A Toxic Mix: Sex, Religion and Hypocrisy – The New York Times

2017/11/14 Leave a comment

Sylvie Kauffman of the Times on Tariq Ramadan in particular, and the Muslim world in general:

If you thought it was challenging for women to come forward and accuse Harvey Weinstein of rape, consider accusing the Islamic theologist Tariq Ramadan. Emboldened by the enormous response in France to the #MeToo wave that was born in Hollywood, two Frenchwomen decided last month to sue Mr. Ramadan for rape and sexual abuse. One of the women, Henda Ayari, has gone public. The second has described her ordeal to journalists but has remained anonymous. And for good reason: Henda Ayari has had to appeal for help after becoming the target of a vicious campaign of insults and slander on social networks, mostly from Muslim extremists. Mr. Ramadan, a grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, denies the accusations.

It is not only that the Swiss-born Mr. Ramadan, 55, who has taken a leave of absence from Oxford University, where he has taught contemporary Islamic studies (a chair financed by Qatar), is a prominent figure on the intellectual and religious Islamic scene in France. What makes his accusers particularly brave is that they, like him, are practicing Muslims. By the very fact of having spent time alone with him, they have, in the eyes of rigorist teachings of Islam, violated the rules of modesty that women are required to follow.

The sexual revolution that liberated Western women in the 20th century has yet to occur in most of the Muslim world. But we may be seeing a beginning, six years after the crushed hopes of the Arab revolutions. In North Africa, at least, and in the Arabic communities within France, the seeds of women’s rebellion are bearing fruit slowly. Tunisia, the one Arab country that did not turn its back on the Arab Spring, is breaking barriers.

“In Arabic, revolution means whirlwind,” the Tunisian film director Kaouther Ben Hania, a woman, recently told the French public radio channel France-Inter. “So it turns everything upside down, it changes everything, and overnight we find ourselves talking about everything, while under the dictatorship we did not talk. I would never have been able to do this movie before the revolution.”

Just released in France and in her country, Ms. Ben Hania’s movie “The Beauty and the Dogs” is a harrowing tale of a 20-year-old student raped by two policemen in Tunis after being caught walking on a beach with a boyfriend at night. The film concentrates on the night that follows, during which Mariam, the student, tries stubbornly to file a complaint, which would require getting a doctor to examine her and policemen to take her testimony. Gradually, as hours pass and she encounters more obstacles, her violated dignity leads to a political awakening. Threatened with arrest at dawn, she does not give in. In the end, Ms. Ben Hania explains, “it is the policemen who are afraid of her. Fear has changed sides.”

Ms. Ben Hania, 40, is one of several Arab women now raising their voices in North Africa and in France. The New Year’s Eve attacks by mostly Arab migrants on German women in Cologne in 2016 shed light on what the Algerian author and columnist Kamel Daoud described as “the sexual misery of the Arab world.” His scathing text, published in Le Monde and The New York Times, shocked a group of French academics, who accused him of indulging in “Orientalist clichés.” But when the video of a young woman sexually assaulted by a group of teenagers on a bus in Casablanca, Morocco, went viral this summer, those academics kept silent.

Neither did they utter a word when the Moroccan actress Loubna Abidar had to take refuge in France last year after receiving death threats for her role in “Much Loved,” a Franco-Moroccan film about prostitutes that was banned in Morocco.

As more women emerge, in France, Switzerland and Belgium, with allegations of sexual misconduct against Mr. Ramadan, a picture emerges of the domination exercised over women by a powerful Islamic theologian who had also impressed some left-wing French intellectuals and television hosts. It is a picture of a double life that those who had scrutinized him had long suspected. The French feminist writer Caroline Fourest, his archenemy, says she had been approached by some of his victims but was not able to persuade them to file complaints.

Bernard Godard, a former official of the Ministry of Interior, where he was for many years the main expert on Islam before retiring three years ago, even told the French magazine L’Obs last week that he had heard that Tariq Ramadan had “mistresses, that he consulted sites, that girls were brought to the hotel at the end of his lectures, that he invited some to undress, that some resisted and that he could become violent and aggressive.” But he admitted to being “stunned” by the latest allegations, of rapes. “I have never heard of rapes,” he said.

Double life is a familiar theme, as is sexual misery, in a very revealing book just published in France, “Sexe et Mensonges: La Vie Sexuelle au Maroc” (“Sex and Lies: Sex Life in Morocco”), by the Franco-Moroccan novelist Leïla Slimani. A celebrated author in France, Ms. Slimani, 36, took advantage of a book tour in Morocco to interview all sorts of women about sex, men, family, women, religion and dress codes.

The world they describe is a world of hypocrisy, where appearance and reality clash constantly, where sex is a source of shame but on everybody’s mind, where the cult of virginity — demanded only of women — leads veiled girls to favor sodomy and oral sex to keep their hymen intact or to pay for hymen reparation before getting married. They tell Ms. Slimani of a schizophrenic society, torn between submission and transgression, where the law prohibits sex outside marriage but where everybody does it — in hiding. They feel sorry for mothers who had to give up a school they loved to marry a man they did not choose. They are sick of the chaos that mass consumption of pornography on the internet adds to teenagers’ confused view of sexuality.

Women are on the front line of this indispensable revolution, because they are the first victims of Islamic obscurantists. Ironically, this world of religious dogmas about sexuality was once a very different world. Ten centuries ago, Arabic erotica written by religious dignitaries and sophisticated dictionaries of sex shocked the West. Six decades ago, women wore miniskirts in Kabul and in Tunis.

