Canada’s oldest Jewish congregation, a civil rights champion, marks 250 years

2018/05/12 Leave a comment

Some early Canadian history:

The Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue of Montreal was a forerunner of multiculturalism before the word had been invented.

Its members were among the founders of Canada: fur-traders, captains of industry and scholars.

Their struggle for civil rights made Quebec the first place in the British Empire where Jews could hold office.

So how come so few people know its amazing story?

Canada’s oldest Jewish congregation is celebrating its 250th anniversary this year. On Thursday, the synagogue is holding a gala dinner to mark the anniversary.

For Rabbi Avi Finegold, it’s an opportunity for the congregation on St-Kevin St. in Snowdon to celebrate its storied past and contribution to intercultural harmony.

“I like to think multiculturalism and religious pluralism started with us,” Finegold said.

“Diversity starts with our congregation. We represent something much bigger than us,” he said.

Montreal city council passed a resolution marking the anniversary in March and the synagogue is planning other events throughout the year, including a speaker series, travelling exhibition and the commissioning of a new Torah scroll.

Founded in Old Montreal in 1768, the synagogue, also known as Shearith Israel (remnant of Israel), was founded by Quebec’s first Jews — an enterprising group of merchants who arrived with British troops starting in 1759.

Its origins are rooted in the military and religious struggles that shaped the modern world, from the Spanish Inquisition to the age-old rivalry between France and England for world domination.

And its membership would include some of the brightest denizens of Montreal’s elite Square Mile, from streetcar magnate Jesse Joseph, president of the city’s streetcar company, to Clarence de Sola, a leader of Canada’s Zionist movement at the turn of the 20th century.

One of the rare surviving mansions on René Lévesque Blvd., the Judah house at 1980 René-Lévesque W., just west of the ramp to westbound Highway 720, belonged to another congregation member, the prominent lawyer and real-estate owner Frederick Thomas Judah.

Never heard of any of those gents?

Not surprising, because there was something of the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie about Montreal’s Jewish community in its first century of existence.

“It was a community that was quite discreet,” said Éliane Bélec, a doctoral student in history at Université du Québec à Montréal who wrote a 65-page commemorative booklet on the congregation that will be distributed to members.

Unlike the Ashkenazi Jews who poured into Canada from 1880 to 1920, fleeing pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, the earlier community (which included Ashkenazi Jews but practised Sephardic rituals) was numerically small, wealthy and assimilated, she noted.

“I think the Spanish and Portuguese, the Sephardic community, was very Westernized while the Ashkenazi who arrived from Europe had their own way of dressing and their own foods,” Bélec said.

During the 1880s, Montreal’s Jewish population rose from 811 to 2,473 and in the 1890s it rose to 6,941, according to Taking Root: the Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community by Gerald Tulchinsky (Brandeis University Press, 1993).

Fast forward to the 1960s, when the arrival of Sephardic Jews from the Middle East and North Africa again changed the Jewish community.

“When we first came in 1970, the congregation was 85 per cent Ashkenazi,” said Norma Joseph, a professor of religion and cultures at Concordia University and the wife of Rabbi Emeritus Howard Joseph, who led the congregation for 40 years.

Within a few years, the membership had become 85 per cent Sephardic, with substantial contingents from Iraq, Lebanon and Morocco, she said.

The couple will be honoured for their long service to the synagogue at Thursday’s gala.

“One of the things my husband excelled at was making the different communities feel welcome and telling them that their own traditions were valuable, wonderful and that we could all live together in our multicultural synagogue,” Joseph said.

“On Rosh Hashanah, we have five different services. We have the main Spanish and Portuguese tradition, we have an Iraqi service, a Moroccan service, a Lebanese service, and an authentic Ashkenazi service.

“When you walk into each one of these services and close your eyes, you think you’re transported back 100 years to the different countries. It’s the most amazing, wonderful feeling,” she said.

For more information on the 250th anniversary, visit thespanish.org/250th-home or call 514-737-3695.

Why Spanish and Portuguese?

When Spain and Portugal expelled the Jews in 1492 and 1497, hundreds of thousands of “conversos,” Jews who had converted to Christianity — often under duress — remained. They now became the main targets for persecution. Over time, some escaped to other parts of Western Europe and returned to the Jewish fold. In Amsterdam, the world’s leading trading city and a centre of religious tolerance, they founded a thriving community, supplemented by the arrival of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. It sent out offshoots to New York (then New Amsterdam) and London, where Spanish and Portuguese Synagogues were founded in 1654 and 1657 respectively. (The New York synagogue credits its founding to 23 Jews who escaped from Brazil after Portugal re-conquered it from the Dutch.)

Hart and Soul

Jews, banned from New France, began arriving in Quebec with the British army from 1759 onward. Among them was Aaron Hart (1724-1800), a sutler who sold provisions to the British troops. A protégé of commander and later governor Frederick Haldimand, Hart founded a dynasty in Trois-Rivières, where he became a successful merchant and landowner. Despite the distance, Hart maintained close ties to the Montreal synagogue.

Fight for rights

In 1807, Hart’s second son, Ezekiel (1770-1843) won a by-election in Trois-Rivières, becoming the first Jew elected to office in the British Empire. But the majority Canadien party (later the Patriotes) refused to let him take his seat in the assembly of Lower Canada because he was a Jew.

In 1832, the assembly passed a motion introduced by newspaper publisher John Neilson extending political rights to Jews, who were still barred from holding office in Britain.

 

Source: Canada’s oldest Jewish congregation, a civil rights champion, marks 250 years

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TV show Roseanne tackles xenophobia with good old-fashioned humanity: Sheema Khan

2018/05/11 Leave a comment

Humanity and understanding are good approaches:

It seems that everyone has an opinion about the reboot of the TV show Roseanne. This stems from the support by Roseanne Barr (and her TV character Roseanne Conner) of U.S. President Donald Trump.

Nonetheless, the show has tackled contemporary issues with nuance, comedy and good old-fashioned humanity.

Take the most recent episode, in which a Muslim refugee family (the al-Harazis) from Yemen moves next door to the Conners. Roseanne is immediately suspicious about the “large amounts” of fertilizer stacked near their garage. They could be a sleeper cell planning a terrorist attack, she surmises to her sister, Jackie, and a friend, who push back against the naked bigotry.

Later in the evening, Roseanne’s visiting granddaughter, Mary, is scheduled to Skype her mother who is stationed in Afghanistan. There’s a glitch in the internet connection − so Roseanne does what she’s always done – hack her neighbour’s WiFi. However, the WiFi password next door has changed. Roseanne’s guess? “deathtoamerica.” When that doesn’t work, she tries “deathtoamerica123.” Her feisty daughter Darlene responds derisively to a thought process steeped in stereotypes.

