The lessons Canada should learn from Britain’s anti-immigrant politics: Julia Rampen

2018/01/19 Leave a comment

IMO, Rampen’s piece shows a limited understanding of Canada and Canadian federal politics. Given the large number of ridings in which immigrants form a significant number of voters, all major parties are essentially pro-immigration as I have argued elsewhere (The growing diversity within federal ridings), which essentially explains why Canada does not have an equivalent to UKIP in terms of popular support.

And she conflates anti-EU origin migration with immigration in general and overstates the importance of Rebel Media given the electoral realities (Sun Media is more representative of those with immigration-related concerns).

And while there are significant number of Canadians with concerns about number of immigrants (about one third), this group is not monolithic, ranging from those who are xenophobic to those who have legitimate concerns:

Nigel Farage, then the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), poses for photographers holding a British passport at the launch of the party’s open-top bus that will be touring the UK for the campaign to leave the European Union, ahead of the referendum, in London on May 20, 2016. (Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images)

On Jan. 29, 2017, the newly inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump got to work and announced a ban on travel and migration from a number of Muslim-majority countries—and in the world’s airports, chaos ensued. Passengers who boarded planes confident of their U.S. itinerary found themselves blocked on landing. Protesters and human-rights lawyers gathered outside airports. Security officials, surprised as everyone else, floundered.

Justin Trudeau, though, was quick to respond. “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith,” he tweeted. “Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.” To date, the tweet has been shared nearly 418,000 times.

It’s the kind of message that has helped Canada become a byword in the international community for a sensible, progressive attitude to immigration. In Britain, too—where 3.7 million European Union citizens spent 2017 waiting to hear whether they could continue to live in the country they had made their home, and where, after a rancorous Brexit vote that many saw as hinging on the issue of immigration, British Prime Minister Theresa May declared that “if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere”—the message was received.

Yet not so long ago, Britain also celebrated diversity, and a U.S. president depicted his Kenyan father and Indonesian childhood as a modern version of the American Dream. Trudeau might declare, as he did in June, that “our differences make us strong,” but there are signs that not everyone agrees—signs that we missed in Britain, until the morning of Jun. 24, 2016, when the cost of missing them became impossible to ignore.

Multiculturalism, Trudeau said in that June statement, “is at the heart of Canada’s heritage and identity.” This may be true, but when it comes to views on immigration, Canada is almost indistinguishable from a European country. A 2017 study by University of Toronto political scientist Michael Donnelly found that seven in ten Canadians would only accept “a few” or “some” poor immigrants, a view most similar to public opinion in France. Most people were willing to be generous to refugees, but only to the extent that British people were. While Canadians were generally positive about the impact of immigrants on the economy—and here, it’s worth noting Canada did not have as bad a financial crisis as many European countries—one in five would support stopping all immigration to the country.

So far, it has been possible for Canada’s political establishment to ignore this awkward squad on immigration. But this may say more about their opponents’ organizational skills than Canadian exceptionalism. “Both countries have large blocs of people who are genuinely upset about immigration alongside many who are quite comfortable with it,” Donnelly said in an interview with Maclean’s, when asked about the U.K. and Canada. “Perhaps the anti-immigrant group is a bit larger in the U.K. than in Canada, but I’d say the major difference is the lack of a British National Party, or the UK Independence Party, to attract and, to an extent, legitimize the fringe right, which is present in both countries.”

The British National Party—a far-right group that, at its high point in the mid-2000s, managed to elect some local councillors—is unlikely to keep Canadian liberals up at night. UKIP, however, is a different story. Under the leadership of the beer-swilling, hat-doffing Nigel Farage, the party charmed its way into TV studios and foxtrotted a fine line between respectable, if anti-European Union, political rhetoric, and far-right xenophobic dog whistles. By 2015, Farage had still not managed to get elected to the Westminster Parliament, but two Conservative MPs had defected to UKIP, immigration was a dirty word, and a rattled David Cameron, then the Conservative prime minister, promised a referendum on EU membership.

Defenders of Britain’s anti-immigration turn will point out that there is one stark difference to Canada: the free movement rules which allowed up to 190,000 EU citizens a year to come to the U.K. and indeed, admiration for Canada’s immigration system is shared by some British Eurosceptics, who say they are in favour of control rather than ending immigration per se. Still, immigration was an issue that united voters across party lines, and against their own party leadership. The Lincolnshire town of Boston—christened Britain’s “most Brexit town” because of the high Eurosceptic vote—experienced a 460-per-cent rise in immigration between 2004 and 2014.

British liberals who reject anti-immigration sentiment, yet accept that after Brexit it has to be taken seriously, often argue that this is because immigration has become a proxy for economic concerns. It is true that in the years between the financial crisis and Brexit, Britain’s Conservative-led government inflicted a series of cuts on public services. Between 2007 and 2015, the U.K. was the only advanced country to see wages shrink while the overall economy grew. For older residents of post-industrial provincial towns, far from the cosmopolitan splendours of London, it would not take a great leap of imagination to believe that there were too many people in the country willing to work for too little. Although at first glance Canada is not plagued with these problems, liberals might want to take note of the fact that in 2014, the country was ranked third worst for regional economic disparity among countries in the OECD. 

Yet there is another bulwark against anti-immigration sentiment in Canada, and this one is far easier to overcome. While the majority of British MPs were in favour of remaining in the EU, the two biggest-selling newspapers in the U.K., The Sun and The Daily Mail, backed Leave. This was no surprise, not least given the same papers had already successfully been blurring the lines between immigrants, refugees and criminals for years. In the spring of 2015, after roughly 1,600 people had died trying to cross the Mediterranean in at the beginning of what would later be called “Europe’s refugee crisis,” Sun columnist Katie Hopkins wrote a piece entitled “Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants.” The Daily Mail published a front page declaring: “MIGRANTS: HOW MANY MORE CAN WE TAKE?”

Hopkins, who also compared refugees to cockroaches, ultimately proved too much for mainstream British audiences after she called for a “final solution” in the wake of a domestic terror attack. But she quickly found a new job—with the Canadian-based Rebel Media, where she hosts her own website, Hopkins World. (Her discussion of “shithole countries” has already prompted one Canadian reader to lament the “Clown Prince” of the liberals, “Justin Mohammed Trudeau.”)

