How the U.S. Census Penalizes Arab Americans

2023/06/20 Leave a comment

Interesting history to the lack of a Middle Eastern and North Africa (MENA) category (in Canada, Arab and West Asian) and the reasons why needed:

The exact number of Middle Eastern residents in the United States is unclear, with estimates ranging from 1.8 to 3.7 million people. The uncertainty is not primarily due to undocumented immigration, poor data maintenance, or limited survey reach, but how the U.S. Census Bureau classifies individuals of Middle Eastern descent. While federal demographic databases typically include five categories (Hispanic, non-Hispanic White, African American/Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, and American Indian or Alaska Native), those of Middle Eastern ancestry do not fit neatly into any of these groups. The federal government and the U.S. Census Bureau address this concern by classifying white as “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.”

This categorization originated from the 19th-century wave of Arab immigration when being classified as white in the United States provided clear advantages such as access to citizenship, legislative programs, and governmental employment. Arab immigrants campaigned to avoid being categorized as Asian, and arguments were made based on Social Darwinism and Christian superiority, as the majority of the initial immigrants were Christian Arabs. They argued that if Jesus, who was from the same region, was the son of God and at the top of the social pyramid alongside Anglo-Saxons, then Lebanese and Syrian immigrants were also white.

This theory faced legal challenges in 1909 when George Shishim, a Lebanese American police officer in L.A. County, arrested the son of a prominent lawyer. The lawyer and his son argued that Shishim, due to his Asian race, was not a U.S. citizen and had no right to arrest U.S. citizens. At the time, Shishim argued, “If I am Mongolian, then so was Jesus, because we came from the same land.” Arab American community leaders rallied around Shishim and hired attorney Byron C. Hanna. In response to the argument, Judge Hutton of the Superior Court of Los Angeles ruled that Shishim was eligible for citizenship and that Lebanese and Syrians belonged to the “white race.” This classification gradually extended to all individuals of Middle Eastern and North African descent across the United States.

While this classification initially benefited Arab Americans, it presented challenges in policy formulation as the United States embraced multiculturalism. Arab individuals are not commonly viewed as white and often have different socio-cultural backgrounds. These differences have significant policy implications. For example, if policymakers or researchers wanted to study alcohol consumption prevalence among Arab residents in California, public health data would not provide specific categories for Arab and European respondents. This lack of differentiation makes crafting effective policy increasingly difficult. Sociology professor Kristine J. Ajrouch, who studies Alzheimer’s disease among Arab Americans, faces this difficulty in her research. “[The current classifications] make it very difficult to identify Middle Eastern and North African individuals or those of Arab ancestry.”

The current categorization prevents Arab Americans from accessing policy programs designed for minority groups. Minority-owned businesses often receive specific advantages in government contracts through local, state, and federal programs. Despite being a minority group, Arab-owned businesses do not benefit from these programs. Legislative actions, such as Executive Order 13769, labeled the “Muslim travel ban” by critics 0f the former Trump administration, which disproportionately impacted travel from many Arab countries, have targeted Arab communities, raising the question of whether Arab Americans are viewed and treated as white. Samer Khalaf, President of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, believes otherwise, arguing, “We’re counted as ‘white,’ but we’re not treated as ‘white.’ We have the ‘no-fly’ lists, and we’re subjected to heightened security wherever we go.”

However, there is a possibility of change in the 2030 Census, as it might include a “Middle Eastern or North African” option. During preparations for the 2020 Census, researchers concluded that a MENA category “helps respondents to more accurately report their MENA identities.” However, a lack of approval from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during the Trump administration prevented the implementation of this plan. In 2021, the Biden administration confirmed that it had reviewed the proposal. If the OMB approves a MENA classification before the finalization of the 2030 Census, it could appear on the nationwide survey for the first time in U.S. history.

Racial categorization is an ever-evolving concept in the United States, and the classification of white has often been contentious. However, beyond symbolic portrayals of group identity, this categorization has significant legislative implications. Not tracking the unique cultural, linguistic, and social patterns found in Arab communities hinders the creation of effective policy. Cities and states across the United States must act and include a Middle Eastern and North African racial option on official surveys in order to pursue effective legislation.

