Research Shows Spanish Speakers Take Longer To Learn English. Why? : NPR

2017/09/18 Leave a comment

Likely a mix of all three explanations:

A recent study out of Philadelphia tracked kindergartners who were learning English and found that four years later there were major discrepancies between which groups of students had mastered the language.

Students whose home language was Spanish were considerably less likely to reach proficiency than any other subgroup. And, on the extreme end, Spanish speakers were almost half as likely as Chinese speakers to cross the proficiency threshold.

The study, conducted by the Philadelphia Education Research Consortium, just looked at English learners who entered the district as kindergartners in 2008 and their progress through the end of third grade.

But this phenomenon isn’t specific to Philadelphia. “I have never seen any study that has looked at this question and not found this trend,” says Ilana Umansky, who studies English acquisition at the University of Oregon.

Earlier this year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a 415-page report on English learners. The report cited 12 studies — dating back to 2004 — that found this gap between Spanish-speaking English learners and other groups.

But to date, no research has been able to determine why.

So, we emailed or spoke with about two dozen researchers, teachers, and students to hear how they would explain this trend. Predictably, there’s no consensus, but here are three basic theories.

Spanish saturation

There are nearly 150,000 Spanish speakers in Philadelphia, according to the American Community Survey. The numbers are even greater in New York City, where Jose Garcia arrived in 2012, at 11 years old, after emigrating from the Dominican Republic.

Garcia moved to the heavily Hispanic Washington Heights neighborhood in upper Manhattan. At home, he spoke Spanish. In school, classmates spoke Spanish. When he watched television, he often tuned into Spanish-language news.

“So it wasn’t like a big challenge for me,” Garcia says.

Eventually, Garcia moved to Philadelphia and weaned himself off Spanish media by watching American movies like The Fast and the Furious. But he considers his early months in New York wasted time, compounded by the fact that many of his friends didn’t seem all that interested in learning English.

“They didn’t wanna learn it as fast because they didn’t need to use it,” he says. “They were speaking Spanish already. So they had a way to communicate with each other.”

But Nelson Flores, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, grew up in an area of Philadelphia with a lot of Spanish speakers, too, and he says that’s not always the case. In fact, he doesn’t think the Spanish-language achievement gap has much to do with language at all.

Family income and segregation

Flores contests the notion that Spanish speakers aren’t learning English — at least in the way we typically understand language acquisition.

“We’re not talking about the ability to communicate in English,” Flores says. “We’re talking about the ability to do grade-level content in English.”

Flores believes a lot of the students who score below proficient in English can speak and comprehend the language with ease. Many of them, he says, can speak English better than Spanish.

So why aren’t they testing well? Flores believes it’s because Latino students are disproportionately living in isolated, high-poverty neighborhoods and learning in isolated, high-poverty schools.

High-poverty schools, Flores points out, tend to receive fewer resources and less-experienced teachers. Plus, these schools have to deal with the compound effect of having so many students who experience trauma, transience and other disadvantages.

It could be true that Spanish-speaking English learners in Philadelphia are generally poorer than, say, Vietnamese-speaking students, but it’s unlikely family income totally accounts for the achievement gap.

It’s no surprise that researchers studying this trend in the past have used income-based controls — such as whether a child qualifies for free or reduced lunch. Those researchers have still found Spanish speakers lagging.

Family background

If you look only at family income, you might assume many immigrant groups come from relatively similar socioeconomic backgrounds.

“Immigrants often look low-income because they’re in transition,” says Patricia Gandara, a UCLA professor who has studied this trend in California. “They may have been physicians in their home country, but now they’re having to work as a cook.”

Many of the proxies we use to measure poverty or disadvantage trace back to how much money a family makes. But in the case of immigrant groups, that may mask some crucial differences.

A 2009 analysis led by Hunter College professor Donald Hernandez found, for instance, large discrepancies in the relative education levels of many immigrant groups. Adult immigrants from East Asia and the Middle East were among the most likely to have a high school or college degree. Adult immigrants from Mexico and Central America were among the least likely to have made it to high school.

Researchers Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou came to similar conclusions when they compared Mexican and Chinese immigrants. They found that, relative to their parents, the children of Mexican immigrants progressed further educationally from one generation to the next. But the children of Chinese immigrants progressed further overall, in large part because their parents started many steps ahead.

The logic here is pretty simple: Parents who attended college are better able to help their children with homework or connect them to resources.

Tip of the iceberg

These were just three theories we heard when we asked about the language acquisition gap, not all of them.

For instance, many people pointed to societal biases against Hispanic students, arguing that teachers and administrators have lower expectations of them than Asian students because of deeply ingrained stereotypes.

Right now, it’s hard to isolate the cause of this gulf between Philadelphia’s Spanish-language English learners and everyone else. It’s possible — maybe likely — that all of these theories have some shade of truth to them.

Source: Research Shows Spanish Speakers Take Longer To Learn English. Why? : NPR Ed : NPR

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Conrad Black’s rubbish column on racism a fine example of white privilege: Paradkar

2017/09/16 Leave a comment

Appropriate takedown of Black’s earlier column (Conrad Black: Racism is dying, yet hateful people are still frequently accusing non-racists of it):

Many who never experience racism view it as a now shunned but once socially acceptable reality of a bygone era, kind of like smoking in the ’60s.