According to Ryan Scrivens, an academic at Concordia University who has spent six years studying far-right extremism, some Canadians are receptive to a “traditional” racist skinhead message. More common, though, is the trend of being drawn to the alt-right, which inhabits the same, ambiguous area as UKIP and columnists like Hopkins. “The alt-right is watered-down hate,” said Scrivens. “It’s the more mainstream, palatable, and acceptable form of hatred, which seems to resonate with more people.”

While Scrivens echoes Donnelly’s view that the far right struggles to co-operate in Canada, he does identify one issue they can unite behind: immigration. Here, the concerns resemble those in Europe, with the focus on refugees from Muslim countries. “With that comes a (mis)perception that, with an increase in Muslim immigrants, Sharia law will be imposed on Canadians and terrorists will sneak into the country and cause harm.”

One year on from his tweet, Trudeau does not face an obvious ideological opponent on immigration, at least so long as Andrew Scheer, focussed on a message of inclusion, leads the Conservatives; Kellie Leitch, who brought anti-immigration ideas to the Tories’ leadership campaign, now faces a nomination challenge for her seat from within her own party in 2019. But the lesson from Europe and the U.S. is that anti-immigration movements do not come from within the establishment. Sites like Rebel Media have seized on the implications of Trudeau’s “Welcome to Canada” message, calling the movement of people from U.S. to Canada since Trump took power a “border invasion.” Leitch and movements like Canada First continue to depict welcoming refugees and Canadian values as incompatible, and despite her loss, a poll during the Conservative leadership campaign found that a majority of Canadians supported some form of values test.

With his personal popularity ratings slipping, and the influence of online media growing, Trudeau needs to beware an insurrection from below. Otherwise, he may be surprised about how quickly a country’s reputation can change.

Source: The lessons Canada should learn from Britain’s anti-immigrant politics

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

‘Racial Impostor Syndrome’: Here Are Your Stories

2018/01/18 Leave a comment

Have just included a few of the mixed identity anecdotes but as mixed union rates increase, more people will be grappling with these identity issues:

It’s tricky to nail down exactly what makes someone feel like a “racial impostor.” For one Code Switch follower, it’s the feeling she gets from whipping out “broken but strangely colloquial Arabic” in front of other Middle Easterners.

For another — a white-passing, Native American woman — it’s being treated like “just another tourist” when she shows up at powwows. And one woman described watching her white, black and Korean-American toddler bump along to the new Kendrick and wondering, “Is this allowed?”

In this week’s podcast, we go deep into what we’re calling Racial Impostor Syndrome — the feeling, the science and a giant festival this weekend in Los Angeles that’s, in some ways, all about this.

All Mixed Up: What Do We Call People Of Multiple Backgrounds?

Here’s how we got started down this track. A couple months ago, listener Kristina Ogilvie wrote in to tell us that “living at the intersection of different identities and cultures” was like “stumbling around in a forest in the dark.”

She asked, “Do you hear from other listeners who feel like fakes?”

Good question. So we took it to our audience, and what we heard back was a resounding “yes.”

We got 127 emails from people who are stumbling through that dark, racially ambiguous forest. (And yes, we read every single one.)

Here are excerpts drawn from a few of the many letters that made us laugh, cry and argue — and that guided this week’s episode.

Let’s start with Angie Yingst of Pennsylvania:

“My mother is a Panamanian immigrant and my father is a white guy from Pennsylvania. I’ve always felt liminal, like I drift between race and culture. When I was young (20s) and living in the city, I would get asked multiple times a day where I was from, where my people were from, because Allentown, Pennsylvania, clearly wasn’t the answer they were looking for … It always felt like the undercurrent of that question was, ‘You aren’t white, but you aren’t black. What are you?’

“But truthfully, I don’t feel like I fit with Latinas either. My Spanish is atrocious and I grew up in rural PA. Even my cousin said a few weeks ago, ‘Well, you aren’t really Spanish, because your dad is white.’ Which gutted me, truly. I identify as Latina. I identify with my mother’s culture and country as well as American culture. In shops, I’m treated like every other Latina, followed around, then ignored at the counter. I married a white guy and had children who are blonde and blue eyed, and I’m frequently asked if I’m the nanny or babysitter. And white acquaintances often say, ‘You are white. You act white.’ And I saltily retort, ‘Why? Because I’m not doing your lawn, or taking care of your kids? You need to broaden your idea of what Latina means.’ ”

Jen Boggs of Hawaii says she often feels like a racial impostor, but isn’t quite sure which race she’s faking:

“I was born in the Philippines and moved to Hawaii when I was three. … I grew up thinking that I was half-Filipina and half-white, under the impression that my mom’s first husband was my biological father. I embraced this ‘hapa-haole’ identity (as they say in Hawaii), and loved my ethnic ambiguity. My mom wanted me to speak perfect English, so never spoke anything but to me. After she divorced her first husband and re-married my stepdad from Michigan, my whiteness became cemented.

“Except. As it turns out, my biological father was a Filipino man whom I’ve never met. I didn’t find out until I tried to apply for a passport in my late twenties and the truth came out. So, at age 28 I learned that I was not half white but all Filipina. …

“This new knowledge was a huge blow to my identity and, admittedly, to my self esteem. ‘But I’m white,’ I remember thinking. ‘I’m so so white.’ After much therapy, I’m happy and comfortable in my brown skin, though I’m still working out how others perceive me as this Other, Asian person.”

Source: ‘Racial Impostor Syndrome’: Here Are Your Stories

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Religious groups meet to discuss concerns over abortion clause in summer jobs grant application

2018/01/18 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see how this continues to play out, and whether the requirement is interpreted broadly, as some faith groups fear, or narrowly as the government is trying to signal:

On a wintry Tuesday afternoon, in a small conference room at the back of a Pentecostal office building in the Toronto suburbs, 60 people representing Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, Christian and other faiths spent two hours debating whether the government is violating their religious freedoms — and if so, what to do about it.

The concern arises out of the Canada Summer Jobs program, which this year comes with a new “attestation” box that all applicants must check off before submitting. The wording of the attestation, which many still find confusing, seems to require a declaration that the applicant does not advocate an anti-abortion position.

A growing number of faith-based groups see the attestation as a threat to the principle of religious freedom in Canada. While some of them are staunchly pro-life, others don’t take a firm stance on abortion rights but don’t want to be forced to take a side in order to apply for a grant.

Tuesday’s discussion was closed to the media, but a few of the attendees spoke to reporters afterward.