Source: How the U.S. Census Penalizes Arab Americans

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No One Ever Made the Case for Reparations Better Than Reagan

2023/06/19 Leave a comment

And it was under Conservative PM Mulroney that Canada also issued an official apology and payments for Japanese internment in Canada, along with the creation of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation:

Today, as Californians consider a reparations package that could reach $800 billion to pay for the harm the state has done to its African-American population on matters ranging from over-policing to housing discrimination, there’s a pro-reparations argument that needs to be revived. It’s that made by Ronald Reagan 35 years ago.

With California’s Task Force to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for African Americans getting ready to submit a draft of its report to the state legislature by late June, Reagan’s argument has become more relevant than ever. “For here we right a wrong,” Reagan declared in 1988, as his second term as president was nearing its end. Reagan spoke these words to mark his signing of a bill designed to provide restitution for the World War II internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry.

At a time when those making the case for reparations are accused of being woke, we forget the heartfelt case for payments combining restitution and reparations that Reagan made without fearing he would lose his credentials as a political conservative.

The decision to remove Japanese Americans from their homes during World War II reflected long standing anti-Asian prejudices. The Roosevelt administration contended that Japanese Americans posed a danger to the country in case of a Japanese attack on America’s West Coast. But there was no comparable treatment of German Americans or Italian Americans despite the United States also being at war with Germany and Italy.

Reagan’s speech is one that few want to recall because of the racism it calls attention to, but the speech is a lesson in how to deal with history we would like to have back. At the speech’s core lies Reagan’s belief that, while we cannot undo the wrongs of the past, we can mitigate their continuing impact.

In his address to the nation in 1988, Reagan managed to apologize for government wrongdoing and argue that his apology left America stronger. “So what is most important in this bill has less to do with property than with honor,” Reagan declared. “We reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law.”

The timing of Reagan’s speech is noteworthy. It came decades before the Supreme Court in 2018 explicitly repudiated the Roosevelt-era Supreme Court’s 1944 Korematsu decision sanctioning the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. In words that echo Reagan’s, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. described Korematsu as “morally repugnant” and “gravely wrong the day it was decided.”

Prior to 2018 the strongest legal dissent from the Korematsu decision was the “confession of error” that the Justice Department issued in 2011 when it acknowledged the misleading role the Solicitor General had played in 1944 in defending the internment of Japanese Americans.

Reagan began his 1988 speech by describing the cruelty of the internment that the government was now seeking to redress. He spoke of thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry being removed from their homes and placed in makeshift internment camps solely because of their race.

The rush to internment began on February 19, 1942, 73 days after the United States entered World War II when President Franklin Roosevelt issued Order 9066. The order came with so little planning that for a time Japanese-American families were interned in the horse stables at Santa Anita race track. In his address Reagan believed it was important not to sugarcoat the emotional and economic impact of internment.

The redress for Japanese Americans interned during World War II has meant tax-free payments of $20,000 to more than 82,000 claimants as a result of the 1988 act. The total amounts to over $1.6 billion.

Reagan was not put off by the cost of restitution, which in fact falls short of the amount of money lost by the men and women interned in the 1940s when put in current dollars. At the heart of Reagan’s speech was his belief that “no payment can make up for those lost years.”

Thirteen years after Ronald Reagan’s White House speech, the National Japanese-American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II opened in Washington on June 29, 2001. Unlike the memorials on the National Mall, the National Japanese-American Memorial does not immediately draw attention to itself. The memorial sits just north of the Capitol on a small triangle of land at the intersection of New Jersey Avenue and D Street.

The 33,000 square-foot park and plaza that hold the memorial invite contemplation. Designed by Washington, D.C. architect Davis Buckley, the memorial, like Reagan’s speech, makes a point of being direct and elegiac about the injustices it addresses. On one of its walls are the names of the 10 internment camps where Japanese Americans were held during World War II, and at the center of the memorial is a bronze sculpture, “The Golden Cranes,” by Nina Akamu, whose grandfather died in an internment camp. Her sculpture consists of two cranes struggling to break free of the barbed wire that entangles them.

“The burden of righting a historic wrong sanctioned by the government does not simply fall on those responsible for the wrong at the time it was committed.”

