Where are the immigrants in Canada’s policy debates?

2020/10/23 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Keith Banting:

COVID-19 is the great revealer. It has revealed yawning gaps in Canada’s current patchwork of social programs, which manifestly failed to cope with the crisis. Emergency measures such as the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and wage subsidies had to be rushed into place simply to keep individuals, families and the economy afloat.

Other fatal limitations soon appeared. Lax regulation of long-term care facilities had tragic consequences for thousands of vulnerable elderly, a crisis which required the emergency deployment of military health personnel in our two largest provinces. More broadly, the pandemic shone a harsh light on inequality in Canada. Many ‘essential’ workers had to travel to work for low pay in infectious workplaces, while the professional middle class worked from the safety of their homes, with little if any hit to their incomes.

These burdens were not shared equally across Canada’s diverse society. The economic and health impacts were greatest in the case of women, recent immigrants, racialized minorities, and members of the First Nations. An analysis by Statistics Canada documents the economic hit. Poverty rates were already high among recent immigrants and racialized communities before the pandemic, but the gaps grew during the crisis, with recent immigrants and racialized communities among the hardest hit. Poverty rates increased most in the South Asian, Chinese, Black, Korean, Arab, Latin American and West Asians communities.

With emergency programs set to wind down, Canadians are engaged in an intense debate over how to ‘build back better’ by improving our social programs. The agenda is larger and more complex than at any time in recent memory.

Income security programs are front and centre. There is pressure to expand eligibility for Employment Insurance to include contingent workers and more of the self-employed. Additional options range from incremental change, such as expanding the existing Canada Workers Benefit, to radical change, such as the introduction of some form of Basic Income.

Other reformers prefer to tackle precarious work, not through income transfers, but through market-shaping policies. Too many workers are in low paying jobs that lack any guarantee of sufficient hours, job security, or sick leave. From this perspective, Canada needs tougher labour market policies, including higher minimum wages and stronger worker rights, to ensure all jobs pay a living wage that can support a dignified life.

Beyond the world of incomes and wages, the social policy agenda extends to the improvement of core services, such as an expansion of childcare and a much stronger long-term care sector. In addition, stronger protections for temporary foreign workers, especially in the agricultural sector, are clearly essential.

Income security, market protections, stronger services: This is a huge agenda.

Canada needs tougher labour market policies, including higher minimum wages and stronger worker rights

Immigrant groups, however, have an ambiguous place in this great debate. With many recent immigrants and racialized minorities working in precarious, low-wage, unsafe jobs, their interests are deeply affected by the political struggle. Many of them would benefit the options on the table. Despite this, the politics of race and immigrant integration are unlikely to play a distinctive, energizing role in the political struggle. The issues are being framed around generic or ‘universal’ workers and their needs. This is the standard way of thinking about social policy in Canada.

The 2015 election provides an earlier example. The Liberal Party promised to raise taxes on high-income earners, cut taxes for the middle class and significantly expand child benefits, which help low-income families most. Strikingly, there was virtually no mention of race and racial minorities during the election debates. Rather, the Liberals presented their package designed to help “the middle-class and those working hard to join it.” Many racial minority families with children, including newly arrived Syrian refugee families, were significant beneficiaries when the new Liberal government significantly expanded child benefits. But racial inequality was not part of the politics that drove policy expansion.

Admittedly, there may be benefits in this generic framing. In the United States and Europe, many commentators argue that ethnic and racial diversity erodes a sense of community, weakens feelings of trust in fellow citizens, and fragments coalitions that might otherwise support social programs. They fear that members of the majority public might be reluctant to support social programs that give money to ‘strangers’ who are not part of ‘us’.

So far, such corrosive politics have been muted in Canada. Nevertheless, one cannot help but wonder whether the politics of diversity might bring added energy to social policy struggles. The Black Lives Matter movement is bringing much needed pressure on the justice system. But it is not part of the social policy debate. This framing of social policy, with its limited acknowledgement of the diversity of those whose interests are at stake, is a little unsettling, a sign perhaps that Canada is not fully comfortable in its own social reality.

Source: Where are the immigrants in Canada’s policy debates?

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What new disaggregated data tells us about federal public service diversity

2020/10/22 Leave a comment

My latest in Policy Options, taking advantage of disaggregated employment equity data:

Just how diverse is the federal public service? This question recently has attracted more scrutiny, particularly when it comes to the inclusion of Black Canadians in the bureaucracy. Before February, no Black person had made it to the deputy minister rank of the public service – Caroline Xavier is now associate deputy minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship. The speech from the throne included a commitment to “Implementing an action plan to increase representation in hiring and appointments, and leadership development within the public service.”

