Working site on citizenship and multiculturalism issues.
2020/11/05 Leave a comment
2020/11/04 Leave a comment
Virtue signalling during the pandemic, when Quebec has some of the highest per capita infection and death rates worldwide:
Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet is doubling down on efforts to draw a line separating his party’s values from those of the Trudeau Liberals — particularly on the fraught ground of free speech.
Blanchet posted a tweet Sunday suggesting Justin Trudeau’s response to attacks in France that authorities have attributed to Muslim extremists did not go far enough, and highlighted what the Bloc leader called a “disturbing gap” in values that he chalked up to possible “weakness” or “ideology” on the prime minister’s part.
Blanchet said in French that Trudeau is threatening Quebec’s friendship with France. He’s sought to align his province with that country’s “republican and secular” principles, contrasting them with what he called an “Anglo-Saxon multiculturalist doctrine.”
The stern words compound Blanchet’s criticism of the prime minister’s reaction to a University of Ottawa professor’s use of a notoriously derogatory word for Black people in class.
Last week, Trudeau condemned the attacks in France as “heinous” acts of terrorism that fly in the face of Canadian values and said Ottawa “would always defend freedom of expression, but freedom of expression is not without limits.”“In a pluralistic, diverse and respectful society like ours, we must be aware of the impact of our words, of our actions on others, particularly these communities and populations who still experience enormous discrimination,” Trudeau told reporters in French on Friday.
At a press conference today, Blanchet argued that Trudeau’s comments suggested “extenuating circumstances” might explain some acts of terrorism.
“My duty is to tell our sisters and brothers and friends in France that Quebec does not share this opinion being expressed by the prime minister of Canada,” Blanchet said.
French attacks
Three attacks in France over the past two months have come amid a growing furor over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that were republished by the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
Extremists attacked the Charlie Hebdo newsroom in January 2015, after the caricatures were first published, and killed 12 people.
Since their reprinting in September at the start of the ongoing Paris trial over the killings, France has endured three attacks blamed on Muslim extremists.
One saw two people injured outside the newspaper’s old headquarters, allegedly by a teenage refugee from Pakistan.
On Oct. 16, a teacher name Samuel Paty was beheaded outside his school for opening a class debate on free speech by showing students the caricatures.
And on Thursday, a knife-wielding man attacked and killed three people in a church in the Mediterranean city of Nice.
At his press conference today, Blanchet accused the Trudeau government of being slow to condemn the attacks. Blanchet said Quebec’s National Assembly passed a unanimous motion condemning the attack on Paty and lamented the fact that the House of Commons chose only to observe a moment of silence.
Last month, the Bloc pushed the government for a response to a controversy over a university instructor’s use of a racial slur in class, demanding that the Liberals state unequivocally whether they support the professor involved.
Blanchet said those subjected to hateful words deserve compassion and support, but using the term in an educational context isn’t bigoted.
Trudeau had told the House of Commons that “we all need to be conscious of the power of our words.”
MPs vote down Bloc motion on October crisis
Blanchet spoke about freedom of expression at a news conference this afternoon ahead of a House vote on his motion demanding an apology from the government for having invoked the War Measures Act during the October Crisis in Quebec 50 years ago.
That vote failed by a vote of 263 to 56. Liberal and Conservative MPs voted against the motion, while most NDP MPs joined their Bloc counterparts and voted in favour.
In October 1970, the Liberal government under then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau chose to suspend civil liberties by invoking the statute then known as the War Measures Act in response to the kidnapping of a Quebec cabinet minister, Pierre Laporte, and a British diplomat by members of the militant FLQ separatist group.
The move, which came at the request of the Quebec premier and Montreal’s mayor, led to soldiers patrolling the streets as authorities rounded up hundreds of residents under suspicion of involvement in the abductions.
The three Green MPs also voted in favour of the Bloc motion, despite a statement released by the party’s leader, Annamie Paul, that criticized it for politicizing a tragic historical event.
“If the objective of the motion is to produce healing and reconciliation related to the events of October, 1970, then it is wrong to introduce a motion that fails to mention the assassination of Mr. Laporte and the impact on his loved ones, does not mention the Quebecers who were injured and terrorised during the bombings attacks carried out during that period, nor acknowledge the role played by the government of Quebec in invoking the War Measures Act,” said Paul.
“Likewise, in responding to the motion, it is wrong for the government to solely mention the horrific assassination of Mr. Laporte, without acknowledging the federal government’s role in the arbitrary arrest and detention of innocent Quebecers under the War Measures Act.”
Paul said she’s proud of the Green Party’s tradition of not whipping votes.
Meanwhile, Quebec’s highest court today began hearing a legal challenge to Quebec’s secularism law — known as Bill 21 — which bans public school teachers, government lawyers and police officers, among other civil servants, from wearing religious symbols at work.
Blanchet has been a steadfast supporter of the law, while opponents argue it disproportionately targets Muslim women and is therefore unconstitutional.
Source: Blanchet seeks to drive values wedge between Quebec and Trudeau government
2020/11/04 Leave a comment
My companion piece to the earlier https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/october-2020/what-new-disaggregated-data-tells-us-about-federal-public-service-diversity/:
PSES data supports the view that the government has considerable work to improve the workplace organizational culture to reduce harassment and discrimination for both visible minority and Indigenous groups.
Black employees report being a victim of discrimination the most, generally and with respect to race and colour. But all groups report significantly higher discrimination than all employees, according to data analyzed by Andrew Griffith.
Following the 2019 Employment Equity Report provision of disaggregated representation for visible minorities, Indigenous people, and persons with disabilities, the 2019 Public Service Employee Survey (PSES) similarly lays out these breakdowns for the four employment equity categories along with LGBTQ2 persons, to assess whether or not the public service is inclusive to all groups.
With the availability of disaggregated data, we now can compare the experiences of different visible minority and Indigenous groups, using the helpful summary tables available at Open Data.
For ease in analysis, I have separated indicators pertaining more to organizational culture (employee engagement, senior management, workplace well-being, empowerment, career development, diversity and inclusion) from those of personal experience (harassment and discrimination).
Figure 1 contrasts the results for the 22 organizational culture questions for women, visible minorities, Indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities (PwD) and LGTBQ2, highlighting those with a variance of five per cent better or worse compared to all employees. Overall, the major issues appear to be with respect to PwD across virtually all indicators followed by Indigenous employees with respect to diversity and inclusion. Visible minorities and LGBTQ2 are largely similar to all employees, with the exception of higher stress due to discrimination for visible minorities. However, visible minorities also indicated being more satisfied with senior management and less stressed after the workday.
