Appeals Court Rules Harvard Doesn’t Discriminate Against Asian American Applicants

2020/11/14 Leave a comment

Of note (will be appealed to SCOTUS where, given Trump appointments, may be overturned):

A federal appeals court in Boston has ruled Harvard doesn’t intentionally discriminate against Asian American applicants in its admissions process.

The panel of judges upheld a federal district court’s decision from last year, teeing up a possible case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Circuit Judge Sandra Lynch, who wrote Thursday’s decision, agreed with the lower court that “the statistical evidence did not show that Harvard intentionally discriminated against Asian Americans.”

Students for Fair Admissions, an advocacy group, first filed its lawsuit in 2014, saying that Harvard’s race-based considerations for applicants discriminated against Asian American students in process.

“Today’s decision once again finds that Harvard’s admissions policies are consistent with Supreme Court precedent, and lawfully and appropriately pursue Harvard’s efforts to create a diverse campus that promotes learning and encourages mutual respect and understanding in our community,” a spokeswoman for Harvard told NPR.”As we have said time and time again, now is not the time to turn back the clock on diversity and opportunity.”

Proponents of ending race-based considerations at U.S. universities were unfazed by Thursday’s decision and plan to bring the case to the Supreme Court, according to Edward Blum, the conservative strategist behind SFFA.

Blum said in a statement to NPR member station GBH that he plans to ask the Supreme Court to end the consideration of race in admissions at Harvard and all other universities.

The question of how much race should be a factor in college applicants is a hotly contested one. President Trump’s administration has challenged colleges on using race in admissions policies, claiming such practices violate federal law. Last month, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Yale University, saying its policies violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yale has said the lawsuit is “baseless.”

Wen Fa, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in the Harvard case, said Asian Americans are harmed by the school’s admissions rules.

“The Supreme Court’s intervention is needed so that universities comport with” federal law, Fa said.

Stella Flores, an associate professor of higher education at New York University, said she hopes the court will rely on decades of research and data that show the benefits of such policies. Race is but one factor within the broad and “holistic admissions policy” at Harvard and other schools, she said.

Flores and Fa say the new conservative majority of the Supreme Court makes predicting whether the justices will take up the case difficult.

The court has previously decided on similar questions. It upheld race-based admissions policies in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, as well as the 2013 and 2016 Fisher v. Univ. of Texas at Austin decisions.

In Grutter, the justices were asked to determine whether the University of Michigan Law School’s use of racial preferences in student admissions violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment or Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In the 5-4 Grutter opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said race-based admissions policies should be for a limited time only, Fa said.

That phrasing may be enough for the current court to take up the case, he said.

Source: Appeals Court Rules Harvard Doesn’t Discriminate Against Asian American Applicants

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‘A fight for the soul of the city’: Report shows how COVID-19 has deepened Toronto’s racial and economic divide

2020/11/14 Leave a comment

No real surprise as it confirms other reports and analysis, both in Toronto and elsewhere. Nevertheless, extremely disturbing:

Higher COVID-19 infection rates. Higher unemployment. Deepening poverty.

Racialized and lower-income Torontonians are bearing a heavier burden during the coronavirus pandemic, which is widening the gap between rich and poor in this city.

That’s the grim conclusion delivered by the Toronto Fallout Report, which provides a snapshot of where Torontonians stand in the midst of the pandemic.

Released Thursday by the Toronto Foundation — which also produces the annual Vital Signs report — this latest report offers an interim look at how the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing inequality in the city.

Among the report’s findings:

  • People earning less than $30,000 a year are 5.3 times as likely to catch COVID-19 than those making $150,000 or more.
  • Black, Latin American and Arab, Middle Eastern or West Asian Torontonians have COVID-19 infection rates at least seven times as high as white residents.
  • About 30 per cent of Torontonians are struggling to pay rent, mortgage, food, utilities and other essentials.
  • Across the country, Canadians who are Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) have unemployment rates almost twice as high as white Canadians. Nearly one-third of BIPOC youth are unemployed, compared to 18 per cent of white youth.

The report shows just how much of a “crisis moment” this is for Toronto, said Mohini Datta-Ray, the executive director of the North York Women’s Shelter and one of the dozens of non-profit leaders who were consulted for the report.

“The consensus is really, really loud and clear that this is a fight for the soul of the city, for who we are as a city.”

The pandemic didn’t create this inequality, she said, but it has magnified it and exploded it into view.

“We’ve all been ringing the alarm bells for years, decades really,” Datta-Ray said. “There’s been a worsening over time and any of us that are working with vulnerable, marginalized, low-income families know how desperate these times have already been.”

The report looks at a broad range of issues, from income and employment, to food security and housing, and what comes up again and again is the widening gulf between rich and poor, and how that divide is increasingly occurring along racialized lines.

“When I looked through the report, for me it really highlighted how deeply embedded racism and white supremacy are in just about all of our systems and institutions,” said Paul Taylor, executive director of FoodShare Toronto, which has dramatically increased its services in response to rising food insecurity during the pandemic.

“It seems like communities that are made up predominantly of white folks have had a very different experience of the pandemic.”