In line with that thinking, Black draws on history to say “most whites considered non-whites inferior, most Chinese considered non-Chinese inferior . . . I and a very large number of readers remember the murder of millions of Chinese and Cambodian and Vietnamese non-communists, and of Rwandans and Sudanese of a minority tribe or religion.”

This reduction of racism to “We all have prejudices,” springs from a half-baked understanding of the subject. It creates false equivalence between groups, just like Trump did with “all sides” at Charlottesville.

It results in ideas such as reverse racism — “racism against whites is acceptable,” Black says.

I’m not surprised when ordinary people shoot off such ideas in their emails to me. I am disappointed, however, when a rich white man with the privilege and authority to open minds instead normalizes ignorance.

All humans have prejudices and biases, of course they do. Humans discriminate. But racism isn’t just about human bias — it’s bias in the context of societal and historical power dynamics. It is also about supremacy, or the discrimination that is stitched into a socio-economic system that privileges one identity above others. In India, for instance, it benefits upper caste Hindus. In Singapore, it benefits Chinese. In Britain, it privileges men who attended private schools.

In North America and many parts of the world, thanks to colonialism, it benefits whites.

In my reading of them, serious newspapers no longer publish columns by men saying sexism is a relic of the past, or that glass ceilings are a feminist invention. Yet, such stories on racism by white people are allowed because delegitimizing progress on that front aligns with the interests of the existing racial hierarchy.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand,” said the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1857. “It never did and it never will.”

I understand when working-class whites chafe at the concept of white privilege. What privilege, if you’ve just lost a job and there are mouths to feed? I suspect some views would soften if they knew white privilege just means that in their exact same circumstance, a darker-skinned person is likely to be worse off.

But when rich white people deny racism, it suggests white power is threatened. They attempt to derail advances by dictating the terms of conversation.

Increasingly this is taking the form of discussions around, “Does racism exist?” It’s in their interest to keep everyone debating on square one rather than move on to, “What are we doing about it?”

Source: Conrad Black’s rubbish column on racism a fine example of white privilege: Paradkar | Toronto Star

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Y a-t-il un bon génie pour ces immigrants? Foreign credential recognition for engineers

2017/09/16 Leave a comment

Progress in foreign credential recognition among Quebec engineers, but of course, challenges remain:

L’Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec s’apprête à faire adopter de nouvelles règles pour faciliter l’intégration des immigrants. Mais ces changements auront-ils vraiment un impact?

Dans son pays d’origine, Maya Khoury concevait des bâtiments, « du sous-sol jusqu’à la clé dans la porte » ! Ici, cette ingénieure civile d’origine syrienne cherche plutôt des clés pour ouvrir la porte du marché du travail. « Ce n’est pas facile. Je ne m’attends pas à être ingénieure et c’est correct, je l’ai été pendant 20 ans. Mais j’aimerais au moins travailler dans mon domaine, celui de la construction », raconte la dame, en marge d’ateliers d’aide à l’emploi organisés spécifiquement pour les ingénieurs et architectes par le Centre social d’aide aux immigrants (CSAI).

Arrivée au Québec avec toute sa famille il y a un an et demi, Maya Khoury a une bonne humeur contagieuse, quelques expériences de travail au Québec — réceptionniste à l’UQAM et caissière dans un Jean-Coutu — et parle un français excellent appris dans la petite enfance chez les soeurs Saint-Joseph à Alep. Mais la vérité est que les chances qu’elle puisse exercer comme ingénieure sont minces.

En effet, de moins en moins de permis sont octroyés à des professionnels formés à l’étranger. Selon les plus récentes données, en 2013-2014, 34 % des permis junior à l’Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec (OIQ) — permettant une pratique sous supervision avant d’avoir le vrai permis — leur étaient octroyés, contre 18 % en 2016-2017. Cependant, le pourcentage d’immigrants déposant une demande de permis junior est quant à lui demeuré stable, entre 20 % et 25 % au cours des quatre dernières années. Ils sont surtout originaires de la France ou du Maghreb, étant donné l’existence de nombreux accords interuniversitaires. « L’accès à la profession, ce n’est pas évident. On ne peut pas dire qu’on ne faisait rien, mais disons qu’il y avait place à l’amélioration », reconnaît Kathy Baig, présidente de l’OIQ. Mais tout va changer, promet-elle.

« Ça fait depuis 2013 que je m’implique à l’Ordre et que j’entends ces histoires de protectionnisme et de corporatisme. C’est un défi qui revient et, à un moment donné, on a décidé d’en faire une priorité », lance Kathy Baig. Elle admet que les longs délais pouvaient en rebuter plusieurs. Idem pour les coûts (entre 600 $ et 1200 $ pour une demande d’admission et 330 $ par examen prescrit), qui sont toutefois réduits de moitié pour les demandeurs d’asile. « On va changer complètement d’approche. »

Nouvelles règles à l’OIQ

Jeudi, le comité exécutif de l’OIQ a en effet entériné une série de nouvelles règles visant à mieux intégrer les immigrants à travers deux objectifs : augmenter le taux d’obtention du permis et réduire les délais. Dès mai 2018, chaque cas soumis sera étudié de manière personnalisée, scrutant le détail du parcours à l’étranger du candidat. L’objectif est de reconnaître son expérience de travail et d’en tenir compte afin de lui épargner certains examens et formations. « Avant, c’était beaucoup plus compartimenté. On se concentrait plus sur les diplômes, les études supérieures. On classait les gens dans des catégories et ça nous indiquait les formations et examens qu’ils devaient faire. Mais là, on va faire une entrevue personnalisée et, si on voit que [la personne] a la compétence requise, on va lui épargner certains examens », explique Mme Baig.