Now, for the first time, the federal government is providing disaggregated data related to the diversity of the public service as part of its Employment Equity Report. The Treasury Board Secretariat’s (TBS) report looks at the three fiscal years from 2016-19 by occupational group. Previously, disaggregated data for visible minority and Indigenous individuals employed in federal public administration (excluding the military) was only available through census data every five years. We now have the tools to do a more granular analysis of visible minority representation in each occupational group and see where work remains to be done. Table 1 looks at the overall visible minority representation in Canada, the visible minority population that are citizens, and the numbers shared in the government’s equity report. The citizenship number is taken here as a benchmark, since citizens are given preference in government staffing processes. This gives us a picture of the degree to which there is under-representation of certain groups compared to the citizenship-based benchmark. A note about the terminology: I have used the term visible minority, as do Statistics Canada and the Treasury Board Secretariat. Indigenous Peoples are their own category for data purposes, and do not fall under visible minority. While the visible minority group definitions are similar to those used by Statistics Canada, TBS groups Arab and West Asians together under “non-white West Asian, North African or Arab.” “Mixed Origin” refers to those with one visible minority parent. The representation of most groups is relatively close to their share of the citizenship population, with South Asian, Chinese and Filipino public servants less represented.Table 2 takes the same approach with respect to Indigenous representation with the exception that total and citizenship-based populations are identical, showing relative under-representation of First Nations and Inuit people.Table 3 compares the representation of each visible minority by occupational group, expressed as the percentage difference with non-visible minority, non-Indigenous employees for the three-year period 2017-19. For most groups, relative representation has not shifted dramatically from 2017 to 2019, with general under-representation in the executive, technical and operational categories.Among executives, no group has improved its representation by one percent or more from 2017 to 2019, with only individuals of mixed origins showing an increase of 0.6 percent, and Black, Filipino and Southeast Asian people showing marginal increases (0.1, 0.3 and 0.1 percent respectively). Table 4 similarly compares the representation of each Indigenous group by occupational groups, expressed as the percentage difference with non-visible minority, non-Indigenous employees for the three-year period 2017-19 (for the executive and technical occupational groups, there are fewer than five Inuit public servants, and thus the federal government does not provide numbers out of concern for privacy).While this analysis highlights the differences in visible minority and Indigenous representation among the different occupational categories, it does not break it down by seniority level. TBS declined to provide a disaggregated breakdown for assistant deputy ministers (level EX4-5) and directors and directors general (level EX1-3) given that breaking down the numbers to those subgroups would present a privacy risk. But TBS did say that of the 335 ADMs, 30 are visible minority (9.0 percent) and nine Indigenous (2.7 percent). Black Canadians are the visible minority group with the strongest numbers in the public service compared to their share of the citizen population, but their representation is overwhelmingly in the two administrative categories. This is not unique – there is significant under-representation among Latin American, Chinese, Filipino and South East Asian groups in the executive ranks of the public service. A similar general pattern can be found with Indigenous public service representation. With this type of disaggregated data in hand, policy discussions and responses can be based more solidly on evidence rather than relying on examples and anecdotes about who works in the public service. With better data, the government can hopefully build a more representative and inclusive public service at all levels.

Source: What new disaggregated data tells us about federal public service diversity

For those interested, the TBS dataset used can be found here: Employment Equity Sub-Group Population in the Public Service of Canada

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#COVID-19: Comparing provinces with other countries 21 October Update

2020/10/22 Leave a comment

Apart from overall large increases in infections in most jurisdictions, and corresponding increases in death rates in some, overall country and jurisdiction ranking largely unchanged.

Deaths per million: no change
 
Infections per million: Sweden now higher than UK (so much for herd immunity), Japan ahead of Atlantic Canada
 
Weekly:
 
 

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Professor’s use of racial slur ignites uOttawa debate

2020/10/21 2 Comments

Interesting debate. From my reading, the professor was using the word in the context of reappropriation by Blacks and not in a gratuitous manner, although she would have been wiser to say the “N-word.” On the other hand, in popular culture, the term has been used by rap artists as well as by directors such as Spike Lee, Tarantino and others. So should it always be off-limits or do context and intent matter?

The student union at the University of Ottawa is calling on University president Jacque Frémont to denounce a group of professors who defended the right to use “racial slurs” as a part of academic freedom.