Ibrahim Hindy, an imam at the Dar Al-Tawheed Islamic Centre in Mississauga, said his mosque is struggling over what to do.

“I came to take it all in and hear the concerns that people were having,” he said. “We were going to apply this year, and we’re still discussing whether or not we will…Some people are asking, does this conflict with our beliefs? If the person has an orthodox understanding of scriptures, is this asking the person to contradict those?”

Father Niaz Toma, a Chaldean Catholic priest, said his community of Iraqi Christians won’t be able to apply for the grant, and referred to the attestation as a “persecution” of his people.

“We will never compromise our faith for the sake of grants to be received from the Canadian government,” he said. “Seemingly, the attempt is to be inclusive. But the end result is exclusivity, blocking certain groups.”

The meeting, which was spearheaded by Conservative MP Alex Nuttall, featured a panel of speakers from Islamic, Catholic and evangelical organizations outlining their interpretation of the attestation, taking questions from the crowd, and moderating a discussion of what should be done in response.

Nuttall — who got involved due to his role as Conservative critic on the youth portfolio — said those in attendance included representatives from Baptist churches, Hindu temples, Sikh temples, Coptic Christians, the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, and many others.

Concerns over the attestation have been popping up around the country, as religious groups grapple with the implications of signing a grant application that includes an attestation about reproductive rights. Some have decided to send in paper applications with their own attestation, rather than sign the government’s.

The attestation requires stating that the organization’s core mandate respects individual human rights as well as the “values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” going on to say this includes “reproductive rights.” The accompanying Applicant’s Guide identifies “the right to access safe and legal abortions” as a human right that the attestation is referring to.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Employment Minister Patty Hajdu have both made it clear the aim is to block federal grants from going to organizations that have the explicit purpose of anti-abortion political activism. They have encouraged faith-based organizations to still apply for the grants.

But religious groups are left with the question of what “core mandate” means, and whether signing the attestation compromises their own religious beliefs. And compounding this is the concern the attestation requirement will spread to other federal programs.

On Tuesday, it was revealed that the new federal youth volunteer program, the Canada Service Corps, also has similar strings attached to it.

The program provides funding for volunteer projects around the country, but the guidelines say the government won’t approve funding for any projects deemed not to respect individual human rights — including reproductive rights. In this case, instead of applicants having to sign an attestation, it will be up to the government department reviewing the applications to decide if the qualifications are met.

Hindy said many of the attendees at Tuesday’s meeting worried that attestations would start to become the norm in Canada, and “values tests” would be applied to more federal programs.

“For example, we’ve seen in Quebec with the niqab issue where the government there said, ‘We don’t like the niqab, so if you wear the niqab you don’t get access to any public service,’” he said. “We’ve seen these kind of values tests before, and they’re not in the spirit, I believe, of what Canada’s all about.”

Source: Religious groups meet to discuss concerns over abortion clause in summer jobs grant application

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with

Toronto Sun editorial: Learning from the hijab hoax

2018/01/18 Leave a comment

Unfortunately in the era of social media, immediate responses are required. However, the suggested disclaimer – “If what has been alleged is true” – is sound advice:

Since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and Toronto Mayor John Tory didn’t say it, we will.

The problem with Toronto’s now infamous hijab hoax is that it will make Muslims and others who are actual victims of hate crimes more afraid to come forward for fear of not being believed.

And it will make the public more cynical about the reporting of hate crimes.

We aren’t going to fault the prime minister, the premier or the mayor for assuming the initial report of an 11-year-old child describing how she had been attacked by an “Asian man” who twice tried to cut her hijab with scissors was true.

Many people believed it was true. We reported it on our front page.

But once Toronto police said, following their investigation, that no attack had occurred, it was incumbent on Trudeau, Wynne and Tory to stress the dangers of anyone falsely claiming to be the victim of a hate crime, or for that matter any crime.

Instead, they ran for cover, saying only that they were glad that no attack had occurred but that it was important to continue to be vigilant about fighting hatred and racism.

Of course it’s important to fight hatred and racism, but that’s not the lesson to be learned from what happened in this case.

The lesson in this case is that when a school board and municipal, provincial and federal politicians leap to conclusions before all the facts are known, the revelations of those facts can lead to the very thing they hoped to avoid — public cynicism about the reporting of hate crimes.

When the media wrongly identify a member of a minority group as the perpetrator of a crime, politicians are the first to condemn them.

Why then their silence when they wrongly identify a member of minority group as the victim of a crime?

The next time a crime of this nature is alleged, we suggest our political leaders say words to the effect of: “If what has been alleged is true, it’s completely unacceptable in our city (or province, or country) and we are confident the police will treat this matter seriously and investigate it thoroughly.”

Which, by the way, is exactly what happened.

Source: EDITORIAL: Learning from the hijab hoax

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with

FUREY: Hijab hoax girl, family owe Canadians an apology

2018/01/17 Leave a comment

Hard to disagree, although more information on the back story on why Noman pulled that stunt would be helpful:

It was the assault that pulled on the heartstrings of a nation.

Khawlah Noman’s story of being attacked not once but twice by a man in his 20s who used scissors to cut her hijab garnered responses from coast-to-coast.

The media seized upon this troubling tale as camera crews rushed to her Scarborough school for a press conference several hours after the Friday morning assault happened.

Noman was flanked by her young brother, who witnessed the despicable act, and her mother – who was in tears.

The public sentiments were like a deluge: they came fast and they came strong. Toronto Mayor John Tory. Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They all issued statements. “Canada is an open and welcoming country,” posted Trudeau, “and incidents like this cannot be tolerated.”

The Toronto Sun featured the story on the front page. My colleague Lorrie Goldstein posted the following sentiment that I agreed with and retweeted: “One can only imagine how terrified this innocent child must have been to have been attacked twice by the same man in the space of a few minutes. Appalling.”

I thought at the time that everyone falling over themselves was a bit too much. The suspect had not yet been found. Maybe things weren’t quite as they were portrayed. And, besides, people are unfortunately assaulted daily in this country and the overly political response to this one implied that assaulting a girl in a hijab was somehow worse and more deserving of censure than assaulting one without.

But even if the response was overkill, the basic idea of a girl being randomly attacked while walking to school was still worthy of our condemnation. It’s not like it would turn out to be a hoax. Right? Wrong.