Aucun quota pour les candidats étrangers ne sera instauré, mais l’idée demeure de réduire le fardeau pour qu’ils puissent obtenir plus facilement un permis de pratique. « On sait que, pour des [immigrants] qui ont 9, 10, 11 examens à faire, c’est long, et ils abandonnent en cours de route, dit-elle. Quand on est retiré de notre domaine de pratique pendant plusieurs mois, voire des années, c’est difficile d’y retourner. »

Mme Baig dit être consciente que ce ne sont pas tous les immigrants ingénieurs qui tenteront d’obtenir leur permis de pratique. « Il y a beaucoup de gens qui se présentent aux séances d’information, mais très peu entament le processus, constate-t-elle. J’ai cru comprendre que, quand ils arrivent ici, ils ont plusieurs autres préoccupations à court terme que d’avoir leur permis. » Et pendant ce temps, le temps file…

Le deuil de la profession

Pour Lida Aghasi, directrice générale du Centre social d’aide aux immigrants, faciliter l’adhésion à l’OIQ est une première étape, mais cela ne garantit en rien l’obtention d’un emploi. « Accélérer l’accès à l’Ordre est une très bonne chose. Mais, selon moi, cela rend perplexes et démotive ceux qui obtiennent le membership et demeurent toujours sans emploi. Les employeurs ont aussi d’autres critères d’embauche [que le permis] », dit-elle, en insistant sur l’importance de les sensibiliser.

La présidente de l’OIQ abonde dans son sens. Le permis junior permet de pratiquer, mais encore faut-il que la personne se trouve un emploi dans une entreprise acceptant de la superviser. « On a un autre projet et on a demandé des subventions pour voir ce qu’il est possible de faire avec les employeurs, qui pourraient afficher leurs besoins et dire qu’ils cherchent des professionnels formés à l’étranger », dit-elle.

Pour Maya Khoury, l’obstacle à un emploi dans son domaine va bien au-delà du permis de l’OIQ, qu’elle se demande si elle tentera un jour d’obtenir. « Je suis rendue à l’équivalence du diplôme et on me demande des relevés de notes de mon université. Mais je viens d’Alep… » dit-elle, pour montrer la difficulté de récupérer ces documents à l’heure actuelle. « C’est très compliqué. Et on va encore me demander d’étudier plus », souligne cette mère de famille à l’aube de la cinquantaine, qui avoue avoir commencé à faire le deuil de sa profession durant son séjour au Liban, avant d’immigrer au Canada.

Même si elle obtenait un jour le permis de l’OIQ, Maya Khoury — qui écrit d’ailleurs « Marie-Claire Khoury » sur son CV — fait remarquer qu’il lui manque deux éléments cruciaux pour pouvoir exercer son métier d’ingénieur : la maîtrise de l’anglais et des contacts dans une entreprise. « Tous mes amis qui ont trouvé un travail, c’est parce qu’ils connaissaient des gens. »

Malgré tout, constatant que les ingénieurs et architectes représentent la majorité de sa clientèle et qu’ils sont « confrontés à un pourcentage élevé de difficulté à trouver un emploi connexe », la CSAI a décidé d’offrir des ateliers sur l’emploi, dont celui qui se termine samedi, avec une formation de l’OIQ sur le processus d’adhésion. « Ces réfugiés ont besoin d’être accompagnés. Ce n’est pas parce qu’ils sont diplômés qu’ils sont autonomes à 100 %, dit Lida Aghasi. On veut leur donner espoir, leur dire qu’il faut qu’ils restent actifs et que nous ne les avons pas oubliés. »

Du réconfort, c’est surtout ce que Maya Khoury est venue chercher. « J’aimerais beaucoup travailler en construction, estimer des matériaux, c’est ce que je faisais. Sinon, avec mes connaissances, je pourrais toujours travailler dans l’aide aux immigrants ! » lance-t-elle en riant.

Source: Y a-t-il un bon génie pour ces immigrants? | Le Devoir

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Fearing Anti-Semitic Speech, Facebook Limits Audience Targeting – NY Times

2017/09/16 Leave a comment

Facebook grapples with its algorithms, business model and social impact:

Facebook has said it will restrict how advertisers target their audiences on the social network after a report said some were able to seek out self-described “Jew haters.”

In a statement dated Thursday, the company also said it would prevent users from indicating what type of ads they would like to see in an attempt to curb hate speech, adding that it had “no place on our platform.”

The moves came in response to a ProPublica investigation that revealed that Facebook’s self-service ad-buying platform allowed advertisers to direct ads to the newsfeeds of about 2,300 users who said they were interested in anti-Semitic subjects.

Reporters from ProPublica tested Facebook advertising categories to see whether they could buy ads aimed at Facebook users who expressed interest in topics like “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” and “History of ‘why jews ruin the world.’” The reporters paid $30 to ensure groups affiliated with these anti-Semitic categories saw promoted ProPublica posts in their Facebook news feeds.

