Multiculturalism | Multicultural Meanderings

Ethnic Media Coverage 11-17 August

2019/08/19 Leave a comment

Latest weekly analysis of ethnic media coverage. For the analytical narrative, go to diversityvotes.ca Ethnic media election coverage 11-17 August 2019:

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism Tagged with DiversityVotes.ca, Election 2019, ethnic media

I’m a Black Feminist. I Think Call-Out Culture Is Toxic. There are better ways of doing social justice work.

2019/08/19 Leave a comment

Thoughtful reflections:

Today’s call-out culture is so seductive, I often have to resist the overwhelming temptation to clap back at people on social media who get on my nerves. Call-outs happen when people publicly shame each other online, at the office, in classrooms or anywhere humans have beef with one another. But I believe there are better ways of doing social justice work.

Recently, someone lied about me on social media and I decided not to reply. “Never wrestle with a pig,” as George Bernard Shaw said. “You both get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” And one of the best ways to make a point is to ignore someone begging for attention. Thanks, Michelle Obama, for this timely lesson; most people who read her book “Becoming” probably missed that she subtly threw shade this way.

Call-outs are often louder and more vicious on the internet, amplified by the “clicktivist” culture that provides anonymity for awful behavior. Even incidents that occur in real life, like Barbeque Becky or Permit Patty, can end up as an admonitory meme on social media. Social media offers new ways to be the same old humans by virally exposing what has always been in our hearts, good or bad.

My experiences with call-outs began in the 1970s as a young black feminist activist. I sharply criticized white women for not understanding women of color. I called them out while trying to explain intersectionality and white supremacy. I rarely questioned whether the way I addressed their white privilege was actually counterproductive. They barely understood what it meant to be white women in the system of white supremacy. Was it realistic to expect them to comprehend the experiences of black women?

Fifty years ago, black activists didn’t have the internet, but rather gossip, stubbornness and youthful hubris. We believed we could change the world and that the most powerful people were afraid of us. Efforts like the F.B.I.’s COINTELPRO projects created a lot of discord. Often, the most effective activists were killed or imprisoned, but it nearly always started with discrediting them through a call-out attack.

I, too, have been called out, usually for a prejudice I had against someone, or for using insensitive language that didn’t keep up with rapidly changing conventions. That’s part of everyone’s learning curve but I still felt hurt, embarrassed and defensive. Fortunately, patient elders helped me grow through my discomfort and appreciate that context, intentions and nuances matter. Colleagues helped me understand that I experienced things through my trauma. There was a difference between what I felt was true and what were facts. This ain’t easy and it ain’t over — even as an elder now myself.

But I wonder if contemporary social movements have absorbed the most useful lessons from the past about how to hold each other accountable while doing extremely difficult and risky social justice work. Can we avoid individualizing oppression and not use the movement as our personal therapy space? Thus, even as an incest and hate crime survivor, I have to recognize that not every flirtatious man is a potential rapist, nor every racially challenged white person is a Trump supporter.

We’re a polarized country, divided by white supremacy, patriarchy, racism against immigrants and increasingly vitriolic ways to disrespect one another. Are we evolving or devolving in our ability to handle conflicts? Frankly, I expect people of all political persuasions to call me out — productively and unproductively — for my critique of this culture. It’s not a partisan issue.

The heart of the matter is, there is a much more effective way to build social justice movements. They happen in person, in real life. Of course so many brilliant and effective social justice activists know this already. “People don’t understand that organizing isn’t going online and cussing people out or going to a protest and calling something out,” Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, wrote in “How We Fight White Supremacy,”

For example, when I worked to deprogram incarcerated rapists in the 1970s, I told the story of my own sexual assaults. It opened the floodgates for theirs. They were candid about having raped women, admitted having done it to men or revealed being raped themselves. As part of our work together, they formed Prisoners Against Rape, the country’s first anti-sexual assault program led by men.

I believe #MeToo survivors can more effectively address sexual abuse without resorting to the punishment and exile that mirror the prison industrial complex. Nor should we use social media to rush to judgment in a courtroom composed of clicks. If we do, we run into the paradox Audre Lorde warned us about when she said that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

We can build restorative justice processes to hold the stories of the accusers and the accused, and work together to ascertain harm and achieve justice without seeing anyone as disposable people and violating their human rights or right to due process. And if feminists were able to listen to convicted rapists in the 1970s, we can seek innovative and restorative methods for accused people today. That also applies to people fighting white supremacy.

On a mountaintop in rural Tennessee in 1992, a group of women whose partners were in the Ku Klux Klan asked me to provide anti-racist training to help keep their children out of the group. All day they called me a “well-spoken colored girl” and inappropriately asked that I sing Negro spirituals. I naïvely thought at the time that all white people were way beyond those types of insulting anachronisms.

Instead of reacting, I responded. I couldn’t let my hurt feelings sabotage my agenda. I listened to how they joined the white supremacist movement. I told them how I felt when I was 8 and my best friend called me “nigger,” the first time I had heard that word. The women and I made progress. I did not receive reports about further outbreaks of racist violence from that area for my remaining years monitoring hate groups.

These types of experiences cause me to wonder whether today’s call-out culture unifies or splinters social justice work, because it’s not advancing us, either with allies or opponents. Similarly problematic is the “cancel culture,” where people attempt to expunge anyone with whom they do not perfectly agree, rather than remain focused on those who profit from discrimination and injustice.

Call-outs are justified to challenge provocateurs who deliberately hurt others, or for powerful people beyond our reach. Effectively criticizing such people is an important tactic for achieving justice. But most public shaming is horizontal and done by those who believe they have greater integrity or more sophisticated analyses. They become the self-appointed guardians of political purity.

