Did Trump’s botched census citizenship push cost red states?

2021/04/29 Leave a comment

Ironic:

Among the many haphazard and politically transparent moves by the Trump administration, few rank quite as high on both measures as its botched push for a census citizenship question. The move was widely criticized as a thinly veiled attempt to dissuade undocumented immigrants from responding and to give the GOP a tool to draw more favorable political maps. The Supreme Court wound up rejecting the whole thing, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. effectively accusing the administration of hiding its true motives.

But even when the administration succumbed, some warned that damage might already have been done — that certain immigrants might still shy away from responding because of fears engendered by the lengthy battle. And there was data to back that up.

So did it happen? It’s not quite clear that it did in significant measure, but there are some indications it might have — though perhaps to the detriment of Trump’s red-state allies rather than Democrats.

Source: Did Trump’s botched census citizenship push cost red states?

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Montreal latest Canadian city to consider granting voting rights to non-citizens

2021/04/29 Leave a comment

Unlikely to happen given provincial decision. Relatively few studies regarding the experience of jurisdictions that have granted voting rights, with Leslie Seidle’s review of the Netherlands, Sweden and Belgium showing mixed results: “Finally, those who advocate local voting rights for non-nationals should be modest in their claims. Although the expanded franchise can have symbolic as well as practical value, more equitable elected representation of immigrant-background communities requires explicit efforts on the part of political leaders and party organizations, as well as the commitment of the broader society.“:

Montreal officials are looking into extending voting rights to more than 100,000 non-citizens in order to better integrate immigrants and encourage more racialized people to participate in municipal politics.

The idea isn’t new: for years, Canadian cities such as Toronto, Vancouver and Saint John, N.B., have debated or proposed giving the vote to permanent residents — but none have succeeded in convincing provincial or federal governments to modify citizenship and voting laws.

Montreal can “show leadership” on this issue and rekindle the debate in the country, according to an April 19 report by the city’s committee on social development and diversity.

“Granting voting rights to permanent residents is one of the ways to foster political participation and ensure better representation of the various groups that form society,” the report said.

“Montreal, the city that welcomes the largest number of immigrants to Quebec each year, should ensure it reflects the diversity of its population.”

The committee, composed mostly of elected officials from the two main parties at city hall, wants Montreal to publicly affirm its desire to grant voting rights to permanent residents who have lived “for at least 12 months on the territory of the city of Montreal.” It also wants the city to lobby the provincial and federal governments to change laws to allow non-citizens to vote in municipal elections.

The idea has its critics. Frederic Bastien, history teacher at Montreal’s Dawson College and former leadership candidate for the Parti Quebecois, says allowing non-citizens to vote could endanger the foundations of the nation state.

He says citizenship comes with an understanding of the culture, language and history of a country, adding that the idea could be a political strategy by Mayor Valerie Plante ahead of next November’s municipal election.

“It is part of a series of gestures from the Plante administration,” Bastien said in a recent interview. “It’s a ‘woke’ trend among Projet Montreal and it’s a toxic vision of social and public life,” he added, referring to Plante’s political party.

Chris Erl, doctoral candidate in McGill University’s geography department who researches municipal politics, disagrees that granting voting rights to marginalized communities would undermine the country’s democratic values. Rather, he said, doing so would provide a voice for many people who have been excluded from politics.

“Where all the political parties have failed in the past is in recruiting candidates from communities of colour,” Erl said. “Something like this could certainly help inspire people that may feel isolated from the political system to get involved.”

He said he questions the fairness of refusing to allow people who are actively engaged in the urban life of a city the right to select those who represent them in office.

“People need to look at this from the very basic idea that their neighbours, who might not have citizenship, are paying the same property taxes, they use the same services and they have the same ideas and opinions about how the city could be better run, so why shouldn’t they be able to send people to city hall to make decisions?” Erl said.

The city’s diversity committee noted that permanent residents compose about 9 per cent of Montreal’s population, equalling about 170,000 people — roughly 105,000 of whom would qualify as voters.

Montreal’s city administration says it’s interested in letting non-citizens vote in order to attract more people to the political process — especially immigrants. Voter turnout in the 2017 municipal election was 22 per cent in Cote-des-Neiges—Notre-Dame-de-Grace, the most ethnically diverse borough in the city, according to government data.

But it’s unclear what the Quebec and federal governments think of Montreal’s idea. A spokesperson for Quebec’s municipal affairs minister didn’t return a request for comment. And Corinne Havard, spokesperson for federal Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc, said Ottawa doesn’t play a role in municipal elections and directed questions about reforming voting laws to the Quebec government.

Montreal doesn’t seem interested in pushing the issue at the moment — at least not ahead of November’s city election.

Genevieve Jutras, spokeswoman for Plante, said the city will take its time to examine the report, adding that it is up to the provincial government to modify voting rights.

“The administration doesn’t have the intention to request a modification before the next municipal election,” Jutras said.

Source: Montreal latest Canadian city to consider granting voting rights to non-citizens

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Protests reveal generational divide in immigrant communities

2021/04/28 Leave a comment

Likely similar in Canada, as second generation grow up with Canadian expectations of equality and opportunity:

When protests began in a Minneapolis suburb after a white police officer fatally shot a Black man, 21-year-old Fatumata Kromah took to the street, pushing for change she says is essential to her Liberian immigrant community.

