Anti-Critical Race Theory Laws Are Un-American

2021/07/07 Leave a comment

Good joint commentary from a variety of perspectives:

What is the purpose of a liberal education? This is the question at the heart of a bitter debate that has been roiling the nation for months.

Schools, particularly at the kindergarten-to-12th-grade level, are responsible for helping turn students into well-informed and discerning citizens. At their best, our nation’s schools equip young minds to grapple with complexity and navigate our differences. At their worst, they resemble indoctrination factories.

In recent weeks, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Iowa, Idaho and Texas have all passed legislation that places significant restrictions on what can be taught in public school classrooms, and in some cases, public universities, too.

Tennessee House Bill SB 0623, for example, bans any teaching that could lead an individual to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.” In addition to this vague proscription, it restricts teaching that leads to “division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class or class of people.”

Texas House Bill 3979 goes further, forbidding teaching that “slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States.” It also bars any classroom from requiring “an understanding of the 1619 Project” — The New York Times Magazine’s special issue devoted to a reframing of the nation’s founding — and hence prohibits assigning any part of it as required reading.

These initiatives have been marketed as “anti-critical race theory” laws. We, the authors of this essay, have wide ideological divergences on the explicit targets of this legislation. Some of us are deeply influenced by the academic discipline of critical race theory and its critique of racist structures and admire the 1619 Project. Some of us are skeptical of structural racist explanations and racial identity itself, and disagree with the mission and methodology of the 1619 Project. We span the ideological spectrum: a progressive, a moderate, a libertarian and a conservative.

It is because of these differences that we here join together, as we are united in one overarching concern: the danger posed by these laws to liberal education.

The laws differ in some respects but generally agree on blocking any teaching that would lead students to feel “discomfort, guilt or anguish” because of one’s race or ancestry, as well as restricting teaching that subsequent generations have any kind of historical responsibility for actions of previous generations. They attempt various carve outs for the “impartial teaching” of the history of oppression of groups. But it’s hard to see how these attempts are at all consistent with demands to avoid discomfort. These measures would, by way of comparison, make Germany’s uncompromising and successful approach to teaching about the Holocaust illegal, as part of its goal is to infuse them with some sense of the weight of the past, and (famously) lead many German students to feel “anguish” about their ancestry.

Indeed, the very act of learning history in a free and multiethnic society is inescapably fraught. Any accurate teaching of any country’s history could make some of its citizens feel uncomfortable (or even guilty) about the past. To deny this necessary consequence of education is, to quote W.E.B. Du Bois, to transform “history into propaganda.”

What’s more, these laws even make it difficult to teach U.S. history in a way that would reveal well-documented ways in which past policy decisions, like redlining, have contributed to present-day racial wealth gaps. An education of this sort would be negligent, creating ignorant citizens who are unable to understand, for instance, the case for reparations — or the case against them.

Because these laws often aim to protecting the feelings of hypothetical children, they are dangerously imprecise. State governments exercise a high degree of lawful control over K-12 curriculum. But broad, vague laws violate due process and fundamental fairness because they don’t give the teachers fair warning of what’s prohibited. For example, the Tennessee statute prohibits a public school from including in a course of instruction any “concept” that promotes “division between, or resentment of” a “creed.” Would a teacher be violating the law if they express the opinion that the creeds of Stalinism or Nazism were evil?

Other laws appear to potentially ban even expression as benign as support for affirmative action, but it’s far from clear. In fact, shortly after Texas passed its purported ban on critical race theory, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, published a list of words and concepts that help “identify critical race theory in the classroom.” The list included terms such as “social justice,” “colonialism” and “identity.” Applying these same standards to colleges or private institutions would be flatly unconstitutional.

These laws threaten the basic purpose of a historical education in a liberal democracy. But censorship is the wrong approach even to the concepts that are the intended targets of these laws.

Though some of us share the antipathy of the legislation’s authors toward some of these targets, and object to overreaches that leave many parents understandably anxious about the stewardship of their children’s education, we all reject the means by which these measures encode that antipathy into legislation.

A wiser response to problematic elements of what is being labeled critical race theory would be twofold: propose better curriculums and enforce existing civil rights laws. Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act both prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, and they are rooted in a considerable body of case law that provides administrators with far more concrete guidance on how to proceed. In fact, there is already an Education Department Office of Civil Rights complaint and federal lawsuit aimed at programs that allegedly attempt to place students or teachers into racial “affinity groups.”

The task of defending the fundamentally liberal democratic nature of the American project ultimately requires the confidence to meet challenges to that vision. Censoring such challenges is a concession to their power, not a defense.

Let’s not mince words about these laws. They are speech codes. They seek to change public education by banning the expression of ideas. Even if this censorship is legal in the narrow context of public primary and secondary education, it is antithetical to educating students in the culture of American free expression.

There will always be disagreement about any nation’s history. The United States is no exception. If history is to judge the United States as exceptional, it is because we welcome such contestation in our public spaces as part of our unfolding national ethos. It is a violation of this commonly shared vision of America as a nation of free, vigorous and open debate to resort to the apparatus of the government to shut it down.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/05/opinion/anti-critical-race-theory-laws-are-un-american.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

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A French Teenager’s Anti-Islam Rant Unleashed Death Threats. Now 13 Are on Trial.

2021/07/07 Leave a comment

No excuse for death threats, words have consequences:

The French girl, 16, was sharing highly personal details about her life in a livestream on Instagram, including her attraction to women. Just not Black or Arab women, she said.

When insults and death threats started pouring in to her Instagram account in response to her comments in January 2020, some from viewers saying she was an affront to Islam, the teenager, Mila, dug in, quickly posting another video.

“I hate religion,” she declared. “The Quran is a religion of hatred.” She also used profanity to describe Islam and the crudest of imagery in referring to God.