Today, they just want to decide freely who they are, what they wear, whom they love and when. Make no mistake. In the environment they live in, that is a highly political demand.

via A Toxic Mix: Sex, Religion and Hypocrisy – The New York Times

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Des minorités visibles invisibles [municipal elections]

2017/11/14 Leave a comment

Common to many municipalities in Quebec and elsewhere. Provincial and federal representation generally stronger:

Avec aussi peu d’élus se disant issus de minorités visibles et ethniques, la diversité ne se reflète pas à Montréal, encore moins au Québec. Pourquoi la métropole, si cosmopolite, peine-t-elle encore à attirer des immigrés ? Le Devoir a rencontré trois élus montréalais qui en ont long à dire sur le sujet.

On les appelle les minorités visibles, mais elles sont pourtant presque invisibles dans le lot d’élus au Québec. Le ministère des Affaires municipales et de l’Occupation du territoire ne tient même pas de données statistiques là-dessus, selon ce qu’a appris Le Devoir. À Montréal, sur 103 élus, il y en a désormais 21 qui représentent cette diversité — minorités visibles (6), minorités ethniques (14) et handicapés (1) —, soit 5 de plus qu’aux dernières élections.

On ne fracasse aucun record ici, croit Nathalie Pierre-Antoine, une élue montréalaise d’origine haïtienne. Elle croyait pourtant que la métropole, qui compte 34 % de minorités visibles, allait faire mieux. « On est quand même en 2017 », dit celle qui a été élue pour un second mandat dans l’arrondissement de Rivière-des-Prairies–Pointe-aux-Trembles pour l’Équipe Denis Coderre.

Ce n’est pourtant pas parce que les électeurs ne sont pas prêts, croit-elle. « La preuve, je suis élue », a-t-elle lancé en riant, citant les exemples de Cathy Wong, d’Abdelhaq Sari, de Marie-Josée Parent, qui se dit d’origine autochtone.

Oui, c’est possible

Immigré du Maroc à l’âge d’un an, Younes Boukala, élu conseiller d’arrondissement à Lachine pour Projet Montréal, s’est dit la même chose. Pour le Québécois de 22 ans, musulman et d’origine berbère marocaine, la seule façon de changer les choses était de plonger lui-même. « Les gens me disaient : “Tu as juste 22 ans et tu te présentes ?” Et moi, je leur disais : “Mais ça prend quoi pour se présenter ? Plein de diplômes et un certain âge ?” Il faut juste oser. »

Sur le Plateau Mont-Royal, les habitants du district De Lorimier ont également accueilli à bras ouverts Josefina Bianco, élue pour Projet Montréal comme conseillère d’arrondissement. « Ça ne fait même pas deux ans que je suis Canadienne et j’ai été élue », s’est réjouie la jeune mère italo-argentine, qui vit au Québec depuis sept ans.

Lors de son porte-à-porte, les habitants du quartier n’ont pas manqué de souligner son petit accent espagnol chantant et lui posaient des questions sur ses origines et ses motivations. « Mais j’ai toujours eu un accueil magnifique », dit-elle, consciente que les choses n’auraient peut-être pas été aussi simples dans un autre arrondissement. « La réponse était positive, que ce soit des femmes immigrantes, qui étaient très fières, ou des Québécois. 

Discrimination positive ?

Mais alors, pourquoi si peu de diversité ? D’emblée, il n’y a pas lieu de jeter la pierre aux partis, qui ont fait de grands efforts de recrutement, constate Mme Pierre-Antoine. N’empêche : sur 298 candidats qui se présentaient cette année, 43 (14 %) ont dit appartenir à une minorité visible, ce qui est loin des 34 % de minorités visibles recensées dans la métropole. Toutefois, en tenant compte de ceux qui se déclarent « minorité ethnique » (43 personnes également), ils ont été au total 86 candidats issus de la diversité à se présenter aux élections de dimanche dernier. Sur ce plan, avec 23 % de minorités visibles dans son équipe, Projet Montréal a fait un peu mieux qu’Équipe Denis Coderre, qui n’en avait que 19 %.

Faut-il obliger les partis à la discrimination positive ? « Il faudrait peut-être une formule pour qu’on soit mieux représentés dans les candidatures, mais le choix final appartient aux électeurs », soutient Mme Bianco. Elle préfère croire en l’émulation et en une « vraie » mobilisation citoyenne. Mme Pierre-Antoine est du même avis. « Il y a du pour et du contre concernant les quotas, et c’est vrai que c’est quand on oblige que les choses finissent par arriver plus concrètement. Mais personnellement, je crois qu’il est toujours mieux de sensibiliser avant. »

Intéresser les immigrants

Pour avoir plus de candidats et d’élus issus de la diversité, encore faudrait-il qu’ils aient un intérêt se présenter. « Comme nouvel arrivant, avant de s’impliquer dans la vie politique, on est “en mode” subsistance. On cherche à se loger, se nourrir, à travailler ; l’implication politique n’est pas une priorité », rappelle Mme Bianco, qui a une formation en travail social. « Il y a aussi des immigrants qui viennent de pays aux histoires politiques très difficiles. Pour croire à nouveau en la politique, ça peut leur prendre du temps », ajoute-t-elle, évoquant le passé dictatorial peu reluisant de son pays d’origine.