Meanwhile, 40-year-old Matilda Kromah feared stepping outside her home as trauma associated with the Liberian civil war suddenly rushed back into her life, two decades after she escaped the conflict.

The two women, whose shared last name is common among Liberians, have seen their lives changed amid the unrest that has sometimes engulfed Minneapolis in the months since George Floyd’s death. Their behavior also reflects a generational split: While Fatumata has been drawn into the protests, Matilda has tried to avoid them, focusing instead on running a dress shop and hair-braiding salon that is essential to sending her children to college.

The same divide has played out across the Twin Cities’ burgeoning Somali, Ethiopian, Liberian and Kenyan communities. Young people have thrust themselves into movements for racial justice, often embracing the identity of being Black in America. Older generations have been more likely to concentrate on carving out new lives rather than protesting racial issues in their adopted homeland.

When Fatumata visited Matilda’s shop this past week in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center, the topic was unavoidable. Matilda’s strip-mall storefront — Humu Boutique and Neat Braids — was vandalized in the aftermath of the April 11 death of Black motorist Daunte Wright. Thieves smashed windows and doors and took nearly everything of value, even stripping mannequins of their African dresses.

Tears formed in the elder woman’s eyes, and her hands shook as she spoke. Memories of the atrocities she had fled during the Liberian civil war had returned.

“Maybe war is starting again,” Matilda said of the demonstrations. “I was traumatized. For three days, I didn’t want to go out of my house. I was hiding in my room.”

But she needed to figure out a way to pay for her son’s college tuition, so she posted an “open” sign on the plywood covering the shop’s broken windows and began accepting customers. She did not have insurance to cover the losses, she said.

Fatumata, who chanted and yelled at protests, grew quiet as Matilda spoke. She agreed that the United States offered opportunities for education and a “better life,” but she had also made up her mind that such a life would not be complete without justice for Black people.

After moving to Brooklyn Center from Liberia in 2015, she said she was treated differently as a Black person. People commented on the color of her skin, disapproved of the clothes she wore and once called the police on her and a friend for being too “loud.”

“I started to realize like, ‘Oh, America is not what it says on TV,’” she said.

Then Floyd’s death sparked protests, and she decided that “this was not the American dream I was promised.”

Kromah is not alone. Young people in the city’s East African communities came out to protest in droves following Floyd’s death. Despite tension, at times, between Black immigrants from Africa and Black people whose long history in the U.S. began with slavery, protesters united around decrying police brutality they said plagued their communities.

The verse “Somali lives, they matter here,” often followed the protest refrain of “Black lives, they matter here.” And one of the most widely shared images of last year’s protests was a video posted on social media showing a protester in a hijab and a long skirt kicking a tear gas cannister back toward law enforcement officers in riot gear.

“I am Somali, I am Black American, I am Muslim,” 21-year-old Aki Abdi said. “If a cop pulls me over, he don’t know if I’m Somali or Black. They go hand in hand.”

When former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder in Floyd’s death, celebrations broke out across the city, and Abdi and two friends made their way to George Floyd Square.

On the sidewalk down the street from where Floyd took his last breath, they scrawled the names of two Somali men — Dolal Idd and Isak Aden — who were fatally shot by Minnesota police in recent years. They hoped some people in the crowd would search those names on the internet. Police defended their actions in both shootings, saying the men had guns, but the men’s families have pressed for more thorough investigations.

Many older immigrants grew up in countries where speaking out against the government resulted in punishment, and some are so focused on making a living after escaping war-torn countries that they do not have time or energy for anything besides their families’ immediate well-being, said Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Younger Black immigrants who were born in America or came at a young age often know firsthand both their parents’ struggles and America’s history of racial injustice, Hussein said.

“By being squeezed by these two pressures, they have no option but to fight and to try to change the system.” he said. “The younger generation is propelled by this legacy of the fight that is happening in the country that they’ve adopted, but also the fight that their parents have been teaching them about in the country that they left.”

Fatumata Kromah’s mother, Rebecca Williams Sonyah, said parents like her fear for their children’s safety both in interactions with police and at demonstrations, all while trying to stay focused on the jobs and businesses essential to their livelihoods.

“Our children should have freedom. They should have equal rights,” Williams Sonyah said. “They shouldn’t judge our children because of their color or because of where their parents are from.”

She recognized her daughter’s activism as important to those goals but still pleaded with her to stay home after Wright’s death, knowing that destruction was likely. They compromised by agreeing that Kromah would return home before the curfews set by city authorities.

Williams Sonyah’s job in medical home care prevented her from joining in the marches in front of the police department. But she seemed sympathetic to the movement.

“If I had a way to go protest,” she said, “I would protest.”

Source: Protests reveal generational divide in immigrant communities

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How Extremists Weaponize Irony To Spread Hate

2021/04/28 Leave a comment

Of interest, and no “just joking” is no excuse:

On a recent episode of his livestreamed show, the 22-year-old extremist Nick Fuentes repeated a formula that has won him a following with some of the youngest members of the far right. He went on an extended, violent and misogynistic rant, only to turn to the camera and add with a smirk, “Just joking!”

In this case, from the April 22 edition of Fuentes’ show, America First, a viewer wrote in to ask Fuentes for advice on how to “punish” his wife for “getting out of line.”

Fuentes responded, “Why don’t you smack her across the face?”

The rant continued for minutes.