On Monday, Toronto Police issued the following brief statement. “After a detailed investigation, police have determined that the events described did not happen,” it read. “Our investigation is concluded and we don’t expect anything further.”

It did not happen. It was a hoax. Well then that statement just doesn’t cut it. While police may not be expecting anything further, Canadians certainly will be.

The outpouring of public support this girl received shows Canadians are compassionate people. They take allegations of this type of intolerance seriously. Yet their generosity was abused.

There are too many questions remaining for the cops to leave it like this. Last August, police considered charging a man in Durham Region for misleading them about a false Islamophobia complaint. Section 140 of the Criminal Code covers public mischief. It says that “making a false statement that accuses some other person of having committed and offence” could see you locked up for up to five years. They even arrested a homeless man in the case, only to later find the complainant’s story didn’t add up.

Khawlah Noman, 11, is accompanied by her brother Mohammad Zakarijja and their mom Saima Samad as she recalls a man slicing her hijab as she and her sibling walked to Pauline Johnson Public School in Scarborough on Friday, Jan. 12, 2018.
Now Khawlah Noman is an 11-year-old, so would not be charged. But what did her mother know? Watching the girl’s video statement again, the girl’s words look well-prepared. It must be asked, given what we now know: Was she coached?

“Heartwarming note: A friend gave her another hijab to wear,” CBC reporter Ali Chiasson tweeted from the press conference. “The one she was wearing with the 12 inch gash is with police as evidence.”

What does this element now mean? Did someone fabricate evidence? That would make it so much worse.

One sad outcome of this story is that decent, fair-minded Canadians whose hearts went out to this girl may look at the next such attack with suspicion. And that one could be real.

The family, the police and the school board owe us an explanation. And Khawlah Noman and her family owe Canada an apology.

via FUREY: Hijab hoax girl, family owe Canadians an apology | Toronto Sun

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Making The Case That Discrimination Is Bad For Your Health : NPR

2018/01/16 Leave a comment

Another in a good series of articles and studies on the impact of discrimination on health, this time on the concept of “weathering:”

When Arline Geronimus was a student at Princeton University in the late 1970s, she worked a part-time job at a school for pregnant teenagers in Trenton, N.J. She quickly noticed that the teenagers at that part-time job were suffering from chronic health conditions that her whiter, better-off Princeton classmates rarely experienced. Geronimus began to wonder: how much of the health problems that the young mothers in Trenton experienced were caused by the stresses of their environment?

It was later, during her graduate studies, that Geronimus came up with the term weathering — a metaphor, she thought, for what she saw happening to their bodies. She meant for weathering to evoke a sense of erosion by constant stress. But also, importantly, the ways that marginalized people and their communities coped with the drumbeat of big and small stressors that marked their lives.

At first, lots of folks in academic circles rolled their eyes at her coinage, arguing on panels and in newspapers that poor, black communities had worse health outcomes than better-off white communities because of unhealthy life choices, and immutable genetic differences. But as the science around genetics and stress physiology became better understood, Geronimus’ “weathering” hypothesis started picking up steam in wider circles.

We spoke to Geronimus, now a public health a public health researcher and professor at the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center, on the latest episode of the Code Switch podcast about how weathering works, and why it took so long for people to come around to what Geronimus and other public health professionals had been saying for years. [This interview was edited for clarity and length.]

CS: Can we get into the science of weathering a little bit?

AG: There have been folk notions and laypeople have thought that health differences between populations — such as black versus white in the U.S. — were somehow related to differences in our DNA, that we were, in a sense, molecularly programmed to have this disease or that disease. But instead, social and environmental factors, can through what’s called DNA methylation, which occurs — I don’t know how technical you want to get — but that occurs when a group of molecules attach methyl groups to specific areas of a gene’s promoter region, and either prevent the reading of certain genes and sort of forms the gene’s product, and you have genetic expression of that gene. That’s a pretty powerful idea, and it sort of refutes the kind of more DNA-centric one, that you are destined by the literal DNA you have to have certain diseases or not.

But what I’ve seen over the years of my research and lifetime is that the stressors that impact people of color are chronic and repeated through their whole life course, and in fact may even be at their height in the young adult-through-middle-adult ages rather than in early life. And that increases a general health vulnerability — which is what weathering is.

I heard an interview with Emerald Snipes Garner, who was talking about the death of her beloved sister Erica. She used a metaphor that I think would also be a great description of weathering. She talked about the stresses that she felt led to Erica’s death at age twenty-seven as being like if you’re playing the game Jenga. They pull out one piece at a time, at a time, and another piece and another piece, until you sort of collapse. I’m paraphrasing her, but I thought that Jenga metaphor was very apt because you start losing pieces of your health and well-being, but you still try to go on as long as you can. Even if you’re disabled, even if it’s hard, that you have a certain tenacity and hope, and sense of collective responsibility whether that’s for your family or community. But there’s a point where enough pieces have been pulled out of you, that you can no longer withstand, and you collapse.

CS: When you coined the term weathering, there was a lot of pushback. Where was the locus of that pushback?

AG: There were actually several loci. Many in the medical community really seemed to think that there was just something intrinsic or genetic: that black-white differences in health must be [caused] by some hypertension gene. Or if it wasn’t a literal gene back in Africa, then maybe something about how hard theMiddle Passage was, that people who survived it had this gene for salt retention. It’s been very well debunked both on anthropological grounds but also on if you compare hypertension rates, for example, between American blacks and blacks in the Caribbean. The American blacks have far higher rates of hypertension, yet both [populations] went through the Middle Passage.

Others didn’t necessarily think in those terms, economists were thinking more behaviorally and sociologists sensed that there was an essential pathological culture that led to bad behaviors and weak families. And that was a very strong narrative in the ’70s, ’80s, and I think it’s a narrative that still exists [today], though more contested.

So this idea of weathering, and its metaphysical aspects, didn’t sound technical enough, and it didn’t fit any of those narratives.

GD: What was that like for you when people were dismissing your work?

AG: It was not fun! [laughs] It was very hard especially because some of them dismissed it very publicly. Another reason people dismissed it is that I first observed that young black women were more likely to have poor pregnancy outcomes if they were in their mid-twenties than if they were in their late teens. And this flew in the face of a lot of advocacy organizations that were working very hard to prevent teen childbearing. I think there was a Time magazine cover at one point that said, something like, “all social problems stem from teen childbearing.” [The cover story’s subhead read: “Teen pregnancies are corroding America’s social fabric.” — ed.] There was certainly a whole narrative that teen motherhood somehow caused perpetual poverty, lack of education, and poor birth outcomes. [But] the data spoke for themselves — that the risks were higher in black young women the later they waited to have children, and that was not true for whites. Whites, by comparison, had the lowest risks around their mid-twenties and the highest risk in their teens.

