McWhorter: Harvard, Brown and Other Top Schools Are Thinking About Black Freshmen the Wrong Way

2024/09/14 Leave a comment

Interesting suggestion on how to interpret the numbers:

Several highly selective universities have recently reported that in their first freshman classes admitted after the Supreme Court banned racial preferences in admissions, the number of Black and Latino students has fallen.

The percentage of Black freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, declined from 15 percent last fall to 5 percent for this fall. At Amherst College the number fell from 11 percent to 3 percent. Other schools have reported less precipitous but still noticeable drops, such as from 18 percent to 14 percent at Harvard, 10.5 percent to 7.8 percent at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill — a taxpayer-supported public university in a state where 23 percent of the population is Black — and 15 percent to 9 percent at Brown University, a school that has spent considerable energy looking at its early ties to the slave trade. Yale and Princeton held relatively steady, but an overall trend is clear.

The conventional wisdom is that this is alarming, but I’m not seeing it that way. We are trained to regard news on racial preferences in a way that makes us see tragedy where, through different glasses, we might just see change.

A first question to ask: Will Black students who weren’t admitted be OK? There is every reason to suppose so. Racial preferences were banned for the University of California in 1996, and the way critics discussed it back then, one would almost have thought that the highly selective U.C. Berkeley and U.C.L.A. were the only campuses in the entire university system. I taught at Berkeley at the time, and some young Black filmmakers had me audition (long story) for a film about a fictional Black teenager who was so devastated by being denied admission because of the new rules that he took his own life in despair.

In real life it was hard to see tragedy in a Black student having to go instead to one of the many other excellent options, like U.C. Davis and U.C. Santa Cruz. As regards that student’s future success, time has borne out that intuition. A study by the Berkeley economist Zachary Bleemer found that the ban had no effect on the post-college wages of Black applicants to University of California schools. (There was, however, a differential for Latinos, an effect that was difficult to explain.)

A second question to ask is whether the universities themselves are OK. There seems to be an assumption that they suffer if Black students are represented at less than our 14 percent presence in the population. But it is difficult to specify just what that assumption is based on.

For example, at Brown, almost one in 10 freshmen is Black (and that doesn’t count applicants who did not specify their race). Black America has suffered too much genuine tragedy for it to be considered ominous that “only” one in 10 students in a matriculating class at an Ivy League school is Black.

Nevertheless we are told to bemoan the decrease in general diversity. But wait — how many Black students do the white ones need in order to get an acceptable dose of diversity? The same question applies to whether Black students will feel there are enough people who look like them to feel at home at the school. I would think that at Chapel Hill, for example, 7.8 percent — about one in 12 freshmen — is enough to build a healthy community.

Plus, there is no real evidence that diversity enhances a good college education. No reasonable person is seeking lily-white campuses. But the idea that diversity means, specifically, better learning has turned out to be difficult to prove. Terrance Sandalow and others observe that what are considered Black views — on topics like police conduct or the availability of quality schooling — are as likely to be aired by non-Black students as by Black ones (a good thing, by the way).

The 1999 report by the psychologist Patricia Gurin, which is often cited as demonstrating that diversity improves college education, was based on students self-reporting vague, self-congratulatory qualities such as whether they came out of college with a drive to achieve or with a sense of satisfaction with their college work. Nor is there much proven benefit post-graduation: This spring, a meta-analysis of 615 studies has shown that workplace diversity does not substantially enhance team performance and cooperation.

There is, however, one other argument for giving extra points to Black applicants. Despite the California data I mentioned, nationwide it is true that going to an Ivy League school rather than a solid non-Ivy increases lifelong earnings, as well as the chance of attending graduate school or getting a job at a top-ranked law firm.

But that one advantage is not worth the endless dissonance that racial preferences in admissions would continue to create, whether we liked it or not.

There would always have been a sense among many non-Black students (and even professors) that many Black applicants got in for different reasons than white and Asian applicants did.

Asian families would always have felt they were evaluated more stringently than Black students, as was clearly shown to be the case at Harvard. This feeling would have persisted especially because they, too, are part of minority groups that experience racism.

