Diversité et emploi: la piètre performance de la Ville de Montréal | Bouazza Mache

2017/01/11 Leave a comment

Bouazza Mache on the ongoing lack of representation in Montreal with respect to the municipal government (Montreal is 32 percent visible minority, Montreal CMA is 20 percent):

Encore une énième recherche qui démontre par l’absurde que les immigrants, souvent plus diplômés, sont les plus touchés par le chômage, en particulier dans la ville la plus colorée du Québec. Ainsi, nous apprenons dans cette étude, menée par l’Institut du Québec (IdQ), en collaboration avec la Chambre de commerce du Montréal métropolitain (CCMM) et Montréal International (MI), que « les immigrants sont plus instruits, mais chômeurs ».

Plusieurs recherches et enquêtes ont montré auparavant, par les chiffres et à coup d’investigations, que c’est devenu une réalité criante. Il y a eu même des études sectorielles sur le thème, comme la présence de la diversité dans les médias, dans le système de l’éducation ou encore, la situation des femmes racisées. Et à chaque fois, les résultats vont dans le même sens, négatif.

Il y a 18 mois, je soulevais le caractère folklorique de gérer la diversité à Montréal, en particulier en ce qui a trait à l’emploi. Et six mois plus tard, en janvier 2016, j’ai demandé au maire Coderre de prêcher la diversité par l’exemple, en mettant à niveau la représentativité des minorités visibles dans les effectifs municipaux, et de publier les résultats du plan d’action en accès à l’égalité en emploi de 2013-2015.

Or, je viens de découvrir qu’un « plan d’action pour la diversité en emploi 2016-2019» a été publié en mai 2016 par la Ville de Montréal, sans faire trop de bruit. Ce document expose sommairement les réalisations des plans précédents et élabore les objectifs pour 2019.

Les réalisations de l’administration Coderre ne sont nullement reluisantes: le pourcentage des minorités visibles dans l’effectif municipal peine à dépasser le cap des 12% (en 2015). Dans certaines catégories d’employés, il demeure très difficile de recruter auprès des groupes visés par le plan en accès à l’égalité en emploi. C’est le cas des cadres/contremaitres et du personnel pompier.

Mais le problème ne se limite pas uniquement aux demandeurs d’emploi. Il frappe aussi de plein fouet celles et ceux qui ont décidé de se lancer en affaires. Les réseaux fermés et l’accointance avec les décideurs (acheteurs) constituent un obstacle majeur face à la pénétration des marchés publics.

La faute à qui?

En premier lieu aux gouvernements qui se sont succédé et qui ont préféré gaver les statistiques pour faire contrepoids à un reste-du-Canada « menaçant », sans tenir compte des réalités sociale et économique. On dirait que la politique d’immigration a été en décalage total avec la société et le milieu des affaires.

La stigmatisation récurrente de certains politiciens et acteurs médiatiques envers certains groupes minoritaires envoie également un mauvais message aux employeurs qui hésitent à embarquer dans différents plans de recrutement.

Résultat : une ou deux générations d’immigrants, arabes et musulmans en particulier, laissées pour compte.

Source: Diversité et emploi: la piètre performance de la Ville de Montréal | Bouazza Mache

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Diversity is key to success in corporate Canada

2017/01/10 Leave a comment

Jennifer Reynolds, of Toronto-based Women in Capital Markets, on the business case for diversity:

In my role, I have the pleasure of spending time at universities across the country, meeting with students to talk about their careers and the important role they can play as future business leaders in Canada’s economy.

I am not sure who coined the term, but I often hear Canada’s leadership teams referred to as “male, pale and stale”. While I consider “stale” a bit harsh, the “male and pale” is hard to deny. A mere 12 per cent of TSX publically listed company directors are women, and visible minorities make up 4.5 per cent of FP500 company directors in Canada. One could argue that universities in Canada were not all that ethnically diverse 30 years ago when the current crop of senior leaders were graduating, however, you can’t argue that there were no women there. Women have represented 50 per cent (or more) of university graduates for 30 years. Women have also been abundantly present in middle management roles for years. The pool of female talent for leadership roles in our economy has existed for decades, yet less than 20 per cent of senior officer roles are held by women and 40 per cent of leadership teams in Canada have no women at all.