Ronald Reagan was not able to attend the opening of the Japanese-American Memorial, but he is present there. Words from his 1988 speech are inscribed on the edge of the memorial pool.

Reagan concluded his speech by recalling the time he attended a 1945 medal ceremony in Orange County, California, at which World War II General Joe Stillwell honored a Japanese-American military hero of the war in Europe with a posthumous Distinguished Service Cross. Reagan’s role at the 1945 medal ceremony, like that of the other celebrities there, was a minor one, but decades later, he saw his presence at the ceremony worth addressing.

In doing so, Reagan was not just personalizing his speech. He was making clear a lesson in continuity that is easy to forget: the burden of righting a historic wrong sanctioned by the government does not simply fall on those responsible for the wrong at the time it was committed. It falls on a state or nation owning up to its past.

Nicolaus Mills is author of Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964—The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America. He is professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College.

Source: No One Ever Made the Case for Reparations Better Than Reagan

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As Juneteenth Goes National, We Must Preserve the Local

2023/06/19 Leave a comment

Interesting commentary, noting that “something’s lost, but something’s gained” in the creation of a national holiday:

It’s been two years since Juneteenth became a federal holiday, one we can celebrate together as a nation. The signing of the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law in 2021 was an expression of real progress in the collective understanding of Black struggle that reinforced our national ideals of liberty and dignity. But I confess my ambivalence. I am worried about what official national recognition might do to what has always been a community-based holiday.

My own memories of Juneteenth, like those of so many others, are distinctly local. They are rooted in a sense of place.

When I was young, that place was Eden Park, high on the hills along the Ohio River in Cincinnati, where I would spend the day contentedly with my mother and the many other families who attended. Years later, after I formed a family of my own with my spouse (who is not Black or Midwestern, but Native American from Montana), discovering where Juneteenth events were held, who organized them and who turned out was like holding a black light to the invisible-inked map of the present and past African American community.

When we moved to Ann Arbor, Mich., to start jobs at the university there, we kept an eye out for the flyers popping up on market bulletin boards and wooden street posts. Following these notices like a marked trail, we wound up at a park in a neighborhood near the Huron River and railroad tracks. The celebration we found there was small and free of charge, with clusters of families gathered to cook out, listen to music on boomboxes and enjoy the summer day outdoors. We felt welcome and accepted.

The location of this small event, it turned out, was an old Black neighborhood that was changing over time as residents from different racial backgrounds and income levels moved in for the river views. But even amid this demographic flux, the area retained its historic character. It was here that Black University of Michigan students who faced housing discrimination near campus in the late 1800s and early 1900s could rent rooms in boardinghouses and where older Black homeowners still had vast lots where they cultivated thick gardens full of emerald collard green rows. If it had not been for that Juneteenth event, my husband and I would have missed the historic and communal character of this neighborhood, the place where we went on to buy our first home in the city two years later and rock our infant twins to sleep.

Juneteenth festivities have long represented tucked-away spaces, deeply local, somewhat surprising and fitted to the variances of Black life in America. They have supported micro-cultures of Black crafts and local economies of neighborhood enterprise, fostering the kind of community exchange that will be most sustainable in the future. Whether they are rural or urban, their local specificity, and their hiddenness from those who would misunderstand their gravity, have made Juneteenth events special and enduring.

The best-known Juneteenth locale and origin story is the one that has given the holiday its name, originating in Galveston, Texas, with Major General Gordon Granger’s June 19, 1865, announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, issued two years earlier. His announcement informed enslaved people, who had been denied information as well as their rights, that freedom had come. In other parts of the country, Black communities celebrated what they called Emancipation Day, keyed to a different historical timestamp. Most often, this day commemorated the end of slavery in the West Indies in 1833 (effective August 1834).

Many Black communities along the Atlantic seaboard celebrated Emancipation Day. Among them was Boston’s longstanding, politically active population, which, the historian Jacqueline Jones has shown in her new book, “No Right to an Honest Living,” was made up of free families extending back to the end of slavery in Massachusetts in the 1780s, freedom-seekers and recent refugees from the South and immigrants from the Caribbean. Boston’s Emancipation Day tradition has re-emerged under the banner of Juneteenth as local organizations like the Museum of African American History celebrate the holiday in the heart of the historic Black community situated around the African Meeting House on the narrow lanes of Beacon Hill.