Finally, Roseanne and Jackie decide to visit their Muslim neighbours at 2 a.m. to ask for their password, with Mary yearning to connect with her mother. While Jackie brings a houseplant as an offering, Roseanne arms herself with a baseball bat. They are greeted by Salim al-Harazi who opens the door, also armed with a baseball bat. Fear meets fear in the heart of America. After initial mutual awkwardness, Roseanne explains the reason for their visit. Salim’s wife, Fatima, joins the conversation and we begin to witness the humanization of the “other.” The stacked bags of fertilizer? Too many inadvertent hits on the Amazon cart. There is a poignant moment when the couple’s young son awakens and worries about the commotion. Fatima reassures him with soothing words and a kiss, sending him back to bed. What’s striking is the bulletproof vest worn by the child. Fatima explains that the family has been subject to harassment that has frightened their son; he sleeps with the vest to feel safe.

This scene is transformational, as fear is vanquished with the discovery of common decency. While the Conners and al-Harazis may come from different sides of the globe, they arrive at a common point of compassion, where families strive to provide the universal goals of safety and security.

The next day, Roseanne meets Fatima at the local grocery checkout. When Fatima’s food stamps and debit card are not enough to pay for her groceries, the cashier makes snide remarks to Fatima about fleecing American taxpayers and her “camel” waiting outside. In spite of her own dire finances, Roseanne steps in to pay for Fatima and then berates the cashier, while emphasizing the need to understand the everyday struggles of a new family fleeing war.

I must confess that this was the first time I have watched Roseanne. My TV staple includes The Good Fight, Black-ish and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Nonetheless, I was moved by this episode – for the simple truths it portrayed.

It also made me reflect upon my own anxieties – some absurd, some well-founded.

For example, there is the annual spring debate: Should I stack the fertilizer bags outside the garage (since I have nothing to hide), or inside the garage (to avoid prying eyes)?

Or, the time I was walking through Trudeau airport with my husband, lagging behind him since I was tired. I then realized that people would see a Muslim woman walking three steps behind her husband, thus confirming stereotypes. I rushed to join his side.

The anxieties heighten when children are involved. Once, my son returned with excitement after his bantam hockey team meeting: The players had chosen “Bombers” as the team name. I was horrified, emphatically advising my son to make it clear that he was talking about hockey when mentioning the “Bombers” in every phone and internet conversation. Prior to our trip to a Vermont hockey tournament, I worried that a U.S. border guard would ask my Muslim son the name of his team.

I can laugh at these incidents now. But the anxieties remain – especially in light of the Quebec City massacre.

And let’s not forget the damaging effect of xenophobia on children, who only crave safety in a complex world.

When Fatima shares her password (“goCubs”) with Roseanne, so that the girl can connect with her mother, she shares a message we should all take to heart: “children should never suffer from the ignorance of adults.”

via TV show Roseanne tackles xenophobia with good old-fashioned humanity – The Globe and Mail

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Two different takes -John Ivison: With another apology, Trudeau tries to right — and rewrite — the past, Emma Teitel: Formal apologies may be most useful not for the oppressed, but for the clueless

2018/05/11 Leave a comment

Interesting contrast between Ivison, going back to Pierre Trudeau’s position, and Emma Teitel’s greater recognition of the value. Starting with Ivison:

In the early 1940s, Pierre Elliott Trudeau flirted with politics that, in the words of his esteemed biographer John English, were “not only anti-war and anti-Liberal, but also clandestine, highly nationalist and, at least momentarily, separatist and even violent.”

In a speech in support of a nationalist candidate in a Montreal by-election, Trudeau minimized the German threat and, according to Le Devoir, said he feared “the peaceful invasion of immigrants more than the armed invasion of the enemy.

“Bring on the revolution,” he concluded.

It should be noted the immigrants he feared in Montreal in those days were mainly Jews.

None of the above reflects well on the current Prime Minister’s father. But as English noted, Trudeau was party to the kind of half-baked plotting that was common in the basements of middle-class houses in Montreal — plots that no-one ever dreamed of acting on. “This was the spirit of the age,” said English, in his peerless book Citizen of the World.

Perhaps at some future date Trudeau’s actions will be used as a pretext to remove his name from Montreal’s airport or from the high school in Markham, Ont., that bears his name. The spirit of today’s age is a revisionism that never ends — the application of today’s mores to periods in history when ethics and standards were very different.

In isolation, Trudeau senior’s comments are shocking. But thankfully they do not stand in isolation. Separatism, revolutionary politics and racism were not his legacies. Quite the contrary.

His comments were made in the context of the time and place in which they were made — and they were decidedly unexceptional for the era.

Yet the current Liberal government is encouraging this impulse toward “presentism” — by changing the name of the Langevin Block that houses the Prime Minister’s Office in Ottawa (named after Hector-Louis Langevin, a Father of Confederation and strong proponent of the residential school system) and through its apparent attempt to break the world record for official apologies.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Wednesday that he looks forward to offering a formal apology on the floor of the House of Commons for the turning away of a boat full of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 — the result of a “discriminatory ‘none is too many’ immigration policy.”

Make no mistake, the decision to turn away the MS St. Louis, with its 907 German Jewish passengers, is a stain on Canada’s history. A historic injustice was done and it should be held in the collective memory to guard against a revival in anti-Semitic sentiment.

But does a formal apology really ensure those mistakes are not repeated?

Arguably, an apology allows the government to turn the page and hope everyone forgets the inconvenient past.

Are they sincere? At one point during question period on Wednesday, Trudeau blustered that he would not apologize for Canada “swaggering” on the world stage. That would seem to be about the only thing for which he is not apologizing.

The MS St. Louis mea culpa will be the fourth delivered by this prime minister. We have already had formal apologies for the Komagata Maru incident, in which another ship carrying Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus was denied entry to Canada in 1914 because of the immigration laws at the time; to residential school students in Newfoundland and Labrador; and to members of the military and federal public service who were persecuted because of their sexual orientation.

It is hard to escape the feeling that political expediency is at work for the Liberals; each apology was targeted at a key political constituency — Sikh, LGBTQ, Indigenous and Jewish Canadians.

That is not a partisan point — Stephen Harper made apologies to Canada’s Chinese community for the imposition of a head tax, which looked electorally motivated, and to its Indigenous population for residential schools, which was perhaps less so.

History exists in context and should not be rewritten or tampered with to suit political ends.

This was recognized by the current prime minister’s father, who in 1984 resisted pressures to apologize to, and compensate, Japanese Canadians who were interned and stripped of their property during the Second World War.