Eliminating both Black students’ stigma and Asian students’ sense of foul play is more important than closing any gap in future earnings, which in any case hardly indicates that Black students outside of the Ivies are relegated to washing cars for a living. Admissions preferences intended to promote socio-economic rather than just racial diversity would encounter much less pushback and confusion.

Here’s a proposal, radical though it may (unfortunately) seem: Colleges should be very happy with the new numbers. Brown, for example, should be saying, “Hey look — even without that outdated and condescending Blackness bonus, we’re still at 9 percent!” Getting into an elite college is hard, and we should celebrate Black applicants pulling it off in such high numbers, even if they don’t happen to fall precisely at 14 percent. We are taught that on race, professional pessimism is enlightened. I don’t get it.

Source: Harvard, Brown and Other Top Schools Are Thinking About Black Freshmen the Wrong Way

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Lederman: Russians at War is an exceptional documentary and needs to be seen

2024/09/14 Leave a comment

Of note, joins the genre of movies such as Das Boot, Los Chicos de la Guerra, and All Quiet on the Western Front, albeit all of these were made after the wars ended, not during hostilities. Interesting question, will this film be shown in Russia or not?:

…The feature film All Quiet on the Western Front, which also humanized the “wrong” side of the First World War with its devastating portrayal of a young German soldier’s experiences, won four Academy Awards last year, including best international feature film.

Russians at War, which dispels the myth that there is any glory involved in war whatsoever, deserves similar recognition. It certainly deserves a chance to be seen.

Of course, Russians is much more sensitive. It is a documentary to begin with, but also because this catastrophe is happening right now. It is bringing agony to Ukrainians at this very moment. Nobody should have to experience what Ukrainians are suffering through at the hands of Russia.

This film in no way discounts that. If anything, it emphasizes it.

It does not disregard the inhumanity of war to humanize the low-level members of the aggressor’s army: Russian soldiers and medics as young as 20 who are sent to the front lines along with their hopes and dreams – and their not-quite-yet-fully-developed prefrontal cortexes. The opposite, in fact.

Russian fighters – some drafted, some indoctrinated, some there to keep their families fed back home or a friend company at the front, some there because they don’t know why – are also victims of this war. As one notes in the film, they are at war with themselves. “Slavs against Slavs.”

Thousands and thousands of people, Ukrainian and Russian, have been ripped from their lives to further a madman’s dream.

And a talented filmmaker, without an official posting or even a press pass, followed them almost all the way to the front so that we could know about it. And be outraged. Not at the film; at the war.

Censoring art is never a good idea. But keeping this film under wraps is denying the public of more than the experience of seeing an excellent movie. It is restricting access to a vital message: an unforgiving indictment of war.

Peace.

Source: Russians at War is an exceptional documentary and needs to be seen

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

The decline and fall of Tariq Ramadan

2024/09/13 Leave a comment

Of interest:

Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and a well-known figure in the Islamic world, has been convicted of the rape and sexual coercion of a woman in a Geneva hotel, after a court overturned an earlier acquittal. Professor Ramadan has been jailed for three years, two suspended, over the 2008 incident.

The verdict marks a remarkable fall from grace for Ramadan, who was raised in exile in Switzerland, and skilfully navigated the Francophone, English and Arabic speaking worlds as an academic, campaigner and theologian. His father, Said Ramadan, was central to the Muslim Brotherhood’s development in Europe.

While Ramadan was convicted in a court in Switzerland, the repercussions of his downfall will be felt here in the UK. Ramadan’s X account currently gives his location as the United Kingdom and contains the description ‘Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford.’ He boasts a following of 721,000, numbers that many politicians or religious leaders could only dream of.

For a period, especially following 7/7, Ramadan was a poster boy for those in authority in this country who sought an Islam that the West could not only do business with, but more importantly feel comfortable about. Bright-eyed, handsome and articulate, Ramadan proved to be a very successful salesman, with audiences as diverse as the Metropolitan Police through to the leftist European Social Forum.

