To my mind, it is more how one engages in discussion and debate, not in the raising of uncomfortable issues:
No one has a right not to be offended. All of us have a duty to challenge bigotry. These two claims are not just compatible, they are often interconnected. Today, though, many view these as conflicting perspectives. To give offence to other cultures or faiths, they argue, is to foment racism; to challenge racism, one should refrain from giving offence.
It’s a belief at the heart of the controversy engulfing Batley grammar school. The facts are still unclear. A teacher apparently showed an image of the Prophet Muhammad in a religious education class. Some parents have demanded the teacher be sacked, holding protests outside the school. The school has apologised and suspended the teacher involved. At the heart of the affair, the former Tory cabinet minister Sayeeda Warsi insists, is the issue of “child safeguarding”, of protecting children from racist bullying.
It is inevitable in plural societies that we offend the sensibilities of others. Where different beliefs are deeply held, disagreement is unavoidable. Almost by definition, that’s what it means to live in a plural society. If we cherish diversity, we should establish ways of having such debates and conversations in a civil manner, not try to suppress them. A structured discussion in a classroom, properly done, seems an ideal approach.
It is inevitable, too, that in pursuing social change, we often offend deeply held sensibilities. Many groups struggling for justice and equality – women, gays, non-believers – within religious communities cannot but be blasphemous. In this context, to accept that certain things cannot be said is to accept that certain forms of power cannot be challenged. Fighting for social justice, in other words, often requires us to offend others. The boundaries of speech are different in a classroom than in the world outside. Here, a teacher is dealing with minors, building a relationship of trust with them, encouraging them to think, and to think about issues that they may not have thought about or may not have wanted to think about.
But here, too, there is nothing wrong in discussing material that may offend or be deemed blasphemous. Some commentators, including Warsi, claim that pupils were shown a Charlie Hebdo cartoon depicting Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. The problem, they say, is not blasphemy but racism.
Whether this claim is true is unclear. Given that, in Paris, Samuel Paty, a teacher, was beheaded after a schoolgirl’s false claim, we should be wary of jumping to conclusions before knowing all the facts. Even if the story is true as reported, however, it does not imply that the teacher was misguided. Nor does it show that the class discussion was a cause of racism or bullying.
One can play a clip of a Bernard Manning joke, show an antisemitic cartoon or discuss a Charlie Hebdo cover in ways that heighten racist prejudices. One can also do each of these things in ways that allow students to think more deeply about the issue at hand and reduce racial or religious tensions. What matters is the manner and context in which the subject is approached. To simply insist that showing offensive material in the classroom is to exacerbate racism is a disingenuous means of manipulating “safeguarding” to limit what can be discussed.
One of the ironies of such controversies is that they serve to silence many Muslim voices and traditions. Virtually every press report on the Batley school controversy has claimed that there is an Islamic prohibition on the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad, as, indeed, does the “agreed syllabus for religious education” in West Yorkshire.
This is historically illiterate. There have been many Islamic traditions, particularly in Persia, Turkey and India, open to depicting Muhammad. Only in the 17th century did attitudes shift, particularly among Sunnis. In recent decades, reactionaries, both Sunni and Shia, have seized on prohibition as a means of strengthening their control over Muslim communities. To claim that “Islam prohibits depictions of Muhammad” is to take the most conservative views and present them as representative of Islam.
When we say that we live in a diverse society, we mean that it’s a messy world out there, full of disagreement and debate. That is something we should welcome, not fear, for it is such disagreement and debate that allow us to break out of our culture-bound boxes, to engage in a wider dialogue that can help forge a more universal language of citizenship. The question we should ask ourselves is not how to minimise such debates, but how to create ways of engaging in them more constructively.
Another good column and series of questions by Sheema Khan:
Since its inception in 1966, the BC Muslim Association, which calls itself “the largest Muslim organization in the province representing Sunni Muslims,” has never had a woman on its executive council. The women are relegated to a “Women’s Council,” which is subordinate to the executive. The original BCMA constitution explicitly banned women from serving on the executive council. While that wording has since been removed, in practise little has changed, and female voices haven’t been given a chance to shape the governance and future of the organization.
There is no theological basis for this arrangement at the organization, which was founded by immigrants from South Asia and Fiji and holds $41-million in assets. Apparently, the (male) powers-that-be see no contradiction with this discriminatory practice and the BCMA’s stated aim of “building a healthy congregation.”
Unhappiness with this approach came to a head last summer, when the BCMA excluded women from all prayer spaces throughout the province, as it partly reopened mosques in the wake of COVID-19. Priority had been given to men.
And then came the bombshell in December, when the CBC broke the story of BCMA imam Abdur Rehman Khan, who was convicted for a 2016 sexual assault against a woman he knew through his role in the community. He was sentenced to three years in prison and placed on the registered sex offender list for 20 years. The imam was released on bail after being charged in 2017. He was later convicted at trial in January, 2020, released pending sentencing, and imprisoned in August, 2020. During this four-year period, he continued to serve as an imam of the BCMA’s Masjid-Ur-Rahmah mosque in Surrey – leading prayers, working with youth, engaging interfaith communities and officiating marriages. Last August, he resigned for “personal matters” – he was going to prison – which the BCMA said it accepted, without any inquiry or follow-up.
The BCMA says Mr. Khan passed a police background check when hired, and that the organization had not been made aware of the allegations and conviction, although some community members say they knew of the situation. If you look at BCMA’s online platforms, you would never know that one of its imams had been imprisoned for sexual assault just a few months ago. No statement whatsoever – no pledge to do better, no commitment to protect female congregants, no calls for other victims to come forward. It’s as if the crime never happened.
Congregants, on the other hand, were furious, demanding answers that never came. Activist and student Sumaiya Tufail organized a community drive-by protest in solidarity with the survivor, demanding transparency from the BCMA, protection of vulnerable congregants and an end to the all-male executive council. A special vote held in February to do away with the archaic setup that keeps the women’s role subordinate to the men’s failed by a substantial margin. The BCMA says that the current executive board anticipates that with increased awareness and engagement, the motion will pass successfully in the near future.