“Why don’t you give her a vicious and forceful backhanded slap with your knuckles right across her face — disrespectfully — and make it hurt?” Fuentes went on. At one point, he pantomimed punching a woman in the face.

He then added, “No, I’m kidding, of course. Just kidding. Just a joke.”

Fuentes was following a playbook popular among domestic extremists: using irony and claims of “just joking” to spread their message, while deflecting criticism.

Researchers who track domestic extremism say the tactic, while not new, has helped several groups mask their danger, avoid consequences and draw younger people into their movements.

Irony as “cover” for extremism

Fuentes is best known for using cartoonish memes to spread white supremacist propaganda. His followers refer to themselves as “Groypers” — a reference to a mutated version of the Pepe the Frogcartoon that was co-opted by the far right. Though Fuentes exists on the fringes of the extreme right, Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., spoke at a political conference that Fuentes hosted, drawing widespread criticism.

But Fuentes has said himself that he uses irony and “jokes” to communicate his message without consequences.

“Irony is so important for giving a lot of cover and plausible deniability for our views,” Fuentes said in a 2020 video. He specifically cited Holocaust denial — or what he termed Holocaust “revision” — as a topic that is too fraught to discuss earnestly, even on the far right.

Far-right extremist Nick Fuentes, seen here in a screenshot from his livestreamed show, has said he uses irony because it provides “plausible deniability” and cover for some of his most incendiary statements.

“When it comes to a lot of these issues, you need a little bit of maneuverability that irony gives you,” Fuentes said.

And, in fact, after Fuentes questioned the death toll from the Holocaust in one rant, he later claimed to The Washington Post that it was just a “lampoon.”

Researchers who track domestic extremism say Fuentes is not the only figure to adopt these tactics, particularly among far-right content creators, who encourage their audiences to follow suit.

“A lot of these content creators will tell the audience explicitly, ‘When people say you’re racist for liking this or thinking this, just laugh at them. They can’t handle it — they’re sensitive babies,’ ” said Jared Holt, a resident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

Concern on campus

In early 2020, Oona Flood started getting more and more worried about a classmate at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The classmate, a 22-year-old named Christian Secor, was already well-known for his self-proclaimed “love” of guns. Around that time, he was also posting racist and antisemitic memes and tweets, attacking immigrants online and publicly supporting Fuentes. Often, Secor adopted the kind of “trolling” style that’s prevalent on the internet.

When one student called Secor out for a tweet that the student found offensive, Secor responded that he was using “post irony.”

“It’s called a joke and the fact that you think that these posts are anything more than that is telling,” added Secor.

Flood, who is Japanese American, said they wanted to speak up.

“I definitely felt that sense of threat,” Flood told NPR recently. “And, like, I really hate to say, [because] it sounds so much like, overblown, ‘snowflake,’ that we’re just overreacting, you know?”

And throughout 2020, students told NPR, UCLA took no action against Secor despite his escalating rhetoric, likely because of free speech concerns. (As a public university, UCLA is legally bound to follow the First Amendment, which protects hate speech.)

In retrospect, Flood’s concern does not seem like an overreaction.

Secor is currently facing federal criminal charges for allegedly storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Prosecutors have cited his support for Fuentes in charging documents. Secor has pleaded not guilty.

In addition to Fuentes and his followers, other experts point to the extremist group known as the Proud Boys, which has embraced outlandish rituals. The group’s name was inspired by a song from the Broadway version of Disney’s Aladdin, and one of the group’s initiation rites involves members listing breakfast cereals while they get lightly punched in the stomach. Yet that same group is known for its involvement in violent street fights. At least 25 members of the group are facing federal criminal charges related to the Capitol riot, including, in some cases, conspiracy.

Gavin McInnes, the group’s founder, said in an email that the media, including NPR, “willfully ignores” jokes to paint the group in a more negative light. The Proud Boys are “funny dudes, not Nazis,” McInnes wrote.

But Cassie Miller of the Southern Poverty Law Center said the group’s use of “jokes” is strategic. “It distracts from what their actual political ideology is and from their violence,” said Miller. “Because if you point it out, it’s, like, ‘well, they’re so goofy.’ ”

Similarly, the far-right, pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is often so over the top on his InfoWars broadcasts that his own attorney likened him to a “performance artist” during a court hearing about Jones’ divorce.

The appeal to young people

Humor has always been crucial to building social movements, experts say, because it serves to define the people who are “in on the joke” and those who “just don’t get it.”

And online extremists have adopted irony because it is, in many ways, the native language of the internet.

“I’m speaking the language of other zoomers,” said Fuentes in 2020. “If you’re a young person online, I mean, this is the language of our generation.”

“Every kid naturally wants to push away from their parents,” said Joanna Schroeder, a writer based in California.

Schroeder was troubled when she saw a pro-Hitler meme pop up in one of her kids’ Instagram feeds. Memes that merely pushed boundaries were mixed in alongside outright racist and antisemitic content.

“The problem is that all of this kind of trolling behavior, some of it is harmless and goofy,” said Schroeder, “and others of it is designed to look harmless and goofy but will drive our kids’ social media and YouTube algorithms toward alt-right and even more extremist content.”

Schroeder has since collaborated with the Western States Center to develop a guide for parents who see their kids share online extremist content.

Historic parallels

Violent domestic extremism in America long predates the internet, however, and so does the tactical use of irony.