“I do not think the purpose of a government is to right the past. It cannot rewrite history. It is our purpose to be just in our time,” he told the House of Commons.

Prophetically, he worried that once the government started down the path, there would be no end to the apologies and the compensation demanded.

“I know we’d have to go back a great length of time in our history and look at all the injustices,” he said.

Pierre Trudeau, more than most, appreciated that it is often the spirit of the age that is responsible for injustice — and that apologies do not erase iniquity.

Source: John Ivison: With another apology, Trudeau tries to right — and rewrite — the past

Teitel focusses on the educational value of such apologies:

Since its release in 1970, many people (married ones especially) have taken issue with the signature line from the hit movie Love Story: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” But I imagine the person most constitutionally averse to this notion is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a man who says sorry more often than a Canadian tourist in a crowded airport.

Where his Prime Minister father, the late Pierre Trudeau, wasn’t a fan of state-issued apologies, our rueful leader appears quite comfortable doling them out.

The PM has made a series of official apologies addressing various historical wrongs since he took office in 2015. Two years ago, for example, he issued an apology for the 1914 Komagata Maru incident, in which hundreds of Sikh, Muslim and Hindu passengers were unjustly turned away at the Canadian border. Their Japanese steamship returned to India, where 19 passengers were shot and killed upon arrival and many others imprisoned.

Last year, the PM issued an apology to survivors of Canada’s residential schools. He also asked the Pope himself to apologize for the church’s role in operating the notoriously exploitative, abusive institutions. (Unfortunately, the pope declined).

And just this week the PM announced plans to formally apologize on behalf of the Canadian government, in the House of Commons, for the tragic incident of the MS St. Louis in 1939, when Canada refused asylum to the more than 900 Jewish German refugees on board. The MS St. Louis was forced to return to Europe, where 254 of its passengers were later murdered in the Holocaust.

“When Canada denied asylum to the 907 German Jews on board the MS St. Louis,” Trudeau said in a recent statement, “we failed not only those passengers, but also their descendants and community. It is our collective responsibility to acknowledge this difficult truth, learn from this story, and continue to fight against anti-Semitism every day, as we give meaning to the solemn vow: ‘Never again.’ I look forward to offering this apology on the floor of the House.”

Unfortunately, not everybody is looking forward to hearing it.

Many critics of the Prime Minister, some of them Jewish, are a little annoyed by the prospect of a staged mea culpa that will address a tragic event whose victims are, by and large, not around to receive it. Some of these formal apologies are, after all, rather bizarre, because the people saying “I’m sorry” are so rarely the wrongdoers and the people saying “I forgive you” are rarely the wronged. As a result, they can come off as cheap and hollow, even to the ears of the people you think might appreciate them most.

Here’s Sally Zerker, whose Jewish, Polish ancestors were denied visas to Canada in the 1930’s, writing about the prospect of a government apology for the MS. St. Louis tragedy in the Canadian Jewish News last year:

“It will not bring back my relatives, or offer me any solace. Instead, it will whitewash a government that did nothing to help the Jews who were fleeing the Nazis and ignored the type of anti-Semitism that was endemic in Canada until the 1970s. Ultimately, it is nothing but a shallow, empty, meaningless act. An apology can’t right this wrong.”

But it can publicize it. And this is where I disagree with Zerker and other critics of government apologies. We’re living in a world where the United States government appears allergic to facts and routinely winks at white supremacists. A world where the leaders of the women’s march, arguably the largest feminist movement on the continent, can pal around with horrendous anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan and retain their status as heroines of an intersectional movement.

A world where, according to the Anti Defamation League, anti-Semitic hate crimes — from violent assaults, to Jewish kids being harassed at school, to vandalism of synagogues — surged 57 per cent last year. Meanwhile, according to a survey released on Holocaust Remembrance Day (Jan. 27) this year, 22 per cent of American millennials haven’t heard of the Holocaust or are unsure of what it is, and two-thirds do not know what Auschwitz is.

All of this is to say that while I agree with Trudeau’s critics that formal apologies are sometimes silly and performative — and perhaps lacking in meaning for some victims and their families — they are also factual and newsworthy. They breathe new life into old wrongs and in doing so they bring awareness to those wrongs.

It’s for this reason that I find it difficult to object to a perfectly harmless government statement that might, even if it doesn’t heal any wounds, inspire an uninformed Canadian to Google “MS St. Louis.”

It’s a sorry thing to say, but formal apologies may be most useful not for the oppressed, but for the clueless.

Source: Emma Teitel: Formal apologies may be most useful not for the oppressed, but for the clueless

Filed under Historical Recognition, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Accommodement raisonnable: la règle du cas par cas s’appliquera

2018/05/11 Leave a comment

In other words, sounds like the overall Canadian approach to accommodation requests:

Près de sept mois après l’adoption de la « loi 62 », la ministre de la Justice, Stéphanie Vallée, a dévoilé mercredi les lignes directrices visant à « guider » les organismes publics dans le traitement de demandes d’accommodement pour un motif religieux reçues à compter du 1er juillet prochain.

Ces lignes directrices ne forment pas un « cadre d’analyse unique », a-t-elle souligné à gros traits en conférence de presse mercredi après-midi. Du coup, chaque demande devra continuer d’être traitée au « cas par cas ».

Installation d’une vitre givrée dans un gymnase, aménagement d’un lieu de prière dans un établissement public, octroi d’un congé lors d’une fête religieuse, Mme Vallée a refusé d’illustrer l’application des nouvelles lignes directrices au moyen d’exemples de demandes d’accommodement raisonnable ou déraisonnable. « Vous me faites une demande très générale dans un contexte très général. Ce qui est important de bien saisir dans les demandes d’accommodement, c’est que ces demandes-là sont formulées dans un contexte particulier, à un organisme particulier, par une personne particulière », a-t-elle fait valoir à la presse. Chaque demande d’accommodement pour un motif religieux sera « étudiée au cas par cas », et ce, « en fonction du contexte au moment où la demande est formulée », a-t-elle ajouté.

Cela dit, un accommodement sera octroyé seulement si une série de conditions prévues par la Loi favorisant le respect de la neutralité religieuse sont respectées, a expliqué Mme Vallée. Parmi elles : « le demandeur doit croire sincèrement qu’il est obligé de se conformer à cette conviction ou cette pratique dans le cadre de sa foi ». L’accommodement demandé ne doit pas entrer en collision avec, d’une part, le droit à l’égalité entre les femmes et les hommes et, d’autre part, le droit de toute personne d’être traitée sans discrimination. Autrement dit, le droit des autres usagers ou employés de l’organisme assujetti à la « loi 62 » de ne pas subir de discrimination fondée sur leur sexe, leur race, leur identité de genre, leur orientation sexuelle ou tout autre motif interdit par la Charte des droits et libertés de la personne doit demeurer intact.