The ensuing onslaught of threats after the video went viral has landed 13 people in court on charges of online harassment.

The case has put a spotlight on the roiling French debate over freedom of expression and blasphemy, especially when it touches on Islam. It is also a landmark test for recent legislation that broadens France’s definition of cyberharassment in regards to attacks on the internet, where vitriol is plentiful, modulated debate less so.

“We are setting the rules of what is acceptable and what is unacceptable,” Michaël Humbert, the presiding judge, said at the trial.

Some looked to history to capture the brutality of what Mila experienced online. Mila’s lawyer said she had been subjected to a digital stoning. The prosecutor in the case spoke of a “lynching 2.0.”

More than a year after Mila — The New York Times is withholding her last name because she has been the subject of harassment — posted her videos, her life remains in a tumult. She lives under police protection and she no longer attends school in person.

The 13 defendants, some teenagers themselves, are on trial in Paris, most accused of making death threats. They face the possibility of jail. The verdict is expected Wednesday.

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Cardozo: Dialogues on diversity is what we need

2021/07/06 Leave a comment

Agree with need for commission or enquiry to allow for a more substantive, comprehensive and non-partisan review.

Issue is with respect to what the focus should be and what kind of research, process and recommendations are needed (stay tuned, working on my thoughts):

“They made us believe we didn’t have souls,” Elder Florence Sparvier, a residential school survivor, said at a press conference in Cowessess, Sask.

Canada Day 2021 and this entire period has been a time for reflection. We are a good country. We have the self-confidence to know that we have lots of strengths. And in that confidence, we also have the ability to be self-critical to recognize the bad parts of our history, or the problems we have today, and to make amends, or at least to try to do better.

Over 50 years ago Lester B. Pearson established two royal commissions: one on the status of women and one on bilingualism and biculturalism. They recognized the fundamental, and, yes, systemic discrimination that was faced by women and by francophones. The results of the commissions have seen significant advances, and committed Canada to an ongoing path to betterment. To be clear, it has not been flowers and rainbows on these paths, but overall the trajectory has been positive as we try to get things better.

And so today as we need to think deeply, carefully and compassionately about our country and be conscious of the racism epidemic that has met the COVID pandemic, as was articulated by Senator Wanda Thomas Bernard at a Pearson Centre webinar last summer.

What can we do? Many things, but here is one idea, a thoughtful national dialogue on diversity. There are many ways to do this, but, as a nation, we must listen to each other, and, most importantly, we must listen to those with grievances.  That’s how we build a better country.

The discovery of unmarked graves at residential schools has not been a surprise to most Indigenous people, but it is the harsh reality that has triggered for many, the many real stages of grief. Made more devastating by the fact that they have been saying this for years and governments and the rest of society either had not believed them or just looked the other way.

This tragic discovery has become a precipitating event that has been a shock for non-Indigenous Canadians, for the political class, and the mainstream media. We somehow missed Calls Action 71 to 76 in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, the missing children and burial information, and all the conversations on this for years.

2020 and 2021 have also seen other aspects of racism come to the fore. With the killing of George Floyd, a Black man killed by a white police officer, in the U.S., our racism problems became much more apparent. Once again, it was the precipitating event there that caused us to become more aware in Canada. In addition to systemic and overt racism faced by Indigenous peoples for years, the reality of anti-Black racism has become more evident. Anti-Semitism has reached new heights—or should we say new depths. Islamophobia is on the rise. We saw the killing of a Muslim family in London, Ont., in June. And with the rise of COVID, we have seen the ridiculous anti-Asian acts of overt racism and racial violence.

There is something rotten in our state these days. And there is nothing wrong in recognizing it and dealing with it. The solutions are many: from legal, to social, to economic, to educational measures. But it starts with dialogue and understanding what marginalization feels like, what unspoken discrimination feels like, or what the hand of racial violence feels like. Also what does white uneasiness or fragility feel like?

At the Pearson Centre we launched a six-month dialogue with two webinars, one with Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson who spoke about the ancient Indigenous history of his city and one with award-winning author Michelle Good. Her novel, Five Little Indians, is about the lives of five young residential school survivors as they make their way through life seriously damaged by their experience. There will be more over the months ahead, that explore systemic racism and various aspects of inequality while always trying to increase understanding across divides and identifying solutions. Using the marvels of webinars we will easily pull together Canadians from across the country into important discussions.

October marks the 50th anniversary of the multiculturalism policy—in the world. It is a good time to take stock and plan the future.

I urge other think tanks, organizations, and companies to launch their own dialogues and to get involved. As Cowessess First Nation Chief Cadmus Delorme said, “All we ask of all of you listening is that you stand by us as we heal and get stronger. All must put down our ignorance and accidental racism of not addressing the truth that this country has with Indigenous people. We are not asking for pity, but we are asking for understanding.”

We are too far apart and we understand too little about each other. We need to learn from each other. And of course dialogue is no reason not to take action. Governments need to engage in dialogue and seriously step up their actions at the same time.

I also think about “what would Pearson do.” I dare say he would strike a royal commission on diversity and equity of some kind, to dialogue about inequality in its various forms.

Source: Dialogues on diversity is what we need

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University research could point the way to more inclusive journalism

2021/07/05 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see the results of this analysis, particularly the evidence in contrast to perceptions:

How well does journalism reflect the diversity of the community? And what are the perceptions of that coverage?

The Diversity Institute at Ryerson University expects to provide some answers with research examining media coverage and its impact in shaping biases and perceptions.

The examination was inspired in part by the institute’s extensive work examining discriminatory workplace practices that, for example, limit gender and racial representation on corporate boards and in executive leadership positions.

From this, there was a recognition of the media’s influence on perceptions and stereotypes, which have a “profound” effect on people’s assumptions about others, said Wendy Cukier, the institute’s director and a professor of entrepreneurship and strategy at the university’s Ted Rogers School of Management.