Facebook approved the posts within 15 minutes, according to the ProPublica investigation.

The social network said Friday that its community standards “strictly prohibit attacking people based on their protected characteristics, including religion, and we prohibit advertisers from discriminating against people based on religion and other attributes.”

Facebook added that “to help ensure that targeting is not used for discriminatory purposes, we are removing these self-reported targeting fields until we have the right processes in place to help prevent this issue.”

The news comes as Facebook faces scrutiny for its role in the 2016 presidential election in the United States. Last week its representatives briefed the Senate and House intelligence committees, which are investigating Russian intervention in the election. The company told congressional investigators that it had identified more than $100,000worth of ads on hot-button issues directed by a Russian company with links to the Kremlin.

Representatives from Facebook said the company had sold the ads to a pro-Kremlin Russian company that was seeking an audience of voters in the United States during last year’s election campaign.

The ads — about 3,000 of them — focused on divisive topics like gay rights, gun control, race and immigration, and they were linked to 470 fake accounts and pages that it subsequently took down, according to Facebook’s chief security officer.

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Indonesia: Widodo’s battle with radical Islam hangs in balance- Nikkei Asian Review

2017/09/16 Leave a comment

Interesting analysis by Ken Ward of Indonesia’s efforts to combat fundamentalist political Islam:

Radical Muslim organizations alleging blasphemy against Jakarta’s Christian governor Basuki Purnama caught Indonesian President Joko Widodo off guard last year, and seemed for a while to threaten his presidency. Mass rallies over several months helped to inflict electoral defeat on Purnama, who was convicted in court and is now serving two years in prison.

Distancing himself from Purnama, a former political ally, Widodo has now begun to tackle the perceived threat from radical Islam. His approach looks like a two-pronged strategy. The first element is to curtail radical Muslim organizations’ freedom of action. The second is to reinforce the status and prestige of Pancasila, the tolerant and inclusive Indonesian state ideology.

In May, Widodo’s security minister, Wiranto, announced that the government would try to have Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, one of the radical Islamist organizations, banned by the courts. Then, fearing a possibly adverse reaction from Indonesia’s unpredictable justice system, the government changed tack and issued an emergency law (formally ‘a regulation in lieu of a law’) in July. This made a court verdict unnecessary. HTI in consequence lost its legal status, and was banned. The case against HTI was that it was opposed to Pancasila, and posed a threat to national unity. Ministers have warned that other organizations may suffer the same fate.

Some observers have expressed surprise that Widodo picked on HTI first, since it was not the most prominent of the groups that had campaigned against Purnama. But the choice of HTI is understandable. This organization has two characteristics that have usually been anathema to Indonesia’s security authorities. It is linked in a nontransparent way to an international movement, and it operates in some respects as a secret or clandestine organization. For example, it publishes neither membership statistics nor the names of its leading office-holders. A single spokesperson is its interface with the Indonesian public. Gaining access to HTI’s inner circles is very difficult.

Like other branches in the international Hizbut Tahrir network, HTI has as its long-term goal the fusing of the national state into a global Muslim caliphate. How this is to be achieved is enveloped in obscurity. Pancasila would presumably have no function. But whether this utopian project will appear sufficient cause for a ban in the eyes of Indonesia’s Constitutional Court, which is reviewing the edict, is hard to predict. The ban might instead be declared unconstitutional.

The campaign against Purnama was headed by the Islamic Defenders’ Front, known by its Indonesian initials as FPI. An early attempt to ban FPI would have taken few commentators by surprise. But successive Indonesian governments have had ambiguous connections with the group. It has sometimes, for example, conducted raids on private sex parties, either in connivance with the police or independently, but in both cases enjoying immunity from prosecution. Unlike HTI’s shadowy leaders, FPI figures seem to have been open to bribery or to manipulation in other ways. This may have saved the organization from being banned, at least for the time being, despite its frequently criminal and socially disruptive behavior.

Habib Rizieq, the longstanding FPI chair, is in temporary refuge in Saudi Arabia; he has been accused of holding a private sex party of his own in violation of the law against pornography. This involved inciting a female nongovernmental organization official to strip in front of a camera which, the police claim, transmitted the images to Rizieq’s smartphone. The FPI leader is said to have been parked outside the woman’s residence at the time of the alleged incident.

Reinforcing Pancasila

A stalemate has arisen between Rizieq and police officers, who want to have him put on trial. The government seems unable to dislodge him from his Saudi refuge by diplomatic or other means. Rizieq clearly fears being arrested should he return to Indonesia. He has chaired FPI for so long that his personal fate will have considerable impact on the group’s future. The government may decide that it is simply not worth trying to ban FPI, either because of the opposition that such a step would provoke or because it might be less potent without Rizieq in command. Police officers visited Rizieq in his Saudi sanctuary, extending a courtesy to him that Indonesian criminals rarely receive.

Reinforcing Pancasila as the state ideology is an equally important element of Widodo’s strategy. Pancasila includes monotheism as one of five principles, but does not grant special status to any religion. It runs counter, therefore, to the ideal of an Islamic state and to the imposition of Islamic law. It is a code-word for tolerance, not for faith.

