Soh: Attacks on Asian-Americans reveal a strange racial double standard

2021/02/23 Leave a comment

While I agree that having heirarchies–ethnic, racial, religious etc–are unhelpful, my sense of Canadian media coverage is that anti-Asian attacks have received extensive and appropriate coverage as race-based attacks.

Not sure why the Globe would publish an op-ed focussed on the US without mentioning similarities and differences with Canada. :

The surveillance-camera video is horrifying to watch. In broad daylight, Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai man, was slammed to the ground while on a morning walk in San Francisco; he never regained consciousness. In Oakland, a man attacked a 91-year-old man, a 60-year-old man, and a 55-year-old woman in Chinatown. Nearly two dozen violent incidents in the area have been recorded in recent weeks.

These incidents are just part of a recent and unfortunate trend, particularly during the Lunar New Year. In a Pew Research Center study conducted last July, about 30 per cent of Asian-American adults said they have experienced discrimination because of their ethnicity or race since the pandemic began.

Former U.S. president Donald Trump’s rhetoric has been blamed for stoking anti-Chinese resentment. He repeatedly referenced the “China virus,” the “China plague” and the “Kung Flu” while in office, holding the country responsible for the pandemic.

And yet, as these crimes continue, there has been a failure to see these attacks as racially motivated. Mr. Ratanapakdee’s homicide, for instance, is not being prosecuted as a hate crime. It wasn’t until Hollywood actors spoke up that media attention was drawn to these incidents, with Daniel Wu and Daniel Dae Kim offering a US$25,000 reward for information. That led to the arrest of 28-year-old Yahya Muslim, who is not facing hate-crime charges.

Being level-headed about emotional subjects is never a bad approach, as it prevents us from jumping to conclusions about unclear events or any legal concerns. But in this case, what is the likelihood that multiple victims, targeted randomly, just happened to all be Asian? If an alarmingly high number of people belonging to another visible-minority group had been violently assaulted and murdered, would anyone doubt that the attacks were racially motivated?

It feels like a double standard. And it can feel, broadly speaking, as if racism against Asians is not taken as seriously as racism against other groups. Take, for example, a job listing posted by a Bay Area tech company recently, which explicitly sought “non-Asian” applicants. Or consider the debate on affirmative action sparked most recently by the case of Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard; in 2019, a federal judge ruled against Asian-American applicants who believed they had been systematically discriminated against by university admissions officials, and who sought a race-neutral process.

That’s where it can feel like obsessions with race are erecting a bizarre racial hierarchy – one in which apparently only white perpetrators can commit racist or hateful acts, and one where discrimination against certain groups counts less or hurts less than discrimination against others.

Because the general economic success of Asian diasporic communities in Canada and the U.S. is dissonant with the narrative that societal white privilege limits and is hostile to visible minorities, we are too often stripped of any progressive clout afforded to “people of colour.” In the eyes of some, we are being recategorized as “white.” From this ideological view – one I disagree with – it isn’t possible to be racist toward white people.

Further complicating this lack of logic is the history of strained relationsbetween Asian and Black communities in the U.S., most notably between protesters and Korean business owners in the Rodney King riots. Asian-Americans have been long held up as an example of successful assimilation, and by doing so, they become used to dismiss the genuine concerns of Black Americans, pitting one group against another.

But protecting racial groups is not a zero-sum game; ensuring the safety of one does not need to come at the expense of another. We can identify racist acts while advocating that they should not be used to justify retaliatory harassment or prejudice against others.

Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve been asked whether I think claims of Sinophobia have been overblown to forward an agenda of race-baiting. In short: No. Because I am often mistaken as having a different Asian ethnicity, it’s been amusing and sad to see what some will say in my presence, only to furiously backpedal their opinions once I tell them that I’m a Canadian of Malaysian-Chinese descent.

For those who remain skeptical, I’d ask how they would feel if people who shared their racial ancestry were being violently targeted and terrorized, and then made to feel that their concerns weren’t legitimate, especially during a time of the year that would normally be celebratory. Acknowledging where the coronavirus originated can be done without blaming or discriminating more widely against people of Asian descent.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-attacks-on-asian-americans-reveal-a-strange-racial-double-standard/

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The Book That Should Change How Progressives Talk About Race

2021/02/23 Leave a comment

Helpful suggestions to reduce polarization and build more shared narratives:

When Heather McGhee was a 25-year-old staffer at Demos, the progressive think tank she would eventually lead, she went to Congress to present findings on shocking increases in individual and family debt.

“Few politicians in Washington knew what it was like to have bill collectors incessantly ringing their phones about balances that kept growing every month,” McGhee writes in her new book, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.”

Demos’s explanatory attempts failed. When Congress finally took action in 2005, it made the problem worse, passing a bankruptcy bill that made escaping unsustainable debt harder than ever. For McGhee, the disaster was an education in the limits of research, which is often no match for the brute power of big money. But as she was walking down the hallway of the Russell Senate Office Building, she learned something else.

Stopping to adjust her new shoes near the door of a Senate office, she wrote, she heard “the bombastic voice of a man going on about the deadbeats who had babies with multiple women and then declared bankruptcy to dodge the child support.” She doesn’t know whether the man was a Democrat or a Republican, but when she heard him she realized she and her allies might have missed something. They’d thought of debt and bankruptcy primarily as a class issue. Suddenly she understood that for some of her opponents, it was more about race.

She wondered how, as a Black woman, she’d been caught off guard. “I hadn’t even thought to ask the question about this seemingly nonracial financial issue, but had racism helped defeat us?” she wrote.

McGhee’s book is about the many ways racism has defeated efforts to create a more economically just America. Once the civil rights movement expanded America’s conception of “the public,” white America’s support for public goods collapsed. People of color have suffered the most from the resulting austerity, but it’s made life a lot worse for most white people, too. McGhee’s central metaphor is that of towns and cities that closed their public pools rather than share them with Black people, leaving everyone who couldn’t afford a private pool materially worse off.

One of the most fascinating things about “The Sum of Us” is how it challenges the assumptions of both white antiracism activists and progressives who just want to talk about class. McGhee argues that it’s futile to try to address decades of disinvestment in schools, infrastructure, health care and more without talking about racial resentment.