In Toronto, racialized people make up 52 per cent of the population, but currently account for 79 per cent of the COVID-19 infections. The highest infection rates in the city are concentrated in the neighbourhoods with the most racialized people.

It’s in those neighbourhoods where people are often living in crowded housing, Taylor said, and where people are more likely to have to take public transit to low-wage jobs without adequate sick days, PPE or the opportunity to physically distance.

“We really have to ask ourselves what allows us to chronically underinvest in the communities where there are higher incidences of COVID infections,” Taylor said.

Datta-Ray, who lives in a relatively affluent downtown neighbourhood and works in the hard-hit northwest corner of the city, has seen first hand the city’s divergent pandemic experiences.

Where she lives, the pandemic has been novel, almost festive, she said. “You wouldn’t even know that the virus is around.”

But in the city’s northwest, where infection rates are 10 times as high, most people aren’t able to work from home and public transit is crowded. “Those neighbourhoods feel the city in crisis.”

Neethan Shan, executive director of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations, said governments need to put racial equity at the heart of any pandemic recovery plan.

“Universal programs aren’t going to be enough,” he said. “If you’re serious about racial equity you have to start looking at it.”

If you target the most vulnerable and most affected communities, he said, everyone will benefit.

“But if you just keep continuing with universal programs that are in some ways colour-blind, we’re not going to see the solutions that we need.”

Liben Gebremikael, executive director of the TAIBU Community Health Centre in Scarborough, said attention on Black communities is often driven by high-profile news events — such as the so-called “Summer of the Gun” in 2005 — which leads to cyclical but unsustained investment.

“We can’t really do systemic change with cyclical investment,” he said. “We have to have a long-term strategy, from the city, the province and the federal government, on how to address these injustices and inequities that are mostly impacting Indigenous and Black communities.”

Gebremikael said he’s hopeful the inequities laid bare by COVID-19 will garner enough attention for more substantial, long-term investment. He cited the provincial government agreeing to collect race-based data during the pandemic — after their initial reluctance — as an example of a step in the right direction.

“If we have evidence then we can really advocate for the resources and the policies and the strategies we need.”

Source: ‘A fight for the soul of the city’: Report shows how COVID-19 has deepened Toronto’s racial and economic divide

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Canada’s Federal Anti-Racism Strategy: An Overview

2020/11/14 Leave a comment

Good useful history, overview and reference document (I was involved in the evaluation of the first action plan, which was more virtue signalling than substantive, apart from police-reported hate crimes statistics):

In many countries around the globe, including Canada, recent movements to recognize and address racial injustices and discrimination have led to increased examination of government efforts to combat racism. This HillNote provides an overview of the federal government’s anti-racism strategy and some anti-racism efforts by other levels of government in Canada.

Canada’s First Federal Anti-Racism Action Plan

In 2005, the federal government established the first coordinated federal approach to combat racism in Canada, entitled Canada’s Action Plan Against Racism (2005-2010). This five-year plan was led by the Department of Canadian Heritage.

In 2010, the Evaluation of Canada’s Action Plan Against Racism identified limitations in the plan’s design and delivery and found challenges in measuring the plan’s overall impact. While some anti-racism initiatives continued at the federal level, the federal government did not renew or replace the action plan until 2019.

The Creation of Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy 2019-2022

In June 2017, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage(committee) launched a study of systemic racism and religious discrimination in Canada. Three of the 30 recommendations in the committee’s report tabled in February 2018 concerned Canada’s Action Plan Against Racism and called on the Government of Canada to:

(1) update and reinstate the previous Canadian Action Plan Against Racism and broaden it to include religious discrimination;

(2) create a directorate at the Department of Canadian Heritage which will develop, implement and monitor this National Action Plan; and

(3) have measurable targets, deadlines and reporting mechanisms in the Plan, dedicate resources to the Plan, and implement adequate monitoring.

In its response to the committee report, the Government of Canada agreed that it “needs to take an active role in addressing systemic racism and religious discrimination” and described recent efforts and plans to do so, including “support for community engagement on a new anti-racism approach that reflects the need to update [Canada’sAction Plan Against Racism].”

From October 2018 to March 2019, the Government of Canada consulted Canadians, especially those with lived experiences of racism and discrimination, to gather input to inform the development of a new anti-racism strategy. The input is summarized in the Department of Canadian Heritage’s What we heard — Informing Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy.

An Overview of Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy 2019-2022

Canada’s federal anti-racism strategy, Building a Foundation for Change: Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy 2019-2022, was launched in June 2019.

The strategy acknowledges the need for the Government of Canada to combat “racism and discrimination that is anti-Indigenous, Islamophobic, antisemitic, anti-Black, or homophobic.” The strategy identifies key terms, including:

  • Racism: any individual action, or institutional practice which treats people differently because of their colour or ethnicity. This distinction is often used to justify discrimination.
  • Systemic or institutional racism: consists of patterns of behaviour, policies or practices that are part of the social or administrative structures of an organization, and which create or perpetuate a position of relative disadvantage for racialized persons. These appear neutral on the surface but, nevertheless, have an exclusionary impact on racialized persons.