On the island of Nantucket, a petite slip of fog-dipped land beyond Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, M.A.A.H. is extending this Juneteenth observance. There, Juneteenth will be celebrated in the historic building of another African Meeting House, which will have a bicentennial anniversary in 2025. A Black and Wampanoag whaling community built the structure as a multipurpose church and school in a neighborhood called New Guinea in the 1820s. As one of the oldest buildings constructed by a free Black community in this country, Nantucket’s African Meeting House has just been awarded a capital project grant from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The celebration of Juneteenth on Nantucket will highlight the precious history of a place where people of African and Indigenous descent joined together as families and made a living off the bounty of the sea.

Two thousand-plus miles west of Massachusetts, Montanans will also observe a refashioned Juneteenth holiday this year. Perhaps like Nantucket and the Massachusetts Cape and Islands, Montana is largely imagined by the rest of the country as a white place (with only a glancing acknowledgment of the significant Indigenous populations and histories there). But Montana also has a long and complex Black history, which has only recently been reconstructed through a multimedia project of the Montana Historical Society.

A handful of Black fur traders crossed into the Rocky Mountain West in the mid-19th century, but most African Americans migrated to Montana after the Civil War. In the 1870s and 1880s, Buffalo Soldiers of the Ninth and 10th Cavalry Regiments and the 24th and 25th Infantry Regiments moved west to man forts. Black women sometimes accompanied their soldiering husbands and at other times arrived with white officers or white families to work as domestics. As the Black population grew in Montana in the late 19th century and early 20th century, tens of thousands of people formed communities in or near cities such as Havre, Great Falls, Butte and Helena. There they followed the demonstrated pattern of African American priorities, erecting schools and churches and developing practices of mutual aid. Some of these Black newcomers married into Indigenous families, navigating dual and triple allegiances. As the historian Anthony Wood has detailed in his 2021 book “Black Montana,” African American residents in the city of Butte celebrated Emancipation Day with a pilgrimage by train into the snow-peaked mountains, where they enjoyed picnics, fun and frivolities.

In the Great Plains states of Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota and Wyoming, Black residents gathered to observe Emancipation Day, too. These were people who had moved from the cotton-belt and rice-field South to form rural settlements on acreage opened through the U.S. Homestead Act of 1862 (a law that distributed ill-gotten Native lands). As shown in a research project led by Richard Edwards at the University of Nebraska Center for Great Plains Studies, African Americans in the region ritualized emancipation as a communal act of remembrance.

Celebrations across the Great Plains and in Montana most likely commemorated not the well-known Galveston, Texas, moment, or even the British West Indies moment, but instead a closer, regional history: August of 1865, later formalized in the Treaty of 1866, when African-descended people owned by Native Americans of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in nearby Indian Territory (present-day eastern Oklahoma) were freed from bondage.

In 2023, for the second year in a row, the Montana Historical Society, in partnership with the Holter Museum of Art and the Myrna Loy theater, will host a free Juneteenth festival, drawing on a local history of diversity and perseverance. Based in Helena, these activities include a trolley ride (reminiscent of those Butte train rides more than a century ago), a tour of Black historic sites, a documentary film about an 1897 cross-country journey by Black soldiers of the 25th Infantry to test whether bikes could replace horses, a dance, food and a teenage art workshop.

Juneteenth celebrations mounted by groups on the ground grow out of these rich histories, help us to recognize them and illuminate pathways toward greater understanding and connection where people live, work and visit.

But the day’s new national recognition has brought a level of commercialization that threatens to eclipse these local celebrations, in all their wondrous specificity. Today we can find Juneteenth T-shirts aplenty at Walmart, a Juneteenth makeup sale courtesy of an online boutique and apparel on Etsy boasting the ironic claim “Culture Not for Sale” in Kwanzaa colors. In just two years, we’ve already seen examples of how this kind of rapid commercialization can go awry. In 2021 Target had to admit that a Juneteenth display of hot sauce, Kool-Aid and watermelon “missed the mark,” and Walmart apologized in 2022 for making and marketing Juneteenth ice cream.