So as this current generation graduates from universities, can we tell them with confidence that 20 years from now Canada’s leadership teams will look like their classrooms? History would argue that “same likes same” in the corporate world. Unless leaders start challenging that overwhelming desire to hire and promote in one’s own likeness, we will find the disconnect between the demographic in our universities and that in the corporate boardroom continues to persist. The reality is, it will take intentional and tenacious focus to hire, develop and promote diverse talent.

To date, corporate Canada hasn’t been all that strong at developing diverse talent. If we want Canada to lead when it comes to innovation, productivity and economic competitiveness, we must take advantage of the immense pool of diverse talent in this country. Our diversity can be a significant competitive advantage. Volumes of research by credible organizations like Credit Suisse, McKinsey and Catalyst have demonstrated higher levels of gender diversity in leadership result in stronger financial performance, same hold true for ethnic diversity.

If you are a leader that buys into the thesis that you need to access the best of 100 per cent of the talent pool to win in the 21st century, you need to start the hard work now. You need to equip your management team with the motivation and tools to change the way they recruit and develop talent. Most importantly, you need to be the biggest, most vocal and tenacious champion of the need for diversity in your business’s talent pool. Even those with the best of intentions fall back on comfortable practices in challenging times. It will take a long-term view to change habits and culture in any organization and the CEO must champion that change.

When young people start their careers in an organization, they are looking for role models. People they relate to and aspire to emulate. If they don’t see anyone that looks like them, if they don’t fit in with the dominant group, that can appear to be a barrier to their prospects. It needs to be clear that “fit” is not “sameness”, that difference of opinion and perspective is valued, and that the leadership team of tomorrow, will look different than the leadership team today.

The best management teams, the ones the next generation will want to work for, will need to evolve from amalgamating power in one dominant person or group, to recognizing that the highest value they can bring to their organizations is to empower other people. To give power to diversity of thought, ideas and solutions. That is innovation in the 21st century.

Source: Diversity is key to success in corporate Canada – The Globe and Mail

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Black people 3 times more likely to be street checked in Halifax, police say

2017/01/10 Leave a comment

Not surprisingly but still alarming and similar data to that of other cities such as Toronto:

Ashley Taylor tenses up every time he sees a police cruiser because he knows what could be coming next.

“Being pulled over by the police for me,” the Nova Scotia resident said, taking a pause, “it’s normal.”

Taylor, 42, estimates he has been stopped by police an average of three times a year. The student support worker at Dartmouth High School in said it usually happens on his drive to work.

“Is it racial profiling? Possibly.”

He’s not surprised to hear a CBC News Investigation finding that Halifax police are more likely to stop and check people who are black.

In fact, according to information released by Halifax Regional Police, black people are three times more likely to be the subject of a so-called street check than white individuals.

Graphic

Halifax Regional Police began recording data of street checks in 2005. (CBC)

Street checks are used to “look at individuals who are doing suspicious activity,” said police Chief Jean-Michel Blais.

Source: Black people 3 times more likely to be street checked in Halifax, police say – Nova Scotia – CBC News

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Lisée veut «aller plus loin» pour séduire les communautés culturelles

2017/01/10 Leave a comment

Given that Lisée has been all over the map on identity issues and ethnic groups, hard to see this ‘seduction’ succeeding:

Le chef du Parti québécois (PQ), Jean-François Lisée, souhaite «aller plus loin qu’avant» pour séduire les communautés culturelles et il croit que sa proposition de ne pas faire de référendum dans un premier mandat risque de l’avantager en ce sens.

Le fait qu’on n’ait pas décidé de tenir de référendum dans le premier mandat est une façon de détendre l’atmosphère», a expliqué M. Lisée, en point de presse, dimanche après-midi, à Montréal.

Le chef du PQ a rencontré les médias pour discuter de son plan d’action qui vise à attirer dans le giron péquiste les Québécois issus de l’immigration, un électorat qui a tendance à voter davantage pour le Parti libéral du Québec (PLQ).

