Yet the outburst of deadly racist violence in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend is not without parallels in Canada. Recent estimates suggest there are dozens of active white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups across the country.
They advocate everything from biological racism to anti-Semitism to radical libertarianism. Members of groups such as the Heritage Front, Freemen of the Land and Blood and Honour have been charged with dozens of crimes, including murder, attempted murder and assault.
Roughly 30 homicides in Canada since 1980 have been linked to individuals espousing some form of extreme right-wing ideology.
But the pattern of right-wing extremist violence in Canada is too inconsistent to merit being prioritized over the threat posed by Islamic extremists, according to two former members of the security establishment.
“I do think right-wing extremism is a national security problem, but we’re not devoting the resources to it because we don’t need to,” said Phil Gurski, a former CSIS analyst who now runs a security consulting business.
“I have seen nothing to suggest that they pose an equally dangerous threat as that posed by Islamist extremism, which in and of itself is still a fairly minor threat in Canada.”
The limited national security resources devoted to right-wing extremism is also based on a belief that such groups are fractious, ideologically incoherent and engage mainly in lower-level crime such as robbery or graffiti, said Stephanie Carvin, a former national security adviser for the Canadian government.
“The violence that results [from right-wing extremist groups] tends to be dealt with more at the police level than the national security level,” said Carvin, who teaches courses about security and terrorism at Carleton University in Ottawa.
“If you just look at the sheer number of cases of individuals who are foreign [jihadist] fighters, or potential foreign fighters or returnees, it still outweighs the potential actors on the far right.”
A dangerous oversimplification?
As recently as January, just days before the deadly shooting at a Quebec City mosque, a threat assessment based on input from Canada’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies determined there was “no indication that right-wing extremists pose a threat to migrants.”
CSIS’s own website says the threat posed by the extreme right has “not been a significant a problem in Canada in recent years. Those who hold such extremist views have tended to be isolated and ineffective figures.”
But the Quebec City shooting, which police believe was carried out by an individual holding anti-immigrant views, raised questions about the accuracy of the security establishment’s estimation of right-wing extremism.
James Ellis, a Vancouver-based terrorism scholar affiliated with the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society (TSAS), said it’s a dangerous oversimplification to portray the majority of far-right groups in Canada as too disorganized to pose a serious threat to national security.
“You’re essentially taking your eye off the ball,” said Ellis, who until recently maintained the Canadian Incident Database, which tracks acts of terrorism between 1960 and 2015.
“The data suggests that right-wing extremism is certainly on par if not exceeding the threat from Islamic terrorism cropping up within Canada itself.”
More on Quebec’s Bill 62 and its expansion to municipalities and municipal services:
La volonté du gouvernement Couillard en matière de « neutralité religieuse » s’étendra aux élus municipaux, employés des villes, travailleurs, visiteurs et utilisateurs des musées et des transports en commun — qui devront tous se présenter « à visage découvert » pour fournir ou obtenir des services.
C’est à tout le moins ce que prévoient les amendements présentés mardi par la ministre de la Justice, Stéphanie Vallée, à l’ouverture de l’étude détaillée du projet de loi 62.
Les demandes d’accommodements seront toujours possibles pour un motif religieux, mais seulement si elles respectent des critères essentiellement jurisprudentiels, comme le principe de l’égalité homme-femme ou de la contrainte excessive au bon fonctionnement d’un organisme. « Je pense que c’est important de cadrer le principe de la neutralité religieuse, de cadrer l’analyse des demandes d’accommodements pour des motifs religieux […] et j’espère que, ce faisant, on va amener une certaine paix sociale », a déclaré la ministre Vallée. Cela dit, « c’est important de faire la nuance : ce n’est pas parce qu’on demande un accommodement que, nécessairement, on y a droit », a-t-elle affirmé plus tard.
L’étude du projet de loi, qui a été déposé en juin 2015, a été reportée au mois de février. Au lendemain de l’attentat de la mosquée de Québec, le gouvernement avait alors choisi d’oeuvrer à la « bonification » du projet de loi visant à faciliter l’intégration des immigrants au marché du travail. Malgré les retards cumulés, Québec espère toujours adopter le projet de loi avant la fin de son mandat, en octobre 2018.
