Thomas Chatterton Williams On Debate, Criticism And The Letter In ‘Harper’s Magazine’

2020/07/13 Leave a comment

A few articles over the Harper’s letter, starting with the Harper’s editor who organized it:

Thomas Chatterton Williams, along with more than 150 prominent journalists, authors and writers, published a letter decrying what it called the “intolerant climate that has set in on all sides” of debate in Harper’s Magazine on Tuesday, fueling a heated controversy over free speech, privilege and the role of social media in public discourse.

“The free exchange of information and ideas,the lifeblood of a liberal society is daily becoming more constricted,” the letter states. “While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”

The letter cites various harms it says have been caused by this state of affairs and concludes that “the restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.”

Williams, an author and columnist for Harper’s Magazine and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, told NPR the letter was meant to defend everyone’s “right to argue back and to take ideas, if they’re faulty, expose them to the light of day and counter them effectively.”

The letter immediately faced backlash. At least two signers distanced themselves from it. Some critics argued that including signatures from certain writers, including J.K. Rowling — who has made comments seen as transphobic on Twitter — took away from the sentiment of the letter altogether. A group of more than 160 writers, journalists, academics and others responded with a letter of their own in The Objective, which argued that the very problems the Harper’s Magazine letter lays out are not trends at all.

“In reality, their argument alludes to but does not clearly lay out specific examples, and undermines the very cause they have appointed themselves to uphold,” the counter-letter read. “In truth, Black, brown, and LGBTQ+ people — particularly Black and trans people — can now critique elites publicly and hold them accountable socially; this seems to be the letter’s greatest concern. What’s perhaps even more grating to many of the signatories is that a critique of their long held views is persuasive.”

Some people signed the counter-letter anonymously but included professional affiliations. (At least four people purportedly associated with NPR signed the counter-letter; no current NPR News employees signed the Harper’s letter.)

Williams talked with NPR’s Michel Martin on All Things Considered about why he helped spearhead the crafting of the letter, what it was meant to accomplish and how it was received by the public.

Interview Highlights

On what motivated him to write the letter

It was not one event in particular, it was a kind of mood or a climate that myself and several of the other drafters have been discussing for some time now and it was in late May, early June that we began thinking that maybe we would get together and write something and see if anybody would sign it.

On the criticism that some of the signers have been accused of transphobia and that their presence on the letter is seen as excusing their bigotry

These are principles that anyone could sign and that everybody should actually be able to uphold. And I think that part of what the letter is trying to do is trying to argue against the idea that you have to look around and Google every statement that anybody on the list has ever said to know if you feel comfortable signing it. The point is that that’s irrelevant.

On if he accomplished what he hoped to

What I think we did is we moved the needle a little bit in some of these spaces. Someone has to look around and say, “Well actually, a lot of these people on the list I do still want to work with. I do still want to make Netflix adaptations of some of their work. I do still want them to make podcasts or report at The New York Times or The New Yorker.” And so I have to take into consideration their point of view too, not just these kind of whipped up mobs online that are faceless and that kind of I’ll never interact with but somehow are now penetrating the inner sanctums of the HR department.

I think we’ve moved the needle a little bit in making people understand that there’s not actually nearly as much consensus on some of these impulses as it may sometimes seem if you spend too much time on Twitter.

Source: Thomas Chatterton Williams On Debate, Criticism And The Letter In ‘Harper’s Magazine’

And on the counter letter:

Three days after an open letter signed by more than 150 cultural luminaires darkly warning of a growing “intolerant climate” stirred intense response on the internet, another group issued a counterblast on Friday accusing them of elitism, hypocrisy and complicity in the bullying they decry.

The first letter, titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” was posted online on Tuesday by Harper’s Magazine. Signed by prominent figures in the arts, media and academia, including Margaret Atwood, Wynton Marsalis and J.K. Rowling, it warned of a growing tide of illiberalism and a weakening of “our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.”

The response letter, titled “A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” chided the Harper’s statement for what it characterized as lofty generalities, as well as ignoring the realities of who actually gets to be heard. If its more than 150 signers were far less well-known, that was perhaps part of the point.

The Harper’s letter “does not deal with the problem of power: who has it and who does not,” according to the response, published at The Objective, a news and commentary site that explores “how journalism has interacted with historically ignored communities.”

“Harper’s has decided to bestow its platform not to marginalized people,” it said, “but to people who already have large followings and plenty of opportunities to make their views heard.”

It continued: “The letter reads as a caustic reaction to a diversifying industry — one that’s starting to challenge diversifying norms that have protected bigotry. The writers of the letter use seductive but nebulous concepts and coded language to obscure the actual meaning behind their words.”

Almost as soon as it appeared on Tuesday, “That Letter,” as Twitter quickly began calling the Harper’s statement, set off rounds of debate about free speech, privilege and the existence or nonexistence of so-called cancel culture.

Akela Lacy, a politics reporter at The Intercept who signed and helped edit the counter-letter, said it grew organically out of a conversation in a Slack channel called Journalists of Color. Initially, there was some wariness of feeding what she and others on Twitter wryly referred to as “letter discourse.”

“There are so many more important things going on in media right now,” Ms. Lacy said, citing in particular threats and harassment experienced by journalists from marginalized groups.

“But the fact is there are a lot of people, particularly Black and trans, expressing very valid concerns about the climate right now,” she said. “Letting this very lofty position go unanswered didn’t feel like it was benefiting anyone.”

The prominence of the Harper’s signers has been a flash point in the conversation, with some deriding that letter as the whining of “assorted rich fools,” as a writer for The Daily Beast put it. The response letter characterized it as a defense of “the intellectual freedom of cis white intellectuals,” which “has never been under threat en masse.”

On Friday, after the response letter was posted, the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who spearheaded the Harper’s letter, highlighted the more than two dozen Black and other nonwhite intellectuals who signed his letter.

“You know, just a bunch of privileged solipsistic elites worrying about problems that don’t exist,” Mr. Williams, who is Black, tweeted. “So far, haven’t seen any of the formerly imprisoned signatories or the ones who have experienced fatwas cave to the social media backlash, though,” he added.

His dig was a reference to the fact that criticism of the Harper’s letter centered as much on who signed it as its content. And within hours of its publication, some who had signed distanced themselves from it, saying they would not have joined if they had been aware of some of the other signers. The inclusion of J.K. Rowling, who has drawn condemnation for a series of recent comments widely seen as anti-transgender, drew particular ire.

The new letter included one person, the historian Kerri Greenidge, who had signed the Harper’s letter, according to emails reviewed by The New York Times, but then asked that her name be removed, saying on Twitter, “I do not endorse this @Harpers letter.”

It also included a number of people signing anonymously, including three listed as journalists at The New York Times. (The Harper’s letter was signed by four Opinion columnists at The Times, who used their names.)

Ms. Lacy said she was aware of the “irony” of an open letter that included redacted signatures, but said that some people who criticized the Harper’s letter had gotten threats or feared workplace retaliation.

“There’s a difference between being canceled in the way Harper’s letter is talking about and actually getting threats of violence,” she said.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/arts/open-letter-debate.html?ref=oembed

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How a Canadian woman pushed a popular South Asian matchmaking site to drop its skin-tone filter

2020/07/13 Leave a comment

Impressive successful advocacy:

When Meghan Nagpal decided to take her chances at finding love by signing up for a popular matchmaking website, she never expected to be asked to describe her skin tone — let alone the skin tone she would find desirable in a partner.