Source: Ken Ward: Widodo’s battle with radical Islam hangs in balance- Nikkei Asian Review

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How the New Immigration Is Shaking Old Europe to Its Core – NYTimes

2017/09/15 Leave a comment

Good in-depth critical reviews of both books. Murray is of the Mark Steyn alarmist school, Chin takes a more balanced and interesting look:

In the mid-1890s, the German sociologist Max Weber warned against “the continual swarm” of cheap Polish laborers arriving in Germany. According to him, a “free market policy, including open borders in the east, is the worst possible policy at this point.” And not just for economic reasons. The likely integration of these aliens would threaten the “social unification of the nation, which has been split apart by modern economic development.” For Weber, a German nationalist, the “influx of Poles” was “far more dangerous from a cultural viewpoint” than even of Chinese “coolies.”

Compared with Weber’s rhetoric about Germany’s “struggle for existence” and his strictures against Catholics and Jews as well as Poles and Chinese, there is nothing overtly racist about the denunciations Rita Chin quotes in “The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe” by opponents of multiculturalism — which for them is shorthand for the nonwhite laborers Europe expediently imported after World War II to reconstruct its shattered economy. The political scientist Samuel Huntington’s comment that “multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European civilization” — approvingly cited by Douglas Murray in “The Strange Death of Europe” — also seems coded in comparison. But as demagogues across Europe and America rant against immigration and promise to build a strong and unified national community through exclusion, it is hard not to feel déjà vu.

Racial nationalism was commonplace in the late 19th century, the radically disruptive first phase of economic globalization. Hierarchies of race, ethnicity and religion were imposed on non-Western peoples as Europeans scrambled for territories and resources abroad, followed enviously by Americans. Exclusion was also central to their frantic effort to build political communities at home. Old bonds and solidarities had frayed in societies split apart, as Weber wrote, by modern economic development. Many of the aggrieved became eager to recreate and purify the social body, and to preserve “our” identity against people stigmatized as the “other” through their names, skin color or religious practices. Mass immigration to Western Europe and America, which peaked in the late 19th century, heightened the fantasy of a lost communal wholeness. So did unregulated flows of refugees: Pogroms in Russia sent thousands of Jewish survivors to Western Europe. (Weber’s warnings against the Polish “swarm” reflected a then widespread anxiety about Ostjuden.)

Virulent anti-Semites flourished in Austria-Hungary, Germany and France as the 19th century ended, while lynchings of blacks by white mobs in the United States became more common. The United States in the 1880s had pioneered racialized immigration policy, passing laws aimed at keeping Asians out. The Jim Crow laws that institutionalized segregation in the 1890s were accompanied by a mass hysteria in the United States against immigrants. Fears of degeneration haunted even powerful white men like Theodore Roosevelt. In 1905, amid widespread paranoia about the Yellow Peril, he warned of “race suicide,” exhorting white people to strengthen themselves against their rising nonwhite rivals.

History repeats itself as unfunny farce when, a century after Roosevelt, another macho president amplifies white fears of losing out in the struggle for existence. “The fundamental question of our time,” Donald J. Trump asserted in Warsaw in July, “is whether the West has the will to survive.” Indeed, the fear of decline has intensified as globalization appears to enfeeble once mighty Western nation-states while empowering those previously stigmatized as the Yellow Peril. As in the late 19th century, demagogues displace the anxieties of powerless people onto a clearly identifiable social group: immigrants or refugees. The mechanism of scapegoating — catalyzing mass disaffection and providing it with a simple culprit — has gone into overdrive in Europe and America as crisis besets the second phase of globalization.

In his surprisingly literate screed, the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik called his country the “most suicidal” in Europe for accommodating nonwhite minorities. The first sentence of Douglas Murray’s book, a handy digest of far-right clichés, claims that all of Europe “is committing suicide.” Like his numerous precursors, ranging from Max Nordau, the author of the popular “Degeneration” (1892), to Breivik, Murray goes on to depict Europeans as culturally and spiritually debauched. Evidently, they are not only helpless before the hordes of virile foreigners rampaging through their continent, but also keenly complicit in their own destruction.

“Only modern Europeans,” Murray writes, “are happy to be self-loathing in an international marketplace of sadists.” It is never quite clear which European masochists Murray, an associate editor of The Spectator in Britain, is talking about. A majority of his own countrymen, as a recent poll revealed, are proud of their former empire, and one might even argue that a xenophobic fantasy to regain imperial glory and power fueled Britain’s decision to leave the European Union last year. What is more, Murray does not seem wholly relieved, like most of us, that the vast majority of Germans regret their country’s Nazi past, and are determined not to repeat it. He offers a stalwart defense of the thuggish outfit Pegida (People Against the Islamization of the Occident/West) against criticism by German politicians and journalists; he claims that the English Defence League (a gang of hooligans shunned by its own founders for its “far-right extremism”) “had a point.” More disturbingly, he rates Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, a self-declared fan of authoritarian democracy, as a better sentinel of “European values” than George Soros.

Needless to say, Murray’s threnody for Europe is as fundamentally incoherent as its late-19th-century originals. It never strikes him, or other secondhand vendors of fixed and singular identities, that nowhere in the world have individuals been the exclusive heirs of a single culture or civilization. Europe as well as America has been a melting pot of diverse influences: Persian, Arab and Chinese, in addition to Greek, Roman, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon. As the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore, a horrified witness to Europe’s suicidal nationalism in the early 20th century, once wrote: “In human beings differences are not like the physical barriers of mountains, fixed forever — they are fluid with life’s flow, they are changing their courses and their shapes and their volumes,” in what is a “world-game of infinite permutations and combinations.”