The strategy contains the following new investments:

  • $4.6 million to establish a new Anti-Racism Secretariat within the Department of Canadian Heritage, to lead a whole-of-government approach to address racism.
  • $30 million for community-based projects, in the form of a newly launched Anti-Racism Action Program. The program funds local, regional and national initiatives that address barriers to employment, social participation and justice for Indigenous peoples, racialized communities and religious minority communities. The Anti-Racism Action Program also has community-led digital and civic literacy programming to address online disinformation and hate.
  • $0.9 million to support Public Safety Canada’s efforts to develop a national framework and evidence-based guidelines to better respond to hate crimes, hate incidents and hate speech.
  • $3.3 million for a national public education and awareness campaign that aims to increase public awareness and understanding across Canada of the historical roots of racism and its impacts on Indigenous peoples, racialized communities and religious minority communities.
  • $6.2 million to increase “reliable, usable and comparable data and evidence regarding racism and discrimination,” including support for Statistics Canada and its Centre for Gender, Diversity and Inclusion Statistics.
  • Additional funding to be provided to the Community Support, Multiculturalism and Anti-Racism Initiatives Program.

The results of the strategy are to be reported “to Canadians on a yearly basis.” No report has been released as of 10 November 2020.

In October 2020, the Government of Canada announced more details about Anti-Racism Action Program funding.

Some civil society organizations have spoken in favour of elements of the strategy. For example, the National Council of Canadian Muslims expressed support for the strategy’s commitment to fund efforts to combat online hate in June 2019, but also suggested that other elements of the strategy need ongoing work informed by consultations. In October 2020 the organization published an open letter to the Prime Minister, co-signed by 25 community, human rights and other non-governmental organizations, calling for the federal government “to establish a national action plan on dismantling white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups that threaten Canadians who are Black, Indigenous, Jewish, Muslim, or Sikh, amongst other communities.”

Other organizations have criticized what they see as a lack of tangible targets in the strategy. For instance, Colour of Poverty-Colour of Change, a network of community organizations, said the strategy “while highlighting $45 million of various existing, redirected, and new federal funding under the banner of anti-racism, fails to specifically outline [its] concrete timelines, actions, and goals.”

The Speech from the Throne delivered on 23 September 2020 pledged to “redouble” the Government of Canada’s efforts to address systemic racism through a variety of new measures.

Recent Anti-Racism Activities at the Parliamentary Level

Recent parliamentary initiatives to address racism include:

  • On 16 June 2020, the Parliamentary Black Caucus published a statement calling for Canadian governments to take specific anti-racist actions.
  • On 18 June 2020, the Senate of Canada held an emergency debate on racism.
  • On 23 June 2020, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security launched a study of Systemic Racism in Policing in Canada.
  • On 25 June 2020, the Senate of Canada was resolved into a Committee of the Wholeto discuss the federal government’s role in combatting racism.
Anti-Racism Strategies and Efforts at Other Levels of Government in Canada

Several provincial governments have developed anti-racism strategies, projects and other actions. For example:

At the local level, some municipalities have their own anti-racism initiatives. For instance:

Additional Resources:

Department of Canadian Heritage, Anti-Racism Resources.

Robyn Maynard, Policing Black lives: state violence in Canada from slavery to the present, Fernwood Publishing: Halifax, 2017.

University of Waterloo, Anti-Racism Resources.

United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism.

United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Report of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent on its mission to Canada, 16 August 2017.

Authors: Laura Munn-Rivard and Laura Hatt, Library of Parliament

#anti-racism-strategy, #discrimination, #equality, #human-rights, #systemic-racism

Source: https://hillnotes.ca/2020/11/13/canadas-federal-anti-racism-strategy-an-overview/

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The Census Is Not Over: What’s Ahead During The Biden Transition

2020/11/13 Leave a comment

To watch:

Counting has ended, but the 2020 census is not over yet — and it’s likely to get tangled in the fraught transition to President-elect Joe Biden’s administration.

Some major final steps for this year’s national head count are set to take place while President Trump is still in office. That includes the release of the first set of results, legally due by Dec. 31, that are used to reapportion congressional seats among states and reset the Electoral College map for the next decade. Under federal law, the president is required by Jan. 10 to hand off those numbers to Congress for certification.

And the census continues to be mired in legal fights over the Trump administration’s push to alter the apportionment numbers, as well as last-minute decisions to shorten the schedule for the constitutionally mandated count of every person living in the United States. A federal judge in California, plus Census Bureau employees themselves, said those changes risked serious data inaccuracies.

Once in office, the Biden administration is poised to start shaping the 2030 count and could reverse some of the Trump administration’s census-related moves. Perhaps most notably, Biden could stop the bureau from producing citizenship data the Trump administration requested that could be used to radically change state-level redistricting in a way that a prominent Republican strategist concluded would benefit Republicans and non-Hispanic white people.

“It’s probably no secret that the census is not top of mind for every administration on an ongoing basis,” says Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former staff director of the House Oversight subcommittee for the census who advised the Obama-Biden transition team in 2008. “But this time is really different because this census faced unprecedented challenges and then disruptions.”