About a year ago, Nagpal joined Shaadi.com, a website that asks users to choose potential matches based on family background, status and body type. She said there was also a filter asking users for their preference of skin colour.

“I felt really uncomfortable,” said the University of Toronto graduate student, who is originally from Vancouver.

Nagpal soon deleted her account, but returned to the site last month after feeling some pressure from her mother to get married. She was again confronted with the skin-tone filter, which allowed users to select from “fair,” “wheatish” or “dark.”

This time, after all the worldwide anti-racism protests inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, her discomfort turned to outrage.

The skin-tone filter, she said, sparked her realization that something needed to be done about what she called the South Asian community’s bias against skin colour.

“There’s a preference for fair skin in the culture when it comes to marriage and finding a life partner,” she said.

Discrimination within communities of colour

To Nagpal, the need to do something felt urgent because even though many prominent people in the South Asian community have come out in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, there are still some, including Bollywood actors, who continue to promote creams that promise to lighten skin tone.

She received a one-sentence response saying the filter was a popular feature with parents looking to arrange marriages for their children.

“Most parents do require this as an option so it is visible on the site,” read the response sent on June 10.

Nagpal then posted the response to a Facebook group with more than 2,000 South Asian women in North America.

They argued that it perpetuates a form of racial discrimination known as shadeism or colourism that’s prevalent in the South Asian community — with light skin being historically viewed as more desirable than dark.

Skin-tone filters removed

Overnight, the petition had amassed more than 1,400 signatures and Nagpal said the skin-tone filter was no longer on the site.

In an email, a spokesperson for Shaadi.com told CBC Toronto that they were not aware of the skin-tone filter and claimed it was a “non-functional aspect” of the site.

“There is no skin colour filter on Shaadi.com, on any of its platforms,” the spokesperson said.

A petition for shaadi.com to remove its skin-tone filter amassed more than 1,400 signatures overnight. Soon after, Nagpal said the skin-tone filter was no longer on the site. (Shaadi.com)

“[It] is a several year old product debris left-over in one of our advanced search pages on the website, which is non-functional and barely used and hence it did not come to our attention,” the email reads.

“We do not discriminate based on skin colour and our member base is as diverse and pluralistic as the world today is.”

Two other prominent South Asian matrimonial sites — Bharat Matrimony and Jeevansathi.com — were also pressured to remove skin-tone filters.

CBC News contacted both websites for comment on this story, but received no response.

‘Colourism is very easy to fester in communities’

Thurka Gunaratnam, a filmmaker and educator based in Toronto who has focused on shadeism in her work, says the filter did not come as a shock to her.

“When a group has been historically oppressed and they have not been given the freedom to understand what their own identity is, something like colourism is very easy to fester in communities,” said Gunaratnam.

Toronto-based writer and filmmaker Mirusha Yogarajah participated in a 2016 social media campaign called #unfairandlovely.

The campaign targeted the South Asian population in particular and was meant to tackle the issue of shadeism and the popularity of skin lightening creams — including one called “Fair and Lovely.”

“It’s so embedded in us from such a young age, it just makes me really sad,” Yogarajah told CBC News.

Prejudice should not be confused with preference, Gunaratnam said.

“In the wake of talking about colorism and racism, one thing that will help with unlearning is to really ask ourselves: Is it a preference or is it prejudice?

“And if it’s a preference, why is it that?”

Source: How a Canadian woman pushed a popular South Asian matchmaking site to drop its skin-tone filter

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Dark skinned patients left out of COVID-19 studies, as minorities some of the hardest bit by the virus

2020/07/13 Leave a comment

Of note, another example of systemic bias and discrimination:

Clinical images of patients with hives, swollen lips, chickenpox-like rashes, and red or purple lesions on the feet known as “covid toes,” have been published in medical studies since the start of the pandemic, demonstrating how the virus can affect the skin.

These images can help doctors diagnose patients who are otherwise asymptomatic – if they have light skin.

But images of darker-skinned patients have largely not been included in medical studies showing how COVID-19 can present on the skin, even as the disease has disproportionately affected people of colour in Canada and the United States. Symptoms can appear very differently on dark skin tones, underscoring the need for inclusion in clinical studies.

“Black folks in Canada, specifically Toronto, are overrepresented in terms of the burden of COVID-19,” said Bolu Ogunyemi, a dermatologist and clinical assistant professor of medicine at Memorial University in Newfoundland.

“So it’s unfortunate that we’re actually underrepresented in records of the manifestation from skin for this disease.”

The COVID-19 studies reflect a pattern in which darker skinned patients are largely missing from medical literature, part of an issue of racism within the medical system.

A literature review in The British Journal of Dermatology found that out of 36 studies showing images of COVID-19 presentations on skin published between December, 2019, to May, 2020, there were zero images of dark skin tones.

Researchers evaluated each clinical image using the six-point Fitzpatrick scale, which categorizes skin tones from lightest to darkest, and found that 92 per cent of the 130 images were of skin in the first three categories, which range from the lightest coloured skin to a medium tone. There were zero images of skin in the two darkest Fitzpatrick categories.

While it is not yet clear how significant these skin lesions can be in diagnosing COVID-19, understanding what they look like could lead to earlier testing. Some provinces, such as Nova Scotia, have added symptoms of red or purple fingers or toes to a list of symptoms that indicate a person should get tested.

“We’re still trying to figure out what these manifestations actually mean,” said the main author of the study, Jenna Lester, who is an assistant professor of dermatology at the University of California, San Francisco.

“But if there is a rash that patients can identify themselves when they were perhaps asymptomatic and can use it as a way to know they need to get tested but we’re not showing it in dark skin – it is a huge disservice to patients.”

Including examples of what diseases can look like on dark skin is important because indicators such as redness may be difficult to spot on dark skin, said Lynn McKinley-Grant, associate professor of Dermatology at Howard University College of Medicine and president of the U.S.-based Skin of Color Society.

Redness on light skin can appear as a different shade on darker skin, she said, or not appear at all. Doctors may have to employ different diagnostic methods to determine the issue, such as using touch to see whether the skin is warm. Sometimes, darker skin can also react very differently.

“In the textbooks it’ll describe a rash as flat and not itchy, but in darker skin types, it’ll be raised and itchy, but still be in the same pattern,” Dr. McKinley-Grant said.

The Skin of Color Society has shared images on social media of darker skin showing symptoms that are similar in appearance to COVID-19 symptoms.

While most health care units in Canada do not yet collect race-based data on COVID-19 patients, statistics show that the most diverse geographic areas also have some of the highest rates COVID-19. In early June, after health care professionals across the country raised concerns about the lack of data on how COVID-19 has affected racialized populations, Ontario had granted some health units permission to begin collecting race-based data.

In the U.S., where race-based data are available, studies show that African-Americans are almost three times as likely to test positive for the virus than white people.

Some doctors in Canada have linked the lack of representation in COVID-19 studies to larger issues of representation in medical studies and textbooks, across all disciplines.

Edgar Akuffo-Addo, a first-year medical student at the University of Toronto, says he has experienced this first hand.