She describes research done by the Race-Class Narrative Project, a Demos initiative that grew out of her work for the book. McGhee and her colleagues, she writes, discovered that if you “try to convince anyone but the most committed progressives (disproportionately people of color) about big public solutions without addressing race, most will agree … right up until they hear the countermessage that does talk, even implicitly, about race.”

But McGhee, who leads the board of the racial justice organization Color of Change, also implicitly critiques the way parts of the left talk about white privilege. “Without the hostile intent, of course, aren’t we all talking about race relations through a prism of competition, every advantage for one group mirrored by a disadvantage for another?” she asks.

McGhee is far from an opponent of the sort of social justice culture sometimes derided as “wokeness.” But her work illuminates what’s always seemed to me to be a central contradiction in certain kinds of anti-racist consciousness-raising, which is that many people want more privilege rather than less. You have to have an oddly high opinion of white people to assume that most will react to learning about the advantages of whiteness by wanting to give it up.

“Communicators have to be aware of the mental frameworks of their audience,” McGhee told me. “And for white Americans, the zero-sum is a profound, both deeply embedded and constantly reinforced one.”

This doesn’t mean that the concept of white privilege isn’t useful; obviously it describes something real. “What privilege awareness does, at its best, is reveal the systematic unfairness, and lift the blame from the victims of a corrupt system,” McGhee said. “However, I think at this point in our discourse — also when so many white people feel deeply unprivileged — it’s more important to talk about the world we want for everyone.”

So McGhee is trying to shift the focus from how racism benefits white people to how it costs them. Why is student debt so crushing in a country that once had excellent universities that were cheap or even free? Why is American health care such a disaster? Why is our democracy being strangled by minority rule? As the first line of McGhee’s book asks, “Why can’t we have nice things?” Racism is a huge part of the answer.

McGhee describes a “solidarity dividend” gained when people are able to transcend racism. Look at what just happened in Georgia, where the billionaire Kelly Loeffler, in an attempt to keep her Senate seat, waged a nakedly racist campaign against Raphael Warnock, who ran on sending voters $2,000 stimulus checks. He still lost most white people, but won enough to prevail. He did it by appealing to idealism, but also to self-interest. In the fight for true multiracial democracy, counting on altruism will only get you so far.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/opinion/heather-mcghee-racism.html

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‘It’s so unfair’: life on the streets of the French town branded as ‘lost to Islam’

2021/02/22 Leave a comment

Good profile of the reality on the ground compared to the polemics:

The HairCoiffure salon on Rue Jean Jaurès, a short walk from Trappes station, is offering a cut-and-blow-dry for women at €18 (£15.50) and €15 for men, a banal observation at the centre of the latest battle in France’s toxic debate over religious extremism.

Hairdressers and their clients hit the headlines after local teacher Didier Lemaire claimed there were no mixed salons in Trappes – suggesting the town was in the stranglehold of Islamic radicalisation. He also claimed schoolchildren were banned from singing and some women barred from cafes. Lemaire has since been placed under police protection following alleged death threats.

The accusations came on the eve French MPs voted on a controversial bill to combat Islamist extremism, put forward after the brutal murder of teacher Samuel Paty last October.

But the claims have sparked anger and indignation from locals known as Trappists – the most famous of whom are the actor Omar Sy, footballer Nicolas Anelka and popular French comedian Jamel Debbouze. In an interview with the Observer, town mayor Ali Rabbeh hit back.

“We are being stigmatised,” he said. “Many of the people spreading lies, exaggerations and unjust accusations about Trappes have no idea what happens here. They have never set foot in the town.

“Yes, there are problems with drugs, delinquency and radicalisation. I have never denied that. But we’re working to resolve them and these sort of attacks don’t help. And of course our children sing: they sing in nursery, primary and secondary schools. We even have school choirs.”

Trappes, in the western suburbs of Paris near Versailles, holds a grim national record after more than 60 local young people left to join Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, making it a soft target in this political and ideological conflict.

It is also in the Yvelines department where Paty was beheaded last October. So when philosophy professor Lemaire, 55, claimed the town was under the yoke of Salafism and “definitively lost” to the republic, he had a captive audience. “There are no more mixed hairdressers, north African women can no longer go to cafés, there’s pressure on women over the veil … Trappes is no longer in France,” Lemaire told French TV. He claimed locals were “living in fear” and laicité – France’s cherished separation of religion and state – was defeated. (Lemaire later admitted his comments on hairdressers were “approximative” but doubled down on the rest).

Rabbeh, 36, the son of Moroccan migrants, responded angrily, accusing Lemaire and the media who gave him airtime of stoking division and making life even more complicated for locals. “Young people taking the baccalauréat this year tell me they’re worried sick about how they’re going to get places at good colleges and universities when they say they’re from Trappes,” Rabbeh said. “It’s so unfair on them. It’s as if every single time we get our head out of water, someone pushes us back under.” Like Lemaire, Rabbeh has also been given police protection.

On a chilly recent Friday, the snow-dusted streets of Trappes were calm. On one side of town, a cluster of men drank outside a bar near the station, on the other worshippers clutching prayer mats streamed from the local mosque. Yards from the Lycée La Plaine de Neauphle where Lemaire taught for 20 years, the window of another hairdressers, Saint Lou Coiffure, was clearly marked “Masculin – Feminin”. The town boasts a modern music and dance school, with subsidised classes for low-income families; the Trappes magazine carries pictures of December’s “Magic of Christmas” illuminations.

Inside the town hall, Rabbeh was fuming: “We know there is a problem with Islamism here but we have made progress. We are working to resolve these problems and someone comes along and attacks us with lies, exaggerations and unjust accusations. Sometimes I despair.”

He added: “Would a mayor with a different name be faced with this? Trappes is part of the French republic. It’s absolutely untrue to suggest otherwise.”

It would be easy to dismiss Trappes as yet another rundown, problem-riddled Paris suburb were it not for the fact that it has benefited from a vast urban renewal programme. Most of its dilapidated 1970s high-rise tower blocks have been demolished and the council estates renovated. More mixed private and public housing with flower beds and children’s playgrounds are gradually replacing low-rent housing. The streets are clean, local facilities modernised and Lemaire’s own lycée boasts the best results in the department. Unemployment is running at 5.6% of the active population – half of whom are under 30 – compared with 6.7% for Paris.