There should be consequences for keeping such draconian policies in place. Sunni Muslims in B.C. should make it clear that the BCMA does not represent them. Congregants should cease donating to the BCMA and instead support institutions that are more inclusive of women and more transparent. In 2019, the BCMA received $3.6-million in donations, accounting for almost half its revenue. Taking a cue from Lieutenant-Colonel Eleanor Taylor, who quit the Canadian Armed Forces in disgust after reports of alleged sexual misconduct, the BCMA’s Women’s Council should resign en massein protest.
Schools, community associations, NGOs and interfaith groups can engage with Muslim organizations other than the BCMA. Pose tough questions – it’s not Islamophobic to ask why a Canadian Muslim charity doesn’t have any women serving on its executive council. While it may be common elsewhere, this should have no place in Canada.
Roughly 66 per cent of all Muslim charitable organizations registered with Canada Revenue Agency have an all-male board, with Quebec as the worst at 82 per cent. The BCMA, the Islamic Foundation of Toronto, Masjid al-Hidayah(Port Coquitlam) and Baitul Mukarram Islamic Society (Toronto) have each had an employee charged or convicted of sexual assault; all have been governed exclusively by men between 2014 and 2018.
All of these incidents would remain hidden if it were not for courageous survivors, who not only endure the trauma of the original abuse, but face shame, blame and accusations of “making the community look bad.” They need compassion and our full support to heal. For too long, the reputation of abusive “leaders” has trumped justice for victims, leaving a trail of human wreckage. Activists working with survivors are all too aware of the tragic outcomes of Muslims abused by imams, preachers and teachers over recent decades. With their pain never addressed, many have struggled with mental-health issues, addictions, dysfunction in relationships and in some cases have even committed suicide.
This has to stop. We need real leaders – both women and men – who will address this serious issue head-on. Leaders who will make paramount the welfare of the vulnerable; who will educate communities about the trauma induced by abuse; and collaborate with agencies to help survivors with sensitivity and due care. Leaders who will hold abusers to account and live by the Islamic principle of standing up for justice – no matter who the perpetrator.
Sheema Khan is the author of Of Hockey and Hijab: Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman.
2017 marked a major change since when these statistics were collected as shown in the above charts. Pre-COVID so recent spike in anti-Asian hate crimes not captured but largely post Black Lives Matter (but pre-George Floyd killing):
There were 1,946 police-reported hate crimes in Canada in 2019, up 7% from a year earlier. Other than a single peak of 2,073 hate crimes in 2017, police-reported numbers are the highest since 2009.
Statistics Canada collects data on the number and nature of hate crimes reported to police in any given year and monitors trends over time. The following statistics from 2019 do not reflect the large-scale societal impacts, both nationally and globally, of the COVID-19 pandemic, as this information is not yet available. The 2019 police-reported hate crime data will, however, be a key reference point for 2020, to identify possible changes in Canadian crime patterns as a result of factors related to the pandemic.
Results from a recent crowdsourcing survey show that, since the start of the pandemic, the proportion of participants designated as visible minorities who perceived an increase in race-based harassment or attacks was three times larger than the proportion among the rest of the population (18% versus 6%). This difference was most pronounced among Chinese (30%), Korean (27%), and Southeast Asian (19%) participants. In addition, some police services and media outlets, such as those in Vancouver(PDF 1,787 KB), Ottawa and Toronto (PDF 1,702 KB), have indicated significant increases in hate crime incidents in 2020.
Hate crimes target the integral and visible parts of a person’s identity and may disproportionately affect the wider community. A hate crime incident may be carried out against a person or property and may target race, colour, national or ethnic origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, language, sex, age, mental or physical disability, or any other similar factor. In addition, four specific offences are listed as hate propaganda or hate crimes in the Criminal Code of Canada: advocating genocide, public incitement of hatred, willful promotion of hatred and mischief motivated by hate in relation to property used by an identifiable group.
Hate-motivated crime up from 2018 and remains higher than previous 10-year average
The number of police-reported hate crimes in Canada was up 7% in 2019, rising from 1,817 incidents to 1,946. Since comparable data became available in 2009, the number of hate crimes has ranged from 1,167 incidents in 2013 to 2,073 in 2017. On average, 1,518 hate crime incidents have been reported annually by police since 2009.
Chart 1 Number of police-reported hate crimes, Canada, 2009 to 2019
As with other crimes, self-reported data provide further insight into hate-motivated crimes. According to the 2014 General Social Survey on Canadians’ Safety (Victimization), Canadians reported being the victim of over 330,000 criminal incidents that they perceived as being motivated by hate in the 12 months that preceded the survey (5% of the total self-reported incidents). Two-thirds of these incidents were not reported to the police, a rate similar to that for victimization overall.
Hate-motivated crime accounts for a small proportion of all police-reported crime (around 0.1% of all non-traffic-related offences). However, police data on hate crimes reflect only those incidents that come to the attention of police and are classified as hate crimes. As a result, fluctuations in the number of reported incidents may be attributable to a true change in the volume of hate crimes, but they might also reflect changes in reporting by the public because of increased community outreach by police or heightened sensitivity after high-profile events.
Most provinces and all territories report increases in hate crimes
In 2019, eight provinces and all three territories posted increases in police-reported hate crimes. The largest contributors to the national increase were British Columbia (+49 incidents), Ontario (+43 incidents) and Quebec (+23 incidents). Alberta reported 38 fewer incidents and Nova Scotia had no change from the previous year.
Accounting for population size, hate crime rates were highest in British Columbia (6.1 incidents per 100,000 population), Ontario (5.9 incidents), Quebec (4.8 incidents) and Alberta (4.7 incidents). While the vast majority (84%) of hate crimes occurred in a census metropolitan area (CMA), non-CMA areas (small cities, small towns and rural areas) accounted for two-thirds (67%) of the increase in hate crime incidents in 2019. Stated another way, areas outside CMAs recorded 86 more incidents in 2019, while CMAs recorded 43 more incidents.