In a first-aid training course he recently completed, Mr. Akuffo-Addo said participants were instructed to check for signs of shock by pressing down on a patient’s fingernails and waiting to see how long it took to turn red again.

“I tried to do the test on myself, and I couldn’t see it on my own skin,” he said. In addition, he said all the patients featured in the video training materials were white.

Mr. Akuffo-Addo describes the lack of representation as “troubling and worrying” and has embarked on his own review of clinical images of skin conditions related to COVID-19, and has so far examined 1,000 images in studies from Spain, France, Italy, the U.S. and Canada. Mr. Akuffo-Addo said that he confirmed with the authors of those studies that all patients were white.

Dr. Ogunyemi said the study of dermatology has been historically white.

When the field was first developing in Britain, the U.S. and Canada, he said, there was a smaller proportion of people of colour, so the criteria for the diagnosis of skin issues was centred around people with lighter skin. But these criteria have not changed significantly since that time.

“The problem is our population in these countries is changing – but the definition of skin disease is not keeping up with the pace.”

Studies also show that a mistrust of the medical system is a major reason why people of colour may choose not to participate in medical studies, stemming from a history of mistreatment as well as discrimination within the medical system.

Dr. Ogunyemi said that because the information on treating dark skin may not be readily available, Canadian doctors may have to take additional steps to ensure they are comfortable and able to treat people with dark skin.

“I think like a lot of things, you have to take a conscious effort, you have to go out of your way.”

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Black Lives Matter Gets Indians Talking About Skin Lightening And Colorism

2020/07/11 Leave a comment

Prompting a needed discussion:

Chandana Hiran loves reading, arts and crafts, and recycling. At 22, she’s enrolled in college, studying to be an accountant. She considers herself a feminist.

But something else is a big part of her identity too.

“I’m slightly dark,” Hiran tells NPR in a phone interview from her family’s Mumbai home, her bold voice suddenly going soft. “I’d be called one of the dark-skinned people in our country.”

In India, colorism is rampant. Darker-skinned Indians, especially women, face discrimination at work, at school — even in love. Some arranged marriage websites let families filter out prospective brides by skin tone.

So it may be no wonder that about half of all skin care products in India, according to the World Health Organization, are lighteners designed to “brighten” or “lift” — essentially to whiten — a user’s skin color. WHO estimates that such products amount to about a $500 million industry in India alone. Until recently, some of them even came with shade cards — like paint swatches — so that users could track the lightening of their skin.

Some products claim to “lighten” the skin using multivitamins such as vitamin B3, and many users have said they’re happy with the results. Other products may contain mercury or bleach, which WHO cautions can damage skin cells. Other skin-lightening treatments, including intravenous and pill formulas, have been linked to liver and kidney damage.

The most popular brand of skin lightener is Fair & Lovely, made by the consumer goods giant Unilever. Generations of Indians have grown up with grocery store shelves lined with Fair & Lovely creams and face washes. They’ve been sold in India since 1975 with a marketing campaign of TV commercials and billboards that equate pale, fair skin with beauty and success.

Those are stereotypes that many find deeply unfair. And as the Black Lives Matter movement spreads across the world, it has prompted a reckoning about skin color in India and a brazen revolt against one of its most popular cosmetics.

Feeling insecure

Being slightly browner than the average Indian, by her own assessment, has left Hiran feeling insecure all her life.

“Even the smallest of things, like not wanting to wear brighter colors or just random people coming to you and saying, ‘Oh, maybe you should apply something on your face,’ ” Hiran recalls. “There is not a single Bollywood actress who could represent my skin tone.”

Instead, Bollywood actresses star in TV commercials for skin-lightening creams.

The Indian beauty queen-turned-actress Priyanka Chopra — who starred in the U.S. TV hit Quantico — is one of the most famous. In 2008, she appeared in a series of promotional videos for a product called White Beauty. She played a forlorn-looking single woman who, in the first episode, watched a slightly lighter-skinned woman strut past with a handsome man on her arm. In later episodes, after she used the skin-lightening cream, the man fell in love with her instead.

Another ad for Fair & Lovely suggests using it before going to a job interview.

Praise for white skin is a theme in popular music too. In a 2015 hit song called “Chittiyaan Kalaiyaan” — which means “pale wrists” in the Hindi language — the male singer croons about how a woman’s pale skin makes him swoon.

“Oh my darling, angel baby, white kalaiyaan drives me crazy!” the refrain goes.

When Hiran was a teenager, listening to such songs, she started using Fair & Lovely. She didn’t even have to buy it; her mother always had some in the family medicine cabinet.

The impact of Black Lives Matter

So that was the backdrop in India this spring, when George Floyd was killed in the U.S. and calls for racial justice echoed around the world.

“Can Indians support Black Lives Matter when we ourselves have so many prejudices?” asks activist Kavitha Emmanuel, founder of a women’s charity in southern India called Women of Worth.

In 2009, Emmanuel started a campaign called Dark Is Beautiful to combat colorism in India. Over the years, while counseling girls, she says she realized how deeply hurt Indian women have been by media messages about skin color.

“In our counseling sessions, this would keep surfacing. [They would keep] saying, ‘I am dark,’ ” she told NPR by phone from her home in Chennai. “It is not just about self-esteem in terms of their looks, but it also affects their overall performance in life.”

A study confirms that the scenes in TV commercials for skin-lightening creams may sadly be accurate. A 2015 report by professors at Southern Illinois University and the Rochester Institute of Technology found that in India:

“A woman’s dark skin can preclude her from entering positions such as news anchor, sales associate, flight attendant and even receptionist because these jobs require exposure to and interaction with the public, who will judge her as unattractive, unworthy and incompetent. Fair-skinned women, conversely, are seen in most of these roles; their skin tone grants them unearned privilege and power within organizations as a result.”

Emmanuel says many Indians now expressing support for Black Lives Matter in the U.S. are blind to such discrimination against racial and religious minorities at home. Many of the same celebrities tweeting about racial justice in the U.S. have actually starred in ads for skin-lightening creams.

Bollywood backlash

Among the first Indian celebrities to express public sympathy after Floyd’s killing in the U.S. was the film star Chopra, who posted a lengthy message on Instagram in May with some of Floyd’s last words: “please, i can’t breathe.”

“There is so much work to be done and it needs to starts at an individual level on a global scale,” she wrote. “We all have a responsibility to educate ourselves and end this hate.”

Her comments drew a backlash online. When Chopra’s husband, American singer/songwriter Nick Jonas, tweeted that he and his wife “Pri” have “heavy hearts” over “systemic racism, bigotry and exclusion,” one user replied: “Was pri’s ‘heart heavy’ before or after she promoted skin lightening creams?”

Chopra has not replied to the tweets. But in a 2017 interview with Vogue India, she said she regretted appearing in ads for skin-lightening products. “I used it [when I was very young]. Then when I was an actor, around my early twenties, I did a commercial for a skin-lightening cream. I was playing that girl with insecurities. And when I saw it, I was like, ‘Oh s**t. What did I do?’ ” Chopra was quoted as saying.

She told Vogue that she now sympathizes with girls who feel insecure about their skin tone and has turned down offers to star in any more such ads.

