Broken Melting Pot Is No Alternative To Canadian Multiculturalism | Jack Jedwab

2016/07/15 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Jedwab.

Reality in many parts of USA is closer to multiculturalism than melting pot, given strong ethnic communities and identities, despite political discourse and posturing:

Those driving the melting pot rhetoric might argue that it refers to the immigrant experience and is therefore not about the American-born black population. That observation however makes illusory the melting pot objective of creating a harmonious whole. As regards immigrant acceptance in the American melting pot, the success of Donald Trump’s campaign has also served as a reminder of the high levels of anxiety and hostility towards immigration and diversity. Then again, perhaps the melting pot theorists were thinking about melting white European and not Hispanic immigrants. Well, so much for the idea that the American model of diversity seeks to make one out the many.

In a thoughtful essay in a 2012 edition of the journal National Identities , northeastern University political science professor David Michael Smith notes that the success of the melting pot rhetoric is attributable to the concept’s ambiguity. It simultaneously represents both uniformity in its end product and the presence of diversity which it must somehow incorporate. Smith observes that “…in the first instance, attention is focused on the creation of a ‘new race” or ”new compound’ which is nonetheless homogeneous in character.” It by virtue of this ambiguity that the concept it used across a spectrum of Americans that rally those who are favorable to immigration and those opposed to it.

Paradoxically, when it comes to describing cultural pluralism in the United States, the trend amongst several American thinkers is towards some variant on the idea of multiculturalism. For some time, the tired melting pot adage has been giving way to a depicting the country as a “salad bowl” with a mixture of various ingredients that keep their individual characteristics. Even the most ardent American proponents of the melting pot acknowledge that it is increasingly difficult to defend the idea.

Sure Canadian multiculturalism has historically and continues to confront a set of important challenges, but it’s difficult to give credibility to misinformed critics that point south of the border to offer a better alternative.

Source: Broken Melting Pot Is No Alternative To Canadian Multiculturalism | Jack Jedwab

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The Tenors sang ‘All Lives Matter’ in ‘O Canada.’ They were wrong.

2016/07/15 Leave a comment

One of the better commentaries – Adrian Lee provides one of the clearest expressions of why the critics of ‘Black Lives Matter’ have it wrong:

In place of the lyrics “With glowing hearts we see thee rise, The True North strong and free,” the group sang instead: “We’re all brothers and sisters/All lives matter to the great,” raising a marker-scrawled sign “All Lives Matter,” before returning to the standard lyrics in French. (A note of pity here for Michael Saunders, the Toronto Blue Jays’ Canadian-born outfielder, who stared blankly into the sun as the camera panned to him during this moment.)

Let’s leave aside what they could have meant by “to the great,” and take a moment to explain why the statement “All Lives Matter” alone here is thoughtless, at best. As a dismissal, or even a response to the statement “Black Lives Matter”—a movement and rallying cry for black communities in America, Canada and beyond who have witnessed, experienced and felt acts of discrimination (both overt and subtle) and are refusing to accept societal norms that have produced police brutality and other acts of violence—it is unworthy. It is a statement that salves the oppressor; it is a sentence that erases the pain by equating that pain to those experienced by everyone. It is, as the popular argument goes, the equivalent of telling a neighbour whose house is on fire that all houses matter. It is, as my colleague Jason Markusoff noted on Twitter, the rhetorical equivalent of interrupting those solemnly pausing on Remembrance Day to say “Never forget” with a haughty “No, it should be ‘Never forget all genocides’.” Never mind that taking vitriolic offence to the brusque response one often receives to “all lives matter” takes away from the actual issues at hand. “All Lives Matter” is, at best, unhelpful because it refuses to acknowledge that people are different, and some people are hurting right now.

Some may point to U.S. President Barack Obama’s more diplomatic note at the recent NATO summit in Warsaw: “When people say ‘black lives matter,’ that doesn’t mean blue lives don’t matter. That just means all lives matter.” This, it’s worth noting, is a different point than merely saying “All Lives Matter.” That’s because saying “Black Lives Matter” does not mean “only black lives matter”; that’s a flawed premise too, and it’s a defensive reading that refuses to acknowledge that those lives actually do. The conceit of “Black Lives Matter” is about focus, and not about exclusion; the reality that most of North American society has focused expressly on lives that are not black makes this urgent, and makes “All Lives Matter” particularly cruel.