The picture is not all rosy, though: more than a quarter of Trappists live under the poverty line and Rabbeh says the Islamic radicalisation problem is “complex” and fuelled by a sense that the republic has abandoned local communities like Trappes.

When a TV crew made an unannounced visit locals crowded round to defend their town. Jacques Michelet who runs the Trappes basketball club rejected the suggestion it had been abandoned to Islamic extremism: “We’ve seen all ideologies, we’ve seen extremists and not just Islamists … but it’s a marginal phenomenon in Trappes.”

Father Etienne Guillet, the local Catholic priest, contested Lemaire’s suggestion that non-Muslim inhabitants have fled. His congregation boasts up to 700 people from 45 different countries. “When there are tensions, I meet with the local imams and we sort things out,” said Guillet. “It’s not easy for everyone to live together and there ’s always the temptation for communities to withdraw, but what I see in this town is things going well.”

Rabbeh said last week he was stepping back from the row, posting a quote by French socialist leader Jean Jaurès, whose statue stands outside Trappes town hall, on social media. It reads: “Courage is to seek the truth and tell it; it is not to be subjected to the law of the triumphant lie that passes, and not to echo, from our soul, mouth and hands to foolish applause and fanatical booing.”

Source: ‘It’s so unfair’: life on the streets of the French town branded as ‘lost to Islam’

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Farmers’ mass protests in India cut deeply across Canada

2021/02/22 Leave a comment

Diaspora politics in play between Sikh and Hindu Canadians.
Although South Asian Hindus are 3.9 percent of the population compared to 1.1 percent South Asian Sikhs, Canadian Sikhs are more concentrated in a number of ridings thus increasing their political weight (14 ridings with more than 10 percent Sikhs, four with more than 20 percent, 10 ridings with more than 10 percent Hindus, with no riding more than 20 percent, 2011 NHS):
Surrey’s Harjit Singh Gill visits his family’s ancestral farm in India almost every year.

The farm, like most in India, is small, with crops of wheat and rice. Some of it’s leased to his brother-in-law, Parminer Singh Rangian, and others in the 3,400-person village of Maksudra in the state of Punjab.

“Punjab feeds the tummies of the rest of India. Punjab feeds 500 million people,” says Gill, standing in his large yard in the Panorama Ridge neighbourhood. This is where he began 25 years ago as an immigrant taxi driver, before becoming a builder and eventually constructing his own mansion.

Despite the states of Punjab and adjacent Haryana forming the breadbasket of India, many of its farmers make meagre livings and are in debt, Gill says. Things are even worse for farmers in other parts of India, where 60 per cent of the population of 1.3 billion relies on agriculture to make a living. But the sector only accounts for one-sixth of the country’s GDP.

Three free-market reforms proposed in September by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — designed to end government-guaranteed crop prices and ostensibly improve productivity — have provoked hundreds of thousands of farmers from the state of Punjab and Haryana to take their tractors and set up continuing protest camps in Delhi, the capital of India. Some confrontations have turned violent.

International celebrities — including U.S. pop singer Rihanna, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and lifestyles entrepreneur Meena Harris, a niece of U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris — have proclaimed support for the farmers and called out Modi. In turn, the majority-backed Indian government has labelled them “foreign individuals” trading in “sensationalism.”

Tensions have been high across Canada, which has a Punjabi-Canadian population of 700,000, most of whom are Sikhs and many of whom have farming origins. They’ve helped organize large motorcade demonstrations against the Indian government in Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Chilliwack, Surrey and downtown Vancouver, outside the consulate of India.

The frequent outcries have forced Prime Minister Justin Trudeau into a complex, changing dance. He’s trying to balance hundreds of thousands of Indo-Canadians who support Modi, a Hindu nationalist, against the many Punjabi-Canadian voters and others who back the aggrieved farmers.

While Punjabi-language newspapers in Canada express outrage over Modi’s proposed reforms, other Indian-language media outlets in Canada have highlighted counter-protests praising Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. One recent pro-Modi demonstration brought 350 vehicles, many bearing the flag of India, to the Indian consulate in downtown Vancouver.

In December, Trudeau, appearing to take sides, came out supporting the Indian farmers’ “right to be heard.” B.C. NDP Premier John Horgan also tweeted he “understands the anguish” of Canadians sympathetic to the farmers.

But Modi’s allies have responded by accusing Trudeau of “legitimating extremist activism” in protesting in front of India’s consulates in Canada. This month, Trudeau, who has more than a dozen Sikh cabinet ministers and MPs in his government, reduced escalating animosity by asking for desperately needed vaccines from India. In turn, Modi let it be known he’s happy to help out his “friend.”

What does Gill think of all the high-level political machinations?

He is uncompromising. The protests aren’t only a fight for justice for farmers, Gill says, they’re also a crusade to safeguard Punjab, population 30 million, from Modi and his agribusiness cronies, who are keen to gobble up small farms.

“Modi has said to the farmers of Punjab: ‘We need your grain to feed the country.’ But really he wants complete control,” says Gill, comparing Modi with populist U.S. President Donald Trump.

The battle over guaranteed produce prices is “not all about farming. It’s about protecting Punjab,” the birthplace of Sikhism, says Gill, a popular talk-show host for Sher-E-Punjab Radio AM 600 who ran in 2019 for the federal NDP.

Even though Gill says he isn’t an advocate for a separate Sikh homeland called Khalistan — “because it’s not realistic to create a sovereign country within another country” — he would like India’s leaders to treat Sikhs in Punjab like Quebecers, who have distinct status within Canada.

Getting to the root of farmers’ conflict

Given the vehemence of the protests and a recent Indian high-court ruling, Modi, whose right-wing party handily won re-election in 2019, has offered to compromise by putting the reforms on hold.

But that hasn’t satisfied suspicious farmers in India, who want the proposals revoked. Nor has it quieted protest organizers across Canada, including in B.C.’s Fraser Valley, such as Pindia Dhaliwal.