Dans les réseaux de transport et les municipalités, dont les noms apparaissent pour une première fois dans le projet de loi, les réactions au changement de cap du gouvernement ont été rares et succinctes. « Après vérification, nous ne semblons pas avoir été consultés sur l’amendement. Si nous sommes assujettis à la loi d’une façon quelconque, nous la respecterons, une fois qu’elle sera adoptée », a répondu la Société de transport de Montréal. « On nous a avisés de la possibilité d’un amendement en juillet. Nous avons réservé nos commentaires et les ferons à la suite de la rencontre de notre conseil d’administration, le 24 août », a aussi fait savoir la Fédération québécoise des municipalités.
La Ville de Montréal a quant à elle rappelé qu’elle est d’accord avec le fait que les services fournis par des employés de l’État doivent être rendus à visage découvert. Elle a cependant demandé à Québec « de respecter son autonomie et sa capacité de gérer la question de la tenue vestimentaire de ses employés et les conditions qui permettent à ses citoyens d’obtenir des services ».
Le projet de loi 62 ne concerne pas nommément les signes religieux, mais prévoit la prestation et la réception de services « à visage découvert ». En vertu des nouveaux amendements, le principe de « neutralité religieuse » sera exigé dans les municipalités, les sociétés de transport en commun, mais aussi les musées, la Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec ou Héma-Québec, entre autres. Est-ce donc dire qu’une personne qui montera à bord d’un autobus ou d’un wagon de métro devra dévoiler son visage ? « Moi, je ne suis pas ici aujourd’hui pour analyser chaque cas d’espèce, parce qu’on pourrait être ici jusqu’à 17 heures », s’est bornée à répondre la ministre Vallée, soucieuse de ne pas aborder d’exemples précis. En pleine consultation sur le projet de loi, en novembre, elle s’était retrouvée en porte à faux avec le premier ministre lorsqu’elle avait déclaré — en opposition aux paroles de Philippe Couillard — que le niqab et la burqa ne seraient pas autorisés durant les examens de conduite de la Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec.
Neutralité ou laïcité
Le libellé du projet de loi, « favorisant le respect de la neutralité religieuse de l’État », a continué de déranger les partis d’opposition, qui souhaitent tous que le Québec inscrive une fois pour toutes la laïcité dans sa législation. « La neutralité, c’est beaucoup plus objectif », s’est défendue la ministre Vallée. « C’est une séparation entre l’État, les institutions et la religion », a-t-elle ajouté, en rejetant la définition voulant plutôt qu’elle reconnaisse toutes les religions comme étant sur un pied d’égalité.
Autre consensus dans l’opposition, celui dégagé par la commission Bouchard-Taylor, qui suggérait d’interdire le port de signes religieux à toutes les personnes « en position d’autorité coercitive », à savoir les magistrats, les procureurs, les policiers et les gardiens de prison. À cette liste, la Coalition avenir Québec a choisi d’ajouter les enseignants du primaire et du secondaire. Le parti avait renoncé à cette demande en février, dans l’espoir d’obtenir l’unanimité au sujet du projet de loi. « On aurait pu régler ce dossier-là avec un compromis que le gouvernement a refusé, donc nous, on revient à notre position d’origine », s’est résignée la députée Nathalie Roy. Le Parti québécois a quant à lui suggéré d’interdire le port du tchador, du niqab et de la burqa aux employés de l’État, « au motif qu’ils représentent un symbole d’oppression qui va à l’encontre du droit à l’égalité entre les femmes et les hommes ». « La longue bataille pour l’égalité des hommes et des femmes est si importante et chère au coeur des Québécois et des Québécoises […] il n’est pas question que l’État représente un recul sur cette bataille », a plaidé la porte-parole de l’opposition officielle en matière de laïcité, Agnès Maltais.
Not comfortable with this trend, whether practiced by the right or left. Agree with the comments by NYU visiting professor David Clinton Wells cited later in the article:
The names and faces of individuals who were part of last weekend’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., are being plastered all over the Internet by civil rights advocates. It’s part of an effort to shame the people who participated. But, it’s a tactic that can also snare some innocent people in its net.