Police-reported hate crimes targeting race or ethnicity and sexual orientation were up compared with the previous year, accounting for most of the national increase. Hate crimes targeting religion were down because of fewer incidents targeting the Jewish population. There were more incidents targeting the Muslim population.
Chart 2 Police-reported hate crimes, by region, 2017 to 2019
Non-violent and violent hate crimes up in 2019
Non-violent hate crime accounted for over half (56%) of all hate crimes in 2019, the same proportion as in 2018. Both non-violent (+6%) and violent (+8%) hate crimes increased in 2019, contributing nearly equally to the overall increase in hate crime.
The increase in non-violent hate crime was largely the result of more incidents of general mischief (+7%). The rise in violent hate crime was driven by more incidents of common assault (+24%) and uttering threats (+12%).
As is typical of police-reported hate crime historically, mischief (general mischief and mischief towards property used primarily for worship or by an identifiable group) was the most common hate crime-related offence, accounting for almost half (45%) of all hate crime incidents.
Police-reported hate crimes motivated by hatred of a race or an ethnicity increase
Individuals designated as visible minorities generally report higher levels of discrimination than the non-visible minority population (20% versus 12%). Specifically, those who identified as Arab or Black were most likely to report having experienced discrimination, with four in five Black Canadians who had experienced discrimination indicating that their race or skin colour was the basis of the discrimination.
Almost half (46%) of all police-reported hate crime was motivated by hatred of a race or an ethnicity in 2019. Police reported 876 crimes motivated by hatred of a race or an ethnicity, up 10% from 2018, and 2 fewer than the record high in 2017. The rise was largely attributable to 40 more hate crimes targeting the Black population (+14%) and 35 more incidents targeting the Arab and West Asian populations (+38%).
With 335 police-reported incidents, hate crimes targeting the Black population reached their highest number recorded dating back to 2009. Hate crimes targeting the Black population accounted for 18% of all hate crimes in Canada, and this population was the most targeted group overall in 2019. Ontario (+29 incidents) and British Columbia (+16 incidents) accounted for the largest increases in hate crimes against the Black population, while Alberta (-19 incidents) reported the largest decrease.
The number of police-reported hate crimes against the Arab and West Asian populations rose from 93 to 128, following a 35% decrease a year earlier. This was the second-highest number dating back to 2009. These crimes accounted for 15% of hate crimes targeting race or ethnicity, and 7% of all hate crimes in 2019.
While the number of hate crimes targeting race or ethnicity rose in 2019, victimization data from the same year suggest that population groups designated as visible minorities were significantly less likely to report having a great deal of confidence in the police (35%), compared with non-visible minorities (44%). Perceptions of personal safety, prior victimization or discrimination, and confidence in the police can all impact the likelihood of an individual reporting a crime to the police.
Hate crimes targeting the Indigenous population continue to account for relatively few police-reported hate crimes
Incidents against Indigenous people—those who are First Nations, Métis or Inuit—continued to account for a relatively small proportion of police-reported hate crimes (2%), decreasing from 39 incidents in 2018 to 30 incidents in 2019.
Police-reported violent hate crimes against Indigenous people are more likely than most other hate crimes to involve female victims. From 2010 to 2019, 45% of victims of violent hate crimes against Indigenous people were female, compared with 32% of all victims of violent hate crimes.
According to the most recent victimization information, Indigenous victims of non-spousal violence were less likely to report the crime to police than their non-Indigenous counterparts. Furthermore, Indigenous people were less likely to report having a great deal of confidence in the police compared with their non-Indigenous counterparts. Previous research has described the relationship between Indigenous people and the police as one of mistrust because of a range of systemic issues that have contributed to experiences of social and institutional marginalization, discrimination, violence, and intergenerational trauma. It is therefore unclear how the number of police-reported hate crimes may be impacted.
Record high number of hate crimes targeting sexual orientation
According to the 2018 Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces, an estimated 1 million people in Canada are sexual minorities—that is, they reported their sexual orientation as gay, lesbian, bisexual or a sexual orientation that is not heterosexual. Compared with heterosexual Canadians, sexual minority Canadians were more likely to report having been violently victimized in their lifetime and were more likely to have experienced inappropriate behaviours in public and online. At the same time, sexual minority Canadians were less likely to report having been physically assaulted to the police.
Police reported 263 hate crimes targeting sexual orientation in 2019, up 41% from a year earlier. This was the highest number of hate crimes targeting sexual orientation dating back to 2009. Nearly 9 in 10 (88%) of these crimes specifically targeted the gay and lesbian community, while the remainder comprised incidents targeting bisexual people (2%); people with other sexual orientations, such as asexual, pansexual or other non-heterosexual orientations (6%); and people whose sexual orientation was unknown (4%).
As was the case in previous years, violent crimes accounted for more than half (53%) of hate crimes targeting sexual orientation. In comparison, just over one-quarter (27%) of hate crimes targeting religion and just over half (52%) of hate crimes targeting race or ethnicity were violent.
Hate crimes targeting religion down for the second year in a row, with fewer anti-Semitic hate crimes
In 2019, 608 hate crimes targeting religion were reported by police, down 7% compared with 2018. Although this was the second year-over-year decrease in a row, following a peak of 842 incidents in 2017, the number was higher than those recorded prior to 2017. Victimization information has shown that people affiliated with a non-Christian religion were significantly more likely than Christians to report having experienced discrimination on the basis of their religion (11% versus 1%).
Following a 63% jump in 2017 and a 3% increase in 2018, the number of incidents targeting the Jewish population decreased 20% in 2019, from 372 to 296. The decline was the result of fairly widespread decreases, including fewer incidents in Alberta (-29), British Columbia (-20), Ontario (-19) and Quebec (-18). While police-reported metrics indicate a decrease in hate crimes targeting the Jewish population, an annual audit conducted by B’Nai Brith Canada reported a record number of anti-Semitic incidents for the fourth consecutive year.