Call-outs make people fearful of being targeted. People avoid meaningful conversations when hypervigilant perfectionists point out apparent mistakes, feeding the cannibalistic maw of the cancel culture. Shaming people for when they “woke up” presupposes rigid political standards for acceptable discourse and enlists others to pile on. Sometimes it’s just ruthless hazing.

We can change this culture. Calling-in is simply a call-out done with love. Some corrections can be made privately. Others will necessarily be public, but done with respect. It is not tone policing, protecting white fragility or covering up abuse. It helps avoid the weaponization of suffering that prevents constructive healing.

Calling-in engages in debates with words and actions of healing and restoration, and without the self-indulgence of drama. And we can make productive choices about the terms of the debate: Conflicts about coalition-building, supporting candidates or policies are a routine and desirable feature of a pluralistic democracy.

You may never meet a member of the Klan or actively teach incarcerated people, but everyone can sit down with people they don’t agree with to work toward solutions to common problems.

In 2017, as a college professor in Massachusetts, I accidentally misgendered a student of mine during a lecture. I froze in shame, expecting to be blasted. Instead, my student said, “That’s all right; I misgender myself sometimes.” We need more of this kind of grace.

Source: I’m a Black Feminist. I Think Call-Out Culture Is Toxic.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with call-out culture, dialogue, Loretta Ross

The myth of Eurabia: how a far-right conspiracy theory went mainstream

2019/08/17 Leave a comment

Good long read. Excerpt below:

….The boundaries between these [far right] blogs and the “MSM” they affected to despise were porous. Some writers aimed for a high-minded tone about the dangers of Muslim immigration: the former Financial Times columnist Christopher Caldwell published in 2009 a book, Reflections on a Revolution in Europe, that recapitulates the idea of a slow-moving Muslim barbarian invasion from a position of Olympian disdain: “Immigrants also bring a lot of disorder, penury and crime … Muslim culture is unusually full of messages laying out the practical advantages of procreation … If you walk north across the Piazza Della Repubblica in Turin, you see, mutatis mutandis, what the Romans saw. To the east, two well-preserved Roman towers remain, and so do the walls built to separate citizens from barbarians. Today, in the space of about 60 seconds on foot, you pass from chic shops and wine bars through a lively multiethnic market into one of Europe’s more menacing north African slums.”

Some were less highbrow. In 2004, the Daily Telegraph gave a column to the Canadian prophet of American greatness Mark Steyn, who had originally made his name as a witty critic of musical theatre. Doom and horror was all he saw in Europe’s future. As early as 2002, he said: “I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark” – a remark he was still proudly quoting for Telegraph readers in 2005, when Iraq had become a slaughterhouse.

In terms that anticipated Jensen, Breivik and the alleged manifesto of the man charged with the Christchurch massacre, Steyn wrote (and the Telegraph published) this prophecy: “In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography – except through civil war. The Yugoslavs figured that out. In the 30 years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43% to 31% of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26% to 44%.”

‘Europeans, vote for AfD, so that Europe will never become ‘Eurabia’!’ reads a campaign poster in Berlin for the far-right party during this year’s European elections. Photograph: Clemens Bilan/EPA

Compare Steyn in 2005 with the manifesto of Patrick Crusius, who confessed to murdering 22 people in El Paso earlier this month: “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion … America is rotting from the inside out, and peaceful means to stop this seem to be nearly impossible.”

In 2007, the believers in a counter-jihad began to meet up in the real world. After a preliminary meeting of bloggers, commentators and Danish and Norwegian sympathisers in Copenhagen, attended by Jensen, a conference was arranged by May and the far-right Flemish party Vlaams Belang, in Brussels in 2007. This brought together most of the ideologues of Eurabia, as they attempted to transform it from an idea into a movement. Littman was the keynote speaker. Others present were Geller and Robert Spencer from the US, and Gerard Batten, later briefly the leader of Ukip in Britain. Ted Ekeroth, of the nationalist, rightwing Sweden Democrats, also attended.

As both Ukip and the Sweden Democrats rose to become powerful political forces, anxieties about terrorism were subsumed into much wider anxieties about demography, and about status within the old order. The American anthropologist Scott Atran has carried out extensive research into the mindset of the young men who become Islamic terrorists: the combination of wounded pride with the delight of belonging to a movement which has both global, apocalyptic significance and a living presence in a friendship group is tremendously important in recruiting jihadis. The same dynamic operates among their enemies: Breivik was remarkable chiefly in that he was so solipsistic that he could radicalise himself without the aid of any friends in real life, only those he imagined on the internet. He had at one stage approached his intellectual idol, Jensen, via email, who brushed him off as “boring as a vacuum cleaner salesman”.

You do not have to be a jihadi to feel the tug of these compulsions. The counter-jihadis, just as much as their enemies, believed they were entering an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. This is a century of wounded pride and anxieties about status for almost everyone.

Despite all this, there were some signs, even before the Breivik killings, that the original Eurabian front would break up. Those who were opposed to immigrants in general began to separate from those who hated Muslims in particular. Johnson, the founder of Little Green Footballs, excommunicated most of his followers in 2010 because of their increasing closeness to parties of western Europe that he regarded as being descended from fascists – the Vlaams Belang in Belgium and the Sweden Democrats, although he also denounced the English Defence League. Johnson was a genuine philosemite, who could not forgive the taint of antisemitism.

The anti-immigrant right had good reasons for separating itself from the anti-Muslim right. If the logic of the “Vienna school” – Jensen, Spencer and Geller, May and Littman – led inexorably to civil war and the righteous slaughter of Muslims and their leftie enablers, then most of the right shrank back from it. Commenters such as Douglas Murray and Caldwell quite genuinely believed that Breivik was insane, and that his actions had no relation to the ideas that he espoused. There may in this have been an element of self-deception, but it is also a testimony to the sort of instinctive, unthinking decency we all need sometimes to rescue us from the consequences of our ideas. It seemed that some kind of pragmatism would prevail.