Les fonctionnaires devront aussi avoir « en tête les principes de sécurité, de communication et d’identification » lorsqu’ils analyseront les demandes d’accommodement faites par une personne tenant à garder le visage couvert lorsqu’elle reçoit un service public en raison de ses convictions religieuses, a rappelé la ministre de la Justice.

« Les demandes d’accommodement pour motif religieux sont déjà traitées dans les organismes en ce moment, à la lumière des règles élaborées au fil du temps par la jurisprudence. […] La publication des lignes directrices facilitera une meilleure compréhension de la loi, mais aussi, et surtout, une mise en oeuvre plus harmonieuse. »

Gérard Bouchard et Charles Taylor, qui ont coprésidé la Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles il y a dix ans, ont mis la main à la pâte, a mentionné Mme Vallée au détour d’une réponse.

Un répondant sera désigné dans chaque organisme pour traiter les demandes d’accommodement pour motif religieux. « Ce n’est pas chaque chauffeur, ce n’est pas chaque employé qui est responsable de [traiter] la demande. Ce seront les répondants », a martelé Mme Vallée en conférence de presse.

Un demandeur qui essuie un refus pourra interjeter appel devant la Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse. « Comme c’est le cas actuellement », a précisé Mme Vallée.

La sous-ministre à la Justice a transmis mercredi après-midi les lignes directrices à ses homologues dans les autres ministères. Les commissions scolaires, les cégeps, les universités, les municipalités, les sociétés de transport recevront également un exemplaire. Des « formations » y seront organisées prochainement, a indiqué Mme Vallée.

Les organismes ont les coudées franches pour rejeter toute demande d’accommodement non raisonnable, selon le gouvernement libéral. En effet, l’accommodement demandé ne doit pas imposer une contrainte excessive à l’organisme visé, c’est-à-dire « nui[re], de façon importante à sa prestation de services, à sa mission [et] à la qualité de ses services ».

D’ailleurs, le demandeur devra « collabore[r] à la recherche d’une solution satisfaisante et raisonnable », notamment en faisant « des compromis pour limiter les contraintes que sa demande peut causer », peut-on lire sur la fiche d’information produite par le ministère de la Justice.

Le coin droit du document est orné d’une fleur de lys formée d’individus, tandis que le coin gauche loge le slogan du gouvernement, « Ensemble… on agit pour une société juste et équitable ».

« Les demandes d’accommodements ont comme objectif d’assurer le respect des droits fondamentaux individuels, d’éviter les situations de discrimination entre les citoyens, elles visent à atteindre l’équité au sein de la société québécoise et non, comme certains le perçoivent, à accorder un traitement de faveur », a souligné Stéphanie Vallée. « Ce ne sont pas toutes les demandes présentées qui constituent une demande d’accommodements, et ce ne sont pas toutes les demandes d’accommodements qui peuvent être accordées », a-t-elle ajouté.

Le Parti québécois et la Coalition avenir Québec ont réagi au quart de tour.

Les lignes directrices n’ajoutent rien à la « loi 62 », déplore la députée péquiste Agnès Maltais. « Ça [en] laisse encore beaucoup sur les épaules des employés », a-t-elle dit.

Selon sa compréhension, les femmes de confession musulmane pourront porter le niqab ou la burka au Québec, « sauf dans le cas où un employé [d’un organisme] — et c’est là que ça revient sur les épaules de l’employé — demande une identification pour des raisons de communication ou de sécurité ».

« Stéphanie Vallée ouvre la porte à un accommodement religieux pour le niqab et la burqa si la croyance est “sincère” et elle ajoute encore plus de confusion à sa loi 62. C’était un fouillis, c’est maintenant un foutoir ! » a poursuivi la députée caquiste Nathalie Roy mercredi après-midi. Elle promet de commenter plus longuement le dossier à l’Assemblée nationale jeudi.

La ministre Stéphanie Vallée tâchera de démêler les incompréhensions des partis politiques d’opposition en commission parlementaire d’ici la fin de la session parlementaire, prévue le 15 juin prochain.

La totalité de la loi favorisant le respect de la neutralité religieuse — y compris l’article 10 indiquant qu’une personne offrant ou recevant un service public « doit avoir le visage découvert », qui a été invalidé par la Cour supérieure en décembre dernier — pourra être appliquée à compter du 1er juillet prochain, est-elle persuadée.

Source: Accommodement raisonnable: la règle du cas par cas s’appliquera

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Trudeau to offer formal apology in the Commons for fate of MS St. Louis

2018/05/10 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see if any of the groups that suffered from wartime internment or other restrictions (e.g., Ukrainian, German and Italian Canadians) will ask for an apology (Japanese Canadians, given the nature of their internment and displacement, received their apology under the Mulroney government).

This apology completes the most obvious cases of immigration restrictions which merit an apology (Chinese Canadians for the head tax, Indo-Canadians for the Komagatu Maru):

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will deliver another official apology in the House of Commons, this time over the fate of the MS St. Louis.

“When Canada denied asylum to the 907 German Jews on board the MS St. Louis, we failed not only those passengers, but also their descendants and community,” Trudeau said in a statement, which doesn’t say when he plans to deliver the apology.

The prime minister said that while an apology can’t change Canada’s history or bring back those who lost their lives, acknowledging the result of the decision to turn away the MS St. Louis — the deaths of 254 people in the Holocaust — is key to learning from the past.

“It is our collective responsibility to acknowledge this difficult truth, learn from this story, and continue to fight against anti-Semitism every day, as we give meaning to the solemn vow: ‘Never again,'” Trudeau said. “I look forward to offering this apology on the floor of the House.”

In 1939, the St. Louis left Germany carrying 907 Jewish passengers fleeing persecution from the Nazi regime. The ship was turned away from Cuba and the United States before trying to dock in Halifax.

When the government of William Lyon Mackenzie King refused to let them disembark, the ship returned to Europe.

About half the passengers were taken in by the U.K., the Netherlands, France and Belgium. About 500 of them returned to Germany, where 254 were killed in concentration and internment camps.