Historians have documented how the early iterations of the Ku Klux Klan were portrayed by group members and their allies as outlandish, rather than as a dangerous terrorist group. The KKK put on racist minstrel shows and created its own songs.

This drawing from 1868 depicts early members of the Ku Klux Klan. Historians have documented how the group used absurdity to mock its opponents and to try to mask the seriousness of the KKK’s atrocities.

Descriptions of attacks by men in hoods, who had titles like “dragon,” “ghoul,” and “wizard,” were often seen by white Americans as tall tales and ghost stories. Newspapers that supported the KKK played up those aspects of the group and mocked their opponents for supposedly taking the KKK too seriously, said Elaine Frantz, a historian at Kent State University.

Pro-KKK newspaper editors would often “talk jokingly about what the klan has done,” said Frantz, “in order to be deniable.”

And at first it seemed to work. Frantz cites the testimony of a Georgia congressman who tried to play down klan murders and other racist atrocities.

“Sometimes, mischievous boys who want to have some fun go on a masquerading frolic to scare the negroes,” testified U.S. Rep. John H. Christy of Georgia in the early 1870s. Christy insisted that stories of klan attacks were “exaggerated.” In fact, he claimed, the group did not exist at all. Frantz said there were also documented instances in the Reconstruction era of white Northerners dressing up in klan robes as a supposedly boundary-pushing “joke.”

But eventually, Frantz said, the testimony of Black Americans who witnessed these atrocities — published widely by newspaper reporters and in government investigations — so thoroughly demonstrated the KKK’s campaign of lynchings and assassinations that it became undeniable. They pulled back the klan hood to see the terrorism and violence it masked.

Source: How Extremists Weaponize Irony To Spread Hate

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Spokesman: Israel to deport dozens of African Hebrews

2021/04/28 Leave a comment

Strange story and history:

Dozens of members of a polygamous, vegan sect in Israel have received deportation orders from the government, the group’s spokesman said Monday, despite much of the community having received permanent residency under arrangements with Israel.

The community, which numbers around 3,000 people, is comprised of Black Americans whose founders moved to Israel in the 1960s and believe they are descendants of an ancient Israelite tribe. Most live in the southern desert town of Dimona.

Prince Immanuel Ben-Yehuda, spokesman for the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, said the Interior Ministry had given notice to at least 46 families that they must leave the country within 60 days, calling it a “shock to the system.”

The African Hebrew Israelites began arriving in Israel in 1969, following Ben Carter, a Chicago steelworker who renamed himself Ben Ammi Ben Israel and claimed to be God’s representative on earth.

But Israel wasn’t sure what to make of the newcomers, who arrived on tourist visas, adopted Hebrew names and a West African style of dress. The government was unsure whether they qualified for citizenship under the country’s “Law of Return,” which is granted to almost any Jew who requests it.

The Interior Ministry granted many members of the community temporary residency in 1992 and permanent residency status in 2003. Many members study in Israeli schools and serve in the military.

“For quite some time, we’ve had a number of members of the community with different levels of immigration status, some of us have full citizenship, some taken permanent residency, some have temporary residency, and some have no status whatsoever,” said Ben-Yehuda. He said the community has been working for years with Israeli authorities to sort out the legal status of those without permanent residency.

The Population and Immigration Authority said in a statement that in 2003, 1,200 African Hebrew Israelites were found eligible for residency, and that in the years afterward the office received other requests from people who were not members of the community.

“All those who were not included in the list of community members and didn’t meet the criteria received a negative reply and in effect are residing illegally in Israel for a long period and must leave according to the law,” the authority said in a statement. It added that those who had received deportation letters were entitled to appeal.

Ben-Yehuda said the community would appeal the decision. “We’re here because we chose to be here to build this country and give our energy to the improvement and the betterment of this nation, so it’s quite a bit disheartening in that respect,” he said.

Source: Spokesman: Israel to deport dozens of African Hebrews

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The federal budget took steps toward racial justice — but activists say more must be done

2021/04/26 Leave a comment

As always. The funds allocated in Budget 2021 are significant compared to earlier budgets and we will see how effective they are through the regular evaluation processes and other analyses:

Advocates for Black, Chinese, South Asian and other racialized Canadians say the federal budget takes a number of positive steps toward building a more inclusive country, but more work needs to be done to address systemic racism in Canada.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland tabled the Liberal government’s first budget in two years on Monday. The budget proposes massive amounts of spending to contend with the uneven impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and pledges to create a million jobs within a year by funding an inclusive, equitable economic recovery.

To address systemic racism, the document sets aside $11 million over two years to expand the activities of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, a non-profit Crown corporation tasked with combating racial discrimination.

Source: The federal budget took steps toward racial justice — but activists say more must be done

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Breaking With Predecessors, Biden Declares Mass Killings of Armenians a Genocide

2021/04/26 Leave a comment

Significant even though many other countries, including Canada, have already done so:

President Biden on Saturday recognized the mass killings of Armenians more than a century ago as genocide, signaling a willingness to test an increasingly frayed relationship with Turkey, long a key regional ally and an important partner within NATO.

“Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring,” Mr. Biden said in a statement issued on the 106th anniversary of the beginning of a brutal campaign by the former Ottoman Empire that killed 1.5 million people. “And we remember so that we remain ever vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.”WHAT TO KNOWAfter years of avoiding the topic, the United States now officially views the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire a century ago as genocide.