The hope now seems deceptive. What changed this was above all the election of the US president, Donald Trump, whose then adviser Bannon was a believer in a “brutal, bloody … global war” against “Islamic fascism”. They showed that there was a huge constituency for racialised hatred and despair and – for them – no real negative consequences, electoral or otherwise, in pandering to it.

Since Breivik’s massacre, his own beliefs have only become more widespread. They have spread into the politics of all European countries. In the campaign for the European elections this May, the German far-right party AfD ran posters showing a naked white woman being pawed by dark-skinned men in Arab headgear. One had stuck his fingers in her unresisting mouth. “Europeans, vote for AfD, so that Europe will never become ‘Eurabia’,” said the caption. Millions of people who have never heard of Bat Ye’or, of Fjordman, or even of Breivik and Bannon, now understand that poster at a glance, and no amount of evidence will shake their certainty. They now believe all politics comes down to the words of one of Trump’s more recent tweets: “The losers all want what you have, don’t give it to them … Be strong & prosper, be weak & die!”

But who, in this situation, are the losers, and who are the strong? Last week, in an apparent attempt to emulate Breivik, a rich, disaffected young Norwegian, Philip Manshaus, shot his way through the entrance gates to a mosque in the upmarket suburb of Oslo where he lived and started firing at the congregation. He was wrestled to the ground by an unarmed 65-year-old Muslim, Mohammed Rafiq, who then held him down, with the help of another man, until the police arrived. On the Gates of Vienna blog, this episode was not deemed worthy of mention. Instead, its devoted readers were told that Muslims had been responsible for a recent outbreak of animal cruelty in Sweden.

Source: The myth of Eurabia: how a far-right conspiracy theory went mainstream

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with Anders Breivik, Andrew Brown, Christopher Caldwell, Eurabia, far right, Mark Steyn

Why Diversity and Inclusion Is a Strategic Imperative for [political] Campaigns

2019/08/17 Leave a comment

From Anthony Robinson the political director at the National Democratic Training Committee, on their approach (all Canadian parties, perhaps save the Bloc and PPC, do this given the large number of immigrants and visible minorities in many ridings):

The rise of diversity and inclusion initiatives and organizational focus over the last several years marks an important shift in our nation’s perspective on opportunity.

Strategists across the public and private sectors agree that the social, political, and organizational challenges of the 21st century are increasingly becoming more complex. As a result, the backgrounds of the leaders and teams finding solutions to these challenges requires a broad and diverse skill set needed to address these issues and make sure D&I (diversity and inclusion) doesn’t become a passive buzz word.

Campaigns are no different.

The nation’s electorate is increasingly becoming more diverse. So, why aren’t campaigns and political party operative and organizations — at least below the presidential level — more intentional about broadening their campaign staff to reflect this shift?

Our electorate continues to be more brown, female, LGBTQ+, and multicultural, while campaign staffs remain white, male, and typically made up of the same individuals who have run party politics for a very long time.

Candidates can no longer hang their hats on diversity and inclusion in campaign promises and not follow it up with a campaign staff which reflects the growing diversity of the electorate. But this challenge cannot be solved overnight. Without a long-term scalable solution, we’ll continue to face the same challenges year after year.

In a 2017 survey by Inclusv, the 41 Democratic state party organizations that participated revealed they collectively employ 401 staffers and 128 identify as people of color. With the increased votes shares from 2012 to 2016 nearing almost 50 percent for people of color, this demographic only represents 32 percent of the workforce.

Alida Garcia, co-founder of Inclusv said, “We must recognize the direct correlation between who works on campaigns and how those campaigns engage the communities disproportionately impacted by every issue on the national agenda. Authentic and deliberate inclusion is a vital component for candidates to succeed.”

Responding to the need for more diverse staffers on campaigns, my organization created a training program that prioritizes leaders who identify as women, as trans and non-binary, and as people of color. These communities continuously drive the Democratic Party but are historically underrepresented on our campaigns, relative to their vote share. We want to ensure we, as a party, are representative of our voters.

We’ve seen our graduates land jobs throughout the industry. But more needs to be done. In order to improve the makeup of campaign staff, it’s critically important that there be a transformational change to the culture of campaigns. Here’s how that can be achieved.

A change in the narrative.

Diversity must work in tandem with inclusion. Culture change must be more than checking a box. This means campaigns are intentional in the creation of systems to fuel equity and access for diverse leaders and staffers. Systems which create inclusive and diverse staffs but also retain them.

In order for this to be a reality campaigns must transform the way they have traditionally recruited, hired, and trained campaign staffers. Lasting transformational change must incorporate innovation and new processes and expectations, not “fast following.” This includes a productive shift in assumptions and behaviors, as well as improved organizational expectations, policies, and expression of power.

These actionable steps can be put into three core groups.

Empower diverse and inclusive leadership. They often build inclusive teams that perform at a high level.

Put D&I in place across workforce and operations. This can only be achieved by having an intentional recruiting strategy and implementation plan.

Put forward an organizational vision for D&I. There should be inclusive internal and external communication and meaningful diversity and inclusion education.

I am often asked about the idea that emphasizing diversity takes time away from organizational goals or that there should be a focus on “diversity of thought.” My response is two-fold. First, a focus on diversity and inclusion doesn’t take time away from the overall objective. It should be part of the objective. Second, seeking diversity and inclusion doesn’t mean you’re not also seeking the most talented person for the job.

There’s an issue in your organization if it’s thought that prioritizing diversity means you’re somehow de-prioritizing talent. Organizations that are future-focused, innovative, and understand the strategic advantage of having an inclusive staff will be more successful.