In contrast, following a large decrease in hate crimes against the Muslim population in 2018, police reported 15 more incidents in 2019, for a total of 181 (+9%). The increase in police-reported hate crimes against Muslims was largely the result of more incidents in Quebec (+15 incidents).
Violent incidents targeting the Muslim population were more likely than other types of hate crimes to involve female victims. From 2010 to 2019, almost half (47%) of victims of violent hate crimes targeting the Muslim population were female, compared with one-third (32%) of all hate crime victims.
The pandemic has been responsible for an outbreak of violence and hate directed against Asians around the world, blaming them for the spread of COVID-19. During this surge in attacks, the perpetrators have made their motives clear, taunting their victims with declarations like, “You have the Chinese Virus, go back to China!” and assaulting them and spitting on them.
The numbers over the past year in the U.S. alone are alarming. As NPR has reported, nearly 3,800 instances of discrimination against Asians have been reported just in the past year to Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition that tracks incidents of violence and harassment against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the U.S.
Then came mass shooting in Atlanta last week, which took the lives of eight people, including six women of Asian descent. The shooter’s motive has not been determined, but the incident has spawned a deeper discourse on racism and violence targeting Asians in the wake of the coronavirus.
This narrative – that “others,” often from far-flung places, are to blame for epidemics – is a dramatic example of a long tradition of hatred. In 14th-century Europe, Jewish communities were wrongfully accused of poisoning wells to spread the Black Death. In 1900, Chinese people were unfairly vilified for an outbreak of the plague in San Francisco’s Chinatown. And in the ’80s, Haitians were blamed for bringing HIV/AIDS to the U.S., a theory that’s considered unsubstantiated by many global health experts.
Some public health practitioners say the global health system is partially responsible for perpetuating these ideas.
According to Abraar Karan, a doctor at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, the notion persists in global health that “the West is the best.” This led to an assumption early on in the pandemic that COVID-19 spread to the rest of the world because China wasn’t able to control it.
“The other side of that assumption is, ‘Had this started anywhere else, like in the U.S. or the U.K. or Europe, somehow it would’ve been better controlled, and a pandemic wouldn’t have happened,'” says Karan, who was born in India and raised in the U.S. He has been working closely with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to respond to COVID-19.
China’s response was not without fault. The government’s decision to silence doctors and not warn the public about a likely pandemic for six days in mid-January caused more than 3,000 people to become infected within a week, according to a report by the Associated Press, and created ripe conditions for global spread. Some of the aggressive measures China took to control the epidemic – confining people to their homes, for example — have been described as “draconian” and a violation of civil rights, even if they ultimately proved effective.
But it soon became clear that assumptions about the superiority of Western health systems were false when China and other Asian countries, along with many African countries, controlled outbreaks far more effectively and faster than Western countries did, says Karan.
The Twitter Blame Game And Its Repercussions
Some politicians, including former President Donald Trump publicly blamed China for the pandemic, calling this novel coronavirus the “Chinese Virus” or the “Wuhan Virus.” They consistently pushed that narrative even after the World Health Organization (WHO) warned as early as March 2020, when the pandemic was declared, that such language would encourage racial profiling and stigmatization against Asians. Trump has continued to use stigmatizing language in the wake of the Atlanta shooting, using the phrase “China virus” during a March 16 call to Fox News.
A report by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), released this month, directly linked Trump’s first tweet about a “Chinese virus” to a significant increase in anti-Asian hashtags. According to a separate report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, anti-Asian hate crimes in 16 U.S. cities increased 149 percent in 2020, from 49 to 122.
“Diseases have often been racialized in the past as a form of scapegoating,” says Yulin Hswen, an assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UCSF and lead author of the study on Trump’s tweet. Sometimes, it’s to distract from other events that are occurring within a society, such as the early failures of the U.S. response to the pandemic, says Hswen.
Suspicion tends to manifest more during times of vulnerability, like in wartime or during a pandemic, says ElsaMarie D’Silva, an Aspen Institute New Voices fellow from India who studies violence and harassment issues. It just so happened that COVID-19 was originally identified in China, but, as NPR’s Jason Beaubien has reported, some of the early clusters of cases elsewhere came from jet setters who traveled to Europe and ski destinations.
“What you’re seeing in the U.S. is this pre-existing, deep-seated bias [against Asians and Asian Americans] – or rather, racism – that is now surfacing,” says D’Silva. “COVID-19 is just an excuse.”
“It’s not that the biases are necessarily birthed from global health researchers,” he says. “It’s more that global health researchers are birthed from institutions and cultures that are inherently xenophobic and racist.”
For example, the West is usually regarded as the hub of expertise and knowledge, says Sriram Shamasunder, an associate professor of medicine at UCSF, and there’s a sense among Western health workers that epidemics occur in impoverished contexts because the people there engage in primitive behaviors and just don’t care as much about health.
“[Western health workers] come in with a bias that in San Francisco or Boston, we would never let [these crises] happen,” says Shamasunder, who is co-founder and faculty director of the HEAL Initiative, a global health fellowship that works in Navajo Nation in the U.S. and in eight other countries.
In the early days of COVID-19, skepticism by Western public health officials about the efficacy of Asian mask protocols hindered the U.S.’s ability to control the pandemic. Additionally, stereotypes about who was and wasn’t at risk had significant consequences, says Nancy Kass, deputy director for public health at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.
According to Kass, doctors initially only considered a possible COVID-19 diagnosis among people who had recently flown back from China. That narrow focus caused the U.S. to misdiagnose patients who presented with what we now call classic COVID symptoms simply because they hadn’t traveled from China.
“Inadvertently, we [did] a disservice both to patients who need[ed] care and to public health,” says Kass.
It’s reminiscent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, Kass says. Because itwas so widely billed as a “gay disease,” there are many documented cases of heterosexual women who presented with symptoms but weren’t diagnosed until they were on their deathbeds.
That’s not to say that we should ignore facts and patterns about new diseases. For example, Kass says it’s appropriate to warn pregnant women about the risks of traveling to countries where the Zika virus, which is linked to birth and developmental defects, is present.