Source: Trudeau to offer formal apology in the Commons for fate of MS St. Louis

Filed under Historical Recognition, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

The case against transparency in government AI

2018/05/09 Leave a comment

Useful note of caution regarding the risks of manipulation as Facebook’s experience indicates:

Governments are becoming increasingly aware of the potential for incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-assisted decision-making into their operations. The business case is compelling; AI has the ability to dramatically improve government service delivery, citizen satisfaction and government efficiency more generally. At the same time, there are ample cases demonstrating the potential for AI to fall short of public expectations. With governments continuing to lag far behind the rest of society in the adoption of digital technology, a successful incorporation of AI into government is far from being a foregone conclusion.

AI itself is essentially the product of combining exponential increases in the availability of data with exponential increases in computing power that can sort that data. Together, the result is software that makes judgments or predictions that are remarkably perceptive to the point of even feeling “intelligent.” Yet, while the outputs of AI might feel intelligent, it’s perhaps more accurate to say that these decisions are actually just very highly informed by software and big data. AI can make decisions and observations, but in fact AI lacks what we would call judgment and certainly does not have the capacity to make decisions guided by human morality. It is only able to report or make decisions based on the training data it is fed, and thus it will perpetuate flaws in data if they exist.

As a result of these technical limitations, AI can have a dark side, especially when it is incorporated in public affairs. Since AI decision-making is easily prone to propagating the biases of others, AI risks making clumsy decisions and offering inappropriate recommendations. In the US, where AI has been partly incorporated into the justice system, on several occasions it has been found to propagate racial profiling, discriminatory policing and harsher sentences for minorities. In other cases, the adoption of AI decision-making in staffing has recommended inferior positions and pay rates for women based solely on gender.

In light of such cases, there have been calls to drop AI from government decision-making or to mandate heavy transparency requirements for AI code and decision-making architecture to compensate for AI’s obvious shortcomings. The need to improve AI’s decision-making processes is clearly warranted in the pursuit of fairness and objectivity, yet accomplishing this in practice will pose many new challenges for government. For one, trying to rid AI of any bias will open up new sites for political conflict in spaces that were previously technocratic and insulated from debates about values. Such questions will spur a conversation about the conditions under which humans have a duty to interfere with, or reverse, decisions made by an AI.

Of course, discussions about how best to incorporate society’s values and expectations into AI systems need to occur, but these discussions also need to be subject to reasonable limits. If every conceivable instance of AI decision-making in government is easily accessible for dispute, revision and probing for values, then the effectiveness of such AI systems will quickly decline and the adoption of desperately needed AI capacity in government will grind to a halt. In this sense, the cautious incorporation of AI in government that is occurring today represents both a grand opportunity for government modernization and also a huge potential risk should the process go poorly. The decision-making process of AI used in government can and should be discussed, but with a keen recognition that these are delicate circumstances.

The clear need for reasonable limits on openness is heading into conflict with the emerging zeitgeist at the commanding heights of public administration which favour ever more transparency in government. To be sure, governments are often notorious for their caution in sharing information, yet at an official level and in the broad principles recently espoused at the centre of government (particularly the Treasury Board), there has been an increasing emphasis on transparency and openness. Leaving aside how this meshes with the culture of the public service, at a policy and institutional level there is a growing reflex to automatically impose significant transparency requirements on new initiatives wherever possible. In general terms, this development is long overdue and a new standard that should be applauded.

Yet in the more specific terms related to AI decision-making in government, this otherwise welcome reflex to ever greater transparency and openness could be dangerously misplaced. Or at least, it may well be too much too soon for AI. AI decision-making depends on the software’s ability to sift through data which it analyzes to identify patterns and ultimately arrive at decisions. In an effort to make AI decisions more accountable to the public, over-zealous transparency can also offer those with malign intent a pathway to tainting the crucial data for informing decisions and inserting bias in the AI. Tainted data makes for flawed decisions, or as the shorthand goes, “garbage in, garbage out.” Full transparency about AI operational details, including what data “go in”, may well represent an inappropriate exposure to potential tampering. All data ultimately have a public source and if the exact collection points for these data are easily known, all the easier for wily individuals to feed tainted data to an AI decision system and bias the system.

A real-world case in point would be “TayTweets”, an artificially intelligent Twitter handle developed by Microsoft and released onto the Twitterverse to playfully interact with the public at large. TayTweets was known in advance to use the Tweets directed at its handle as its data source, which would permit it to “learn” language and ideas. The philosophy was that TayTweets would “learn” by communicating with everyday people through their Tweets, and the result would be a beautiful thing. Unfortunately, under this completely open approach, it did not take long for people to figure out how to manipulate the data that TayTweets would receive and use this to rig its responses. TayTweets had to be taken down within only 24 hours of its launch, when it began to voice disturbing, and even odious, opinions.

Presumably AI-enabled or assisted decision-making processes in government would be much more cautious in the wake of TayTweets, but it would not take long for this kind of vandalism to occur if government AI adhered to a strict regime of openness about its processes. Perhaps more importantly, a failure like TayTweets would be hugely consequential for a government and its legitimacy. Would any government suffering from a “TayTweets”-like incident continue to take the necessary risks with technological adoption that would ultimately permit it to modernize and stay relevant in the digital age? Perhaps not. A balance indeed needs to be struck but, given the high risk and potential for harm that would come with government AI failures, that balance should err on the side of caution.

Information about AI processes should always be accessible in principle to those that have a serious concern, but it should not be so readily accessible as to be a source of catastrophic impediment to the operations of government. Being open about AI decisions will be an important part of ensuring that government remains accountable in the 21st century, yet it is wrong-headed to assume that successful accountability will be accomplished for AI processes under the same paradigm that has been designed to govern traditional human decision-making processes. The principal of transparency remains a cornerstone of good governance, but we are not yet at the point of truly understanding what transparency looks like for AI-enhanced government. Assuming that we already are is a recipe for trouble.

Source: The case against transparency in government AI

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ADL tallies up roughly 4 million anti-Semitic tweets in 2017

2018/05/09 Leave a comment

It would be nice to have comparative data with respect to different religions just as we do for police-reported hate crimes. :

At least 4.2 million anti-Semitic tweets were shared or re-shared from roughly 3 million Twitter accounts last year, according to an Anti-Defamation League report released Monday. Most of those accounts are believed to be operated by real people rather than automated software known as bots, the organization, an international NGO that works against anti-Semitism and bigotry, said.

The anti-Semitic accounts constitute less than 1% of the roughly 336 million active accounts,

“This new data shows that even with the steps Twitter has taken to remove hate speech and to deal with those accounts disseminating it, users are still spreading a shocking amount of anti-Semitism and using Twitter as a megaphone to harass and intimidate Jews,” said ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt in a statement.