The declaration by Mr. Biden reflected his administration’s commitment to human rights, a pillar of its foreign policy. It is also a break from Mr. Biden’s predecessors, who were reluctant to anger a country of strategic importance and were wary of driving its leadership toward American adversaries like Russia or Iran.

The Turkish government, as well as human rights activists and ethnic Armenians, gave a muted response to the news, which leaked days in advance, describing the move as largely symbolic. Later on Saturday, the country’s foreign minister summoned the U.S. ambassador to protest the declaration, state media reported.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has repeatedly denied that the killings amounted to genocide, had lobbied hard to prevent the announcement, mounting a conference and media campaigns before the anniversary on Saturday.

But in a call on Friday, Mr. Biden told Mr. Erdogan directly that he would be declaring the massacre an act of genocide, according to a person familiar with the discussion who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose details of the conversation.

A summary of the call provided by the White House said only that the pair had agreed to an “effective management of disagreements.” The Turkish presidency said in a statement that both leaders agreed on the “importance of working together.” They are scheduled to meet at a summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in June.

In his statement on Saturday, Mr. Biden acknowledged the Armenians who were forced to rebuild their lives.

“We affirm the history,” he said. “We do this not to cast blame but to ensure that what happened is never repeated.”

Since taking office, Mr. Biden has kept Mr. Erdogan at a distance, calling other world leaders — and leaving his Turkish counterpart, who enjoyed a friendly relationship with President Donald J. Trump, waiting for months.

After news broke on Wednesday of the impending announcement, Mr. Erdogan said in a statement that Turkey would “defend the truth against the lie of the so-called ‘Armenian genocide.’”

Mr. Erdogan is widely expected to use the designation to whip up support at home, where he has increasingly adopted a nationalist-Islamist stance to retain his voter base. But political analysts said he was likely to tread carefully with the United States.

Relations between the countries have reached their lowest point in decades, as Mr. Erdogan has turned increasingly combative in his dealings with Washington, particularly after a failed coup in 2016. Mr. Erdogan has blamed the bid to oust him from power on a Turkish cleric living in self-imposed exile in rural Pennsylvania, and by extension on the United States.

Tensions escalated with Turkey’s deal to buy a missile system from Russia in 2017, which prompted the Trump administration to impose sanctions on Turkey in December. Syria, too, has been a flash point. Mr. Erdogan has bitterly criticized the United States military’s support of Kurdish forces in Syria that are affiliated with a group that has waged a decades-long insurgency against Turkey, and his own operations there have further tested the Atlantic alliance.

Mr. Erdogan sees Turkey, a country of 80 million and a member of the Group of 20, as a regional power that deserves greater respect on the world stage. That view has fueled a greater geopolitical assertiveness demonstrated in military interventions in Syria, Libya, Iraq and Azerbaijan and in exploration for energy in contested waters in the eastern Mediterranean last year.

European leaders and members of the Biden administration advocate continued engagement with Mr. Erdogan’s government because Turkey houses millions of Syrian refugees who might otherwise head to Europe. They also point to Turkey’s support for Ukraine and Afghanistan, where it will maintain a small force to train Afghan army and police personnel as the United States and other coalition troops withdraw by Sept. 11.

The White House’s sustained silence toward Mr. Erdogan had been seen as a sign that Mr. Biden did not view Turkey as a priority and intended to manage the relationship at lower levels of the administration.

“They don’t want to have a conflict with him, but they don’t want to be too cozy with him either,” said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, the director of the Ankara office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Mr. Erdogan also would not seek to further damage relations over the genocide designation, said Asli Aydintasbas, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. By one count, at least 29 other countries have taken similar steps.

“In the past, Turkey used to issue all types of threats, but lately the policy toward genocide recognition from allies has been to shrug it off,” she said. “They will issue denouncements, but not go so far as to create a crisis.”

Mr. Unluhisarcikli, like other analysts and human rights defenders, questioned the timing and purpose of the announcement.

“The Turkish government will feel obliged to respond in ways that are consequential for the U.S. and for U.S.-Turkey relationship,” he said.

The Turkish public will see it as evidence of American double standards, and anti-Western forces in Turkey will use it to incite fury, he said.

Both opposition and pro-government leaders attacked the expected designation.

“This is an improper, unfair stance,” said Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the largest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party.

Dogu Perincek, the leader of the ultranationalist Patriotic Party, in an open letter to Mr. Biden, questioned his authority to issue such a declaration. “As is known, the genocide against the Jews was adjudicated at an authorized court,” he wrote, “but regarding the 1915 incidents, there is no judicial ruling.”

The killings of Armenians occurred at the end of World War I during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of modern Turkey. Worried that the Christian Armenian population would align with Russia, a primary enemy of the Ottoman Turks, officials ordered mass deportations in what many historians consider the first genocide of the 20th century: Nearly 1.5 million Armenians were killed, some in massacres by soldiers and the police, others in forced exoduses to the Syrian desert that left them starved to death.

Turkey has acknowledged that widespread atrocities occurred during that period, but its leaders have adamantly denied that the killings were genocide.

n the days leading up to Mr. Biden’s announcement, Armenians and human rights activists in Turkey expressed caution, partly because of years of political seesawing over the issue.