In a statement to NPR before the election, Jamal Brown, the Biden campaign’s national press secretary, said that Biden “knows the critical importance of the census and how it touches every aspect of American life, from federal investments around health care, housing, and education, to how states redistrict and draw their congressional boundaries.”

Among the members of Biden’s transition agency review team for the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, are two census watchers who have been calling for more transparency as the bureau prepares to release the 2020 census results. They include Nancy Potok — who, during the Obama administration, served as a deputy director at the bureau and was later appointed to be the chief statistician within the White House Office of Management and Budget — and Denice Ross, a senior fellow with the National Conference on Citizenship who worked on data projects and policy in the Obama administration as a presidential innovation fellow and an adviser at OMB.

But before Biden officials can make any changes, there are some key questions about the census for the courts and Congress to answer in the final weeks of the Trump administration.

Can Trump change who is counted in numbers that determine House seats and the next Electoral College map?

The Supreme Court is expected to weigh in with its answer to that question after hearing oral arguments on Nov. 30.

So far, three lower courts have rejected the presidential memo Trump issued in July that calls for an unprecedented change — the exclusion of unauthorized immigrants from the census numbers used for determining each state’s share of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives, as well as each state’s Electoral College votes.

All of those three-judge panels unanimously found that carrying out the memo would violate a federal law requiring the president to deliver a report to Congress of “the whole number of persons in each State” as determined by the census. One of those panels also ruled that it would go against the 14th Amendment.

The Trump administration has been pushing the high court to rule before Dec. 31. That’s the legal deadline for the commerce secretary, who oversees the bureau, to give the president the first set of census results, which Trump wants to alter.

But it remains unclear, given all of the schedule changes the Trump administration has made, whether the Census Bureau can meet the Dec. 31 deadline and how that would affect the president’s ability to report numbers to Congress by Jan. 10. Any delays that push key steps in the congressional reapportionment process past the Jan. 20 inauguration could strip Trump of control over the count.

Last month, the bureau’s top career official in charge of the census, Al Fontenot, said the agency hasn’t committed to when it will wrap up processing and checking all of the information it has collected.

“We are trying to maintain the flexibility to get the job done in a quality way,” Fontenot said during a news briefing.

Justice Department attorneys say the administration hasn’t finalized how to accurately count unauthorized immigrants, aside from those in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, in order to exclude them from the apportionment numbers.

In July, Biden condemned Trump’s memo in a tweet, writing: “We won’t let him deny communities the funding and representation they deserve. Because in America, everyone counts.”

But Brown, the Biden campaign spokesperson, has not responded to NPR’s question about what the Biden administration would do if, before leaving office, Trump attempted to remove unauthorized immigrants from the apportionment numbers before giving them to Congress.

If Trump did that, it is also unclear whether the clerk of the House, which will remain under Democratic control, would certify those numbers.

Will Congress extend legal deadlines for reporting census results to allow for more quality checks?

That question has been hanging over the census since April, when the Trump administration first proposed four-month extensions to the legal deadlines for reporting the apportionment counts and redistricting data, which are due to the states by March 31.

Publicly backed at the time by Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, career officials at the bureau said that because of delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic, they needed more time to tally the country’s residents and run quality checks on the results.

But the administration made an about-face in July and began pushing to end counting early, sticking with the original reporting schedule. The Supreme Court ultimately allowed the administration to cut counting short, leaving open the possibility for Trump to control the apportionment numbers even without winning reelection.

Faced with a shortened window for counting in their states, some Republican lawmakers in Congress began publicly supporting the Democratic-led push for deadline extensions.

But now that counting has stopped, it’s unclear if there’s enough bipartisan support for deadline extensions to be passed.

The bureau has already scaled back some quality checks, risking “serious errors,” career officials warned, that they may not have time to fix.

Some census advocates — including Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights — are calling for Congress to pass deadline extensions during the lame-duck session to help ensure that the bureau has enough time to address any major errors it finds in the census results before they’re used to reapportion House seats.

“I think waiting until a new administration and new Congress to act would be too late for the census,” Gupta, a former Obama administration official, says. “A new administration and new Congress really would be in uncharted territory that would take time to navigate, conceivably creating a constitutional crisis that could be avoided if Congress gives the Census Bureau the time that it needs and the time that it asked for.”

Source: The Census Is Not Over: What’s Ahead During The Biden Transition

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Delacourt: Canada’s federal leaders will defend your right to wear a poppy, Just don’t ask them to stick up for your freedom of religion

2020/11/13 Leave a comment

Nails the virtue signalling and hypocrisy:

The great furor over the poppy ban at Whole Foods lasted less than one news cycle last week, thanks to the full-throated outrage from political leaders all over Canada.

Imagine how long Quebec’s secularism bill — which bans a lot more than poppy-wearing — would have lasted with similar shock and condemnation from those same politicians.

Sanctimony is never in short supply in the realm of politics, but we seem to have entered the season for freedom-of-expression lectures in Canada.

