How White Nationalists See What They Want to See in DNA Tests

2019/07/15 3 Comments

Interesting:

On the hate site Stormfront, one of the largest online discussion forums dedicated to “white pride,” sharing DNA results with fellow members has become a rite of passage for some members.

But what happens when users’ results show that they fail to meet their own genetic criteria for whiteness? Are they still willing to post them? And if so, how do other users respond?

Such questions have long intrigued the sociologists Aaron Panofsky, who studies the social implications of genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Joan Donovan, whose research at Harvard University focuses on how information is manipulated on the internet.

“We had a puzzle,” Dr. Panofsky said in an interview this week. “If Stormfront says, ‘You’ve got to be all white or we’ll kick you out,’ how do they deal with these anomalies?”

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Esi Edugyan: ‘Where are you from?’ In search of my Canadian identity

2019/07/15 Leave a comment

Great piece by Edugyan on identities:

Back in 2006, I went to live for a year at an artist colony on the outskirts of Stuttgart, Germany, a city nearly obliterated during the Second World War. I remember the blue thread of the Neckar River running along it in the fine bright air, so that from our residence overlooking the city, we could almost imagine only wilderness lay below.

It was the year Germany played host to the FIFA World Cup. Among the young artists who had arrived from all over the world, an excitement had taken hold. We were eager to be a part of things, to take in as much as we could of this moment.

There was among the German artists, especially, a kind of mild shock at their countrymen’s outpouring of emotion for their nation. For the first time since before the war – which is to say, since before their lifetimes – it had become socially acceptable to hang the national flag from windows, to fly it from cars, to drape it over shoulders in the streets. Visual symbols of patriotism were something I took for granted in Canada, so that I was surprised when, walking the Stuttgart town centre with a friend, I heard her draw a sharp breath at the sight of a child turning a tiny plastic flag in his fingers. For her, it was truly a new era.

I remember so much about those days. How a group of us would spend hours in the beer gardens dotting the city to watch on massive screens matches taking place in all parts of the country. How lightly the sun fell, cupping our foreheads in a warmth that was like the touch of a human palm. How, sometimes, the air in the gardens would reek sharply of shredded grass. And how one evening, during a match between Germany and France, the weather suddenly turned black and churning and vicious, slinging thick braids of water into our faces, so that we opened our mouths.

There was so much beauty in those hours. I recall us all walking home after that rainy match and hearing a damp susurration from beyond the path. My friend, Eugen, parted the long grasses to discover an enormous frog. We passed the frog from hand to hand, and I remember so vividly the feel of it in my careful fist – a pulsing damp shudder, like a living heart. The wonder that came over me then was like a physical shock – I felt as if anything could happen in that moment, as if the world was made of the strange and the unexpected, that it was a place of great openness and possibility.

Then, as we continued on, something happened that drew me up short. We had all been complaining about the French soccer team, but Eugen began to mock them viciously, beginning with their names. His biggest complaint was the fact that so many of them were brown or black men, children no doubt of immigrants who’d settled in France from its former colonies. “How were any of those people actually French?” he said, and then he met my eye: “And you, Esi, how are you Canadian?”

It had been a question that had defined my life, although I would not then have expressed it so. For years I had travelled in search of the place I would feel most at home – indeed, my time in Germany was part of that search – but it was slowly dawning on me that the answer had been clear from the moment I first left home, that I had been stubbornly refusing to look at it.

What became so clear to me with Eugen’s question was how much I had taken a certain kind of multiculturalism for granted, and how much, until those years of travel, I’d come to surround myself with people who also took that plurality for granted. I had always believed that there were many different pathways to citizenship and fealty and belonging beyond the single one suggested by him, which was, of course, blood. In a country in which the population of black people has never exceeded 3.5 per cent (and in British Columbia, where I’ve lived for 20 years, it is less than 1 per cent), the idea of my being able to claim anything like true Canadian-ness was, to him, ridiculous.

My parents were Ghanaian immigrants who’d met, not in Canada, but in San Francisco, as students; A mutual friend was hosting a party to watch the moon landing on his black and white television. Six months later they were married, and my brother was born a year after that. They settled eventually in Alberta, first in Edmonton, where my sister was born, then in Calgary, where I was born. They often used to joke that they stopped moving to avoid having more children.