Human rights activists in India have also accused Chopra and other Indian celebrities of hypocrisy for expressing sympathy for Floyd and outrage over his killing but not condemning similar violence against minorities, particularly Muslims, in India. In recent years, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, attacks on India’s minority Muslims have skyrocketed. Dozens have been lynched in the streets with little public outcry.

Colonialism and caste

Emmanuel and others trace India’s color discrimination back to the colonial period when mostly white Britons ruled over darker-skinned Indians. But its roots may go back even further than that — to Hinduism’s ancient caste system, roughly based on a hierarchy of professions people are born into.

Historians of ancient India say discrimination based explicitly on skin color has never been part of the Hindu caste system. But it may have evolved over time. For centuries, members of the less privileged, lower castes traditionally did manual labor outdoors under the sun.

“The British colonizers were able to build on India’s existing caste system. So the upper-caste people who were powerful had fairer skin. And the lower-caste people, when they would work outside, those castes started having darker skin [from prolonged sun exposure],” explains Neha Dixit, an Indian journalist who has studied the history of colorism and written about her own experience as a slightly darker-skinned woman. (The euphemism her relatives used for her skin color is “wheatish” — the color of wheat.)

“We have actually internalized all those prejudices,” she says. “So anybody with fairer skin is supposed to be better off than a dark-skinned person.”

Those stereotypes have been reinforced in India for millennia. But modern ideas of racial equality — and the Black Lives Matter movement — are slowly making a dent. A landmark case against caste discrimination is currently under litigation in California, where Indian American tech workers are accused of discriminating against a colleague because he’s a member of a lower caste.

New name, same cream

A few years ago, when she was in her late teens, Hiran, the accounting student, stopped using Fair & Lovely cream. Unilever says its products do not contain potentially harmful bleach or mercury. But Hiran’s decision had more to do with a maturing sense of self rather than any health concerns, she says.

“I started to realize, OK, maybe the problem is not with me. Maybe I’m not supposed to look any other way,” she says. “And I’m not supposed to feel insecure about my own skin.”

This year, Hiran started an online petition to get the name of the product changed. It’s one of several such petitions that have flooded the Internet in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.

A Texas woman of South Asian descent, Hetal Lakhani, also started an online petition against Shaadi.com, one of the most popular matrimonial websites, demanding that it remove a function that allows users to search for potential partners on the basis of their skin color. Last month, the website obliged, issuing a statement saying that it “does not discriminate” and that the skin color filter was a “product debris left-over in one of our advanced search pages.”

Then, in late June, Fair & Lovely’s manufacturer, Unilever, made an announcement: It’s removing any references to “fair/fairness,” “white/whitening” and “light/lightening” from all of its packaging.

“We are fully committed to having a global portfolio of skin care brands that is inclusive and cares for all skin tones, celebrating greater diversity of beauty,” Sunny Jain, president of the company’s beauty and personal care division, was quoted as saying. “We recognize that the use of the words ‘fair,’ ‘white’ and ‘light’ suggest a singular ideal of beauty that we don’t think is right.”

But even though the packaging now says only that the product moisturizes and gives a pink glow, these terms are understood to be euphemisms for lightening your skin.

This month, Unilever’s Indian branch announced a new name: Glow & Lovely. Its men’s product line will also be rebranded, as Glow & Handsome. The company says the name changes will happen in the coming months.

The cosmetics brand L’Oréal says it’s making a similar change.

But some activists say that’s not enough — that it’s not the names that needed to be scrapped but the products themselves. Another big company, Johnson & Johnson, says it’s discontinuing two of its skin-lightening products altogether.

Souvenir tube

Hiran calls the Fair & Lovely name change “a step in the right direction.”

“It’s not a small thing that Fair & Lovely has done. Because this brand has thrived all these years on the insecurities of women. This is really changing the narrative,” she says. “But it’s only the first step toward being more inclusive and diverse. No matter what you call it, it’s still going to be offensive.”

Even though she hadn’t used the product in years, Hiran says she recently found an old tube of Fair & Lovely in her medicine cabinet. She says she’ll probably hold on to it.

“Now it’s going to become a souvenir,” she laughs.

So the Fair & Lovely label will soon be history. But the question remains as to how long these skin-lightening products — whatever they’re called — will remain in India, along with the attitudes behind them.

Source: Black Lives Matter Gets Indians Talking About Skin Lightening And Colorism

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Hassan: What face masks tell us about the niqab

2020/07/11 Leave a comment

While I am less worried about the niqab than Hassan and recognize that wearing the niqab may reflect a variety of reasons, I do share her annoyance over the facile comparison between face masks and niqabs. Reasons, objectives and intent are completely different:

One annoying narrative emerging from the COVID-19 seclusion is the way some religious people gloat about the niqab being somehow equivalent to the now mandated masks.

“See?” they say. “The government wanted to ban the niqab, but Allah has decreed otherwise. Now everyone must wear a niqab.”

Let it be clear: a face covering during a pandemic is a medical recommendation. A niqab is nothing but a religious travesty inflicted on a minuscule number of Muslim women by their Islamist guardians.

This false equating of the niqab to medical face masks has even made the print media rounds. Katherine Bullock, chair of ISNA-Canada, wrote an article with the provocative title We are all niqabis now: Coronavirus masks reveal the hypocrisy of face-covering bans.

First, we are not all niqabis. And secondly, there is no hypocrisy because the objectives of the two types of face coverings are completely different. Bullock asked, “If Canadians, Americans and Europeans can get used to the new ubiquitous face masks, will they also get used to niqabs?”

The answer is no. And why should opposition stop? Niqabs are discriminatory; face masks are not.

The fact is niqabi women wear what they wear because many face discrimination at home. They are considered chattel, or commodities that need to be hidden from public gaze. Their “protectors” worry they may bring shame to their families if not segregated and marginalized.

Bullock’s article further states that whereas people with surgical or medical masks are allowed to interact freely with each other without having to remove them, niqabi women are forced to remove their niqabs in public or at citizenship ceremonies. Well of course. The masks are being worn during an unprecedented medical crisis that presents an extreme danger to people’s health. What purpose does the niqab serve under normal conditions other than to create interpersonal barriers?

Another article, by freelance writer Sami Rahman, makes the same mistake of equating niqabs with medical face coverings. It alludes to U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson’s derision of niqabi women as letterboxes, and says perhaps we have all become letterboxes – as if this is some sort of divine judgment meted out to all people.

The article further confounds the debate by associating the niqab with all Muslim women. She writes, “Anti-racism organization Tell MAMA recorded a surge in hate crimes towards Muslim women that very same week.”

Muslim women? The overwhelming majority of Muslim women do not wear the niqab or even the hijab. Why associate these garments with the practice of most Muslim women, who rightly assert that their faith does not prescribe them?

The fact is that Islamists promote the niqab and hijab as symbols of mainstream Islam when they most certainly don’t represent Muslim practice.

Let Islamists gloat over the current requirement for face masks. When the crisis is behind us – and hopefully it will be soon with the development of a vaccine – all the medically prescribed masks will be gone.

But the niqab will persist, and all its supporters will still have to answer the familiar and fundamental questions: Why must they promote such patriarchal and cumbersome attire? Why glorify the niqab and hijab when they are arguably not even prescribed by Islam?