Source: The Tenors sang ‘All Lives Matter’ in ‘O Canada.’ They were wrong.

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Rise in anti-Semitism in Western Europe, decrease in Eastern Europe: poll | i24news

2016/07/14 Leave a comment

Interesting findings and linkage to concerns over large-scale arrival of migrants and refugees:

A recent survey has revealed a rise in anti-Semitism in Western Europe, while at the same time there has been a decline in anti-Jewish sentiments in Eastern European countries.

The survey was conducted by the EJA (European Jewish Association) ahead of a discussion Wednesday on anti-Semitism in Europe at the Israeli Knesset’s Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora.

The poll found that 19 percent of Jewish communities – the vast majority of them in Western Europe (mainly in France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Northern Ireland) – reported a rise in anti-Semitism.

In Antwerp, Belgium, one community reported a marked rise in antisemitism (5 on a scale of 5), while another community in the same city reported relative calm.

Communities in the Netherlands reported a rise in anti-Semitism (4 on a scale of 5), as did the Jewish community in Nancy, France.

However, some 9.5% of Jewish communities – the vast majority of them in Eastern Europe – reported a decline in anti-Semitism in the past year.

Around 66% of Jewish communities throughout Europe (East and West) reported a lack of real change in the level of anti-Semitism in the past year.

The survey was conducted last Thursday among a representative sample of communities in capital cities and outlying towns throughout Europe, from Belfast in Northern Ireland in the West to Tbilisi, Georgia in the East.

In cities where there are large concentrations of Jews (Paris and Antwerp, for example), the sample included a number of communities in the same city.

The survey comes just months after an annual study on global anti-Semitism found that the number of violent anti-Semitic incidents worldwide fell considerably in 2015, partly because the extreme right has been focused on Muslims.

Violent anti-Semitic incidents dropped more than 40 percent in 2015, but other kinds of anti-Semitic displays increased dramatically in Europe, stated the Annual General Analysis on Anti-Semitism Worldwide, published jointly by Tel Aviv University, Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the European Jewish Congress.

The report attributed the decrease to a number of factors, including an increase in security measures, the growing fear of terrorism that may increase sympathy for Jews targeted for violence, and the lack of a military confrontation involving Israel in 2015.

Another factor cited in the report was the flow of over a million immigrants and refugees to Europe in 2015, which caused a trend of anti-immigrant sentiment that has strengthened extreme right parties. In Scandinavian countries, extreme right sympathizers have been gravitating towards major centrist and right parties for practical reasons.

The extreme right has also in many cases pointed at Jews as the root cause of terrorism, claiming they fostered Muslim immigration in order to undermine European culture. “The Jews are depicted as directly responsible for the migration wave, either by causing the war in Syria and Iraq and by creating ISIS […] because of the wish to achieve the following goals: to destroy European racial identity, to incite Christians and Muslims against each other, to create a Middle East devoid of Arabs and Muslims and even to destroy western democracies in order to control them – an accusation which is a derivative of conspiracy theories. Jews are guilty of the Islamization of Europe by bringing in the refugees, and of the opposite as well, of Islamophobia, by allegedly misusing the anti-Muslim rhetoric in order to invoke support for Israel,” said the report.

Source: Rise in anti-Semitism in Western Europe, decrease in Eastern Europe: poll | i24news – See beyond

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‘That Ignoramus’: 2 French Scholars of Radical Islam Turn Bitter Rivals – The New York Times

2016/07/14 Leave a comment

Personally, I think it is a mix of the two elements – the individual and the structural:

What propels Islamist terrorism and attacks against France is more than an academic debate: The answer shapes policy toward blunting the threat.

So it is no inconsequential matter in a culture under attack, and one that so cherishes its intellectual debates, that France’s two leading scholars of radical Islam — former friends — have turned bitter rivals over their differing views.