Pour ce faire, il a confié le mandat à sa conseillère spéciale en matière de diversité, Évelyne Abitbol, de tenter de tisser des liens avec ces électeurs. Carole Poirier, la whip en chef du PQ et porte-parole sur l’immigration et les communautés culturelles, s’occupera pour sa part à mobiliser les membres et ses collègues députés sur cette question.

«Pendant la campagne au leadership, Jean-François a réuni une vaste coalition de la diversité. Cette vaste coalition, il faut maintenir ces liens et la rendre active», a soutenu Mme Poirier.

Selon le chef du Parti québécois, le fait de mettre le référendum de côté pendant quatre ans permettra au parti d’accueillir plus de communautés culturelles, qui seront plus réceptives à ses messages.

«Il y a des gens qui sont d’accord avec nous, mais qui ne nous connaissent pas assez (…) Nous, on a décidé de ne pas en tenir (de référendum), alors est-ce qu’on peut ouvrir les portes, les oreilles, les conversations? On pense qu’il va y avoir plus de fluidité», a-t-il expliqué.

M. Lisée estime que certains de ces électeurs ne connaissent pas assez bien de son parti parce qu’ils se font toujours dire par le PLQ qu’un vote pour le PQ équivaut à un vote contre le Canada.

Le chef du PQ ne s’est pas avancé sur ce qui a pu nuire à son parti par le passé auprès des communautés culturelles, mais il dit vouloir profiter du vent de changement amené par la récente course à la direction.

«Cette curiosité et cette présence de beaucoup de membres de la diversité dans ma campagne, dans celle d’Alexandre (Cloutier), de Martine (Ouellet) et de Véronique (Hivon), pour moi, c’est un fait nouveau intéressant. Il faut miser là-dessus», a-t-il souligné.

Interrogé sur la possibilité que le PQ ravive la Charte des valeurs de l’ancien gouvernement Marois sur laquelle il avait été très critiqué, M. Lisée a fait valoir que ses propositions sur laïcité étaient beaucoup plus «pragmatiques» et «ouvertes» que l’ancienne politique prônée par son parti.

«C’est clair que notre message est plus attrayant pour les membres de la diversité qui ont une vision plus laïque sur l’avenir du Québec et ils sont très nombreux», a-t-il soutenu en anglais.

Le Parti québécois affirme qu’il mettra en place une «série d’actions» dans les prochaines semaines, ce qui inclut la création d’un comité pour la diversité dans les instances du parti.

Source: Lisée veut «aller plus loin» pour séduire les communautés culturelles | Vicky Fragasso-Marquis | Politique québécoise

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Conservative Party’s fortunes hinge on immigration policy: Ibbitson

2017/01/09 Leave a comment

Good overview by Ibbitson of the varied immigration positions of the Conservative leadership contenders (the Harper support mentioned below reflected in part the weakness of the other parties as well as the strong outreach by former Minister Jason Kenney):

Under Stephen Harper, the Conservatives enjoyed broad support from immigrant Canadians, many of whom are economically and socially more conservative than many native-born Canadians.

But when the party promised during the 2015 election campaign to root out “barbaric cultural practices,” it made Conservatives look anti-immigrant.

New Canadians will support the Conservatives, but only if they believe that Conservatives support them.

Source: Conservative Party’s fortunes hinge on immigration policy – The Globe and Mail

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ADL and Wiesenthal Center don’t seem to agree on anti-Semitism in America | Bloggish | Jewish Journal

2017/01/09 Leave a comment

Interesting contrast (ADL’s approach the more reasonable one):

Shortly before the New Year, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, both human rights organizations dedicated to fighting hate speech, each put out the top 10 list of anti-Semitic incidents in 2016 (the Wiesenthal Center’s list also included anti-Israel incidents – more on this below).

The two lists are starkly different, and that difference is worth paying attention to.

Numbers one through four on the ADL list are all related to the election, apparently arising from the Donald Trump moment and the new life it gave to the seedier elements of American xenophobia.