Source: Why Diversity and Inclusion Is a Strategic Imperative for Campaigns

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with Anthony Robinson, Democrats, diversity, National Democratic Training Committee

Martin Patriquin: The Quebec Liberals’ sad interculturalism gambit

2019/08/16 Leave a comment

Of note:

The Quebec Liberal Party is in the midst of an identity crisis. About 150 years into its existence, the party finds itself in the very unfamiliar position of being out of power and largely out of favour with the province’s electorate — it has been left bobbing in the deep blue wake of Premier François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Quebec. So the Quebec Liberals appear to have staked their future in targeting the gut-level issues of identity and cultural insecurity. In so doing, Quebec’s de facto multicultural party is distancing itself from the very concept, and the consequences are both huge and unfortunate for the province as a whole.

Last weekend, the Liberal Party’s youth wing voted in favour of the adoption of a law on interculturalism. For those of you rushing to the nearest dictionary, don’t bother; the term is obscure in origin and application. Essentially, it’s a contract between Quebec society and its new arrivals, in which integration happens by way of a common language (French) and culture. Apparently, it’s official Quebec policy, though when I asked in 2011, no one could tell me for how long. “It’s been like that for a number of years, I think,” a spokesperson told me at the time. The word barely appears on the government’s website and is rarely uttered by its ministers.

But the definition of the term isn’t nearly as important as the context in which the Liberals are suddenly pushing it. Quebec’s Liberal Party has long been the parking lot of choice for the anglophone and allophone vote. Though this has given the party a long and enviable advantage in Montreal and its immediate environs, this sizeable voting bloc was a millstone for the party in the last election. The CAQ savaged the Liberals for being too English, too urbane, too out of touch and too … multicultural.

The CAQ’s trope, shabbily hidden behind these code words, is simple enough: that recent arrivals to Quebec don’t assimilate, are ambivalent or worse toward the French language, and are as such a detriment to the future of the Québécois nation. It worked like hell, and now the Liberals want in.

Granted, it isn’t the first time the party has been late to the identity game. In 1974, in an attempt to stave off a surging Parti Québécois, the Liberals introduced Bill 22, which made French the official language of government and the workplace. The party was at first fervently against Bill 101, the Parti Québécois’s ensuing (and far more restrictive) language law before coming out in its favour.

But there is a massive difference between Quebec’s language laws and the CAQ’s more recent legislation targeting immigrants and religious minorities. Bill 22 and Bill 101, the latter of which has thankfully been law for over four decades, addressed a quantifiable problem concerning the French language. Namely, without legislation buttressing its precarious existence in Quebec’s classrooms and workplaces, French would disappear. Conversely, the alleged non-integration of recent arrivals to Quebec is an unsubstantiated fear — a “crisis of perception”largely conjured by certain members of the political and media classes eager for a wedge issue to exploit. In fact, and contrary to this fear, Quebec’s language laws have ensured that successive waves of immigrants are schooled in French. Interculturalism had exactly nothing to do with any of this.

Its interculturalism gambit is the Liberal Party’s attempt to ingratiate itself with the white francophone majority by appealing to its baser fears. Even sadder: I doubt the party will suffer one iota because of it. This province’s immigrants, allophones and English types, long supporters of the Quebec Liberal Party out of conviction or convenience, have no one else to vote for. They are a captive audience, for better and now for worse.

Source: Martin Patriquin: The Quebec Liberals’ sad interculturalism gambit

Filed under Interculturalisme, Multiculturalism Tagged with Martin Patriquin, Quebec, Quebec Liberals

Fletcher: ‘Diversity’ won’t tell you if a politician is competent

2019/08/16 Leave a comment

Former Harper government and current PPC candidate Fletcher has some valid points regarding life experience diversity and that standard measures of diversity (women, Indigenous, Persons with disabilities, visible minorities) are incomplete and imperfect measures.

Less convinced by his arguments that the standard measures have been at the expense of competency:

What does a picture of a group of people tell us?

Often, in the media and in the general public, a photo is used to demonstrate diversity. People may look at the colour of the skin, hair colour, eye colour, age, gender, size of the people in the picture and assume that the group is diverse and therefore qualified.

In elections, political parties use the appearance of diversity to suggest competency. This diversity “picture” seems to be strongest on the left of the political spectrum in Canada, but it certainly has infiltrated all parties. However, judging competency based on appearance is really quite ridiculous. The diversity “picture” championed by the left assumes a monolithic view of visible minorities.

The electorate should not vote based on appearance of diversity, but on the diversity of the competency of the candidate. We should look to the diversity of skill sets when voting.

Skill sets cannot be determined by gender, skin colour or any of the other stereotypical characteristics that too many people associate with diversity. The assumptions people make about other people they do not know are usually wrong. A photo tells us nothing about an individual’s ability to represent any of us.

Diversity needs to include people who have education, experience and knowledge that best allow for good public policy development and implementation. It can also include life experience.

There are not enough engineers, accountants, trades people, medical professionals and numerous other skill sets in any party. Parliament is weaker as a result. In fact, there are probably too many lawyers and liberal arts graduates taking up space.

At present, the diversity test seems to be a binary choice between male/female ratios or visible minorities. But visible minorities and gender are not homogeneous in their views. Just because someone is purple doesn’t mean they represent all the purple people.

When I first entered politics, it was assumed that I was an NDP supporter and sometimes a Liberal. This assumption arose because I happen to be a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down.

It is true that for a lot of good reasons many of the activists in the disabled community are left-of-centre. It was striking how common this assumption was made when I first started door-knocking for the federal election in 2004.

People also assume that because someone is in a wheelchair, it affects the hearing and cognitive functions of that individual. People sometimes raise their voice when explaining something.