GD: And the rates were higher because the black women who waited just a few years later were more weathered.

AG: Exactly. The impacts on their bodies had been happening for a longer period of time.

So when did this concept of weathering start to gain more traction?

AG: It’s been two steps forward, one step back rather than there being a time when it gained traction. It was a hypothesis for me at first and then I started with colleagues doing studies to test it. As the years went by, we had more and more studies that seemed to be consistent with it.

In addition, I think the idea of stress — and not just, “I feel so stressed” but this broader sense of stress actually being this physiological process that impacts your health, or the strength of your various body systems — that became better understood sort of in the ’90s. A variety of neuro- endocrinologists at Rockefeller University, and Robert Sapolsky at Stanford talked about these stress reactions, what they do to your body and how they happen.

And I don’t want to sound cynical, but because it was about physiological reactions in human beings, discovered by, you know, two men — it was many more men, and it was women, too, but the two people who got, I think the most credit, and deservedly, were men who were lab scientists — it had more credibility in our society than talking about weathering and lived experience and racism.

GD: I want to go back to your Jenga metaphor. If weathering is this process by which the blocks are pulled away and your health becomes more and more tenuous, is there any way to put the blocks back?

AG: It’s hard to say. I certainly don’t believe that there isn’t anything that can be done. One thing that can be done and is done — and this benefits in particular people who are weathered but in the middle class or more highly educated — is access to healthcare. So you may be hypertensive from weathering but if you have good access to healthcare, you get diagnosed early, you get it treated. You learn what you need to do with your diet to make it a little less likely to turn into its more pernicious and life-threatening form. We’ve seen evidence, in some of our studies where we’ve compared blacks in very high-poverty areas to blacks in more middle-class neighborhoods, and what we’ve seen is that those in the higher-class neighborhoods do have much longer life expectancy than those in the poor neighborhoods. But they spend most of that extra life with chronic conditions and possibly disabled. Or, with a variety of morbidities than whites with the same incomes and educations, living in the same neighborhoods. So certainly, having a longer life expectancy and averting death and averting hypertension, or diabetes, or their complications are good things. But without dealing with the kind of more structurally rooted factors that lead to weathering across class, we’re not going to end weathering.

via Making The Case That Discrimination Is Bad For Your Health : Code Switch : NPR

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Perception vs. reality: Why negative views of Islam should be challenged – Sheema Khan

2018/01/16 Leave a comment

Another good column by Khan, presenting the positive side of Canadian Muslims:

Jan. 29 will mark one year from the evening that six Muslim worshippers were massacred at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City. Nineteen were injured, children were left fatherless and wives widowed.

The atrocity resulted in an outpouring of support for traumatized Muslims across the country. That did not last long, however. Human-rights activist Bernie Farber and Mira Sucharov, associate professor of political science at Carleton University, have chronicled hateful incidents directed at Muslims during the rest of 2017. As they wrote in an opinion piece: “It was as though the Jan. 29 killings had never happened.” In one example, students at a Mississauga elementary school were subject to religious epithets from demonstrators denouncing Islam and prayer rooms. The year concluded with Muslim worshippers in Quebec worried once again about their safety. Quebec-based TVA falsely reported that a Montreal mosque barred female construction workers near its premises on Fridays during prayer sessions, leading to alleged hate-filled invective and death threats directed at the mosque. The network later apologized for the baseless report.

Surely these isolated incidents do not reflect the majority view. Or do they?

In November, the Angus Reid Institute released a poll indicating that nearly half of Canadians believe that “the presence of Islam in their country’s public life is damaging.” No other religion faces such widespread contempt. Let it sink in. If you do not hold a negative view of Islam, then someone in your immediate circle does.

Yet the perception of Islam is so different from the lived reality of Canadian Muslims. Some have a cultural affiliation to the faith. For others, the attachment is deeper. Across the diverse spectrum of belief, it can be argued that basic Islamic teachings contribute richly to our collective social fabric.

Sadaqah (charity) is ingrained in Islam. Muslims perennially organize drives to clothe, shelter and feed fellow Canadians. Mohamad Fakih answered a call from fellow business person Jennifer Evans to provide hotel rooms and meals for 18 homeless people in Toronto during the recent deep freeze. Islamic Relief Canada, a national charity, has launched a similar campaign.

Muslims have responded to natural disasters (e.g., flooding in Quebec and Ontario and fires in Fort McMurray, Alta.) with their time, money and emotional support. They have raised funds for hospitals and joined neighbours to clean parks. Last year, Ottawa’s Muslim community quickly collected $23,000 to fund extracurricular activities and resources for public schools lacking a school council.

The Islamic pillar of fasting, observed during the month of Ramadan, inculcates discipline, empathy, gratefulness and generosity. This year, take the opportunity to join in the sunset meal (which ends the daily fast) and experience the beauty of human fellowship.

The Koran states that saving one life is akin to saving all of humanity. In 2017, two Canadian Muslims personified this noble teaching.

Aymen Derbali directly faced the gunman at the Quebec City mosque to divert him from killing others. He was shot multiple times and lay in a coma for two months. The father of three is now paralyzed, yet grateful for the generosity of Canadians in helping him find a home that accommodates his disability.

Yosif Al-Hasnawi, a 19-year-old student at Brock University, was shot to death outside an Islamic centre as he tried to help a stranger who was being attacked by two men. The good Samaritan had just left the centre after participating in a celebration of the birth of the Prophet Mohammed.

Another important Islamic tenet is forgiveness. Al Salam mosque in Fort Smith, Ark., was vandalized in 2016 by three men, including Abraham Davis, who later wrote a letter of apology to the mosque from jail. The mosque board advocated forgiveness and opposed the charges against him. Nonetheless, Mr. Davis was fined and ordered to stay away from the mosque and its members. He posted a gracious note of thanks on Facebook. One member replied: “Bro move on with life we forgave you from the first time you apologized don’t let that mistake bring you down. I speak for the whole Muslim community of fort smith we love you and want you to be the best example in life we don’t hold grudges against anybody!” The story didn’t end there. Unable to pay his fine, Mr. Davis was set to enter jail for six years. The mosque intervened and paid the full amount. The members want him to succeed.