Ramadan’s talk of reform, a European Islam and apparent doubt about Islamic hudood punishments (these include amputation, stoning and flogging) were music to the ears of his audience. In his memoir, the former Head of Scotland Yard’s Muslim Contact Unit, Bob Lambert, thanks Ramadan in the acknowledgments. In 2008, Ramadan addressed the ‘Countering Insurgency and Terrorism’ conference, jointly organised by the Swedish National Defence College and UK Defence Academy.

To his critics, Ramadan was instead guilty of ‘doublespeak’ – saying one thing to western audiences, and another to Islamic audiences. Appointed to the Home Office’s ‘Preventing Extremism together’ taskforce in the wake of the 7/7 bombings in 2005, Ramadan would condemn violence, but not the Salafist ideology from which it has often emerged. That such beliefs are a rival to liberal democracy, and that giving them a leg-up may be a bad idea, seemed to be overlooked by many in power.

In 2014, Professor Ramadan sat on Baroness Warsi’s Foreign Office Advisory Group on freedom of religion or belief. Such commitments did not prevent Ramadan moving in elite circles in areas hardly known for such freedoms, most notably the Gulf. The post he formerly held at Oxford is officially known as the His Highness Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani Professor in Contemporary Islamic Studies, and is made possible by a benefaction by the Qatar Foundation, running into the millions.

Despite the seriousness of the accusations against him, Ramadan’s status ensured lofty support. In 2017, when accusations about Ramadan first emerged in France, concerns that they were motivated by his status as a ‘prominent Muslim’ ensured that the University of Oxford allowed him to continue teaching for three weeks, before granting a leave of absence. Eugene Rogan, Director of Oxford’s Middle East Centre stated:

‘It’s not just about sexual violence. For some students it’s just another way for Europeans to gang up against a prominent Muslim intellectual. We must protect Muslim students who believe and trust in him, and protect that trust.’

Here an element of snobbery also emerges; it is hard to imagine a university porter being given leave of absence, or attracting academic supporters, in such circumstances. In 2018, when Ramadan was remanded in custody in France, Muslim lobbyists MEND referred to a ‘weak accusation’ and demanded his release on health and human rights grounds.

By 2020, Ramadan had been released but remained indicted, prompting dozens of academics, politicians and activists to denounce the French legal system in a round-robin letter. Their number included high-profile broadcasters and the great and the good from the Islamic world.

Their letter asked: ‘Is there one form of justice for Muslims in France and another for everyone else?’ In June 2024, a French court decided charges against Ramadan could proceed. As due process has now been followed in Switzerland, a period of reflection should follow. Activists who promoted Professor Ramadan, and his supporters in the fields of counter-extremism, policing and academia have plenty to think about.

Source: The decline and fall of Tariq Ramadan

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Lederman: Canadians must be allowed to see what’s in the Deschênes Report

2024/09/12 Leave a comment

Agree:

…Alti Rodal, the director of historical research at the Deschênes commission, has called for the report’s release, with proper context. “They are allegations only, that were minimally investigated,” Ms. Rodal told The Globe. “They were not well researched, let alone proven in a court.”

Concerns that this will turn into a witch hunt, and that the Ukrainian-Canadian community could be vilified, are understandable. But give the public some credit. You don’t keep information secret because there are racists – and Russians – who will use it for nefarious purposes. Nobody will blame Canadian children and grandchildren of alleged Nazi collaborators. Nobody is going to blame the Ukrainians on the ground right now, getting bombed by Russia.

But in a vacuum, speculation breeds. Release the report as part of that continuing commitment to transparency and let’s get on with it. There are crises that urgently require attention. They include Russia’s catastrophic war in Ukraine.

Source: Canadians must be allowed to see what’s in the Deschênes Report

Related: Top international scholars urge Canada to release war criminals report

Filed under Holocaust, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Study provides evidence of AI’s alarming dialect prejudice

2024/09/09 Leave a comment

Interesting study, just adding to the challenges of using AI to evaluate speech:

An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him, The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him. – Dr Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady

While large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT-4 have been trained to avoid answers that overtly racially stereotype, a new study shows that they “covertly” stereotype African Americans who speak in the dialect prevalent in New York, Detroit, Washington DC and other cities such as Los Angeles.