When we allow corporations and distant event planners to hijack Juneteenth, we lose the texture of these various places and their particular commemorations. We share the responsibility to prevent that.

In the middle of the Civil War, in October of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln inaugurated Thanksgiving Day (in a proclamation written by Secretary of State William Henry Seward, after long-term lobbying by the writer and editor Sarah Josepha Hale). We know this Thanksgiving vision was exclusionary, advancing what the historian David Silverman has described as a false narrative about Indigenous and English settler relations. But over time, the practice of the holiday has had the unifying impact of bringing people of diverse heritages together around a shared identity and a meal, creating a sense of both commonality and intimacy. Resisting homogenization and commodification, Thanksgiving gatherings orient toward relationships. Families, friends and neighbors converge in homes, churches, community centers and shelters for unhoused people to break bread and express gratitude, a ritual of connection.

With care and concerted effort, the Juneteenth holiday might rival Thanksgiving as a new communal ritual, highlighting the value of shared freedoms as our workweek tempo slows and personal rhythms align, even as we notice and cherish the treasure of each distinct celebration. In these right-size gatherings in parks, on blocks, at town greens and city squares, we can gain so much more than kitschy displays and logo T-shirts — loneliness dispelled, neighborhoods sustained and a torn national fabric slowly darned from the inside out.

For the sake of our history and maybe our country, we should let a thousand Juneteenths bloom.

Source: As Juneteenth Goes National, We Must Preserve the Local

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GOLDSTEIN: Ex-spy chief warned of China’s interference in 2010 — he was almost fired

2023/06/19 Leave a comment

Remember the controversy well during my time at the multiculturalism program and agree with Goldstein that his warning was prescient:

Thirteen years ago, the then newly-appointed director of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service warned Canadians about the growing threat of interference by China.

It almost ended Richard Fadden’s career. It’s also why he would be an excellent choice to head a public inquiry into foreign interference today.

In 2010, he warned us that politicians and public servants were under the influence of Beijing, that China was exerting influence on Canadians of Chinese origin and that academic relationships between Canadian universities and China were another source of interference.

Based on what we now know, what Fadden said was mild. He focused mainly on attempts by China to interfere through gestures of so-called friendship, rather than threats.

But back then, few wanted to listen.

Not the majority of MPs or in the media, who condemned Fadden for everything from raising the issue without clearing it with the government, to fomenting hatred against Canadians of Chinese origin.

Today, it is the Chinese diaspora community in Canada who are at the forefront of calls for a public inquiry because they have been the primary targets and victims of Beijing’s interference.

Fadden initially commented publicly about foreign interference in response to a question after a speech he gave in March 2010 at Toronto’s Royal Canadian Military Institute to police, military and intelligence and security officials.

“There are several municipal politicians in British Columbia and in at least two provinces there are ministers of the Crown whom we think are under at least the general influence of a foreign government,” Fadden said. “They have no idea. It’s just a long-standing relationship. “You develop friendships, it’s what I do, in reverse and they’re very good at it.”

Very few people would ever have heard Fadden’s comment if CSIS hadn’t filmed his entire speech and given it to the CBC for an upcoming feature on CSIS’ 25th anniversary.

When that documentary aired three months later in June, the CBC’s Brian Stewart asked Fadden to elaborate on foreign interference.

Fadden expanded his prior comments to include attempts by some countries to establish influence programs with universities and social clubs by donating money to them, pressuring members of their diaspora communities using everything from friendly gestures to threats to toe the government line abroad, to warnings of deportation of visiting university students if they publicly criticized their homelands.

The CBC did a follow-up interview with Fadden the next day, where he confirmed to an incredulous Peter Mansbridge that he was mainly talking about China and that its attempted influence was municipal and provincial at that point, not federal.

After that, all hell broke loose with a Commons committee controlled by the opposition parties in the then minority Conservative government, demanding PM Stephen Harper, who appointed Fadden, condemn his remarks and fire him for, among other things, not pre-clearing his comments with the government.

Fadden survived and went on to become Harper’s national security advisor before retiring after the Liberals won the 2015 election.