“Madman,” “thug,” “illiterate,” “paranoid,” “ass,” “not a thinker” — these are just some of the choicer insults the two men have hurled at each other in a peculiarly personal quarrel with far larger stakes that has reverberated through the French news media and society for months.

The two distinguished academics, Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel, have long lists of books to their name, and years of field work in the Middle East, Central Asia and the troubled French suburbs. They are both eagerly consulted by the French news media and government officials.

But with France on edge and the continued target of terrorist attacks, their clashing analyses of the origins, development and future of jihadism have broken out of academic circles to present an important question for France and for all of Europe: Which man holds the key to understanding the phenomenon?

Mr. Kepel, 61, a professor at Sciences Po, the prestigious political science institute, finds much of the answer inside France — in its suburbs and their dysfunctional sociology — and in the role of Islam, angering many on the left.

Mr. Roy, 66, who as a bearded young man roamed Afghanistan with the mujahedeen in the 1980s and now teaches at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, places greater emphasis on individual behavior and psychology in a jihadism he considers strictly marginal to Islam.

Mr. Kepel sees individuals as cogs in a system — part of a classically French, structuralist tradition that minimizes the role of individual human agency.

Mr. Roy, on the other hand, sees mostly troubled people in the jihadist ranks who act out their fantasies of violence and cruelty.

The terrorists who have carried out recent attacks were mostly marginalized young men and petty criminals, he says, adding that they have used Islam as a cover to pursue extreme violence.

“They haven’t had a militant past,” Mr. Roy said of many of these terrorists, in a telephone interview. The problem they represent, he says, is the “Islamicization of radicalism.”

It is a signature phrase that enrages Mr. Kepel, who leans toward its opposite: the radicalization of Islam.

“That ignoramus,” Mr. Kepel grumbled in an interview this month in his book-lined office, offering some choice gibes about his onetime friend’s lack of Arabic.

Mr. Kepel testified for an influential 2015 parliamentary report, wrote a best seller on terrorism after the attacks in Paris in November, and has been omnipresent in television and radio studios.

“At the ministry, they tell me, ‘I saw Kepel yesterday,’ ” said Mr. Roy, himself a favorite of the country’s dominant left-leaning news media. His arguments, for the moment at least, appear to be winning in government circles.

As the jockeying has intensified in official circles, so has the falling-out between the old friends.

Today they cannot stand each other, and, with the passion that typifies intellectual fights in a country where nothing short of war is more serious, they contemptuously dismiss each other’s views.

“The King Is Naked,” read the headline on Mr. Kepel’s attack on Mr. Roy this spring in the newspaper Libération, in a play on the French meaning of Mr. Roy’s name.

In turn, while acknowledging a long and now broken friendship, Mr. Roy today offers his own less-than-friendly critique of Mr. Kepel as a kind of cloistered intellectual.

 “We were friends for 20 years,” Mr. Roy said in the interview. “I traveled with him in Istanbul. But I was very struck by his incapacity to talk to anybody.”

“He’s sincere the way a madman is,” he added. “He’s not a thinker. He’s not a philosopher.”

The French debate has echoes of Republican criticism in the United States of President Obama for his reluctance to use the word Islam in connection with terrorism.

But as is so often the case in contemporary France, the heart of the dispute here is a disagreement about the country’s relationship with Islam.

Mr. Roy sees a Muslim population that is relatively well-integrated.

But for Mr. Kepel, the murderous jihadism that struck France in 2015 is the expression of a slow-burning Islamist radicalization that took shape over decades because of a failure of integration.

Source: ‘That Ignoramus’: 2 French Scholars of Radical Islam Turn Bitter Rivals – The New York Times

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Beyond Integration: How Teachers Can Encourage Cross-Racial Friendships : NPR

2016/07/14 Leave a comment

Lessons that can also be applied at later stages in life? In the workplace?

There’s a reason Jose Luis Vilson’s students learn in groups: He wants them to feel comfortable working with anyone in the classroom, something he’s realized in his 11 years of teaching doesn’t always come naturally.

“I don’t really give students a chance to self-select until later on, when I feel like they can pretty much group with anybody,” he says.