Migration is rarely a clean narrative. Alongside the joys, stories of migration often contain the loss of treasured things, and also the gaining of things not wanted. At the centre of these stories is often risk. And indeed, when I think of my mother’s case, what I’m struck by is how much she had to risk to gain an education. She was a young woman in an African society where women did much of the work and held little of the power, and as her secondary school years were coming to an end, she was left floundering at the starkness of her choices. She chafed at the expectation that she would keep her father’s house until she found a husband. She wanted to become a nurse. In order to do so, though, she would have to leave home. And what amazes me is that she managed to do it.

I sometimes ask myself what might have happened if she had never made the choice to leave. If my father had also stayed and by some whim of chance they’d met and married in Ghana? Her near-fate as an uneducated mother and wife could well have been my own fate, too. The life given to me is lived in the shadow of that other possible life. I marvel even now at the strange combination of circumstances that had to come about for me to be here.

To be a Canadian is to accept that the story has more than one thread, more than one character, more than one point of view. It has become a near cliché to say it, but it’s true: we are a nation of many narratives and histories, and it is in the attempts to harmonize our various stories that our culture lives.

These negotiations can sometimes be fraught, but they are ours. Within my own family, there are a multitude of stories: one of my sisters-in-law immigrated to Edmonton from Hong Kong when she was eight years old, while the other is from the Coast Salish tribes of Vancouver Island, whose people have lived on the land for generations. My brother-in-law is French-Canadian. My husband’s aunt, who was born and raised in Guyana, has commented that when we sit down to holiday dinners we look like a UN summit. I think, though, that the variety that strikes her as an international feature is actually a very national one. And it is in our struggle to forever negotiate and align these stories that our identity is made and shaped and reshaped. The failure to come to a consensus on a single narrative – the hesitation and uncertainty about having one dominant story – is what the culture has become.

What do we see as features of our future stories, going forward? What is it we can be? The image returns to me of that rainy walk home in Stuttgart, the feel of that tiny life in my hands – how unexpected and full of wonder that moment was, how much it made the world feel boundless and without limits, as if the miraculous lay within reach. That feeling is what we need to harness, it is what I want my children to feel. The sense that nothing is closed to anyone, not because of race or gender or religious belief, that everything is open and full of startling possibility, regardless of who we are.

Source:     ‘Where are you from?’ In search of my Canadian identity Esi Edugyan July 11, 2019     

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Kelly Toughill: The corrosive power of “Where are you from?”

2019/07/15 Leave a comment

Part of the challenges in encouraging and retaining immigration to Atlantic Canada. Not unique to Atlantic Canada: my Russian-born mother always bristled when she was asked the question in Toronto in the 50s and 60s:
Opinion: If Atlantic Canadians are serious about boosting immigration and making newcomers feel welcome, writes Kelly Toughill, we need to find a way to have real conversations about regional culture and the come-from-away phenomenon.

“Do you feel like a Nova Scotian?” I asked the woman.

We had stumbled into the topic by mistake. It is not something we talk about here: not those of us who chose Nova Scotia nor those who are tethered to the province by ancestral DNA. We were cautious, hesitant, both aware of the danger surrounding the taboo.

She is a person of significant influence with a broad social and professional network who has lived here more than 20 years. No, she said, she does not feel like a Nova Scotian and knows she never will.

Neither do I.

“I moved to Nova Scotia 21 years ago and expect to live here until I die, but I have come to terms with the fact that I will always be treated like a guest.”

There is a stereotype about the “come from away” phenomenon in Atlantic Canada, but little deep, respectful discussion of how the tendency to divide people by origin affects the region and its future. If we hope to use immigration to bolster the flagging population, we must figure out how to have that conversation right now.

Where you are from means something very different here than in the other places I have lived. In San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, Washington, D.C. or Toronto, when asked where I was from, the question really meant, “Where do you live? Where do you choose to make your home? Where can you best relax and let down your guard?”

Here, it means something else entirely. I have never seen a place so connected to its roots. That is a joyful thing. It is one reason this province has such a strong sense of identity, a distinct culture and a tradition of caring for its own. But traditions can be exclusionary.

“When I first moved to Nova Scotia, I travelled the Atlantic region extensively for work. In other regions, an opening social line might be, “What do you do?” But here it was always, “Where are you from?””

I would answer, “Halifax,” because that’s where I live or, if asked in Halifax, would say, “Here.”

And people treated me as if I were lying.