“Every single aspect of diversity and inclusion in the workplace or in the education system pointed to broad cultural stereotypes and biases that get embedded in organizations and shape the way individuals think and behave,” she said.

“The media is one of the most important carriers of values and culture. And it has a profound impact on these stereotypes and assumptions and biases, or it can help challenge them,” Cukier said.

The project, tentatively titled “Media Bias and Under-represented Groups,” will analyze the online news of selected outlets and their representations of those who are Indigenous, Jewish, Muslim, Black and racialized. Focus groups with identified groups will glean perceptions of media coverage and its impact on their identities.

The research will identify areas of misrepresentation, under coverage or coverage that reinforces negative stereotypes. The objective is to make journalism more representative and inclusive.

Working on the project are Mohamed Elmi, the institute’s director of research, and Ruby Latif, research associate, Media Bias Project lead. Both have experience examining how media shape stereotypes.

Elmi was involved with the Black Experience Project, an extensive study published in 2017 that examined what it was like to be Black in the Greater Toronto Area. In a survey done for the project, respondents cited inaccurate media portrayals of the Black community that exaggerated involvement in criminal activity, or depicted them as uneducated or lacking ambition. Few saw what they considered to be accurate portrayals of Blacks as leaders or individual success stories.

“When you’re looking at the media, they only saw people who look like them portrayed in a negative light, not necessarily as an expert or some commentator on a particular subject,” Elmi said.

Latif’s own research focused on Muslim women and organizations. That work and research since has noted how the Muslim community was being “othered,” she said.

“It’s putting somebody in another light, that they’re not part of the in-group … showing that they’re not the same or they don’t have similar values, like Canadian values,” said Latif, who is a regular contributor to the Star’s opinion section.

The deaths of a London, Ont. family — run down last month during an evening walk because they were Muslim, according to police — has underscored those concerns.

The role of mass media in amplifying racial divides is well-documented. The Ontario Human Rights Commission notes, for example, that racism “is communicated and reproduced through agencies of socialization and cultural transmission such as the mass media (in which racialized persons are portrayed as different from the norm or as problems).”

Cukier says progress has been made, notably in the wake of last year’s murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. “But I’m not sure if mainstream reporting and editing and the kind of power structure has shifted that much,” she said.

Floyd’s death prompted a reckoning among institutions on race, racism and diversity. For media outlets like the Toronto Star, it means examining how well the paper reflects the diversity of the community it serves, in both the journalists who work in the newsroom and in its coverage.

Breaking stereotypes and ensuring stories are representative requires effort in all parts of the editorial process, from decisions on which stories to cover, the language used in those stories, the people chosen for interviews and the selection of pictures. Each is a subjective decision — and a chance to make coverage more inclusive.

Researchers emphasize that media portrayals too often perpetuate stereotypes. Another issue is journalists only seeking out racialized individuals to talk about issues of diversity and race, rather than their fields of expertise, be it finance, law or science. “They’re not featured as experts in whatever their field is … I would argue that just reinforces a certain kind of marginalization,” Cukier said.

The Trust Project, a global group of media outlets that includes the Star, rightly sets out diverse voices as one marker of trusted news: “Are some communities or perspectives included only in stereotypical ways, or even completely missing?” And the Torstar Journalistic Standards Guide states, “Inclusiveness is at the heart of thinking and acting as journalists.”

The Star has worked to ensure that the diversity of the community is reflected in its stories. Journalists are encouraged to bring new voices to their story-telling. It makes for better-informed journalism and improved civic discourse. No doubt that remains a work in progress.

This research project promises to be an important road map to how the Star and other media outlets can do better.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/public_editor/2021/07/02/university-research-could-point-the-way-to-more-inclusive-journalism.html

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Douthat: The Excesses of Antiracist Education

2021/07/05 Leave a comment

On trying to find a balance and the risk of simplistic dichotomies, in contrast the the more varied realities and situations:

In my last column I tried to describe part of the current controversy over race and K-12 education — the part that turns on whether it’s possible to tell a fuller historical story about slavery and segregation while also retaining a broadly patriotic understanding of America’s founding and development.

In this column I will try to describe the part of the controversy that concerns how we teach about racism today. It’s probably the more intense debate, driving both progressive zeal and conservative backlash.

Again, I want to start with what the new progressivism is interested in changing. One change involves increasingly familiar terms like “structural” and “systemic” racism, and the attempt to teach about race in a way that emphasizes not just explicitly racist laws and attitudes, but also how America’s racist past still influences inequalities today.

In theory, this shift is supposed to enable debates that avoid using “racist” as a personal accusation — since the point is that a culture can sustain persistent racial inequalities even if most white people aren’t bigoted or biased.

Still, this kind of vision would, on its own, face inevitable conservative resistance on several grounds: that it overstates the challenges facing minorities in America today; that it seems to de-emphasize personal responsibility; that it implies policy responses (racial quotas, reparations) that are racially discriminatory, arguably unconstitutional and definitely threatening to the white middle class.

But the basic claim that structural racism exists has strong evidence behind it, and the idea that schools should teach about it in some way is probably a winning argument for progressives. (Almost half of college Republicans, in a recent poll, supported teaching about how “patterns of racism are ingrained in law and other institutions.”) Especially since not every application of the structural-racist diagnosis implies left-wing policy conclusions: The pro-life and school choice movements, for instance, regularly invoke the impact of past progressive racism on disproportionately high African-American abortion rates and underperforming public schools.

What’s really inflaming today’s fights, though, is that the structural-racist diagnosis isn’t being offered on its own. Instead it’s yoked to two sweeping theories about how to fight the problem it describes.