The report comes amid growing concern about harassment on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as their roles in spreading fake news. Both companies are trying to curb hatred on their platforms while preserving principles of free speech and expression. Last month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was summoned to Washington to testify in front of Congress, in part out of concern over how the social network was used to spread propaganda during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has publicly made harassment on the social network a priority, even soliciting ideas for combatting the problem from the public. In March, Dorsey held a livestream to discuss how to deal with the issue. The company has made changes, such as prohibiting offensive account names or better enforcing its terms of service.

Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The ADL report, evaluated tweets on subjects ranging from Holocaust denial and anti-Jewish slurs to positive references to anti-Semitic figures, books and podcasts. The ADL also tallied the use of coded words and symbols, such as the triple parenthesis, which is put around names to signal someone is Jewish.

The study used a dataset of roughly 55,000 tweets, which were screened by a team of researchers for indications of anti-Semitism. Since this is the first report if its kind from the group, there aren’t numbers to compare to data. Though, the ADL did release a report on the targeting of journalists during the 2016 election which also included Twitter data.

The ADL says that artificial intelligence and algorithms will eventually be effective at identifying hate online, but human input is needed to train such systems. For example, screeners can teach machines when anti-Semitic language might have been used to express opposition to such ideas or in an ironic manner.

Such issues aren’t simply hypothetical. The ADL pointed to the huge volume of tweets about anti-Semitism that were posted during the week of the Charlottesville, Virginia riots last summer. Though Twitter saw the highest volume of tweets about anti-Semitism for the year, only a small percentage were actually anti-Semitic.

The report noted the ADL works with Twitter on the issues of anti-Semitism and bigotry online. Greenblatt said the organization is “pleased that Twitter has already taken significant steps to respond to this challenge.”

Source: ADL tallies up roughly 4 million anti-Semitic tweets in 2017

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White privilege and an exploration of uncomfortable truths

2018/05/09 Leave a comment

Good explanations and discussion by Denise O’Neil Green, Ryerson’s vice-president for equity and community inclusion, and Rinaldo Walcott, director of the University of Toronto’s women and gender studies institute:

In Philadelphia, two Black men are arrested by police for simply sitting in a Starbucks. In Australia, the pop star Halsey goes online to vent about the lack of hotel shampoos for ethnic hair. On Twitter, an exchange between two Canadian politicians — one white, one Black — sparks a national debate over issues of race and privilege.

Such stories are increasingly making waves around the world and each new headline seems to generate a flurry of tweets, thinkpieces and conversations about the notion of white privilege. After percolating in academic circles for decades, the term “white privilege” has found mainstream currency in recent years; it has also attracted both repudiation and support.

For many people, they are now engaging with the idea for the first time and asking: “What is white privilege anyway?” This week, hundreds of people will gather at Ryerson University to explore this question and more at Canada’s first white privilege conference, an event that has been held annually in the United States since 1999.

To address some of the basic ideas around white privilege, the Star spoke with two scholars who will be attending the conference: Denise O’Neil Green, Ryerson’s vice-president for equity and community inclusion, and Rinaldo Walcott, director of the University of Toronto’s women and gender studies institute.

Both have spent much of their careers thinking about white privilege and the ways in which it shapes our world. Here’s what they had to say:

Let’s start with the basic question. How do you define white privilege?

Green: In very basic terms, it is an unearned benefit or “perk” that one receives simply because of their skin colour. A more multi-layered way of looking at it is that white privilege operates in terms of a system that benefits particular groups over others. It’s a system structure that all of us operate in — whether we’re aware of it or not.

Walcott: For me, what the term “white privilege” seeks to allow people to understand is the way in which societies, like the one that we live in, are default white societies. Everywhere we look in these societies, all of the ways in which people are accorded, important, respected and so on centre around the idea that anything that is white North American or white European is the absolute standard to reach.

But what that means is that many people who are not white can never, ever achieve that standard, and many people who are simply born white are assumed to have reached that standard, even if they themselves can’t reach it either. So that’s what we begin to call “white privilege”; the ways in which we live in a society where some people, because of the accident of their birth, can enter that society — its institutions, government, education, universities, even the holidays we celebrate — and participate at levels and in ways that other people are unable to.

Can you think of some examples of white privilege in action, both on the micro and macro level?

Walcott: Let’s say (a Black person) enters a department store and they want to buy a pair of pants in the men’s section and a T-shirt for their child in the children’s section. They will make sure to pay for those pants in the men’s section and then go to the children’s section. Meanwhile, you see many white people who have piles of clothes, they walk all through the store and all kinds of floors, and they don’t have to think about it. The reason we pay before going to another floor is because we know that the possibility of being accused of shoplifting exists for us.

That’s an example of white privilege. When you don’t have to think about how you move through your everyday life, worrying about whether or not you’re going to be stopped by security or police. Non-white, Black and Indigenous people in Canada have to think about that all the time.

Green: On a macro level, unfortunately, it’s the way particular groups are treated by the police versus others. The CBC just came out with their own statistics (showing) that in particular areas of the country where you have a high population of Indigenous or Black Canadian citizens, they find themselves disproportionately impacted by the police in a very different and sometimes fatal way.

Another macro aspect is the diversity on boards; they still continue to be predominantly white and predominantly male. Probably another example is one’s name; if you have a racialized-sounding name, or a less English sounding name, then you’re less likely to be called back for a job interview.

So those are examples of privilege that for some can be very invisible, but is very visible for many of us.

A lot of people deny that white privilege exists. How do you understand that denial and where it comes from?

Walcott: When white working-class people hear “privilege,” they often think you’re talking about the individual material benefits that some people have. And yes, of course, a part of that is individual material benefits but when we’re talking about white privilege, what we’re really talking about is (how) the possibility of a white person being able to make it out of the working class is many, many times higher than, say, a Black person or Indigenous person.

When we talk about white privilege, we’re also talking about a body of ideas where even white working-class people can understand themselves to be more important or contributing more to society. So white privilege is not just about individuals being able to accumulate things for themselves, it’s also about a way of understanding the world — and that cuts across class.

Green: What I think is very interesting about white privilege, and just privilege in general, is you never really get to know what’s happening unless you walk in another person’s shoes.

I’ll give a personal example. My son was unfortunately hit by a drunk driver and as a result, he ended up needing to use a wheelchair. That experience has absolutely opened my eyes to how the world privileges those who are fully able-bodied: restaurants, institutions, buildings not having elevators, buildings not having ramps. That’s something that people can get and understand more readily because it’s something they can see.

White privilege operates in the same way. What happened with my son had a very profound effect on me, but it also helped me to greater understand how systems and white privilege and other privileges impact our day-to-day lives … and how the world sees us and invites us in. Or not invite us in.

A common reaction when someone’s white privilege is pointed out to them is defensiveness, the feeling that they’ve been accused of racism. Is pointing out someone’s white privilege the same as pointing out their racism?