“Yes!You’re a racist” is the name of a Twitter account that’s been very active in posting pictures of white supremacists at the Charlottesville rally. Logan Smith, who runs the account, thinks other people should see the faces of white supremacists.
“They’re not wearing hoods anymore — they’re out in the open,” Smith says. “And if they’re proud to stand with KKK members and neo-Nazis and anti-government militias, then I think the community should know who they are.”
Smith says he didn’t attend the rally, but he’s been getting pictures from activists who were there. They share them through social media. He re-posts them on his Twitter account. And on Twitter people are happy to help him make these individuals even more public.
“Immediately, as soon as I posted those photos people (were) saying ‘Oh! I went to high school with this person. I had a class in college with that person. I recognize this person as a prominent white supremacist in my area.’ ”
After getting more information, Smith would add names and places to the photos and that has had some consequences in the real world.
Cole White, who used to work at a hot dog restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., “voluntarily resigned” on Saturday after his employer confronted him to discuss his participation in the rally.
The father of participant Jeff Tefft felt he needed to post a letter in a local newspaper disavowing his son. Although Pearce Tefft says he and his family are not racists, once his son’s face and name were posted on social media they became the targets of people upset with his son.
David Clinton Wills, a visiting Professor at NYU who follows social media, says he’s actually troubled by the way that anti-racist activists are using Twitter. “Never in my lifetime did I remotely think I would vaguely defend the rights of a possibly very hateful person,” says Wills who happens to be black and Jewish.
Nonetheless, he says “it scares me to call that activism because it seems more like a certain condemnation and a certain judgement that ironically flies in the face of democracy itself.”
Wills sees a lynch mob mentality on both the left and the right when they try to use social media to shame people.
Just last week, Google was at the center of another social media storm when a memo by a company employee critical of diversity efforts at the company went viral. When Google fired the employee web sites on the right, critical of the company’s actions, released names of Google employees. Those employees were then harassed online.
For Wills the historical parallel is Nazi Germany. Wills says the Third Reich encouraged citizens to name people they thought were enemies of the state. “When that became a power that your neighbor could execute or your neighbor could use against other people the power became unchecked.”
Wills says all kinds of people began to get caught up in the drag net of laws and declarations of enemies. Wills knows that social media activists are still very far from the evil that was the Third Reich. But, he thinks maybe people should take a deep breath and think before they press the send button with someone else’s name in the message.
And it’s also important to remember that a picture doesn’t tell the whole story; it can be photo-shopped. Someone could have an ax to grind and try to make it look like an individual is a racist.
Smith who runs the ‘Yes! You’re a racist” Twitter account” says he’s willing to risk a mistake to speak out. “Ever since the days of the KKK burning crosses in people’s yards, they depend on people remaining silent” Smith says. “And no matter the risk I’m not going away.”
And neither are the people who disagree with Smith. One thing is certain — in the age of social media anyone who wants a soap box can have one.
Impressive large scale study with disturbing conclusions:
When a white person kills a black man in America, the killer often faces no legal consequences.
In one in six of these killings, there is no criminal sanction, according to a new Marshall Project examination of 400,000 homicides committed by civilians between 1980 and 2014. That rate is far higher than ones for homicides involving other combinations of races.
In almost 17 percent of cases when a black man was killed by a non-Hispanic white civilian over the last three decades, the killing was categorized as justifiable, which is the term used when a police officer or a civilian kills someone committing a crime or in self-defense. Over all, the police classify fewer than 2 percent of homicides committed by civilians as justifiable.
The disparity persists across different cities, ages, weapons and relationships between killer and victim.
To understand the gaps, The Marshall Project obtained dozens of data sets from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and examined various combinations of killer and victim. Two types of “justifiable homicide” are noted: “felon killed by private citizen” or “felon killed by police officer.” (In a bit of circular logic, the person killed is presumptively classified as a felon, since the homicide could be justified only if a life was threatened, which is a crime.)
The data were processed to standardize key variables and exclude more than 200,000 cases that lacked essential information or were homicides by the police. The resulting data detail the circumstances of each death: any weapons used; information on the killer’s and victim’s race, age, ethnicity and sex; and how police investigators classify each type of killing (“brawl due to the influence of alcohol,” “sniper attack” or “lover’s triangle,” for example).