In “AI generates covertly racial decisions about people based on their dialect” published in Nature at the end of August, a team of three researchers working with Dr Valentin Hofmann at the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle shows how AI’s (learned) prejudice against African-American English (AAE) can have harmful and dangerous consequences.

In a series of experiments, Hofmann’s team found that LLMs are “more likely to suggest that a speaker of AAE be assigned to less-prestigious jobs, be convicted of crimes and be sentenced to death”.

The study, the authors write, “provides the first empirical evidence for the existence of dialect prejudice in language models: that is, covert racism that is activated by features of a dialect (AAE).”

The study states: “Using our new method of matching guise probing, we show that language models exhibit archaic stereotypes about speakers of AAE that most closely agree with the most negative human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded, dating from before the civil rights movement.”

Developed in the 1960s at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, “guise probing” allowed the isolation of attitudes held by bilingual French Canadians towards both Francophones and Anglophones by having subjects pay attention to language, dialect and accent of Francophones and Anglophones on recordings and asking the subject to make judgements about these individuals’ looks, sense of humour, intelligence, religiousness, kindness, and ambition, among other qualities.

A new racism emerges

Hofmann and his co-authors begin their discussion by placing the AI’s covert racism in a historical context that is quite separate from other problems with machine learning such as hallucinations, that is, when an AI system makes things up.

Instead, they map the appearance of covert racism onto the history of American racism since the end of Reconstruction in 1877.

Between the end of the American Civil War in 1865 and 1877, to a greater or lesser degree, the national government enforced the Amendments to the US Constitution that ended slavery and granted civil rights to the freedman.

This effort was abandoned in 1877 and, soon, white supremacist state governments in the South began instituting Jim Crow laws that stripped the freedmen of their civil rights and created a legal regimen of peonage that was slavery in all but name.

In the 1950s, the civil rights movement and Supreme Court decisions such as the 1954 Brown vs Board of Education (which ruled that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional) set the stage for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other federal laws that dismantled the legal structures of Jim Crow.

However, Hofmann et al write, “social scientists have argued that, unlike the racism associated with the Jim Crow era, which included overt behaviours such as name calling or more brutal acts of violence such as lynching, a ‘new racism’ happens in the present-day United States in more subtle ways that rely on a ‘colour-blind’ racist ideology”.

This ideology (which the Supreme Court of the United States endorsed when it ruled that affirmative action admissions programmeswere unconstitutional) allows individuals to “avoid mentioning race by claiming not to see colour or to ignore race but still hold negative beliefs about racialised people”.

“Importantly,” the authors argue, “such a framework emphasises the avoidance of racial terminology but maintains racial inequities”.

Two lines of defence

According to Dr Craig Kaplan, who has taught computer science at the University of California and is the founder and CEO of the consulting firm iQ Company, which focuses on artificial general intelligence (AGI), when AI reproduces the racist assumptions contained in the texts the systems were trained on, developers typically first try to further filter and curate the data on which the systems were trained.

“Some of these systems are trained on three Library of Congresses’ worth of information that could include information from books like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn that contain racist stereotypes and dialogue.

The first line of defence, then, is to try to curate the data. But, it’s impossible for humans to sort reliably and filter every instance of racial stereotype. There’s so much data that it’s a losing battle,” he said.

The second line of defence is a technique known as Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) which uses humans to question the LLMs and correct them with feedback when the LLMs’ responses are dangerous or inappropriate.

Unfortunately, Kaplan explained, it is impossible to question LLMs on every topic, so bad actors can always find ways to get into an LLM to provide dangerous or inappropriate information. As fast as bad responses can be addressed, new ways of “jailbreaking” the LLMs emerge.

Kaplan characterises RLHF as “Whack a Mole”, a child’s game in which the aim is to keep hitting the mole that pops up.