Another misconception is on the cognitive side. I recall a radio interview on the main station in Winnipeg, CJOB, when the announcer asked me on live radio, “Why would anyone vote for you over the star Liberal candidate, especially given your condition?” My reply was, “I believe the constituents would rather have an MP that was paralyzed from the neck down than the neck up.” I wasn’t applying to be the quarterback of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers; I was applying for a position that I was qualified to perform. Half a dozen stereotypes were blown out of the water in that radio interview.

I was recently in a “higher learning” program for executives for corporations. In the program, we were shown a photo of an example of what the program called “a model of a corporate board.” The class was asked to comment, and most of the class responded robotically and positively towards the photo. Not me.

The photo provides no information; it simply allows people to impose their own biases and stereotypes onto the images without merit.

The foremost criteria must be competency, always. Competency may include diversity, but diversity does not guarantee competency.

A recent example in Manitoba is when the largest Crown corporation in the province, Manitoba Hydro, saw an entire board resign en masse. They did this on principle, due to government interference. The replacement board of political appointees certainly appeared to be photographically politically correct. But in an unusual demonstration of self-awareness, these political appointees demanded the government add members, because the board as appointed did not have the skill sets to fulfil its responsibilities.

The government was caught out by its own appointees in its misguided attempt to be politically correct.

In 2011, a federal NDP candidate was elected and became famous because she hadn’t actually done much campaigning. She spent a part of the election in Las Vegas, worked as a waitress at a bar and was a single mother. This MP was mocked from all sides.

It was my impression, which is shared by many others, that she is one of the most effective and talented MPs for the NDP, or any party, for that matter. The diversity she brought was in her different life experience and work ethic.

Recently, a Liberal MP was whining about the MP workload. Good grief.

I worked underground in the mining industry. That was hard work: dangerous, long hours and no breaks. Perhaps, a few hard-rock miners should go to Parliament to demonstrate work ethic.

The political establishment in Canada is collectively responsible for reinforcing stereotypes for political gain – gaming Canadians to put appearance ahead of the competency of the candidates. The political party space-takers are denying many more qualified people the opportunity to run for Parliament.

The foremost criteria must be competency, always. Competency may include diversity, but diversity does not guarantee competency.

Hopefully, in this election Canadian people will vote for the person rather than the party. In exchange, whoever becomes an MP must represent the people, not the party. Can you imagine?

Source: Fletcher: ‘Diversity’ won’t tell you if a politician is competent

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with diversity, PPC, Steven Fletcher

Australia’s new suicide prevention advisor says culturally specific support ‘critical’

2019/08/16 Leave a comment

Of note (as is the case of mental health and other areas):

Christine Morgan has what some might think is an impossible task ahead of her.

She has been appointed as the country’s first national suicide prevention advisor as the government embarks on its ambitious “towards zero” target for suicide rates in Australia.

According to the latest data available, 3,128 people died by suicide in Australia in 2017, a figure Ms Morgan said is “far too high”.

“It is something that is sad beyond belief,” she told SBS News on Wednesday, following Health Minister Greg Hunt’s unveiling of a plan to fix Australia’s mental health system. The plan includes $114 million for eight adult mental health centres.

Ms Morgan, chief executive of the National Mental Health Commission, was appointed by Scott Morrison in July and is currently on a three-month tour of the country, listening to Australians from all walks of life about their experiences with self-harm and suicide.

“It’s about what is driving people to a point where they feel they have lost hope,” she said. “And I’ve got to say, it’s not an easy answer.”

Cultural differences

When it comes to multicultural Australia, with more than a quarter of people in the country born overseas, Ms Morgan said the task can be “extraordinarily complex”.

“It’s not just about having a translator, in terms of specific words and language, it’s actually about translating concepts,” she said.

It’s not just about having a translator in terms of words, it’s actually about translating concepts.

“It’s understanding what may be culturally familiar to somebody, and when they are trying to communicate a thought, a feeling, a behaviour, and what that means through their cultural framework.

“The challenges with the current system are that it’s an expectation that they [culturally and linguistically diverse people] connect with the system – we have to turn that on its head.”

Rather, she said, support services need to actively reach out to minority communities, if they are going to be effective.

While no specific funding has yet been allocated for multicultural Australia, Ms Morgan confirmed she does see a need for targeted programs within culturally and linguistically diverse communities.

Indigenous Australians

While the government spends nearly $5 billion a year on mental health services – including more than $500 million towards youth mental health and a suicide prevention plan – support specifically for Indigenous Australians is also a top priority for Ms Morgan in her new role, she said.

Rates of suicide among Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander people is more than double the national average, with rates among children even higher.

Indigenous children make up five per cent of Australia’s youth but account for 25 per cent of child suicides.

While travelling around the country, Ms Morgan said she visited a community where a teenager had recently died by suicide.

“It was raw, really raw, and the sense of helplessness that you have, I mean what do you say?” she said.

“The pain, the pain of those who are left behind, the pain of the family … It’s a palpable feeling and realising that when we lose someone to suicide it doesn’t just affect the person who has gone, but so many others.”

Personal drive

After a career in corporate law, Ms Morgan wanted to try something different. She became general manager of Wesley Mission, a charity supporting vulnerable Australians, including those who are homeless and experiencing mental health issues.

It was a turning point in her life.

She went on to spend a decade at eating disorder support organisation The Butterfly Foundation, a time she describes as “incredibly formative”.

“It taught me so much about listening to the voices of those going through it, and capturing that to translate not just the pain, but to inform what was needed to bring that issue to the table and come up with initiatives to address it,” she said.

“That now drives me.”

While she is still in the preliminary stages of her role, Ms Morgan said the way forward is to stop seeing suicide as just a mental health problem.