“Personally, it is not going to make me excited,” Yetvart Danzikyan, the editor in chief of Agos, an Armenian-Turkish weekly newspaper in Istanbul, said, pointing to a statement President Ronald Reagan issued in 1981 about the Holocaust that mentioned the “genocide of the Armenians” in passing.

Murat Celikkan, a journalist and longtime human rights activist, said the declaration would be good for American-Armenian citizens, but he did not expect it to change attitudes in Turkey or encourage reconciliation between Turks and Armenians.

“It did not change with more than 20 countries officially recognizing it, including Germany,” he said.

In the United States, some Armenian activists welcomed the declaration as a step forward.

“The denial of the genocide has been such a painful chapter,” said Bryan Ardouny, the executive director of the Armenian Assembly of America. “This is a really critical moment in the arc of history, in defense of human rights.”

“The president is standing firmly against basically a century of denial and is charting a new course,” he said.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/us/politics/armenia-genocide-joe-biden.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

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The Pandemic Imperiled Non-English Speakers In A Hospital

2021/04/24 Leave a comment

Of note, both the findings and the measures the hospital took to address the problem:

In March, just weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic, the incident command center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston was scrambling to understand this deadly new disease. It appeared to be killing more black and brown patients than whites. For Latino patients, there was an additional warning sign — language.

Patients who didn’t speak much, if any, English had a 35% greater chance of death.

Clinicians who couldn’t communicate clearly with patients in the hospital’s COVID units noticed it was affecting outcomes.

“We had an inkling that language was going to be an issue early on,” says Dr. Karthik Sivashankar, the Brigham’s then medical director for quality, safety and equity. “We were getting safety reports saying language is a problem.”

Sivashankar dove into the records, isolating and layering the unique characteristics of each of the patients who died: their race, age, gender and whether they spoke English.

“That’s where we started to really discover some deeper, previously invisible inequities,” he says.

Inequities that weren’t about race alone.

Hospitals across the country are reporting higher hospitalizations and deaths for Black and Latino patients as compared to whites. Black and brown patients may be more susceptible because they are more likely to have a chronic illness that increases the risk of serious COVID. But when the Brigham team compared Black and brown patients to white patients with similar chronic illnesses, they found no difference in the risk of death from COVID.

But a difference did emerge for Latino patients who don’t speak English.

That sobering realization helped them home in on a specific health disparity, think about some possible solutions, and begin a commitment to change.

“That’s the future,” says Sivashankar.

Identifying the mortality risk is just the first step

But first, the Brigham had to unravel this latest example of a life threatening health disparity. It started outside the hospital, in lower-income communities within and just outside Boston, where the coronavirus spread quickly among many native Spanish speakers who live in close quarters with jobs they can’t do from home.

Some avoided coming to the hospital until they were very sick, because they didn’t trust the care in big hospitals or feared detection by immigration authorities. Nevertheless, just weeks into the pandemic, COVID patients who spoke little English began surging into Boston hospitals, including Brigham and Women’s.

” We were frankly not fully prepared for that surge,” says Sivashanker. “We have really amazing interpreter services, but they were starting to get overwhelmed.”

“In the beginning, we didn’t know how to act, we were panicking,” says Ana Maria Rios-Velez, a Spanish-language interpreter at the Brigham.

Rios-Velez remembers searching for words to translate this new disease and experience for patients. When called to a COVID patient’s room, interpreters were confused about whether they could go in, and how close they should get to a patient. Some interpreters say they felt disposable in the early days of the pandemic, when they weren’t given adequate personal protective equipment.

When she had PPE, Rios-Velez says she still struggled to gain a patient’s trust from behind a mask, face shield and gown. For safety, many interpreters were urged to work from home. But speaking to patients over the phone created new problems.

“It was extremely difficult, extremely difficult,” she says. “The patients were having breathing issues. They were coughing. Their voices were muffled.”

And Rios-Velez couldn’t look her patients in the eye to put them at ease and try to build a connection.

“It’s not only the voice, sometimes I need to see the lips, if smiling,” she says. “I want them to see the compassion in me.”

Adding interpreters and telemedicine tech

The Brigham responded by adding more interpreters and buying more iPads so that remote workers could see patients. The hospital purchased amplifiers to raise the volume of the patient’s voice above the beeps and machines humming in an ICU. The Mass General Brigham network is piloting the use of interpreters available via video in primary care offices. A study found lower use of telemedicine visits by Spanish-speaking patients as compared to white patients during the pandemic.

The Brigham’s goal is that every patient who needs an interpreter will get one. Sivashankar says that happens now for most patients who make the request. The bigger challenge, he says, is including an interpreter in the care of patients who may need the help but don’t ask for it.

In the midst of the first surge, interpreters also became translators for the hospital’s website, information kiosks, COVID safety signs and brochures.

“It was really tough. I got sick and had to take a week off,” saysYilu Ma, the Brigham’s director of interpreter services.

Mass General Brigham is now expanding a centralized translation service for the entire hospital network.

Seeing the inequities within the hospital workforce

Brigham and Women’s analytics team uncovered other disparities. Lower-paid employees were getting COVID more often than nurses and doctors. Sivashankar says there were dozens of small group meetings with medical assistants, transport workers, security staff and those in environmental services where he shared the higher positive test rates and encouraged everyone to get tested.