The Punjabi diaspora, from New Zealand to California, Dhaliwal says, is determined to: “Ask India why they’re killing us? Ask India why they are oppressing us, why they’re silencing us, why they are persecuting minorities?”

Modi seeks to loosen strict regulations around the pricing and storage of produce, which have protected India’s farmers from the free-market system for decades. The government currently exempts farmers from income tax and crop insurance, guarantees a minimum price for 23 crops and regularly waives off debts. But the system disappoints all sides, with critics saying it’s rife with shady middlemen.

Along with many economists, Modi has argued that offering farmers a guaranteed minimum support price (MSP) for crops prevents them from bargaining for better prices.

Opponents in Canada, including Gill, are by no means alone in mistrusting Modi’s motives.

They say his reforms were poorly conceived, not to mention pushed forward during a pandemic without consultation.

Sanjay Ruparelia, a political scientist at Ryerson University in Toronto, says advocates of Modi’s three reforms say farmers would be able to sell their harvest to a much wider range of private actors, raising their incomes and reducing food prices.

“Yet, consider the fine print,” Ruparelia says. “There is also a very real risk that agricultural deregulation will lead to farmers being paid less than the minimum support price.’’

Interviewed while travelling in India on work, University of B.C. adjunct public policy Prof. Shashidharan Enarth says the guaranteed MSP system for selling crops in India is riddled with a lack of transparency, caste conflicts and corruption.

Still, it’s better than Modi’s plan, says Enarth, who has worked for the World Bank.

“The MSP policy should be considered a public good,” he says, because it provides some stability. “The focus should be on removing corruption rather than removing MSP itself without an effective alternative.”

Although Modi promotes a free market, Enarth says it can only “work well when there is rule of law. India may be an electoral democracy, but we have rule of muscle running most institutions.”

Similarly, Surrey’s Gill says he’s appalled by the way banks, working with Modi’s government, have encouraged millions of farmers to become indebted.

Some, says Gill, have overextended themselves with mortgages to build big houses in Punjab. Others, Gill says, are borrowing too much from banks to send their offspring to Canada as students or temporary workers, in hopes they will eventually immigrate, including to Surrey, where one-quarter of the population speaks Punjabi.

Despite widespread problems with the status quo, Enarth — who has spent 15 years organizing small-scale, often illiterate farmers in India into collectives so they will gain more bargaining power — says he’s been several times to Punjab, but his organizing efforts aren’t particularly needed there.

“Punjabis are well organized, with more political muscle, and relatively wealthier than other Indians. Farmers from other states could not have sustained a 90-day protest on this scale.”

Data shows Indian farmers’ suicides rates are even higher outside Punjab and Haryana.

Punjabi farmers tend to do better than others, Gill says, because they’re industrious, have embraced modern technology and lobbied governments to build irrigation systems. They strongly advocate the secure price system for wheat, rice and barley, he says, because they have benefited from it — more than farmers from other regions, where the system has been spotty.

Even though having taxpayers guarantee how much farmers receive has often led to an excess of certain crops that go wasted, Enarth says the MSP’s value lies in the way it combats price-fixing by cartels.

India’s agriculture sector, however, is in trouble in general, says Enarth. “Reforms are needed to address the root cause of poverty among rural Indians, which is farm labourers’ very low productivity.”

At least half of farm workers in India should be helped to move into another field of work, he says.

Indo-Canadians seek to sway Indian politics

How did complex farm legislation become the focus of street activism in Canada?

“Punjabi Canadians,” says Enarth, “have very close ties with their families back home — and therefore they are exerting whatever leverage they have in terms of influencing local politics in Punjab, and among non-resident Indians elsewhere.”

Asked how some of the roughly 800,000 Indo-Canadians who aren’t Punjabi are viewing the protests, Enarth suggests many are from middle- to high-income families far removed from agriculture — and many are fans of Modi. “They’re therefore likely to be indifferent, if not befuddled.”

Some Indian and Indo-Canadian media outlets have been critical of the pro-farmers’ protests in Canada. The Vancouver-based Hindi-language outlet CanAm News is among those aiming to counteract the anti-Modi protests, according to Mirems, which translates ethnic-language media reports in Canada.

Some Indo-Canadians “believe the agenda has largely been hijacked by pro-Khalistan elements in Canada,” according to CanAm News, echoing a common view in India’s media. One article quoted the organizer of a recent pro-India car rally in Vancouver, Neema Manral of Delta, who has been a candidate for the B.C. Green party.

“There was so much anger within the community here” over anti-government protests that “we had to do something,” Manral says. While most Indo-Canadians respect the protesting farmers, Manral was determined to help organize the 350 vehicles that took part in a Feb. 6 “tiranga rally,” referring to displays of the orange, white and green flag of India.

In response to the cascade of accusations flying around the world and Canada, Ajay Bisaria, India’s High Commissioner in Ottawa, this week lamented the “flood of misinformation, blatant lies and distortions being circulated.”

“There has been an increase in rhetoric promoting violence in India. Such disinformation is aimed at defaming and harming the image of India and Indians, as well as to sow distrust and promote hatred between different communities of Indian origin in Canada.”

He called on everyone to be vigilant against propaganda and hate speech.

Now in their sixth month, the protests have become one of the biggest challenges ever faced by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party government.

Source: Farmers’ mass protests in India cut deeply across Canada

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Heating Up Culture Wars, France to Scour Universities for Ideas That ‘Corrupt Society’

2021/02/20 Leave a comment

Trying to outflank the right is never good policy, even if sometimes “good” politics:

Stepping up its attacks on social science theories that it says threaten France, the French government announced this week that it would launch an investigation into academic research that it says feeds “Islamo-leftist’’ tendencies that “corrupt society.’’

News of the investigation immediately caused a fierce backlash among university presidents and scholars, deepening fears of a crackdown on academic freedom — especially on studies of race, gender, post-colonial studies and other fields that the French government says have been imported from American universities and contribute to undermining French society.

While President Emmanuel Macron and some of his top ministers have spoken out forcefully against what they see as a destabilizing influence from American campuses in recent months, the announcement marked the first time that the government has moved to take action.