Source: HASSAN: What face masks tell us about the niqab

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Report Slams Facebook For ‘Vexing And Heartbreaking Decisions’ On Free Speech

2020/07/10 Leave a comment

Of note. Major fail as combination of ideology and business model have led Facebook to where it is today:

Facebook’s decisions to put free speech ahead of other values represent “significant setbacks for civil rights,” according to an independent audit of the social network’s progress in curbing discrimination.

The auditors gave a damning assessment of what they called “vexing and heartbreaking decisions” by Facebook. Among them: Keeping up posts by President Trump that “clearly violated” the company’s policies on hate and violent speech and voter suppression; exempting politicians from third-party fact-checking; and being “far too reluctant to adopt strong rules to limit [voting] misinformation and voter suppression.”

The report reflects two years of investigation by Laura W. Murphy, a former American Civil Liberties Union executive, and the civil rights law firm Relman Colfax. They were hired by Facebook following widespread accusations that it promotes discrimination by, for example, letting advertisers target users based on race. The auditors examined policies and practices ranging from how the company handles hate speech to its work to stop election interference.

“What has become increasingly clear is that we have a long way to go,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, wrote in a blog postintroducing the auditors’ report.

“While we won’t make every change they call for, we will put more of their proposals into practice,” she said.

Sandberg said Facebook would create a new role for a senior vice president dedicated to making sure civil rights considerations informed the company’s products, policies and procedures.

The audit echoed complaints that advocacy groups have made for years. Leaders of those groups expressed skepticism over whether Facebook would make meaningful change now.

“The recommendations coming out of the audit are as good as the action that Facebook ends up taking,” Rashad Robinson, president of the nonprofit Color of Change, told NPR. “Otherwise, it is a road map without a vehicle and without the resources to move, and that is not useful for any of us.”

Vanita Gupta, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which along with Color of Change was instrumental in getting Facebook to make the audit public, said advocates would continue to put pressure on the company.

“It is a work in progress clearly, and this report in some ways is a start and not a finish for the civil rights community,” Gupta said. “We’re going to continue to push really hard using multiple tactics to be able to get done what we need to to preserve our democracy and protect our communities.”

The audit comes as hundreds of brands have pledged not to advertise on Facebook this month to protest its laissez-faire approach to harmful posts. Some of the boycott organizers, which include Color of Change, the Anti-Defamation League and the NAACP, held a call with Facebook leaders on Tuesday and hung up disheartened.

“They showed up to the meeting expecting an ‘A’ for attendance,” Robinson said of CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the other Facebook executives in a press conference after the meeting.

Advertising accounted for more than 98% of the company’s nearly $70 billion in revenue last year. The boycott campaign’s stated goal is “to force Mark Zuckerberg to address the effect that Facebook has had on our society.”

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told NPR the roster of brands that have paused advertising has passed 1,000, including household names such as Hershey, Ford and Levi’s.

“[Facebook executives] haven’t addressed the concerns of their advertisers. They haven’t addressed the concerns of the civil rights community. They haven’t addressed the concerns of consumer advocates,” Greenblatt said. “If they fail to do so, we will press and we will push. This effort will amplify, this campaign will expand, and more organizations will join.”

The audit included further recommendations for how Facebook could build “a long-term civil rights accountability structure,” including hiring more members of the civil rights team and making a civil rights executive a part of decisions over whether to remove content.

The auditors said Facebook had made progress in curbing discrimination — for example, by barring advertisers from targeting housing, employment and credit ads based on age, gender or ZIP code and expanding policies against voter suppression and census interference.

But they warned that the company’s decisions to prioritize free speech above all else — particularly speech by politicians — risked “obscur[ing]” that progress, especially as the presidential election approaches. They called on Facebook to enforce its policies and hold politicians to the same standards as other users.

“We have grave concerns that the combination of the company’s decision to exempt politicians from fact-checking and the precedents set by its recent decisions on President Trump’s posts, leaves the door open for the platform to be used by other politicians to interfere with voting,” they wrote.

“If politicians are free to mislead people about official voting methods … and are allowed to use not-so-subtle dog whistles with impunity to incite violence against groups advocating for racial justice, this does not bode well for the hostile voting environment that can be facilitated by Facebook in the United States.”

Source: Report Slams Facebook For ‘Vexing And Heartbreaking Decisions’ On Free Speech

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Scrabble Association Bans Racial, Ethnic Slurs From Its Official Word List

2020/07/10 Leave a comment

Small but significant indicator how social norms are changing:

The word “slur” has a number of meanings in English, but the one that has concerned Scrabble aficionados and Hasbro, which owns the U.S. and Canadian trademark for the popular board game, means “a derogatory or insulting term applied to particular group of people.”

On Wednesday, the North American Scrabble Players Association announced that derogatory language would be removed from the game’s official word list.

The decision follows an online poll conducted by NASPA that elicited impassioned responses, the organization’s CEO, John Chew, said in a statement on Wednesday.

“Some members threatened to leave the association if a single word were removed; others threatened to leave the association if any offensive words remained,” he said. “There were a lot of good and bad arguments on both sides.”

NASPA’s word list is used in competitive tournaments, which is different than the Merriam-Webster Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. Hasbro says it has worked to eliminate offensive words from the dictionary with every new printing of it.

While Hasbro has no say over NASPA’s list, and the organization’s members do not use Scrabble’s dictionary in competition, the company said Wednesday that it was amending the rules that appear in every Scrabble box “to make clear that slurs are not permissible in any form of the game.”

“Hasbro Gaming is rooted in community and bringing people together, and we are committed to providing an experience that is inclusive and enjoyable for all,” the company said.

Speaking to NPR, Chew said NASPA represents about 10,000 players in the U.S. and Canada and that there was “about a 50-50 split” over whether to remove the slurs from its official word list.

He said the reevaluation of the list started a few weeks ago with a post on NASPA’s Facebook page.

“One of our members asked what we were doing to reduce racial tensions in the U.S. and Canada,” he said. “And then someone else asked ‘what if we take the “N” word out of the lexicon, would that at least be a good start?’ ”

A discussion and the online poll ensued and NASPA’s advisory board ultimately voted to remove 236 words from the list, Chew said. Words that are potentially offensive but are not considered slurs — such as those for parts of the body — remain, he said.

Source: Scrabble Association Bans Racial, Ethnic Slurs From Its Official Word List

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Calls grow for news outlets reporting on systemic racism to address own failures

2020/07/10 Leave a comment

Of note. Ironically, and perhaps not surprising, on Wednesday, watched a Star panel on equity. Including the moderating, 4 women, 1 man, 4 visible minorities, much more diverse than others I have watched:

Journalists have not had to go far to uncover searing stories of racism in Canada — they’re finding them in their own newsrooms, among their co-workers and involving their bosses.

All while reporters increasingly turn their attention to detailing institutional discrimination in nearly all other facets of society, including justice, politics, health care and education.

For the similarly flawed media industry, a long-standing problem has suddenly become harder to ignore: Many outlets striving to inform the public of widespread racial bias do so with stories that are assigned, reported and analyzed by predominantly white editorial staff.

The not-so-surprising result? They’re failing, say industry watchers and a growing number of staff members risking their jobs to speak out. And while many media organizations are expressing renewed commitments to diversify their newsrooms and coverage, those journalists say it will take more than pledges to create meaningful change.