In the coming weeks, mosques across the country will hold open houses. Take an opportunity to peek in. Get to know Muslims who are your neighbours, co-workers and fellow Canadians.

And then ask yourself if Islam is damaging to Canadian society.

via Perception vs. reality: Why negative views of Islam should be challenged – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

The year since the mosque shooting has made amnesiacs out of Quebec’s political class: Martin Patriquin

2018/01/16 Leave a comment

Another reminder by Patriquin of one of convenient forgetfulness:

On the morning of Jan. 31, 2017, with camera in hand, I walked into the Centre Culturel Islamique de Québec. Less than 48 hours before, a gunman had walked into the centre, killing six and injuring 19. Once the police had finished their work, mosque administrators opened the doors to journalists, if only to show firsthand the often-visceral consequences of unchecked hatred and ignorance.

It was like the aftermath of war. Men and women parishioners wandered around, dazed and weeping. Bullets, dozens of them, had splintered drywall and shattered glass. And blood was everywhere: on the carpet and prayer rugs, on the Linoleum floor outside the main room, caking the stairs to the basement and circling a storage closet drain. It smeared windows and pooled in sinks. I left with it on my boots.

‘Senseless violence’

The province’s political leaders were immediately and appropriately sombre. Quebecers “must avoid words and gestures that separate, divide and attract hate,” said Premier Philippe Couillard. François Legault, leader of the conservative Coalition Avenir Québec, expressed his solidarity in the face of “senseless violence” with Quebec’s Muslim community. Parti Québécois leader Jean-François Lisée said the most by stating the obvious. “It’s not easy to be a Muslim in the 21st century,” he told reporters.

If time weakens emotions and fades memories, the year since the shooting has made amnesiacs out of Quebec’s political class. Last week, the National Council of Canadian Muslims asked the federal government to designate Jan. 29 as a national day of remembrance and action on Islamophobia. In Quebec, the idea of questioning exactly why the shooting took place was largely met with shrugs or worse.

Both the PQ and the CAQ quickly opposed such a thing. “I think we’ve debated the divisions surrounding the presence of religion enough in Quebec,” PQ MNA Agnès Maltais told Le Devoir. The governing Liberals, who harvest the vast majority of the province’s Muslim vote come election day, utterly waffled on the idea.

Once aghast at the many Muslim victims who had done nothing but gather for prayers, these politicians now declared the deliberate targeting of Muslims passé — an isolated incident perpetuated by a crazy man. “Quebecers are open and welcoming, they are not Islamophobic,” said a CAQ spokesperson. (Only Québec solidaire, the Montreal-centric lefty redoubt, came out in favour of the NCCM proposal.)

Clearly, the amnesia stretches beyond the last year. On Dec. 6, 1989, Marc Lépine walked into Montreal’s École Polytechnique and killed 14 women before turning his gun on himself. Like Alexandre Bissonnette, the man currently on trial for last year’s mosque massacre, Lépine was more than just a crazy man with a gun. He harboured a deep resentment of women, which he weaponized and made homicidal in the classrooms and corridors of Polytechnique.

The Polytechnique shootings sparked a societal debate in the province about gender, feminism and the extent of institutional misogyny in Quebec society, purportedly one of the more equalitarian in the country. It was a painful but wholly necessary exercise, one commemorated by the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women.

At first glance, it might be difficult to see why most Quebec politicians are ambivalent at best about a similar exercise for Muslims in Quebec and beyond. Lépine blamed feminists for his problems. Bissonnette left an online trail of anti-Muslim rhetoric before the mosque shootings. And as with Polytechnique 28 years earlier, the mosque shootings were but the bloodiest example of institutional enmity against an identifiable group.

Crimes targeting Muslims

Police-reported hate crimes against Muslims in Canada tripled between 2012 and 2015, according to Statistics Canada. In Quebec City, crimes targeting Muslims have doubled since the mosque shootings, according to the city’s police chief.

Apart from being alarming, such statistics are fodder for Muslim extremists, who use society-wide anti-Muslim animus as a recruiting tool. If this is the case, these extremists have a veritable wellspring of recruiting material in Quebec City’s many populist (and enduringly popular) radio stations, which — with a few notable exceptions — remain largely anti-Muslim and anti-immigration a year after the mosque shootings.

A week after the deadly shooting at a mosque, hundreds took to the streets of Quebec City to honour the victims. 1:54

For its politicians, perhaps it’s less about amnesia than Quebec’s own brand of crass identity politics. The three main political parties are locked in a battle for the hearts and votes of Quebec’s lily-white, lapsed Catholic hinterland in Quebec City and beyond — everywhere, it seems, save for Montreal. The dynamics are such that even the Liberals, who have a lock on the non-Francophone vote, can demonize Montreal’s multicultural reality.

In 2013, the PQ government attempted to ban “conspicuous” religious symbols from the bodies of anyone drawing a government paycheque. Though it failed, the ensuing Liberal government last year passed a ban on face coverings for anyone giving or receiving a government service. Only Québec solidaire protested the law’s blatant targeting of Quebec’s Muslim minority. Everyone else said it didn’t go far enough.

A year ago, these very politicians professed shock and sadness at a murderous hate crime perpetrated on their watch. Demonstrably, as Quebec approaches a fall election, political reality has pushed this emotion aside. Maybe they didn’t forget the tragedy. Maybe they just don’t want to be reminded of the reasons behind it.

via The year since the mosque shooting has made amnesiacs out of Quebec’s political class | CBC News

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Muslims and Jews find common ground in faith, hope — and security

2018/01/15 Leave a comment

Good example of communities working together even if the circumstances which compelled this cooperation are unfortunate:

From the outside, the mosque is an unremarkable, warehouse-like building in an industrial pocket of central Mississauga. Away from city lights, a few streets down from the highway, its doors are always open, the Islamic school brimming with women and children during the day, the echoes of Arabic prayer quietly streaming in its halls.

Jeffrey Brown, an Orthodox Jew from Thornhill, spent the last day of Hanukkah there meeting with three police officers, five Muslim men, and a Muslim woman. In December, the unlikely congregation had gathered in the teal-coloured carpeted prayer hall to talk about restoring a sense of security in their places of worship.