Politicians have waded into the frays over saying the N-word in the classroom, wearing poppies in upscale supermarkets and the publication of religiously offensive cartoons in France. There’s no end of courage — almost no end — when it comes to standing up for the right to make a statement.

Bloc Québécois Leader Yves François Blanchet has been the most strident, but by no means has he been the only one. Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole has put out videos proclaiming himself as a free-speech champion in the face of what he sees as worrying ambivalence by Justin Trudeau after acts of terrorism in France.

Funny, though, not one of them rushed to the podium over the stories being told in a Quebec court last week about the lives ruined by Bill 21’s limits on the rights of religious expression. Several constitutional challenges have been launched against that legislation, which bans the wearing of religious symbols in public, and one is now underway.

Even though it’s freedom-of-expression season in federal politics, not one party leader — not Blanchet, not O’Toole, not Trudeau or NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh — has offered comment on the tales being told in the Bill 21 trial. There have been stories of teachers having to choose between their careers and their religion, and Muslims being targets of hate and bigotry because of the law. And from the selective free-speech champions in Ottawa? Silence.

Trudeau and Singh have said they don’t like Bill 21, but they’re going to let the courts do what they do. O’Toole has said the law is “difficult,” but he’s not touching it because he doesn’t think it’s any of the federal government’s business — unlike poppies in supermarkets or acts of violence in Europe.

Blanchet has said he supports Bill 21 because it has majority support in Quebec, even though allowing minority rights to be settled by majority opinion has always been a sketchy kind of argument when it comes to constitutional matters. Where do we get that idea? Oh yes, from Quebec.

To its credit, Whole Foods didn’t try that one with its poppy ban, though it’s kind of fun to imagine how over-the-top the political outrage would have been if the Amazon-owned outlet had said, “Most people who work for us don’t want to wear poppies.”

Let’s face it, though, it was pretty easy to be mad at Whole Foods. No one in politics wants to be associated with billion-dollar companies, tech giants or overpriced food these days, so it was simply a matter of hearing about the poppy ban and pressing “play” on the outrage tape.

It’s a little harder, apparently, to work up the nerve to say that Bill 21 is a flagrant slap in the face of freedom of expression and, worse yet, that it is inflicting real, not symbolic damage on real citizens.

It’s politics, naturally. No one wants to get on the wrong side of that majority opinion in Quebec, or worse, get accused of trying to interfere with provinces’ rights to make their own laws. We may be enthusiastic rights champions in Canada, but we are also very polite about poking our noses into constitutional-jurisdiction matters. See O’Toole’s arguments, above.

As for why politicians are suddenly falling over each other to climb aboard the freedom-of-expression these days, there may be an easy explanation: It’s the pandemic, and especially this second wave of COVID-19, which is proving to be a real freedom-wrecker.

People are angry, frustrated and fatigued with limits on their lives. The addition of one more constraint, even if it extends to their speech alone, gives the public and politicians a way to vent a little emotion about how unfree we’re all feeling behind our masks and closed doors.

But the sanctimony of the free-speech champions at the podium in Ottawa is a little hard to take while Bill 21 is sitting on the books as a stain on Charter rights in Canada.

These staunch champions of rights are of course free to proclaim they believe in freedom of expression day after day at their political pulpits. But we should feel free to take note of what freedoms — and whose freedoms — they are also failing to defend.

Source: Canada’s federal leaders will defend your right to wear a poppy, Just don’t ask them to stick up for your freedom of religion

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Regg-Cohn: Surprised that some Black people and Latinos voted for Trump? Try looking at them as individuals

2020/11/13 Leave a comment

Good commentary on the diversity within groups:

In other news, it turns out that more Blacks, Latinos and gays turned out for Donald Trump this time than last time.

Why is that news? The only surprise is that anyone is surprised.

That certain groups are presumed to vote in their supposed self-interest — as determined by other groups who know better what’s best for them — is not merely presumptuous. It’s profiling.

Today, some of the same social critics who warn against stereotyping Blacks or Latinos are now scratching their heads about why they didn’t vote as expected in the U.S. presidential election. Profiling can be perilous.

Today, some of the same social critics who warn against stereotyping Blacks or Latinos are now scratching their heads about why they didn’t vote as expected in the U.S. presidential election. Profiling can be perilous.

It is a human impulse. But impossibly dehumanizing at times.

Profiling seeks out similarities, but it is pointless if we forget individual differences. It relies on the notion that people of similar backgrounds or aspirations hold similar beliefs, live in similar neighbourhoods, and so on.

Profiling seeks out similarities, but it is pointless if we forget individual differences. It relies on the notion that people of similar backgrounds or aspirations hold similar beliefs, live in similar neighbourhoods, and so on.

The biggest problems with profiling are the premises and definitions that underlie it. That more Latinos voted for Trump this time tells us little of interest, because it’s such an imprecise term (and is overshadowed by the overpowering reality that whites voted massively and decisively for him).

Latinos range from anti-Communist arch-capitalists in Miami’s Cuban émigré community to impoverished Honduran refugees fleeing drug wars via Mexico, to second-generation strivers in Texas or Arizona aspiring to join the ruling Republican establishment. Ethnic is not monolithic.