The slur in question was the N-word, which was used by a part-time sociology professor last month in a Zoom discussion on language and the reappropriation of offensive words by groups such as people of colour, the disabled and the LGBTQ communities. In a statement posted online Sunday night, the University of Ottawa Student Union complained that the N-word remains “offensive, hurtful and reprehensible.”

Source: Professor’s use of racial slur ignites uOttawa debate

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Germany: Coronavirus an extra burden for immigrants

2020/10/21 Leave a comment

Common pattern in most countries:

The German federal government commissioner for integration, Annette Widmann-Mauz, highlighted the plight of asylum seekers and people with immigration backgrounds during the coronavirus pandemic and the related economic crisis in a statement on Sunday.

“They often work in industries which are particularly affected by the economic consequences of the pandemic, such as retail, logistics or the hospitality sector,” she said, on the eve of the 12th integration summit which shines a light on the effects of the pandemic on immigrants.

At the same time as work conditions are becoming more difficult, the number of opportunities for integration are also shrinking.

The national integration action plan took on a digital offensive offering online integration courses, language teaching and consultations over social networks. The focus is on supporting women to enter and integrate into the job market.

“We mustn’t lose any time on integration, in spite of coronavirus,” Widmann-Mauz said.

A joint effort on integration policy

The integration summit, which began in 2006, will see around 130 representatives from immigrant organizations, religious communities, the economy, politics and sports come together over video conference to discuss the current topics regarding integration policy.

The government’s vice-spokeswoman, Martina Fietz, announced in advance of the summit, that those taking part “will discuss answers to the important question of how we can also strengthen integration in times of coronavirus, as many people with an immigration background are particularly hard hit.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will lead the discussion which will also look at the possibility of recognizing foreign professional and educational qualifications, as well as the promotion of early childhood education.

The first summit took place 14 years ago following a national debate about violence in schools. Teachers from a school in Berlin triggered the founding of the summit through a protest letter they wrote.

Source: Germany: Coronavirus an extra burden for immigrants

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The Long History of Blaming Immigrants in Times of Sickness

2020/10/21 Leave a comment

Useful reminder of history as the Smithsonian collects items from the current pandemic for future generations:

On a chilly morning in February, about a thousand Chinese immigrants, Chinese Americans and others filled the streets of San Francisco’s historic Chinatown. They marched down Grant Avenue led by a bright red banner emblazoned with the words “Fight the Virus, NOT the People,” followed by Chinese text encouraging global collaboration to fight Covid-19 and condemning discrimination. Other signs carried by the crowd read: “Time For Science, Not Rumors” and “Reject Fear and Racism.”

They were responding to incidents of bias and reported significant drops in revenue in Chinatown and other local Asian American-owned businesses, even at a time when the city had not yet experienced any Covid-19 cases. The rally banner is soon to join the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for the story it tells of America’s history of associating its immigrants with disease.

“There have been long-standing messages about disease being particularly something that Chinese immigrants, Chinese spaces incubate, that Chinese people spread, either because of their unsanitary living conditions or especially the weird, exotic food that Asians allegedly eat,” says Erika Lee, director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota.

How this phenomenon continues now during the Covid-19 pandemic was recently the subject of a curatorial colloquium called “Fear and Scapegoating during a Pandemic.” The online discussion kicked off Pandemic Perspectives: Stories Through Collections, a twice-monthly online panel discussion organized by the curators and historians at the museum. The series invites audience participation in the examination of objects and images from the collections, using them as a jumping off point for discussions on various aspects of life during the pandemic. Upcoming sessions will focus on such topics as voting, masks, comfort food, essential workers and the race for a vaccine.

“[Fear and scapegoating are] something that emerged right at the beginning of the pandemic, and it’s one of the most pervasive, stubborn kind of myths and prejudices that have emerged,” says Alexandra Lord, medical historian at the museum and the discussion’s moderator. “So we thought it was really important to start by talking about this topic in particular.”

While the virus had only just reached American shores—the day of the San Francisco rally saw America’s first Covid-19 related death in Washington—many Chinese Americans already saw how such terminology as “China virus” intensifiedan existing anti-Chinese sentiment that would bubble to the forefront of the country’s social conscience.

“We didn’t really shut down as a society until mid-March, yet we see how early Chinese Americans are feeling the impact of the virus, partly because of the history, partly because they are connected transnationally to families and communities in China, but also because the xenophobia that has risen out of Covid-19 was already global before we really experienced the pandemic ourselves,” says Lee, a panelist at the colloquium.