Vilson teaches math at a public middle school just north of Harlem in New York City. Most of his students are Latino and African-American, and Vilson pays close attention to the fact that their racial identities affect their experiences in the classroom.

Children entering adolescence, he knows, are less likely to maintain cross-racial friendships as they grow older. But teachers like him may be able to help change that, according to a new study led by researchers from New York University.

In past decades, it’s become increasingly clear that diversity in classrooms isn’t just a buzzword. A growing body of research points to classroom diversity as an important aspect of childhood development. Kids who make friends with kids of other races tend to be more socially well-adjusted, more academically ambitious and better at interacting with people who are different from them.

The NYU researchers knew of these findings and wondered if just putting kids of different races in classrooms together is enough to foster lasting connections. Their hypothesis was that, as kids grow into early adolescence, they increase their same-race friendships and decrease their cross-race friendships.

So they looked at data from the Early Adolescent Development Study (EADS), a longitudinal survey where researchers questioned more than 500 elementary and middle-schoolers over the course of two academic years: fall 1996 to spring 1998. The students in the study all went to school in one district in the American northeast where the racial makeup of each of their classrooms was roughly half black and half white.

And the researchers were right, says Elise Cappella, head of the project: “Cross-race friendships diminish over the course of one academic year; same-race friendships increase.” The finding bore out among all of the students in the study, particularly those who were older and/or white.

Integration, she says, “[is] a very important step” to fostering cross-race connections. “But it’s not the only step.”

This is where teachers like Jose Vilson can have an impact. All of those group activities he encourages in his classroom, he hopes, will help students learn to learn from each other.

The difference comes down to the kind of environment teachers created: did students collaborate with one another, or did they compete?

“Teachers who were warm and responsive to students’ needs and created a classroom context characterized by respect and trust — in those classrooms, students had lower increases in same-race friendships over the course of that year,” Cappella says.

In other words, students who started the year with cross-race friendships were more likely to keep them throughout the year with the help of a friendly teacher.

The third, fourth and fifth-graders in this sample, Cappella says, are just entering the age where they start to become more self-conscious. “Sometimes, during those times, you begin to associate with people who you think may have shared identities as you as a way of building an understanding of who you are,” she says.

Teachers who build supportive atmospheres “[allow] students to get to know one another across differences,” Cappella says. “And when you get to know each other across differences, you see other kinds of similarities that may be more hidden as well.”

It’s relatively rare to find classrooms that look like the ones profiled in the EADS: more or less an even split between black and white students. Vilson’s classroom doesn’t look like that, but he says that cross-cultural contact in school will help his students outside the classroom.

“The real world is such that people have to find a way to get along with each other, but also work with each other,” he says. “There’s a lot of value in actually getting to know different people — how they work and what their values are and what their experiences are.”

Source: Beyond Integration: How Teachers Can Encourage Cross-Racial Friendships : NPR Ed : NPR

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Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in Shootings – The New York Times

2016/07/13 Leave a comment

Surprising_New_Evidence_Shows_Bias_in_Police_Use_of_Force_but_Not_in_Shootings_-_The_New_York_TimesUnderlying bias and discrimination remains of concern, but useful nuance to current debates:

A new study confirms that black men and women are treated differently in the hands of law enforcement. They are more likely to be touched, handcuffed, pushed to the ground or pepper-sprayed by a police officer, even after accounting for how, where and when they encounter the police.

But when it comes to the most lethal form of force — police shootings — the study finds no racial bias.

“It is the most surprising result of my career,” said Roland G. Fryer Jr., the author of the study and a professor of economics at Harvard. The study examined more than 1,000 shootings in 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California.

The result contradicts the image of police shootings that many Americans hold after the killings (some captured on video) of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.; Tamir Rice in Cleveland; Walter Scott in South Carolina; Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La.; and Philando Castile in Minnesota.

The study did not say whether the most egregious examples — those at the heart of the nation’s debate on police shootings — are free of racial bias. Instead, it examined a larger pool of shootings, including nonfatal ones.