Walcott: No, it’s not. Of course sometimes pointing out white privilege is about pointing out a set of racist practices or behaviours, but pointing out someone’s white privilege is not always about calling them racist. What you’re trying to point to is the way in which that person can do something — or have an experience — because of their whiteness that is not available to other people.

If we understand white privilege as embedded in the structures and institutions of society, then we can’t assume that everybody who benefits from it is actually engaged in racist practices. People are simply going about the ways in which they have been taught to live a life in this society. That is part of the reason why the idea of white privilege rubs some people the wrong way, because they don’t fully understand that the way in which they’re doing things will accrue to them a set of privileges.

I’d like for you to address the perspective that white privilege is an inherently racist concept and talking about it is racist. How do you respond to that?

Walcott: It’s wrong, absolutely wrong, because white privilege is not about demarcating a particular racial group. It’s pointing to ways in which an already demarcated racial group — in fact, a group of people who have historically marked other people as “not white” — has, through violence and other means, built a society in which they accrued the most privilege.

But more importantly, when people make the claim that to talk about white privilege is racist against white people, what we’re seeing is an attempt to hijack the language of civil rights and human rights and to turn that language in on itself … to take the progressive language that is supposed to push back against forms of oppression and use it to actually continue those forms of oppression.

Green: There are actually a lot of white scholars who have not only developed the concept, but explored the concept and done a lot of work on the concept of a white privilege and whiteness. So I don’t necessarily agree that the term in and of itself is racist.

For me, I see it as a way to bring to light something that can be extremely uncomfortable to discuss. I do agree with that — it’s very uncomfortable to discuss — but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to shy away from it.

What do you hope will come out of the upcoming white privilege conference?

Green: What I envision is that it will start the conversation in a very constructive, intentional way and get individuals to begin to look at various aspects of privilege that we operate in and how they impact all of us — looking at that, taking in this information, and seeing how it can be applied to their own personal circumstances. This is a means of helping us move the needle in the conversation around inclusion, and being able to truly make Canada an inclusive society.

Source: White privilege and an exploration of uncomfortable truths

Shree Paradkar’s related column:

Some privileges exist in the realm of emotions: It’s a privilege to be alive. It’s a privilege to live in a free country. It’s a privilege to write for this paper.

Then there are privileges that are not visible to, or acknowledged by, those that enjoy them: racial privilege, ethnic privilege, caste privilege, skin colour privilege, class privilege.

White privilege is a term that riles people who don’t understand it, which leads us to another academic term: “white fragility” — but that’s for another day.

I’ve enjoyed class, caste and skin-colour privilege in Asian countries. In India, as with my uncle, I was a “first-class” citizen. When I was looking for a house in Singapore, my real estate agent told me it was a “good thing” I was a light-skinned Indian “or nobody would give you a place.” In Canada, I have sufficient education/class privilege to compensate for the loss of racial privilege.

As someone who has walked both sides of the identity-based privilege line, I can attest to the invisibility of privilege when you enjoy it. I see the genuine blindness to its existence, but also the wilful ignorance of it. I recognize the defensive denial of this racial privilege because acceptance would challenge an enduring and implicit belief in white superiority as being foundational to Canada.

White privilege is a neutral academic observation. It doesn’t mean all white people are rich. It doesn’t mean all white people didn’t have to work hard for their success. It doesn’t imply all white people are racist. It does not attribute to an individual the actions of their race, or damn them for it.

White privilege just means that a white person in the exact same circumstance as a non-white person is far likelier to find success and growth. That means being white accrues some unearned benefits to an individual. “White” here depends on the current definition of it; not so long ago, Irish people were called the n-word on this continent. In the early 20th century Canadians from Ukraine and Eastern Europe were imprisoned in internment camps just based on their origin. Many, but not all, would be considered white today.

If the “white” race was created from an economic incentive to keep “Black” Africans low in the pecking order, or, in other words, if “white” was a term created to distinguish a set of people from “Black,” it’s obvious that a society that privileges whites least favours Blacks.

White privilege comes from the social value automatically ascribed to people just because of the colour of their skin. Add markers such as gender and wealth and education, and the value of white goes up exponentially.

Skin colour is the unkindest measure of a person’s worth and desirability. It’s a stamp branded on one’s body, one that cannot be covered or erased, so that people may be scrutinized and judged at a glance: whether they deserve to be rented a house or a key to the café washrooms or whether the mere sight of them is threatening enough to deserve instant death.

From what I’ve seen, the indulgent response to loud drunken white boys on public transit is quite different from the recoiling, recriminating looks shot at a sober Black man speaking somewhat loudly into his phone in a train.

Within whiteness, how closely you conform to British culture or physical type determines your chance of success. Once you meet those racial and cultural criteria, the ladder is yours to climb.

Meanwhile, the rest of the people are left looking at the ladder, realizing the game is already rigged.

Source: Shree Paradkar: White privilege is an academic observation, not an accusation

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The persistence of anti-Muslim hate on Facebook | Southern Poverty Law Center

2018/05/08 Leave a comment

The data mapping showing confluence between anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, white nationalist, neo-Confederate and anti-Government/Militia is of interest.

Have always wanted more data on social media networks and what they say about integration or not between different ethnic communities, not just the standard demographic analysis of communities and hopefully this analysis will stimulate such work. We need to look beyond the ‘physical enclave’ to include the virtual ones:

…Researcher and professor of computer science at Elon University, Megan Squire, is conducting a large-scale, ongoing study of hate groups on social media platforms, including Facebook.

“Preliminary results from my research indicate that – not surprisingly – groups with broadly ‘nativist’ ideologies, including anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant views, have significant membership in common,” Squire said.

“But this social network analysis also shows that anti-Muslim ideologies in particular can serve as a bridge between mostly disconnected communities, such as between anti-government and white nationalist communities.”

To construct the graph below, Squire first classified Facebook groups into ideologies using SPLC’s descriptions. She then selected the groups having more than 10 members in common and used social network analysis software to reveal the underlying “co-membership” network.

Each node represents one Facebook group. Lines between the groups indicate that the groups have at least ten members in common. Groups are positioned on the graph according to how similar their membership is. Groups that are closer to the center have more in common with one another. Green nodes, representing anti-Muslim groups, can be seen throughout.

Anti-Muslim hate seems to be the unifying cause hate groups can rally around and engage in on the social media platform. These findings are part of her ongoing research project to study far-right extremist beliefs through social media.

Is Facebook enabling anti-Muslim sentiment?