First, there is a novel theory of moral education, according to which the best way to deal with systemic inequality is to confront its white beneficiaries with their privileges and encourage them to wrestle with their sins.

Second, there is a Manichaean vision of public policy, in which all policymaking is either racist or antiracist, all racial disparities are the result of racism — and the measurement of any outcome short of perfect “equity” may be a form of structural racism itself.

The first idea is associated with Robin DiAngelo, the second with Ibram X. Kendi, and they converge in places like the work of Tema Okun, whose presentations train educators to see “white-supremacy culture” at work in traditional measures of academic attainment.

The impulses these ideas encourage take different forms in different institutions, but they usually circle around to similar goals. First, the attempt to use racial-education programs to construct a stronger sense of shared white identity, on the apparent theory that making Americans of European ancestry think of themselves as defined by a toxic “whiteness” will lead to its purgation. Second, the deconstruction of standards that manifest racial disparities, on the apparent theory that if we stop using gifted courses or standardized tests, the inequities they reveal will cease to matter.

These goals, it should be stressed, don’t follow necessarily from the theory of structural racism. The first idea arguably betrays the theory’s key insight, that you can have “racism without racists,” by deliberately trying to increase individual racial guilt. The second extends structural analysis beyond what it can reasonably bear, into territory where white supremacy supposedly explains Asian American success on the SAT.

But precisely because they don’t follow from modest and defensible conceptions of systemic racism, smart progressives in the media often retreat to those modest conceptions when challenged by conservatives — without acknowledging that the dubious conceptions are a big part of what’s been amplifying controversy, and conjuring up dubious Republican legislation in response.

Here one could say that figures like Kendi and DiAngelo, and the complex of foundations and bureaucracies that have embraced the new antiracism, increasingly play a similar role to talk radio in the Republican coalition. They represent an ideological extremism that embarrasses clever liberals, as the spirit of Limbaugh often embarrassed right-wing intellectuals. But this embarrassment encourages a pretense that their influence is modest, their excesses forgivable, and the real problem is always the evils of the other side.

That pretense worked out badly for the right, whose intelligentsia awoke in 2016 to discover that they no longer recognized their own coalition. It would be helpful if liberals currently dismissing anxiety over Kendian or DiAngelan ideas as just a “moral panic” experienced a similar awakening now — before progressivism simply becomes its excesses, and the way back to sanity is closed.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/opinion/antiracist-education-history.html

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What unconscious bias training gets wrong… and how to fix it

2021/07/05 Leave a comment

Good overview on the latest research and lessons. Main conclusion, no quick fix, has to be part of ongoing training and awareness:

Here’s a fact that cannot be disputed: if your name is James or Emily, you will find it easier to get a job than someone called Tariq or Adeola. Between November 2016 and December 2017, researchers sent out fake CVs and cover letters for 3,200 positions. Despite demonstrating exactly the same qualifications and experience, the “applicants” with common Pakistani or Nigerian names needed to send out 60% more applications to receive the same number of callbacks as applicants with more stereotypically British names.

Some of the people who had unfairly rejected Tariq or Adeola will have been overtly racist, and so deliberately screened people based on their ethnicity. According to a large body of psychological research, however, many will have also reacted with an implicit bias, without even being aware of the assumptions they were making.

Such findings have spawned a plethora of courses offering “unconscious bias and diversity training”, which aim to reduce people’s racist, sexist and homophobic tendencies. If you work for a large organisation, you’ve probably taken one yourself. Last year, Labour leader Keir Starmer volunteered to undergo such training after he appeared to dismiss the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement. “There is always the risk of unconscious bias, and just saying: ‘Oh well, it probably applies to other people, not me,’ is not the right thing to do,” he said. Even Prince Harry has been educating himself about his potential for implicit bias – and advising others to do the same.

Sounds sensible, doesn’t it? You remind people of their potential for prejudice so they can change their thinking and behaviour. Yet there is now a severe backlash against the very idea of unconscious bias and diversity training, with an increasing number of media articles lamenting these “woke courses” as a “useless” waste of money. The sceptics argue that there is little evidence that unconscious bias training works, leading some organisations – including the UK’s civil service – to cancel their schemes.

So what’s the truth? Is it ever possible to correct our biases? And if so, why have so many schemes failed to make a difference?

While the contents of unconscious bias and diversity training courses vary widely, most share a few core components. Participants will often be asked to complete the implicit association test (IAT), for example. By measuring people’s reaction times during a word categorisation task, an algorithm can calculate whether people have more positive or negative associations with a certain group – such as people of a different ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender. (You can try it for yourself on the Harvard website.)

After taking the IAT, participants will be debriefed about their results. They may then learn about the nature of unconscious bias and stereotypes more generally, and the consequences within the workplace, along with some suggestions to reduce the impact.

All of which sounds useful in theory. To confirm the benefits, however, you need to compare the attitudes and behaviours of employees who have taken unconscious bias and diversity training with those who have not – in much the same way that drugs are tested against a placebo.

Prof Edward Chang at Harvard Business School has led one of the most rigorous trials, delivering an hour-long online diversity course to thousands of employees at an international professional services company. Using tools like the IAT, the training was meant to educate people about sexist stereotypes and their consequences – and surveys suggest that it did change some attitudes. The participants reported greater acknowledgment of their own bias after the course, and greater support of women in the workplace, than people who had taken a more general course on “psychological safety” and “active listening”.

Unfortunately, this didn’t translate to the profound behavioural change you might expect. Three weeks after taking the course, the employees were given the chance of taking part in an informal mentoring scheme. Overall, the people who had taken the diversity course were no more likely to take on a female mentee. Six weeks after taking the course, the participants were also given the opportunity to nominate colleagues for recognition of their “excellence”. It could have been the perfect opportunity to offer some encouragement to overlooked women in the workplace. Once again, however, the people who had taken the diversity training were no more likely to nominate a female colleague than the control group.