Little large-scale research has examined the role of race in “justifiable” homicides that do not involve the police. The data examined by The Marshall Project are more comprehensive and cover a longer time period than other research into the question, much of whichhas focused oncontroversial Stand Your Ground laws.
In the United States, the law of self-defense allows civilians to use deadly force in cases where they have a reasonable belief force is necessary to defend themselves or others. How that is construed varies from state to state, but the question often depends on what the killer believed when pulling the trigger.
“If there are factors — even if they’re stereotypes — that lead the defender to believe he’s in danger, that factors in, whether it’s a righteous cause or not,” said Mitch Vilos, a Utah defense lawyer, gun rights advocate and the author of “Self-Defense Laws of All 50 States.”
Self-defense decisions by regular people, much like those involving the police, are made quickly and with imperfect information. As a result, a homicide can be ruled self-defense when the killer faced no actual threat but had a reasonable belief he or she did.
That is where irrational fear can come into play. The police, prosecutors and juries may be apt to give killers the benefit of the doubt in situations when they were faced with someone who seemed “dangerous.”
“Tell me that it doesn’t factor in if the person is black when they’re approaching the suspect,” Mr. Vilos said. “It contributes to the decision to pull the trigger because of the fear associated with the stereotype.
“Right or wrong, that’s what’s happening, in my opinion.”
The vast majority of killings of whites are committed by other whites, contrary to some folk wisdom, and the overwhelming majority of killings of blacks is by other blacks.
Most Americans are worried about Islamic extremism, and most Muslim Americans share these concerns.
About eight-in-ten U.S. Muslims (82%) say they are either very (66%) or somewhat concerned (16%) about extremism committed in the name of Islam around the world, about the same as the share of the general public that feels this way (83%), according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Only about one-in-six U.S. Muslims (17%) and Americans overall (15%) say they are “not too” or “not at all” concerned about extremism carried out in the name of Islam worldwide. Among both groups, concern about extremism is up 10 percentage points since the Center’s last survey of U.S. Muslims in 2011.
Muslim American women are particularly worried about global extremism in the name of Islam. Nearly nine-in-ten U.S. Muslim women (89%) say they are at least somewhat concerned about it, up 16 points since 2011. A smaller share of U.S. Muslim men (75%) say they feel this way.
While U.S. Muslims are slightly less worried about Islamic extremism in the United States than around the world, their concern about domestic extremism is still high. About seven-in-ten American Muslims (71%) say they are at least somewhat concerned about extremism in the name of Islam occurring in the U.S. As with global extremism, the level of concern among Muslim Americans about extremism in the U.S. is very similar to the general public’s (70%).
Despite their concerns about Islamic extremism, only 17% of Muslim Americans say there is a great deal (6%) or fair amount (11%) of support for extremism among U.S. Muslims. Most say there is not much support for extremism (30%) or none at all (43%) among the U.S. Muslim community. This contrasts with the views of Americans in general. Compared with Muslims, twice as many people in the general public (35%) say there is at least “a fair amount” of support for extremism among Muslims who live in the U.S.
Muslim Americans also differ from the general public in their views on undercover sting operations and other police efforts to disrupt terrorist plots. Four-in-ten U.S. Muslims (39%) say that when law enforcement officers have arrested Muslims on suspicion of plotting terrorist acts, they have mostly arrested “violent people who posed a real threat.” But 30% say such arrests have mostly involved “people who were tricked by law enforcement and did not pose a real threat,” while an additional 30% say they are not sure or express no opinion.
The general public is less divided on this question: 62% of U.S. adults say anti-terror arrests have mostly stopped real threats, while only 20% say authorities mostly have entrapped people who did not pose a real threat.
Both Muslims and the general public also were asked if there are circumstances under which targeting and killing civilians can be justified in order to further a political, social or religious cause. Roughly eight-in-ten U.S. Muslims (84%) say such tactics can rarely (8%) or never (76%) be justified. The share of Muslims who say such tactics can often or sometimes be justified (12%) is similar to the share saying this among the general public (14%). And Muslims are more likely than the public as a whole to say that targeting civilians for political, social or religious causes can never be justified.