“In this game … you tell the model that when it says African Americans are less intelligent and so forth, the system gets whacked. This is called reinforcement learning with human feedback (HF). But it’s impossible to anticipate every potential racist response that the LLM might generate,” said Kaplan.

Part of the reason RLHF won’t work is because of the way AI systems work.

“How LLMs represent anything, including African Americans, is a ‘black box’, meaning it is not transparent to us,” Kaplan told University World News.

“We don’t know how the information is represented or understood by the LLM. LLMs have maybe 500 billion parameters or a trillion parameters – far too many for a human to really grasp. We don’t know which exact combination of parameters, which are just numeric values, might represent erroneous concepts about African Americans.

“We simply have no visibility into that,” he said.

Though Hofmann and his co-authors do not speculate as to what is happening in the ‘black box’, their statistical analysis shows that HF (the same as RLHF) training perversely increases the dialect prejudice.

“In fact we observed a discrepancy between what language models overtly say about African Americans and what they covertly associate with them as revealed by dialect prejudice.

This discrepancy is particularly pronounced for language models trained with human feedback, such as GPT4: our results indicate that HF training obscures the racism on the surface, but the racial stereotypes remain unaffected on a deeper level,” the study states.

Striking and dangerous assumptions

The different assumptions made because of dialect are striking.

Prompted by the (Standardised American English, SAE) sentence “I am so happy when I wake up from a bad dream because they feel too real” the LLM said the speaker is likely to be “brilliant” or “intelligent” and not likely to be “dirty”, “lazy” or “stupid”.

By contrast, the AAE sentence “I be so happy when I wake up from a bad dream cus they feelin’ too real” led the LLM to say the speaker was “dirty”, “lazy” and “stupid”.

The authors draw attention to the fact that race is never mentioned; “its presence is encoded in the AAE dialect”.

However, they continue, “we found that there is a substantial overlap in the adjectives associated most strongly with African Americans by humans and the adjectives associated most strongly with AAE by language models, particularly for the earlier Princeton Trilogy studies”.

The Princeton Trilogy was a series of studies that investigated common American racial stereotypes held by Americans. Accordingly, speakers of AAE were recommended by various LLMs for jobs like cleaner, cook, guard or attendant.

By contrast, speakers of SAE were recommended for jobs like astronaut, professor, psychiatrist, architect, lawyer, pilot and doctor.

Criminal justice experiments

If anything, what Hofmann et al found in their two criminal justice experiments is even more alarming.

In the first, they asked the LLM to decide whether an individual was guilty or not guilty of an unspecified crime using only the statement of the defendant. In the case of GPT4, when the statement was in AAE, the conviction rate was 50% higher than when the statement prompt was in SAE.

The second experiment asked the LLM if the defendant merited the death penalty for first-degree (planned and deliberate) murder. Again, the only evidence provided to the language modes was a statement made by the defendant.

In this instance GPT4 sentenced speakers of AAE to death approximately 90% more often than it did speakers of SAE.

Massive pattern detectors

Why, Kaplan was asked, do LLMs produce such unjust outcomes for African Americans?

“These systems are basically massive pattern detectors. They could be trained on millions of documents, including court records that go back decades,” he replied.

“Those old court records would reflect the prejudices of the times, when people of colour were sentenced more harshly, as they still are.

“The records may also contain court transcripts including African Americans’ speech in the context of sentencing. That could all be reflected in the data used to train an LLM.

“The AI system could recognise these patterns of prejudices of the society, reflected in the court records and bound up with the language of the African American defendants who were sentenced to death,” he explained.

Source: Study provides evidence of AI’s alarming dialect prejudice

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Terry Newman: Trudeau’s Canada safe for alleged terrorist targeting New York Jews

2024/09/09 Leave a comment

One of the first pieces in mainstream media that ventures into country of origin and values arguments against immigration in addition to housing, healthcare etc:

…Canada needs to slow immigration for a number of reasons: lack of housing (it’s unfair to bring immigrants here when they have nowhere to live), rising unemployment, increasing social unrest, and decreasing social cohesion. At the very least, Canada needs to slow immigration from countries whose residents are currently hostile to Canada and the United States. This isn’t rocket science, and the notion that even discussing immigration in any way makes you a racist needs to be put to bed once and for all. There are countries with governments and citizens who hate our way of life and want to destroy it, and they are quite vocal about it. Canada needs a government that is mature enough to recognize this reality in order to keep citizens safe. This does not make us less empathetic. It makes us smart.