For more than 10 years, Brown has served as a community security volunteer at his synagogue. He has developed relationships with police, created a pool of volunteer patrols, and established a security infrastructure.

He’s clear-eyed about the need for security. “People in a house of worship have to be comfortable where they are,” Brown said. “They should be able to concentrate on prayers and know if something happens, plans are in place.”

But until last year’s mass shooting at the Quebec Islamic Cultural Centre, Brown had not had any close interactions with the Muslim community.

Where a shocked nation saw the faces of the six Muslim men who were killed there, Brown saw an open and unguarded door.

“There was nothing there,” said Brown. “No one there.”

For months after the shooting, a single-shooter scenario played in Mohammed Hashim’s mind every time walked into a mosque. He imagined where a gunman would come in from, where the children would hide, where the exits were.

Hashim is a crisis manager for the Canadian Muslim community — stepping in to help whenever, and wherever, they need it. He went to Quebec City the day after the shooting to witness “everyone’s worst nightmare.”

In May, he attended a rare interfaith event for the first time. Held at Brown’s synagogue, Hashim walked through metal detectors, as people with walkie-talkies stood inside, and police cars stood outside.

“I thought it was overdone at first — whoa, it’s Thornhill, not a war zone,” said Hashim. “But then, as I started thinking about it, it felt like deterrence. There was a sense of prevention conveyed to those who seek to do harm.”

Brown said that there was chatter about protests in the lead-up to the interfaith event, so he told his police contacts and made the necessary arrangements.

“Critical to community security is knowing who to work with in the police department,” said Brown. “This requires proactive work before incidents happen. It’s a two-way street — you have to learn about the police while they learn about the community.”

At the interfaith dinner, Brown surprised Hashim by offering to share his experience with the Muslim community.

“I don’t think we could’ve gotten this level of help from anyone other than the Jewish community because I don’t think any other faith group has felt under siege as much as them,” said Hashim.

“They’re so advanced in their state of security that it’s only natural that it was someone like Jeffrey,” he said.

“It’s his job now: To teach Muslims how to do security.”

**

Until last year, Atif Malik had never spoken to an Orthodox Jew. When Hashim persuaded him to meet Brown, Malik hesitated. He didn’t know how to speak to someone from the Jewish community. He didn’t know how he’d react if the interaction didn’t go well, if one of them got offended.

Hashim, a big brother figure to Malik, 32, connected the two because of how similar they are. Both are members of the legal profession with a desire to help their respective communities, and to learn. Malik could be the Muslim counterpart to Brown, said Hashim.

Malik’s hometown of Mississauga has one of the largest Muslim populations in Ontario. He calls in “an incubator” that has largely insulated him from racism.

After 9/11, the mosques he attended made a conscious effort to open themselves, to ensure they remained part of the community and not boxes of seclusion. Even if there was only one person inside, the doors to his mosques were always unlocked.

The Quebec mosque shooting shattered his incubator. Imams and mosque volunteers began talking about cameras and protocols.

All of this feels like “a conversation that should’ve happened a long time ago,” said Malik, who feels guilty that he didn’t prompt them earlier. “I question now why I didn’t make the effort to reach out and make connections with other communities, regardless of faith group,” he said. “Could we help them? Could they help us?”

He found empathy in Brown, who spoke about the same fears and complicated emotions. The Jewish community “has gone through a learning curve that we haven’t gone through,” Malik said. “Now, they’re handing us the information — here’s how you do it, if you have any questions come back to us, our doors aren’t closed. It’s mind-blowing.”

Now, they are working together on common security practices to be shared with all mosques, beginning with three in Mississauga and one in Brampton.

Neither will specify the practices being discussed or prevented, for fear of compromising their efficacy. Security is dealt with as quietly as possible, said Brown, apparent only to the person who wants to cause harm.

In this way, both men have become crisis coordinators for their communities, someone who, in the event something happened, would have police on speed dial and a response at the ready.

**

“Here in Canada, we have a complacency when it comes to houses of worship,” said Bernie Farber, executive director of the Mosaic Institute. “We just don’t believe something like [the Quebec mosque shooting] can happen here.”

Farber was one of the first to respond to the shooting, calling imams and volunteers like Hashim to offer his condolences and support. The former chief executive officer of the Canadian Jewish Congress oversaw security and safety for the Jewish community for 30 years, beginning in 1986.

In the 1980s and 1990s, having a security officer at large congregations of events was discomforting — an uncomfortable sign that the world had changed, and places of worship weren’t the sacrosanct sanctuaries that could be left unguarded.

Events like the Quebec mosque shooting change everything, said Farber. “The place no longer feels the way it should feel. Whether you ever regain that sense of safety, I don’t know.”

“People come to mosques to find peace, but that sanctuary was violated in the most horrific way,” said Hashim. “I think people saw that as a violation of one of our most basic provisions and rights, which is the right to practice freely and safely.”

Watching and facilitating the Muslim and Jewish community come together with police organisations to try and regain a sense of safety, however, has been a unique experience for Farber and Hashim. “I suppose between every bleak, dark avenue there is a pinpoint of light, said Farber. “This terrible tragedy brought together two communities that are united by hateful acts against them.”

Jeffrey Brown, left, who has served as the lead community security volunteer at his synangogue for 10 years, has been working with mosques and their members in Missisauga for the last six months. He's training a counterpart, Atif Malik, and leading an interfaith conversation about security and safety.
Jeffrey Brown, left, who has served as the lead community security volunteer at his synangogue for 10 years, has been working with mosques and their members in Missisauga for the last six months. He’s training a counterpart, Atif Malik, and leading an interfaith conversation about security and safety.  (RICHARD LAUTENS)  

Such acts can be deadly, as the Quebec mosque shooting, or just a series of less threatening acts: Putting bacon on a mosque’s door handle. Carving swastikas onto a synagogue. Graffiti of hateful messages.

Rabbi John Moscowitz, who also reached out to imams in the wake of the shooting, believes that social bonds constitute a different type of security. “When you can trust people of different faiths from you and stand together in the wake of something like the mosque attack, it deepens relationships,” he said. “And that deepens the bonds of trust, commonality and brotherhood.”

“Sometimes security feels less secure because you’re aware of why security is there” said Moscowitz. Community bonds, he added, are an “antidote to loss of faith” that heal.

At that first conversation in Mississauga, the unlikely group of one Jew, six Muslims and three police officers shook hands and promised that the conversation would continue.