Figure 2 compares the harassment and discrimination indicators across the categories. The results are as one would expect for each category. While visible minorities are comparable to all employees with respect to harassment, they are more likely to have encountered discrimination based on their race, ethnic origin, colour, or religion. Indigenous people are more likely to feel excluded and encounter discrimination based on their race. Once again, PwD are more likely to encounter harassment, whether being subject to excessive control, being excluded, humiliated or encountering interference in their work, and being discriminated against in their disability. LGBTQ2 people encounter more sexual comment or gesture harassment, along with greater discrimination on sexual orientation or gender identity.
Figure 3 contrasts the responses for the different visible minority groups for the organizational culture indicators compared to all employees. Generally, employee engagement indicators show comparable results across all groups to all employees with minor variations. Most groups are more satisfied with senior management than all employees, particularly with respect to information flow. Workplace well-being indicators are generally more positive than for all employees, with the notable exception of harassment- and discrimination-induced stress. While empowerment indicators generally are similar to all employees, Black, Japanese, and Korean feel the least empowered. Career development indicators are also generally comparable, with the exception of more negative perceptions by Japanese, Black, South Asian, and West Asian employees responding that discrimination has adversely affected their career progress. While diversity and inclusion indicators are generally comparable across groups, Japanese employees have the lowest satisfaction along with Black employees regarding support for a diverse workplace.
Overall, Filipinos have the highest levels of satisfaction of all groups consistently across all indicators.
Figure 4 contrasts the responses for the different visible minority groups for the harassment and discrimination indicators compared to all employees. Black, Filipino, and Chinese employees report lower harassment for most indicators than other groups. Aggressive behaviour is highest among some Asian groups, along with yelling or shouting. Perceived unfair treatment is common to most groups, save Filipino and Southeast Asian.
Overall, Japanese employees report the greatest harassment and least satisfaction regarding harassment resolution and Filipinos the least harassment and greatest satisfaction with resolution, followed by Chinese employees.
Black employees report being a victim of discrimination the most, generally and with respect to race and colour. But all groups report significantly higher discrimination than all employees, whether by race, ethnic origin or colour, save for West Asians/Arab. However, Southeast Asian and West Asians/Arab report high levels of religious discrimination, most likely related to Islam. Interestingly, both Chinese and Southeast Asian employees report higher levels of age discrimination, and family status discrimination is highest among Japanese. Discrimination resolution satisfaction is highest with Filipinos and lowest with Black, Japanese, Latin American and mixed.
Figure 5 contrasts the responses of the three Indigenous groups for the organizational culture indicators compared to all employees. Overall, Inuit have higher levels of satisfaction across the vast majority of these indicators, with Métis having the lowest levels with respect to employee engagement, the highest work-related stress and the lowest levels of empowerment. North American Indian/First Nations and Métis employees rate the psychological health lower than all employees and all three groups report higher levels of discrimination-induced stress.
Figure 6 contrasts the responses with respect to harassment and discrimination. All Indigenous groups report harassment over the past 12 months, being excluded or ignored. Inuit have higher rates of being humiliated or being subject to offensive remarks while Métis report being subject to excessive control and personal attacks. Only Inuit are satisfied with harassment resolution while Métis are least satisfied. With respect to discrimination, all have experienced higher levels of discrimination than all employees, with very high levels based on race for First Nations and Inuit and high levels with respect to nation or ethnic origin. As in the case of harassment resolution, only Inuit are as satisfied as all employees while Métis are least satisfied.
While it appears that the experience of visible minorities is worse than Indigenous peoples, PSES data supports the view that the government has considerable work to improve the workplace organizational culture to reduce harassment and discrimination for both visible minority and Indigenous groups. This needs to take place at the general and the specific group levels by each department given the variances between the individual groups.
As in the case of disaggregated data with respect to employment equity groups, the increased granularity of the PSES provides a richer evidence base for managers and human resources to develop measures to improve inclusion in the public service at the departmental and organizational levels.
Methodology:
This analysis is based upon the TBS abridged PSES data table, 2019 PSES —Diversity and Inclusion Tables. The data tables contain comparisons of the 2019 PSES results between certain demographic groups or sub-types of designated groups under the Employment Equity Act and the rest of the public service. As the PSES is a voluntary survey, open to core public administration (Schedule I and IV) and separate agencies (Schedule V), the responses cover a broader range of organizations than TBS Employment Equity reports which only apply to core public administration. Responses for categories and groups were contrasted with all responses, save for the general question on harassment and discrimination for women which is a direct comparison with men. TBS weighs the responses based on workforce demographics. The response numbers by group were taken from the 2019 Public Service Employee Survey open dataset.
A threshold of five per cent to flag significant differences was used, with red indicating worse and green better.
Larger format tables (pdf):
2020/11/03 Leave a comment
Of note:
Born and raised in a small Ontario community, Cindy Tran says she learned racism was something Asians endured.
Then, her beloved grandmother was assaulted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
So Tran, a Carleton University student, unleashed her long bottled-up anger and frustration with a blog post, which became the talk of Pembroke, her small city of 15,000 northwest of Ottawa.
“It’s shocking that a town that marches for Black Lives Matter still breeds hate toward people of colour,” she wrote back in August, before describing the attack by a group of young teenagers on her 80-year-old grandmother, Thi Nga Doan.
“I grew up in this town, but I have never truly called it home.”
The journalism student’s decision to speak out and the ensuing reaction prompted the mayor to form a diversity committee to tackle racism.
It’s a situation, Tran acknowledges, that might not have unfolded without the collison of the coronavirus pandemic and the widespread protests against systemic racism sparked by the death of George Floyd in the United States.
“Race was not something that was discussed in Pembroke. My story and opinion piece got so much interaction and interest from people,” said Tran. “So much was happening with Black Lives Matter. In the midst of that, you see an 80-year-old elderly woman attacked in her own home. That’s what’s bringing everything together, unfortunately.”
It’s been widely observed that twin epidemics have dominated North American news in 2020 — the scourge of COVID-19 and that of racism.
The pandemic has found society’s weak points and exacerbated its fissures. The crisis had had a disproportionate impact on the working poor, often racialized people, bringing society’s existing systemic racism, whether anti-Black or anti-Asian or other, to the fore.
Against the backdrop of the health crisis, the killing of Floyd by police gave people stuck in lockdown fresh reason to reflect on systemic injustices, triggering an awareness that advocates hope will lead to long-lasting change. For many, the moment has stirred memories of the discrimination they faced early in their lives — and which they continue to see today.
“People’s consciousness was raised. If you can shift one’s consciousness, everything else will flow,” said Kiké Roach, lawyer, community activist and the Unifor National Chair in Social Justice and Democracy at Ryerson University.