But what had happened set back any serious public conversation about combatting foreign interference in the Harper and Trudeau governments until Sam Cooper, formerly of Global News, now with thebureau.news, and Robert Fife and Steven Chase of the Globe and Mail began breaking stories beginning in November 2022, based on sources, that the federal government was downplaying warnings about interference

We should have listened to Fadden 13 years ago. Today, he supports a public inquiry.

Source: GOLDSTEIN: Ex-spy chief warned of China’s interference in 2010 — he was almost fired

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‘A sense of betrayal’: liberal dismay as Muslim-led US city bans Pride flags

2023/06/19 Leave a comment

Of note:

In 2015, many liberal residents in Hamtramck, Michigan, celebrated as their city attracted international attention for becoming the first in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council.

They viewed the power shift and diversity as a symbolic but meaningful rebuke of the Islamophobic rhetoric that was a central theme of then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.

‘It’s brought us together’: at Ramadan, American Muslims on life in the age of Trump

This week many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property that had – like many others being flown around the country – been intended to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.

Muslim residents packing city hall erupted in cheers after the council’s unanimous vote, and on Hamtramck’s social media pages, the taunting has been relentless: “Fagless City”, read one post, emphasized with emojis of a bicep flexing.

In a tense monologue before the vote, Councilmember Mohammed Hassan shouted his justification at LGBTQ+ supporters: “I’m working for the people, what the majority of the people like.”

While Hamtramck is still viewed as a bastion of multiculturalism, the difficulties of local governance and living among neighbors with different cultural values quickly set in following the 2015 election. Some leaders and residents are now bitter political enemies engaged in a series of often vicious battles over the city’s direction, and the Pride flag controversy represents a crescendo in tension.

“There’s a sense of betrayal,” said the former Hamtramck mayor Karen Majewski, who is Polish American. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.”

For about a century, Polish and Ukrainian Catholics dominated politics in Hamtramck, a city of 28,000 surrounded by Detroit. By 2013, largely Muslim Bangladeshi and Yemeni immigrants supplanted the white eastern Europeans, though the city remains home to significant populations of those groups, as well as African Americans, whites and Bosnian and Albanian Americans. According to the 2020 census some 30% to 38% of Hamtramck’s residents are of Yemeni descent, and 24% are of Asian descent, largely Bangladeshi.

After several years of diversity on the council, some see irony in an all-male, Muslim elected government that does not reflect the city’s makeup.

The resolution, which also prohibits the display of flags with ethnic, racist and political views, comes at a time when LGBTQ+ rights are under assault worldwide, and other US cities have passed similar bans, with the vast majority driven by often white politically conservative Americans.

While the situation in Hamtramck largely evolved on its own local dynamics, some outside rightwing agitators connected to national Republican groups have been pushing for the ban on Hamtramck’s social media pages and voiced support for it at Tuesday’s meeting. They are from nearby Dearborn where they were part of an effort last year to ban books with LGBTQ+ themes.

Their talking points mirror those made elsewhere: some Hamtramck Muslims say they simply want to protect children, and gay people should “keep it in their home”.

But that sentiment is “an erasure of the queer community and an attempt to shove queer people back in the closet”, said Gracie Cadieux, a queer Hamtramck resident who is part of the Anti-Transphobic Action group.

Mayor Amer Ghalib, 43, who was elected in 2021 with 67% of the vote to become the nation’s first Yemeni American mayor, told the Guardian on Thursday he tries to govern fairly for everyone, but said LGBTQ+ supporters had stoked tension by “forcing their agendas on others”.

“There is an overreaction to the situation, and some people are not willing to accept the fact that they lost,” he said, referring to Majewski and recent elections that resulted in full control of the council by Muslim politicians.

Though the city’s Muslims are not a monolith and some privately told the Guardian they were “frustrated” with council, the only leader to publicly question it was the former city council member Amanda Jaczkowski, a Polish American who converted to Islam.

In a statement, she raised concerns about the move’s legality: “There are far too many questions to pass this today with any semblance of responsibility.”

On one level, the discord that has flared between Muslim and non-Muslim populations in recent years has its root in a culture clash that is unique to a partly liberal small US city now under conservative Muslim leadership, residents say. Last year, the council approved an ordinance allowing backyard animal sacrifices, shocking some non-Muslim residents even though animal sacrifice is protected under the first amendment in the US as a form of religious expression.