It took me a while to realize they were asking me to name a spot of earth that defines my identity. Where are my ancestors buried? Where do people remember my malevolent uncle, my grandmother’s affection for mathematics, my mother’s brilliant, eclectic career?

There is no place like that for me. There is no place like that for hundreds of millions of people around the world. And that is incomprehensible to many of my neighbours and, now, closest friends.

It was a union activist who helped me figure out how to answer that essential East Coast question. We were sitting on a wharf in Saint Anthony, Newfoundland, when he asked where I was from. I explained that I had no idea how to answer in a way that honoured the real intent of his question. After a long talk, he suggested I name the place that I was born.

Now, when people ask, I say “Washington, D.C.” My parents were newly arrived in Washington when I was born. I left when I was eight years old and I do not have a single relative or friend in that city. It feels a little bit like a lie every time I say it, but it is the closest answer to their truth that I can offer.

A recent article in the academic journal Ethnicities describes how that specific question can be part of a system of welcoming that leaves racialized newcomers as perpetual outsiders. Speaking welcome: A discursive analysis of an immigrant mentorship event in Atlantic Canada, by Kristi A. Allain, Rory Crath and Gül Çaliskan, examined an event in Fredericton designed to welcome newly arrived economic immigrants. They considered the language and structure of the event through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s theory of conditional hospitality. They found that the event designed to welcome newcomers actually reinforced their status as foreign and other. And it all started with, “Where are you from?”

This is not just a matter of manners and personal feelings. Atlantic Canada will need tens of thousands of new immigrants to maintain its population, tax base and public services over the next few decades. There is much public debate about how to structure immigration pathways, how to improve economic outcomes and how immigrants can best be supported for long term success. But there is little discussion of local culture and how that can work for – and against – the retention of newcomers.

The woman and I were hesitant because we both know that this topic relies exclusively on personal experience as evidence, and that can very easily be misunderstood as a blanket criticism of the region. It takes trust even to talk about the phenomenon.

I sent her a draft of this column and asked if she was comfortable being named. She thought about it for a day and then declined. She said was afraid of discouraging other newcomers and also afraid of hurting the feelings of her Nova Scotian colleagues.

I know what she means. My Nova Scotian friends have been hurt or angry when I tried to describe my experience, so now I just don’t. After all, the Atlantic region is known for its tremendous hospitality. There is even a hit Broadway musical about how Newfoundland welcomed strangers stranded on 9-11. But being treated well as a guest is not the same as being included, for guests are expected to leave.

I asked the woman if she feels Canadian. The answer was instant and affirmative: of course, absolutely.

Me too. I am Canadian through-and-through. My inclusion in the body Canada does not feel conditional in any way, unlike my status in Nova Scotia.

I still wince every time I hear someone ask, “Where are you from?” It reminds me that I will always be a stranger in my own home province. I’ve come to accept my outsider status as the price of living in this magnificent place, but it is sad. If we want to draw people here, not everyone will make the same choice that I have.

So, here’s a suggestion: No matter how much it might feel right, no matter whether your intention is to welcome, or simple curiosity, don’t ask a stranger, “Where are you from?” Wait until you get to know them to probe that specific identity marker. Wait until you have forged a bond. Wait until that question will not be seen as a signal that your new friend will never really belong.

Source: The corrosive power of where are you from

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Tung Chan: Dialogue with Chinese consul at reception can promote Canada’s case

2019/07/13 Leave a comment

Valid argument. The test, however, will be how many municipal politicians will raise their concerns and how forcefully or not they do so. And dialogue requires a willingness on the Chinese side, not very much in evidence these days:

I read with amazement about the debate over whether municipal politicians should attend the reception to be hosted by the Consulate of the People’s Republic of China at the 2019 Union of B.C. Municipalities Convention, to be held Sept. 23-27 at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

The central arguments against attending can be summed up in two points.

The first is that as a result of China acting in a hostile way toward our country, we should not have any contacts with its officials. The second is that if our politicians attend the reception, they will end up under the influence of the Chinese officials.

There is no doubt that China is acting in a heavy-handed way toward Canada. But this is precisely the time that more dialogue between our two countries is needed. Even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tried to talk to Chinese President Xi Jinping at the recent G20 meeting in Japan. The reception at the upcoming UBCM will give our municipal politicians the opportunity to talk to Chinese officials.   