“This is about a whole of life experience.”

Homelessness, unemployment, chronic pain, and experiences of trauma, all contribute to suicide rates, she said, and those things need to be addressed.

“Let’s really take a good hard look at what are those societal factors, those social determinants –housing, education, experience of veterans, trauma – how can we start to bring those to the table and wrap them into our initiatives?”

“Maybe by doing that we can be more effective with driving towards fewer people dying by suicide.”

Challenge ahead

While she believes Australia has come a long way in the last decade when it comes to mental health, Ms Morgan says the nation has to do better.

“I think we still have very high levels of stigma around reaching out for health [support].”

“A lot is self-stigma, people saying ‘I can understand when it affects someone else, I can be empathetic when it affects someone else, but do I want to admit when it affects me?’”

Ms Morgan says Australia has “incredibly deep and rich” resources when it comes to support services, but “we need to harness that and continue to leverage that”.

She is expected to deliver an interim report by July 2020, with a final report and recommendations due the following December.

With a huge task at hand, she says the keyword in the government’s “towards zero” slogan, for now, is “towards”.

Source: Australia’s new suicide prevention advisor says culturally specific support ‘critical’

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with Australia, prevention, suicide

The resurgence of Oriana Fallaci’s anti-Islam message in Italy

2019/08/15 Leave a comment

Not too surprising:

At his political rally in Milan in March, Italy’s far-right Minister of Interior and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini mentioned two women: the Virgin Mary, who, he said “will lead us to victory”, and Oriana Fallaci, whom he described as “the founding mother of this Europe”.

One of Italy’s most famous journalists, Fallaci, who died in her late seventies in 2006, covered the Vietnam War and interviewed the likes of Henry Kissinger, Indira Gandhi and Ruhollah Khomeini.

After September 11, she adopted an anti-Islam stance and today her legacy is enjoying a moment of renewed popularity.

In 2019 Italy, Fallaci’s unapologetic Islamophobia is alarmingly mainstream. The new ruling class is rediscovering Fallaci as a prescient thinker.

Streets or squares have been renamed after her in Pisa and Arezzo, in central Italy, and Genoa, further north.

A public garden was also dedicated to her in Sesto San Giovanni, an industrial town close to Milan, where the mayor also blocked the construction of a mosque and recently mentioned Fallaci in his inauguration speech: “Her exhortations to the West to wake up still resonate today.”

In July, the lower chamber of Parliament approved the creation of low-denomination treasury bills that could also be used as a de-facto parallel currency to the euro. According to the plan’s main proponent, the League’s MP Claudio Borghi, the 20 euro bill should bear a picture of Fallaci.

For what would have been her 90th birthday, state-owned television channel RAI 2 aired a celebratory documentary about her.

And Salvini has trumpeted his newly approved security bill as inspired by Fallaci.

At home, her ideas were not perceived as radical – her anti-Islam manifesto was first published in the country’s most prestigious newspaper.

But with rising anti-immigrant sentiment and with the far-right League party receiving almost 40 percent in the most recent elections, her message resonates with the current climate.

On September 28, 2001, a week after the September 11 attacks, Corriere della Sera, the Milan-based newspaper, published a five-page article titled La Rabbia e l’Orgoglio, or Rage and Pride, in which Fallaci accused the West of being too soft on Islam and Muslim immigrants.

In Italy, she argued, “there is no place for muezzins, minarets, fake teetotalers, their f****** middle ages, and their f****** chadors.”

From then on until her death, Fallaci stirred anti-Muslim sentiment.

[Fallaci has become] a darling of the right precisely because she was a public figure previously associated with the left.

LEONARDO BIANCHI, NEWS EDITOR OF VICE ITALY

After the article in 2001, she wrote three books – The Rage and the Pride, The Force of Reason, and Oriana Fallaci Interviews Herself – in which she described the Muslim world as an “enemy we treat as a friend” and warned Europe about what she believed to be the danger of becoming “Eurabia”.

She borrowed the term from a conspiracy theory popularised by the Egyptian-born British writer Bat Ye’or (a pseudonym for Gisele Littman) about an alleged plan to “Islamise” Europe through mass immigration.

A few months before her death, Fallaci famously said she was ready to blow up the minaret of a mosque in Chianti because she did not want to “see a 24-metre minaret in the landscape of Giotto when I can’t even wear a cross … in their country!”.

More than a decade later, her influence on Italian public life has strengthened.

“The fact that Oriana Fallaci took such decisive positions after 9/11 transformed her into a figure of reference for the right,” said Francesco Borgonovo, deputy director of the conservative newspaper La Verita.

He claimed that Fallaci was often criticised for warning Western governments against immigration from Muslim-majority countries, but she understood that “in the face of a certain Islam, it is dangerous to say hurray to multiculturalism.”

Before being revered by the Italian right, Fallaci was a respected war reporter, essayist and political interviewer.

“She was the most famous Italian journalist in the world,” said Ugo Tramballi, war correspondent and columnist for the newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.

He said that while Italy had other prominent journalists, “none of them was known outside Italy and has had bylines on great American magazines as did Fallaci.”

Her interrogative interview style, in which she was vocal about her own opinions, contributed to her popularity.

“When Oriana Fallaci was going to follow the news, she became the news,” said Tramballi.

The daughter of an anti-fascist partisan, Fallaci wrote about the moon landing, interviewed Robert Kennedy and was injured during the repression of student movements in Mexico in 1968.

Some view Fallaci’s early career, sometimes aligned with liberal causes, as distinct from her later days as an anti-Islam polemicist.

But Borgonovo, the conservative commentator, said they are two sides of the same coin: “The reasons behind her attacks against a certain kind of Islam were the same than those behind her previous battles. She was a feminist, a woman of the left and a libertarian.”