But there’s a difference, she says, between making sure people have enough information to understand a disease and attaching a label, like “Chinese virus,” that is inaccurate and that leads to stereotyping.
Karan says we also need to shift our approach to epidemics. In the case of COVID-19 and other outbreaks, Western countries often think of them as a national security issue, closing borders and blaming the countries where the disease was first reported. This approach encourages stigmatization, he says.
Instead, Karan suggests reframing the discussion to focus on global solidarity, which promotes the idea that we are all in this together. One way for wealthy countries to demonstrate solidarity now, Karan says, is by supporting the equitable and speedy distribution of vaccines among countries globally as well as among communities within their own borders.
Without such commitments in place, “it prompts the question, whose lives matter most?” says Shamasunder.
Ultimately, the global health community – and Western society as a whole – has to discard its deep-rooted mindset of coloniality and tendency to scapegoat others, says Hswen. The public health community can start by talking more about the historic racism and atrocities that have been tied to diseases.
Additionally, Karan says, leaders should reframe the pandemic for people: Instead of blaming Asians for the virus, blame the systems that weren’t adequately prepared to respond to a pandemic.
Although WHO has had specific guidance since 2015 about not naming diseases after places, Hswen says the public health community at large should have spoken out earlier and stronger last year against racialized language and the ensuing violence. She says they should have anticipated the backlash against Asians and preempted it with public messaging and education about why neutral terms like “COVID-19” should be used instead of “Chinese virus.”
“Public health people know there is a history of racializing diseases and targeting particular groups,” says Hswen. “They could have done more to defend the Asian community.”
Legitimate concerns among Asian Canadians. Just as there are legitimate concerns among Black Canadians, Muslim Canadians, Jewish Canadians etc. My bias is for more programming that crosses all groups as the default, with any community-specific programming aimed at addressing issues that are truly unique to the particular community, as I think that the commonalities of racist behaviour are greater than the differences:
Fifty years ago, Canada became the first country to adopt multiculturalism as an official policy. Multiculturalism seeks to preserve the distinctiveness of individuals and cultures while recognizing that diverse ethnic groups can co-exist and contribute to the Canadian society. Over the last five decades, the policy has evolved from an ideal laid out in a policy document to a quintessential aspect of Canadian national identity. Not only is diversity our strength, we have come to celebrate our diversity and uniqueness – the mix of respect, humility and openness that define Canada’s image on the global stage stems from who we are at home. The diversity it promotes and helps institutionalize makes our country stronger.
Reflecting upon my own experience growing up in Toronto, multiculturalism was a fact of life. I arrived in Canada as a young girl from South Korea who barely spoke English. In Toronto, where over 180 languages are spoken every day, I was proud of my Asian heritage and it was absolutely normal for me and my student peers to celebrate the Lunar New Year, Diwali, Nowruz, Hanukkah, Christmas and Eid, and to try different cuisines packed by our mothers at lunchtime. My experience of growing up in Toronto – and later studying and teaching Canadian history at the University of Toronto – was largely inspired by curiosity and the conviction that every one of us has a role to play in shaping the Canadian society.
Much has changed since the COVID-19 pandemic began. I have recently returned to Canada after a few years of working and living in Italy. In the past year alone in Ottawa, I can recall about a dozen racist incidents where I was either yelled at, denied service, or verbally harassed. Despite working as a human rights advocate for the past decade, I found myself completely helpless when an angry stranger at the grocery store suddenly told me to get out, yelling “Go back to China.” In each instance, I was alone and often feared for my safety and rushed back home.
Sadly, studies show that my experience is not an isolated case – there has been a rise of anti-Asian racism and violence since the outbreak of COVID-19, with young Asian women being disproportionately targeted, particularly in Ontario and British Columbia. In Vancouver, for instance, hate incidents targeting East Asians increased sevenfold between 2019 and 2020. A recent study by the Chinese Canadian National Council’s Toronto chapter revealed more than 1,000 cases of racism against Asian-Canadians since the COVID-19 outbreak, and the actual numbers are likely higher considering that in East Asian culture, it is considered more appropriate to brush off these negative incidents rather than speak up.
The recent attacks in Atlanta, as well as various reports of physical, verbal and online attacks against Asians in Canada since the pandemic began, all point to a troubling reality of ignorance and hatred. These attacks are taking place in grocery stores, sidewalks, parks and restaurants in daylight, with bystanders behind their masks and perpetrators walking away unpunished, leaving victims with deep psychological and physical wounds. Many of the recent attacks targeted frontline workers such as nurses, transit operators, and small business owners, many of whom have risked their own lives and safety to serve Canadians during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Canada, despite our celebrated history of multiculturalism, is clearly not immune to anti-Asian sentiment or the prejudiced misconception that Asia – or China – bears responsibility for the spread of COVID-19. Neither Donald Trump’s “China virus” reference nor general discontent with the Chinese government’s current policy stance justifies such harassment or the racist comments that Asian-Canadians face today. Canadians should know better. We have never been perfect, which is why we vowed to never forget painful incidents in our history like the Chinese Head Tax, the turning away of the Komagata Maru, the internment of Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War, and even post-SARS racism.
Tackling anti-Asian racism is not just a moral issue. It is also in Canada’s interest to recognize the important contributions Asian-Canadians have made to our economy. The largest source of immigration – the lifeblood of Canada’s economy – now comes from Asia, and Canadians with Asian heritage comprise the largest and fastest-growing ethnic minority group in Canada, at about 6 million. These are hard-working Canadians who have made enormous contributions to Canada and who will play crucial roles in our recovery post-COVID.
Asia is also the biggest source of international students in Canada – over 50 per cent of all international students come from India and China, followed by South Korea and Vietnam. In 2018, international students in Canada contributed an estimated $21.6 billion to Canada’s GDP and supported almost 170,000 jobs for Canada’s middle class, according to Global Affairs Canada. These are our neighbours, friends and colleagues who are facing threats, abuses and even violent attacks, simply because of the colour of their skin. An attack on one of them is an attack on fundamental Canadian values that took years of hard work by millions of Canadians to build a society of respect and inclusion.