Murray’s retro claims of ethnic-religious community, and fears of contamination, call for close analysis. Their toxic effects, which have been amply verified by history, make it imperative to explore the deeper sources of contemporary anxieties: political, social and economic upheavals. And this is what Rita Chin’s book does, synthesizing the endless debates over multiculturalism into a vivid picture of postwar Europe. Lucidly written and resourcefully argued, it is a superb example of a scholarly intervention in a public debate dominated by unexamined prejudice.

Chin’s parents were ethnic Chinese forced to leave Malaysia after the end of British rule and to move through many “different cultural worlds as students, employees, colleagues, neighbors, friends and in-laws.” She wishes her reader to understand the multiple and perennially shifting identities of immigrants “in a world where much of the political discourse is quick to demonize them as groups.” Accordingly, she declines to accept identities — British, German or European — as unalterable essences. Rather, she explores the specific ideas that many in post-1945 British, French, Dutch and German societies have used to clarify their identity; and she never ceases to historicize what to a tub-thumper like Murray seems self-evident.

The very notion of Europe, for instance, began to emerge out of European encounters with Muslim populations during the Crusades. European self-consciousness was then sharply demarcated in remote trading posts and colonies vis-à-vis subjugated and supposedly racially inferior peoples. But, as Chin writes, the “reversal of migratory patterns” after World War II “shifted the process of European self-definition in a dramatic way”: “Instead of Europeans moving outward into the world as they had done for hundreds of years, people from around the world began to settle in Europe, filling the demand for labor created by wartime destruction.”

For Chin, an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan, this is the crux of the problem: “In the past, groups perceived as incompatible with European identity were usually located beyond European borders. But now they are firmly established within Europe itself.” In the 19th century, nation-states premised on homogeneous populations needed foreign lands and resources in order to expand; and they had the brute power necessary to enforce hierarchies of race, class and education that kept the “natives” in their place. This supremacy has been progressively weakened, first by the urgencies of postwar reconstruction, then by the accelerated flows of technologies, goods and capital in recent decades of globalization.

Chin pays little attention to the socioeconomic traumas that have led to an acute obsession with immigration: deindustrialization, the shrinking of the welfare state, the fragmentation of working classes and the rise of extreme inequality. Nor does she go into a pre-1945 history of immigration in Europe, and the projection of internal problems on to various “outsiders” — Jewish, Italian, Portuguese, Irish, Polish. But she is consistently acute on how European elites since 1945 have reacted to the darker-skinned strangers in their midst, ignoring, misrepresenting and marginalizing them at first, and then turning them into a problem, often broadly identified as “multiculturalism.”

Multiculturalism, in Chin’s account, appears largely to be a problem for people who have long been accustomed to an identity built on domination and exclusion, and are panicked by its slow crumbling. Certainly, immigration was not a problem foisted on Europe from the outside; the fates of Europeans and non-Europeans were inextricably connected in the 19th century by conquest, colonization and trade. Yet historical amnesia played an outsize role in dealing with nonwhite workers who were never expected to stay in Europe, let alone integrate or assimilate. Chin describes how people from the Caribbean who began to arrive in Britain after 1948, for instance, were seen as “colored immigrants” when in fact they were British citizens. An unreconstructed racism (exemplified by the commonplace sign “no dogs, no blacks, no Irish”) remained for many years the appalling fate of people who had shaped, like millions of toiling workers and peasants in the imperial provinces, the privileged destiny of the rich in the metropolitan center.

A backlash against multiculturalism began to gather force after the economic crises of the 1970s. The controversy over Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” accelerated it. Black people had long been seen as culturally predisposed to crime and hooliganism. But after the Ayatollah Khomeini, wrongly identified by the uninformed as the sole representative of more than one billion Muslims, issued his fatwa against Rushdie, Islam began to seem incompatible with “Western values” too. Diversity has come to seem unworkable to many as the unequal world made by imperialism unravels, and Europe suffers terrorist attacks, economic crises and huge influxes of refugees from the countries it once brusquely made and remade in Asia and Africa. Chin vigorously tackles the “shared presumption,” recklessly echoed by even mainstream politicians in Britain, France and Germany, that multiculturalism is a failure. “Declaring multiculturalism ‘dead,’” Chin argues, “is a way of white Britons, Germans and French telling immigrants, ‘We don’t recognize you; you aren’t a part of our society.’”

Surely, the many populations that now exist in every part of Europe cannot be homogenized, except through the savage ethnic cleansing practiced in almost every European country in the first half of the 20th century. In any case, as Chin asks, “what exactly do Europeans imagine as a replacement for multiculturalism? How will they come to terms with multiethnic diversity moving forward?” Chin offers no simple answers, but her questions have never seemed more urgent as Europeans (and Americans) seem to move forward to their grim past.

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White people must understand that racism is real: Coren

2017/09/15 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

The one constant and reliable conclusion about people who argue that racism no longer exists is that they are white. And naive of course. It’s a crass statement, to be thrown in with claims such as unions have outlived their usefulness, fascism and Communism are as bad as each other, poverty a result of laziness, and the rest of the reactionary mantra. The lions of the suburbs preaching, as it were; gratingly comfortable and darkly unworldly in their invincible smugness.