On the Wiesenthal Center list, this type of anti-Semitism is featured just once, coming in at number five with Richard Spencer’s memorable tryst at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C. Number one on this list is the failure of the Obama administration to veto a recent United Nations resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

The difference is notable because in theory, it shouldn’t exist. These two organizations are not identical, to be sure. The Wiesenthal Center is Los Angeles-based, for one, and incorporates Holocaust memory to a greater extent in its mission.

But both have at their core the same goal of fighting anti-Semitism. The overlap is great enough to cause some amount of institutional rivalry.

“ADL is always a little bit worried that the center in L.A., the Wiesenthal Center, will steal its thunder,” Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University told me in November. “So they always have kind of one eye on the Wiesenthal Center.”

Why, then, do two organizations with the same ideals come to vastly different conclusions about where to look for the most troubling incidents of anti-Semitism?

I brought this question up during a recent interview with Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean of the Wiesenthal Center. He pointed out to me that the lists were in fact not the same and that his organization, unlike the ADL, had included “anti-Israel incidents” as a criterion. That’s why the U.N. resolution ended up at the top of the Wiesenthal Center list without appearing at all on the ADL list.

Fine. But that doesn’t explain the massive discrepancy between, on the one hand, nearly half of a top 10 list being dedicated to right-wing anti-Semitism, and, on the other, a single item buried halfway down.

It’s easy to chalk this up to politics. Critics of Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL CEO, like to point out that he came to the job from a post in the Obama administration. In their mind, he’s a left-wing actor that has turned the ADL into a basically partisan operation.

But I take Greenblatt at his word when he told me that during the campaign trail “I said what I said and we did what we did because it was consistent with ADL’s historic role.”

Greenblatt, it seems to me, is too smart to nakedly put his politics on display. If he really were a leftist shill, he’d probably be smarter about hiding it, anyway. I’m guessing – and we can only guess as to people’s intentions – that both lists reflects a real concern about where anti-Semitism exists in America today.

The net result is that we have two lists that tell us more about the organizations that generated them than they do about anti-Semitism.

Source: ADL and Wiesenthal Center don’t seem to agree on anti-Semitism in America | Bloggish | Jewish Journal

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Austria to consider total headscarf ban for public servants – The Globe and Mail

2017/01/09 Leave a comment

Hard to see how this will assist community relations and integration:

Austria’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Integration Sebastian Kurz said on Friday he wants to ban public servants, including school teachers, from wearing the Islamic headscarf.

Mr. Kurz, of the Christian Conservative People’s Party (OVP), is working on a draft law with Muna Duzdar, a junior minister from the OVP’s senior Social Democrat coalition partner who has an Arab family background and is Muslim.

If passed by Austria’s parliament, the nationwide ban would be stricter than laws in France, where only the full body veil is illegal, or Germany, where the highest court in 2015 restricted lawmakers’ scope to ban teachers from wearing the headscarf.

“Because there (schools), it’s about the effect of role models and the influence on young people. Austria is religion-friendly but also a secular state,” Mr. Kurz said, according to a spokesman.

Christian crosses, widespread in staunchly Catholic Austria, should be allowed in classrooms, Mr. Kurz said, referring to the country’s “historically grown culture.”

An adviser to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) said in March companies should be allowed to prohibit staff from wearing the Islamic headscarf but only as part of a general ban on religious and political symbols.

Mr. Kurz is revamping Austria’s integration laws and would also like to include a ban on full body veils and restrictions on the distribution of the Koran by Salafist Muslims, Kurz’s spokesman said.

A spokeswoman for Austria’s most prominent Muslim group, IGGIO, noted that discrimination in the workplace on religious grounds was illegal in Austria and said: “After such a statement, trust is badly shaken.”

She said such a ban would send the wrong signal, not least because working women wearing the headscarf could help overcome deep “patriarchal prejudices.”

Ms. Duzdar, the junior minister, told Reuters a person cannot be discriminated against in the workplace on the grounds of their religion and said she wanted to wait for a final ECJ ruling on the issue before sending the law to parliament.

“I’m open to discussions about this but in reality one cannot pick individual religions. If you discuss religious dress and symbols, you have to speak about all religions. We work on a dialogue with all religious communities,” she said.