It came as France’s lower house of Parliament passed a draft lawagainst Islamism, an ideology it views as encouraging terrorist attacks, and as Mr. Macron tilts further to the right, anticipating nationalist challenges ahead of elections next year.

Frédérique Vidal, the minister of higher education, said in Parliament on Tuesday that the state-run National Center for Scientific Research would oversee an investigation into the “totality of research underway in our country,’’ singling out post-colonialism.

In an earlier television interview, Ms. Vidal said the investigation would focus on “Islamo-leftism’’ — a controversial term embraced by some of Mr. Macron’s leading ministers to accuse left-leaning intellectuals of justifying Islamism and even terrorism.

“Islamo-leftism corrupts all of society and universities are not impervious,’’ Ms. Vidal said, adding that some scholars were advancing “radical” and “activist” ideas. Referring also to scholars of race and gender, Ms. Vidal accused them of “always looking at everything through the prism of their will to divide, to fracture, to pinpoint the enemy.’’

France has since early last century defined itself as a secular state devoted to the ideal that all of its citizens are the same under the law, to the extent that the government keeps no statistics on ethnicity and religion.

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How can boards create anti-racist companies?

2021/02/19 Leave a comment

Nice to see data-based arguments and practical suggestions:

In the 34 years since Canada’s Employment Equity Act was introduced, we haven’t yet normalized Black professionals in senior leadership or on boards. Black people have been underrepresented, marginalized or plain excluded — and with the added intersectional lens of gender, Black women have the worst experience of all. Being a numbers person, I like to start with data. Thankfully, recent reports have begun to break down representation in employment and on boards by visible minority status (Statistics Canada’s terminology, not my own).

Black leaders occupy less than one per cent of executive roles and board seats at major Canadian companies. What’s more, they hold only 0.3 per cent of corporate board positionsand 3.6 per cent of all board positions in Toronto, despite comprising 7.5 per cent of the city’s total population. In July 2020, just as the first COVID-19 lockdown was ending, the national unemployment rate was 10.9 per cent. In contrast, the unemployment rate for Black women was 7.7 points higher at 18.6 per cent, and for Black men, it was 4.2 points higher at 15.1 per cent. This data suggests that Black workers face systemic and institutional barriers to employment in Canada and therefore advancement to boards.

Embedded in our institutions, systemic barriers are everywhere, and are therefore normalized as “just how things are done around here.” You can’t see these barriers, so this invisibility makes it difficult to measure their impact on people who encounter them. As leaders at the boardroom table, it’s essential that we play a significant role in eliminating anti-Black racism and all forms of discrimination in our organizations.

In the months following the tragic murder of George Floyd, many companies realized they could no longer be silent. Some made public statements, pledged donations, or committed actions to revisit their diversity, equity and inclusion goals. But decades of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) work have already shown racial disparities in the advancement of Black professionals into board seats, so it’s safe to assume that doubling down on generic DEI efforts will not address the specific issues surrounding anti-Black racism.

So, how can boards take action to create anti-racist companies?

The fish rots from the head

As an individual board member, now is the time to add anti-racism to your core values. Start by educating yourself on anti-Black racism in the workplace. Build your networks to include Black people and organizations that serve Black communities. Ask willing Black people about their experiences, but come with humility and be prepared to have your views on race and privilege challenged without getting defensive.

As a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA), I have internalized the adage “tone at the top,” which describes an organization’s approach to preventing fraud and other unethical practices in the workplace. Racism in both overt and covert forms is an ethical issue that companies must address in the same way.

The board is ultimately responsible for establishing the tone of the organization, so it must embed anti-racism into its strategic priorities — not just pay lip service to it. Anti-racism objectives will be unique to each organization, depending on its industry, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. For instance, a tech company writing complex algorithms to identify faces for law enforcement wouldn’t have the same anti-racism policy as a farming operation employing temporary foreign workers from the Caribbean.

The only constant is change

Board composition is important to its overall effectiveness when it comes to meeting shareholder expectations and the demands of regulators. Several factors in board composition can slow down the advancement of Black people — most notably, skills matrices, term limits and qualifying criteria.

Board governance practices have embraced the skills matrix to identify competencies needed to increase board effectiveness, but these skills cannot remain static. Why not include anti-racist skills and competencies, such as learning how to talk productively about race with fellow board members or reviewing decision-making and policies from an anti-racist lens? If the current makeup of your board falls short in these competencies, consider training or increasing the size of the board and its committees.

The lack of term limits only serves to reinforce the status quo. Regulators and companies should adopt a maximum tenure for board members. It wasn’t too long ago that a requirement for a majority of independent directors on publicly traded companies was new, but now, it’s common practice. Companies can commit to recruiting and nominating at least one Black leader to its board as the next available term comes to an end.

Corporate boards also need to examine informal requirements for board members to be former CEOs or other senior executives or to obtain excessive credentials. Is this truly what is needed, or does it serve as another mechanism to reinforce exclusion? I know many talented Black professionals in the not-for-profit sector whose qualifications would be well-suited for a public board, even though they’ve never held a corporate c-suite title. Similarly, I know many Black professionals who carry a well-respected ICD.D designation (granted by the Institute of Corporate Directors) and still are not on any corporate boards.

Your choice: Carrot or stick

Some corporations will look at policies and processes to advance Black leaders as being good for business, such as reaching new markets, addressing skills shortages, and maintaining global competitiveness, or — even better — for social justice reasons. That’s the carrot approach. Others will require a direct strategy, such as tying results to CEO performance and compensation, or through legislation. Monetary penalties for non-compliance is the stick approach.

In Canada, federally incorporated companies and TSX-listed companies are subject to diversity disclosure requirements. Bill C-25 requires federally incorporated companies to report gender and race, as well as representation from Indigenous people and people with disabilities, in the composition of its board and leadership. “National Instrument 58-101Disclosure of Corporate Governance Practices” (NI 58-101) requires TSX-listed companies to disclose the numbers, targets and mechanisms to address representation of women in their director and executive ranks. If these companies do not comply, they must explain why. But NI 58-101 has defined diversity as the advancement of women only, neglecting how gender intersects with race, sexual orientation and disability.