As to the second point about being afraid that our municipal politicians would be influenced, as a former Vancouver city councillor and former president of the Non-Partisan Association, I have full confidence that our elected mayors and councillors would not be so easily influenced by a cocktail or two. To suggest otherwise is an insult to their intelligence and integrity.

If we truly believe that our politicians can so easily become “under the general influence” of the cocktail host and then “all of a sudden, decisions aren’t taken on the basis of the public good, but on the basis of” the preoccupations of the cocktail party’s host (to paraphrase a statement by Richard Fadden, former head of CSIS), then we should, on principle, also ban commercial sponsorship at all gatherings of our politicians. Otherwise they will all be making decisions on the basis of those commercial enterprises and not on the basis of the public good. 

The fact is influence can go both ways. Why is it that those who suggest boycotting the reception have so little confidence in themselves or other politicians who want to participate of their own power of influence?  Why won’t they consider using the interaction to impress, to the extent possible, to the hosts of the reception in question that Canada is acting the way we are because we are a country that believes in the rule of law?

The points of view of the Chinese consular officials may not be changed but at least there would be constructive dialogue and our local politicians would reinforce the message of our prime minister and the foreign affairs minister. 

I believe, with the best interest of our country in heart, we need to open up more channels of dialogue between Canada and China.

Common sense tells us that problems can only be solved through dialogue, not through avoiding contact. It is time for our local politicians to join in the effort to tell China via the Chinese consuls face-to-face the feelings of the people they represent about the actions of the Chinese government. Our local politicians cannot leave that job to our prime minister and the minister of foreign affairs alone.

Tung Chan is a former Vancouver city councillor and former president of the Non-Partisan Association.

Source: Tung Chan: Dialogue with Chinese consul at reception can promote Canada’s case

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HASSAN: UN should press Islamic nations for more inclusive societies

2019/07/13 Leave a comment

Valid critique of many members of the OIC:

Last year, the United Nations Council on Human Rights passed a resolution acknowledging defamation of religion as a human rights violation. Pakistan led the delegation representing the 56-nation Organization of Islamic Conference and proclaimed that “Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.” Pakistan asserted that nations must “deny impunity” to those showing intolerance and ensure respect for religion.

But which religion, how and by whom?

Last Tuesday, the editor of a moderate Islamic website criticized the UN measure, citing freedom of speech issues. More important, he accused Muslim nations of expressing most of this so-called defamation of religion. He said reports from Muslim countries, such as Pakistan, not only tell horrific tales of local misogyny and terror but also reveal ways the rights of non-Muslim minorities are constantly violated. He cited many examples of this, including the publication of jihadi literature and laws that marginalize religious minorities and discriminate against women. In Pakistan, for example, Hindu girls continue to be forcibly converted to Islam and sold into marriage. This is the worst kind of intolerance based on faith.

New Age Islam editor Sultan Shaheen has tried hard in the past decade to salvage Islam from its darker manifestations and to encourage a more humane version of the faith. Like other South Asian moderates, such as Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, he has offered newer interpretations of religious precepts in an attempt to rid Islam of bigotry, violence and fundamentalism.

In drawing attention to these heinous practices in the Muslim world, Shaheen has identified the valid reasons for the bad reputation Islamic countries have earned. In a letter to the UN, he stated that, while this resolution seeks to protect Islam from defamation through any association with terrorism, other religions are routinely defamed in Muslim countries by radical Muslims. For example, propaganda is often published justifying violence against non-Muslim civilians. He cited a long essay in the Taliban mouthpiece Nawa-e-Afghan Jihad entitled Circumstances in which the Killing of Innocent People among Infidels is Justified.

Shaheen’s novelty is to interpret intolerance by Muslim extremists as defaming not only other religions but primarily distorting the essence of Islam itself. He urges the Council to “ask the Muslim countries to treat intolerance of minorities and jihadi literature too as defaming the religion of Islam.”

Shaheen quoted some jihadi literature in his letter, such as by radical Islamic scholar Sheikh Yusuf Al Abeeri, who has openly justified destroying American cities and killing enemy civilians. Shaheen characterized such literature as a tirade against Islam. He also highlighted the anti-Semitism of many of these radical scholars.

Sultan Shaheen has rightly identified the main reason for the negative image of Islam. It is the actions of radical Muslims more than anything else, coupled with the fact that moderates do not actively challenge them or distance themselves from their parochial ideas, that defame Islam the most.