“Both our faiths and our country demand a sense of respect and friendship amongst peoples,” said Hashim, “and I don’t think I witnessed that so clearly as I did that night.”

“This is about new communities getting established and getting comfortable,” said Brown. “We too were once strangers in a strange land.”

“When we had that meeting, we felt God’s presence.”

via Muslims and Jews find common ground in faith, hope — and security | Toronto Star

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

Douglas Todd: Five ways to protect free speech on campuses

2018/01/15 Leave a comment

Not a bad list:

Few issues more divide North American campuses than free expression. And conflict over it has further divided the right against the left.

More exceptionally, free speech is also pitting the left against the left.

How did North America get to this place, which has weakened progressive voices and allowed the right to make valid accusations that the left is excessively prone to censorship and coddling?

Many on the liberal-left join conservatives in being appalled by violent antifa (anti-fascist) protesters shutting down debates on free speech and conservative topics on North American campuses, including at Ryerson University and the University of Toronto.

The split in left-wing circles reflects a conflict between two ethical goods: The value of free expression is being pitted against the value of always expecting to be treated with dignity. Current debates over free speech shows they’re not as easily reconciled as we might like.

As faculty are discovering at Sir Wilfrid Laurier University, the University of B.C. and many campuses, it can sometimes be impossible to harmonize the right to say controversial things with everyone’s wish to be “respected,” which is proving to be a quality that is hard to define or measure.

At another level, the split among progressive people over free speech also reflects a deeper disagreement between social-justice advocates who stress identity politics (such as gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity) and those who emphasize the common good.

Here are five ways to protect free speech on campus, and everywhere:

University officials must face down the censors

Former B.C. Civil Liberties Association director Stan Persky, a long-time gay rights advocate, says there is no justification for activists using intimidation or violence to stop invited speakers from having a campus “platform.”

“Most of the controversial incidents about free speech on campus could be settled by the administration exercising its responsibility to prevent speakers from being silenced,” says Persky, echoing UBC law professor Emma Cunliffe’s criticism of UBC’s recent draft statement on free expression, which is being reworked.

Although Persky says it’s appropriate for faculty or students to call in the police to prevent invited speakers from being muzzled, the retired Capilano University philosophy professor emphasized free speech is not an absolute.

“Free speech, despite common misperceptions, does not mean that you can say anything you want. When speech turns into an act of direct threat … or is for false advertising, or to defame or libel people, we retain the right to limit and prevent it. In Canada we have even authorized explicit laws against ‘hate speech’. … But our bias is towards free speech.”

Question the concept of “safe space”

Some in higher education seem to want entire campuses to adopt the values of a psychotherapist’s office.

Efforts, for instance, to issue “trigger warnings” before raising certain subjects are leading to often-valid complaints that excessive coddling has created many campus “snowflakes,” which the Urban Dictionary defines as “extremist liberals that get offended by every statement and/or belief that doesn’t match their own.”

There’s nothing wrong with creating defined “safe spaces” — where women, ethnic minorities, males or people of the same sexual orientation, for instance — can share their vulnerable feelings. But the concept can’t be stretched to include an entire institution. It’s unrealistic. And it leads to unnecessary restrictions on free expression and on edgy ideas.

Recognize the value of a thicker skin

Everybody talks these days about the importance of building psychologically-resilient young people. But that goal is often contradicted by the over-protection of students and supposedly vulnerable others in the name of “diversity” and “inclusion.”

Exposure to difficult things is often what makes people grow psychologically. And a mutual commitment to responsible free expression can encourage that process.

UBC political scientist emeritus Phil Resnick, who tends to the liberal side of the spectrum, says it may not be wise, for instance, to protect students from examples of hate speech in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Nor would it be beneficial, says Resnick, to guard students with Asian origins from being offended by the harsh language used in texts about early 20th-century anti-Orientalism in B.C.

UBC philosophy professor Paul Russell says he’s guided on the limits of free speech by what he would allow in his classroom. He wouldn’t permit a student to call another a “faggot.” But he would accept a student honestly expressing her opposition to same-sex marriage. Students, he believes, should be expected to handle conflicting world views.

What do we make of more extreme clashes over free speech? The Islamic terrorists who killed 17 people at the satirical French magazine, Charlie Hebdo, believed no one had a right to make light of their religion’s founder, Muhammad.

But maybe the hard-line Muslims in Europe mostly needed thicker skins, as most Christians have learned to develop, to accept the admittedly unpleasant reality that their religion is open to ridicule in a Western democratic society.

Clarify what higher education is for

Should a university or college be like a church? Should faculty be spreading certain ideologies to the world, like missionaries?

Russell, who considers himself of the liberal-left, says some secular people get involved in social-justice causes as “a replacement religion.” But he has trouble with the idea that professors should be proselytizers.

Unlike faculty in any number of university humanities departments that focus heavily on social-justice issues, Russell said he doesn’t believe faculty or students in higher education should be expected to adhere to, or spread, any particular world view.

Free speech, and a willingness to criticize and be criticized, is mandatory in higher education and secular society. “Our role on campus is to provide a platform for discussion,” said Russell, “to be a place where debate about truth and values can occur.”

Face reality: Campus careers are being harmed

There is widespread fear on some campuses today, with many faculty and students frightened to air opinions that challenge certain claims by advocates of social justice or identity politics.

The tragic reality is that it can be a “great career move” to conform to politically correct orthodoxy on North American campuses, says Russell, who teaches at both UBC and the University of Gothenburg, where he is director of the Gothenburg Responsibility Project.

People who question certain approaches to diversity, and who defend conservative or controversial speech, can easily be bypassed for research grants, positive peer assessment, tenure and other promotions because of their unpopular views.

Precious few at Sir Wilfrid Laurier University, for instance, initially spoke up when media outlets rightly excoriated its officials for their harsh treatment of teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd, who had simply tried to start a classroom discussion about transgender pronouns.

While almost all other faculty remained silent, the lone Wilfrid Laurier professor who risked leaping in early to defend Shepherd, a sociologist of religion named David Millar Haskell, put the case for free speech plainly when he said: “If we’re going to claim in the arts and humanities that we are teaching our students to critically think, the only way that happens is through presenting opposing views.”

via Douglas Todd: Five ways to protect free speech on campuses | Vancouver Sun

Filed under Multiculturalism

← Older posts

Newer posts →