Source: Terry Newman: Trudeau’s Canada safe for alleged terrorist targeting New York Jews

Filed under Immigration, Radicalization Tagged with ,

Geist: A new academic year requires a new approach to combatting antisemitism on campus

2024/09/09 Leave a comment

This one will be the hardest to implement I think. But needed:

…Third, universities must preserve their position as neutral forums for discussion, debate and learning. Often referred to as institutional neutrality, the principle dates back to the 1960s and a University of Chicago report that concluded, “There is no mechanism by which it [the university] can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives.”

In other words, institutional neutrality ensures that faculty members and students are free to express their opinions, but the institution itself should refrain from wading into political matters. That principle was undermined by the University of Windsor’s recent agreement with campus protesters, which included commitments to university advocacy and restrictions on academic partnerships that could undermine academic freedoms.

The proliferation of campus antisemitism may have caught some universities off guard last year. But this year, there are no surprises. Universities must rise to the challenge by prioritizing a safe environment for all students and faculty – one that lives up to their ideals of inclusion and non-discrimination.

Michael Geist holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa’s faculty of law.

Source: A new academic year requires a new approach to combatting antisemitism on campus

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Religious and Visible Minority Intersectionality: Education and Income

2024/09/07 Leave a comment

For the data nerds among us:

This short article continues my analysis of citizenship by examining the intersectionality between visible minorities, religious minorities and gender in terms of citizenship acquisition, education and income, 15 years old and higher.

Overall, the percentage of non-citizens is greatest among South Asian Hindus and Sikhs, likely reflecting India’s prohibition of dual citizenship. Black and Arab Muslims have higher rates of non-citizens than Christians save for Black Christian men. For the most part, being a university graduate does not appear to affect this overall pattern. None & secular have the largest median after-tax income across most visible and religious minority groups. Male non-citizens have significantly lower levels of government transfers than female non-citizens, again across most visible and religious minority groups. However, there are relatively few gender differences in poverty rates across most visible and religious minority groups.

To provide context on immigrant visible and religious minorities, Tables 1 and 2 provide the overall national and provincial percentages for all immigration periods.

Table 1 highlights the percentage of the various visible minority groups at the national and provincial levels. Overall, 53 percent are female immigrants. The higher percentage of female immigrants applies to most groups with the exception of Arabs and West Asians, where women form less than 50 percent of all immigrants.

Visible minorities form 69 percent of all immigrants but this percentage has increased to 83 percent in the most recent census period, with more Black and Filipino immigrants than Chinese, and more West Asians than Southeast Asians.

Similarly, Table 2 provides a similar breakdown for religious minorities for all immigration periods, national and provincial. Overall, women form 52 percent across all religions, with Buddhists and Christians having higher percentages of women, while Muslims being the only group with a marginally smaller percentage of women.

Religious diversity is increasing. While non-Christians formed 53 percent across all immigration periods, they formed 60 percent of immigrants in the 2016-21 census period. The percentage of Muslim immigrants has increased from 13 to 20 percent, Hindus from 6 to 11 percent, Sikhs have increased marginally from five to six percent. Both Buddhists and Jews have declined; the former from 3 to 1.5 percent, the latter from one to 0.5 percent.

Religious diversity varies among visible minority groups.

Some visible minority groups have greater religious diversity than others, notably South Asians, Blacks, Southeast Asians and to a lesser extent Arabs, West Asians and Japanese. The percentage of None & secular is highest among Chinese and Japanese. I have not included traditional given the small overall numbers and minimal numbers among visible minorities.