The UN Council on Human Rights must look beyond its own naive resolution and urge Islamic nations to enact laws that enable freer and more inclusive societies. Instead of Pakistan urging consequences for those who supposedly defame its state religion, it should seek real consequences for those who openly and aggressively promote violence against women and non-Muslims.

Source: HASSAN: UN should press Islamic nations for more inclusive societies

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Is ‘Race Science’ Making A Comeback? . News

2019/07/12 Leave a comment

Interesting and relevant interview:

When Angela Saini was 10 years old, her family moved from what she called “a very multicultural area” in East London to the almost exclusively white Southeast London. Suddenly her brown skin stood out, making her a target. She couldn’t avoid the harassment coming from two boys who lived around the corner. One day, they pelted her and her sister with rocks. She remembers one hit her on the head. She remembers bleeding.

There had been racist comments before that, she says, “but that was the first time that someone around my own age had decided to physically hurt me. And it was tough.”

It was also one of the first stories she reported, writing about the incident and reading it out for class. She says that’s what made her a journalist.

Saini is now an award-winning science journalist, often reporting on the intersection of science, race and gender. Her latest book, Superior: The Return of Race Science tracks the history and ideology of race science up to its current resurgence.

We talked to her about how race isn’t real (but you know…still is), why DNA tests are misleading and how race science crept its way into the 21st century. It’s a lot to get your head around.

This is an excerpt from our interview with her. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Code Switch: I guess we should start with the obvious question. What is race science?

Angela Saini: Once upon a time, in the 19th and early 20th century, race science was just science. It was very widely accepted that races exist biologically, that possibly we are different species or different breeds as human beings, and that there might be a racial hierarchy between us.

After the Second World War, when we saw eugenics play out — saw the consequences of Nazi racial hygiene in the Holocaust, the world kind of took a collective intake of breath and tried to put its house in order. So scientists, policy makers, the United Nations all came together and decided, race has no place in biology anymore. It’s not scientifically accurate. Race is not how difference plays out in the real world.

But there were two problems with this. Number one was the hardcore scientific racists. This includes Nazi race scientists. So the ones who believed that whites were superior, that slavery was justified, that segregation was justified. They kept scientific racism alive within a small, but very active global network.

The other aspect is mainstream science. Did everyday scientists really abandon these ideas completely? My argument is, no. They clung on to them, partly because, of course, racism was still there in society. We still had racism all around the world, discrimination embedded in the structures of institutions. And that means even to this day, there are still scientists who, despite knowing better, and despite being mainstream, good-hearted, well-intentioned scientists, still sometimes invoke race in scientific research, particularly medical research, when it’s inappropriate.

Should we even be talking about race anymore?

I’ve read genetics textbooks on race that say race is all silly, we should all let it go and live in this kind of colorblind world. Well, no, because that’s not the world that we live in. These things matter, because that boy when I was 10 years old did not throw rocks at me because of genetics. He threw rocks at me because I looked brown, and that he took exception to that. And that’s not going to stop.

…

The thing is, race is real in society. It’s real in politics, it’s real in the ways that we treat each other. It’s visceral because we have made it visceral in our everyday lives, and it has a biological impact because of that. Racism impacts people’s bodies. It impacts people’s minds. It affects how they live and how they grow.

So I think all researchers, if they’re going to invoke race, have to be really knowledgeable about where these ideas come from, and how they are using race. Are they using it because they’re studying the effects of racism and discrimination, or are they using it as a biological entity in itself? And if they’re using it as a biological entity in itself, then they had better be sure exactly how they define it.

In the U.S., race is defined differently from South Africa, Australia, the U.K., India. We can’t biologize blanket ideas about who people are, because these are socially constructed ideas. I think it’s deeply dangerous, because it falls into the same trap that the people who invented race in the first place wanted us to fall into. The people who hardened these categories wanted us to believe that we are fundamentally different. We are not fundamentally different.

We did an episode not so long ago about how people from certain populations in North and West Africa were more likely to have a trait that makes them predisposed to sickle cell anemia. Is it possible that we risk missing out on important scientific realities if we are skittish about getting into genetics and race?

I think we need to be careful about what we mean when we say race. We know that the sickle cell trait exists in those regions of the world where cases of malaria are high, and that is because, as devastating as it is to have sickle cell anemia, having the trait provides some resistance to malaria. So in the regions where it exists, it is beneficial to the people who have it, because one risk outweighs the other. And this means it’s geographical, it’s not racial. It exists in certain parts of Africa and not all, and it exists in other parts of the world outside Africa, where people don’t have black skin.