Avec sa monarchie, le Maroc n’a pas non plus une grande tradition démocratique, souligne Younes Boukala. « Là-bas, on ne se pose pas de questions. C’est le roi qui décide », dit-il. Il a parfois senti une désillusion de la politique de certains de ses concitoyens de Lachine. « Des [personnes issues de] minorités ethniques me disaient “tu vas être un vendu toi aussi” », raconte-t-il. Il leur répondait aussitôt : « Je veux juste vous dire une chose, ce serait quoi mon intérêt à aller en politique à 22 ans ? Mes parents ont beaucoup souffert pour que je puisse réussir et je veux donner cette même chance de réussite aux autres », se rappelle-t-il. « Neuf fois sur dix, leur approche changeait. »

Voter sans citoyenneté

Et si on l’enlevait l’exigence de citoyenneté pour encourager les gens à aller voter au municipal ? N’y aurait-il pas plus de nouveaux arrivants et de gens d’origines diverses en politique active ? La chose mérite qu’on se penche dessus, lance Josefina Bianco. « Il faudrait voir de façon précise avec quel statut on autoriserait le vote, mais c’est vrai que pour quelqu’un qui vit ici, qui paye ses taxes dans la ville, qui a des enfants à l’école et contribue à son quartier, pourquoi pas ? Ça enracinerait davantage les gens. » Younes Boukala abonde dans le même sens. Après tout, les statistiques montrent que plus un individu commence à voter à un jeune âge, plus les chances sont grandes qu’il revote et s’intéresse à la politique. « Et on aurait au moins une chance de diminuer le faible taux de participation au municipal. »

via Des minorités visibles invisibles | Le Devoir

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How to speak to far-right nationalists: Buruma

2017/11/13 Leave a comment

Buruma is always interesting to read and his general advice worth reflecting upon:

Something many right-wing populists have in common is a peculiar form of self-pity: the feeling of being victimized by the liberal media, academics, intellectuals, “experts” – in short, by the so-called elites. The liberal elites, the populists proclaim, rule the world and dominate ordinary patriotic people with an air of lofty disdain.

This is in many ways an old-fashioned view. Liberals, or leftists, do not dominate politics any more. And the influence that great left-of-centre newspapers, like The New York Times, once had has long been eclipsed by radio talk-show hosts, right-wing cable TV stations, tabloid newspapers (largely owned by Rupert Murdoch in the English-speaking world) and social media.

Influence, however, is not the same thing as prestige. The great newspapers, as with the great universities, still enjoy a higher status than the more popular press, and the same goes for higher learning. The Sun or Bild lack the esteem of the Financial Times or the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and evangelical colleges in rural parts of the United States cannot compete in terms of cachet with Harvard or Yale.

Social status arouses more envy and resentment in our populist age than money or fame do. U.S. President Donald Trump, for example, is a very wealthy man, who was more famous than any of his rivals for the U.S. presidency, including Hillary Clinton. And yet he seems to be in an almost permanent rage against people who have greater intellectual or social prestige than he does. The fact that he shares this resentment with millions of people who are much less privileged goes a long way toward explaining his political success.

Until recently, figures on the extreme right had no prestige at all. Driven to the margins of most societies by collective memories of Nazi and fascist horrors, such men (there were hardly any women) had the grubby air of middle-aged patrons of backstreet porno cinemas. Stephen Bannon, still a highly influential figure in Mr. Trump’s world, seems a bit like that – a crank in a dirty raincoat.

But much has changed. Younger members of the far right, especially in Europe, are often sharply dressed in tailor-made suits, recalling the fascist dandies of pre-war France and Italy. They don’t shout at large mobs, but are slick performers in radio and TV studios, and are savvy users of social media. Some of them even have a sense of humour.

These new-model rightists are almost what Germans call salonfaehig, respectable enough to move in high circles. Overt racism is muted; their bigotry is disguised under a lot of smart patter. They crave prestige.

I had occasion to encounter a typical ideologue of this type recently at an academic conference organized by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College in the United States. The conference was about populism, and the ideologue was Marc Jongen, a politician from the far-right Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD) party with a doctorate in philosophy. The son of a Dutch father and an Italian mother, born in Italy’s German-speaking South Tyrol, Mr. Jongen spoke near-perfect English.

Self-pity lay close to the surface. Mr. Jongen described Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to give shelter in Germany to large numbers of refugees from Middle Eastern wars as “an act of violence” toward the German people. He called immigrants and refugees criminals and rapists (even though crime rates among refugees in Germany are far lower than among “natives”). Islam was robbing the German Volk of its true identity. Men like Mr. Jongen were always being called Nazis. And so on.

I had been asked to furnish some counterarguments. I did not call Mr. Jongen a Nazi. But I did my best to point out why I thought his claims were both wrong and dangerous. We shook hands at the end. And that, as far as I was concerned, was that.

Then a minor academic storm broke out. More than 50 distinguished U.S. academics signed a letter protesting the Hannah Arendt Center’s decision to invite Mr. Jongen to speak. The point was not that he didn’t have the right to express his opinions, but that Bard College should not have lent its prestige to make the speaker look respectable. Inviting him to speak made his views seem legitimate.

This strikes me as wrong-headed for several reasons. First, if one is going to organize a conference on right-wing populism, it is surely useful to hear what a right-wing populist actually has to say. Listening to professors denouncing ideas without actually hearing what they are would not be instructive.

Nor is it obvious that a spokesman for a major opposition party in a democratic state should be considered out of bounds as a speaker on a college campus. Left-wing revolutionaries were once a staple of campus life, and efforts to ban them would rightly have been resisted.