The Canadian diversity rules lack teeth because there are no consequences for non-compliance. You might even say it’s easier to avoid reporting and instead just explain why, in the case of Bill C-25, non-existent targets were not met, or in the case of NI 58-101, why internal company targets were not met. Needless to say, it’s unsurprising that recent data suggests the proportion of women in executive leadership has remained unchanged and that there’s a marked absence of directors from other equity-seeking groups.

Other countries have established targets and enforced them. In the U.S., NASDAQ may become the first major stock exchange to mandate board diversity reports, and to require board diversity by having at least one member identify as a woman and one who identifies as being from LGBTQ+ communities or another underrepresented group. Under the NASDAQ-proposed diversify-or-delist rules, if companies do not publicly disclose board diversity data or fail to meet diversity requirements and do not publish a reason explaining why, they could be delisted from the stock exchange. These proposals, specifically the possibility of delisting, could have greater impact on diversification of corporate boards because NASDAQ sets the rules for 3,000 corporations listed on its exchange.

Bill C-25 and NI 58-101 need to go one step further by penalizing companies that fail to comply with the rules that establish racial diversity targets. Following an anti-racist approach means always remembering that race is in every room — including the boardroom.

There are no quick fixes to the complexity of dismantling anti-Black racism on corporate boards. Change will need to be deliberate, purposeful and prolonged, but board members are uniquely positioned to challenge “how things are done around here.”

Source: How can boards create anti-racist companies?

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

Canada should say no to racism at the United Nations (20th anniversary of Durban Conference)

2021/02/19 Leave a comment

The legacy of Durban… Would be nice if there would be greater focus on China’s treatment of its religious and other minorities:

By bringing together all nations — democratic and non-democratic alike — the United Nations provides opportunities for both: For states that respect human rights, the UN can provide a forum for promoting that respect, while for states that violate them, the UN becomes a forum in which to defend, divert, and obfuscate.

One diversion tactic the latter use is to point human-rights standards elsewhere. They might use the vocabulary of human rights, but these words mean what they want them to mean.

The 2001 World Conference against Racism is a prime example. By singling out Israel, the concluding document was itself racist. The document called the Jews of Israel foreigners, even though Jews have lived continuously in Israel since prehistoric times.

The document further referred to their presence in the region as colonial occupation, even though colonization of the area had ended with the termination of the British mandate in 1948. The document blamed the plight of the Palestinians on Israel alone, as if all the terrorist organizations targeting the Jews of Israel, not least the Palestinian governing authority, had nothing to do with it.

While the strategies employed by rights-violating states at the UN to smother criticism are various, a notable component is an inordinate focus on Israel. Israel is small and geopolitically insignificant. A raft of states in the Arab and Muslim world are opposed to its very existence. Non-democratic states who are neither Arab nor Muslim, but who want to make sure the UN busies itself with anyone but them, are quick to join Arab/Muslim states in elaborate, prolonged, exaggerated criticism of Israel.

Zionism stands for the existence of Israel as the realization of the right to self-determination of the Jewish people. Anti-Zionism stands opposed. There is a confluence of agendas of the anti-Zionists states and the other non-democratic states. Anti-Zionists, having failed in their attempts to destroy Israel through force — in 1948, 1967, and 1973 — have switched to terrorism and delegitimization through demonization. A primary vehicle for this delegitimization strategy is the United Nations.

Jews are the prototypical victims of racism. They are a people whose victimization has been so awful, it gave racism itself, before the Holocaust a widely accepted ideology, a bad name. Yet, they themselves are labelled by anti-Zionists (in a typically tyrannical vocabulary inversion) as racist. Non-democratic states that repress their minorities and who truly are racist are more than happy to jump on this anti-Zionist bandwagon barrelling toward Israel and away from them.

We can be thankful that Canada and several other states walked out of the Durban Conference. But the anti-democratic/anti-Zionist coalition at the UN never misses a trick. It embraced a Durban Review Conference in Geneva in 2009, and a 10th-anniversary event in New York in 2011. Canada boycotted both, as did other rights-respecting states.

At the end of last year, the UN General Assembly decided by resolution that in September 2021 it will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Durban Declaration. Canada voted against this resolution, as did several other rights-respecting states. The anniversary celebration this fall is expected to call for the full implementation of the declaration.

Feb. 22 is the first day of the next session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. On opening day, a high-level panel is scheduled to discuss the upcoming 20th anniversary. Canada should there express again its concerns about the Durban document and make clear its intention not to attend the celebration.

Canada, despite all the obfuscation of the cabal of anti-Zionist and other non-democratic states, should work through the United Nations to combat real racism. One component must be standing continuously against the Durban perversion of the anti-racist agenda to serve racist ends, with Jews yet again the intended victims.

The fight against racism is too important to ignore. Through their resurrection of the Durban Document and their pretend accusation as racist of a people devastated by racism, truly racist states attempt to avoid the criticism they so justly deserve. Canada at the United Nations should continue to say no to racism, real racism, and no also to this 20th anniversary.

Sarah Teich is a senior fellow with the Macdonald Laurier Institute. David Matas is senior honorary counsel to B’nai Brith Canada.  He was rapporteur for the Jewish Caucus at the 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism.  

Source: Canada should say no to racism at the United Nations

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

The polite xenophobia compelling Canada’s ever tighter travel restrictions

2021/02/19 Leave a comment

Don’t really get the arguments. Travel restrictions apply generally to all Canadians, and hard to see how any particular group is more affected than others pending data proving the contrary.

And arguably, visible minorities with family members abroad may be more affected, many non-visible minorities also have family members abroad (we haven’t been able to see our son in Germany for over a year).

And if one is going to criticize flight cancellations to Mexico and the Caribbean on the grounds that Canadians with Mexican or Caribbean connections will be unduly affected, one needs to base this assertion with data regarding sun vacation travel (the target of the government policy) and those visiting family.

The more serious issues pertain to the situation of front-line service workers, many of whom are visible minorities and immigrants, not travel restrictions:

Some of the exceptions favour Canada prides itself as a compassionate leader in an otherwise hostile world. However, the country’s reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic exposes a unique brand of Canadian xenophobia.