“The two pandemics — COVID-19 and racism — touch all different people. We are in this moment together.”
‘They would interrogate us’
Canada has seen before the racism that can emerge amid a public health crisis.
But there’s been a progression in how political leaders and the media have responded to anti-East Asian incidents since the SARS epidemic in 2003, says Amy Go, president of the Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice.
As early as January, Toronto Mayor John Tory and medical officer Dr. Eileen De Villa stood side-by-side with Chinese community members to condemn emerging racism directed at Chinese Canadians and decry boycotts of Chinese businesses.
In May, government funding was quickly made available to support a community website, Fight COVID Racism, for alleged hate crime victims to file incident reports, trace documented cases through an interactive timeline and map in its response to the wave of hate crimes.
So far, more than 600 alleged incidents have been reported.
“During SARS, very few mainstream media would listen to our stories or they would interrogate us and ask, ‘How do you know it’s racially motivated?’” said Go. “With COVID, we didn’t have to justify we had been victimized due to our race.”
‘I was born and raised here’
Connie Lee was 14 during that SARS pandemic in Toronto. In school, a fellow student came up to her and said, in front of the whole class, that all Chinese people had SARS so she couldn’t hang out with her anymore.
Now 31, Lee was recently at a No Frills store in North York when she was yelled at by a white man, who not only cut in front of her in the checkout line but called her a “stupid b—–” for wearing a medical mask, then told her to go back to where she came from.
“SARS was severe, but it was short-lived. COVID’s scope is different in terms of how far it’s spread and its long time span. Anti-masking and anti-Asian sentiments are going together now,” said Lee, a municipal government administrator.
“I was born and raised here, but people don’t see me that way. Even though I identify as Canadian on paper, the way other people see me is different.”
Like Tran, who felt she had no outlets to talk about racism in school or at home, Lee said Asians are often caught in the middle between Blacks and whites.
“We’re a group used as model minorities. People think we can’t experience racism because some of us can be very successful, but we are used as a pawn, seen as good and bad, depending on how the politics go. We are not white enough and we are not black enough,” said Lee, who grew up in Toronto.
“This puts things into perspectives about Asians not having a voice.”
However, the current pandemic, she said, has given some Asians a framework to tell their stories.
“Before, if you wanted to talk about it, you didn’t have the context to talk about it. You’re seen as a troublemaker by saying anything,” said Lee, who has spent a lot of her time during the lockdown on virtual workshops about anti-Asian racism to “unlearn” some of the white supremacist views she said she internalized while growing up.
“Now you can see (racism) confidently because there’s a larger conversation about it. Previously you could talk about it, but you’d get dismissed as a one-off experience. Systemic racism has always been there but the pandemic has brought it to the forefront.”
‘Mutual friends do nothing’
Toronto’s Ian Hood, who is half Japanese and half Scottish, was taunted during his school days with racial slurs. As a young person, his coping mechanism was to toss slurs back at his classmates based on their European heritage.
Now an adult, he’s seen fresh racism related to COVID-19, which he says has brought out the worst even from a friend he grew up with in Aurora.
Since February, the friend has started posting anti-Chinese and anti-Asian Japanese comments on Facebook directed at him, with stories about how the Chinese and Asians brought the disease to Canada and why they should all go back where they came from. The worst part, Hood said, was how everyone in this friends’ group kept silent about it.
“He kept using the term ‘deal with it.’ In private messages, he called me (slurs) and went on with his tirades. At first, he thought they’re funny. When I spoke against it, he became angry. His humour seemed to be hiding his violent attitude and anger at Asian people,” said Hood, 42. “Mutual friends do nothing. They let him.”
The experience reminds him of his upbringing in Aurora, especially one incident in elementary school during a class about geography and heritage. His teacher repeatedly asked him where he was from, even though he was born and raised in Canada, until he responded that his mother was Japanese and father was Scottish.
“It was the recognition that I wasn’t like the others. She was trying to teach me that I wasn’t like the others. It’s a constant reminder that you don’t quite fit in like others,” said Hood, who is a program evaluation analyst with the Canadian Red Cross. “It hurt.”
During the pandemic, given the confluence of all the forces that have created an openness to discuss racism, Hood said he has felt encouraged to speak up and confront it.
“The experience during COVID motivated you to be more active in fighting racism and engage in conversations. The experiences we’ve had since this pandemic has motivated all of us to have these conversations,” he said.
“Personally, it has made me far more willing to talk about this. The ability to have a conversation about racism empowers me to stand up against it.”
Hood said the global BLM protests stemming from Floyd’s death helped open up people to look at systemic racism that cuts across ethnic boundaries affecting all visible minority groups.
“If we look after the most marginalized people in our society, we can only make the society better for everybody,” said Hood, who has since joined the new diversity and inclusion task force established at his workplace.
“COVID shows us that a lot of the inequity we are seeing has to do with socio-economic status, which in turn is related to race and ethnicity. They are intertwined.”
‘Black Lives Matter has triggered all these conversations’
Although South Asians, visibly appearing different from their East Asian counterparts, are not targeted in COVID-19-related racism, activist Shalini Konanur said their own experiences during the pandemic, such as job losses, have also served as a reminder of the systemic racism to which they’re not immune.
Some people in the community started to look at the role they themselves play in perpetuating racial stereotypes, biases and discrimination within the bigger system.
“They look at the disconnect and where the South Asians are in this,” said Konanur, executive director and a lawyer at the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario, who is also part of a new online group called South Asian Allyship to build partnerships with other communities to address these issues.
“Black Lives Matter has triggered all these conversations. It has addressed the apathy piece in the community.”
The underlying thread of the pandemics of coronavirus and systemic racism is the breakdown of the system and the collective urge for people to confront the lack of accountability and transparency, said Ryerson’s Roach.
In both pandemics, she says, some people are bearing the brunt more than others and the crisis has prompted the much-needed public discussion around different ideas that had not been widely talked about, such as abolitionism and defunding police.
“You must understand it’s not a mater of a few bad apples and someone is being mean to another person. It is about understanding the way the system perpetuates the unequal distribution of power, inequitable representation of ideas, views and experiences from a cross section of diverse people. We need to look at the system and have hard conversations.”
‘You can’t be afraid’
Back in Pembroke, where her grandmother’s alleged assailants were arrested and charged, Tran says she has been flooded with emails and messages from people who didn’t feel they could speak up about their own experiences of racism.
“A lot of people who see my blog say, ‘You are so creative in writing this.’ They say, ‘You’re courageous.’ What makes a good advocate is you abandon your fear. You can’t be afraid of people calling you a liar or saying your issues don’t matter,” Tran said.