Shree Paradkar reports on the NGO critique of Canada’s record in combatting racism (Debbie Douglas of OCASI, Avvy Go of the Chinese & Southeast Asian Legal Clinic, Shalini Konanur, of the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario).
While their points are largely valid, they portray a completely bleak picture when surely the reality is more nuanced. This may be the nature of the process when their role is to prevent an alternative view to the more positive portrayal of the government response.
But it is surprising, given that all three are Ontario based, that they do not mention the province’s anti-racism strategy as an example that the federal government should emulate.
And surely, is the change of federal language towards diversity and inclusion, the increased diversity of appointments, and other policy initiatives of the current government not worthy of note, while allowing for criticism where needed?
Every day when I read news from around the world, I have occasion to feel thankful to be in Canada.
Yet, I was surprised this weekend to hear many Canadians, revolted by the events unfolding in Charlottesville, Va., say: At least we’re not as bad. In reality, our history, too, involves slavery, indentured labour, brutal oppression and colonization. Our country, too, has thriving right-wing extremism.
It’s not Canadian to be flashy and to shout out our deeds from the rooftops. The flip side of this modesty is, when history judges those actions to be misdeeds, we are able to dismiss them as trivial because they were not as glorified as they were down south.
The dismissal allows us to masks the past and ease our collective conscience.
It’s precisely a recognition of those past misdeeds, their present consequences and a reckoning of current laws that a group of prominent Canadian NGOs are seeking in Geneva Monday, when they ask a UN body to hold Canada’s feet to the fire for failing to keep its promises to end discrimination.
The Colour of Poverty — Colour of Change and its members are asking the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) to recognize how Canada has “failed to comply with its international human rights obligations . . . and domestic human rights laws.”
“Racism is a matter of life and death,” for Indigenous peoples, their joint statement says, citing dismal socio-economic health indicators, suicides, murders and disappearances of thousands of people.
Both Indigenous and Black people are disproportionately poor and disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system.
“This is not the first time we brought this concern to the CERD committee, and yet very little has changed in more than a decade of our submitting shadow reports,” said Debbie Douglas, executive director of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI).
The NGOs are calling for a national action plan on racism for Canada that would commit to combating discrimination in hiring, and funding anti-racist organizations.
Chiefly, it is seeking the collection of “disaggregated” data across all government departments.
This kind of data collection that specifies identities such as race, gender or disability is the minimum Canada needs so it can measure the impact of its policies whether in health or housing or jobs.
How do you try to solve a problem when you can’t quantify it?
“For instance,” says Avvy Yao-Yao Go, clinic director at the Chinese & Southeast Asian Legal Clinic, “Under the Federal Employment Equity Act, the federal government has data on the representation of women, ‘visible minority,’ Indigenous peoples and people with disabilities in the federal public service.
“However, we do not know, for instance, of the “visible minority” categories, what are the percentages for people of African descent versus people of Chinese descent versus people of South Asian descent. Or under (the category of) women, how many are women of colour and from which communities.” [Comment: Actually we do from census data – see my Federal Employment Equity and Religious Minorities in the Public Service)]
Or, take Canada’s immigration law that allows people detained for immigration purposes to be detained indefinitely. More than 6,000 people were held in 2016-17, the agencies say, although more than 90 per cent of them were not considered a security threat.
“We recently participated in a case in federal court that sought to challenge indefinite detention,” says Shalini Konanur, executive director of the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario.
“During that case we spoke with several detainees, and the vast majority were racialized. Currently, there is no race-based data being collected about detainees but we know anecdotally that racialized persons in Canada are disproportionately impacted by indefinite detention.”
The NGOs also want the federal and provincial government to remove barriers to the recognition of international training, and to amend the Ontario Human Rights Code to stop discrimination based on police data.
They are drawing attention to domestic laws that discriminate against specific groups.
In addition to immigrant detainees affected by law, migrant farm workers and caregivers such as nannies — the majority of whom are people of colour — are also vulnerable.
Migrant agricultural workers do not have access to permanent resident status. As for caregivers, their once guaranteed pathway to permanent residence was revoked in 2014.