Once Canada closed its borders to foreign travellers in March 2020, returning Canadians became required to quarantine or isolate at home for 14 days, unless exempt to perform “essential work.” As the first wave showed signs of decline in late June, the federal government expanded entry to family members of Canadians. Strict border measures seemed to have thwarted COVID.

Fast forward to December 2020: Canada is in the throes of a disastrous second wave, holiday beachgoers crowd Canadian airports, and new variants erupt around the world. Coincidentally, a majority of Canadians begin to support an international travel ban. Notoriously xenophobic Quebec Premier François Legault urged the federal government to cancel all “non-essential” inbound flights and require quarantine in hotels at the traveller’s expense. In Ontario, conservative Premier Doug Ford called for mandatory COVID testing of landed air travellers and heightened quarantine surveillance.

On Jan. 29, federal ministries announced sweeping measures to curb border crossing — notably, targeted flight cancellations and mandatory hotel quarantine with a price tag of at least $2,000. The renewed strategy also increases quarantine policing and promises to detain COVID-positive returnees in undisclosed government “isolation hotels.”

A recent Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) report revealed that, out of 8.6 million travellers into Canada since March 2020, only 26 per cent required quarantine; 6.3 million workers entered Canada with quarantine exemptions in 2020, says CBSA. While setting “leisure travellers” against “essential workers” oversimplifies various travel situations, COVID cases linked to all travel linger at 2 per cent of Canada’s case total.

Canadians have relied on migrant workers to maintain their “critical infrastructure” throughout the pandemic. Though Canadian corporations regularly exploit migrant workers, their situation only worsened under COVID, for example in Windsor-Essex, Ont. where exploitative labour practices exposed surrounding communities to COVID. Nevertheless, Canada’s COVID cases bottomed out during the peak of migrant work last summer.

The data points to travel’s low public health burden and the impossibility of completely closing borders. Tightening travel restrictions are not reasonable, but dangerous errors that distract from deadly domestic problems.

Behind travel restrictions is a unique brand of Canadian xenophobia. During the pandemic, BIPOC (im)migrants and newcomers experience increasing hardship. COVID-related scapegoating and stereotyping — from microaggressions to federal policies — benefit privileged Canadians and affirm right-wing extremists while the rest of us suffer.

What does it say when Canada prosecutes COVID patients while outbreaks continue in workplaces deemed “essential?” What does it mean when restrictions impede Canadians seeking life-saving medical procedures abroad while the able-bodied and rich travel undeterred?

Such trends reflect widespread fear of immigrants in Canada, only heightened by COVID. Canadians of all political persuasions use the pandemic to camouflage their polite xenophobia.

Polite xenophobia looks like “We Believe” yard signs, Facebook posts applauding Trudeau’s Jan. 29 announcement, and exploited BIPOC delivery workers allowing the lucky few to #StayAtHome.

Polite xenophobia forgets that, within Canadian borders, live millions of immigrants for whom travel remains essential — immigrants who are otherwise celebrated for contributing to Canada’s multicultural mosaic.

For example, Canada’s flight suspension between Mexico and the Caribbean to “protect Canadians” disregards millions of Canadians for whom Mexico or the Caribbean are home, not merely “sun” destinations.

Xenophobia unmasks the limits of multiculturalism — and travel restrictions.

Many of us keep silent in fear of diminishing COVID’s severity. There is a distinct difference, however, between anti-maskers endangering lives and anti-xenophobes combating systemic oppression.

Canada’s COVID response marks an alarming irresponsibility on behalf of government officials. Ignoring its “social determinants of health,”Canada fans xenophobic flames by investing in police, detention, borders, and unfair labour that endanger everyone.

In the fight against COVID, we are safer when popular demands are met: front-line workplace safety, paid sick leave, universal basic income;eviction moratoriums, decent housing, and status for all.

Canada, look in the mirror. By refusing xenophobia, we reach toward COVID’s deadly, inequitable roots. Xenophobia cannot be our new normal.

Darian Razdar is a transnational writer and activist based in Toronto.

Source: The polite xenophobia compelling Canada’s ever tighter travel restrictions

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Confronting racial bias in government funding

2021/02/19 Leave a comment

Hard to balance these calls for greater flexibility and unrestricted funding with long-standing government accountability requirements:

The federal government has proclaimed itself committed to the pursuit of diversity, equity and inclusion. The 2020 Treasury Board directive calls for an “equitable, diverse and inclusive workplace where no person is denied employment opportunities or benefits for reasons unrelated to ability or job requirements.” The federal budgeting process is supposed to use GBA+ analysis in decision-making. And yet, the government continues to ignore the entanglement of race in the organizations they fund. This has only served to disadvantage Black-focused, Black-led, and Black-serving (B3’s) organizations.

Recently, Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), launched the Supporting Black Canadian Communities Initiative (SBCCI) – a capacity-building funding program. B3’s from all regions of Canada, outside of Quebec, submitted applications in the desperate hope of securing funding. You see, the funding apparatus in Canada, including the philanthropic sector, leaves Black-led organizations and groups that serve primarily Black communities without support to operate at their full potential. A recent report by the Foundation for Black Communities outlined the “miniscule” amount of funding provided to B3s, and how that funding is “sporadic, unsustained, and does not invest in the long-term capabilities of Black community organizations.”

And so when an initiative emerges that lays claim to building the capacity of B3’s, there is a collective hallelujah throughout Black communities. However, for many applicants to the new ESDC funding program, shouts of hallelujah quickly turned into groans of frustration. Organizations such as Black Lives Matter, the Somali Center for Family Services in Ottawa, and Operation Black Vote Canada, disclosed through various media channels that they received emails from ESDC rejecting their applications for funding because “information provided…was insufficient to clearly demonstrate that the organization is led and governed by people who self-identify as Black.”

The grant application required all applicants to “describe the extent your organization is Black-led, serving or focused.” The aforementioned organizations and others easily satisfy this criterion (by a glance at their websites) – Black leadership and service to Black communities are at the core of their being.

Social Development Minister Ahmed Hussen responded to the outcry stating that the initial communication sent to organizations like Operation Black Vote Canada was “completely unacceptable” and that his department “has implemented new measures” (details not publicly shared) to ensure such a “mistake” does not reoccur.