When Michigan legalized marijuana, it gave municipalities a late 2020 deadline to enact a prohibition of dispensaries. Hamtramck council missed the deadline and a dispensary opened, drawing outrage from conservative Muslims who demanded city leadership shut it down. That ignited counterprotests from many liberal residents, and the council only relented when it became clear it had no legal recourse.

At other times, the issues are not unique to Hamtramck. In the realm of local politics, personal fights among neighbors, warring factions and dirty politics are a common part of the democratic process across the US.

“I don’t know that we’re really all that different from other cities in most ways,” Majewski said.

However, race and religion add more fraught layers to Hamtramck’s issues. Islamophobia exists here, and some Muslims say they saw bigotry in local voter fraud investigations, and in LGBTQ+ supporters not respecting their religion.

But Majewski said the majority is now disrespecting the minority. She noted that a white, Christian-majority city council in 2005 created an ordinance to allow the Muslim call to prayer to be broadcast from the city’s mosques five times daily. It did so over objections of white city residents, and Majewski said she didn’t see the same reciprocity with roles reversed.

Ghalib disagreed, and labeled the prayer broadcast a “first amendment issue” while noting no one was asking for city hall to broadcast the calls.

Moreover, the white majority council was not always hospitable to Muslim residents who have previously faced overt racism. And with a majority-Muslim council in place, more Muslims had been appointed to boards and commissions, and hired in city hall. So had some LGBTQ+ residents, Ghalib added.

Despite the political clashes, he thinks there is hope for Hamtramck to live up to its multicultural ideals.

“We can get along and people are not violent here,” he said.

Cadieux agreed peaceful coexistence was possible.

“We aren’t in the business of excluding people from our society and I’m not going to exclude socially conservative Muslims – they have a place at the table just like everyone else,” she said. “However, they cannot, and will not, shove another community out of the way.”

Source: ‘A sense of betrayal’: liberal dismay as Muslim-led US city bans Pride flags

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

Australia: What is the government’s multicultural policies review seeking to …

2023/06/17 Leave a comment

Of interest:

Fifty years after the Whitlam government released its landmark report on multiculturalism in Australia, the Albanese government has launched a major review of its policies to ensure they are serving multicultural communities in the best ways.

But will this review provide a multicultural policy “for all Australians”? Or is it just seeking to ensure, as the government put it, that “no one is left behind, and everyone feels that they truly belong”?

Multicultural policies in Australia initially aimed to benefit all Australians, not just multicultural communities. They were meant to express the broader principles of liberal democracy, such as equality, freedom and economic opportunity.

However, the past decade has been marked by “fear-mongering and division”, as Immigration Minister Andrew Giles recently reminded us.

Perhaps this is why the Albanese government review, promised during the 2022 federal election, has set a modest goal on multicultural policies. It may ultimately fall short of the broader goal of engaging with wider society.

So, what will the review actually be looking at? And what is it seeking to achieve?

How Australia has changed

The review’s terms of reference say the aim is quite simple: ensuring we have a government that works for a multicultural Australia.

It identifies discrimination, systemic barriers to services and social mobility as focal points for action.

Australia has changed significantly over the past decade. More than 50% of the population today was born overseas or has at least one parent overseas born. And nearly 30% identify with a non-Anglo culture.

Over the past decade, perhaps the biggest issue in relation to the social integration of immigrants has been the huge increase in temporary migration to Australia.

Public policy has equated “temporary” with “not requiring support”. That means these migrants have not received adequate services in housing, transport, education, employment protection and health.

They were the ones most abandoned during the pandemic, when they were told simply to “go home” or survive on the streets.

What the review will look at

There are three intertwining policy spheres that require a major rethink in the multicultural review:

  • multicultural policy (including language policy, recognition of people’s identities and support for their sense of belonging to Australian society, and employment protection policy)
  • settlement policy (focused on new arrivals of both migrants and refugees, including trauma recovery), and
  • community relations (covering discrimination, relations between different cultural groups, anti-racism efforts, social integration and the all-important relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians).

These policies were left to decay over the last generation, throughout both Labor and Coalition governments.

Another focus of the review will be on the power hierarchy in Australia and how open it is to non-European Australians.