Source: Austria to consider total headscarf ban for public servants – The Globe and Mail

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The Canada experiment: is this the world’s first ‘postnational’ country? | Charles Foran | The Guardian

2017/01/07 Leave a comment

Nice long-read by Foran, commenting on what ‘post-national’ means in practice:

Can any nation truly behave “postnationally” – ie without falling back on the established mechanisms of state governance and control? The simple answer is no.

Canada has borders, where guards check passports, and an army. It asserts the occasional modest territorial claim. Trudeau is more aware than most of these mechanisms: he oversees them.

It can also be argued that Canada enjoys the luxury of thinking outside the nation-state box courtesy of its behemoth neighbour to the south. The state needn’t defend its borders too forcefully or make that army too large, and Canada’s economic prosperity may be as straightforward as continuing to do 75% of its trade with the US. Being liberated, the thinking goes, from the economic and military stresses that most other countries face gives Canada the breathing room, and the confidence, to experiment with more radical approaches to society. Lucky us.

Nor is there uniform agreement within Canada about being post-anything. When the novelist Yann Martel casually described his homeland as “the greatest hotel on earth,” he meant it as a compliment – but some read it as an endorsement of newcomers deciding to view Canada as a convenient waystation: a security, business or real-estate opportunity, with no lasting responsibilities attached.

Likewise, plenty of Canadians believe we possess a set of normative values, and want newcomers to prove they abide by them. Kellie Leitch, who is running for the leadership of the Conservative party, suggested last autumn that we screen potential immigrants for “anti-Canadian values.” A minister in the previous Conservative government, Chris Alexander, pledged in 2015 to set up a tip-line for citizens to report “barbaric cultural practises”. And in the last election, the outgoing prime minister, Stephen Harper, tried in vain to hamstring Trudeau’s popularity by confecting a debate about the hijab.

To add to the mix, the French-speaking province of Quebec already constitutes one distinctive nation, as do the 50-plus First Nations spread across the country. All have their own perspectives and priorities, and may or may not be interested in a postnational frame. (That said, Trudeau is a bilingual Montrealer, and Quebeca vibrantly diverse society.)

Though sovereign since 1867, Canada lingered in the shadow of the British empire for nearly a century. Not until the 1960s did we fly our own flag and sing our own anthem, and not until 1982 did Trudeau’s father, Pierre, patriate the constitution from the UK, adding a charter of rights. He also introduced multiculturalism as official national policy. The challenge, then, might have seemed to define a national identity to match.

This was never going to be easy, given our colonial hangover and American cultural influence. Marshall McLuhan, one of the last century’s most seismic thinkers, felt we shouldn’t bother. “Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity,” he said in 1963.

According to poet and scholar BW Powe, McLuhan saw in Canada the raw materials for a dynamic new conception of nationhood, one unshackled from the state’s “demarcated borderlines and walls, its connection to blood and soul,” its obsession with “cohesion based on a melting pot, on nativist fervor, the idea of the promised land”. Instead, the weakness of the established Canadian identity encouraged a plurality of them – not to mention a healthy flexibility and receptivity to change. Once Canada moved away from privileging denizens of the former empire to practising multiculturalism, it could become a place where “many faiths and histories and visions” would co-exist.

That’s exactly what happened. If McLuhan didn’t see how Chinese, Japanese, Ukrainian and later Italian, Greek and Eastern European arrivals underpinned the growth of Canada in that sleepy first century, he surely registered before his death in 1980 the positive impact of successive waves of South Asians, Vietnamese and Caribbean immigrants. The last several decades have been marked by an increasingly deep diversity, particularly featuring mainland Chinese, Indians and Filipinos.

Others have expanded on McLuhan’s insight. The writer and essayist John Ralston Saul (co-founder of the charity for which I work) calls Canada a “revolutionary reversal of the standard nation-state myth”, and ascribes much of our radical capacity – not a term you often hear applied to Canadians – to our application of the Indigenous concept of welcome. “Space for multiple identities and multiple loyalties,” he says of these philosophies, the roots of which go deep in North American soil, “for an idea of belonging which is comfortable with contradictions.”