“We let them know they wouldn’t lose their jobs,” if they had to miss work, Sivashankar says. And he, along with managers, told these employees “that we realize you’re risking your life just like any other doctor of nurse is, every single day you come to work.”

Some employees complained of favoritism in the distribution of PPE, which the hospital investigated. To make sure all employees were receiving timely updates as pandemic guidance changed, the Brigham started translating all coronavirus messages into Spanish and other languages, and sending them via text, which people who are on the move all day are more likely to read. The Mass General Brigham system offered hardship grants of up to $1,000 for employees with added financial pressures, such as additional child care costs.

Angelina German, a hospital housekeeper with limited English, says she appreciates getting updates via text in Spanish, as well as in-person COVID briefings from her bosses.

“Now they’re more aware of us all,” German says through an interpreter, “making sure people are taking care of themselves. ”

Moving beyond the hospital walls to address disparities

The hospital also set up testing sites in some Boston neighborhoods with high coronavirus infection rates, including neighborhoods where many employees live and were getting infected. At least one of those sites now offers COVID vaccinations.

“No one has to be scheduled, you don’t need insurance, you just walk up and we can test you,” explained Dr. Christin Price during a visit to one of the testing sites last fall. It was located in the parking lot of Brookside Community Health Center, in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood.

Nancy Santiago left the testing site carrying a free 10-pound bag of fruits and vegetables, which she’ll share with her mother. Santiago said she’s grateful for the help.

“I had to leave my job because of [lack of] daycare, and it’s been pretty tough,” she said, “but you know, we gotta keep staying strong and hopefully this is over sooner rather than later.”

The Brigham recently opened a similar indoor operation at the Strand Theater in Dorchester. Everyone who comes for a coronavirus test is asked if they have enough to eat, if they can afford their medications, whether they need housing assistance and if they’re registered to vote.

The bags of free food, and the referrals to social support, are evidence of a debate playing out about the role hospitals will play, outside their walls, to curb health disparities rooted in racism.

“Poverty and social determinants of health needs are not going away any time soon, and so if there’s a way to continue to serve the communities, I think that would be tremendous,” says Price, who helped organize the Brigham’s community testing program.

Mass General Brigham leaders say they’ll take what they’ve learned dissecting disparities during the COVID-19 pandemic, and expand the remedies across the hospital network.

“Many of the issues that were identified during the COVID equity response are unfortunately pretty universal issues that we need to address, if we’re going to be an anti-racist organization and one that promotes equity strongly as one of our core strategies,” says Tom Sequist, chief of patient experience and equity for Mass General Brigham.

The Brigham’s work on health disparities comes, in part, out of a collaboration with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), and included a focus on gathering, analyzing and tracking data.

“There’s a lot of defensive routines into which we slip as clinicians, that the data can help cut through and reveal that there are some biases in your own practice,” explains IHI President and CEO Dr. Kedar Mate.

“If we don’t name and start to talk about racism and how we intend to dismantle it or undo it,” Mate adds, “we’ll continue to place Band-Aids on the problem and not actually tackle the underlying causes.”

But has the Brigham’s work lowered the risk of death from COVID for Spanish-speaking patients? The hospital hasn’t updated the analysis yet, and even when it does, determining whether (or how) the interventions worked will be hard to prove, Sivashankar says.

“It’s never going to be as simple as ‘We just didn’t give them enough iPads or translators and that was the only problem,’ and now that we’ve given that, we’ve shown that the mortality difference has gone away,” said Sivashankar.

But Sivashankar says more interpreters, iPads, and better messaging to non-English speaking employees, plus all the other steps the Brigham has taken during COVID have improved both the patient and employee experience. That, he says, counts as a success, while work on the next layer of discrimination continues.

Source: The Pandemic Imperiled Non-English Speakers In A Hospital

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Changing immigration trends colour ‘Minari’ reception in South Korea

2021/04/24 Leave a comment

Of interest:

The heartfelt Korean immigrant tale in “Minari” resonated with many Asian Americans, but for some in South Korea the film presented a far too dated view of immigration to the United States.

“Minari”, directed by a Korean-American and produced in the United States, was nominated for six Academy Awards, including best picture, best director and best supporting actress for Youn Yuh-jung, a historic first for a Korean actor.

Released in the midst of the pandemic, the film’s Korean elements and its Oscar nominations helped make it a commercial success in South Korea, where the film brought in $7 million of its total $11 million global box office receipts, compared with $2 million from showings in the United States, according to IMDb.

In “Minari,” the tale of a hard-luck immigrant farming family in rural Arkansas in the 1980s highlighted the heyday of immigration from South Korea to the United States. Today, however, it’s a tale that is increasingly foreign to many South Koreans, especially younger people.

“It is true that people are less interested in ‘Minari’ because of its topic, as these days it’s mostly rich people who immigrate to America,” said a 35-year-old teacher who only gave her surname, Jeong.

About 350,000 Koreans were estimated to have immigrated to the United States in the 1980s after the liberalisation of overseas travel and studies. The annual tally peaked in 1986, at 30,500, but it slowed to 8,000 a year in the 2000s, and then to about 4,000 after Washington tightened border controls after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, according to South Korea’s foreign ministry.

Most new Korean immigrants to the United States are there for jobs or satisfy an investment requirement of nearly a million dollars, the ministry data showed.