The counterintuitive results provoked debate after the study was posted on Monday, mostly about the volume of police encounters and the scope of the data. Mr. Fryer emphasizes that the work is not the definitive analysis of police shootings, and that more data would be needed to understand the country as a whole. This work focused only on what happens once the police have stopped civilians, not on the risk of being stopped at all. Other research has shown that blacks are more likely to be stopped by the police.

Roland G. Fryer Jr., a professor of economics at Harvard. Erik Jacobs for The New York Times 

Mr. Fryer, the youngest African-American to receive tenure at Harvard and the first to win a John Bates Clark medal, a prize given to the most promising American economist under 40, said anger after the deaths of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and others drove him to study the issue. “You know, protesting is not my thing,” he said. “But data is my thing. So I decided that I was going to collect a bunch of data and try to understand what really is going on when it comes to racial differences in police use of force.”

Source: Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in Shootings – The New York Times

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A Saudi Morals Enforcer Called for a More Liberal Islam. Then the Death Threats Began. – The New York Times

2016/07/12 Leave a comment

Good long read by Ben Hubbard on the tensions within Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment and broader society:

For most of his adult life, Ahmed Qassim al-Ghamdi worked among the bearded enforcers of Saudi Arabia. He was a dedicated employee of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice — known abroad as the religious police — serving with the front-line troops protecting the Islamic kingdom from Westernization, secularism and anything but the most conservative Islamic practices.

Some of that resembled ordinary police work: busting drug dealers and bootleggers in a country that bans alcohol. But the men of “the Commission,” as Saudis call it, spent most of their time maintaining the puritanical public norms that set Saudi Arabia apart not only from the West, but from most of the Muslim world.

A key offense was ikhtilat, or unauthorized mixing between men and women. The kingdom’s clerics warn that it could lead to fornication, adultery, broken homes, children born of unmarried couples and full-blown societal collapse.

For years, Mr. Ghamdi stuck with the program and was eventually put in charge of the Commission for the region of Mecca, Islam’s holiest city. Then he had a reckoning and began to question the rules. So he turned to the Quran and the stories of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, considered the exemplars of Islamic conduct. What he found was striking and life altering: There had been plenty of mixing among the first generation of Muslims, and no one had seemed to mind.

So he spoke out. In articles and television appearances, he argued that much of what Saudis practiced as religion was in fact Arabian cultural practices that had been mixed up with their faith.

There was no need to close shops for prayer, he said, nor to bar women from driving, as Saudi Arabia does. At the time of the Prophet, women rode around on camels, which he said was far more provocative than veiled women piloting S.U.V.s.

He even said that while women should conceal their bodies, they needed to cover their faces only if they chose to do so. And to demonstrate the depth of his own conviction, Mr. Ghamdi went on television with his wife, Jawahir, who smiled to the camera, her face bare and adorned with a dusting of makeup.

It was like a bomb inside the kingdom’s religious establishment, threatening the social order that granted prominence to the sheikhs and made them the arbiters of right and wrong in all aspects of life. He threatened their control.

Mr. Ghamdi’s colleagues at work refused to speak to him. Angry calls poured into his cellphone and anonymous death threats hit him on Twitter. Prominent sheikhs took to the airwaves to denounce him as an ignorant upstart who should be punished, tried — and even tortured.

Source: A Saudi Morals Enforcer Called for a More Liberal Islam. Then the Death Threats Began. – The New York Times

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Diaspora Dialogues Gives Emerging Writers a Voice

2016/07/12 Leave a comment

Good initiative given the power of story telling and writing. CanLit includes a number of strong immigrant and visible minority writers (e.g., Bissoondath, Vassanji, Ondaatje, Hage, Hill):

New writers are using mentorship opportunities to create and share more diverse and inclusive stories about Toronto’s history and culture.

“What we want to do is to create a living history of Toronto through literature [and] make it as diverse as the city itself,” says Helen Walsh, the president of Diaspora Dialogues  – a charitable society made up of writers, artists and performers.

“I’m not surprised that there are at least 50 to 60 countries represented through Diaspora Dialogues – lots of voices from Asia, Africa and Northern Europe,” Walsh adds. “Often, people write about their own cultural background and we want to bring Toronto to life through literature.”