“It’s weird that there had never been a reckoning like this before but now there is. It’s an encouraging sign.”
2020/11/03 Leave a comment
Interesting:
The Rolodex of terms that can describe identity seems to expand and change on a steady basis. So, how do dictionaries both physical and online keep up? Sometimes they don’t.
The term “BIPOC” meaning Black, Indigenous and people of colour, has become the topic of many explainers since June, when this year’s racial reckoning began after George Floyd’s death. According to the New York Times, BIPOC was first used on social media by a Toronto-based account in 2013. Yet the date stamp on Merriam-Webster’s entry for “BIPOC” is just Sept. 3, 2020, and Google has yet to generate its own dictionary landing at the top of search.
It took some time for the word “racialized” to move from academic papers to colloquial use. Even as it has become more common, it’s a toss up if it can be typed out free of a crimson spell check flag depending on the online browser or platform being used.
And according to Merriam Webster’s online time traveller tool, which shows the year words were first recorded, “genderqueer” first appeared in 1995, but when typed into the messaging app Slack, it generates a red underline.
Kory Stamper is a New Jersey-based lexicographer and author of the book “Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries.” Stamper said that the challenge is that many English-speaking countries have set up the dictionary as an authority on language, which is not the case.
“As a lexicographer, you’re always way behind. You’re basically behind (language), picking up the crumbs, so that you can follow where it’s heading,” she said. Dictionaries record a snapshot of language at a particular time, she adds.
Even for words that are age-old but in need of updating, it’s still a process. Stamper once had to update the definition for “god” which hadn’t been updated in 60 years when she was an associate editor at Merriam-Webster. It took her four months.
For a term like “BIPOC” to enter the dictionary, it has to come across a lexicographer’s desk, have a good amount of printed uses, and is ultimately a subjective decision of that worker and the dictionary, if it’s widely used enough to make the cut. And from there, a lot of thought consideration and research is required to make sure that the definition crafted is nuanced and does the word justice.
But just because a word hasn’t made it through this process, doesn’t mean it’s not a real word or accepted term.
“Just because a word is not in the dictionary, does not mean it is not a word,” Stamper said. “That just means that a lexicographer has not found enough evidence or the production cycle has not moved quickly enough (for it to be entered).” If two people are having a conversation, and they understand the meaning of the words they are using, they are using real words, she said.
Still Stamper thinks about what out-of-date tech and dictionaries can mean for people who aren’t native English speakers.
Once, she typed out “person of colour” and got a grammar suggestion which recommended “coloured person,” a phrase that has long gone out of fashion and leans more offensive, in North America today.
Stamper said that while she and a good amount of people are aware that “people of colour” isn’t grammatically incorrect, and is a fixed phrase, she still thinks of people who may be learning English as a foreign language and may be heavily reliant on these prompts. “Would I have enough knowledge of the nuances of the language to know?”
As for the spell check inconsistencies, Vancouver-based software engineer Dawn Chandler notes that tech companies don’t all refer to the same dictionaries or data sets to operate these tools. Nor do they publicly share exactly what those algorithms are.
There would always be a chance of a lag or bias depending on where the data is being collected from, Chandler said. “Dictionaries are written to record and reflect the language people use.” Still, she said, “they can’t capture languages in every region, in every subculture.”
Kola Tubosun is a linguist currently based in the U.K. who created an online dictionary of Yoruba names after noticing that computers often red-underlined common Yoruba names, and also disregarded tonal accents necessary to write them correctly. He advocates for Nigerian languages to be more accessible and recognized through tech. He’s noticed, for example, that in Nigeria, ATMs are usually only in English, which ends up discouraging Nigerians who only speak local dialects from using banks.
Tubosun does note that media in North America, whether publications or dictionaries, do pay attention to new words, new ways of speaking, the language, the interpretation.
One instance he’s noticed where there can be tech and dictionary gaps in English, are in cultural colloquialisms. A phrase like “see you next tomorrow” which is commonly used in Nigerian culture and means “the day after tomorrow” made it into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2020. But with or without the dictionary recognition, it is still a phrase with a fixed meaning.
“There are many levels in which words get adopted and accepted,” he said.
Angelyn Francis is a Toronto-based reporter for the Star covering inequity and inequality. Her reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative. Reach her via email: afrancis@thestar.ca
2020/11/02 Leave a comment
Of interest:
On June 16, three weeks after the killing of George Floyd set off a wave of protests that would blaze across the globe, Joël Babdor received an unexpected email.
It was an invitation for Dr. Babdor, an immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco, to write a blog post to share his “personal experience as a Black man in academia,” the email said. The sender was a marketing manager from Springer Nature, a company that publishes Nature and thousands of other scientific journals. Springer Nature most likely needed little introduction, the email noted to Dr. Babdor, “since you have published with us before.”
Dr. Babdor recalled being excited and flattered by the message. But then, he said, “I started to spiral.”
Three years prior, he had been a first author on a paper published in Nature Immunology, a highly respected journal. But even after nearly a decade in his field, Dr. Babdor could not name more than a few other Black immunologists. He couldn’t help but wonder how much of an anomaly he was.
“Are they contacting all their Black authors?” he mused of Springer Nature. “I was like, ‘How many of us are there?’”
Dr. Babdor posed the question to the company, but it had no answers; it kept no database of Black scientists who had published in Springer Nature journals.
Neither do many other prominent academic publishers in the life sciences.
When asked by The New York Times to provide data on the racial and ethnic diversity of researchers publishing on their platforms, several journals or journal families that deal in the biosciences — including Cell Press, eLife, JAMA Network, the Lancet, PLoS, PNAS, the New England Journal of Medicine and Springer Nature — said that they did not keep tabs on these metrics, or had no numbers to share. A few publishers said that they were early in the process of collecting this data, or had begun discussing the possibility, but could not yet disclose details.
The paucity of data rang a discordant tone, experts said, in the wake of editorials and commentaries published by these journals in recent months that pledged to combat racism in science and medicine.
“They were making those statements from even less of a grounded place than I thought,” said Ambika Kamath, a behavioral ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “What does it mean to say ‘I’m in favor of diversity’ when you haven’t even reckoned with what the state of diversity is in your own institution?”
Only two organizations, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society, provided data on its authors, as well as on their reviewers — the outside experts that vet manuscripts en route to publication, and who can make or break their success. But the data provided from these two pools of authors and reviewers, which was collected by voluntary surveys, accounted for only about 10 to 20 percent of the people who had recently contributed to the journals. And what little data was available revealed a familiar skew.