Just as LGBTQ voters can be Republican or Democrat, Latinos are more different than they are alike.

Profiling is a tool and a template. It is a form of demography and part of democracy, for better or for worst — which is why pollsters, political operatives and party fundraisers mine the data to harvest votes and donations at election time.

They’re just more sophisticated than the rest of us in slicing and dicing the fruit salad. They know that skin colour is only skin deep, so they drill down for other demographic details such as education, income, location.

That’s why postal codes are the preferred proxies for pollsters. Yet zeitgeist and zip codes are rarely congruent.

My own education in demographic divisions came when I was posted to the Toronto Star’s Middle East bureau years ago. Despite my background as a political reporter, I only realized as a foreign correspondent how many ways Israelis could be subdivided.

Not merely as hawks versus doves, but ethnic Ashkenazi versus Sephardi; secular Russian immigrants versus ultra-Orthodox Haredi; socialist kibbutzniks versus modern Orthodox Jewish settlers; urban versus suburban; Muslim and Christian Arab citizens versus Jewish citizens; and last but not least, left versus right. The miracle was how quickly those internecine divisions melted away when Israelis faced an external enemy and existential threat; and how quickly the internal tensions returned (Palestinians, too, fought their own civil war in Gaza between Islamist Hamas rejectionists and secular Yasser Arafat loyalists).

The security services typecast people as safe or threatening based not only on background but back story and behaviour — whether at airport check-ins, military checkpoints or political rallies. Which is why Yitzhak Rabin’s security guards let down their guard when a kippah-wearing orthodox Jew chatted them up before assassinating the prime minister — he didn’t fit their Palestinian profile of a clear and present danger.

Stephen Harper’s Tories made inroads in the GTA suburbs by appealing to the traditional values of many immigrant communities that converged with conservatism. His then-minister of multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, once sat me down to demonstrate his mastery of Chinese Canadian demographics — delineating early anti-Communist immigrants from Taiwan, subsequent waves of Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong dual citizens, and more recent (more apolitical) arrivals from mainland China.

The New Democratic Party — founded as an alliance between the co-operative agricultural movement and the labour movement — long ago learned the working class would not reflexively rally to their side. If workers are reluctant to recognize their own enlightened self-interest — rallying to Doug Ford’s Tories even when they campaigned on cancelling a minimum wage hike and then freezing it for years — why are progressives perplexed when Blacks or Latinos warm up to Trump?

Vote-determining issues are more likely to be economic than ethnic, and political preferences are often more idiosyncratic than ideological. That’s only human.

The point is that profiling tells you everything and nothing about people. Just as postal codes are imprecise — people are unpredictable.

Political parties bank on profiling because there’s much to gain from voters and donors, and little to lose from mass mailings or email blasting that misses the mark. The minimal cost of bulk postage and mass spamming is a mere rounding error.

The point is that profiling tells you everything and nothing about people. Just as postal codes are imprecise — people are unpredictable.

Political parties bank on profiling because there’s much to gain from voters and donors, and little to lose from mass mailings or email blasting that misses the mark. The minimal cost of bulk postage and mass spamming is a mere rounding error.

The rest of us can’t afford to be so reckless with our wild guesses, unproven hunches and dehumanizing assumptions. If the penalty of your profiling is an assassin’s bullet, or an airplane bombing, or a human rights humiliation, then the miscalculation yields an incalculable cost.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2020/11/11/surprised-that-blacks-and-latinos-voted-for-donald-trump-try-looking-at-them-as-individuals.html

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New documentary tells the story of Ukrainians’ role in Canada’s war effort

2020/11/12 Leave a comment

As one of my multiculturalism files was historical recognition of communities that were either subject to immigration restrictions or wartime internment, found this documentary of interest:

The late Ukrainian Canadian poet Michael Gowda, who in 1907 enlisted in the Canadian Home Guard and sought to create a Ukrainian regiment to serve the British army, once wrote a series of verses addressed directly to his new homeland.

Written from the perspective of an immigrant allowed to live in Canada primarily to colonize the prairie, as 170,000 Ukrainians did between 1891 and 1914, “To Canada” describes these new Canadians as in some sense merely “holders of thy soil.” To be recognized as fully Canadians, their people would have to fight and even die for Canada. It would take a blood sacrifice for their children to one day be “free to call thee theirs,” as the poem reads.

It is an outmoded vision of Canadian citizenship but no less powerful for the cultural change that has occurred since then, as Ukrainian-Canadians established themselves in Canada over many generations, with veterans of every war Canada has fought.

Award-winning Winnipeg filmmaker John Paskievich said this poem “proved prophetic.” The sacrifice was real, and the sense of belonging was finally ensured.

His new documentary, A Canadian War Story, describes Ukrainian Canadians’ contribution to Canada’s war efforts. Working for the Ukrainian Canadian Research & Documentation Centre, he and other researchers tracked down details of veterans in Legion Halls and various archives, and gave voice to old correspondences.