The protest against inviting Mr. Jongen was not only intellectually incoherent; it was also tactically stupid, because it confirms the beliefs of the far right that liberals are the enemies of free speech and that right-wing populists are victims of liberal intolerance. I like to think that Mr. Jongen left the Bard conference politely discredited. Because of the protest, he was able to snatch victory from defeat.

via How to speak to far-right nationalists – The Globe and Mail

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Racism’s Chronic Stress Likely Contributes To Health Disparities, Scientists Say : NPR

2017/11/13 Leave a comment

Interesting series of studies and analyses:

A poll recently released by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that roughly a third of Latinos in America report they’ve experienced various kinds of discrimination in their lives based on ethnicity — including when applying for jobs, being paid or promoted equally, seeking housing or experiencing ethnic slurs or offensive comments or assumptions.

Amani Nuru-Jeter, a social epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, is another researcher working to find out how, as she puts it, racism gets under the skin. “How does the lived and social experience of race turn into racial differences in health — into higher levels of Type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease or higher rates of infant mortality?”

For example, black children are about twice as likely as white children to develop asthma, health statistics suggest. And racial and ethnic gaps in infant mortality have persisted for as long as researchers have been collecting data. People with diabetes who are members of racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to have complications like kidney failure, or to require amputations.

Genetics might partially explain some of the differences, Nuru-Jeter says. Research has suggested that different populations may respond differently to some asthma drugs, for example.

“But it’s not an adequate explanation for the very persistent dramatic differences we see in health outcomes between racial groups,” she says. And public health researchers have found that health disparities remain even after they take into account any differences in income and education.

Nuru-Jeter and others hypothesize that chronic stress might be a key way racism contributes to health disparities. The idea is that the stress of experiencing discrimination over and over might wear you down physically over time.

For example, let’s go back to how Montenegro remembers feeling that night when strangers assumed he was a valet. He said he was “turning red,” his heart was “pounding.” Those are signs his body was feeling acutely stressed.

“When you start to worry about something, whether that’s race or something else, then that initiates a biological stress response,” says Nuru-Jeter.

Hormones like adrenaline and cortisol shoot up, readying your body to flee or fight. Those hormones can help you kick into action to escape a wild animal, for example, or to run after a bus. Under such circumstances, the ability to experience stress and quickly respond can be benign — and valuable.

Whatever the source of the perceived threat, the physical response — higher levels of stress hormones, a faster heart rate — usually subside once the threat has passed.

“That’s what we expect to happen,” says Nuru-Jeter.

But research suggests bad things happen when your body has to gear up for threats too often, consistently washing itself in stress hormones.

“Prolonged elevation [and] circulation of the stress hormones in our bodies can be very toxic and compromise our body’s ability to regulate key biological systems like our cardiovascular system, our inflammatory system, our neuroendocrine system,” Nuru-Jeter says. “It just gets us really out of whack and leaves us susceptible to a bunch of poor health outcomes.”

A number of small studies have documented similar stress reactions in response to racism, and even in response to the mere expectation of a racist encounter.

In studying black women, for example, she has found that chronic stress from frequent racist encounters is associated with chronic low-grade inflammation — a little like having a low fever all the time. Nuru-Jeter thinks it might be a sign that experiencing discrimination might dysregulate the body in a way that, over time, could put someone at a higher risk for a condition like heart disease.

Now, this kind of research is complicated. There’s no thermometer that measures degrees of racism, and it’s not like scientists can take a group of people, expose some of them to discrimination, and then see how they fare compared with others.

“Unless we could experimentally assign people to racist or nonracist experiences over a life course, we can’t make causal connections,” says Zaneta Thayer, a biological anthropologist at Dartmouth, who is currently looking into how discrimination experiences might influence multiple aspects of stress physiology, including cortisol and heart rate variability.

So, researchers find correlations, not causal links.

For example, Thayer studied 55 pregnant women in Auckland, New Zealand, and found that women who said they experienced discrimination had higher evening stress hormone levels late in pregnancy than other women who didn’t cite frequent discrimination. Another study, at Duke University, found that black students had higher levels of stress hormones after they heard reports of a violent, racist crime on campus.

The connection isn’t just with hormones. Other scientists have found correlations between discrimination and various measures of accelerated aging, including the tips of people’s chromosomes and subtle alterations in gene activity.

Individually, such studies are rarely conclusive, Thayer says. “There are always more questions to ask.”

But collectively, she says, they form a compelling picture of how discrimination, stress and poor health might be related.

And sometimes, in rare situations, researchers do get a slightly sharper glimpse of how such a connection may be playing out.

On May 12, 2008, about 900 agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — including some who arrived in a couple of Black Hawk helicopters — raided a meat processing plant in Postville, Iowa. They were looking for people who were working illegally in the U.S.

“You could time exactly when it happened,” says Arline T. Geronimus, a behavioral scientist at the University of Michigan who has studied the event. “It was a surprise, and it was quite extreme.”

According to some witnesses, the agents handcuffed almost everyone they encountered who looked Latino. They ended up arresting more than a tenth of the town’s population, detaining many for days at a fairground.

According to Zoe Lofgren, a California representative who chaired a congressional hearing on the Postville raid, detainees were treated “like cattle.”

“The information suggests that the people charged were rounded up, herded into a cattle arena, prodded down a cattle chute, coerced into guilty pleas and then [sent] to federal prison,” Lofgren said at the hearing. “This looks and feels like a cattle auction, not a criminal prosecution in the United States of America.”