One object discussed was an illustration from the May 26, 1882 issue of the San Francisco Illustrated Wasp, published just weeks after the Chinese Exclusion Act passed. Depicting three ghoulish figures called malarium, smallpox and leprosy and with one holding a sash that says “Chinatown,” the artist’s intent was clear: to suggest that the places Chinese people inhabit spawn disease.

View the pre-recorded seminar: “Fear and Scapegoating During the Pandemic”

On the cover of an 1899 issue of another mainstream magazine, Judge, U.S. President William McKinley is depicted bathing a Filipino native baby in the “waters of civilization.” In the background, two figures dressing themselves in clothes made from the Puerto Rican flag have presumably just been freshly washed with the same “brush of education” that McKinley holds in his hand. Published during the Spanish-American War just after the U.S. colonized the Philippines and Puerto Rico, the illustration vividly visualizes the racist ideas of the period, according to Theodore Gonzalves, a curator at the museum who specializes in Asian American and performing arts history.

“One thing that we’re seeing in these images is this idea that it’s not just policy that shapes our ideas about immigration, but also, our concept of health, both at a policy level and in terms of medical inspections and also at a cultural level in the stories we tell about race,” said panelist Natalia Molina, a professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

The popular narratives about race have often been tied to differences in physical health and intelligence, as Molina noted after an audience member asked about the role of eugenics in shaping these stories. Lee pointed to the Ku Klux Klan and its reliance on myths of physical and mental disparities between races as a method of enforcing racial segregation and white supremacy, to maintain an “America for Americans.”

In another context, purported differences in physical constitution encouraged agricultural and railroad construction employers to hire Mexicans. Molina explained that people in the United States believed Mexicans to be biologically different: their bodies, it was said, could withstand 110-degree Fahrenheit heat better and produce more work in the fields. But when the Great Depression rolled around, those same workers became economic scapegoats, and characterized as immigrants who were taking jobs away from native-born Americans. During this period, racist notions created the medical myth that portrayed Mexican workers as more susceptible to diseases like tuberculosis and led to charges that they would burden the nation’s healthcare system.

“It doesn’t begin with ethnic and racial minorities,” Gonzalves emphasized. “If we go back to the 1790 Naturalization Act, we have to think about how that was a law that equated citizenship with free white persons of good moral character. . . we have to think about who was really identifying and obsessed with identities. It’s clearly the founders themselves. . . . Of course it’s going to be an obsession, because [America was founded] on stolen land and everything follows from that. So we are following in the great tradition of America, which is to be obsessed with these questions of identity.”

The museum’s curators are collecting items that document the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.S., and are asking the public to help decide what objects or images will represent this time to future generations. “It’s so important to be documenting the impact of Covid especially on immigrant and refugee communities,” Lee said, noting that these populations of people are disproportionately working in occupations and industries that put them at greater health and economic risk. “As Dr. Molina pointed out, they are essential workers, but they are not treated as essential. . . . And we need to be collecting their stories.”

Source: The Long History of Blaming Immigrants in Times of Sickness

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The Consequences Of Dehumanizing Language In Politics

2020/10/20 Leave a comment

Of note:

United States politicians are no strangers to using unkind language against their opponents. It’s a trend that dates back to at least 1800 when, during the presidential campaign, Thomas Jefferson hired James Callender to slime John Adams. But Alexander Theodoridis, who teaches political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says that today’s partisanship can lend itself to particularly dehumanizing language not only between political opponents, but also between regular Americans who belong to opposite political parties.

Theodoridis told NPR’s Weekend Edition that “dehumanizing language,” which includes people referring to others as animals, can lead to people believing that those who disagree with them don’t deserve the same treatment or respect as those who agree with them.

“That is often where things lead,” he said. “As either a justification post hoc for treating somebody differently or, in some cases, a precursor to treating a group differently.”

One fear is that this kind of dehumanization leads to violence. Another is that it leads people to believe in conspiracy theories that further demonize the people they disagree with. Theodoridis says while both Democrats and Republicans use this kind of language, Republicans tend to believe conspiracy theories like QAnon more easily.

“I think part of that is just the composition of the parties,” Theodoridis said. “One feature of the sorting that has happened in terms of who is a Democrat and who is a Republican, there is this sort of diploma divide, and I think that’s a factor.”

In an interview with NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Theodoridis reflects on the political polarization of this moment, the dehumanizing language that has risen up and where we go from here.