Two-thirds of the authors and reviewers who reported their race or ethnicity to A.A.A.S., which publishes the Science family of journals, listed themselves as white. People identifying as Black, Latino, Indigenous or Native together composed less than 10 percent of these groups. (Pacific Islanders were grouped together with Asians; this category accounted for roughly one-quarter of authors and reviewers.)
At the Royal Society, which is based in Britain and publishes annual diversity reports, about 75 to 80 percent of the authors and reviewers who responded to the institution identified as white. The remainder of the scientists were grouped together as “Black and minority ethnic.”
Sudip Parikh, the chief executive of A.A.A.S., cautioned against over-interpreting what little data existed. “The data is meaningless right now,” he said. Still, the association decided to publish what data it had, Dr. Parikh said, because “transparency can lead to accountability.”
Other experts noted that a more complete data set would have been unlikely to showcase much more racial and ethnic diversity. People who identify as white and Asian still make up the vast majority of Americans who earn doctorates each year, according to the National Science Foundation.
“This is not at all reflective of the demographics of broader society,” said Cassandra Extavour, a geneticist and evolutionary biologist at Harvard University. “But it is highly representative of the demographics of academia.”
A.A.A.S. also reported that nearly 90 percent of the people who had received awards and honors from the organization — a nomination-based process — identified as white.
“That was a punch in the gut,” said Bianca Jones Marlin, a neuroscientist at Columbia University. “It does not correlate with the amazing work in those that should be honored.”
Studies continue to reaffirm that diversity — on a multitude of axes — boosts performance and the quality of work across disciplines. Science is no exception. Only researchers as diverse as the people and phenomena they study, experts said, can accurately capture the dizzying amount of variation in the natural world and innovate beyond it. Scientists who hail from across spectra of gender, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality and more are also uniquely equipped to collaborate with communities that have been ignored, silenced or even exploited and abused by the discriminatory practices of Western scientists.
“Better science is accomplished with more diverse perspectives,” said Martha Muñoz, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University. “How many discoveries are we missing out on?”
A.A.A.S., the Royal Society and PLoS also provided some figures on racial and ethnic diversity among their employees, including the editors who shepherd scientific papers through the publication process. Close to 90 percent of the members of the Royal Society’s editorial boards were white. Among editors employed in the United States by PLoS, 74 percent were white; none identified as Black. Roughly 80 percent of A.A.A.S. leadership, editors and advisers were white.
In an editorial published in June, the eLife editor in chief, Michael B. Eisen, wrote, “The entire leadership team of eLife is white.” Another editorial, released by the editors of the journal Cell just weeks later, said: “We are 13 scientists. Not one of us is Black.”
Publishing papers in top-tier journals is crucial scholastic currency. But the process is deeply insular, often hinging on personal connections between journal editors and the researchers from whom they solicit and receive manuscripts.
“Science is publicized as a meritocracy: a larger, data-driven enterprise in which the best work and the best people float to the top,” Dr. Extavour said. In truth, she added, universal, objective standards are lacking, and “the access that authors have to editors is variable.”
To democratize this process, editors and reviewers need to level the playing field, in part by reflecting the diversity that journals claim they seek, Dr. Kamath said. “People think this is a cosmetic or surface issue,” she said. “But in reality, the very nature of your scholarship would change if you took diversity, equity and inclusion seriously.”
In responses to The Times, several organizations, including A.A.A.S., Cell Press, the Lancet and PLoS, pointed to ongoing efforts to track and boost equitable gender representation in science. Of the journals who kept tabs on these trends, many had hired women into leadership and editor positions. But where reported, authors and reviewers who identified as male still outnumbered their female colleagues — and not all organizations offered a nonbinary option. (Publishing rates among women have also fallen since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.)
Other journals largely skirted questions.
Jim Michalski, a senior public information officer at JAMA, did not provide data on the company’s employees, instead inviting The Times in an email “to visit our websites and assess the diversity of all aspects of the leadership of each JAMA Network journal, including Editors in Chief, Deputy Editors, Editorial Boards, etc.”
After evaluating some of the publishers’ written responses to The Times, Dr. Crystal Wiley Cené, a physician and health equity researcher at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, said, “I really questioned whether I would submit my work there again.”
The barriers raised to people of color in academia — often referred to as an ivory tower — arise early and often. “There is this false narrative that to achieve diversity, we have to compromise on excellence,” Dr. Muñoz said.
Keolu Fox, a human genome scientist at the University of California, San Diego, recalled being put down by a peer after receiving top marks on a prestigious fellowship during graduate school. “Another student saw my score, and he was like, ‘Oh man, I wish I could have borrowed your brownness for my application package,’” said Dr. Fox, who is Native Hawaiian. “That crushed me.”
Alison Mudditt, the chief executive of PLoS, said her organization was now prioritizing collecting more demographic data from its journals’ contributors. But she added that regulations around privacy, which can affect how such data is collected and stored and can differ between countries, would inevitably bog down the process.
Journals will also need to address low response rates among the contributors they survey, Dr. Marlin, of Columbia University, said. Poorly framed questionnaires could be interpreted as diminishing or even exploiting the people they are targeted to. “People need to hear, ‘We’re not going to use this against you,’” she said.
Some scientists are trying to encourage publishers to speed the process along. Dr. Babdor, for instance, is leading the charge behind #BlackInImmunology week, a celebration of Black immunologists that will take place at the end of November. In the lead-up to the event, the team will be approaching journals and publishers to request that they begin to collect and report more diversity data.
Keolu Fox, a human genome scientist at the University of California, San Diego, recalled being put down by a peer after receiving top marks on a prestigious fellowship during graduate school. “Another student saw my score, and he was like, ‘Oh man, I wish I could have borrowed your brownness for my application package,’” said Dr. Fox, who is Native Hawaiian. “That crushed me.”
Alison Mudditt, the chief executive of PLoS, said her organization was now prioritizing collecting more demographic data from its journals’ contributors. But she added that regulations around privacy, which can affect how such data is collected and stored and can differ between countries, would inevitably bog down the process.
Journals will also need to address low response rates among the contributors they survey, Dr. Marlin, of Columbia University, said. Poorly framed questionnaires could be interpreted as diminishing or even exploiting the people they are targeted to. “People need to hear, ‘We’re not going to use this against you,’” she said.
Some scientists are trying to encourage publishers to speed the process along. Dr. Babdor, for instance, is leading the charge behind #BlackInImmunology week, a celebration of Black immunologists that will take place at the end of November. In the lead-up to the event, the team will be approaching journals and publishers to request that they begin to collect and report more diversity data.