Mentoring new writers

Toronto’s iconic Old City Hall, a national historic site, was the stage for Diaspora Dialogues during Doors Open Toronto, an event that offers access to buildings with historical significance across the city.

“Often, people write about their own cultural background and we want to bring Toronto to life through literature.”

Jamaican-born and Ottawa-raised emerging writer Dianah Smith is one of 12 writers who presented their work at Old City Hall. As a teacher and arts educator, Smith joined Diaspora Dialogues in 2014 for its mentoring program, in which she paired-up with Jamaican-Canadian writer and media professional Martin Mordecai.

“For about six months, he helped me to get into [a] schedule of my draft and first novel, finalizing some of the scenes of my manuscript to get it ready for publication,” Smith says about her experience as a mentee.

“It’s a story about a seven-year-old girl, Jemela Campbell, and her experience in immigrating from Jamaica to Canada and her first year in Canada,” Smith explains.

The excerpt she reads is from the novel, with a working title The Promise of Foreign, which explores some of the challenges newcomer parents face in Canada such as finding work and keeping jobs.

Seeking recognition as writers

“As a racialized person of colour, as an immigrant, you don’t really feel represented in the publishing world,” Smith explains. “You have names like Margaret Atwood, mainly white and middle-class people.”

She says that while Diaspora Dialogues does not restrict white writers from participating, it also tries “to have alternative voices to give immigrants and indigenous people the opportunity to share their stories.”

Author Mia Herrera adds that working in the Canadian publishing and writing industry is precarious.

“A writer who publishes regularly makes a salary of about $12,000 a year. You can’t make a living on that,” she says.

Born to Filipino parents, Herrera now lives in Bradford, Ont. She works in communications and marketing and says she continues to write because it is her passion.

Smith says she is still in the process of finding an interested publisher for her novel. While her mentorship program ended last fall, she continues to participate in other programs led by Diaspora Dialogues such as Lunch and Learn events, workshops about pitching to agents, as well as mentee book readings such as the one at Old City Hall.

Source: Diaspora Dialogues Gives Emerging Writers a Voice – New Canadian Media

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Josiah Wilson, the Indian Act, hereditary governance and blood quantum

2016/07/11 Leave a comment

Fascinating account of the different aspects of identity, ranging from bloodline requirements to culture, and the challenge this poses across a number of fronts:

The story of Josiah Wilson, the Haiti-born, Heiltsuk First Nation adopted basketball player, has raised questions of Indigenous identity much bigger than whether he should be allowed to play in an All-Native Basketball Tournament in B.C.

The tournament committee’s decision to ban Wilson, 20, a status Indian, because he doesn’t have at least 1/8th First Nations ancestry or “blood quantum” is a symptom of a greater conflict.

This conflict lurks in band offices, treaty offices, on the land and on reserves across the country.

What, or who, defines someone as Indigenous — is it the hereditary system, the Indian Act, a blood test?

According to the Canadian government, Wilson is an “Indian.” According to the Heiltsuk, he is Heiltsuk. And according to the All-Native Basketball Tournament, he is an adoptee, Canadian and Haitian, but not Heiltsuk.

Heiltsuk hereditary system

In the eyes of the Heiltsuk Hemas (hereditary chiefs), Wilson is Heiltsuk. The Hemas embody the Heiltsuk Nation’s traditional social structure and hereditary system of governance, which identifies members through cultural protocol and a connection to family crests and clans.

Heiltsuk Hemas standing with Haida Hereditary Chiefs

In the eyes of the Heiltsuk Hemas (hereditary chiefs), Josiah is Heiltsuk. Here, Heiltsuk Hemas are shown with Haida hereditary chiefs. (Don Wilson/Facebook)

Heiltsuk cultural adviser Frances Brown says the hereditary system is a complex set of laws that governs not only a responsibility to the land, but also social relationships to one another, including adoption.

“If there’s a customary adoption it means that you adopt a child and you do it in a potlatch where there’s many witnesses and the chiefs are there,” said Brown.

Gary Housty was one of the Heiltsuk Hemas to witness the ceremonial adoption of Wilson by a First Nations family. He says he wrote a letter to members of the all-native committee urging them to let Wilson play, but received no response.

“I really have a problem with the way they’re setting down rules that disallow people to participate in these very important cultural events, such as the All-Native Tournament. There’s so much culture there. And we are talking about culture here.

“In my eyes Josiah is a Heiltsuk boy, a Heiltsuk person. He belongs here with us,” said Housty.

Source: Josiah Wilson, the Indian Act, hereditary governance and blood quantum – Aboriginal – CBC

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U of T gets personal with staff to track race, gender data

2016/07/11 Leave a comment

Lessons for the federal public service and other organizations?

Particularly significant is the removal of names from resumés to remove implicit (and explicit) bias.

Ontario EducationI was able to drill down to visible minority groups using NHS data for the  education sector as in the chart above for Ontario, as differences among groups are increasingly more important than between visible minorities and non-visible minorities:

Canada’s largest university is asking its employees remarkably personal questions — from what race they are and where they come from to whether they’re transgendered — in a bid to make sure certain groups aren’t being left out of jobs and promotions.

In a new survey given this week to all 10,000 employees from professors to secretaries, the University of Toronto goes beyond asking staff if they see themselves as “persons of colour” or “racialized,” to whether they are black, white, Asian, Latin/Hispanic, Middle Eastern or mixed.

And that’s just to start.

The updated Employment Equity Survey then dives to a level believed unmatched on any other Canadian campus: If you answer ‘black,’ are you African, Caribbean, European, North American or South American?

If you said Asian, do you mean East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), South Asian (Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan), Southeast Asian (Malaysian, Filipino, Vietnamese) or Asian Caribbean from, say, Trinidad? Hispanic employees are asked if their heritage is Caribbean, Central American, European or South American.

The questions also offer a sneak peek at what the university’s 85,000 students will be asked this fall on its first student demographic survey.

“Students have made it very clear they don’t see themselves reflected in faculty and staff, so collecting data is part of an overall move to get a better sense of who is under-represented so we can do better outreach and targeted recruitment,” said Angela Hildyard, vice-president of human resources and equity.

Like other organizations that do a certain amount of business with the federal government, U of T has for decades been required to track its employees by gender, disability, whether they’re aboriginal or members of a ‘visible minority.’

“But this language no longer makes sense,” said Hildyard, especially with students. “If you’ve been to one of our convocations lately, you’ll see we’re so diverse, the visible minority would likely be white.” Even changing the category last year to “person of colour or racialized person” shed little light on the true diversity of campus workers.

“If equity and diversity are linked to excellence — and we are the only university in North America to have a statement making it clear we’ll only be excellent with diversity and equity — then we need to collect more information on how different groups are represented on campus.”

Some black faculty members have been vocal about the need to increase their ranks, she said, “but we have no idea how many we have because we don’t have data. This gives us a better sense of who we have here and if they are under-represented, and target candidate pools.”

Moreover, the university will start giving the survey to job applicants as well, so it can track where the gaps begin.

“Black students feel woefully under-represented (among U of T faculty and staff), so this will allow us to actually see the numbers of black applicants in the first place, and are they being shortlisted? Is there some kind of discrimination going on?”

Too, U of T will take the unusual step of removing names from job applicants’ resumés “to see if that enhances certain groups’ possibility of being interviewed. We always want to be sure we hire the best candidate, but is there something happening (that blocks particular groups) like hiring committees having a bias against certain kinds of names?”

Anecdotally, the ranks of professors at Canadian universities “are not very representative of the wider population,” noted David Robinson, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, “so gathering this kind of information is a positive thing.” It also could help reveal which university departments are less diverse than others, not only with regards to race, but also gender and abilities.

The U of T survey asks about disabilities and sexual orientation, and a new question on gender includes check-boxes for man, woman, two-spirit, “another gender identity” or “trans: a person who identifies with a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth, or differs from stereotypical masculine and feminine norms.”

Said Hildyard: “The data can help us learn who applies, who gets shortlisted, who gets interviewed for jobs, so if we find the candidate pool is not diverse, that’s where we can focus our efforts.”

Source: U of T gets personal with staff to track race, gender data | Toronto Star

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