Both groups have their work permit tied to a specific employer leaving them vulnerable to exploitation.
“While migrant workers contribute to social entitlement programs in Canada, their temporary status largely precludes them from accessing these programs,” said Amy Casipullai, an OCASI staffer.
The UN committee is expected to release its review on Aug. 25.
Interesting account of some of the history of ethnic studies, the political debates and the evidence of how it encourages more engagement among minority students:
In Jr Arimboanga’s ninth-grade classroom, students learn about critical consciousness: how to read the word, but also the world. It’s a concept popularized by a Brazilian educational theorist named Paulo Freire in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
The class is ethnic studies. It’s part of an effort by San Francisco educators like Arimboanga to teach courses centered on the perspectives of historically marginalized groups. Just last year, California passed a law mandating a model ethnic studies curriculum.
Sometimes called multicultural education or culturally responsive teaching (though there are subtle differences among the three), ethnic studies has been expanding on the west coast and in pockets across the country. San Francisco’s curriculum is “designed to give high school students an introduction to the experiences of ethnic communities that are rarely represented in textbooks,” according to the school district’s website.
Teachers of ethnic studies argue that these courses give students a pathway to break the cycles of poverty, violence, and incarceration that so many communities of color face.
“Ethnic studies works,” says Artnelson Concordia, a veteran teacher who is helping to develop the San Francisco curriculum. He wants students to see that “all of their experiences can be connected to larger issues.”
“So by the end of the school year, they’re seeing themselves as makers of history,” Concordia says.
Movements and Counter-Movements
Ethnic studies has “gained momentum, frankly, with the election of Donald Trump,” says Ravi Perry, president of the National Association for Ethnic Studies. This summer, Oregon set a timetable for the adoption of K-12 ethnic studies standards. Efforts to introduce statewide legislation are also ongoing in Kansas and starting this year, Indiana high schools will be required to offer ethnic and racial studies as an elective course. States with large indigenous populations — like Montana and Alaska — have already written standards for culturally responsive teaching.
“We have an obligation to ensure their heritage is aptly reflected in how we talk about America,” Perry says. “This is not about promoting an individual agenda. It’s about understanding the importance of community solidarity.”
Other movements are concentrated at the district level. Seattle has passed a resolution, based on recommendations from the NAACP. Students in Providence, R.I., have successfully lobbied for a pilot of the ethnic studies curriculum. Albuquerque, N.M., has launched ethnic studies courses in all of its high schools.
Though the start of the ethnic studies movement can be traced to the early 1900s, it really kicked off in the 1960s at colleges and universities. In the past decade, the growth has accelerated in K-12 schools, partly in response to an Arizona law that banned the curriculum.
There, Republican lawmakers were specifically targeting a Mexican-American studies program at Tucson High School — where minority enrollment is 88 percent. The Republicans who wrote the legislation, Tom Horne and John Huppenthal, claimed the classes were stoking racial tensions and “radicalizing students.” They pointed to the course materials — among them, Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America — as well as the class decor, which included a poster of Che Guevara.
In 2010, Horne and Huppenthal passed HB 2281, prohibiting classes and materials that “promote the overthrow of the U.S. government,” “resentment toward a race or class or people,” or “ethnic solidarity.” (This happened soon after the passage of SB 1070, which gave local police the authority to question a person’s citizenship.)
There were other ethnic studies courses in Tucson that were not touched by the bill, Huppenthal says. He mentions African-American studies, for one. But the teachers of Mexican-American studies classes at Tucson High, Huppenthal says, were “indoctrinating students.”
“They were doing a very simplistic application of Karl Marx’s dictum: All of history is the struggle between the ‘oppressor’ and the ‘oppressed,’ ” Huppenthal says. “And they were going to identify whites as oppressors and Hispanics as the oppressed.”
Myths and Truths
“One of the things you would hear was that our classes were hateful. That we were teaching resentment,” says Curtis Acosta, who piloted one of the Mexican-American studies classes that sparked the controversy in Arizona. “That’s exactly the antithesis of what you would see.”
Acosta taught for 18 years in Tucson Unified School District. On a typical day in his Chicano literature class, Acosta says, you’d find students sitting at tables “doing really controversial things like reading and writing well.”