Table 3 highlights the overall contrast between those who have naturalized and those who remain non-citizens. Overall, the percentage of non citizens is greatest among South Asian Sikhs and Hindus, Black and Arab Muslims, Latin American and Korean None & secular, along with all religions among Japanese. The greater percentage of non-citizens among South Asian Hindus and Sikhs may reflect India’s prohibition of dual citizenship; however, China’s similar prohibition does not appear to have impacted naturalization to the same degree. Fewer women than men are naturalized among Buddhists, Southeast Asian and Korean None & secular, and all Japanese religions.

Education

Table 4 provides the population numbers by religious affiliation of visible minorities for all education levels and bachelor’s degree or higher, along with the percentage of bachelor degrees, ordered by group size. University degrees vary significantly by visible minority group, with Blacks, Latin Americans, Southeast Asians having lower rates than non visible minorities. With respect to religious minority groups, Buddhists and Sikhs have lower rates than Christians, who in turn have lower rates than Hindus, None & secular, Jewish and Muslims.

Table 5 contrasts non-citizen rates for the university educated. Highest rates for non-citizens are Japanese Buddhists and Christians, South Asian Hindus and Sikhs, followed by Black and Latin American Christians and Muslims. Overall, more women remain non-citizens than men among Buddhists, Sikhs and None & secular with exceptions for South Asian and Black women None & secular. The greatest gaps are with Southeast Asian, Korean and Japanese all major religions, and West Asian Christians.

Income: After-tax, government transfers, poverty rate

Table 6 compares median after tax income, government transfers and poverty rates by visible minority, religious minority and gender. With respect to median income, the overall pattern shows that non-citizen visible minorities, regardless of their religious affiliations, have lower median incomes than visible minority citizens, with gender varying by group. Chinese and Southeast Asian women, all religions have higher incomes than citizens, as do Arab Muslims and no religion secular.

Most racialized/religious women citizens have significantly lower median AT income save for Black Christians, Black Muslims and no religion, secular. While overall gender differences are generally small, Buddhist non-citizen women are doing relatively better than Buddhist non-citizens men and Jewish women relatively worse.

Women have higher levels of government transfers then men across all groups save West Asian Christian non-citizens, reflecting child benefits, CPP, OAS, survivor benefits, GIS supplement and possibly social assistance with the exception of traditional overall and all Japanese men, among non visible minorities, only Christian men have a lower percentage.

Table 7 compares the after-tax median income of religious minorities compared to Christians for naturalized citizens and non-citizens. Among the visible minority population, Hindu men citizens and non-citizens have higher median income than Christians, as do Jewish women citizens and Jewish men non-citizens and Arab Muslim women citizens and non-citizens. For most visible minority groups, None & secular citizens and non-citizens have higher median incomes than Christians, with the exception of South Asian women non-citizens, Black citizens and non-citizens, Chinese citizens and non-citizens, Filipino non-citizens, and Southeast Asian men citizens and all non-citizens.

The positive income gap between citizens and non-citizens is greatest for None & secular for most groups. Conversely, the positive income gap for non-citizens compared to citizens is for south Asian Hindu and Muslim men, Chinese Buddhists and None & secular, and Japanese Buddhists and None & secular.

Concluding observations

In general, visible minority group affiliation is more significant in education and income differences than religious affiliation. However, the variation within visible minority groups by religious affiliation is significant, particularly for Buddhists, Muslims and Sikhs.

Overall, the percentage of non-citizens is greatest among South Asian Hindus and Sikhs, likely reflecting India’s prohibition of dual citizenship. Black and Arab Muslims have higher rates of non-citizens than Christians save for Black Christian men. For the most part, being a university graduate does not appear to affect this overall pattern. None & secular have the largest median after-tax income across most visible and religious minority groups. Male non-citizens have significantly lower levels of government transfers than women, again across most visible and religious minority groups. However, there are relatively few gender differences in poverty rates across most visible and religious minority groups.

Just as there is diversity within visible and religious minority groups, largely reflecting country of origin, this analysis highlights the need for ongoing disaggregated data to better understand the dynamics behind immigrant integration and citizenship.