How unique is any of this? Ralston Saul argues that Canada’s experiment is “perpetually incomplete”. In other countries, a sovereignty movement like Quebec’s might have led to bloodshed. Instead, aside from a brief period of violent separatist agitation culminating in kidnappings and a murder in 1970, Canada and Quebec have been in constant compromise mode, arguing at the ballot box and finding ways to accommodate. Canada’s incomplete identity is, in this sense, a positive, a spur to move forward without spilling blood, to keep thinking and evolving – perhaps, in the end, simply to respond to newness without fear.

None of this raw populism is going away in 2017, especially as it gets further irritated by the admittedly formidable global challenge of how to deal with unprecedented numbers of people crossing national borders, with or without visas. But denial, standing your nativist ground, doing little or nothing to evolve your society in response to both a crisis and, less obviously, an opportunity: these are reactions, not actions, and certain to make matters worse.

If the pundits are right that the world needs more Canada, it is only because Canada has had the history, philosophy and possibly the physical space to do some of that necessary thinking about how to build societies differently. Call it postnationalism, or just a new model of belonging: Canada may yet be of help in what is guaranteed to be the difficult year to come.

Source: The Canada experiment: is this the world’s first ‘postnational’ country? | Charles Foran | World news | The Guardian

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The burdens and expectations of this year’s critically acclaimed, diversity-forward films – The Globe and Mail

2017/01/07 Leave a comment

Good read on the industry’s ongoing diversity challenge and how this year’s films are strong award contenders (I saw Moonlight at TIFF and well worth seeing):

You know Moonlight even if you haven’t stepped inside a movie theatre in months. Ever since Barry Jenkins’s intimate drama about one black man’s coming of age premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this past September, it has dominated the cultural conversation. Walk a block in any major city and you’ll encounter giant bus ads touting its brilliance. Read any film critic’s year-end Top 10 list and you’ll find it near the top (Metacritic has the film topping 52 lists). Ask any industry insider and they will tell you Moonlight is the film to beat at this year’s Academy Awards.

Which is all quite a radical shift from this time last year, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its nominations for the 2016 Oscars, and exactly zero non-white performers were nominated in the acting categories. For the second year in a row. In an instant, the social-media hashtag #OscarsSoWhite became easy shorthand for the industry, with the Oscars themselves cast as, in Chris Rock’s words, “the White People’s Choice Awards.”

But Moonlight, and a handful of other films, might represent a long-overdue turnaround. In the last quarter of 2016 – what is traditionally known as awards season, when studios release their prestige pictures – there has been a notable surge of heavily marketed, critically acclaimed, diversity-forward films dominating the marketplace: Moonlight, certainly, but also the historical drama Hidden Figures; the interracial drama Loving; the Barack Obama biopic Barry; two monumental documentaries from Ava DuVernay (13th) and Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro); the tearjerker Lion starring Dev Patel; and the powerful Fences, directed by and starring Denzel Washington.

All promise to be strong presences at this year’s Academy Awards – and all offer the hope of a sea change in the industry, an acknowledgment that Hollywood is finally waking up to the need for diverse voices, both in front of and behind the camera.

Or is it the mere illusion of a sea change?

The industry has been down this road before, after all. In 2002, Denzel Washington and Halle Berry became the first black performers to win both top acting Oscars in the same year (for, respectively, Training Day and Monster’s Ball). Five years later, seven performers of colour dominated the 2006 Academy Awards’ acting categories: Will Smith, Djimon Hounsou, Eddie Murphy, Rinko Kikuchi, Adriana Barraza and eventual winners Forest Whitaker and Jennifer Hudson. But instead of those moments leading to permanent change, the industry fell back on whatever promises those recognitions may have implied.

“When Denzel and Berry won, the industry said, ‘Well, that’ll do for the next 20 years! Good job, everyone, pack it up!’” jokes Darnell Hunt, director of UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and an expert on diversity in the film business. It’s a good line, but there are real tears mixed with the humour. While Hollywood considers itself a bastion of liberal values and progressive politics, it has consistently proven loath to highlight diverse performers and filmmakers, and in recent years has even lost what little progress had been made. (Last February, Hunt released a study that found that film jobs still go to “overwhelmingly white male performers and filmmakers,” with minorities losing ground in acting, writing, directing and producing jobs since his previous study came out in 2015.)