A SERIES OF MISSTEPS

Revelations have emerged in recent weeks of racial indignities suffered at multiple news outlets, where current and former employees are attempting to lift the curtain on how and why tensions persist.

Corus Entertainment faced a public lashing by rank-and-file staff over claims of toxic workplaces for people of colour; the National Post endured a newsroom revolt over contentious columns that denied the existence of systemic racism in Canada; CBC suspended and disciplined star Wendy Mesley for twice quoting a racial slur in editorial meetings and CBC Radio’s “Yukon Morning” host Christine Genier resigned over the lack of Indigenous representation in Canadian media.

While there might be an increase in the number of on-air personalities who are people of colour, that’s not an accurate measure of success, says diversity consultant and former journalist Hamlin Grange, whose firm DiversiPro Inc. was recently hired by Corus Entertainment to review its operations.

“It’s the people who are behind the scenes, the decision-makers that really matter and that’s where the media in this country have failed.”

It’s not for lack of trying, of course.

Over the years, there have been recruitment efforts, training sessions, and diversity pledges, just as there have been in other business sectors.

But anything that fails to dismantle systemic and structural barriers are superficial measures that don’t achieve meaningful change, says Brian Daly of the Canadian Association of Black Journalists.

MORE EFFECTIVE SOLUTIONS

The CABJ and Canadian Journalists of Colour have partnered for a joint call to action that includes: regular disclosure of newsroom demographics, more representation and coverage of racialized communities (in part through hiring), and proactive efforts to seek, retain and promote Black and Indigenous journalists and journalists of colour to management positions.

They also suggest regular consultation with racialized communities on news coverage, identifying and addressing systemic barriers, targeted scholarships and mentorship opportunities, and encouraging journalism schools to lay the groundwork with diverse faculty and more focus on how to cover racialized communities.

Many on the ground agree conditions won’t improve without system-wide changes.

An expressed desire to address diversity is not enough, says TSN’s SportsCentre anchor Kayla Grey, who weathered blowback and sparked a Twitter hashtag when she criticized white freelance journalist Sheri Forde for using the N-word in a Medium blog post that ironically detailed Forde’s efforts at building racial awareness.

“Companies and newsrooms are showing their ass right now,” says Grey, the first Black woman to anchor a national TV sports show in Canada.

“I’m seeing people fumble and it’s clear that they just don’t have those voices in those rooms that check them in the first place. Or they might have those voices in the room, they might have that representation, but are they listening clearly to those voices? And have those voices felt empowered to speak out about such issues?”

THE IMPACT ON STAFF

The National Post met condemnation both within and outside of its newsroom for several inflammatory commentaries, most notably one from Rex Murphy on June 1 that declared, “Canada is not a racist country.” The online link now features an apology for “a failure in the normal editing oversight” and points readers to a rebuttal by Financial Post writer Vanmala Subramaniam.

Nevertheless, Murphy defended the piece in another column June 16 and Post founder Conrad Black added his denials of systemic racism in columns June 20 and 27, the latter of which dismissed the current reckoning with racial injustice and systemic racism as an “official obsession” causing “an absurd displacement for other concerns.”

A few frustrated staffers began withholding bylines from their own stories shortly after that first Black column, growing to involve more as the week wore on.

Editor-in-chief Rob Roberts would not comment on the byline strike, only saying: “We stand by our columnists’ right to state their opinion.”

Phyllise Gelfand, vice-president of communications for Postmedia, says in an emailed statement that the company is revisiting its diversity and inclusion programs and that diversity training for its newsrooms will roll out “immediately.”

Daly says it would be harder to dismiss the lived experiences of Black people if they were welcomed into newsrooms and their leadership.

“Allow people of differing worldviews and differing lived experiences to coexist in a newsroom environment, and then you’re going to get a healthy newsroom,” says Daly, a TV producer for the CBC in Halifax.

Throughout a 25-year career spanning five provinces, Daly has worked at CBC, CTV and Global, plus The Canadian Press and the former QMI Agency, and says he has never had a manager of colour. He recalls just three full-time colleagues who were Black.

NEXT STEPS

In June, the CABJ penned an open letter to Corus Entertainment urging improved supports for Black voices and staff while expressing solidarity “with Black employees at Global News who have grappled with feelings of defeat” over repeated microaggressions.

That was followed last Thursday by another open letter to Corus and its Global News division signed by more than 100 hosts, producers, reporters, editors and camera operators with similar demands. “If we are to expect accountability of others, we must demand it of ourselves,” they wrote.

Corus has hired Grange’s agency, DiversiPro Inc., to review the entire organization, while its executive vice president of broadcast networks, Troy Reeb, says in a statement it’s “acting immediately” at Global News to increase representation, remove systemic barriers to retention and promotion, and consult with marginalized communities on news coverage.

Grange, who wouldn’t discuss details of the review, notes an enduring lack of diversity in the broader media industry when it comes to those who decide which stories are covered and how they’re told.

Entire communities and perspectives are at risk of being ignored or distorted when coverage is filtered through a predominantly white lens, says Daly.

And when that happens, news coverage can effectively uphold the status quo, sustain systemic barriers and actively deepen racial inequities, adds Anita Li of the Canadian Journalists of Colour.

“That’s actually bad for democracy because if people don’t see themselves reflected in the news they’re less likely to vote, to trust their neighbours, to engage civically,” says Li, whose career has included stints with CTV Ottawa, CBC, the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail.

These are not new problems, she adds, suggesting recent scrutiny rather than genuine insight has spurred some organizations to declare serious plans to address race-related failings.

Li notes the CABJ and CJOC issued their joint calls to action in January but the response from legacy organizations “was crickets.”

“We didn’t hear anything from them until these mass protests started happening,” she says of widespread demonstrations against anti-Black racism and police brutality.

Grange, too, says the majority of his clients have not traditionally been media. But that’s changing.

“Suddenly, we’re getting them. It’s kind of interesting.”

THE GROWING RESPONSE

Despite recent high-profile transgressions, the media industry does appear to be confronting its role in upholding white bias, says Li, pointing to emerging outlets, major media unions and larger organizations that have publicly committed to the calls to action.

She says they include the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail union, Global News, and the Walrus.

The Canadian Press says it has met with the CABJ and CJOC on the recommendations and is working to ensure it has the proper infrastructure in place to fully enact them.

“I actually feel like there’s genuine traction being made and there’s actual, candid conversations about the barriers that journalists of colour are facing,” says Li.

The conversation is long overdue at the Winnipeg Free Press, editor Paul Samyn wrote July 3 in an opinion piece titled, “An apology for marginalizing people of colour; and a promise to atone for our past.” The article admits the paper has, “at times, been part of the problem, not the solution,” while promising to better reflect and serve marginalized communities.

Measures there include the addition of four full-time reporters of colour, a special news project examining race and racism, and plans to close online commenting as of July 14 because it too-often served as a magnet for racist commentary.

Li acknowledges that dwindling ad revenues, dropping readership and fragmented audiences amid a plethora of free online competitors make it financially difficult for many outlets.

But investing in diversity and inclusion pays off in the long run, she says, noting Canada’s immigrant and racialized population is growing.

“So you’re just increasingly missing a bigger and bigger portion of Canadian society,” she says of ignoring change.

“Sooner or later these folks, these communities that are being overlooked, are going to go to alternative sources of media.”