Interview Highlights

How do you capture how dehumanizing language has seeped down from politicians to the body politic in your studies?

One of the measures we use literally shows people a “ascent of man” picture, which is basically the image where you have where you go from sort of a stooped ape-like figure up to a standing human. And we ask them, how evolved do you think these groups are? And we ask them, Democrats and Republicans, how evolved?

And what we find is around 80% of people rate their own side higher than they rate the other side. And almost 70% of people rate their own side more than 10 points higher than the other side. And the average is in the 30s, like 35-point difference. So this is a pretty substantial gap.

And the fear is that our use of language, or how we talk, can lead to action, or in this case, violence.

I don’t want to be alarmist. I don’t think that we’re very close to widespread political violence, largely because I think most people in this country are still fairly happy and are not concerned enough with politics on a day-to-day basis to take to the streets and do awful things.

But we asked people to give a [prison] sentence to somebody who had attacked a senator from one party or the other, randomizing the party of the senator and those who dehumanize more give a more lenient sentence. Right. So they view it as less of an offense when you attack the other side than when you attack their own side.

Other social scientists we have spoken to wonder if the genie can actually be put back in the bottle. I will say, as someone who has covered countries where there is deep polarization outside of the United States, it is hard to roll that back.

My thoughts on this are actually somewhat pessimistic. We long for a period in our history in the latter part of the last century where polarization along party lines, not necessarily along other lines, but along partisan lines, was not very pronounced. Your race, religion, education level, didn’t necessarily predict your partisanship the way that it does today. And because all those identities are aligned, it becomes this sort of superordinate, super powerful identity.

So then where should we go from here? Because what I hear over and over again from voters is that they are tired of this partisanship and yet they are part of this partisanship.

That’s right. So I really do think the focus should be, first of all, on just trying to lower the temperature and I think that falls largely on elites, on elected officials. I think we should hold them to a higher standard and the media should hold them to a higher standard in terms of not stoking these fires in ways that can be dangerous.

But beyond that, I think we should really look for ways to make it so that our government can work effectively under polarization, because I think this is a much more natural state of affairs than the kind of odd period historically that we have recently emerged from where the parties weren’t really aligned with ideology and all sorts of characteristics.

Source: The Consequences Of Dehumanizing Language In Politics

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Why the World Should Care About Language in Inner Mongolia

2020/10/20 Leave a comment

Yet another example of Chinese government repression and attempts at cultural genocide:

On August 26 China passed a law to sideline teaching in the Mongolian language in the region of Inner Mongolia (also referred to as Southern Mongolia). This measure, which sparked immediate protests, will create irreparable losses not just for ethnic Mongolians, but also for many cultures around the world.

What is at stake here is not just the spoken language, but an 800-year-old script with a multicultural lineage that emanated from the golden era of the Silk Route.

Mongolian, as a language, is still widely spoken in independent Mongolia, but the “Mongolian script” was largely lost after the Russians introduced Cyrillic in the 1940s, when Stalin sought to control the country as a buffer against China. This makes the Inner Mongolians, who are currently under Chinese rule, the last custodians of the script. For academics, historians, linguists, and cultural aficionados, the Mongolian script holds the key to historical links between cultures that were forged during the Silk Route era and earlier. Understanding this connection might help people realize that this is not Mongolia’s fight alone.

For decades, China’s ongoing efforts to assimilate its minorities had it cracking down harshly on the religions, and languages of Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongolians. These are all largely nomadic cultures that were propagators of multicultural exchanges at the height of the Silk Route era.

Like the Tibetans and the Uyghurs, who have been struggling against Chinese hegemony, Mongolians have been protesting since August, but punitive measures taken by the Chinese government leave Mongolians with little choice but to concede.

“This is the final blow to our culture,” said Enghebatu Togochog, director of the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center.  “The world should know that it is not simply a language issue. This strikes at the very heart and existence of our national identity. If we lose our language we lose everything. We’ve already lost political autonomy, our nomadic way of life, and our environment. This is cultural genocide.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the border, in the independent state of the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR), a democratic revolution in 1990 pushed for a switch from Russian Cyrillic to the old Mongolian script. That idea, however, received little interest and gained no traction. Parents saw it as a hindrance to their children’s future prospects at the time. But the recent protests in the Inner Mongolian region have made Mongolians in the MPR realize what they failed to in 1990. The significance and threat to their cultural, intellectual, and literary heritage is now being viewed through a new lens.