 The people arrested were charged with criminal fraud for knowingly working under false Social Security numbers, despite allegations of judicial misconduct and reportsthat few of the employees were actually guilty of that crime.

“People lost their jobs,” Geronimus says. “People were afraid to go home in case there would be raids in their homes. They were sleeping in church pews. Some fled the state.”

By all accounts, it was an extremely stressful event for the approximately 400 people who were arrested and their families.

But the event also sent ripples throughout the state. Apparently, as Geronimus and her colleagues reported this year in the International Journal of Epidemiology, it may even have affected the unborn children of some Iowa residents who were pregnant at the time.

In the months after the raid, Geronimus says, some Latina women living in Iowa started giving birth to slightly smaller babies.

The researchers looked at birth certificates of more than 52,000 babies born in Iowa, including those born in the nine months following the raid, and in the same nine-month period one and two years earlier. They found a small but noticeable increase in the percentage of babies who weighed less than 5 1/2 pounds — the definition of what pediatricians term low birth weight — born to Latina moms.

“Pregnant women of Latino descent throughout the state of Iowa — including those who were U.S. citizens, including those who were not right at Postville — experienced, on average, about a 24 percent greater risk of their babies having a low birth weight than they had in that very same period of time the previous year,” Geronimus says.

Before the raid, 4.7 percent of babies born to white moms were low birth weight. After the raid, that number dropped to 4.4 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of babies with a low birth weight born to foreign-born Latina moms went up from 4.5 percent (76 babies) to 5.6 percent (98 babies). And it went up for the babies of U.S.-born Latina moms, too — from 5.3 percent (42 babies) to 6.4 percent (55 babies).

Overall, that’s a difference of just a few dozen children, each probably born just a few ounces underweight. But at that stage of life, a few ounces can make a difference, Geronimus says. Babies born small are at higher risk of dying in infancy and of having health and developmental problems later on.

“Low birth weight in general is not higher in the Latino population than in the white population,” Geronimus says. “And in Iowa it was not higher before the raid, and it was not higher years after the raid. But there is a spike that happens to be exactly when the raid was.”

And it’s worth noting, she says, that the effect even occurred among babies born to Latina moms who were U.S. citizens — people who shouldn’t have been worried about being arrested or deported.

“So why did it suddenly spike?” Geronimus asks. “Well, there’s a lot of research that suggests that stressful events during pregnancy can result in some complex immune, inflammatory and endocrine pathways and can increase the risk of low birth weight.”

She and her colleagues think the poor treatment of people who “looked Latino” to the immigration agents might have caused additional stress among women outside the immediate area of the raid who were pregnant around that time.

“People could begin to worry this could happen to them or to people they know or in their communities,” she says. “And those worries alone can activate these physiological stress responses, even if they never did have a raid in their own hometown.”

In fact, other researchers have noticed similar connections.

In the six months following the Sept. 11 attacks in the Eastern U.S., babies born in California to moms with Arabic-sounding names had a higher risk of being born small or preterm than observed in that group during the same time period the year before — a change that didn’t apply to other babies born in the state.

Both studies investigated the impacts of specific, dramatic events — and the results were consistent.

“You could time exactly when it happened,” says Geronimus. “We could measure before and after.”

But she views such events as merely slivers of insight into patterns that may quietly be happening on a much larger scale among many populations. Patterns that are harder to tease out and measure — like the effects of centuries of racism against black Americans, or a persistent series of incidents involving police brutality against minorities.

Maybe, Geronimus says, the cascade of stress that such events initiate sets the stage for health disparities in a generation of children — before they even enter the world.

via Racism’s Chronic Stress Likely Contributes To Health Disparities, Scientists Say : Shots – Health News : NPR

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Chinese-Canadian veterans fought in secret WWII unit and helped changed laws

2017/11/13 Leave a comment

Interesting part of our history and how their military contribution forced Canada to reconsider its restrictive laws (e.g., voting):

It wasn’t until two years after the war, in 1947, that Canada allowed Chinese-Canadians to vote and repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which had banned almost all immigration from China since 1923. Chinese immigrants had also been singled out to pay a head tax.

“I think it was after we got our citizenship and our right to vote that they realized we did our duty,” Lee says of the general population in Vancouver, where the return of Caucasian soldiers was widely celebrated while minorities who’d also risked their lives in war were mostly ignored.

Henry Yu, a professor in the history department at the University of British Columbia, says the federal government did not want Chinese-Canadians fighting in the war because of fears they’d demand the vote.

“They’d seen it already because several hundred Chinese and Japanese had fought for Canada in World War I and when those veterans returned they asked for the vote. So they knew from experience in World War I that this was going to be a problem,” Yu says. “They wanted to maintain white supremacy.”

Chinese-Canadians were recruited into Force 136 with the belief they’d blend in behind enemy lines, he says.

Catherine Clement, curator of the Chinese Canadian Military Museum in Vancouver’s Chinatown, says the little-known story of Force 136 has been mostly forgotten and there are few records of the clandestine group of spies that was part of Britain’s Special Executive Operations.

“They created this double victory,” she says of Lee and the Chinese-Canadian veterans. “They helped the Allies win the war and they also helped to win the rights for all Chinese living in Canada.”

via Chinese-Canadian veterans fought in secret WWII unit and helped changed laws | National Post

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Naheed Nenshi’s real work: Calling out Calgary’s racism

2017/11/11 Leave a comment

Gary Mason on Calgary politics and Naheed Nenshi:

After the most bruising election of his political career, Naheed Nenshi is still a little tender in spots.