Li encourages journalists and outlets to guard against feeling defensive when forced to acknowledge failures.

“For me it’s about calling them in, not calling them out,” says Li.

“The only way we can solve this issue is collaboratively together, with all hands on deck. It’s not just the responsibility of people of colour or journalists of colour. It’s the responsibility of the entire industry.”

Source: Calls grow for news outlets reporting on systemic racism to address own failures

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Disaggregated data key to ensuring representative workplaces, say experts, as PMO skirts Black staff statistic

2020/07/09 Leave a comment

Partial data on political staffer diversity, with a very low response rate:

A recent Hill Times survey seeking to understand the demographics of staff on Parliament Hill found that, among a small pool of respondent MP offices, 42 per cent of staff identified as a visible minority, while 5.3 per cent identified as Black, but a comparison to cabinet offices, including the Prime Minister’s Office, isn’t possible after a separate survey was circulated by the PMO that excluded a specific category on staffers who identified as Black.  

Instead, results from the PMO, which are said to include responses from a little more than 560 staffers across all cabinet offices and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s (Papineau, Que.), offered an aggregated percentage of staff who identified as “racialized/visible minority/a person of colour.”

But truly addressing gaps in diversity and representation requires being willing to talk about the numbers and breaking them down, “particularly along racial lines,” said York University professor Lorne Foster, as barriers to inclusion—and their solutions—are unique to different groups.

“In education for instance … a large number of the visible minority category are doing quite well in school, but when you disaggregate the data you find that South Asians do well, but Blacks don’t do well,” said Prof. Foster, who is director of York’s Institute for Social Research. 

Moreover, ensuring a truly representative workforce means going beyond just “diversity by the numbers” to look at occupational mobility, who holds senior positions of power, how diversity is being harnessed and empowered, and how diverse perspectives are being integrated into organizational frameworks, he said.

“If you don’t have that disaggregated data, you really don’t know where the gaps are and you really cannot get to any problems or vulnerability, or even develop constructive workplace policies. You know, there’s an old saying, it’s been said a million times but it’s worth noting again: what gets measured gets done,” said Prof. Foster, noting “consistent” calls from the Black community, and others, for disaggregated data across various issues and sectors. “It’s the only way to comprehensively deal with problems that have been with us for centuries.”

“By staying away from those numbers, putting their head in a hole, then they’re actually preserving their own interests, but it really doesn’t do anything for an inclusive and empowering society and the representative society that we all want and we all talk about,” he said.

Recent widespread anti-Black racism and police brutality protests have put a spotlight on diversity and representation among Canada’s public institutions.

Last fall, The Hill Times collaborated with The Samara Centre for Democracy and researchers Jerome Black and Andrew Griffith to analyze more than 1,700 candidates running for the Liberals, Conservatives, NDP, Greens, and the People’s Party in 2019. Compiled through candidate biographies, media articles, social media and the like, it found 16.5 per cent of candidates were from a visible minority group, with 2.8 per cent identified as Black, and 3.7 per cent as Indigenous.

Of the 338 MPs elected, roughly 15.1 per cent belong to a visible minority group—within that, five MPs, or 1.5 per cent, are Black—and almost three per cent (10 MPs) are Indigenous. Within Mr. Trudeau’s 36-member cabinet, seven ministers (19.4 per cent) are a visible minority, just one of whom is Black, and one is Indigenous. 

Mr. Griffith similarly spoke to the need for disaggregated data, noting that, through his research, when it comes to political representation, often “South Asians tend to be overrepresented in relation to their share of the population, whereas Blacks are underrepresented and Filipinos are underrepresented.”

While there may be seen to be “less everyday racism in the street” in Canada as compared to the U.S., the story is reversed when it comes to institutional racism and systemic discrimination, said Prof. Foster, with far more instances of Black people in positions of power, as elected officials and otherwise, south of the border.

“It’s really quite remarkable and distinctive in terms of its difference with the Canadian scene,” he said, noting that within Canada’s federal public service, the highest-level Black public servant is the assistant deputy minister for Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada, Caroline Xavier, who was appointed in February and stands alone at her level. 

Just as important as elected officials are the staff who support them—the people at the table or behind the keyboard when laws are being drafted, debated, amended, and passed.

Low response rate, aggregated categories cloud survey findings 

To conduct its survey, The Hill Times reached out to a total of 386 offices on Parliament Hill, including all 338 MPs, all opposition leader offices, House leaders, Whips, research bureaus, 36 ministers’ offices, and the PMO. In reaching out, it was indicated responses would be reported on in aggregate with other like offices. 

The survey was voluntary, and based entirely on self-identification by staff. Offices were asked for a total count of full-time staff (both on the Hill and in riding offices), a gender breakdown (male, female, or non-binary), and how many staff identify as a visible minority, Black, or Indigenous. Offices were also asked about their hiring practices, namely: what they’ve done to ensure diversity in hiring and whether approaches were being reconsidered. For ministers’ offices and the PMO, an extra question was included regarding how many EX-level staff—a Treasury Board Secretariat designation that refers to the senior-most level of ministerial staff, like directors and chiefs of staff—identify as Black or Indigenous.

Questions were sent to offices by email on June 16 and 17, with a deadline of June 29 to respond.

It’s important to note that, along with being based on self-identification, the survey did not capture part-time staff, students, or interns—a decision contested by at least one office, noting an increased level of part-time staff due to efforts to provide flexible work arrangements. 

In the end, excluding cabinet and the PMO, The Hill Times received 38 responses from 36 MP offices, the Liberal research bureau, and the Liberal Whip’s office. Among MPs, 26 of the 36 respondents were Liberal, six were Conservative, three were NDP, and one Bloc Québécois, for a total response rate of about 10 per cent.

Based on Elections Canada’s riding assessments, of those MPs who responded, 27 represent urban ridings, five represent urban/rural ridings, and four represent rural/urban ridings. 

One MP office that responded declined to provide a gender breakdown, and another declined to provide a breakdown of Black or Indigenous staff. In turn, percentages for those categories were calculated using modified total staff counts. 

In all, these 38 offices reported a total of 212 full-time staff, of whom 119 identified as women (57.2 per cent), 88 as men (42.3 per cent), and one as non-binary (0.5 per cent), and 89 identified as a visible minority (42 per cent). Eleven staff identified as Black (5.3 per cent of the adjusted total), while five identified as Indigenous (2.4 per cent).

Graph created with Infogram

Reacting to The Hill Times’ findings from MPs, Mr. Griffith said he was “surprised” at the “very high percentage of visible minority staffers,” but stressed it’s hard to draw conclusions as the results don’t reflect “the total universe of MPs and their staff” due to the small sample size and self-identifying nature of the survey. Mr. Griffith also hypothesized that MPs from more diverse ridings—namely, urban ridings, which 75 per cent of MP respondents were—may be more likely to have diverse offices. 

The results are different when it comes to cabinet and the PMO.

Though The Hill Times reached out to these offices individually with a similar set of survey questions, only one minister’s office responded directly, and in doing so, declined to provide a specific breakdown of Black or Indigenous staff.

Instead, The Hill Times understands the PMO circulated a different, voluntary survey among ministers’ offices, with responses collected and aggregated by the PMO before being emailed on the evening of July 3. 