Leonardo Bianchi, news editor of Vice Italy, who wrote a book about Italian populism, sees it differently.

According to him, after September 11, Fallaci became “a darling of the right precisely because she was a public figure previously associated with the left”.

She exemplified that “even ideologically unwholesome people understand that the threat [of Islam] is serious and something needs to be done.”

After the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, Fallaci’s work resurfaced on social media platforms, with some arguing she was right to bemoan Islam after all.

Recently, social media savvy Salvini was photographed while reading one of her books on holiday.

And Facebook is now full of fans groups with names such as Oriana Fallaci, the power of truth and Aphorisms by Oriana Fallaci.

Fallaci is no longer a simple journalist but has become, said Bianchi, “a prophetess of misfortune who warned us that Islam wanted to attack us.”

Source: The resurgence of Oriana Fallaci’s anti-Islam message in Italy

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with Italy, Matteo Salvini, Oriana Fallaci

The Battle for Hong Kong Is Being Fought in Sydney and Vancouver How Beijing is weaponizing social media in its fight to crush the Hong Kong protests.

2019/08/15 Leave a comment

Good account:

As the police deploy tear gas against protesters on the streets of Hong Kong, another battle is raging less visibly: the one for narrative control. After weeks of asserting that the unrest had been orchestrated by foreign “black hands,” Chinese officials on Monday accused protesters of showing the first signs of “terrorism.” Such messaging is key to Beijing’s public opinion operation, which has been turned up to full volume.

The weapons of this information war include a flood of social media posts from state-run media, some carrying misinformation. When a woman dispensing first aid was shot in the eye by the Hong Kong police, the state-run CCTV reported on its official social media account that she had been shot by protesters. It also accused her of handing out money to demonstrators. Chinese readers are unlikely to question the veracity of such an authoritative source, and CCTV’s Weibo post, which says the movement is slandering the Hong Kong police by blaming them for the injury, has been liked more than 700,000 times.

Ten weeks ago, when Hong Kongers first took to the streets to protest disputed extradition legislation, Beijing censored all reports of this civil unrest. But in recent days, it has reveled in posting video of protesters purportedly using air guns, slingshots and petrol bombs against the police. The state-run Global Times has described protesters as “nothing more than street thugs who want Hong Kong to ‘go to hell,’” or as people who had “voluntarily stripped themselves of their national identity.” Such descriptions are aimed at delegitimizing the protesters’ cause, especially among educated mainlanders who might otherwise be sympathetic.

Chinese people living or studying overseas are another important audience for Beijing’s messaging. Their primary news diet is largely delivered via WeChat, a Chinese chat app where messages are subject to censorship, so they often still fall within Beijing’s propaganda orbit. Recent pictures of an American diplomat meeting two activists, Joshua Wong and Nathan Law, were used to bolster Beijing’s claims of hostile foreign forces backing the protests. On Tuesday, scenes of a Chinese state media worker being tied up at the airport and beaten by young protesters flooded Chinese social media, bolstering calls for Beijing to intervene militarily in Hong Kong.

Such messaging helps to mobilize Chinese communities, especially newly arrived migrants in Australia, Canada, the United States and elsewhere, to support the official line from Beijing. One website for a planned protest this weekend in Sydney asks Chinese to stand together against “rioting” in Hong Kong, which it said was causing discrimination against Chinese in Australia.

The battle over Hong Kong is, in effect, being exported, pitting overseas Chinese communities against each other. Over the past few weeks, “Lennon Walls,” covered in colorful Post-it notes expressing support for Hong Kong, have been torn down by supporters of Beijing from Auckland, New Zealand, to Vancouver, British Columbia, and from Hobart, Australia, to Harvard Square. After a violent tussle between pro-China and pro-Hong Kong students in late July at the University of Queensland in Australia, the Chinese consul-general in Brisbane, Xu Jie, issued a statement praising the “spontaneous patriotic behavior of Chinese students.”

One reason this conflict is playing out on social media is that almost all of Hong Kong’s big media companies are owned by mainland business executives or groups with extensive business interests in China, so they have instinctively taken a pro-Beijing stance. This has left digital news outlets and the overseas media as the front line in the battle for public opinion. People trying to livestream the protests and foreign media are apparently already being targeted by the police. In recent weeks, a BBC journalist was saved from injury only by his face mask, which shattered when the police shot directly at his head. Another reporter wearing a bright yellow press vest was crushed against a wall by three police officers. Two journalists were attacked by a gang of street thugs, and a well-known British livestreamer scratching his belly was publicly accused by a pro-Beijing politician of being a “foreign commander” sending hand signals to protesters. Such an accusation would be laughable had it not been so widely shared.

To counter what they say are lies and malicious distortions, the protesters have started to hold regular news conferences, with their representatives addressing the media wearing face masks and yellow helmets. The movement’s social media strategy has been to use colorful memes and videos tailored for different audiences, including large-print messages with floral backgrounds for elderly readers.

In recent days, the state-run Chinese media has begun sharing videos showing large-scale exercises featuring the People’s Armed Police, a paramilitary group, in the city of Shenzhen, over the border from Hong Kong. The same group, instead of the People’s Liberation Army, was used to crack down on protests in Chengdu in 1989. Hong Kongers may dismiss these provocations as bluffing, but it is a clear sign that the information war, like the battle for Hong Kong itself, is set to escalate further.

Source: The Battle for Hong Kong Is Being Fought in Sydney and Vancouver

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with China, Hong Kong, information war, Louisa Lim, protests

Kelly McParland: Why reactionary populism will fizzle in Canada

2019/08/14 Leave a comment

Tend to agree:

Populism is getting a bad rap in Canada, unjustifiably so.