As a story of racist exclusion giving way to acceptance, the film also offers a chance to reflect on the ethnic diversity of military service, especially from an ethnicity of Canadians who, like Japanese Canadians, were once persecuted as enemy aliens, even interned in work camps.

For Ukrainian Canadians in the late 19th and early 20th century, many of whom immigrated with the promise of title to a quarter section if they could farm it, resentment and suspicion were the norm. The film quotes then Prime Minister Mackenzie Bowell referring to the consternation felt by established Canadians as trainloads passed through Ontario on their way west, filled with “disgusting creatures… being bearing human form” but having “sunk to such a bestial level.”

That was the climate in which Gowda tried to create a Ukrainian Canadian regiment as the threat of war grew in Europe. Canada was not interested. On the contrary, Ukrainians were suspected of sympathy for the enemy Austro-Hungarian empire, whence they came. Those who were not naturalized were forced to register as enemy aliens. Others were disenfranchised, and some were interned in forced labour camps.

There were exceptions, and the film describes how Filip Konowal, a Ukrainian Canadian from the allied Russian empire, became the only Eastern European born person to win the Victoria Cross, for “most conspicuous bravery and leadership when in charge of a section in attack.”

The second wave of Ukrainian immigration in the 1920s was similarly met with broad racism and exclusion. By the end of the 1930s, the reasons for enlisting were similar to other Canadians — patriotism, duty, excitement, lack of other work — but with that added cultural sense that Gowda’s blood sacrifice had not yet been paid.

The film quotes veterans such as Joseph Romanow of Saskatoon, who described an awareness that Ukrainian Canadians mustn’t be seen as second-rate citizens, and one way to do that was to fight for their country.

John Yuzyk of Rhein, Sask., said the economic climate was also so bad that “guys joined up because it paid and you could get three square meals a day.”

Ann Crapleve of Ladywood, Man., who would later participate in reconstruction efforts after the war, said: “I was a Canadian and wanted to do my bit for the country.”

The film ends with a description of Ukrainian Canadians assisting in this effort to rebuild Europe, and sometimes finding Ukrainians in camps for displaced persons, and facilitating their immigration to Canada rather than repatriation to the Soviet Union.

Source: New documentary tells the story of Ukrainians’ role in Canada’s war effort

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How A Minneapolis Clinic Is Narrowing Racial Gaps In Health

2020/11/12 Leave a comment

Of interest:

North Minneapolis, one of the most racially diverse neighborhoods in Minnesota, was already dealing with high coronavirus infection and death rates when George Floyd was killed by police outside a corner store just 3 miles away.

His death on May 25 sparked deeper conversations all across the U.S. about the ways racial inequality plays out, including when it comes to health. Nationally, Black people are at least twice as likely to die from heart disease, from COVID-19 or in childbirth, compared with white people, and north Minneapolis mirrors those trends. Nearly two-thirds of Latinos in the area who get tested for the coronavirus test positive — that’s a rate nearly 10 times higher than the state’s rate overall.

“We were not surprised, because we serve a community that has health disparities,” says Stella Whitney-West, CEO of NorthPoint Health & Wellness Center, a community health and dental clinic and social services agency located in the heart of north Minneapolis.

Stella Whitney-West has been CEO of NorthPoint Health & Wellness Center for the last 16 years. “Our staff is reflective of our community that we serve,” she says.

But NorthPoint also has a five-decade history of addressing public health through the lens of race. It was founded with a mission to increase access to health care and social services in a community that today is 90% Black, Latino or Asian.

Central to its approach is tackling the social problems that contribute to illness — in order to better prevent and treat disease. Over the years, the center has made strides in public health: increasing the rates for child vaccinations and screenings for things like cancer, depression and dental care needs.

Of course the coronavirus pandemic has also added weight to many existing social burdens that contribute to poor health: loss of employment and insurance, poverty and food scarcity, stress and anxiety. Whitney-West says the racial strife layered on top of that also feels like a step backward.

“It’s been hard — not only for the community but patients, clients and our staff,” says Whitney-West. “Our staff is reflective of our community that we serve. Civil unrest — the riots in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death — brings us back to the history of how NorthPoint was started.”

The NorthPoint center began during a time eerily reminiscent of today.

NorthPoint is located at a corner of Plymouth Avenue that burned down during protests and rioting in 1967, when long-standing grievances in the Black community over lack of access to adequate housing, education and health care turned violent.

“I was 10 years old at the time, but it was very traumatizing to see all these Black people getting beat up by police and the fires right on our block,” says Gary Cunningham, who lived on Plymouth Avenue and watched it burn that night.

Inadequate access to medical care was a major issue that shaped life for Cunningham and his neighbors.

“There was an issue with ambulance service,” Cunningham says. “The ambulance wouldn’t serve the Black community there,” so he and his mother would take the bus across town when they needed care. “Most Blacks went to Dr. Brown — his office would be like 200 people in the waiting room because he was one of the few Black physicians.”

The federal government tried to increase access to health care for minorities. Among other efforts, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty established pilot programs in 14 cities to offer health and social services.