The bunch of banality can usually be dismissed but lately a number of influential and even respected journalists have joined in. Sometimes they couch their arguments with a vague intelligence, often in tabloid hysteria, but the theme is repetitive: traditional values are under attack, political correctness is oppressing us, free speech is moribund, and radicals are violent and unreasonable. We’re all going to hell in a handbasket and the world has to know about it.

Most of the writers are middle-aged, as am I. In my case not only middle-aged but a white, middle-class man to boot. As such do I find some of the claims and demands of many young progressives to be shocking? Yes. But does that mean that they are wrong? No. If I can break out of my comfort zone there’s no excuse for anybody else.

Thing is, aging needn’t be synonymous with conservatism. In fact, the maxim that we become more right wing as we grow older is often the opposite of the case. Life experience, years of parenting, an increasingly safe distance from the daily economic struggle faced by younger people, the sobering reality of immortality, should all lead one to become more empathetic and reasonable.

It should also make us braver and not more fearful, but it’s fear — even hysterical fear — that seems to characterize so many of the comments from this new right collective of journalists and pundits.

Judging from what they say and write they are threatened and intimidated by the anti-Fascist movement, by Black Lives Matter, by students asking for language to be more inclusive than it used to be. Yet while these may be new movements in their specifics, there is nothing new in a fresh generation wanting a better world. When my uncle went off to Spain as a 16-year-old to fight against Franco, his parents in London were outraged. They later celebrated him as a hero.

Complacency is the last refuge of the privileged. It’s nasty in the bar or the social club but unacceptable in the pages of national newspapers. This increasingly militant wallowing in nostalgia, this reverence for a time that never was, doesn’t expand but simply destroys the debate. Yes of course such attitudes will attract fans but that says nothing — the politically blind leading the politically deaf.

It’s like the boorish parent bemoaning the music their teenagers listen to and the clothes they wear. You become figures of fun at best but at worst you’re causing harm. After one recent article denying that there was very much racism in Canada I asked a Black friend about his experience. Had he ever been stopped by the police?

He laughed. That was all. Laughed. It wasn’t a laugh of contempt but of resignation. Of course he had been stopped, several times. Is it really too much to ask those who will never be treated thus to make a small leap of empathy? Isn’t that what real journalists are supposed to do?

In the case of racism for example, it might be one thing to question some of the actions of radical groups in the Black community but quite another to refuse to understand why they were radicalized in the first place. The majority, those who enjoy power, is always frightened by anger but that does not mean that anger is not justified. As for students, socialists, and social justice campaigners, remember that liberation has to breathe. Give it some room, allow for the a few rough edges, let go and enjoy the ride.

Terms such as racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia and the rest did not develop from a vacuum and without cause. They are, alas, undeniably real. Getting old is inevitable, being young at heart, mind and soul is a choice. Do not go gently into that dark night of irrelevance.

Source: White people must understand that racism is real: Coren | Toronto Star

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ICYMI: ‘Deeply Worrying’ Fears Around Muslims And Islam Revealed In Damning Report | HuffPost UK

2017/09/15 Leave a comment

Not too surprising:

Britons’ attitudes towards Muslims and Islam have “worsened” with more than half of all respondents to a new survey believing the religion “poses a threat” to the West.

“The fear and hostility displayed towards Muslims is deeply worrying, despite most people claiming that they stand firm against extremists’ attempt to conflate their heinous actions with that of an entire religion,” Hope not Hate (HnH) chief executive Nick Lowles said of the finding’s of the charity’s Fear And Hope 2017 report which was released on Wednesday.

“Clearly there is a lot of work to be done here, both by those tackling hate crimes and misinformation, and potentially by Muslim communities themselves.”

The report, billed as “one of the most comprehensive studies of English attitudes towards contemporary issues”, found that despite views on immigration “softening”, attitudes towards Muslims and Islam have “simultaneously worsened among the more hostile sections of society”.

The report, based on a Populus survey of 4,000 people in “six identity tribes” across England, found that 52% of respondents believe Islam “poses a threat to the West”. As a result of recent terror attacks 42% of those surveyed were now “more suspicious” of Muslims and a quarter of Brits believe Islam is a “dangerous religion that incites violence”.

The study found older people were more prone to Islamophobia, “painting a worrying set of views” which HnH said would require “significant effort” to address.

Anti-hate charity Tell Mama told HuffPost UK that it was not surprised by the survey’s findings and called on mosques and Islamic institutions to do more to “break down barriers”.

“We know, given the levels of aggression towards victims, that there is a foothold taking place within small sections of the UK, around anti-Muslim hatred,” Tell Mama director Iman Atta said.

“For the survey to show that 25% of Brits believe that Islam is a dangerous religion, is concerning and we need more mosques and Islamic institutions to engage with their neighbours and break down barriers that there may be. Also, for 52% of respondents to believe that Islam poses a threat risk to the West shows that a lot more work needs to be done by Muslims and NGO’s to counter such growing divisions.”

Atta added:  “We are the vanguard of trying to tackle anti-Muslim hatred and we call upon others to join us in standing against all forms of hatred, including anti-Muslim hatred. There is much work to be done and clearly, there is a long road ahead. If we do not challenge this, it will strengthen Islamist extremism as well as alienating large numbers of Muslims.”