Each morning, his class would begin with an affirmation, a Mayan precept called In Lak Ech, which translates to “You are another me.” Students would recite in Spanish and English part of the poem by Luís Valdez:
Tú eres mi otro yo. You are my other me. Si te hago daño a ti, If I do harm to you, Me hago daño a mi mismo. I do harm to myself. Si te amo y respeto, If I love and respect you, Me amo y respeto yo. I love and respect myself.
“Students were sharing and taking risks and that didn’t happen by accident,” Acosta says. “It was real intentional.”
Alexei Marquez can attest to that. She was in Acosta’s class the first year it was offered. Up until then, she had been a dutiful, if disengaged, student. “I learned from an early age to play the game as it was,” Marquez says.
When she took Acosta’s class, it was the first time she’d connected to literature on a personal level. She fell in love with The Devil’s Highway by Luís Alberto Urrea. “I can’t even tell you what I read in AP English,” Marquez says.
“The research says, plainly, that this stuff works,” explains Christine Sleeter, a California State University professor and ethnic studies expert. In 2010, the National Education Association asked her to review the academic and social impact of ethnic studies.
A few things happen when students take courses that connect with their lived experience, Sleeter says. Engagement increases, as do literacy skills, overall achievement and attitudes toward learning.
“As students of color proceed through the school system, research finds that the overwhelming dominance of Euro-American perspectives leads many such students to disengage from academic learning,” Sleeter writes in the NEA report. “Ethnic studies curricula exist in part because students of color have demanded an education that is relevant, meaningful, and affirming of their identities.”
Something else happens in these classes: students develop “a sense of agency,” Sleeter writes. So they aren’t just learning about history, they’re engaging with it and shaping it — reading the word and the world.
A Stanford study finds similar outcomes — particularly for high school students at risk of dropping out. Taking a course which examines “the roles of race, nationality and culture on identity and experience” improved not only academic performance, but also attendance.
“Kids react when the curriculum isn’t speaking to their experiences or to the things that really matter to them,” Sleeter says. “They just get bored and they either intellectually drop out or physically drop out.”
Not all the people who support Donald Trump are Nazis, white supremacists or more mundane racists. Some genuinely believe that the institutions of the republic have become so corrupt that only a wholesale, populist cleansing will redeem the American promise.
But for whatever reason they support him, Mr. Trump’s followers are enabling a President who stokes race hatred, who will not condemn Nazis and other fascists, whose words and deeds are leading white supremacists to kill on a street in New York, on a subway car in Portland and now during a melee in Charlottesville.
We can empathize with people cast adrift by the economic storms of globalization and the digital revolution; we can understand, though never condone, their resentment over the fact that a minority of children born in the United States today are white, that the evolution of the American myth embraces a racial and sexual diversity that they can’t comprehend.
But empathy has limits. The fascists are mobilizing in Donald Trump’s name. They may be few in number, but a larger, still-silent minority may come to approve their message, if not their methods or regalia. Unless this President’s malignant poisoning of the body politic is contained, there will be more riots, more confrontations, more deaths. Unless he is contained, future historians may see Charlottesville as an overture to something even uglier and deeper and more dangerous.
Donald Trump exhausts us. He tries to tear down the social safety net. He seeks to wreck the global trading system. He attacks a free press. He threatens war against other weak, dangerous men. And he does it all at once, day after day. His assaults on democracy and civility are so multifaceted – and his term has barely begun! – that it’s tempting to turn away, to hold your family tighter and just try to carry on.
But those who believe in democracy, in a free press, in racial harmony, in peace, have to fight back. What’s so frustrating for Canadians is that there is little we can do on this side of the border, except watch in horror and pray.
Good thoughtful piece by Frank Bruni on the risks of a reductionist approach to identity to inclusion and integration:
Mark Lilla, a Columbia University professor, got a big, bitter taste of this late last year when he wrote, in The Times, about the presidential election and “identity politics,” which, he argued, had hurt the Democratic Party. He maintained that too intense a focus on each minority group’s discrete persecution comes at the expense of a larger, unifying vision.