Was this a mistake? We will probably never know. What B3’s know with certitude is that when it comes to securing financial support from the government or other funding sources, it’s a vicious cycle. The organizations that tend to get funded are organizations that can demonstrate capacity and effectiveness. But how do organizations increase capacity in the first place? Of the millions of federal dollars in grant money we hear about in the news that are dispersed every year, only a small percentage reach Black communities and B3’s. The federal government should consider this a consequential failure on its part.

Black-focused, Black-led, and Black-serving organizations’ struggle has not been due to a lack of quality programming, ability, innovation, or dedication. They struggle due to a lack of funding and access to resources – funding to increase and strengthen their capacity and unrestricted dollars to operate at their full potential. (Unrestricted funding is not tied to any particular project or initiative, and can be used at the organization’s discretion.) The clientele served by B3’s is the constituency most impacted by injustice, and that regularly navigates multiple systems of oppression.

Further, leaders of B3’s have smaller budgets to work with compared to their white counterparts. Leading these organizations is not merely a job. It is their community. It is their life. And yet, the work they champion remains unfunded and under-resourced.  This leaves the issues and neighbourhoods they advocate for lingering in a perpetual state of community disadvantage.

For many B3’s, their experience with the Supporting Black Canadian Communities Initiativehas only exacerbated racial inequities and highlighted, yet again, the need for frank conversations about race and funding access.

There are four measurable steps the federal government can take now, to remove the barriers to equitable funding:

  • Explicitly acknowledge that broad change cannot happen without comprehending the reality that the grant-making process still operates in a system of inequity, making the journey to acquiring funding difficult to traverse for B3’s. Things that are not acknowledged remain unchanged.
  • Consult, engage, and convene B3’s in the design of funding programs and disbursement of funding dollars. This ensures an explicit eye toward inclusion and equity.
  • Design funding programs that take into account and provide financial support (e.g. seed funding) to B3’s at distinctly different points in their development.
  • Support B3’s with multi-year, unrestricted funding. This would provide an infusion of resources that would enable B3’s to address the needs prevalent in Black communities in a transformative way; increase organizational capacity and sustainability; and foster transparency and accountability between the government and organizations. This approach also prevents B3’s from being trapped in the annual application cycle.

Federal grant funding access and success are deeply entangled with inequities – stifling the success of B3’s and their ability to drive social change in the communities they serve. Black-focused, Black-led, and Black-serving organizations know that racial disparities matter. The mistakes made in the management of the SBCCI have elevated awareness. This must now lead to deliberate action.

Source: Confronting racial bias in government funding

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Levitt: Morals, not medals, must guide our way on decision to attend the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing

2021/02/18 Leave a comment

Good commentary and call. Given that calls to mode the games from Beijing are unlikely to be agreed to by the IOC and many member countries, the government and COC have to face up to the reality that non-attendance is the only realistic option:

A genocide is happening, but Olympic officials want us to look the other way. As the issue of Canada’s participation in the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics has heated up in recent days, it has been disappointing to see the debate focus primarily on the efficacy, or lack thereof, of previous Olympic boycotts, and the need to separate sports and politics. 

Surely, the discussion must be focused on Canada taking a strong moral stand in the face of the abysmal human rights record of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The facts speak for themselves; the arbitrary detention of the two Michaels, the violent crackdown on democracy activists in Hong Kong, and of course, the perpetrating of genocide against the Uighurs in Xinjiang province.

On this last point, one cannot and must not compartmentalize genocide, arguably the greatest of all evils in human history. As millions of Uighurs face unspeakable abuse, including accusations of mass detention, forced sterilization, and recent reports of systematic rape, sexual abuse and torture, the 2022 Winter Olympics simply cannot be business as usual. 

It is misguided to leave the critical discussion about whether Canadian athletes should compete in Beijing to be had behind the closed doors of the Canadian Olympic Committee. This debate needs to take place on the floor of the House of Commons, allowing Canadians to have their say through their elected members of Parliament. 

This past summer, Parliament’s Subcommittee on International Human Rights held a series of emergency hearings on “The Human Rights Situation of the Uighurs.” In a unanimously adopted statement, the committee unequivocally condemned the Chinese government for its persecution of the Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang, and stated that they were “persuaded that the actions of the Chinese Communist Party constitutes genocide as laid out in the Genocide Convention.” 

Further, just last week, 13 MPs from all five federal parties signed a letter urging the International Olympic Committee to relocate the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics to another country in response to the CCP’s human rights abuses against the Uighur minority. 

It is a source of great personal pride that as a member of Parliament, I was able to raise my voice in support of two unanimous motions in the House of Commons recognizing the genocides being perpetrated against the Yazidis in 2016 and the Rohingya in 2018. 

Just as we did then, Canadian parliamentarians must once again be given the opportunity to rise in the House to address the situation facing the Uighurs and be heard on the determination of genocide. Only in this context can the full implication of Canada’s participation in the 2022 Beijing Games be properly evaluated. 

Since the introduction of the modern games in 1896, the Olympics have not only been a site of international co-operation and celebration, they have also acted as a lightning rod for social, economic and political tensions. Superpowers have long recognized the symbolic power of gold medals and awe-inspiring opening ceremonies in shaping public perceptions of host nations. 

So-called “sportswashing,” the hosting of a sporting event as a means for a country to improve its reputation, in particular on a poor human rights record, throws the legitimacy of the Games themselves into question.

The ethical implications of participating in the Olympics when they are hosted by a nation guilty of gross human rights abuses has been a point of international debate for decades. One only has to look back to the 2008 Beijing Olympics to see the extensive laundry list of human rights violations that intensified in the preparation for and hosting of the Games in China; a dark legacy that still lingers to this day. 

Canadians want nothing more than to celebrate and support our incredible athletes on the world stage, but not at any cost. As human rights icon Irwin Cotler reminds us, “in the face of evil, indifference is acquiescence, if not complicity in evil itself.” 

If Canada’s participation in the 2022 Winter Olympics requires our complicity with a regime perpetrating genocide, it is simply a price we cannot afford to pay.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2021/02/16/moral-not-metals-must-guide-our-way-on-decision-to-attend-the-2022-winter-games-in-beijing.html

Filed under foreign policy, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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