The reason it looks racialized in the U.S. is because in the U.S., many white people are of European ancestry, and many black people, because of the history of slavery, are of West African ancestry. That means that in the U.S., you see far higher rates of sickle cell in the black population than the white population.

But globally, it doesn’t look racialized. Globally, it looks as though people in certain regions of the world have it. So in the U.S., when people talk about sickle cell being a black disease or a black illness, they’re really using race as a proxy for geography.

And that goes for many illnesses or diseases that we think about as being racialized. Black Americans are more likely to die of almost everything than white Americans. The life expectancy of a black American is lower than a white American. It is perverse to assume that this must be genetic. Are black Americans so genetically disadvantage that even infant mortality would be higher in black Americans? It just doesn’t make any sense. In the U.K., where I live, we see this life expectancy gap between the rich and the poor. It is exactly the same in America, but in America, it is treated as racial because socioeconomic circumstances run along racial lines.

The inscription in your book reads, “For my parents, the only ancestors I need to know.” What does that mean?

Well, that kind of is a joke at ancestry testing companies. When they tell us that you can find out who you are descended from, thousands of generations back, to your “actual ancestors.” One, you can’t tell me who my actual ancestors are, because DNA testing cannot tell you that.

But secondly, why does it matter? Why is it so important to us to know who our distant ancestors were when we have people alive with us right now who can give us our culture, who give us our frameworks, who give us our sense of who we are, our sense of right and wrong, our place in the world?

…

[Race scientists] play on your sense of ethnicity or sense of origin story. They build up this image of you as being a biologically essential person, and that this ties you to this identity, and it becomes embedded in who you are.

And this is what ethnic nationalists do. They play on these assumptions and stereotypes and the lack of education that we have around these issues, and they make us believe that identity is biological, when identity is cultural.

Source: Is ‘Race Science’ Making A Comeback? . News

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UK’s Labour Party spars with BBC over charges of anti-Semitism

2019/07/12 Leave a comment

Ongoing train wreck (the Conservatives have the same problem with anti-Muslim attitudes):

British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn’s office interfered in independent party discipline processes aimed at rooting out anti-Semitism, the BBC said on Wednesday, a claim that the Labour Party sharply rejected.

A BBC investigation spoke to former Labour officials who said top party figures, including Corbyn’s communications director Seumas Milne and general secretary Jennie Formby, had minimized complaints of anti-Semitism against party members.

Labour said the accusations were “deliberate and malicious misrepresentations designed to mislead the public”.

Labour has battled accusations of anti-Semitism since 2016 and Corbyn – a veteran campaigner for Palestinian rights – as well as other senior party officials have been criticized for failing to take decisive action to deal with it.

British Jewish groups have accused Labour of becoming institutionally anti-Semitic, and the issue has played a part in Labour’s failure to take electoral advantage of the Conservative government’s turmoil over Brexit.

The BBC quoted an email from Milne telling Labour’s internal complaints team that “something’s going wrong, and we’re muddling up political disputes with racism”.

Labour said this misrepresented Milne’s email, which referred to a dispute between Jewish Labour members with Zionist and anti-Zionist views. A fuller extract of the email read: “If we’re more than very occasionally using disciplinary action against Jewish members for anti-Semitism, something’s going wrong, and we’re muddling up political disputes with racism.”

The BBC investigation also quoted former party members who felt a hostile atmosphere toward Jews within the party in recent years, who were sometimes challenged over Israeli government actions by other party members.

Nine lawmakers quit the party this year, citing the leadership’s handling of anti-Semitism as well as its stance on Brexit as reasons for leaving.

British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt said the BBC investigation showed that Corbyn was either “wilfully blind to anti-Semitism or anti-Semitic himself”.

Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, who is frequently critical of Corbyn, said he was “shocked, chilled and appalled” by the allegations in the BBC report.

Labour’s press office said the party was “implacably opposed to anti-Semitism,” and that some of the former officials quoted by the BBC had “personal and political axes to grind” against Corbyn.

Britain’s Conservatives face regular accusations of hostility toward Muslims. On Monday broadcaster Channel 4 published a survey of 892 Conservative Party members by pollsters YouGov which showed that 56% believed Islam was a general threat to Britain’s way of life.