“We share similar goals,” Dr. Babdor said. “It’s time to start this conversation.”
2020/11/02 Leave a comment
Good overview of this study, showing that overall STEM immigrants do worse in Canada than the USA, with Statistics Canada providing possible explanations:
Immigrants make up a large share of university-educated workers in STEM fields in both Canada and the U.S., and a recent study looked into which country sees better outcomes for immigrants in these sectors.
The Statistics Canada study looked at the economic outcomes of immigrants age 25 to 64 who had at least a bachelor’s degree in a STEM— science, technology, engineering, mathematics—field. In Canada, the data is from 2016, while U.S. data is from 2015 to 2017.
In general, U.S. immigrants saw better outcomes.
In both countries, immigrants with at least a bachelor’s degree were twice as likely as the native-born population to have studied in a STEM field. They were also three times as likely to have studied engineering, computer science, and math.
In terms of occupational outcomes, more than half of STEM-educated immigrant workers in both countries held non-STEM jobs. The study said this was, generally, not a big issue because STEM skills are valued in many other occupations. However, it becomes an issue when STEM-educated immigrants in Canada end up working at jobs that do not require a university education. In Canada, only 20 per cent of STEM educated immigrants working outside of the field are actually working a job that requires a university degree. In the U.S., it is 48 per cent.
Among all STEM-educated workers, immigrants earned 25 per cent less than their Canadian-born counterparts. There was no earnings gap between immigrants and U.S.-born workers.
Even within the Canadian STEM field, immigrants who found work earned 17 per cent less than Canadian-born individuals. In the U.S., immigrants earned about 4 per cent more than their native-born counterparts.
STEM-educated immigrants who did not find a job in the field earned about 34 per cent less than Canadians with the same education. The wage gap was narrower in the States, with immigrants earning about 7 per cent less.
Why are outcomes better in the U.S.?
Statistics Canada offers five possible explanations, though little research has been done on this question.
U.S. is first choice for many high-skilled immigrants
It may be that the skills of STEM-educated immigrants entering the U.S. are higher on overage than those entering Canada.
The study referenced a paper that examined the wage gap between immigrants and native-born workers in Australia, Canada and the U.S. It found significant earning gaps in Australia and Canada compared to the U.S. The authors said the tendency for highly-skilled immigrants to choose the U.S. over other countries was a primary factor in their better relative earnings outcomes in the U.S.
More STEM-educated immigrants in Canada
A higher percentage of Canada’s STEM-educated workforce are immigrants compared to the U.S. The number of STEM-educated immigrants who entered Canada rose significantly in the 1990s in response to the high-tech boom, and has remained at high levels since. Canada does not face a general shortage of STEM workers, the study says.
When there’s an abundance of workers, employers may tend to hire STEM graduates from universities that they are familiar with, and who have experience from countries with similar economies to Canada.
Different immigrant selection processes
In order to immigrate to the U.S. as a skilled worker, immigrants typically already have a job offer when they arrive, or they are international students who can be interviewed by prospective employers in the country. Immigrants who entered the U.S. contingent on job offers were more likely to get skilled jobs. Those who entered on a student, trainee, or temporary work visa, had a significant advantage over the native-born population in wages, patenting and publishing. Much of this advantage was due to their comparatively higher levels of education.
Canada’s points-based immigration system, which has been in use since the 1960s, selects economic immigrants based on their human capital. These days, the Express Entry system ranks candidates based on factors like education, work experience, age, and language ability. The highest-scoring candidates get invited to apply for permanent immigration. Though candidates can get extra points for having a job offer, in some cases, it is not required in order to immigrate to Canada.
Canadian employers play a larger role in immigrant selection in the Canadian Experience Class (CEC) federal immigration program, as well as many Provincial Nominee Programs (PNP), than compared to the Federal Skilled Worker Program.
The study found that STEM-educated immigrants that immigrate through the CEC do relatively well compared to others, and those who go through the PNP typically have the poorest outcomes. One major difference is that the CEC requires immigrants to have at least one year of skilled work experience in Canada, whereas the PNP is more varied, and includes pathways for low-skilled and medium-skilled workers to become permanent residents.
Differences in country of education
Country of education is one of the most important determinants of immigrant earnings, along with language and race or visible minority status, the study says.
Country of education may differ significantly among STEM-educated immigrants in Canada and the U.S. STEM immigrants educated in non-Western countries do not do as well, economically, as others. The study suggest this is for a number of reasons, for example, the quality of education may be lower, or perceived to be lower. In the absence of a shortage of STEM workers, employers may prefer to hire those educated in Western counties. Also, some credentials are not recognized by professional associations in the host country, either for valid or invalid reasons, and this may prevent immigrants from developing countries from getting STEM jobs. Language or cultural issues may also prevent immigrants from being able to use their STEM education. Discrimination may also be a factor.
Other factors unrelated to immigration policy
Factors unrelated to immigration policies may also contribute to better outcomes of STEM-educated immigrants in the U.S., for example, the U.S. industrial structure may result in a higher demand for STEM-educated workers in comparison to other countries.
2020/11/02 Leave a comment
Never heard of this index before and no detailed explanation of methodology used to assess “implementing Islamic ideals” rather than religious practise and observance:
New Zealand has been named the country that most fits Islamic ideals for the second year in a row, but the area of everyday finance is still difficult for Muslims, says a financial commentator.
In the 2019 Islamicity index, released earlier this year, New Zealand is ranked first overall, followed by Sweden, Iceland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark and Ireland. The top Muslim-majority country is United Arab Emirates (UAE) at 44.
New Zealand ranks 3rd in terms of its economy, 4th for legal and governance, 5th for human and political rights, and 8th for international relations.
According to Islam, the use of money for the purpose of making money is forbidden, meaning the concept of interest is not allowed. Wealth must be generated from legitimate trade and asset-based investment, and investors are also required to invest in things with social and ethical benefit.
Financial commentator Janine Starks said that despite the high ranking, the New Zealand system was not helpful to Muslims in terms of their everyday personal finance needs.
Source: New Zealand ranked the most ‘Islamic country in the world’ in annual index
2020/10/31 Leave a comment
Some practical pointers:
We’ve all been there.
At a dinner party. In line at the post office. On a Zoom meeting. You can feel it coming: that awful joke your friend likes to tell about immigrants. Questions like “Don’t all lives matter?” or “Did he resist arrest?” The discomfort becomes palpable. Your gut twists. God, I hope someone says something, you think with increasing desperation. And so does everyone else.
This phenomenon, in which no one in a group of witnesses chooses to disrupt a problematic event, is called the bystander effect, said Thomas Vance, a national certified counselor and a postdoctoral psychology fellow at the New School for Social Research in New York.