Source: ‘Deeply Worrying’ Fears Around Muslims And Islam Revealed In Damning Report | HuffPost UK

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ICYMI – In Praise of Equipoise: David Brooks

2017/09/14 Leave a comment

Good piece by Brooks on the need to get out of one’s bubble and the risks of attachment to a single identity:

Group victimization has become the global religion — from Berkeley to the alt-right to Iran — and everybody gets to assert his or her victimization is worst and it’s the other people who are the elites.

The situation might be tolerable if people at least got to experience real community within their victim groups. But as Mark Lilla points out in his essential new book, “The Once and Future Liberal,” many identity communities are not even real communities. They’re just a loose group of individuals, narcissistically exploring some trait in their self that others around them happen to share. Many identity-based communities are not defined by internal compassion but by external rage.

How do we get out of this spiral?

The first step is to just get out. Turn the other cheek, love your enemy, confront your opponent with aggressive love.

Martin Luther King is the obvious model here. “Love has within it a redemptive power,” he argued. “And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. … Just keep being friendly to that person. … Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. … They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load.”

The second step is to refuse to be a monad. Maalouf points to the myth that “‘deep down inside’ everyone there is just one affiliation that really matters.” Some people live this way, hanging around just one sort of person, loyal to just one allegiance and leading insular, fearful lives. In fact, the heart has many portals. A healthy person can have four or six vibrant attachments and honor them all as part of the fullness of life.

The more vibrant attachments a person has, the more likely she will find some commonality with every other person on earth. The more interesting her own constellational self becomes. The world isn’t only a battlefield of groups; it’s also a World Wide Web of overlapping allegiances. You might be Black Lives Matter and he may be Make America Great Again, but you’re both Houstonians cruising the same boat down flooded streets.

The final step is to practice equipoise. This is the trait we should be looking for in leaders. It’s the ability to move gracefully through your identities — to have the passions, blessings and hurts of one balanced by the passions, blessings and hurts of several others.

The person with equipoise doesn’t feel attachments less powerfully but weaves several deep allegiances into one symphony. “A good character,” James Q. Wilson wrote, “is not life lived according to a rule (there rarely is a rule by which good qualities ought to be combined or hard choices resolved), it is a life lived in balance.” Achieving balance is an aesthetic or poetic exercise, a matter of striking the different notes harmonically.

Today rage and singularity is the approved woke response to the world — Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. But you show me a person who can gracefully balance six fervent and unexpectedly diverse commitments, and that will be the one who is ready to lead in this new world.

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ICYMI – After Ahok: Indonesia Grapples with the Rise of Political Islam | The Diplomat

2017/09/14 Leave a comment

Unfortunate trend:

Five months after its closure, the doors of the Al-Hidayah mosque were sealed with wooden planks and crisscrossed with yellow police tape, as if it some kind of grisly crime had taken place within. Barred from entering their house of worship by official order, four young men held their midday prayer in the heat outside, their bodies bent towards a large sign driven into the concrete by the local authorities. Its message was emblazoned in red: “Activities are banned.”

In February, police converged on this green-tiled mosque in Depok, 15 kilometers south of the Indonesian capital Jakarta, to enforce an order sealing off the building until further notice. The order followed a clamor from Islamic fundamentalists, who held protests calling for the expulsion of this small congregation of Ahmadi Muslims from the district. “We had a permit to build this mosque, so we have no idea why they sealed it,” said Abdul Gofur, 42, the caretaker of the site.

The unpretentious Al-Hidayah mosque, a box-like building lacking the otherworldly dome and minaret of many Muslim houses of worship, has a long history of run-ins with the local authorities. Gofur said the mosque had been “sealed” six times since 2011, and has survived a concerted campaign from hardline vigilante groups, including the notorious Islamic Defenders Front, or FPI, which sees Ahmadis as heretics and apostates.

On June 23, two nights before Idul Fitri (as Eid al-Fitr is known in Indonesia), the festival marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, Gofur said that white-robed militants pelted the building with eggs and paint, and strung up spray-painted banners calling for the expulsion of the Ahmadiyah. The 400-strong congregation has erected its own signs reading, “Love for All, Hatred for None.”

The Ahmadi minority numbers around 500,000 people scattered across this island nation of 260 million. The sect is not officially recognized in Indonesia, which acknowledges just six religions: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. While most Ahmadiyah see themselves as Muslims, they cleave to unorthodox tenets: the sect has its own holy text, the Tadzkirah, and does not regard Muhammad as the final prophet – a belief that many Indonesians see as heresy. As a result, they have become both a subject of official discrimination, and a target for religious vigilantes.

Things got particularly bad after 2007, when a leading clerical body declared the Ahmadiyah a deviant sect; the following year, then-President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono signed a decree banning Ahmadi Muslims from disseminating their faith. Following the decree, mosques were shuttered and burned, and members of the community were subject to violent attacks. In February 2011, west of Jakarta in Banten province, three Ahmadi men were beaten to death by a mob; the perpetrators received only light sentences. According to the Jakarta-based Setara Institute for Democracy and Peace, which monitors religious freedom in Indonesia, there have been a total of 546 violent incidents against Ahmadi Muslims since 2007.

Source: After Ahok: Indonesia Grapples with the Rise of Political Islam | The Diplomat

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