“Public opinion in MPR has changed drastically since China’s crackdown on Inner Mongolia,” said Otgonsuren Jargaliin, an outer Mongolian teacher, linguist, and environmental activist. “Mongolians now see the urgent need to preserve and protect this ancient script and not take it for granted. They now appreciate that 80 years of Cyrillic is not on par with 800 years of a writing that is our lineage and ancestry.”

She pointed out that as recently as last week MPR National Television was now carrying subtitles not only in Cyrillic, but also in the old Mongolian script, which was a new development.

The Mongolian Script

The story of the Mongolian script starts with Genghis Khan. In 1204 he appointed the Uyghur scholar Tatatunga to develop a unifying script after he established his empire. The new Mongolian script was adapted from an old Uyghur script.

The Uyghurs today are Turkic-speaking Muslims, descended from the Uyghur Khaganate, a nomadic kingdom in Mongolia, which was predominantly Manichaean and then later Buddhist. It lasted from 744 to 840 CE. It was while they were Manicheans that the Uyghurs adopted their script from the Sogdians. By the 16 century, however, the Uyghurs had transitioned to the Arabic script and were no longer using their own.

The Sogdians, meanwhile, were the remnant traders of the ancient Achaemenid Persian Empire, who capitalized on economic opportunities along the Silk Route from the fourth to ninth centuries. Like many Silk Route traders, they exported not just material goods but fashion, culture, religion, arts, and language. Their script had its roots in Aramaic.

The Uyghurs replaced the Sogdians as custodians of the script from the eighth to the beginning of the 13th century, when Genghis Khan introduced it to his new empire, the largest contiguous one the world had ever seen. As the lingua franca of the Mongolian Empire, the script was used widely connecting east with west, the Pacific to the Mediterranean.

The history of the script, therefore, offers a well documented evolution of a writing that originated from the ancient Mesopotamian civilization, and traveled across time and cultures through the Silk Route. The script’s history tells us how people from vast geographical backgrounds were connected, often not out of choice, but nevertheless linked through trade and travel. It shows us how our ancestries and heritages are all interlinked and interconnected.

The indigenous nomadic tribes from different cultures, along with traders from different regions and countries, brought a broader understanding of a socio-cultural world through their free movement along the Silk Route. Unlike China’s nationalistic ideology, they were not confined to a specific religion, nationality, ethnicity, language, or geographical boundary. This was what promoted cultural connectivity and created an era of great cultural exchange.

Today China is trying to recreate its idea of a Silk Route through its “One Belt, One Road” foreign policy and economic strategy, also known as the Belt and Road Initiative. But what China fails to recognize is that the success of the original Silk Route was due to its recognition and acceptance of the many cultures it spanned and encountered. Cultural legacies were embraced and valued rather than wiped out along the way in the name of uniformity. The Belt and Road Initiative can’t replicate the success of the Silk Route if it persecutes the very people and cultures, like the Mongolians, that made the original routes last for centuries.

The irony is that, in trying to recreate the Silk Road through its nationalistic lens, China may once again end up with something that is just another “Made in China” imitation.

Source: Why the World Should Care About Language in Inner Mongolia

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New head of Canadian Race Relations Foundation says group will take a stronger advocacy role

2020/10/20 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see if a more activist approach results in an increase in influence and impact or not. All CRRF CEOs have had to grapple with the fact that as a crown corporation, the CRRF is not completely independent of government:

In its 2018 annual report, the Canadian Race Relations Foundation wrote: “It is not the Foundation’s role to be a strong advocate.” For an organization born out of an apology for systemic racism, that starting point made little sense to Mohammed Hashim.

Wanting to change it, he applied to lead the Crown corporation. To his surprise, the hiring committee handed him the keys, rather than showing him the door.

“I told them it was wrong for them to put that in the annual report, I was shocked to hear that. And I think we need to figure out a new approach, one that has advocacy as a central core,” Mr. Hashim said in an interview last week, during his first few days on the job.

The foundation was launched in 1997, as part of the federal government’s Japanese Canadian Redress Agreement struck a decade earlier. In the late 1980s, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s government apologized for Canada’s treatment of Japanese Canadians who were interned and stripped of their human and civil rights during the Second World War.

In the intervening years, some activists and experts in the field say the organization has not gone as far as it could in holding the government to account and advocating for the most vulnerable in Canadian society. At times, Jack Jedwab a former foundation board member and the president of the Association for Canadian Studies, said it’s looked “as though they’re getting direction from government rather than giving direction to government,”

Mr. Jedwab said the foundation needs to play a bigger advocacy role and “reaffirm leadership.”

