrimination, which is associated with depression, anxiety and paranoia.
According to 2020 polling from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, 60% of Muslims reported personally experiencing religious discrimination. And the FBI’s latest hate crime statistics in 2019 suggest that, of the reported 1,715 victims of anti-religious hate crimes, 13.2% were victims of anti-Muslim bias.
“There’s just trauma over trauma over trauma,” Abbasi says. “The impact of growing Islamophobia, the violence that is being directed against Muslims, all that is having a huge impact on mental health.”
They sometimes find it hard to reconcile their feelings and their faith
Last November, 39-year-old Chicago investor Jessica Ali broke down after separating from her husband.
“I felt that I was unworthy and there was no reason for me to live,” she said. Ali, a mother of three, had attempted suicide for a third time. The first two were in 2008 and 2018. “I started believing that I was crazy, that I must be a bad Muslim.”
That was until she joined a Muslim support group. It was there that Ali, who was diagnosed with severe depression, first came to terms with her mental illness.
“It’s very likely that when you’re sitting at the masjid, somebody in your praying row has felt this way,” Ali told NPR.
Now, Ali takes medication and visits a therapist.
But unlike Ali, some Muslims may not get the help and support they need.
To help jump over these hurdles, Muslim mental health professionals across the country are providing more culturally appropriate and religiously sensitive resources for Muslims.
Culturally appropriate resources can help
Dr. Sameera Ahmed, executive director of The Family & Youth Institute, a Muslim nonprofit, developed a suicide prevention toolkit in 2017 that helps Muslim American families navigate suicide risks, intervention, assessment and prevention.
“There may be mental health providers available, but if an individual doesn’t trust the system, they’re not going to use it,” Ahmed told NPR. “We try to translate the research into culturally and religiously tailored mental health resources that are community informed and disseminated by Muslim American mental health professionals.”
In 2017, the Khalil Center, which offers Muslims faith-based mental health services, launched a hotline that provides a “safe and empathic space” for those in crisis situations. “There’s more awareness happening,” Khalil Center psychologist Dr. Fahad Khan told NPR. “We have seen a rise in those who are seeking services.”
Imams have an integral role in community mental health because Muslim Americans may be more willing to seek help from religious leaders. That’s why Awaad started a campaign to train 500 Muslim leaders on suicide response in their communities by 2022.
“A number of imams came forward and said, ‘We as the religious and community leaders of the Muslim community really need to step up to this discussion,’ ” Awaad said.
Dr. Heather Laird, founder of the Center for Muslim Mental Health and Islamic Psychology, found that Muslims were more likely to seek psychotherapy if it aligned with Islamic values. So she ignited a movement toward Islamic psychology. By Laird’s definition, Islamic psychology is the treatment of the mind and soul within an Islamic context.
As for Nazir, he uses a combination of therapy and journaling to tend to his psychological wounds.
“This battle for mental health is not necessarily you solve it, you cure it, you move on,” Nazir said. “For me, it’s an ongoing journey.”
Of note. Will see extent to which if influences the policy debates:
Italy’s enthusiasm over its Olympics success, driven in part by multicultural athletes, has once again reignited debate over its citizenship law and the bureaucratic hurdles faced by thousands of young people.
The debate comes on the heels of Italy’s best performance in history at the Olympic Games, with 40 gold medals from a diverse band of athletes from a variety of backgrounds, including the country’s new star, Texas-born sprinter Lamont Marcell Jacobs.
The debate was sparked anew after the head of Italy’s National Olympic Committee, Giovanni Malago, complained of the bureaucratic headaches confronting Italian-born athletes who want to compete for their country but lack citizenship.
Under its current path to citizenship, Italy is an outlier in Europe, providing rights based on blood ties rather than based on where children are born – an idea known as “ius soli”, or “right of the soil”.
Children born in Italy to foreign parents must await their 18th birthdays before applying for citizenship, beginning an arduous process that can take four years, one that Malago described as “a Dante-esque circle”.
After Interior Minister Luciana Lamorgese said Malago’s criticism was valid, far-right leader Matteo Salvini, head of the populist Lega party, retorted that the minister would be better served controlling the countries’ borders than rekindling “ius soli”.
In Italy, the far-right has linked the debate over citizenship with the ongoing migrant crisis, which this year has seen 31,777 migrants land on the country’s coasts, more than double that in the same period in 2020, according to interior ministry figures.
“I think the important thing is that for these kids we have to think of social inclusion,” Lamorgese told La Stampa daily on Tuesday, noting that the issue went beyond Italy’s young athletes.
“They have to feel an integral part of society,” she said.
‘Full-fledged Italian’
There are various paths to citizenship in Italy — Jacobs’ citizenship was accorded through his Italian mother despite being born in the United States to an American father — but that involving children of two foreign-born parents is the most complicated.
Case in point is 17-year-old pole vaulter Great Nnachi, who was born in Turin to Nigerian parents, and is already a champion. Having broken records throughout her teens, she most recently won a junior title with her personal best of 4,01 metres in February.
But her records are not recognised by the state, as she is not technically Italian, and she cannot compete for Italy in international competitions.
“Despite being a full-fledged Italian, I can’t represent my country in sports,” Nnachi told La Stampa Tuesday. “I’m an Italian champion but I can’t demonstrate it outside the border.”
Italy’s national statistics agency Istat calculates there are about 800,000 minors in Italy who would receive Italian nationality were “ius soli” adopted, while some 60,000 newborns a year would become automatically Italian.
According to Italy’s Olympic Committee, 46 of its athletes who competed in the Tokyo Olympics this year were foreign-born.
I thought the right-wing press might notice Avvy Go’s appointment. Will be interesting to see how she manages the transition from a very public activist to being a more discrete judge:
A Toronto legal activist who questioned the need for immigrants to take immigration citizenship tests and said the COVID-19 pandemic has created an increase in racism in Canada, has been appointed a federal judge.
Blacklock’s Reporter said Avvy Yao-Yao Go has also lamented the “shameful history” of Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald.
Go had been director of a Toronto law clinic that criticized Canadians for “anti-China sentiment and white supremacy.”
Go described herself in a 2020 commentary in the Globe & Mail as a lawyer “fighting for social justice” and cohesion.
“The past several years of turmoil both in the United States and Canada have taught us our democracy is fragile and that structured racism, if left unchecked, poses a serious risk to social cohesion,” wrote Go.
Attorney General David Lametti appointed Go to the bench on Friday saying he was confident she will “serve Canadians well.”
Go was director of the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic of Toronto. The federally-funded group in a June 1, 2020 submission to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights complained of widespread racism in Canada.
“In contrast to the image of Canada as multicultural and welcoming, many Canadians have been emboldened to use the pandemic as a license to exhibit hate and racism,” said the submission to the UN.
“Moreover, since the outbreak of the pandemic, anti-Asian hate speech has proliferated on social media platforms fueled by right-wing extremists who are using the pandemic as an opportunity to stir up racist ideologies.
“The collision of conspiracy theories, anti-China sentiment and white supremacy has rendered dangerous results, including the movement of racist theories and messaging from the fringe to the mainstream.”
The group earlier received a $301,904 grant from the Canadian Heritage department.
“While the Prime Minister has remarked that ‘hate, violence and discrimination have no place in Canada’ and his government stands with ‘Asian-Canadians across the country,’ his government has failed to take any concrete steps to address the surge of hateful violence and messaging that has arisen during the pandemic,” said the report.
Meanwhile, Go in numerous commentaries and letters to editors criticized Canadians’ treatment of racial issues and proposed abolishing the citizenship test as a “hollow screening” of immigrants.
“The moment I became a true Canadian was the very moment when I began to challenge the Canadian system,” the Hong Kong-born Go wrote in 1998.
In a 2014 commentary in the Toronto Star, Go lamented the “shameful history” of Macdonald, “architect of racist law” that saw Canadians “forced to live in nightmarish conditions while Macdonald pursued his dream to unite Canada.”
“Given the stark human rights record under his belt, why should Canadians celebrate John A. Macdonald’s birthday?” wrote Go.
In a 2013 letter to the Globe, the judge wrote: “The term ‘visible minority’ is fraught with issues, the key one being it uses ‘white’ as a standard against which everyone else is measured.”
“As we prepare to mark Canada Day, Ottawa must admit past wrongs particularly against Chinese-Canadians,” she wrote Toronto Star editors in 2003.
Go was one of thirteen new federal appointees named to the bench Friday.
Multicultural Meanderings 