Although he won handily, his margin of victory wasn’t as awe-inspiring as in the past. Some of that erosion was to be expected: Any mayor who’s been in office for seven years is bound to rub some constituents the wrong way. But this campaign was also more divisive and personal than any other the Calgary mayor has experienced.

He doesn’t hide the fact that comments made about him, particularly online, were incredibly hurtful.

“Certainly, there was a lot of coded language about me which I found uncomfortable,” he told me while scarfing down Chinese food at his office desk. “When I raised the fact that the level of out-and-out racism and hatred and Islamophobia online was getting out of control, rather than condemning it the local media accused me of playing the race card.”

This he found deeply offensive.

“Saying you’re playing the race card actually means we will tolerate you in our society as long as you never remind us who you are,” he said, a tinge of anger in his voice. “I was surprised that in this day and age you could actually say to someone who calls out racism that it is inappropriate to do so.”

He found racism embedded in coded language. For instance, he would hear people say he’d become “too big for his britches” or that he’d “gotten uppity” – things, he said, people would never say about former prime minister Stephen Harper or the late Jim Prentice. This inherent racism was magnified online through bots and trolls, creating a level of ugliness the mayor had not known before.

Mr. Nenshi believes that racism is a bigger problem in his city than it was seven years ago, when he was first elected. Back then, he did not get the impression voters cared about his ethnicity or faith or the colour of his skin. But statistics show that acts of hatred and Islamophobia are on the rise across the country – and Calgary is no exception, he says.

“Certainly it’s an issue here, but you also see it in Vancouver when conversations about real estate too quickly become conversations about ‘the other,’ ” he said. “You’re seeing it in Quebec with Bill 62, saying it’s better to isolate people in their homes and not let them take a bus than it is to actually welcome these folks into our society.”

This isn’t the first time Mr. Nenshi has spoken out on the matter of race. He made headlines a couple of years ago when he told me he’d been personally “shaken” by the racist nature of the debate over accepting Syrian refugees. But generally he has steered clear of the subject, especially as it has pertained to racist rhetoric aimed at Muslims, like him.

That reluctance, however, is disappearing. The mayor now feels a need to sound an alarm about a phenomenon we are witnessing around the world – and certainly in this country. As Canadians, he told me, we need to think hard about our “polite language around multiculturalism” and whether it’s sufficient to protect the promise of a place where everyone can succeed.

“That is the big focus of our work,” he told me, brushing rice off his shirt. “And that is the core strength of Calgary – certainly more so than our proximity to carbon atoms in the ground.”

Mr. Nenshi now has four more years to champion this cause, and I hope he does. Few speak with as much passion and authority on the subject or can speak from his personal experience. Social media has given those who yearn for a society that existed in the past – who have no room in their hearts for people who may not look like them or speak like them – an unfiltered megaphone.

Still, the mayor has reason to be heartened. Voter turnout in Calgary’s civic election was the highest in 40 years. Citizens were convinced that something significant was at stake – something worth fighting for.

Maybe the kind of city they want to live in.

via Naheed Nenshi’s real work: Calling out Calgary’s racism – The Globe and Mail

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In Brexit-Era London, a Mosque Sits Between Two Types of Hate – The New York Times

2017/11/11 Leave a comment

Good long read (excerpt from beginning):

Behind a glass door inside Al Madina Mosque, Ashfaq Siddique stands at ramrod attention, his eyes darting. He is the mosque’s guiding spirit. He is also a former policeman with Scotland Yard. He is scanning live feeds from 36 closed-circuit cameras that monitor everything from the prayer hall to the ablutions room. He is searching for trouble.

None in the parking lot, where white nativists routinely throw nails over the walls to puncture the car tires of those praying inside. Nor in the main hall, where Islamist extremists have sometimes argued against democracy with mainstream imams.

This morning, the problem is overcrowding. So many Muslims now live in the working-class East London neighborhood of Barking that roughly 9,000 people attended the morning prayer sessions in early September to begin the holiday of Eid al-Adha.

“Upstairs is filling up — start moving them to the upper hall of the community center!” Mr. Siddique, 50, shouts into a yellow walkie-talkie.

Few, if any, major Western cities have been more open to Muslims than London. More than 12 percent of Londoners are Muslim. Eighteen months ago, this became the first Western capital to elect a Muslim mayor, a milestone for residents proud of their multicultural ethos.

Barking and Dagenham was one of the few districts of London to favor Brexit, and it did so by a vote of nearly two to one. Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Now, though, religious hate crimes are up nearly 30 percent, primarily against Muslims. At his mosque, Mr. Siddique is hiring extra security guards to protect his congregants. Muslim women have complained about being spit on, or cursed.

What has brought these tensions to the surface? Brexit and terrorism.

Britain’s unexpected vote in June 2016 to exit the European Union — only a month after London elected Sadiq Khan as mayor — was fueled by a nationwide campaign infused with anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant venom. Then, after a decade without Islamist terrorist attacks, this year Britain has suffered four, including an assault by Islamist terrorists in June that killed eight people at London Bridge and Borough Market.

Even as crowds of Londoners came out to mourn — and to show their commitment to the city’s inclusive spirit — the dynamics of daily life shifted for many mainstream Muslims. Brexit and the terrorist attacks have given bigots license to express hostility, many Muslims say, or to label them all as terrorists, or to tell them to go home — as if London were not their home.