Source: UK’s Labour Party spars with BBC over charges of anti-Semitism

Filed under Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Facial Expression Analysis Can Help Overcome Racial Bias In The Assessment Of Advertising Effectiveness

2019/07/11 Leave a comment

Interesting. The advertisers are always ahead of the rest of us….:

There has been significant coverage of bias problems in the use of machine learning in the analysis of people. There has also been pushback against the use of facial recognition because of both bias and inaccuracy. However, a more narrow approach to recognition, one focused on recognition emotions rather than identification, can address marketing challenges. Sentiment analysis by survey is one thing, but tracking human facial responses can significantly improve accuracy of the analysis.

The Brookings Institute points to a projection that the US will become a majority-minority nation by 2045. That means that the non-white population will be over 50% of the population. Even before then, the growing demographic shift means that the non-white population has become a significant part of the consumer market. In this multicultural society, it’s important to know if messages work across those cultures. Today’s marketing needs are much more detailed and subtle than the famous example of the Chevy Nova not selling in Latin America because “no va” means “no go” in Spanish.

It’s also important to understand not only the growth of the multicultural markets, but also what they mean in pure dollars. The following chart from the Collage Group shows that the 2017 revenues from the three largest minority segments are similar to the revenues of entire nations.

It would be foolish for companies to ignore these already large and continually growing segments. While there’s the obvious need to be more inclusive in the images, in particular the people, appearing in ads, the picture is only part of the equation. The right words must also be used to interest different demographics. Of course, that a marketing team thinks it has been more inclusive doesn’t make it so. Just as with other aspects of marketing, these messages must be tested.

Companies have begun to look at vision AI for more than the much reported on facial recognition, that of identifying people. While social media and surveys can catch some sentiment, analysis of facial features is even more detailed. That identification is also an easier AI problem than that of full facial identification. Identifying basic facial features such as the mouth and the eyes, then tracking changes based on watching or reading an advertisement can catch not only a smile, but the “strength” of that smile. Other types of sentiment capture can also be scaled.

Then, without having to identify the individual people, information about their demographics can build a picture of how sentiment varies between groups of people. For instance, the same ad can easily get a different typical reaction from white, middle aged women, then from older black men, and from that of East Asian teenagers. With social media polarizing and fragmenting many attitudes, it’s important to understand how marketing messages are received through the target audiences.

The use of AI to rapidly provide feedback on sentiment analysis will help advertisers to better tune messages, whether aiming at a general message that attracts an audience across the US marketing landscape, or finding appropriate focused messages to attract specific demographics. One example of marketers leveraging AI in this arena is Collage Group. They are a market research firm which has helped companies to better understand and improve messaging to minority communities. Collage Group has recently rolled out AdRate, a process for evaluating ads that integrates AI vision to analysis sentiment of the viewers.

“Companies have come to understand the growing multicultural nature of the US consumer market,” said David Wellisch, CEO, Collage Group. “Artificial intelligence is improving Collage Group’s ability to help B2C companies understand the different reactions in varied communities and then adapt their to the best effect.”

While questions of accuracy and ethics in the use of facial recognition will continue in many areas of business, the opportunity to better message to the diversity of the market is a clear benefit. Visual AI to enhance the accuracy of sentiment analysis is clearly a segment that will grow.

Source: Facial Expression Analysis Can Help Overcome Racial Bias In The Assessment Of Advertising Effectiveness

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Open letter from Chinese-Canadian groups boosts Hong Kong government, blasts protesters

2019/07/11 Leave a comment

Expect we will see more of these debates emerge, some legitimate, some bots, some home-grown, some planted:

As protesters in Hong Kong continue to rally against Beijing’s tightening grip on the city, dozens of Chinese-Canadian groups have delivered a different message, voicing support for the enclave’s China-backed government and singling out violent “extremists” among the demonstrators.

The open letter published recently in Vancouver and Toronto Chinese-language newspapers is raising questions about who was behind the statement, with some fingers pointing at the Chinese government and its influence machine.

The authors of the message deny any outside involvement.

The advertisement, signed by over 200 organizations across the country, complained about radicals causing violence, defended China’s “inalienable” right to control Hong Kong, and appealed to Chinese Canadians’ ethnic identity.