In response to that criticism, Mr. Hashim said the foundation will be outspoken in addressing racism, pushing Ottawa to move from studying the issues to actually fixing them.

“I think there’s lots of room for the government to move on the criminal-justice system, on reforming the police, and I hope that the foundation can play a role in bringing people together,” Mr. Hashim said.

The Black Lives Matter movement has helped to show “the absolute necessity of public policy-makers to finally respond and respond decisively,” he said.

His risky interview pitch wasn’t the only thing that made him an unusual appointment by a Liberal government to a non-partisan position. His anti-racism work started as a response to Stephen Harper’s government, he said, and until taking this job, Mr. Hashim was a member of the NDP, worked on Jagmeet Singh’s leadership campaign, and organized for the provincial party.

’s now shedding his partisan stripes and will be reaching out to the party once led by Mr. Harper. In a 2018 podcast interview, he was highly critical of the former prime minister. Last week, he told The Globe and Mail that he was particularly concerned about the 2015 election campaign, which he called “horrible” and “terrible.” Mr. Hashim said the Conservative push for a snitch line on “barbaric cultural practices” contributed to a spike in violence against Muslim women.

Since that election, Mr. Hashim said the Conservatives have become more inclusive and are “going in the right direction” on race relations.

Among the issues seizing his attention today is the rise in anti-Asian sentiment, which he said is being fuelled by rhetoric from the small-c conservative movement.

“You can replace ‘China’ with ‘Islam’ and it feels like 2003,” he said, referring to the backlash of Islamophobia that rose out of the 9/11 terror attacks. China, he said, is deserving of criticism for its human-rights record, but he said it needs to be talked about in a way that’s “not alienating.”

Now on a national stage, he said he plans to continue the grassroots approach he honed as a senior organizer at the Toronto & York Region Labour Council. In that job, he flew to Quebec City to help with the response to the mass murder at a mosque, was an unofficial adviser to the Muslim community in times of crisis, and consulted with the Toronto Police Service on using language that doesn’t malign Black people or perpetuate stereotypes.

His role, he said, is to help people navigate uncomfortable conversations, which he calls necessary to changing the status quo. It’s a skill, his former boss at the Toronto-based Labour Community Services, Faduma Mohamed, says has allowed him to bring an “urgency and greater awareness” of systemic racism to decision and policy-makers.

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, who signed off on Mr. Hashim’s appointment, said his posting shows that the minority Liberals are “ready and willing” to act.

Still charting the organization’s plan for the next five years, Mr. Hashim is not yet ready to say what will be on the agenda. But for a sense of what it might look like, he said if it wasn’t for COVID-19, he would already be in Nova Scotia, amplifying the story of Mi’kmaq fishermen who have been the victims of violent attacks from non-Indigenous, commercial fishermen.

“I want to push as hard as we possibly can so that 50 years down the line, we don’t have to apologize again,” he said.

Source: New head of Canadian Race Relations Foundation says group will take a stronger advocacy role

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Gal Gadot as Cleopatra in new movie about Egyptian queen is causing misplaced outrage

2020/10/19 Leave a comment

Always useful to have historical and social context, rather than contemporary reflexes only:

I was happy for two reasons when I heard earlier this week that Israeli actress Gal Gadot had been tapped to play Cleopatra in her latest Hollywood incarnation. First, she’s a star who could help popularize the legendary queen in a rare female-directed blockbuster. Second, like myself and Cleopatra, she’s from the Middle East. I celebrated this fact with my partner, a fellow Middle Easterner from Lebanon and Turkey, who was excited in the same spirit of regional solidarity.

Claims that the casting was another example of “whitewashing” had an amusing side to them since no one seemed to agree on what exactly the acceptable ethnic origin for the actress playing Cleopatra is.

But we knew controversy was soon to follow given the demands of the current social climate that roles only be played by a person of the same ethnicity as the character. In this case, though, claims that the casting was another example of “whitewashing” had an amusing side to them, since no one seemed to agree on what exactly the acceptable ethnic origin for the actress playing Cleopatra is: North African, African, Arab and Egyptian were suggested. In other words, anybody from the region except Jewish Israelis.

The controversy shows a misunderstanding of history and an unfortunate persistence of racialized thinking about both Gadot and Cleopatra, two women born some 2,000 years apart in two relatively close parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. The fact that neither one’s background can be easily distilled shows why it’s wrong to insist that artists fit rigid identity boxes to qualify for a role and to treat historical figures as markers in our modern-day divides, rather than celebrating individuals for their talents and civilizations for their diversity. To do otherwise denies humanity its rich multicultural heritage.