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Ottawa warned release of names of Nazi war criminals who settled in Canada could help Russia

2024/09/06 Leave a comment

Of note (hard to satisfy both groups…):

…A report by LAC on its consultation in June and July, seen by The Globe and Mail, says many stakeholders it spoke to were concerned about the implications “of associating Ukrainian names with Nazis, especially considering that this was part of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.”

They were worried that Russia could use the report to “further these allegations or conduct disinformation campaigns in Canada,” which might affect public support here for Ukraine.

Ihor Michalchyshyn, chief executive officer and executive director of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, said he thought the government is bound by Justice Deschênes’s view that Part 2 of the report should “remain confidential.”

But he added that all alleged war criminals, regardless of when or where they committed their crimes, should be brought to trial under Canadian criminal law. “If evidence of wartime criminality by any person found in Canada exists, that information must be communicated to the proper authorities for investigation,” he said.

The report by LAC on its consultation said some people expressed concern that people who committed atrocities during the Second World War “were allowed to live peacefully in Canada and never faced any justice measures due to insufficient evidence.”…

Source: Ottawa warned release of names of Nazi war criminals who settled in Canada could help Russia

Filed under Holocaust, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

The Muslim Choice: Integration or Confrontation

2024/09/05 Leave a comment

Could also be written for many religions, the fundamentalist vs moderate:

…Two narratives about Islam have developed in western European countries, where Muslims are now a substantial minority presence. The first is of people from various countries settling into their new homes determined to live in peace with (if often at a distance from) their neighbours and the state. In several cases, these newcomers make a considerable contribution to public life: 25 Muslims were elected to the UK parliament in the July general election. The second narrative is of a group aggressively insisting upon their religious rights while they assert that they are the victims of comprehensive Western racism. Occasionally, atrocities are committed, usually by young Muslim men invoking Allah and at the deliberate cost of their own lives.

Likewise, parallel narratives have developed among the Muslim communities themselves. The first understands the West as a place in which they can live relatively well, practise their religion (or not) with little or no opposition, and enjoy freedoms often not available in their own—or their parents’—birth countries. A quite separate view sees relations with state authorities and native citizens in adversarial terms—a constant struggle against a colonial legacy of Islamophobic prejudice, hostility, suspicion, and barriers to freedom of expression and female dress that demand a militant response.

The attacks on mosques and individual Muslims during the August riots demonstrate that bigotry is still a problem among some cohorts of the UK population. But Islamophobia is also a much-abused and hotly contested term. Long before the summer riots, accusations of Islamophobia were used by those eager to deflect—or even reverse—blame for Muslim violence, and amplified by sympathetic parts of the media and some public figures. 

Yet polling does suggest that moderate British Muslim attitudes and communities are not a myth. In 2020, the Crest consultancy launched a research project that compared polls and focus groups of Muslims in eight towns and cities with a comparative group of the general population. The project concluded that: 

We found majorities of British Muslims trust the police, are concerned about Islamist extremism, support the aims of the [government’s counter-extremism] Prevent programme and would refer someone to it if they suspected that they were being radicalised. We found that the views of British Muslims frequently mirror those of the general population and even where they differ they rarely do so dramatically. 

Crest also found that British Muslims have a “broader range of views than is commonly acknowledged by politicians, the media and other participants in the debate on extremism.” The authors do not use the phrase “Muslim community,” since they believe the Muslim population is too diverse to make such a term useful. Instead, Muslims are seen as members of a common faith with differing backgrounds, ideas, and customs who have largely adapted to life in a new country.

As the August riots died down, another poll was conducted by More in Common, a think tank established in 2016 after the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox, and named after a House of Commons speech in which she said, “We have far more in common than that which divides us.” Its findings underlined the moderation of the British population as a whole and appeared to show that we do indeed have much in common in our views on extremism. Between 87 and 97 percent of respondents said, “The riots do not speak for me.” The outlier was Reform Party supporters, 41 percent of whom said that the riots did, in some measure, speak for them….

John Lloyd was a domestic and foreign correspondent for the Financial Times and a co-founder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Source: The Muslim Choice: Integration or Confrontation

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →