The Difference Between Racial Bias and White Supremacy | TIME

2016/12/01 Leave a comment

Always find John McWhorter’s pieces interesting and relevant, and his valid point that the left has to guard itself against the very same criticisms it makes of the right:

Among too many these days, the term “white supremacy” has become, of all things, a kind of hate speech.

Of course, the meaning of words and terms always changes and always has. “Audition” once referred to hearing and only gradually came to refer to hearing someone try out for a singing part on stage, upon which the term was extended to any kind of tryout at all. Like “white supremacy” has, terms have a way of coming to refer to less extreme manifestations of what they first referred to—”terrible” once meant truly horrific and now can be used about getting stuck in traffic.

But words can be more than words. The N-word, the F-word referring to gay men and the C-word referring to an anatomical part are slurs, tools for injury, not just dictionary terms. We also all understand that a word or term or reference can be a dogwhistle. “Law and order” can have a racialized meaning, for example.

The term “dogwhistle” is even an example, in that we typically use it in reference to the right wing. However, white supremacy is now a dogwhistle itself. A leftist contingent is now charging any white person who seriously questions a position associated with people of color as a white supremacist. The idea is that if you go against a certain orthodoxy, then it isn’t only that you disagree, but that you also wish white people were still in charge, that you want people of color to sit down and shut up.

This is hasty and unfair. David Duke is, indeed, a white supremacist. The alt-right is, indeed, white supremacist. For one, they openly say so. Are there some whites who are more codedly white supremacist, even if they don’t quite know it? One assumes so—but the rhetorical brush is being applied much too broadly. After all, if whites accept anything a person of color states, is this not a new form of condescension? These days, the term “white supremacy” is being used not as an argument but as a weapon.

“White supremacist” is a new way of saying “racist” while stepping around the steadily increasing awareness that that word, too, is being wielded in sloppy ways. Writing “white supremacist” is a way of making the reader jump, in the way that “prejudiced” and “racist” once were. What handier way of driving your critique home than implying that your target would have broken bread with the Confederacy, stood at the school doors at the behest of Orville Faubus, or today would be happy to sip coffee at conferences with well-spoken alt-righters?

Of course, no one means precisely that—but educated people cannot lecture the world on how words must be used carefully, that we must understand words’ larger resonances, while casually throwing around a term that calls to mind black men hanging from trees. Never mind that it’s mean.

More to the point, the left sinks to the level of the right with its own dogwhistles, intolerance and exaggerations. This is not a call for the left to suppress their anger or lie down with the right as the lamb to their lion. Criticism is vital, and not always in emotionless tones. However, we must avoid the mores of the sandbox. Nietzsche’s point, that too often punishment is rooted in a desire for revenge rather than correction, is relevant.

If you make a claim that someone desires that white people be in charge and muzzle the opinions and opportunities of people of color, you should be able to prove it. No, the fact that psychological tests reveal subtle racial biases in whites does not justify calling any white person’s questioning of the views of a person of color a white supremacist. That’s an athletic jump from the subtle to the stark, from the subliminal to the egregious.

It is tragic how ordinary that jump is becoming—it isn’t only the famous being paintballed this way. My Columbia colleague Mark Lilla has presented an argument that the extremes of identity politics should be pruned in favor of a class-based politics in order to further the goals of liberals and the left. Katherine Franke of the Columbia University law school has tarred him for this as, well, you can guess. This is the quintessence of linguistic violence.

To use “white supremacy” as a battering ram is, in the end, as uncivilized as anything offensive to liberals scrawled on a wall or spewed into a comments section. Criticism? Of course. Recreational abuse? One is to rise above it.

Source: The Difference Between Racial Bias and White Supremacy | TIME

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Stop Playing Defense on Hate Crimes | TIME

2016/12/01 Leave a comment

Some good insights by researchers Elizabeth Levy Paluck and Michael Chwe but hard to square the core recommendation that those ‘elite influencers’ within ethnic or other groups admonish hate or disrespectful speech when so much of the tone comes from the President-elect:

How do we stop this violence? Looking in from the outside and reporting events after they occur is not enough. We must understand the perpetrators’ motivations.

We often think that perpetrators simply mimic the hateful speech and actions of others. In doing so, we discount the effects that community or peer pressure can bring to bear. In fact, research shows that potential perpetrators of hate crimes and bullying are actually quite conscious of the degree to which their community supports or condemns their actions. 

For example, research has found that when a person hears others tell racist or sexist jokes, his or her tolerance for gender or racial discrimination increases. At an extreme level, it can encourage genocide: David Yanagizawa-Drott has shown that inflammatory messages played on a hate radio station, aimed at motivating Hutus to murder their Tutsi neighbors in Rwanda, had a greater effect when people in surrounding neighborhoods were also exposed to the same radio messages. In other words, hate radio alone did not increase individual hatred or violence; rather hate radio coupled with widespread exposure resulted in greater community support for violence.

Potential perpetrators do not simply “imitate” Trump but rather are encouraged to act by the fact that he garnered so many votes and supporters. They infer that they have a better chance of escaping social and legal sanction than before.

To stop hateful actions, potential perpetrators must be convinced that those in their community are opposed to this behavior. Who can best communicate this opposition? 

Kevin Munger recently found that white males who racially harass others on Twitter reduced their use of slurs when another white male with a large number of followers admonished them with a tweet (black males, and white males with few followers, were not as successful). In schools, Elizabeth Levy Paluck, Hana Shepherd and Peter Aronow showed that students who receive the lion’s share of attention in student social networks have an outsized influence over school social norms: when they stand up against bullying and student-on-student harassment, student conflict drops by up to 30%. 

These studies suggest that some people are better than others at delegitimizing hatred and violence. These “elite influencers” are more likely to come from a community considered important by a potential perpetrator—whether their racial community or their friendship group. Also, these influencers are more likely to be higher status—connected to many people within those networks.

But whether or not you are an elite influencer in your own community, evidence shows that the old-fashioned strength-in-numbers approach also works. Large numbers of people who assert values of inclusiveness and tolerance in a big, public way can change minds and behavior. Large media events or assemblies that create “common knowledge” of these values, that show each member of the community that every other member shares these values, are the most successful.

For example, a public service announcement during the Super Bowl that encourages people to report domestic violence is more successful in deterring domestic violence than an ad in a magazine; a potential perpetrator infers that the millions watching the Super Bowl find domestic violence unacceptable and are more likely to stand against and report offenders. 

A recent study also showed that people who watched a political speech in the company of a crowd (in this case, a speech by U.S. House Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-CT, on the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act), are more persuaded by the speech. Listening together, as opposed to watching alone or watching a video viewed by others at different times, is more effective because when communities synchronize their attention, people process the message in a deeper and more serious manner. 

The alternative, in which communities do not collectively bear witness to and support anti-hate speech, is a scenario in which potential perpetrators will feel more and more emboldened.

Schools, universities and localities cannot just play defense and wait for their members to be victimized. Potential perpetrators must clearly understand that everyone around them, regardless of their political views, believes that hate is unacceptable. Elite influencers in every community can help to broadcast this message. Standing with them, there is strength in numbers, and as individuals and communities, we need to come together to speak as loudly and publicly as possible.

 Source: Stop Playing Defense on Hate Crimes | TIME

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New policy template aims to encourage gender diversity on boards

2016/12/01 Leave a comment

Good initiative and one benefit of having a policy is the discussion it engenders:

Canada’s leading association for corporate directors is hoping to nudge more companies to add women to their boards by offering a free template of a board-dversity policy.

The Institute of Corporate Directors has teamed up with law firm Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLC to develop a general model of a board-diversity policy, aiming it at smaller companies that have not complied with new diversity-reporting guidelines. The template includes alternative wording options so companies can customize the content and it is free to download from both organizations’ websites.

ICD chief executive officer Rahul Bhardwaj said his organization launched the project after seeing the results of a review of diversity-reporting rules by securities regulators in September. The review showed that just 21 per cent of 677 companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange clearly disclosed that they have adopted a gender-diversity policy for their boards and their executive ranks. While that is an improvement from the 15 per cent of last year, it still signals slow progress since regulators introduced new “comply or explain” rules in 2015 requiring companies to report on their approach to gender diversity.

Mr. Bhardwaj said he was concerned about the lukewarm response by companies to the new reporting rules and concluded that many smaller companies weren’t acting because they didn’t know where to start or didn’t have the resources to hire consultants and lawyers to help them develop policies.

“The first step is to actually turn their mind to it,” he said. “For organizations saying, ‘How do we actually start to craft a policy?’, we’re saying, ‘Here’s an easy way to do it.’ It will get you into the game and thinking about it.”

He said his hope is that boards will not simply “tick the box” by quickly downloading the sample policy and adding it to their disclosure documents, but will instead have a discussion about their approach to diversity.

Osler lawyer Andrew MacDougall, who wrote the policy, said many small companies could find it helpful to have access to a model that is similar to policies adopted by larger companies with help from professional advisers.

“Often the hardest part about making any change is taking that first step,” Mr. MacDougall said. “We thought that the easiest way to jump-start a dialogue at the board level would be to help them with the first step, which is the adoption of a policy.”

The template allows boards to choose whether to make a general statement about diversity, including having an “appropriate number of women directors,” or whether to commit to a specific target level of diversity on the board. They can also choose to add a time frame for reaching the target.

The policy also includes a provision that any search firm hired to help identify board candidates will include multiple women on the possible hiring list, as well as a clause that says female candidates will be included on any “evergreen” list of potential nominees.

Mr. MacDougall said he hopes many who use the template will opt to implement a concrete target for women on the board, but that might be a step too far for some.

“We wanted to make sure that they at least had a policy that forced them to have a dialogue about whether or not to adopt a target,” he said.

Source: New policy template aims to encourage gender diversity on boards – The Globe and Mail

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That ‘ethnic driver accidents’ stereotype? It’s wrong 

2016/11/30 Leave a comment

Good piece citing relevant studies:

“Everyone knows who the culprits are that are driving up our rates but no one has the guts to come and say it. Don’t give me the argument that there are no stats on this.”

Well, we all know the colour of this particular elephant in the room. It’s not white. And anyone who overhears casual conversation knows the stereotype to which the coded language refers — all those inherently terrible Asian drivers.

I hate to be the bearer of news but first, there’s no coverup and, second, that elephant is a chimera, that is, something that may be devoutly wished for by someone but which turns out to be an illusion.

There are some statistics, just not from Metro. The Insurance Corporation of B.C. does not track accident statistics according to ethnicity. But then, why should it?

However, there is third-party research into what’s essentially an ethnic stereotype: that adult immigrants are unsafe drivers and responsible for more road crashes than long-time residents.

The study was centred on Metro Toronto, one of the most ethnically diverse populations in Canada. It looked at the driving records of more than four million drivers and set out to discover whether recent immigrants represented any increased risk of involvement as drivers in serious motor vehicle accidents.

It was published in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention.

Contrary to popular opinion, it turns out, recent immigrants are actually better drivers than the native-born scofflaws who like to speed, race the amber lights at intersections, change lanes abruptly without signalling, smoke, eat and drink hot coffee while at the wheel and other common transgressions.

Traffic slowly moves over the Lions Gate Bridge between Stanley Park and the North Shore. Contrary to popular opinion, says columnist Stephen Hume, recent immigrants are actually better drivers than the native-born drivers who like to speed, race the amber lights at intersections, change lanes abruptly without signalling and other common offences.
Traffic slowly moves over the Lions Gate Bridge between Stanley Park and the North Shore. Contrary to popular opinion, says columnist Stephen Hume, recent immigrants are actually better drivers than the native-born drivers who like to speed, race the amber lights at intersections, change lanes abruptly without signalling and other common offences. DARRYL DYCK /  THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES

Hot coffee? Oh, yes, counterintuitive as it may be, a study done by the U.S. government’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concludes that hitting the drive-through for a jolt of morning java increases your odds of an accident by 80 per cent. Furthermore, the researchers found, 65 per cent of near-miss accidents result from drivers fiddling with food and drink.

In fact, the agency found, drinking hot coffee puts drivers at the greatest risk for distraction while driving. It turns out drinking hot coffee at the wheel is worse than using your cellphone or, speaking of distractions, reaching for the radio to dial up Bruce Allen’s latest rant about cyclists.

Yet it’s not coffee-drinking commuters who draw ire.

“A frequently blamed group of drivers are adult immigrants as typified by negative stereotypes,” the researchers found. “Such beliefs” — stop me if you’ve heard this — “are based on the person’s presumed lack of familiarity with geographic locations, roadway layout, prevailing laws, common customs, local signage, social etiquette, basic skills or language idioms.”

One trope is the recurring anecdote about foreign-looking drivers looking lost, being inconsiderate of traffic etiquette and delaying or putting other commuters at risk with their driving and parking ineptitude.

Why is this? The researchers sought explanations in psychology. They discovered that when traffic is congested and drivers feel late rather than relaxed they display heightened selfishness, diminished graciousness toward others and increased reliance on stereotypes to explain their situation.

“Second, the anonymity of driving provides little deterrence against outbursts of bigotry.”

And finally, people justify their own driving errors as a result of their situation while judging other drivers’ mistakes as latent traits.

Among the million Metro residents of Asian descent there are doubtless a few bad drivers. The published research indicates, however, that the proportion of bad drivers is greater in the long-term population than among recent immigrants.

In the Toronto study, researchers examined accidents and hospital admissions with traffic injuries and compared the rates among a million recent immigrants with those for long-term residents.

“Recent immigrants were less likely to be drivers involved in a serious motor vehicle crash compared to long-term residents,” the study says. “Findings suggest that recent immigrants contribute to fewer serious road crashes than the population norm.”

Source: That ‘ethnic driver accidents’ stereotype? It’s wrong | Vancouver Sun

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6 Potential Brain Benefits Of Bilingual Education : NPR

2016/11/30 1 Comment

What the latest science and studies show:

So what does recent research say about the potential benefits of bilingual education? NPR Ed called up seven researchers in three countries — Sorace, Bialystok, Luk, Kroll, Jennifer Steele, and the team of Wayne Thomas and Virginia Collier — to find out.

Attention

It turns out that, in many ways, the real trick to speaking two languages consists in managing not to speak one of those languages at a given moment — which is fundamentally a feat of paying attention.

Saying “Goodbye” to mom and then “Guten tag” to your teacher, or managing to ask for a crayola roja instead of a red crayon, requires skills called “inhibition” and “task switching.” These skills are subsets of an ability called executive function.

People who speak two languages often outperform monolinguals on general measures of executive function. “[Bilinguals] can pay focused attention without being distracted and also improve in the ability to switch from one task to another,” says Sorace.

Do these same advantages accrue to a child who begins learning a second language in kindergarten instead of as a baby? We don’t yet know. Patterns of language learning and language use are complex. But Gigi Luk at Harvard cites at least one brain-imaging study on adolescents that shows similar changes in brain structure when compared with those who are bilingual from birth, even when they didn’t begin practicing a second language in earnest before late childhood.

Empathy

Young children being raised bilingual have to follow social cues to figure out which language to use with which person and in what setting. As a result, says Sorace, bilingual children as young as age 3 have demonstrated a head start on tests of perspective-taking and theory of mind — both of which are fundamental social and emotional skills.

Reading (English)

About 10 percent of students in the Portland, Ore., public schools are assigned by lottery to dual-language classrooms that offer instruction in Spanish, Japanese or Mandarin, alongside English.

Jennifer Steele at American University conducted a four-year, randomized trialand found that these dual-language students outperformed their peers in English-reading skills by a full school year’s worth of learning by the end of middle school.

Such a large effect in a study this size is unusual, and Steele is currently conducting a flurry of follow-up studies to tease out the causality: Is this about a special program that attracted families who were more engaged? Or about the dual-language instruction itself?

“If it’s just about moving the kids around,” Steele says, “that’s not as exciting as if it’s a way of teaching that makes you smarter.”

Steele suspects the latter. Because the effects are found in reading, not in math or science where there were few differences, she suggests that learning two languages makes students more aware of how language works in general, aka “metalinguistic awareness.”

The research of Gigi Luk at Harvard offers a slightly different explanation. She has recently done a small study looking at a group of 100 fourth-graders in Massachusetts who had similar reading scores on a standard test, but very different language experiences.

Some were foreign-language dominant and others were English natives. Here’s what’s interesting. The students who were dominant in a foreign language weren’t yet comfortably bilingual; they were just starting to learn English. Therefore, by definition, they had much weaker English vocabularies than the native speakers.

Yet they were just as good at decoding a text.

“This is very surprising,” Luk says. “You would expect the reading comprehension performance to mirror vocabulary — it’s a cornerstone of comprehension.”

How did the foreign-language dominant speakers manage this feat? Well, Luk found, they also scored higher on tests of executive functioning. So, even though they didn’t have huge mental dictionaries to draw on, they may have been great puzzle-solvers, taking into account higher-level concepts such as whether a single sentence made sense within an overall story line.

They got to the same results as the monolinguals, by a different path.

Source: 6 Potential Brain Benefits Of Bilingual Education : NPR Ed : NPR

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After Election, Diversity Trainers Face A New Version Of ‘Us Versus Them’ : NPR

2016/11/30 1 Comment

Interesting story on how some US diversity consultants are assessing the impact of the election:

[Dorcas] Lind is a diversity consultant in the health care industry. It’s her job to go into companies and help them create inclusive environments for their employees.

For consultants like Lind, the election’s polarizing nature, which especially divided the nation on issues of race, is two-fold. While it means some of their business will almost certainly boom, a new set of challenges emerges for the professional peacemakers. Now, they say, they have to work harder to tamp down heightened feelings of us versus them; they have to hear the concerns of people usually thought of as privileged; and they have to navigate a language minefield where the wrong word can ignite conflict.

Studying the maps of how people voted, Lind was disturbed by the stretch of red in her district, a New Jersey suburb, which she said had once been celebrated for its diversity. Like many others in the business, Lind equated a vote for Trump with a vote for intolerance.

“I thought that my whole career had blown up in front of me,” said Lind, who has worked in the field for more than two decades and is founder and president of Diversity Health Communications. “I felt so absolutely overwhelmed with the depth of how much work had to be done. And on the other hand, I felt like I didn’t even want to do the work. … Given the results and how the map looked, I felt my work would be futile.”

“There’s a whole toolkit of language we need to create [in order] to talk about this polarization,” Lind said. “It’s those who voted for Trump or support Trump — and everyone else. And that’s a really difficult dichotomy to address.”

Luby Ismail is the head of Connecting Cultures, a diversity consulting business in the Washington, D.C., area. She said one of her biggest tasks is to break down any feelings that people are on warring sides. Ismail, who’s an Egyptian-American Muslim, has worked with companies including The Walt Disney Co., Nike Inc. and Sodexo to lead sessions that help employees better understand Arab-Americans and American Muslims.

“The workplace is very tricky,” Ismail said, “because what do we say if you want to remain friends with people? ‘Then don’t talk about politics and religion.’ And yet, people are needing to talk about it. So if only we had some way to bring civility with caution, and for people to feel that instead of doing an us versus them, a right versus wrong, it’s, you know, ‘Help me understand why you believe something.’ “

The Department of Justice uses one of Ismail’s training videos on identifying anti-Muslim bias as part of its cultural competence curriculum. She’s updating the DOJ training now, but she said she’s not sure what will come of it after Inauguration Day.

That “us-versus-them” sentiment Ismail mentioned is particularly tough to manage now. Doug Harris heads The Kaleidoscope Group, a diversity company in Chicago. He said that he has to help people of color deal with “historical garbage” — he means racism — while also helping white people who, he learned during this campaign, feel strongly that they’re “out of the power base.”

“I think right now there’s a temperament within society of exclusion on both sides of the table,” Harris said. “And those who may have been seen to have been historically included are feeling just as excluded as everyone else. It’s always a fight today in some ways [over] who’s most excluded. Historically, it might have been about women, people of color, gay and lesbian. There’s another group that’s more powerful called — uh, I don’t know the right name of it, but white males — who feel they haven’t been given their fair shake. And so how do we make sure their viewpoint is heard?”

Usually, Harris uses an exercise he calls “insiders and outsiders” to get people to self-reflect. In this exercise, employees list who might feel like outsiders in the company. Maybe it’s new workers or people at lower levels or people who have English as a second language or introverts, Harris said. Inevitably, the list turns to women and people of color.

“So we look at the list. If you’re not part of the list, that means you’re probably one of the ones causing the exclusion,” Harris said.

White people as a group, and particularly men, don’t typically make that list. But the presidential campaign, Harris said, unearthed the strong sentiment among white people that “they don’t feel like the lead group that’s been privileged, and if you look at their lives, they’re not.”

Those who do diversity, he said, have a responsibility to address everyone’s concerns. “It’s not about a special effort toward white men,” he said. “That’s not the effort I’m talking about. It’s more-so that … if you honor everybody’s challenges, they’re more likely to own their privileges.”

Lind adds an amendment to that thought, one that underscores the tension diversity consultants, like the rest of the country, are tasked with resolving. Longstanding racial discord, fueled by the “historical garbage” Harris mentioned, collides with the idea of honoring everybody’s challenges when some of those challenges spring from racial ignorance and racism. Thinking of all challenges as equal, she said, is a problem.

“I think the backlash we’re seeing is people who work in the diversity space — and also civil rights folks in general — are saying, ‘We are not going to be inclusive of ideas and values that are explicitly detrimental and harmful,’ ” Lind said. “Because the rhetoric is, ‘One side has lost, one side has won, and everybody needs to get together and move forward for all Americans in the country.’ ”

Walking that line of competing interests is made even tougher by the language of diversity, including the word diversity itself. Leah P. Hollis, president of Patricia Berkly LLC in Philadelphia, said she actively avoids language that might be polarizing so she can keep everyone in the conversation. After all, in a swing state like Pennsylvania, where nearly 6 million people voted and Trump won by fewer than 70,000 votes, she has to assume that half of the employees she’ll be working with voted for Trump, half for Clinton. So figuring out what tone to strike is important.

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Racial profiling, budget concerns Ottawa top police board meeting

2016/11/30 1 Comment

Not a particularly impressive discussion by the Ottawa Police Board on racial profiling:

Attention then quickly turned to the results of a two-year race data project mandated by a settlement with the Ontario Human Rights Commissions, which were revealed last month.

Data from traffic stops, collected by Ottawa police officers and analyzed by a team of researchers, shows Middle Eastern-looking people are 3.3 times more likely to be pulled over than their percentage of the population, while black-looking people are 2.3 times more likely to be pulled over than their percentage of the population.

The project was the result of a racial-profiling complaint lodged by then-18-year-old Chad Aiken, who said he was pulled over because he was black. Both the researchers that conducted the study and Chief Charles Bordeleau said the results didn’t “prove” racial profiling by officers, which the human rights commissioner took exception to at Monday’s meeting.

“All too often when people like Mr. Aiken come forward to speak about racial discrimination, they are dismissed as being overly sensitive or not having enough proof that their experience is systemic — the ‘a few bad apples’ defence,” Renu Mandhane told the board.

“And that’s why we are disappointed by recent comments that the OPS data does not prove racial profiling. Especially when considered together with the personal accounts that led to the data being collected in the first place, the findings are alarming, are entirely consistent with racial profiling, and cannot and should not be easily explained away.”

Mandhane says she wants to specifically hear from the force that the data is consistent with racial profiling, and says acknowledging it is the first step to fixing it.

Bordeleau said he believes “the service has actually stepped up to the plate and done a lot of things.” He pointed to the settlement-mandated study being the first of its kind in the country. “I want to make it clear that I’ve never denied the existence of racial profiling. I said before that racial profiling exists in society, it exists in policing and that it has no place in either.”

Mandhane also called on the force and the board to make policies to eliminate discrimination, have independent monitoring and accountability bodies, and discipline officers who engage in discrimination.

Board chair Coun. Eli El-Chantiry told Mandhane that the board has committed “significant” public resources to measure how police treat people of different racial groups. “The study showed that there was a problem and we have committed to working with our police service to fix it.”

The board also heard from Danardo Jones, legal director of the African Canadian Legal Clinic, who also wanted the force to call the results racial profiling and voiced concern about including only data from traffic stops in the study. Bordeleau said it was “unfortunate that four years ago when we reached out the ACLC, and numerous times since that, that you didn’t take us up on the offer to participate (in the report).”

Source: Ottawa Citizen | Latest Breaking News | Business | Sports | Canada …

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Facebook Runs Up Against German Hate Speech Laws – The New York Times

2016/11/30 1 Comment

About time – social media companies also need to be accountable (as do users):

In Germany, more than almost anywhere else in the West, lawmakers, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, are demanding that Facebook go further to police what is said on the social network — a platform that now has 1.8 billion users worldwide. The country’s lawmakers also want other American tech giants to meet similar standards.

The often-heated dispute has raised concerns over maintaining freedom of speech while protecting vulnerable minorities in a country where the legacy of World War II and decades under Communism still resonate.

It is occurring amid mounting criticism of Facebook in the United States after fake news reports were shared widely on the site before the presidential election. Facebook also has been accused of allowing similar false reports to spread during elections elsewhere.

Mr. Zuckerberg has denied that such reports swayed American voters. But lawmakers in the United States, Germany and beyond are pressing Facebook to clamp down on hate speech, fake news and other misinformation shared online, or face new laws, fines or other legal actions.

“Facebook has a certain responsibility to uphold the laws,” said Heiko Maas, the German justice minister. In October, Mr. Maas suggested the company could be held criminally liable for users’ illegal hate speech postings if it does not swiftly remove them.

Facebook rejects claims that it has not responded to the rise in hate speech in Germany and elsewhere, saying it continually updates its community standards to weed out inappropriate posts and comments.

“We’ve done more than any other service at trying to get on top of hate speech on our platform,” Mr. Allen said.

Tussles with German lawmakers are nothing new for Facebook.

It has routinely run afoul of the country’s strict privacy rules. In September, a local regulator blocked WhatsApp, the internet messaging service owned by Facebook, from sharing data from users in Germany with its parent company. The country’s officials also have questioned whether Facebook’s control of users’ digital information could breach antitrust rules, accusations the company denies.

Facebook’s problems with hate speech posts in Germany began in summer 2015 as more than one million refugees began to enter the country.

Their arrival, according to company executives and lawmakers, incited an online backlash from Germans opposed to the swell of people from Syria, Afghanistan and other war-torn countries. The number of hateful posts on Facebook increased sharply.

As such content spread quickly online, senior German politicians appealed directly to Facebook to comply with the country’s laws. Even Ms. Merkel confronted Mr. Zuckerberg in New York in September 2015 about the issue.

In response, Facebook updated its global community standards, which also apply in the United States, to give greater protection to minority groups, primarily to calm German concerns.

Facebook also agreed to work with the government, local charities and other companies to fight online hate speech, and recently started a billboard and television campaign in Germany to answer local fears over how it deals with hate speech and privacy.

Facebook hired a tech company based in Berlin to monitor and delete illegal content, including hate speech, from Germany and elsewhere, working with Facebook’s monitoring staff in Dublin.

“They have gotten better and quicker at handling hate speech,” said Martin Drechsler, managing director of FSM, a nonprofit group that has worked with Facebook on the issue.

Despite these steps, German officials are demanding further action.

Ms. Merkel, who is seeking a fourth term in general elections next year, warned lawmakers last week that hate speech and fake news sites were influencing public opinion, raising the possibility of new regulations.

And Mr. Maas, the justice minister, has repeatedly warned that he will propose legislation if Facebook cannot remove at least 70 percent of online hate speech within 24 hours by early next year. It now removes less than 50 percent, according to a study published in September by a group that monitors hate speech, a proportion that is still significantly higher than those for Twitter and YouTube, the report found.

For Chan-Jo Jun, a lawyer in Würzburg, an hour’s drive from Frankfurt, new laws governing Facebook cannot come soon enough.

Mr. Jun recently filed a complaint with Munich authorities, seeking prosecution of Mr. Zuckerberg and other senior Facebook executives on charges they failed to sufficiently tackle the widespread wave of hate speech in Germany. The company denies the accusations.

While his complaint may be dismissed, Mr. Jun says the roughly 450 hate speech cases that he has collected, more than half of them aimed at refugees, show that Facebook is not complying with German law. Despite its global size, he insists, the company cannot skirt its local responsibilities.

“I know Facebook wants to be seen as a global giant,” Mr. Jun said. “But there’s no way around it. They have to comply with German law.”

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Trump’s Win and the Threat to Canadian Multicultural Policy

2016/11/29 Leave a comment

Usual helpful Mirems (Multilingual International Research and Ethnic Media Services) summary of ethnic media reactions, this time in relation to the Trump victory:
Donald Trump’s election win has been reverberating strongly in the Canadian ethnic media across all language groups. The main emphasis in the early reporting was on how this could happen and on the potential implications for Canada especially in terms of immigration and the economy. In addition, ethnic media in Canada were concerned with the spill-over of a more overt and aggressive form of racism from South of the border to Canadian cities.

Despite his lack of experience, or maybe because of it, Trump appealed to those feeling disenfranchised and frustrated with the traditional elites by appearing to speak from the heart and skirting political correctness (OMNI BC, Punjabi, 8/11/2016). He used incitement and hate speech to win (Sing Tao, Chinese, 10/11/2016). A Pakistani paper argues that terrorist incidents and suicide bomb attacks in the US, which caused hate and fear among Americans, led to Trump’s victory (Pakistan Times Canada, 10/11/2016). Meanwhile, a Hispanic radio host considered that “he managed to appeal to the lowest instincts of those disappointed with Washington’s policies… with a campaign based on personal insults, arrogance and ignorance” (CIRV radio, Spanish, 9/11/2016). Both candidates had been caught in many lies and the Chinese Sing Tao recommended that politicians should reflect on why people were not happy with the system (9/11/2016).

Some ethnic voices responded favourably to the election outcome. Callers on CMR Radio’s Urdu program expected the ‘businessman’ to increase job opportunities and noted a change in his tone after his election that they took to mean he would not implement the plans he talked about during his campaign (9/11/2016). Most callers on a Red FM Punjabi program in Vancouver welcomed the election results, saying Americans voted for a better economy and for better jobs. A Sikh-American caller from Los Angeles said his family and community members voted for Trump because they believe he will strengthen the American economy and stop immigration. A BC caller said that he supported Trump’s immigration policies and said there should be restrictions on immigration in Canada as well because cheap labour and fraudulent immigration are causing poverty in BC (Red FM Punjabi, 9/11/2016).

United Chinese American President Haipei Xue also reported that many new immigrants from mainland China voted for Trump, in part due to a legislative push to permit California’s public university to consider race and ethnicity in admissions; this was considered an impediment to Chinese children getting into good schools (Fairchild radio, Mandarin, 9/11/2016). Anti-immigrant sentiment is not restricted to Caucasians, as immigrant communities are often faced with the most intense competition from more recent arrivals.

Some commentators saw the election as a choice between two evils, or between a “true villain” and a “hypocrite”; they chose the “true villain” because they can predict what he will do (Fairchild radio, Mandarin, 9/11/2016). The black community reportedly didn’t participate much in voting this time, which worked in Trump’s favour (CHIN Urdu, 9/11/2016).

However, the majority of ethnic sources in Canada see Trump’s win as reflecting the mindset of North Americans: “They have rubber-stamped bigotry. Americans are still not ready to give equality to women. Not only discrimination against minorities and racism, but sexism is the biggest problem in the US” (Radio Rim Jhim, Punjabi, 9/11/2016). Trump said he would bar Muslims from the US and “ordinary Caucasians thought he was good for them” (OMNI BC, Punjabi, 8/11/2016). He was able to win mainly due to his anti-immigration, anti-globalization policies platform (CIRV Mandarin, 9/11/2016). Trump “targeted the Spanish and Muslim communities, which brought him closer to the majority of white people” (CIAO Punjabi, 9/11/2016). Now immigrants are wondering if they should leave the country as they are terrified. It was a rebellion against the elites, but it was also about race: this was a “white-lash against a changing country and against a black president” (G 98.7 FM radio, Afro-Caribbean, 9/11/2016).

…Another area of spill-over to Canada seems to be a trend towards more overt racism. Conservative leadership contender Kellie Leitch is allegedly “counting her victory after Trump’s win” (Canadian Punjabi Post, 11/11/2016). Just as the City of Toronto and the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI) launched an awareness campaign about the persistence of racism (Share, Afro-Caribbean, 10/11/2016), posters urging white people to join the ‘alt-right’ movement sprang up in many parts of Toronto and were widely reported in the ethnic media. The posters promoted white nationalism and railed against political correctness, immigration, diversity and “being told you are ‘racist’ for celebrating your heritage” (Canadian Punjabi Post, 15/11/2016). The same day, an Ottawa rabbi woke up to a swastika and an anti-Semitic slur spray-painted on her front door (PTC Punjabi TV, 16/11/2016). She attributes this to the elections results in the US, which gave people permission to foment division, hatred, racism, misogyny and opposition to immigrants and non-Christian religions (Voces Latinas radio, Spanish, 15/11/2016). A Jewish community centre, a church with a Black pastor and a mosque were also targeted with racist graffiti in Ottawa, while racist flyers called on Richmond, BC, residents to rally against their Chinese neighbours.

Donald Trump’s election ushers in a time of uncertainty and division in North America, with no one more affected than the minority communities on a multicultural and diverse continent. Engagement with the ethnic media can send a message that any organization, business or government agency is serious about serving all local clients and customers equally and respectfully interested in all segments of society. And since Federal responsibility for race relations and multiculturalism in Canada has moved back to its original home at Canadian Heritage, perhaps we can expect a positive message from Ottawa as we move towards celebrating Canada’s 150th anniversary as a nation built on the principles of racial harmony and inclusion.

Source: MIREMS Blog – MIREMS 2016

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Africville residents carry on fight for compensation 47 years after black community bulldozed in Nova Scotia

2016/11/29 Leave a comment

Interesting that the 2010 apology and settlement, which did not include any personal compensation, has effectively been challenged by this case.

But as in federal historical recognition, the likely form of compensation is ex gratia payments, as was the case for Japanese Canadian wartime internment (who also lost property) or those Chinese Canadians who paid the entry head tax:

The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia will hear arguments this week about whether to certify a proposed class action lawsuit for dozens of former residents of Africville, the black community in north-end Halifax that in 1969 was cleared of its residents and demolished to make room for industrial development.

The destruction of the site, especially the Seaview United Baptist Church that had stood there for over a century, is widely regarded as a shameful symbol of the treatment of black Nova Scotians, many of whom had fled slavery in America.

“I’m hoping for a settlement,” said Flemming Vemb, a plaintiff and former resident who recalls being forced out of the four-bedroom house on the waterfront where his father had tried to build a dry dock, but was refused permission by the city. “It was an abrupt thing,” he said of his family’s removal from their home.

After years of slow negotiations and growing awareness of the historical outrage, in 2010 then Halifax mayor Peter Kelly signed off on an almost $5-million compensation deal, from three levels of government, which included an apology. As a result, a replica of the church has been built and a park established on the site.

Library and Archives Canada

Library and Archives CanadaThe destruction of Africville, especially the Seaview United Baptist Church that had stood there for over a century, is widely regarded as a shameful symbol of the treatment of black Nova Scotians.

“We apologize for the heartache experienced at the loss of the Seaview United Baptist Church, the spiritual heart of the community, removed in the middle of the night. We acknowledge the tremendous importance the church had, both for the congregation and the community as a whole,” Kelly said.

That deal involved no personal compensation and no admission of liability by Halifax, however, and it led to discord, with some plaintiffs saying the settlement was signed over their objections.

The lawsuit is led by the Africville Genealogy Society, which represents the estates of 48 former residents whose identities are known, as well as those who are as yet unknown.

The lawsuit was filed in 1996, the same year Africville was designated a National Historic Site. It includes nearly 40 plaintiffs who are still alive, and families of many more who have died, who claim they were not compensated for the loss of their lands. Many of the named plaintiffs are related, with Carvery, Flint, Izzard and Vemb especially common surnames.

As a judge put it, they claim “Halifax is liable to the former residents and their descendants for a broad array of tortious conduct and breaches of contract over the span of the community’s existence.”

 Source: Africville residents carry on fight for compensation 47 years after black community bulldozed in Nova Scotia | National Post

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