As we reflect upon this important 50th anniversary of the advent of official multiculturalism, we must therefore face, head-on, the rising discrimination against Asian-Canadians. There are several concrete measures that can be undertaken immediately to confront the situation and renew our commitment to diversity and inclusion:
The Senate and House of Commons should strike a joint parliamentary task force to conduct a comprehensive examination of the current state of harassment and racism against Asian-Canadians and recommend legislative and policy measures. The task force should make diligent efforts to consult with provincial and municipal representatives in Ontario and British Columbia as well as key civil society organizations and community representatives to provide concrete recommendations.
The Department of Justice should sponsor a wide consultation with provincial and territorial attorneys general on possible amendments to section 718.2 of the Criminal Code with respect to sentencing for hate-inspired crimes to better define hate based on race. There is a serious lack of legislative and judicial guidance on how much impact hate motivation should have on the quantum of a sentence.
Private-sector actors such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google, as well as major media outlets in Canada should take initiative for a coherent public awareness campaign on the history of Asian-Canadians, as well as underling the unacceptable incidents of harassment in recent months, in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of multiculturalism policy.
The federal government should provide a new funding package for the Federal Anti-Racism Secretariat to monitor discrimination against Asian-Canadians across the nation, promote preventive measures and a hotline for victims to report incidents, and report to Parliament by the end of this calendar year on progress.
The Department of Public Safety should prioritize the enforcement of anti-racism policy as a key aspect of our national security.
History education across provinces must be amended to shed light on the evolution of multiculturalism and include specific references to the contributions of Asian-Canadians, as well as negative incidents from the past, so that we may better educate our next generation of Canadians.
The continued expression of empathy and support from political, business and public institutional leaders in the wake of the massive ramp up of anti-Asian slurs, harassment and violence is welcome. But the true measure of Canada’s response to the surge in anti-Asian racism will depend on how quickly serious policy measures are undertaken at various levels of jurisdiction, to educate the public, punish the perpetrators and provide a solid source of support for those who are affected.
We must not allow recent incidents to become media headlines and produce another policy paper that will be forgotten in the next election cycle. As Sir Winston Churchill once said, “Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.” Instead of being paralyzed by fear and paranoia, we must stand up in solidarity with our Asian-Canadian neighbours and friends, and systematically examine ways to break the cycle of hate and violence and invest our energy and resources for a better future.
The time for this kind of leadership has come. The costs of avoiding that leadership are, on so many levels, deeply problematic for the nation we love and the values that underlie the future of Canada.
The race and age of jurors has a noticeable effect on trial verdicts, American studies indicate, but Canada has no data allowing similar research here.
Experts in Canada said it’s imperative to gather such demographic information to better understand systemic biases in the criminal justice system.
One 2012 study in Florida found all-white juries convicted Blacks at a rate 16 percentage points higher than whites. The gap disappeared when the jury pool included at least one Black member, the research found.
“The impact of the racial composition of the jury pool — and seated jury — is a factor that merits much more attention and analysis in order to ensure the fairness of the criminal justice system,” the study concludes.
Another U.S. study, in 2014, showed older jurors were significantly more likely to convict than younger ones:
“If a male defendant, completely by chance, faces a jury pool that has an average age above 50, he is about 13 percentage points more likely to be convicted than if he faces a jury pool with an average age less than 50.”
“These findings imply that many cases are decided differently for reasons that are completely independent of the true nature of the evidence,” it says.
Shamena Anwar, co-author of the papers, said in an interview this week that juries can be highly unrepresentative of their communities as a result of the selection process.
The research, which shows age of jurors and race play a substantial role in verdicts and convictions, indicates demographics “definitely” matter, Anwar said.
As a result, collecting the data was important in understanding that role, said Anwar, an economist who studies criminal justice and racial disparities at the non-profit Rand Corporation.
“If you don’t collect it — you don’t have access to the problem,” Anwar said. “This work shows you that (jury demographics) can have a big impact on (trial) outcomes.”
However, a survey by The Canadian Press found provinces and territories collect almost no demographic data of jurors, despite concerns about systemic bias and government promises to address it.
The absence of information makes it all but impossible to discern whether juries reflect the makeup of the community, experts said.
Colton Fehr, an assistant criminology professor at Simon Fraser University, said bias can infiltrate a trial in many ways, but the lack of data makes it difficult to track and study.
“I’d rather know just how bad it is, so that we can try to fix it, as opposed to just not know where things are going wrong,” Fehr said.
Interesting, likely correlates with lower income as well:
Canada will collect data on the impact of siting a disproportionate number of polluting industries and landfills in areas inhabited by racial minority communities, federal lawmakers voted Wednesday.
The bill aims to tackle “environmental racism,” where Indigenous, Black and other racial minority communities are exposed to higher levels of dirty air, contaminated water or other toxins and pollutants.
One of the most famous cases is in the Indigenous Grassy Narrows First Nation community in Ontario, where residents have since the 1960s suffered health impacts from mercury contamination produced by a former pulp and paper mill.
Similar cases of polluting industries being sited in racial minority communities are common across Canada and the United States, where President Joe Biden signed an executive order in January pledging to tackle the issue.
“For too long, people just didn’t realize that some people were being exposed to more toxins than others simply because of the colour of their skin,” said Lenore Zann, a Liberal MP from Nova Scotia and the bill’s sponsor.
“It’s time that we address that and change our behaviour as a society,” she said in a phone interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Collecting data on the issue — such as the location of environmental hazards and levels of health problems in those areas — will make the problem clearer and allow legislators to create policy recommendations to begin addressing it, Zann said.
In 2019, a UN special rapporteur on human rights and hazardous substances and wastes concluded that “marginalized groups, Indigenous Peoples in particular, find themselves on the wrong side of a toxic divide, subject to conditions that would not be acceptable elsewhere in Canada.”