“We like to think that we live in a world where people will jump in,” Dr. Vance said in an email, but “the greater the number of people present, the less likely people are to help a person in need or distress.”
“This happens because being part of a large crowd makes it so no single person has to take responsibility for an action,” he added.
This diffusion of responsibility can make well-intentioned people complicit in whatever acts of violence or discrimination they silently witness.
To avoid that silent complicity, people can learn to become active bystanders: individuals who work to create cultures that actively reject harmful or discriminatory behavior through targeted interventions.
First, let’s talk about the difference between an ally and an active bystander.
An ally is someone who “does not suffer the same oppressions” as you do but who “supports your struggle for rights and freedom,” Micki McElya, a history professor at the University of Connecticut, wrote in the Boston Review.
Absent from that definition is action. Active bystanders see something bad happen and make discreet choices to respond to the concerning behavior, said Monica Reyna, a violence prevention educator at the Advocates, a nonprofit in rural Idaho. That can take many forms, such as recording suspected police brutality or challenging everyday microaggressions like dinner-table racism. It can be leaning into humor to unpack “compliments” — for example, your boss describes a Black colleague as “articulate,” the subtext being that this is somehow exceptional — or educating friends about the problematic origins of commonplace expressions.
To beat the bystander effect, we have to retrain our brains and establish new patterns of behavior. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of ways to do this.
“We began to categorize all of the anti-bias actions that could be taken,” said Derald Wing Sue, a professor at Columbia who studies the psychology of racism and antiracism and has written extensively about microaggression theory. “There were literally thousands of them.”
One of the most effective tactics, Dr. Sue said, is what he calls the art of the comeback.
“A person will say to me, ‘You speak excellent English,’ and I will say, ‘You do, too, John!’” said Dr. Sue, who is Chinese-American. “The ‘compliment’ has a hidden communication to me that I’m a perpetual alien in my own country, I’m not a true American.” He said that “by simply reversing it, it may have a humorous or sarcastic impact” that reveals the comment’s underlying meaning.
Dorothy J. Edwards, president and founder of Alteristic, a nonprofit consultancy that provides bystander training, focuses on “the three D’s”: direct, distract and delegate.
“We emphasize that ‘direct’ doesn’t have to be combative or confrontational; it just means you address the situation directly,” Dr. Edwards said. This can be as simple as “checking in on the person at risk” by asking if the person is OK or telling the perpetrator to “knock it off.”
Even your physical presence can be enough to keep someone from being the target of racial violence, said LaVonne Pepe, a social worker and a senior trainer at Alteristic.
If you witness a concerning event that may escalate into harm, Dr. Edwards recommends creating a diversion. For example, suggest going to get food. Or tell a white lie: Say someone’s car is being towed. Interrupt a heated discussion by asking for a phone charger. Doing so can help to de-escalate a situation and give the person on the receiving end of the behavior a chance to exit the scene.
Delegation is even easier: Enlist the help of that one friend who actually likes direct confrontation or has the clout to absorb any pushback. The idea is to just do something, whatever that may be.
Before Alteristic trainers get into the three D’s, they focus on why people don’t speak out in the first place. Training starts by examining what human social behavior and thought patterns also conspire against us.
“A lot of us are taught how to mind our business, or that if it does not involve us then we shouldn’t interject,” Dr. Vance said. “We have to unlearn that particular method and relearn strategies to challenge our biases that we have developed over time.”
For people with privilege, losing that privilege can be a strong demotivator, Dr. Sue said. Many white Americans learn from an early age not to talk about race, which makes it harder for them to speak out.
“When a young child makes an obvious, naïve observation of skin tone, eyes and physical differences, what do parents do? They hush them up,” he said, adding that this can feed into adults’ claims of “color blindness,” which he explores in his book “Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence.”
“If you are colorblind, you are color mute,” he said.
The socialization of women, too, can also prevent them from being active bystanders, Dr. Edwards said.
Women learn “certain messages of what it means to be feminine and a woman,” she said, adding that the privilege of being white makes it “even easier for me to not make waves,” especially if not doing so helps retain that privilege.
And for people who hold marginalized identities, making waves can mean facing consequences, according to a recent article in Harvard Business Review. If you’re the only Black person at your company, for instance, calling out your boss’s inappropriate jokes may reduce opportunities for you.
Active bystanders should strive to intervene early and often.
What we need, Dr. Sue said, is for allies “to find the moral courage to intervene when they see a moral transgression occurring.”
“When no action is taken and people remain silent in the face of racism, it causes pain and suffering to the targets, it creates guilt in the mind of onlookers and it creates a false consensus that racism is OK,” he said in an email.
That suffering compounds the mental and emotional burden that marginalized people already carry, Ms. Pepe said. Continued exposure to systemic and casual discrimination increases stressand elevates cortisol, compromises mental health and can even lead to physical pain.
Almost by definition, an active bystander is a person who chooses to “act in the moment” when he or she witnesses problematic behavior, Dr. McElya said.
That said, there is no statute of limitations on stepping up. If you miss your window, follow up with the perpetrator later in a private conversation. Or share resources through email or social media.
“The way that you choose to say it is up to you,” Ms. Pepe said. “But at the end of the day, if your value is that people shouldn’t be hurt, for whatever the reason is, you can find a way to say that if you care about it enough.”
It is hard! The fatigue that we all feel is real and it is normal. Standing up as an active bystander, going to protests, engaging in online discussions, educating yourself and your children … all of that means exposing yourself to harsh realities like the killing of George Floyd, systemic discrimination and violence. And the deeper you get into these realities, the more you begin to see how entrenched they are.
“Those things are all very draining and all of us become traumatized,” said Beryl Domingo, an active bystander coordinator at Quabbin Mediation, a community-based organization in Orange, Ma., that offers dispute mediation services and active bystander training. “No one is unaffected by this. You’d have to be a robot not to be affected by these vicious incidents.”
The author Robin DiAngelo coined the term “white fragility” to describe what she calls the “silence, defensiveness, argumentation, certitude and other forms of pushback” that white people manifest when confronted with their own racial biases.
But, according to Ms. Domingo, building the “moral courage” to confront these feelings and become a more active bystander can help to make the world a more equitable place.
“It takes work and it takes time, but you do get better, actually,” she said. “Because you begin to feel confident, you begin to feel, Hey, I can do this.”
You will. Try again. Build resilience.
If you’re uncomfortable and exhausted, it means you’re headed in the right direction. Like anything worth doing, becoming an active bystander takes practice.