“We support the rule of law and stability in Hong Kong, oppose the violent acts of a small number of extremists, oppose any Hong Kong independence movement … and support the Hong Kong government maintaining law and order,” the letter in Ming Pao newspaper said. “Hong Kong is China’s inalienable sovereign territory; Hong Kong’s affairs are China’s internal affairs; and we oppose any foreign interference.”

The ad marks a contrast to what happened on the streets of Hong Kong itself, where hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated against a law that would have allowed extradition of alleged criminals to mainland China. Critics feared the legislation could be used to dispatch enemies of Beijing to a legal system controlled by the Communist Party. Some observers view the mass protests also as a general pushback against China’s growing control of the city since the U.K. gave up control of it in 1997.

The movement shows little sign of ending soon. Even as Carry Lam, the Beijing-backed chief executive of the Hong Kong government, announced Tuesday the extradition law is now is dead and work on it was a “total failure,” critics expressed skepticism about the government’s intentions.

Why would groups purporting to represent the Chinese diaspora in democratic Canada take sides against such demonstrators?

Many of those signatories are shell groups beholden to Beijing, and the message was likely dictated by China’s representatives here, charges Cheuk Kwan of the Toronto Association for Democracy in China.

“These are basically fake organizations … They are what I call the mouthpieces of the Chinese consulate,” he said. “This is a very clearly United Front effort by the Chinese government … If it’s not instituted directly, then indirectly.”

Kwan was referring to the United Front Work Department, the Chinese Communist Party offshoot that works to influence ethnic Chinese and political and economic elites in other countries. Its role has expanded greatly under current Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Still, he admitted that Chinese Canadians are divided on the Hong Kong protests, with some supporting the demonstrators, and others wishing for a return to civil order.

Fenella Sung, spokesman for Vancouver’s Friends of Hong Kong, agreed that the “linguistic craftiness” of the letter seems typical of the United Front. She pointed especially to its appeal to ethnic nationalism, with statements that Chinese Canadians are “all sons of China and members of the Chinese people,” and “blood is thicker than water.”

There is “not a word about being Canadians, as if they have nothing to do with Canada,” said Sung. “The text of the ad could be used anywhere in the world.”

She also said it blatantly distorted the facts, suggesting protesters caused scores of injuries one day early in the event, when independent human rights groups blamed police action.

Yu Zhuowen of the Chinese Freemasons group in Toronto and one of the organizers of the statement, denied any government was involved, calling the letter a heartfelt appeal to restore peace in Hong Kong, his own hometown.

Yu said protesters misunderstand the extradition legislation — which he argued would protect the city from mainland-based criminals — and faced the same kind of police response they would have in Canada.

“We don’t want to see Hong Kong like this. I have my family in Hong Kong, too, I don’t want them to get hurt,” he said about the demonstrations. “In Canada or America, when the protesters come out, the police get them away right away, they use a lot of violence, too.”

Source: Open letter from Chinese-Canadian groups boosts Hong Kong …

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Ethnic diversity makes Britain’s culture great. It would be a disaster if we lost it

2019/07/11 Leave a comment

A reminder and a more positive picture:

A couple of weeks ago, a young black man from south London stood up in front of tens of thousands of people and delivered one of the most celebrated performances in the history of Glastonbury. A few days later, an England cricket squad – almost half of whom were born abroad or are from an ethnic minority background – made it into the semi-finals of the World Cup. Meanwhile over at Tate Modern, a British artist of Nigerian origin is displaying an artwork made up of thousands of booksimprinted with the names of migrants who have made significant contributions to British culture.

Today, some of our most brilliant prospects in art and culture are from minority ethnic or migrant backgrounds. We present a gloriously multicultural face to the world. And that is important not just for the story we tell to others, but for the stories we tell ourselves. Think of the cultural power of the first Asian families on EastEnders, the breakthrough of Soul II Soul in the 1980s, or the nation-defining literary output of Zadie Smith.

The British actor Riz Ahmed refers to this as “stretching the flag, so it’s big enough to embrace all of us”. He is talking about how art can remould how we see ourselves and the country that we live in. The Pakistani-British heritage of his youth is just as much a part of our modern national story as the playing fields of Eton, remote Shetland communities or the multi-ethnic melting pots of Leicester, Birmingham and London. But it is only through the representation of that experience in our national culture that those truths are cemented across the whole country.

Source: Ethnic diversity makes Britain’s culture great. It would be a disaster if we lost it

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