“Was Cleopatra white?” is an essentially meaningless question since categories and morphologies of race in the United States of 2020 are not those of 1st century B.C. Egypt. And they are particularly inappropriate given that Cleopatra and the region she dwelled in were defined by a breathtaking array of cultural mixing — something the critics of her casting would do well to remember.

When Cleopatra was born in 69 B.C., her birthplace of Alexandria was the capital of Egypt’s Ptolemaic Kingdom. Though located on the southern side of the Mediterranean, the ruling monarchy was rather conscious of its Greek origins and wanted to maintain that cultural status; intermarriage with the native Egyptians was forbidden in Alexandria and other cities, although this wasn’t always observed.

The kingdom was part of the effervescent Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean in which Cleopatra’s mother tongue, Koine Greek (the standardized dialect of Athens), was the lingua franca for the exchange of goods and ideas. The dynasty she was born into had been founded about two centuries earlier by its namesake Ptolemy, a companion of Alexander the Great whose conquests from Egypt to India laid the foundations of the Hellenistic world. The kingdom’s diverse people included Egyptians, Nubians, Syrians, Celts and Jews, some of whom would occasionally be granted the coveted status of Greek elites.

On her father’s side, Cleopatra was an eighth-generation descendant of Ptolemy. The identity of her mother has never been verified, giving rise to speculations that she might have been a native Egyptian or perhaps had some Iranian or Syrian heritage.

Either way, the debate over her DNA misses the much more interesting part of Cleopatra’s biography and the mix of worlds she encompassed by nurture if not nature. Although she had been born into an Alexandria with segregation between the ruling Greeks, native Egyptians and other ethnic groups such as Jews, her own outlook defied this rigid separation.

When Cleopatra came to the throne jointly with her brother in her late teens, Cleopatra became the first-ever Ptolemaic ruler to fluently learn the local Egyptian tongue. (The language is now extinct, but a form of it was spoken until around the 16th century and is now preserved as the liturgical language of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority.)

Cleopatra also dressed and styled herself like an Egyptian, elevated Egyptian religious practices and identified herself with the Egyptian goddess Isis. If we are to believe the tall tales of her first-century Roman biographer Plutarch, she not only possessed an “irresistible charm” but spoke fluent Ethiopian, Arabic, Syriac, Parthian and Hebrew (one thing in common with Gadot, at least.) This probably exaggerated multilingualism wasn’t due to linguaphilia but her self-nativization attempts to help spread her authority in the region, challenged as it was by the might of Rome.

Ironically, her origins were the subject of conversation then, too. Her Roman opponents inflicted racist scorn on her, with Roman ruler Augustus deriding her as an “Eastern courtesan” and Latin poets Horace and Virgil speaking of her as a conniving “oriental.”

The black-and-white thinking that confines Cleopatra and Gadot to racial boxes ignores the complexities of human commonality and community. Gadot can indeed be a white-passing actor in the U.S. while also being a fellow Middle Easterner to Iranians like me, despite the unfortunate conflicts that pit our nations against each other. Someone who celebrates her origins from a “small country in the Middle East,” Gadot is certainly as fit as anyone to play Cleopatra — their hometowns are only a half-day’s drive away, after all.

The knee-jerk anxiety about unmatched ethnicities of actors and characters is understandable. The history of cinema is full of hurtful portrayals by white actors, ranging from the gruesome blackface donned by Al Jolson in the landmark sound film “The Jazz Singer” to Mickey Rooney’s infamous Mr. Yunioshi in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” to Alec Guinness’ anti-Semitic Fagin in “Oliver Twist.” But the problem with these portrayals is their demeaning caricaturization — something that no one expects in the coming Cleopatra film.

Meanwhile, if we are to truly expand representation on screen, maybe we can look at some other ancient female leaders? How about a film on the 2nd century B.C. Nubian Queen Shanakdakhete, who reigned in today’s Sudan? Or a biopic on the 1st century A.D.’s Musa? Believed to be he first woman to have ever ruled Iran, she was originally an Italian slave gifted to the Parthian monarch of Iran by Augustus, the very tyrant who defeated Cleopatra. Maybe we can fictionalize history and watch her rise and take revenge for Cleopatra? I’d watch Iranians and Italians fight over who gets to play her any day.

Source: Gal Gadot as Cleopatra in new movie about Egyptian queen is causing misplaced outrage

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