Is Moonlight, then, and its fellow crop of Oscar favourites – each worthy in their own way, each carrying unfair burdens and expectations – part of a deliberate reaction to the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, or a simple matter of good timing bereft of any meaningful industry change?

“In the case of Loving, it certainly isn’t a reaction – the movie’s been in the works for four years, and that’s just the kind of gestation period it takes for features,” says Peter Saraf, one of the drama’s producers. “But we are seeing more films that are starting to engage on issues that have been ignored for a while.”

Cameron Bailey, artistic director for the Toronto International Film Festival, agrees, though adds that there’s another factor to consider. “What we’re seeing is a reaction to the establishment that elevates movies to the public consciousness. The companies that sell and buy movies, the exhibitors, the critics – all those areas are probably paying more attention and are more conscious of trying to address diversity than a year or two ago,” says Bailey, whose festival this past fall hosted premieres of Moonlight, Loving, I Am Not Your Negro and Lion, as well as a sneak peek of Hidden Figures. “It all makes it impossible to ignore the great work coming from African-American or Asian American or Latin American artists.”

This cultural elevation, Bailey says, can be framed as an evolving democratization of just how movies get valued. “It used to be critics telling audiences what was great and what they had to see. And it still is, but it’s also Twitter and Facebook now, and Black Twitter has also been incredibly vocal and increasingly influential,” he says, referring to the loosely defined network of social-media users focused on interests to the black community, from politics to the arts. “Look at the reaction on Black Twitter to, say, the new Black Panther movie being developed by Disney. Every time there’s a casting announcement, Twitter freaks out! That’s great, but what it tells you is that people who make movies and green-light them are finally paying attention to social media – and if they want to make money, they follow that interest.”

“We talk about the industry as if it’s a monolith, and of course, at the end of the day, it isn’t – all those people sitting in those rooms making decisions are ultimately paying lip service to the notion that they want to get their product to an audience,” says Nina Shaw, a lawyer and industry power player who represents some of the top black artists working in Hollywood today, including DuVernay and musician John Legend. “So when you see something you like, you tweet about it, and use all your social-media outlets to encourage other people to do the same. And I’m telling you, the folks on this side of town are looking at those things and using them as indicators as to what audiences want to see.”

Source: The burdens and expectations of this year’s critically acclaimed, diversity-forward films – The Globe and Mail

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The U.S. Army Just Made It Easier for Religious Troops to Wear Beards, Turbans and Hijabs | TIME

2017/01/07 Leave a comment

Just in time prior to the Trump inauguration:

U.S. service men and women who wish to wear a turban, beard or hijab for religious reasons will be able to gain approval thanks to revised uniform regulations that aim to better accommodate religious minorities serving in the military.

The revisions — outlined in a memorandum signed by U.S. Army Secretary Eric Fanning earlier this week — allow brigade-level commanders to approve religious accommodations, Reuters reports.

In the past, the authority to approve such accommodations rested with the Army secretary.

Lieut. Colonel Randy Taylor, the army’s director of public affairs and assistant secretary, said in a statement, “Our goal is to balance soldier readiness and safety with the accommodation of our soldiers’ faith practices, and this latest directive allows us to do that.”

Under the new guidelines, Muslim and Sikh servicemen will be able to wear beards, provided they are shorter than 2 in., rolled up or tied. Turbans, patka (under turbans), as well as head scarves or hijab for women, are permitted under the new rules. The memo also stipulates that hair braids, cornrows, twists and locks are also allowed.

“We are pleased with the progress that this new policy represents for religious tolerance and diversity,” Harsimran Kaur, legal director of civil-rights-advocacy group the Sikh Coalition, told Reuters.

Previous Army uniform rules had clashed with religious clothing and grooming customs, making it difficult for soldiers to serve without compromising their religious beliefs and traditions. Many American Sikhs have protested the grooming rules, leading to several court cases.

Source: The U.S. Army Just Made It Easier for Religious Troops to Wear Beards, Turbans and Hijabs | TIME

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