“We did our best to design a training that would be effective,” Chang tells me. “But our results suggest that the sorts of one-off trainings that are commonplace in organisations are not particularly effective at leading to long-lasting behaviour change.”

Chang’s results chime with the broader conclusions of a recent report by Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which examined 18 papers on unconscious bias training programmes. Overall, the authors concluded that the courses are effective at raising awareness of bias, but the evidence of long-lasting behavioural change is “limited”.

Even the value of the IAT – which is central to so many of these courses – has been subject to scrutiny. The courses tend to use shortened versions of the test, and the same person’s results can vary from week to week. So while it might be a useful educational aid to explain the concept of unconscious bias, it is wrong to present the IAT as a reliable diagnosis of underlying prejudice.

It certainly sounds damning; little wonder certain quarters of the press have been so willing to declare these courses a waste of time and money. Yet the psychologists researching their value take a more nuanced view, and fear their conclusions have been exaggerated. While it is true that many schemes have ended in disappointment, some have been more effective, and researchers believe we should learn from these successes and failures to design better interventions in the future – rather than simply dismissing them altogether.

For one thing, many of the current training schemes are simply too brief to have the desired effect. “It’s usually part of the employee induction and lasts about 30 minutes to an hour,” says Dr Doyin Atewologun, a co-author of the EHRC’s report and founding member of British Psychological Society’s diversity and inclusion at work group. “It’s just tucked away into one of the standard training materials.” We should not be surprised the lessons are soon forgotten. In general, studies have shown that diversity training can have more pronounced effects if it takes place over a longer period of time. A cynic might suspect that these short programmes are simple box-ticking exercises, but Atewologun thinks the good intentions are genuine – it’s just that the organisations haven’t been thinking critically about the level of commitment that would be necessary to bring about change, or even how to measure the desired outcomes.

Thanks to this lack of forethought, many of the existing courses may have also been too passive and theoretical. “If you are just lecturing at someone about how pervasive bias is, but you’re not giving them the tools to change, I think there can be a tendency for them to think that bias is normal and thus not something they need to work on,” says Prof Alex Lindsey at the University of Memphis. Attempts to combat bias could therefore benefit from more evidence-based exercises that increase participants’ self-reflection, alongside concrete steps for improvement.

Lindsey’s research team recently examined the benefits of a “perspective-taking” exercise, in which participants were asked to write about the challenges faced by someone within a minority group. They found that the intervention brought about lasting changes to people’s attitudes and behavioural intentions for months after the training. “We might not know exactly what it’s like to be someone of a different race, sex, religion, or sexual orientation from ourselves, but everyone, to some extent, knows what it feels like to be excluded in a social situation,” Lindsey says. “Once trainees realise that some people face that kind of ostracism on a more regular basis as a result of their demographic characteristics, I think that realisation can lead them to respond more empathetically in the future.”

Lindsey has found that you should also encourage participants to reflect on the ways their own behaviour may have been biased in the past, and to set themselves future goals during their training. Someone will be much more likely to act in an inclusive way if they decide, in advance, to challenge any inappropriate comments about a minority group, for example. This may be more powerful still, he says, if there is some kind of follow-up to check in with participants’ progress – an opportunity that the briefer courses completely miss. (Interestingly, he has found that these reflective techniques can be especially effective among people who are initially resistant to the idea of diversity training.)

More generally, these courses may often fail to bring about change because people become too defensive about the very idea that they may be prejudiced. Without excusing the biases, the courses might benefit from explaining how easily stereotypes can be absorbed – even by good, well-intentioned people – while also emphasising the individual responsibility to take action. Finally, they could teach people to recognise the possibility of “moral licensing”, in which an ostensibly virtuous act, such as attending the diversity course itself, or promoting someone from a minority, excuses a prejudiced behaviour afterwards, since you’ve already “proven” yourself to be a liberal and caring person. 

Ultimately, the psychologists I’ve spoken to all agree that organisations should stop seeing unconscious bias and diversity training as a quick fix, and instead use it as the foundation for broader organisational change.

“Anyone who has been in any type of schooling system knows that even the best two- or three-hour class is not going to change our world for ever,” says Prof Calvin Lai, who investigates implicit bias at Washington University in St Louis. “It’s not magic.” But it may act as a kind of ice-breaker, he says, helping people to be more receptive to other initiatives – such as those aimed at a more inclusive recruitment process.

Chang agrees. “Diversity training is unlikely to be an effective standalone solution,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be an effective component of a multipronged approach to improving diversity, equity and inclusion in organisations.”

Atewologun compares it to the public health campaigns to combat obesity and increase fitness. You can provide people with a list of the calories in different foods and the benefits of exercise, she says – but that information, alone, is unlikely to lead to significant weight loss, without continued support that will help people to act on that information. Similarly, education about biases can be a useful starting point, but it’s rather absurd to expect that ingrained habits could evaporate in a single hour of education.

“We could be a lot more explicit that it is step one,” Atewologun adds. “We need multiple levels of intervention – it’s an ongoing project.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/25/what-unconscious-bias-training-gets-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it

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Mahmud Jamal’s nomination to Canada’s Supreme Court scores a win against the name barrier

2021/07/03 Leave a comment

Of note:

A few years ago, frustrated that I kept being detained at airports just because my name bore a resemblance to someone who was on a terrorist watchlist, I decided to adopt a middle name.

At the time, I struggled with what name I should choose. I thought long and hard about taking an Anglo-Saxon one, so as to appear less threatening to airport authorities. However, the thought of having to change an integral part of myself in order to live my life without unnecessary incursions based on the notion that I posed a danger irked me inside. Why should I have to do it, when others don’t? This is a dissonance that I imagine most immigrants or children of recent immigrants face as they navigate their professional lives. How much of your cultural heritage do you keep? And what is worth shedding as you attempt to move up the rungs of Canadian society?

So rather than anglicizing my name, I adopted the Arabic middle name Majid, after my maternal grandfather Abdul-Majid. At the time, I knew my decision could actually attract more scrutiny at airports, rather than less. It also provided another opportunity for others to misspell, mispronounce or generally feel uncomfortable saying my name.

That prospect was ingrained in my mind, as those were all experiences I underwent growing up as a South Asian-Canadian in the relatively small and homogeneous city of St. Catharines, Ont., where even well-meaning people struggled to say my name in what would be considered its “authentic” Arabic pronunciation. I found myself too shy to correct them – either out of a sense of fear or, otherwise, because I didn’t deem myself important enough to canvass a conversation around my name and, more essentially, my parent’s culture and ancestral history.

But with the accumulated baggage of life deep in the recesses of my mind, I felt some sense of vindication when Mahmud Jamal was nominated recently to the Supreme Court of Canada. Upon his appointment, he will be the first person of colour to serve on our country’s highest court.

With Justice Jamal’s appointment, as well as other recent high-profile appointments – including the selection of Reem Bahdi as the next dean of the University of Windsor’s law school – we are starting to see the erosion of both name and colour barriers in the upper echelons of the legal profession. Even the most reticent and conservative lawyers will now have to come face to face with a sitting judge who does not look like anyone from the past. 

Moreover, they will be forced to write and pronounce Justice Jamal’s name (correctly, I hope) under a new dynamic in which a member of a racialized minority group now occupies a seat of power.

For most of us who come from racialized communities, the authority that Justice Jamal will exercise from the high court is not the overwhelming reality of our existence. Rather, in Canada, we are often placed in hierarchal relationships in which an individual with an Anglo-Saxon name occupies the more authoritative position. 

So when our names are pronounced incorrectly, confused with someone else’s or even neglected, we find ourselves biting our tongues so as to avoid upsetting the status quo. This was my childhood reality and, for many, a lifelong one. This scenario has become exhausting and increasingly depressing as we await the promised inclusiveness of the country we or our parents chose.

Just as I refused to anglicize my middle name, my wife and I chose an “ethnic” name for our son when he was born two years ago. We were not ignorant of the realities we grew up in and that persist until today with regard to pronouncing and, by inference, accepting foreign-sounding names. As such, we chose a name for him that could be pronounced by the array of ethnic communities that compose our great land without the sense of trepidation that I have always thought those around me have felt. But erasing our ancestry altogether was not an option. And for us and others in our position, the nomination of Justice Jamal stands to makes us more comfortable in our shoes, not afraid to express our cultural identities all the while attempting to break whatever glass ceilings remain.

The choice that I made to affirm my roots through my middle name was a difficult one. It required concerted thought and effort. Thanks in part to the appointment of a man whose name is making history, my son will not have to take the same pains to reconcile his heritage and his ambitions.

Hassan M. Ahmad is a law professor at the University of Ottawa.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-mahmud-jamals-nomination-to-canadas-supreme-court-is-a-win-for/

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

‘Another political extravaganza?’ Muslim academics, community members skeptical about what might be achieved at Islamophobia summit

2021/07/03 Leave a comment

Some merit to this reaction as summits tend to be one-time events, often more symbolic recognition of affected groups with limited ongoing impact and change. This does not make the motives for holding them insincere, just that their impact is limited.

The many meetings and conferences regarding antisemitism have not reduced the number of antisemitic incidents, for example:

A National Summit on Islamophobia will be held this month, in the wake of a deadly truck attack in London, Ont. that left multiple members of the same family dead and as violent incidents of street harassment against Muslim women have been reported in Alberta.

But with scarce details available about the virtual event, including its date, and with the history of inaction on Islamophobia at federal and provincial levels, Muslim academics and community members are skeptical about what might be achieved.

They told the Star they fear governments may be providing the same empty words and promises that emerged in years past, including after the Quebec City mosque shooting.

Discussions where governments consulted with community members about how to tackle Islamophobia and hate have happened before — and the moment for talking has passed, they say. It’s now time to dismantle policies that limit the rights of Muslim people in Canada, said Fatimah Jackson-Best, a public health researcher and lecturer at York University.

“We don’t need a summit to know [about Islamophobia], we see this happening in our news. We need action,” she said. “There are some pressing issues around safety and freedom of religion and expression that we need policy on expeditiously,” she said.

Jackson-Best cites Bill 21 in Quebec, which bans the wearing of religious symbols for public servants, as discriminatory as it disproportionately impacts Muslim women who are not able to dress the way they want and wear the hijab in jobs in the province, including as lawyers or teachers.

Along with an honest discussion about standing up against Bill 21, the summit would also need to feature a multitude of voices to reflect the vast diversity of Canada’s Muslim community. Black Muslims, refugees and those of lower income need to be spotlighted, she explained.

She’s not interested in empty discussions on topics of which the community and politicians are already aware.

“Is [the summit] going to be another political extravaganza?” she asked. “There was nearly an entire family killed in London due to Islamophobia. This is getting very dire, so I’m just anxious to hear what kind of summit it will be.”

Calls for a summit grew after the June 6 attack in London that saw Salman Afzaal, 46, Madiha Salman, 44, Yumna Afzaal, 15, Fayez Afzaal, 9, and Talat Afzaal, 74, targeted for their faith while they were out for an evening walk. Fayez was treated in hospital and was the sole survivor.

In the weeks since the murders there have been violent incidents targeting Muslim women in Edmonton, including an attack where a woman wearing a hijab was pushed to the ground and knocked unconscious, while another woman had a knife held to her throat.

The office of Canada’s Diversity and Inclusion Minister Bardish Chagger told the Star Wednesday evening that on June 11 the government committed to hosting the summit and that she “would like to assure all Canadians that work began that very day. This is an important step as we recognize that systemic action is necessary and needed.”

Chagger said the federal government has been committed to tackling Islamophobia since it took office, by passing M-103, which was a motion to condemn Islamophobia, and by developing Canada’s anti-racism strategy, creating the anti-racism secretariat along with adding white supremacist groups to Canada’s terror list.

The National Council of Canadian Muslims has put out a call for policy submissionsfor the summit that it will include in the final report it presents there.

Combating street harassment, specifically where hijab-wearing Muslim women are targeted, along with putting another 250 white supremacist groups on Canada’s list of terrorist organizations are just some of the issues the NCCM plans to raise, said spokesperson Fatema Abdalla.

A petition by the NCCM in June asking for Ottawa to convene a summit amassed more than 40,000 signatures.

Calls for a summit to address Islamophobia are not new and have been discussed since incidents of hate increased after 9/11, nearly 20 years ago, said Faisal Kutty, a lawyer and adjunct law professor at York University.

Anti-terror measures implemented at the time that have seen many innocent Muslim Canadians placed on no-fly lists, impeding their ability to work and travel, continue to be a major issue, he said.

Provincial and federal governments have portrayed the Muslim community as a threat and they have a track record of making hate towards Muslims worse, not better, Kutty explained.

“The government has played a significant role in breeding Islamophobia. The onus is on them to take the initiative to rectify the situation,” he said.

Kutty says he’s doubtful real policy that will help communities, like launching a national database on all hate crimes, will emerge from the summit.

He points to the failure by the government to pass real policy changes following the January 2017 mosque shooting in Quebec City that left six dead and five others seriously injured.

In 2017 following the attack, the House of Commons passed M-103 with a vote of 201-91, which was a non-binding motion that condemned Islamophobia. The majority of Conservative MPs voted against it.

As a result of that motion, a Heritage committee report with 30 recommendations on hate, systemic racism and Islamophobia was published and included creating a national action plan and improved data collection on hate crimes.

Other than declaring Jan. 29 a day of remembrance for the Quebec Mosque attack, not much was implemented from the report, said Kutty.

“That’s why I’m saying the track record has not been good,” he said. “The fact that people are acknowledging it and saying they want to do something about it is an improvement, but until we see action … I can’t really say we’re going to see too many improvements.”

After the June attack in London, a motion presented at Queen’s Park by Liberal MPP Mitzie Hunter called on the legislature to condemn all forms of Islamophobia and commit to a six-month plan to tackle anti-Muslim hate in the province, including dismantling hundreds of white supremacist groups. It also called for support of the national summit.

But the province ended up tabling its own version of the motion that, while including condemning Islamophobia, did not include the six-month plan commitment, Hunter told the Star.

In a statement, the Ministry of the Solicitor General told the Star the province condemns all forms of hatred including Islamophobia and cited its anti-racism strategic plan that includes working with the Muslim community to tackle hate.

On Tuesday, Ontario also pledged $300,000 to Muslim organizations to address Islamophobia in schools.

The anti-racism directorate within the anti-racism strategic plan doesn’t have the resources it needs and is another instance where current government policies aren’t working, said Amira Elghawaby, a founding member of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, which monitors, exposes and counters hate groups.

She said she hopes at the very least the summit will symbolize that governments are finally agreeing on the urgency of the issue.

“We finally got past the point of people still denying the reality of Islamophobia. And now we are starting to move toward addressing it, but it won’t happen overnight,” said Elghawaby.

Jasmine Zine, a sociology professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, was the co-chair of the Islamophobia subcommittee under Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government. But it was dismantled when Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government was elected in 2018 and there is now a lack of proactive approach to Islamophobia — with statements and funding only emerging when there is an attack, said Zine.

“There’s been a lot of lost opportunities,” she said, referring to M-103, echoing Kutty’s comments about the 30 recommendations not being implemented.

She said she is unsure whether the summit will end up being politicians posturing, especially ahead of a possible fall federal election.

“It’s hard to feel that there’s a lot of sincerity when after the last terror attack there were opportunities to do something and they were not taken,” she said.

“So here we are again. It’s like déjà vu for a lot of us.”

Source: ‘Another political extravaganza?’ Muslim academics, community members skeptical about what might be achieved at Islamophobia summit

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Using A.I. to Find Bias in A.I.

2021/07/02 Leave a comment

In 2018, Liz O’Sullivan and her colleagues at a prominent artificial intelligence start-up began work on a system that could automatically remove nudity and other explicit images from the internet.

They sent millions of online photos to workers in India, who spent weeks adding tags to explicit material. The data paired with the photos would be used to teach A.I. software how to recognize indecent images. But once the photos were tagged, Ms. O’Sullivan and her team noticed a problem: The Indian workers had classified all images of same-sex couples as indecent.

For Ms. O’Sullivan, the moment showed how easily — and often — bias could creep into artificial intelligence. It was a “cruel game of Whac-a-Mole,” she said.

This month, Ms. O’Sullivan, a 36-year-old New Yorker, was named chief executive of a new company, Parity. The start-up is one of many organizations, including more than a dozen start-ups and some of the biggest names in tech, offering tools and services designed to identify and remove bias from A.I. systems.

Soon, businesses may need that help. In April, the Federal Trade Commission warned against the sale of A.I. systems that were racially biased or could prevent individuals from receiving employment, housing, insurance or other benefits. A week later, the European Union unveiled draft regulations that could punish companies for offering such technology.

It is unclear how regulators might police bias. This past week, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government research lab whose work often informs policy, released a proposal detailing how businesses can fight bias in A.I., including changes in the way technology is conceived and built.

Many in the tech industry believe businesses must start preparing for a crackdown. “Some sort of legislation or regulation is inevitable,” said Christian Troncoso, the senior director of legal policy for the Software Alliance, a trade group that represents some of the biggest and oldest software companies. “Every time there is one of these terrible stories about A.I., it chips away at public trust and faith.”

Over the past several years, studies have shown that facial recognition services, health care systems and even talking digital assistants can be biased against women, people of color and other marginalized groups. Amid a growing chorus of complaints over the issue, some local regulators have already taken action.

In late 2019, state regulators in New York opened an investigationof UnitedHealth Group after a study found that an algorithm used by a hospital prioritized care for white patients over Black patients, even when the white patients were healthier. Last year, the state investigated the Apple Card credit service after claims it was discriminating against women. Regulators ruled that Goldman Sachs, which operated the card, did not discriminate, while the status of the UnitedHealth investigation is unclear. 

A spokesman for UnitedHealth, Tyler Mason, said the company’s algorithm had been misused by one of its partners and was not racially biased. Apple declined to comment.

More than $100 million has been invested over the past six months in companies exploring ethical issues involving artificial intelligence, after $186 million last year, according to PitchBook, a research firm that tracks financial activity.

But efforts to address the problem reached a tipping point this month when the Software Alliance offered a detailed framework for fighting bias in A.I., including the recognition that some automated technologies require regular oversight from humans. The trade group believes the document can help companies change their behavior and can show regulators and lawmakers how to control the problem.

Though they have been criticized for bias in their own systems, Amazon, IBM, Google and Microsoft also offer tools for fighting it.

Ms. O’Sullivan said there was no simple solution to bias in A.I. A thornier issue is that some in the industry question whether the problem is as widespread or as harmful as she believes it is.

“Changing mentalities does not happen overnight — and that is even more true when you’re talking about large companies,” she said. “You are trying to change not just one person’s mind but many minds.”

When she started advising businesses on A.I. bias more than two years ago, Ms. O’Sullivan was often met with skepticism. Many executives and engineers espoused what they called “fairness through unawareness,” arguing that the best way to build equitable technology was to ignore issues like race and gender.

Increasingly, companies were building systems that learned tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data, including photos, sounds, text and stats. The belief was that if a system learned from as much data as possible, fairness would follow.

But as Ms. O’Sullivan saw after the tagging done in India, bias can creep into a system when designers choose the wrong data or sort through it in the wrong way. Studies show that face-recognition services can be biased against women and people of color when they are trained on photo collections dominated by white men.

Designers can be blind to these problems. The workers in India — where gay relationships were still illegal at the time and where attitudes toward gays and lesbians were very different from those in the United States — were classifying the photos as they saw fit.

Ms. O’Sullivan saw the flaws and pitfalls of artificial intelligence while working for Clarifai, the company that ran the tagging project. She said she had left the company after realizing it was building systems for the military that she believed could eventually be used to kill. Clarifai did not respond to a request for comment. 

She now believes that after years of public complaints over bias in A.I. — not to mention the threat of regulation — attitudes are changing. In its new framework for curbing harmful bias, the Software Alliance warned against fairness through unawareness, saying the argument did not hold up.

“They are acknowledging that you need to turn over the rocks and see what is underneath,” Ms. O’Sullivan said.

Still, there is resistance. She said a recent clash at Google, where two ethics researchers were pushed out, was indicative of the situation at many companies. Efforts to fight bias often clash with corporate culture and the unceasing push to build new technology, get it out the door and start making money.

It is also still difficult to know just how serious the problem is. “We have very little data needed to model the broader societal safety issues with these systems, including bias,” said Jack Clark, one of the authors of the A.I. Index, an effort to track A.I. technology and policy across the globe. “Many of the things that the average person cares about — such as fairness — are not yet being measured in a disciplined or a large-scale way.”

Ms. O’Sullivan, a philosophy major in college and a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, is building her company around a tool designed by Rumman Chowdhury, a well-known A.I. ethics researcher who spent years at the business consultancy Accenture before joining Twitter.

While other start-ups, like Fiddler A.I. and Weights and Biases, offer tools for monitoring A.I. services and identifying potentially biased behavior, Parity’s technology aims to analyze the data, technologies and methods a business uses to build its services and then pinpoint areas of risk and suggest changes.

The tool uses artificial intelligence technology that can be biased in its own right, showing the double-edged nature of A.I. — and the difficulty of Ms. O’Sullivan’s task.

Tools that can identify bias in A.I. are imperfect, just as A.I. is imperfect. But the power of such a tool, she said, is to pinpoint potential problems — to get people looking closely at the issue.

Ultimately, she explained, the goal is to create a wider dialogue among people with a broad range of views. The trouble comes when the problem is ignored — or when those discussing the issues carry the same point of view.

“You need diverse perspectives. But can you get truly diverse perspectives at one company?” Ms. O’Sullivan asked. “It is a very important question I am not sure I can answer.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/technology/artificial-intelligence-bias.html

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Black business owners raise concerns about government loan fund

2021/06/30 Leave a comment

This has echoes of the WE Charity political scandal given the sole source process followed with an organization close to the PM (his riding), an untested organization in program delivery, and complaints by applicants regarding the program requirements.

Will be interesting to see the results one year from now in terms of disbursements and areas of activity, and at the five year program evaluation benchmark.

And while I always welcome more information of the demographics of applicants, this does seem overly intrusive:

Some Black businesspeople say a new government program meant to bolster Black entrepreneurship is hard to access, offers unclear repayment terms and asks invasive questions about applicants’ sexuality.

The Black Entrepreneurship Loan Fund was announced in September by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Its application portal launched late last month.

The $291.3 million program offers loans of up to $250,000 to businesses that are majority Black-owned. Black entrepreneurs starting companies or operating existing small businesses can also apply for funding.

Source: Black business owners raise concerns about government loan fund

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