According to a 2017 Pew research study, 75 percent of Muslims polled believe there is a lot of discrimination in the United States against Muslims. Americans polled that same year by Pew rated Muslims on a “feeling thermometer” where 0 is the coldest and 100 is the warmest, the lowest among all religions at just 48. This disposition is well illustrated on Facebook, a platform in which Nazis and white nationalists are removed, while anti-Muslim groups remain.

Many publications have highlighted the double standards that exist in policing various demographics. Like other tech companies, Facebook largely responds when there is a controversy that is reported on by a publication. ProPublica points to complaints made by many users and the Anti-Defamation League about a page called “Jewish Ritual Murder,” which Facebook didn’t respond to until ProPublica wrote about Facebook’s inaction.

Monica Bickert, who leads the global policy management team at Facebook, explained, “The policies do not always lead to perfect outcomes. That is the reality of having policies that apply to a global community where people around the world are going to have very different ideas about what is OK to share.”…

via The persistence of anti-Muslim hate on Facebook | Southern Poverty Law Center

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The Historian Behind Slavery Apologists Like Kanye West – The New York Times

2018/05/05 Leave a comment

Useful history:

A video of the rapper Kanye West discussing slavery is a sad reminder of America’s historical amnesia about the brutal realities of that institution. “When you hear about slavery for 400 years,” he said in the clip, which was widely circulated on Twitter, “that sounds like a choice.”

Mr. West seemed to suggest that enslaved African-Americans were so content that they did not actively resist their bondage, and, as a result, they bear some responsibility for centuries of persecution.

He’s not alone in his thinking. In 2016, the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly asserted that slaves were “well fed and had decent lodgings.” Last September, the Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore deemed the antebellum era the last great period in American history. “I think it was great at the time when families were united,” he declared. “Even though we had slavery, they cared for one another.”

Modern scholarship has debunked such whitewashing, accurately depicting slavery as an inhumane institution rooted in greed and the violent subjugation of millions of African-Americans.

Yet countless Americans have not learned these lessons. They cling, instead, to a romanticized interpretation of slavery, one indebted to a book published 100 years ago.

In the spring of 1918, the historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips published his seminal study, “American Negro Slavery,” which framed the institution as a benevolent labor agreement between indulgent masters and happy slaves. No other book, no monument, no movie — save, perhaps, for “Gone With the Wind,” itself beholden to Phillips’s work — has been more influential in shaping how many Americans have viewed slavery.

Born in 1877 into a Georgia family with planter roots, Phillips developed an abiding sympathy for the Old South. He studied history at the University of Georgia and then as a graduate student at Columbia University under the tutelage of William A. Dunning, a scholar with a pro-Southern bent.

After earning his doctorate in 1902, Phillips set out to correct the slanted picture of the Southern past that he believed prevailed at the time. “The history of the United States has been written by Boston and largely been written wrong,” he lamented. “It must be written anew before it reaches its final form of truth, and for that work, the South must do its part.”

Phillips certainly did his. During his 30-year career, he published nine books and close to 60 articles, earning a series of prestigious professorships that culminated in a “very flossy job,” as he put it, at Yale University. This 1930 appointment reflected his stature as the country’s leading historian of slavery and the South, as well as the influence of his most important book, “American Negro Slavery.”

He was a prodigious, albeit selective researcher. Phillips found evidence in plantation records and Southern travelogues that bolstered the book’s benign interpretation of slavery, while downplaying evidence that did not. In his hands, plantations became idyllic sites where white families had modeled the habits of civilized life for their childlike black charges. “The plantations,” Phillips wrote, “were the best schools yet invented for the mass training of that sort of inert and backward people which the bulk of the American negroes represented.”

According to Phillips, slaveholders provided the enslaved with comfortable living quarters and plentiful rations and eschewed physical discipline. They rarely sold slaves, especially if it meant breaking up families. Slave owners’ rule “was benevolent in intent” and “beneficial in effect.”

Phillips’s use of the passive voice — “in March the corn fields were commonly planted” — further distanced the reader from slaves’ coerced labor. Enslaved African-Americans, in turn, displayed gratitude and loyalty to their masters. Phillips concluded that, while slavery may have been economically inefficient, “the relations on both sides were felt to be based on pleasurable responsibility.”

“American Negro Slavery” won widespread acclaim in the North and the South. Reviewers praised Phillips for his thorough research, charming style and lack of bias. In the words of the historian John David Smith, an expert on Phillips, the book served as “the definitive account of the peculiar institution” from World War I into the 1950s.

The book set the tone for the treatment of slavery in classrooms and textbooks across the country. “There was much to be said for slavery as a transition status between barbarism and civilization,” maintained a 1930 best seller, echoing Phillips almost verbatim. “The majority of slaves were … apparently happy.”

From the beginning, however, Phillips had his critics, who insisted on telling a more truthful, unvarnished history of slavery. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote a scathing review of “American Negro Slavery,” observing, “It is a defense of American slavery, a defense of an institution which was at best a mistake and at worst a crime.” Drawing on interviews with ex-slaves, sources Phillips rejected, the historian Frederic Bancroft published a 1931 book that exploded Phillips’s misrepresentations of the domestic slave trade.

Phillips’s critics grew more vocal in the 1950s and 1960s, as a new generation of scholars challenged his benign reading of slavery and the racism that stained almost every page of “American Negro Slavery.”

Yet while Phillips’s most egregious claims fell out of favor, the legacy of “American Negro Slavery” has proved tenacious.

According to a new Southern Poverty Law Center report on how slavery is taught in public schools, current pedagogy continues to focus on slavery from the perspective of whites, not the enslaved, while failing to connect the institution to the white supremacist beliefs that supported it. Textbooks often ignore slaveholders’ desire to make money and too easily slip into grammatical constructions — Africans “were brought” to America — that absolve enslavers of their actions.

Last year, a Charlotte, N.C., teacher asked her middle-school students to list “four reasons why Africans made good slaves.” An eighth-grade teacher in San Antonio recently sent students home with a work sheet titled “The Life of Slaves: A Balanced View.” It prompted students to list the “positive” aspects of slavery along with the “negative.”

We must confront mischaracterizations of the nature of slavery, whether nurtured in the classroom or broadcast on Twitter. After all, historical accuracy on this topic is not just about getting the past right; it is also about understanding the challenges of the present.

The persistence of racial inequality in America — from police brutality and school segregation to mass incarceration and wealth disparities — reflects, to some degree, the persistence of the Phillipsian take on slavery. If the institution were little more than a finishing school for African-Americans, then why acknowledge or address its pernicious legacies today?

via Opinion | The Historian Behind Slavery Apologists Like Kanye West – The New York Times

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