While these findings in ways present more data than was sought—providing insights into language, disability, and LGBTQ2 diversity among political staff—they also lack one of the two key aspects The Hill Timessought to understand, specifically: how many political staff identify as Black. Instead, numbers were provided for staff who identify as “racialized/visible minority/a person of colour” as one combined category. 

“As many of the offices you surveyed have a smaller number of staff, information shared detailing individual’s race and gender by each office could very much identify individual staff. So to ensure the privacy of individuals is maintained, we asked Minister’s Offices to share information in a manner that was both anonymous and voluntary,” said PMO press secretary Alex Wellstead in an email. 

“With that in mind, we sent a confidential survey to staff to help collect information on the diversity of our team.”

Graph created with Infogram

In all, the PMO reported a response rate of 82 per cent to its survey, with a little more than 560 respondents from all ministers’ offices, including the PMO. The Hill Times was only provided the aggregated, total percentages for each category.

Of the total, 24.7 per cent of staff identified as racialized/visible minority/a person of colour and 3.4 per cent identified as Indigenous; 51.2 per cent identified as male and 48 per cent as female; 2.3 per cent identified as a person with a disability; 15.8 per cent identified as LGBTQ2; 68.5 per cent identified English as their first language, while 23.8 per cent said it was French, and 6.2 per cent identified another language as their first.

Graph created with Infogram

Among senior staff in the PMO and ministers’ offices (directors, senior advisers, chiefs of staff) who responded, 19.1 per cent identified as racialized/visible minority/a person of colour and 1.9 per cent identified as Indigenous; 57.4 per cent identified as male and 42.6 per cent as female; 3.1 per cent identified as a person with a disability; 11.7 per cent identified as LGBTQ2; 71.6 per cent identified English as their first language, while 24.1 per cent said French, and 2.5 per cent identified another language. 

Graph created with Infogram

Picking out the PMO specifically, the office reports that 29.9 per cent of its staff self-identified as racialized/visible minority/a person of colour and 1.1 per cent as Indigenous; 52.9 per cent identified as male and 47.1 per cent as female; 3.4 per cent identified as a person with a disability; 12.6 per cent as LGBTQ2; and 69 per cent identified English as their first language, while 25.3 said French, and 4.6 said another language.

“As all our offices are always striving to provide a safe and healthy workplace, and one where employees feel valued and be treated with dignity and respect, this information will also help us continue our work toward a more diverse and inclusive workplace,” said Mr. Wellstead.

“We are committed to creating a workplace that truly reflects the full diversity of our great country and we will continue to recruit, retain, and train diverse staff from across Canada. The current conversations around systemic racism and discrimination in our society have made it even clearer that we need to continue this work,” said Mr. Wellstead. 

“We will be offering opportunities for staff to participate in future confidential and voluntary surveys to better understand our team later this summer. Topics on this survey will include greater granularity on demographics, mental health in the workplace, the impacts of COVID-19, systemic inequalities, education and training, and more,” he said, noting the upcoming survey would use Statistics Canada’s list of visible minority groups. That list includes “Black” as a distinct group.

The Hill Times reached out to Diversity, Inclusion, and Youth Minister Bardish Chagger’s (Waterloo, Ont.) to speak with the minister about diversity on Parliament Hill but was told she was not available by filing deadline.

Source: Disaggregated data key to ensuring representative workplaces, say experts, as PMO skirts Black staff statistic

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Study shows virus hit African immigrants hardest in France

2020/07/09 Leave a comment

As is the case everywhere, those at the lower economic scale, living in worse areas, and with more precarious yet essential work:

Death rates among immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa doubled in France and tripled in the Paris region at the height of France’s coronavirus outbreak, according to a study from the French government’s statistics agency released Tuesday.

The INSEE agency’s findings are the closest France has come yet to acknowledging with numbers the virus’s punishing and disproportionate impact on the country’s Black immigrants and the members of other systemically overlooked minority groups.

The study was the first in France to cross-reference deaths that occurred in March and April, when intensive care units were swamped with COVID-19 patients, with the regions of origin of the people who died. By highlighting dramatic increases in deaths among immigrants born in Africa and Asia, the research helps fill some of the gaps in France’s understanding of its minority communities.

The topic has become an increasingly hot-button issue for French administrators in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the death of George Floyd. French researchers hailed the study as an important step but also said it only begins to scratch the surface of how the pandemic is impacting France’s minorities, who often live in crowded, underprivileged neighborhoods.

French Black rights activists have long pushed for more and better ethnic-specific data. Officially, the French republic is colorblind, refusing to categorize or count people by race or ethnicity. For critics, that guiding philosophy has made the state oblivious to discrimination and put minorities at additional risk during the pandemic.

“I’m delighted, and I know colleagues are delighted, because we have been waiting for this data,” Solene Brun, a sociologist specializing in issues of race and inequality, said. “But our enthusiasm is tempered by the fact that this concerns only countries of origin. It’s not looking at Black populations or North African and Asian populations in their entirety.”

Most glaringly, the study shed no light on how the French-born children of immigrants are faring in the pandemic. Still, its findings pointing to high death rates among their foreign-born parents suggest that minorities, especially Black people from Africa, may have disproportionately borne much of the brunt in France.

“They have very clearly been hard hit. That is undeniable,” said Sylvie le Minez, who heads INSEE’s department of demographic studies.

Mounting evidence from the United States and Britain pointing to greater COVID-19 mortality risks for Black residents than whites has increased pressure for French studies. Researchers bemoaned that their hands were tied by French taboos against identifying people by race or ethnicity and by legislation that regulates the scope of research and data collection.

“France doesn’t do ethnic-racial statistics, but we have the country of birth,” Le Minez said. “That is already very, very illuminating.”

INSEE researchers drilled down into data gleaned from France’s civil registry of births, deaths and marriages to look at the birth countries of people who died during the March-April peak of the country’s outbreak. France has reported about 30,000 virus-related deaths in all since the pandemic started.

The research findings were particularly alarming for the Paris region, especially in the densely populated and underprivileged northern reaches of the French capital. Compared to March-April of 2019, Paris-region deaths during the same two months this year shot up by 134% among North African immigrants and by 219% for people born elsewhere in Africa.

The region’s increased March-April mortality in 2020 was less marked among people born in France: 78%.

Skewed death rates were even more pronounced in Seine-Saint-Denis, the northern outskirt of Paris long troubled by poverty and overcrowding. There, deaths increased by 95% among the French-born but by 191% among people born in North Africa and by 368% among those from sub-Saharan Africa.

The study suggested that African immigrants were more exposed to infection because they live in more crowded conditions, make greater use of public transportation to commute to work and are more likely to have been among the key workers who continued at their posts when white-collar workers stayed home during France’s two-month lockdown.

Sociologist Brun said the study, by exposing limits in France’s knowledge about minorities, offered compelling arguments for broader research.

“Once you wedge a foot in the door, it becomes easier to open it,” she said. “What’s precious about this data is that, roughly put, it gives us a glimpse of what we could learn if we agreed to really look at racial inequalities in health. So not just immigrants, but also their descendants and even perhaps their grandkids, that’s to say all those people who are racialized as non-white in France and live with discrimination because of that.”

Source: Study shows virus hit African immigrants hardest in France

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