By building up “your moral courage muscle, you actually gain strength,” Ms. Domingo said. “And other people see what you’re doing, and they begin to do the same thing.”
Keep in mind that, despite your best intentions and efforts, you won’t always have the impact you desire. Pre-empt potential harm by leaning into the “bystander” part of being an active bystander, Dr. McElya said, and by taking your cues from marginalized people on how to show up for them.
You won’t get it right every time. You might be unsure of how to intervene or miss your window for a snappy comeback. That’s just reality, Ms. Edwards said, because in real life “we have barriers.” Don’t beat yourself up about it. Instead, plan to do better next time. Continue your education about the issues that matter, and remember that it’s OK to start small.
Ms. Domingo said, “When you don’t do something, the person doing the harm assumes that you’re in agreement with their actions.”
“If we don’t challenge them, they will continue to do what they do and they will influence other people to do the same,” she added.
More resources about being an active bystander:
The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity website has a virtual training and downloadable materials.
Hollaback offers various trainings in New York City and a free guide to bystander interventions.
This Guide to Responding to Microaggressions explains identity-based microaggressions and ways to counteract them.
2020/10/31 Leave a comment
Of note:
By now, the world knows that Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and his Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) have eroded the liberal principles of the Indian Constitution and are turning the country into an increasingly illiberal democracy. It is common knowledge that Mr. Modi thrives on the grievances and bigotries that pit privileged majorities against minorities living in fear.
Less familiar, but much more hopeful, is the response of the main target of this majoritarian assault: India’s Muslim minority — roughly 172 million people who account for just about 14.2 percent of India’s total population of approximately 1.32 billion people, roughly 79.8 percent of whom are Hindu.
This large religious minority of Muslims has gone through a hard time in recent years at the hands of Hindu supremacists: They have faced lynchings, lethal riots, and social and political disenfranchisement.
When minorities are pushed to such walls, they may retreat into a siege mentality that breeds radicalization. But India’s Muslims have not come up with calls for violent jihad, nor chants for Shariah law. Instead, they have embraced and emphasized the blessings of liberal democracy by placing their faith in the Constitution of India and insisting on their constitutional rights as citizens.
This hopeful tack was most visible during the mass protests for three months that started in December against the Citizenship Amendment Act, an unabashedly discriminatory law enacted by the government that fast-tracked citizenship for Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist immigrants from neighboring countries, but not for Muslims, whom Home Minister Amit Shah tried to dehumanize as “termites.”
Mr. Shah has also proposed a national register of citizens requiring documentary evidence for place of birth and residence that many Indians, especially the poor, lack. Of these the non-Muslims could escape through the loophole in the new Citizenship Amendment Act, but Muslims would find themselves stateless and liable to be put into detention camps.
In response, Shaheen Bagh, a neighborhood in New Delhi, held a 101-day sit-in against the citizenship law and the proposed citizenship registry, with the protest led not by conservative Muslim clerics, but by Muslim women. Thousands occupied a protest tent 24 hours each day by rotating in shifts and displaying banners saying, “We stand for peace, harmony and fraternity.” They also showed portraits of the Hindu leaders who led India’s independence movement, and festooned their dais with the preamble of the secular Constitution.
The B.J.P.’s propaganda machine depicted Muslim protesters as “traitors” and “anti-nationals,” but they were wearing headbands saying, “I love India.” waving Indian flags, and repeatedly singing the national anthem.
In other campaigns, Indian Muslim women in recent years challenged not just Hindu supremacism but also patriarchy within their own community. Through successful appeals to the Supreme Court — which upholds India’s constitutional principles — they obtained a legal ban in 2017 on “instant divorce,” a contested Shariah ruling that gives Muslim men the right to abandon their wives at will. Another Muslim women’s group gained a 2016 court decision that enforced women’s constitutionally guaranteed right of equal entry, along with men, to a Sufi shrine in Mumbai.
All such liberal moves, according to Sharik Laliwala, a Muslim Indian commentator, signify “a fundamental transformation in the political strategy of the Muslim community.” Indian Muslims, he added, are “marrying a constitutional phraseology of freedom, justice and equality with religious notions.”
Irfan Ahmad, an Indian anthropologist based at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, argues that what is happening is a new emphasis rather than a transformation, which Indian Muslims have always sought along with pluralism. The protests in Shaheen Bagh, he adds, highlighted the rift between the B.J.P.’s rule by and for the Hindu majority and a new vision of democracy that would uphold the rights and dignity of all Indians, including Muslims.
Yet there is still a danger that B.J.P. ruthlessness may backfire and drive Muslims into radicalism. In September, Umar Khalid, a secular left-wing student leader who is Muslim, was arrested on highly contested charges of orchestrating Hindu-Muslims riots last February in Delhi, where most victims were Muslim.
All of this means that India is on a very wrong track. A country that does not treat its minorities as equal human beings will be not the world’s biggest democracy, but rather a tyranny of the majority.
The results may be social strife, radicalism, decline of economic progress, and the ruination of India’s image abroad. The country is already being criticized by human rights organizations for violating human rights in Kashmir, and more recently for forcing Amnesty International’s office in India to close.
India’s story could hold lessons for Muslims elsewhere. Across the border, Pakistan long ago established what India’s B.J.P. seeks: an ethno-religious state dominated by the majority. In Pakistan’s case, this means the hegemony of Sunni Muslims at the expense of minorities such as Shiite Muslims, Ahmadis or Christians.
Farther in the East, in Malaysia, Malay-Muslim supremacy has been an official ideology since the founding of the multireligious nation in 1957. In Turkey, the Islam-infused populism of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with its own insatiable wrath against “traitors” and “anti-nationals,” has strong parallels with Mr. Modi’s populism. And in the parlance of Islamist movements everywhere, “liberalism” and “secular state” are only dirty words, if not heresies.
Alas, it seems that many Muslims in countries other than India enjoy the tyranny of the majority when they themselves are in the majority and control the state, while others realize the blessings of liberalism if they are in minorities. Of course, such a double standard is neither virtuous nor defensible.
A more principled Muslim view of politics is needed, and for that, Muslim opinion leaders should observe the experience of their coreligionists in India. The latter, the largest religious minority in the world, has an important story with a lesson: Human rights and liberties must be defended in every nation, in every civilization. Without them, only power rules. And instead of betting on power, which may be won or lost, they should try to constrain it everywhere, so that no one group is oppressed and everyone is free.
Mustafa Akyol, a contributing Opinion writer, is a senior fellow on Islam and modernity at the Cato Institute, and the author of the forthcoming book “Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance.” Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, is a columnist for The Times of India, and a commentator for India’s television.
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