During debate on the bill Tuesday, however, opposition parties said the Liberal Party government had itself failed to act on pollution threats.
They pointed to delays in the government fulfilling its 2015 pledge to within five years clean up water supplies in Indigenous communities and end advisories to boil drinking water or drink bottled water.
The federal auditor general says in a report that the Liberal government won’t meet its goal to lift all boil-water advisories for several years. Dawn Martin-Hill, chair of Indigenous studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, says there needed to be more work with Indigenous communities to build a strategic plan to ensure access to reliable, safe drinking water.
The government has lifted more than 100 long-term advisories since the pledge, but 58 are still in place in 38 First Nation communities, according to Indigenous Services Canada, a government body.
Conservative MP Eric Melillo said the government’s record in tackling environmental racism had been “all talk.”
He said it should prioritize practical steps like cleaning up water in First Nations communities and investing in infrastructure to help Indigenous people deal with the impacts of climate change.
Issue featured in 2019 Netflix doc with Elliot Page
The bill was inspired by the work of Ingrid Waldron, a sociologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, whose research has highlighted how environmental hazards disproportionately impact Black and Indigenous communities in the province.
Waldron in particular has examined the town of Shelburne, where a toxic waste dump sited near a Black neighbourhood is suspected of contributing to higher-than-usual cancer rates in the area.
Siting of such facilities “is based on racism, to put it bluntly,” said Waldron, whose work was brought to a wider audience by a 2019 Netflix documentary directed and narrated by Hollywood actor Elliot Page.
Speaking with the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview, Waldron said the facility siting decisions made by largely white economic and environmental policy-makers rarely involved Black or Indigenous people.
“The last thing they’re going to do is put these industries in a white community,” she said.
While the new bill will require the federal government to collect data on the problem and create a strategy to solve it, analysts said the problem often lies in provincial-level industrial permitting decisions and other laws.
“The strategy, even if it’s excellent, will come up against a barrier where it can’t actually achieve what it wants to unless things change at the provincial level as well,” said Dayna Scott, an environmental law professor at York University.
She said the bill has put the issue on the agenda, but provincial rule changes would be needed, such as prohibiting the siting of polluting facilities in areas already overburdened with them.
The German government on Wednesday agreed to a draft law to grant citizenship to more descendants of Nazi victims.
If enacted, the law should fully close a loophole that led to many victims’ descendants being denied German citizenship, despite a long-standing policy of allowing descendants of persecuted Jews to reclaim citizenship.
Some were denied citizenship because their ancestors fled Germany and changed citizenship before Nazi Germany officially revoked their German citizenship. Others were denied because they were born before April 1, 1953, to a non-German father and a German mother in a gender-discriminating rule.
In 1941, the Nazi regime stripped citizenship from any German Jews living outside its borders, rendering Jewish refugees stateless and stranded. Jews inside the country were stripped of their rights and rendered state subjects.
Before this, many Jews and other victims of Nazi rule had their citizenship stripped of them individually by decree for political or racial reasons.
Enshrining a new rule
The government said the new law was largely symbolic but would set into law a change in rules adopted in 2019.
“This is not just about putting things right, it is about apologizing in profound shame,” said Interior Minister Horst Seehofer.
“It is a huge fortune for our country if people want to become German, despite the fact that we took everything from their ancestors,” he said in a statement.
Interior Ministry spokesman Steve Alter said formalizing the 2019 rule change was a way of strengthening the legal position of beneficiaries and giving them “the value they deserved.”
‘Injustice cannot be undone’
The president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, Josef Schuster, said: “During the Nazi era, countless German Jews were forced to flee or were expatriated. In addition, Jews were fundamentally excluded from acquiring German citizenship due to racist legislation. This injustice cannot be undone. But it is a gesture of decency if they and their descendants are given legal opportunities to regain German citizenship.”
His organization had campaigned for the law, saying that the previous decrees had been inadequate.
Austria changed its rules in 2019, too, allowing the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who fled the Nazis to be renaturalized. It previously only allowed Holocaust survivors themselves to obtain Austrian citizenship.
Certain Quebec politicians and commentators are terribly insulted on the province’s behalf. No need to hold the front page; it’s the same basic melodrama as always.
As is his wont, University of Ottawa professor and Twitter fanatic Amir Attaran has been infuriating people. This time, he tweeted mean things about Quebec: it is “led by a white supremacist government”; it’s “the Alabama of the north”; he accused the hospital employees caught on video verbally torturing Joyce Echaquan, a 37-year-old Atikamekw woman who died in a Lanaudière hospital last year, of carrying out a “medical lynching.”
As is their wont, Quebec nationalists including Premier François Legault and Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon demand satisfaction. “I ask you to condemn publicly Mr. Attaran’s words and apologize to Quebecers,” Plamondon wrote to U of O president and vice-chancellorJacques Frémont. “I also ask you to intervene (to ensure) he stops this behaviour, and to apply proportional sanctions.”
As is its wont, U of O did what a university should not: offered an opinion. “I deplore these kinds of highly polarizing statements made in public forums,” Frémont wrote back to Plamondon.
At least Frémont declined to discipline Attaran. And his response wasn’t all bad: “Freedom of expression, we will agree, is not a buffet where one can pick and choose what kind of speech is deemed acceptable,” he wrote — a fine statement in principle, and in theory quite a good comeback. Quebec nationalists have recently adopted freedom of expression, academic and otherwise, as a major cause, lest (as Legault recently put it) “radical militants” send “censorship spilling out into our political debates and our media.”
In practice, however, Quebec’s notion of academic freedom tends to evaporate precisely at the moment it wounds the collective amour propre. Thus, many in Quebec who deplored the suspension of U of O professor Verushka Lieutenant-Duval for using the N-word in an academic context now want Attaran’s ears boxed. Four years ago, some of the same people successfully demanded Andrew Potter’s departure from McGill’s Institute for the Study of Canada for suggesting a “malaise (was) eating away at … Quebec society.”