North Minneapolis got one of those programs. Months after the 1967 riots, Pilot City — which later became NorthPoint — opened in an old synagogue on Plymouth Avenue.

“I just remember it being a place where community gathered. The health center and social service center at that time were one place,” Cunningham recalls.

Nearly four decades later, Cunningham took over as the clinic’s CEO.

By then, Pilot City had fallen into disarray — its public image was that of an impoverished clinic of last resort. By 2002, when Cunningham took over, he says, it was running a $2 million annual deficit, and few patients were getting regular vaccinations or mammogram screenings.

So Cunningham refocused on Pilot City’s original mission: to increase access to health care by also identifying and enhancing social services to support that goal.

Cunningham’s team developed some innovative solutions to bring more patients in, including providing bus tokens to patients who couldn’t otherwise afford transportation. NorthPoint’s new approach reached a growing Somali and Hmong population in the area through hosting lunch events with religious leaders and featuring food from those communities. Over the last 15 years, vaccination and health screening rates more than doubled, to close to 80%.

That has meant more prevention of disease and lower costs for treatment and care.

Diabetes, lead poisoning and depression are also big problems in the community. So NorthPoint lobbied local agencies to get lead paint safely removed from homes. The center stocks a free-food shelf with healthy, culturally relevant food. All patients — regardless of what health problem they come in for — are now automatically screened for depression and dental care needs and are told to bring their family members in as well.

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NorthPoint’s founding mission was to increase access to health care and social services. Over the years, this approach helped the clinic increase the neighborhood’s rates of child vaccinations and screenings for things like cancer, depression and dental care needs.

These measures have increased NorthPoint’s reach into a diverse community — something many other medical centers facing similar dynamics are struggling with today.

Rashida Jackson first came to NorthPoint as a patient in childhood, and is now community board member. The clinic, she says, is a beloved part of the community.

As a child, Rashida Jackson, 52, came to NorthPoint for health care, and now her mother, children and all her grandchildren see their doctors there.

Jackson is now on NorthPoint’s board of directors, which draws a majority of its seats from patients like her, who are members of the community.

“This is one of those powerful institutions that developed out of a lot of civil unrest and pain,” says Jackson, “and it’s a thing of pride to see this small community health clinic explode and grow. Whatever social service support you need, they have.”

That’s why the center is so beloved by the community, she says: “We own it, it’s family — it’s almost a living, walking, breathing thing.”

And today, NorthPoint is once again being held up as a model.

This past summer, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, Minneapolis and the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners declared racism a public health crisis.

Irene Fernando, one of the co-authors of the county’s declaration, says just as NorthPoint has done in the health realm, the county wants other government agencies to rethink policy — by looking at how race affects outcomes in education, employment and criminal justice.

“NorthPoint listens to the community,” says Fernando, who also serves on NorthPoint’s board. “Earlier than other entities, NorthPoint was reporting on race; earlier than other entities, NorthPoint was willing to do free testing for COVID.” So thinking about improving access to health care “is in how NorthPoint operates,” she says.

One reason its approach differs from those of other health centers is that it is a community health clinic, not a hospital, says Ed Ehlinger, former Minnesota health commissioner, who has written about racism in health.

That means, he says, its mandate is to improve public health in the community; it’s not under the same commercial pressures many private hospitals are up against.

Ehlinger compares NorthPoint to medical centers in countries that have universal public health care. “They focus on community-oriented primary care and have much better outcomes and lower health care costs,” he says. “So even though there aren’t as many of those neighborhood health centers left, I see them as the model that we should look to replicate, in moving forward.”

At a time when few patients trust their health care providers, NorthPoint has bucked that trend.

LaVonne Moore, a midwife and lactation consultant with the center, says that’s in part because NorthPoint recruits its leaders and doctors from the community it serves.

Moore, who lives nearby, says that interconnection between residents and staff fosters enduring, trusted relationships with patients and a level of care that is highly unusual today.

“I’m a provider,” she says. “I have dropped medicines for COVID-19 patients at their door: I just leave it at the door, go back in the car, make sure they know what’s out there, and they come to the door and pick it up.”

That trust is critical, especially given the gravity of problems that north Minneapolis faces these days: Nearly two-thirds of Latino patients who test for the coronavirus at NorthPoint are testing positive. While that’s an alarmingly high rate, CEO Whitney-West says it’s also a positive sign. A significant number of those patients are undocumented immigrants, she notes, and the findings suggest they trust NorthPoint enough to get tested at the center.

And from a public health standpoint, that’s a win, she says, because you need to know where the virus is in order to stop its spread.

Source: How A Minneapolis Clinic Is Narrowing Racial Gaps In Health

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#COVID-19: Comparing provinces with other countries 11 November Update

2020/11/12 Leave a comment

Main news continues to be with respect to rapid increase in infections in most countries and provinces:
 
Weekly:
 
Infections per million: France ahead of New York, Italy and Sweden ahead of Quebec, British Columbia ahead of Philippines
 
Deaths per million: UK ahead of USA, France ahead of Sweden, Canadian North ahead of Nigeria
 
 
 

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Rembrance Day, 2020

2020/11/11 Leave a comment

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