According to my unaffiliated and wholly non-partisan online dictionary, populism is defined as “a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.” That’s pretty much the whole world, outside a few billionaires, right?

Appealing to ordinary people is what most major political parties claim to do. The least populist parties are the ones on the extreme left or right that seek to spread blinkered minority views that are too often rooted in bitterness, envy, anger, ignorance or ideology run wild. The only people who think this is ordinary are the extremists themselves.

Donald Trump is not a populist, he’s an appallingly shallow, ignorant and narcissistic loudmouth who has struck a chord with Americans who are, for the most part, decent people, but feel they’ve been forgotten by Washington’s craven and self-serving establishment. They have good reason for feeling that way, though supporting Trump is not the solution.

There is little chance of Canada’s federal government being seized by the same sort of ugliness. There are several reasons for this, chief among them that Canadians are vastly different from Americans, less fixated on the outer reaches of individualism, less prone to absolutism and more inclined to compromise and a culture of reformative fudging.

Nonetheless, someone in Ottawa evidently felt the need to invite a perceived expert on the issue to address a task force of senior bureaucrats on “diversity and inclusivity,” which under the Trudeau government has become an obsession all its own. The expert, Tim Dixon, is a “a social movement builder” who co-founded More in Common, a non-profit with operations in a number of European countries that seeks to “build communities and societies that are stronger, more united and more resilient to the increasing threats of polarization and social division.” He is also co-founder of Purpose Europe, “a home for building movements that harness technology to engage large numbers of people and help make progress on major global problems.” Before setting out to remake the world he was a speechwriter for Australian politicians.

If you survey the faces of the various Purpose teams on their websites, you’d have a hard time finding a better-scrubbed, diverse group of young, motivated, good-intentioners anywhere. More in Common has only existed since 2017 but has already printed numerous publications, mostly focused on the U.S. and Europe, dealing with the strains linked to immigration and refugees.

There is no question such strains exist. The Brexit mess in the U.K. is tied directly to hostility towards immigration rules. Over the weekend The New York Times published a lengthy examination of how Sweden’s legacy of tolerance has been undermined by a cross-border digital web of dark impulses exploited by a local party founded on Nazi principles. Italy’s latest government crisis could see the prime ministership go to Matteo Salvini, a party leader with very Trumpian views who has been linked in a series of recent reports to illicit funding from Russia. In the U.S., the political divide has grown so wide and deep there is serious doubt the Democratic party can find a nominee free enough from plans for radical social and economic upheaval to stand a chance against Trump.

Such developments offer good reason for Canadians to look beyond their borders and wonder what perverse political virus has seized the world. But there still is not much cause for serious concern that it might take hold here. For all the Trudeau Liberals’ attempts to portray Conservative leader Andrew Scheer as a bigot-in-training, the man’s biggest flaw may be that he’s just too much an everyday Canadian to inspire excitement among a population that takes its politics in small doses, and only when necessary. The closest Canada comes to a party of intolerance is the People’s Party of Maxime Bernier, who broke away from Scheer’s Tories out of pique at having been rejected as leader and precisely because necks among the Scheer Conservatives aren’t nearly red enough for his liking. Bernier is pledging to significantly reduce immigration to Canada, but fears he might steal votes on the right have proved unfounded: the party barely registers in polls and Bernier has been reduced to recruiting from among disaffected candidates who were either rejected by the Tories or couldn’t drum up much interest anywhere else.

In contrast to Bernier’s pledge to cap immigration at minimal levels, the other parties all remain gangbusters for increased numbers, mainly because Canada needs bright, educated and hard-working people to feed the workforce and the gaps that remain in important industries. The biggest difference between Tory thinking and Liberal thinking relates to the qualifications of would-be migrants, how much time they spend in Canada and how many family members should be allowed in without much prospect they’ll be able to contribute to the benefits they’ll consume.

The “immigration crisis” most often referred to in headlines refers to the sudden flood of arrivals across an illegal crossing in Quebec, which upset Canadians because they thought it was unfair, and because many felt Trudeau brought it on himself via a typically vainglorious tweet offering open arms at a time the world was beset by crises involving millions of people displaced by war and poverty. Conservatives saw arrivals as largely opportunistic and illegal, Liberals wanted to deny there was a crisis. Since the numbers have eased, the “crisis” talk has faded.

The bottom line is that there’s not much evidence Canada is in danger of producing the sort of deep-seated antipathy that feeds the forces of rancour on the left and right. If anything, it seems more likely the abhorrence with which Trump is widely viewed will act as a barrier to any serious spread of the virus that has troubled Europe and the U.S. It’s nice that bureaucrats would feel the need to familiarize themselves with the challenges confronting their colleagues in other countries, but it’s unlikely More in Common will need to mobilize its forces to establish a branch plant in Canada just yet.

Source: Kelly McParland: Why reactionary populism will fizzle in Canada

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with Kelly McParland, populism

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Multicultural Meanderings

Ethnic Media Coverage 11-17 August

I’m a Black Feminist. I Think Call-Out Culture Is Toxic. There are better ways of doing social justice work.

The myth of Eurabia: how a far-right conspiracy theory went mainstream

Why Diversity and Inclusion Is a Strategic Imperative for [political] Campaigns

Martin Patriquin: The Quebec Liberals’ sad interculturalism gambit

Fletcher: ‘Diversity’ won’t tell you if a politician is competent

Australia’s new suicide prevention advisor says culturally specific support ‘critical’

Cultural differences

Indigenous Australians

Personal drive

Challenge ahead

The resurgence of Oriana Fallaci’s anti-Islam message in Italy

The Battle for Hong Kong Is Being Fought in Sydney and Vancouver How Beijing is weaponizing social media in its fight to crush the Hong Kong protests.

Kelly McParland: Why reactionary populism will fizzle in Canada

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