Also in practice, Frémont, who was happy to throw Lieutenant-Duval to the wolves (she was later reinstated), is in no position to be making such pronouncements. And it did no good anyway: In a Monday press conference with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the topic of broadband funding, Legault said he was disappointed Frémont hadn’t condemned Attaran more harshly.
If anyone’s behaving a little differently than usual in this rote performance, it’s Trudeau. “Enough of the Quebec-bashing,” he said at the press conference, borrowing a phrase most commonly used by nationalists — including against him and his government.
When it comes to harsh allegations of racism against Canadian institutions , “Quebec bashing” is largely a misnomer. Trudeau knows very well they aren’t only directed at Quebec and Quebecers. In 2017 the co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto called Trudeau “a white supremacist terrorist.” Reactions to Trudeau’s blackface problem were replete with such charges. Among Indigenous activists, the terminology of structural racism is de rigueur. And Trudeau uses it himself.
“There is systemic discrimination in Canada, which means our systems treat Canadians of colour … differently than they do others,” he said last year, responding to protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
The real difference is that Quebec is uniquely sensitive to criticism in general, and bizarrely resistant specifically to the notion that state apparatuses might have discrimination baked into them that can manifest irrespective of any individual actor’s intentions.
“This is yet another example of systemic racism,” Trudeau said of Echaquan’s death at the time.
Legault responded with a perfect circle of logic. “My role as premier … is to bring Quebecers together, to take action … to fight racism,” he said. He didn’t want to “alienate the large number of Quebecers who think there is no systemic racism in Quebec.”
The Liberals have pulled off a neat trick throughout Quebec’s 15-year battle over minority religious rights, which has culminated (for now) in Bill 21, the ban on teachers, Crown attorneys and some other civil servants wearing hijabs and turbans and kippas: They have maintained their “party of the Charter” brand, opposing such restrictions with while not suffering much for it in Quebec.
On the issue of Bill 21, Trudeau hardly covered himself in glory during the 2019 campaign: “I am the only one on the stage who has said ‘yes: a federal government might have to intervene on this’,” he half-heartedly boasted during a leaders’ debate. But it was slightly further than Jagmeet Singh, a Sikh who wears a turban, would go, and much further than stalwart religious-rights defender Andrew Scheer would. The Conservatives lost two seats in Quebec; the NDP lost 15. Trudeau kept his job, with plenty of Quebec MPs behind him.
The Conservatives are accelerating their pitch. Erin O’Toole’s Saturday keynote speech at the Conservatives’ convention reiterated special promises to Quebec: a single tax-return (which it could have now if it just agreed to have Ottawa collect the money) and expanding French language laws into areas of federal jurisdiction, based on no compelling evidence that French (as opposed to unilingualism) is imperilled in Quebec. It’s an unsavoury and quite likely doomed endeavour.
The Liberals’ advantage here is by no means entirely earned: The party’s various Montreal fortresses aren’t impregnable for any especially good reason. But that’s all the more reason for them to stay well away from the sandbox of nationalist grievances. It’s one of the few scraps of principle any federal political party has left.
Useful study. Wonder how it compares in Canada (or at least in the largest provinces):
The U.S. Education Department has released the first in a series of school surveys intended to provide a national view of learning during the pandemic. It reveals that the percentage of students who are still attending school virtually may be higher than previously understood.
As of January and early February of this year, 44% of elementary students and 48% of middle school students in the survey remained fully remote. And the survey found large differences by race: 69% of Asian, 58% of Black and 57% of Hispanic fourth graders were learning entirely remotely, while just 27% of White students were.
Conversely, nearly half of white fourth-graders were learning full-time in person, compared with just 15% of Asian, 28% of Black and 33% of Hispanic fourth-graders. The remainder had hybrid schedules.
This disparity may be partly driven by where students live. City schools, the survey found, are less likely than rural schools to offer full-time, in-person classes. Full-time, in-person schooling dominated in the South and the Midwest, and was much less common in the West and Northeast.
The racial and ethnic gaps may also be driven in part by which families are choosing to stay remote, even where some in-person learning is offered. Three out of 4 districts around the country were offering some in-person learning as of January, the report says, with full-time, in person learning more common than hybrid schedules.
The Education Department created the survey in response to an executive action signed by President Biden on his first full day in office. To obtain results quickly, researchers used the existing infrastructure of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the testing program also known as “The Nation’s Report Card.”
More than a year after schools around the country first switched to virtual learning, this is the first attempt at federal data collection on the progress of school reopening. Although the Trump administration pushed for school reopening, it made no such efforts. “I’m not sure there’s a role at the department to collect and compile that research,” former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said last October.
This survey covers a nationally representative sample of around 7,000 schools, half of which were educating fourth-graders and the other half educating eighth-graders (those being grades included in The Nation’s Report Card testing).
New results will be reported monthly through at least July. The results are intended to provide context for The Nation’s Report Card in 2022, and state tests, which the Biden administration is requiring this year.
The survey is also intended to pinpoint inequities. For example, among the other key findings: More than 4 in 10 districts said they were giving priority to students with disabilities for in-person instruction. Yet in practice, 39% of elementary students with disabilities remained remote, compared with 44% overall. Many families of students with disabilities have said that their children receive limited benefit from virtual learning.
Finally, this pilot survey asked how many hours of live video instruction students were receiving when learning remotely. The majority of schools said they are offering more than three hours per day. But 10% of eighth-graders, and 5% of fourth-graders, are getting no live instruction at all when learning remotely. They may be working on other activities such as homework packets, or software, or watching pre-recorded lessons.
The response rate to this nationally representative survey varied around the country and was lowest in the Northeast. Notably, out of 27 large urban districts targeted in the survey, 16 declined to participate.
Previously, NPR has been citing school reopening data provided by an organization called Burbio. Burbio scrapes school district websites to find out whether school is being offered hybrid, full-time or all-virtual. Their data set — 1,200 school districts representing 35,000 schools and nearly half of the U.S. school population, is larger than that covered in this federal survey.