“People feel they have the right to be open about Islamophobia,” said Saima Ashraf, a local council member in Barking and a French-Palestinian immigrant. “Or to be open about their racial views, or just to be a bit more nasty.”

The Brexit vote stunned many Londoners — the city voted heavily to remain in the European Union — but not Mr. Siddique. His borough of Barking and Dagenham was one of the few in London that voted to leave, and it did so by a margin of nearly two to one. Many whites there saw a vote for Brexit as a vote against immigration and Islam.

For years, Al Madina Mosque has sat uncomfortably on a fault line between the Islamist radicalism of the terrorist attacks and the white nativism intertwined with Brexit….

via In Brexit-Era London, a Mosque Sits Between Two Types of Hate – The New York Times

Filed under Multiculturalism

Quebec’s Bill 62 splits federal Liberals amid calls to ignore court challenge

2017/11/11 Leave a comment

Not surprising:

Quebec’s face-covering law is exposing divisions among federal Liberals, with staunch defenders of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on one side and a large number of Quebec MPs who fear becoming political casualties of the contentious debate on the other.

Several Liberal MPs are calling on the government to stay out of the coming court challenge to the law, including some of the most vocal opponents of Bill 62 in caucus.

The Trudeau government has responded with a carefully calibrated response: stating that women have the right to dress as they want, while refusing to be drawn into an open confrontation with the provincial government.

The Liberal government’s decision to stay on the sidelines has created anger among opponents of the legislation who feel it is a full-on assault of Charter rights targeted at Muslim women. Passed last month, the provincial law requires people to show their face when giving or receiving services in places such as libraries, university classrooms, daycares and buses.

Federal officials said the government has yet to decide whether it will participate in the coming court challenge, which was launched this week by the National Council of Canadian Muslims and Canadian Civil Liberties Association. If Ottawa participates in the judicial showdown, federal lawyers will have to publicly state their views on the Charter issues raised by the law, which could contribute to its defeat.

Liberal Party officials said that Quebec MPs and ministers have been urging their colleagues from other parts of the country to cool their rhetoric on the issue in recent weeks.

“The Quebec caucus was very clear … in telling our colleagues, our ministers, that this is a file that belongs to the Quebec government,” said Liberal MP Rémi Massé, who is the chair of the party’s Quebec caucus. “This is [the Quebec government’s] responsibility and we are giving them the necessary leeway to do what they feel they have to do. With the court challenges that are starting, it’s up to them to react accordingly.”

Liberal MP Alexandra Mendès has been one of the most vocal critics of the law, but she said Ottawa should continue to stay out of the matter at least until it reaches the Supreme Court of Canada.

“I think right now, the government should just let it play out in Quebec and see how the courts in Quebec look at this,” said Ms. Mendès, who represents a riding on Montreal’s south shore. “The fact that I have a very strong opinion doesn’t mean that the government should necessarily intervene right away.”

Another opponent of Bill 62, Liberal MP Raj Grewal, said the law goes against his vision of the country, but added the government needs to respect “the National Assembly’s ability to pass their own laws.”

“I’m fundamentally happy that it is going to be challenged because in my humble opinion, it goes against everything that Canada stands for,” said Mr. Grewal, the MP for Brampton East.

Liberal MP Nicola Di Iorio, a lawyer who represents a Montreal riding, said Ottawa cannot take the lead when it comes time to challenging the constitutionality of provincial laws.

“The federal government’s role is not to act as law enforcement for the legislatures,” he said. “There are organized groups that are sufficiently resourced to be able to raise these issues, and the federal government should not be at the forefront of such a topic.”

While the law has exposed political fault lines across the country, it has garnered support in all regions of Canada. According to a Nanos survey conducted for The Globe and Mail, 63 per cent of Canadians support or somewhat support Bill 62.

Support for the law is highest in Quebec (69.4 per cent), the Prairies (63.5 per cent) and the Atlantic provinces (62 per cent), but Ontario (59.4 per cent) and British Columbia (58.4 per cent) are not far off behind. The poll of 1,000 Canadians was conducted between Nov. 4 and 7 and is considered accurate within 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20

Pollster Nik Nanos said the results show how “this is a no-win situation” for the Liberals. “The message to the government is that this is a political minefield,” he said.

To this point, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has walked a fine line on the law, always stopping short of vowing to fight it in court.

“As I’ve said several times, I don’t think a government should be telling a woman what to wear or not wear,” he has said. “We are looking very carefully at what tools we have and what steps we have to make sure we make this situation better for everyone.”

Liberal MPs from Quebec said they don’t want the debate to turn into a federal-provincial battle, or a symbol of Ottawa’s interference in Quebec’s affairs. One of the worst scenarios would be for Quebec to use the notwithstanding clause to keep the law on the books even if it is defeated in court, a Liberal MP from Quebec said.

The groups who filed a court challenge in Quebec Superior Court on Tuesday said the law is unconstitutional and discriminates against Muslim women.

“I live in fear,” co-plaintiff Warda Naili said at a news conference in Montreal. “I don’t know what will happen when I go out. I don’t know how people will react because of this law.”

via Quebec’s Bill 62 splits federal Liberals amid calls to ignore court challenge – The Globe and Mail

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EU watchdog: Anti-Semitism goes unchecked in large parts of Europe | The NEWS

2017/11/11 Leave a comment

Canadian police reported hate crimes also take time to be compiled and reported on, the latest statistics reflect 2015 numbers (Police-reported hate crime in Canada, 2015 – Statistics Canada):

The EU is not keeping proper track of anti-Semitic crimes and incidents, the bloc’s human rights agency has said on the anniversary of the 1938 Nazi pogroms against Jews.