Many people disagreed. Good. But what too many took issue with was, well, his identity. “White men: stop telling me about my experiences!” someone later scrawled on a poster that was put up to advertise a talk, “Identity Is Not Politics,” that he gave at Wellesley College.
“But I wasn’t talking about their experience or my experience,” Lilla pointed out when I spoke with him recently. “I was talking about an issue.”
In a new book coming out this week, “The Once and Future Liberal,” he asserts that “classroom conversations that once might have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. This makes perfect sense if you believe that identity determines everything. It means that there is no impartial space for dialogue. White men have one ‘epistemology,’ black women have another. So what remains to be said?”
And where are the bridges?
Race, gender, sexual orientation, class: All of this informs — and very often warps — how we see the world. And for much too long, this country’s narrative has been scripted by white men, who have also dominated its stage and made its rules. Our advantage, as a class, is real and unearned.
The “check your privilege” exhortation asks us, rightly, to recognize that. It’s about “being aware of systemic injustice and systemic inequality,” Phoebe Maltz Bovy, the author of the recently published book “The Perils of ‘Privilege,’ ” told me. And she applauds that.
But she worries that awareness disclaimers and privilege apologies have ferried us to a silly, self-involved realm of oppression Olympics. They promote the idea that people occupying different rungs of privilege or victimization can’t possibly grasp life elsewhere on the ladder.
In her book she mocks the inevitable juncture in a certain kind of essay “where the writer (probably a cis White Lady, probably straight or bisexual, probably living in Brooklyn, definitely well educated, but not necessarily well-off) interrupts the usually scheduled programming to duly note that the issues she’s describing may not apply to a trans woman in Papua New Guinea.”
Should we really have say and sway only over matters that neatly dovetail with the category that we’ve been assigned (or assigned ourselves)? Is that the limit of our insights and empathies? During the Democratic primary, a Hillary Clinton supporter I know was told that he could not credibly defend her against charges of racism for her past use of the word “superpredators” because he’s white.
That kind of thinking fosters estrangement instead of connection. Lilla noted that what people in a given victim group sometimes seem to be saying is: “You must understand my experience, and you can’t understand my experience.”
“They argue both, so people shrug their shoulders and walk away,” he said.
Across a range of American institutions, we need more diversity. We need it to expunge and guard against the injustice that Bovy mentioned, and we need it because it’s indeed a portal to broader knowledge and greater enlightenment. That means that white people — men in particular, even Google engineers — must make room in that narrative and space on that stage.
But I question the wisdom of turning categories into credentials when it comes to politics and public debate. I reject the assumptions — otherwise known as prejudices — that certain life circumstances prohibit sensitivity and sound judgment while other conditions guarantee them. That appraises the packaging more than it does the content. It ignores the complexity of people. It’s reductive.
Thomas Chatterton Williams, the author of the memoir “Losing My Cool: Love, Literature, and a Black Man’s Escape From the Crowd,” got at this in an essay about privilege that he published last year, writing: “My black father, born in 1937 in segregated Texas, is an exponentially more worldly man than my maternal white Protestant grandfather, whose racism always struck me more as a sad function of his provincialism or powerlessness than anything else. I don’t mean to excuse the corrosive effects of his view; I simply wish to note that when I compare these two men, I do not recognize my father as the victim.”
At the beginning of this column I shared the sorts of personal details that register most strongly with those Americans who tuck each of us into some hierarchy of blessedness and affliction. So you know some important things about me, but not the most important ones: how I responded to the random challenges on my path, who I met along the way, what I learned from them, the degree of curiosity I mustered and the values that I honed as a result.
Those construct my character, and shape my voice, to be embraced or dismissed on its own merits. My gayness no more redeems me than my whiteness disqualifies me. And neither, I hope, defines me.
While not a fan of some of Maher’s blind spots on religion and Muslims, this line captures the concept of integration (mutual partial melting) in contrast to assimilation (completely newcomer melting):
“One of the first things I said on my old show (ABC’s Politically Incorrect) is if you’re going to come to the melting pot, melt a little bit. You’ve got to melt a little,” Maher said.
Of course, the definition of what ‘melt a little’ means is where the public debates occur.
Multicultural Meanderings 