Racial tensions, highlighted by a recent Atlanta shooting in which four Koreans were killed, and the high numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths in the United States, have also cast a darker shadow on the idea of living there, said Park Soo-hui, 69, who said she has relatives in the United States.

Park said the film reminded of the hardships her relatives suffered after moving to the United States in the early 1990s. But her teenage granddaughter had a different thought.

“They left hoping for a better life as they were not doing well here, and they went through a lot in their early days, including racial discrimination and family disputes,” she said. “But as we watched the film together, my granddaughter was just envious, saying not everyone could go there.”

“Minari” is the second film in as many years to make history at the Academy Awards with its Korean connections, after the South Korea-produced “Parasite” took the 2020 awards by storm, snagging six nominations and four wins, including “Best Picture.”

It attracted more than 10 million viewers in South Korean theatres within two months of its release in 2019, becoming one of the most watched films in Korean history.

“Minari,” which opened in South Korea on March 3, has drawn about 925,000 viewers as of Wednesday, Korean Film Council (KOFIC) data showed.

More than “Minari” itself, South Koreans expressed more interest in the nomination for Youn, who plays a spunky grandmother who travels to the United States to take care of her grandchildren.

Jung Duk-hyun, a culture critic, said the domestic audience could be more focused on Youn because she not only earned the Oscar nomination but also embodied an “independent, mischievous and cool grandma,” an image of women increasingly pursued in Korean society.

Source: Changing immigration trends colour ‘Minari’ reception in South Korea

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Khan: In Quebec, an act of injustice receives no accountability

2021/04/23 Leave a comment

More good commentary:

Apr. 20 was a day marked by sharp contrasts in judicial verdicts relating to harm.

In Quebec Superior Court, Justice Marc-Andre Blanchard issued a ruling regarding Bill 21, Quebec’s “secularism” law, which bans the wearing of religious symbols for government employees deemed to be in a position of authority, such as judges, government lawyers, teachers and police officers. New hires must remove religious symbols, while those already employed with the government can keep their symbols and jobs; they cannot, however, get promoted or transferred.

And so systemic discrimination have been enshrined in law, in a province whose premier repeatedly denies the existence of systemic racism.

In contrast, we witnessed accountability for cruel behaviour in a Minnesota courtroom. There, a 12-member jury found former police officer Derek Chauvin guilty on three counts in the death of George Floyd. The sheer inhumanity of Mr. Chauvin’s actions – namely, kneeling on the neck of Mr. Floyd while he was prone, handcuffed and pleading for his life – was broadcast for all to see. Mr. Chauvin was held accountable for his actions, and now awaits sentencing for the three charges of which he has been found guilty. Elation was tempered with the knowledge that the fight against police brutality and systemic racism is far from over. U.S. President Joe Biden acknowledged as much, calling systemic racism “a stain on our nation’s soul.”

A life, to be sure, has not been snuffed out by Bill 21. But livelihoods are being waylaid all the same by systemic discrimination.

While Justice Blanchard affirmed the bulk of Quebec’s law, he struck down portions that applied to English school boards and the wearing of face coverings in the National Assembly. He also had harsh words for the bill: “There is no doubt that in this case the denial by Bill 21 of the rights guaranteed by the Charter has severe consequences for the persons concerned. Not only do these people feel ostracized and partially excluded from the Quebec public service, but in addition, some see their dreams become impossible while others find themselves stuck in their positions with no possibility of advancement or mobility. In addition, Bill 21 also sends the message to minority students wearing religious symbols that they must occupy a different place in society and that obviously the way of public education – at the level of preschool, primary and secondary – does not exist for them. On the other hand, the beneficial effects appear at least tenuous.”

Quebecers aspiring to one of these jobs now face a dilemma, Justice Blanchard added: “Either they act according to their soul and conscience – in this case their beliefs – or they work in the profession of their choice. It is easy to understand that this is a cruel consequence which dehumanizes those targeted.”

Nonetheless, such cruel dehumanization is legal because of the province’s deployment of the Charter’s notwithstanding clause.

Meanwhile, Quebec Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette, the law’s architect, will appeal the ruling, stating, “There are not two Quebecs – there is only one.” This is rich coming from a man who has himself created two Quebecs: One where opportunity is available for all, and another where opportunities are limited because of a person’s religious belief and expression.

Let’s not forget that the majority of Quebeckers approve of Bill 21 – cruelty, dehumanization and systemic discrimination be damned. Is it any wonder that Quebec has been facing a shortage of teachers? Lost is the irony that today everyone must cover their face in government institutions, including in the National Assembly.

Federal leaders, conscious of the significant number of seats in Quebec, have reacted along differing lines. Green Party Leader Annamie Paul and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh have each unequivocally opposed the law, while the Conservatives have thrown Quebec’s religious minorities under the bus, stating they will not challenge the law but assuring Canadians that they would never introduce a federal version of Bill 21. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been non-committal about intervening.

We must now take inspiration from the U.S., where activists have pushed for justice for Black lives and are now opposing new laws in Georgia that will affect voters of colour. We must publicize the systemic discrimination, dehumanization and cruelty of Bill 21 far and wide, and confer with activists about the best way forward to address discrimination enshrined in law.

Let Quebec explain Bill 21 to the world. After all, those who aspire to a more just society should remember the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It does not bend on its own.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-in-quebec-an-act-of-injustice-receives-no-accountability/

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

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