Of the 28 EU countries, 11 have not provided official information on such incidents for 2016 or have not recorded anti-Semitism at all, the EU Fundamental Rights Agency said in Vienna on Thursday.

“Without such data, efforts to combat anti-Semitism will remain general and untargeted,” the agency said in a statement.

Different data collection methods among EU countries and “large-scale underreporting by victims” also obscured the picture.

Some of the countries that do report hate crimes against Jews need to improve their monitoring, the agency added.

The Fundamental Rights Agency carried out a large-scale survey among nearly 6,000 Jews in the EU in 2012, which showed that more than 26 per cent had been verbally harassed because of their religion in the past year.

Four per cent had experienced physical violence or threats.The survey will be repeated next year.

The EU agency reported that there is no police data at all from Hungary, Lithuania, Malta and Portugal.

The following countries have not provided data for 2016: Finland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Slovakia and Sweden.

via EU watchdog: Anti-Semitism goes unchecked in large parts of Europe | The NEWS

Filed under Multiculturalism

To our inner Hadiya resisting workplace conformity, carry on. Just don’t keep calm: Paradkar | Toronto Star

2017/11/11 Leave a comment

Good column by Paradkar:

It’s fair to say that when “Black on Bay Street,” the piece by lawyer-turned-academic Hadiya Roderique in the Globe and Mail, went viral, it lit flames of #IAmHadiya in many of us, and not just those belonging to Bay St., not just lawyers and not just Black, even though the Black experience of racism is uniquely painful.

Roderique’s piece should once and for all silence the proponents of the politics of respectability — the idea that you won’t be discriminated against if only you pull up your socks, do the right thing — as in, do everything you can to fit in with “mainstream” culture.

Mainstream in this country is, of course, Anglo-Euro settler culture. The truth is no matter what marginalized individuals do to change, to fit in, to be just like everyone else in the workplace, most have to be brilliant to be considered good enough.

So how far should you go to try to fit in?

Roderique referenced diversity consultant Ritu Bhasin, who says in her book The Authenticity Principle, “there’s only so much conforming and masking we can do. It eats away at your spirit.”

Quite by chance I was reading the book when Roderique’s article appeared. I’m usually leery of self-help gurus whom I tend to see as dishing out quotable words of wisdom whose sole role is to land on eminently re-giftable Hallmark mugs.

But at one point in the book, whose subtitle declares it’s about resisting conformity and embracing differences, Bhasin, herself once a Bay St. lawyer, writes she realized how even being authentic can be a performance. I found that revelation honest. “I would try to signal ‘Look how real I am,’ ” she writes. “For example, I chose to wear bright colours in the business world to signal ‘I’m so anti-conformist.’ ”

Reading both these women revealed to me — a rank outsider to Bay St. types — what an anally retentive bunch the people who make big decisions must be if wearing bright colours is considered rebellious in their world. “I filled my arms with two colours,” Roderique wrote about suits she bought, “black to blend and the more daring light grey.”

Beyond clothing, though, conformity can be extracted in multiple ways. Do you shine at meetings? Do you laugh at the boss’s jokes? Do you toe the line with group think?

In order to not fall afoul of those narrow constraints, to a certain extent everybody adopts behaviours and habits that don’t come naturally — white men might, for instance, force an interest in golf.

But the more marginalized you are the more you have to contort your personality to fit those expectations. Women might tone down talk of motherhood, feign an interest in hockey, pretend to be extroverted, laugh at stupid jokes and even allow men to take credit for their ideas just to see those ideas in action.

Add colour to your skin or a scarf on your head or fluidity to your gender and workplace constraints begin to suffocate. At that point, you’re not just masking your likes and dislikes, or adjusting aspects of your personality.

What’s at stake are your values, your fundamental identity.

Bhasin says, as a child of immigrants, she learned at a young age to not act brown, but to act white. “By the time I ended up in the workplaces I had already learned how to switch codes and navigate through white male culture. The more I conformed, the more I was rewarded, and I succeeded … that continued to the point where I was living a binary life. So I was one way at work and evenings and weekends, living in a very different way. And ultimately I was profoundly unhappy.”

She talked to hundreds of women and found that, “my story is the story of people who come from marginalized communities. We’re taught to conform and that cannot be the way we live any longer.”

Embrace yourself, be yourself are great mantras. Yet, as Bhasin writes, even authenticity is a privilege.

“I have found that those with higher status, power and success are often better positioned to practice authenticity more consistently than others.”

There’s your chicken and egg — being true to who you are might liberate you to attain some social power, but until you’re powerful, you may not have the confidence — or the leeway — to be authentic.

So please, if you have the privilege to do so, carry on. Work out your own formula, make your choices, resist if you can.

Carry on, because you are unfairly burdened with the task of challenging the system. Carry on until leaders stop looking at “others” with a condescending gaze. Carry on until they exhibit openness to hiring practices people like Roderique are advocating, or change the framework of what they consider “successful.”

Carry on until sweeping systemic changes give everyone a fair chance. Just don’t keep calm, because that is one thing they’re definitely counting on.

via To our inner Hadiya resisting workplace conformity, carry on. Just don’t keep calm: Paradkar | Toronto Star

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