This remains a major challenge for the country. There are few people of multicultural backgrounds in positions of power, such as

Importantly, the review will also consider the role of the government as an employer itself. Recent studies have pointed to the under-representation of culturally and linguistically diverse groups in the public sector at both the Commonwealth and state levels – especially at senior levels.

The review will consider how the Commonwealth government has been addressing all of these issues. It will make recommendations on legislation, policy settings, community relations and government services at the federal, state and local levels.

Where the review may fall short

Unfortunately, the review was not asked to examine the poor state of Australian government data collection on diversity and its appalling consequences.

We recently saw this most starkly in the lack of statistics on mortality from COVID, which hit older, multicultural Australians particularly hard.

Neither is it being asked to consider how to rebuild the depleted state of Australian research on diversity and multicultural issues. This was a central recommendation of the last Labor-led parliamentary committee review of multicultural policies in 2013.

The chair of the current panel is Dr Bulent Hass Dellal, executive director of the Australian Multicultural Foundation. He has considerable experience as a government advisor in the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments. He also has the confidence of the new government.

However, there are no First Nations people on the panel, though they will be invited to contribute. The government has also not appointed any academic researchers to either the panel or reference group.

From the perspective of experts with an interest in cultural and linguistic diversity, this is disappointing.

Lastly, the review is being conducted within the Department of Home Affairs rather than the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Multicultural policy was once thought important enough to have the support and imprimatur of the prime minister and be monitored by his staff – be it Malcolm Fraser or Bob Hawke. This is seemingly no longer the case.

Andrew Jakubowicz, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Technology Sydney

Source: What is the government’s multicultural policies review seeking to …

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Black Canadians gave views on racism in the justice system and experiences with police. Results were ‘stunning’

2023/06/17 Leave a comment

Of note:

The rift between Black Canadians and the country’s criminal justice system runs particularly deep and wide, according to the results of Canada’s first Black Canadian National Survey.

A report released this week by York University’s Institute for Social Researchreveals that 90 per cent of Black Canadians believe that racism in the criminal justice system is a serious problem. They are closely followed in that belief by the country’s Indigenous people, at 82 per cent.

The survey also outlines the extent of Black Canadians’ deep mistrust of the nation’s police services as well.

In the 12 months prior to the survey, more than one in five Black Canadians (22 per cent) reported being unfairly stopped by police — an experience less than half as common in any other racial or ethnic group. Only five per cent of white Canadians, for example, reported unfair stops.

The survey numbers suggested this seems to happen more in the country’s coastal provinces than anywhere else. In Atlantic Canada, 40 per cent of Black males reported being stopped unfairly by police in the previous 12 months. In B.C. that figure was 41 per cent. By comparison, the rates in Ontario and Quebec were 30 and 31 per cent respectively.

Lorne Foster, York University’s Research Chair in Black Canadian Studies and Human Rights and one of the co-authors of the survey report, calls those numbers “stunning.”

“It kind of makes me gasp, in a sense, to think that 22 per cent of randomly collected Black respondents across the country suggest that they’ve had unfair encounters with police,” he says.

He says although many people think of the racial profiling and racial discrimination of Blacks by police as a big-city problem, that the data from the Atlantic Provinces and B.C. — where the percentage of Blacks reporting unfair stops by police was almost 20 points higher than the national average — calls that idea into question.

“There is, in policing, the usual theory that all our police services are good. (And) if there’s something wrong, it’s only a few bad apples and there’s a few bad apples in every good barrel,” he says. “That argument has existed for a long time — that the police services are basically and fundamentally fair and unbiased.

“This data sort of belies that.”

The RCMP did not respond to requests for comment on the results of the survey.

Under former commissioner Brenda Lucki, the Mounties eventually acknowledged ongoing problems with systemic racism and discrimination. Lucki’s Vision 150 program was designed, over the course of five to seven years, to transform the RCMP, in part by addressing those discrimination problems — problems that have, since 2018 lead to the national police force paying out or potentially facing some $2.4 billion worth of damages in multiple class action lawsuits.

Part of that program was a three-hour, online course, United Against Racism launched in November 2021. It was stipulated by the RCMP as mandatory for all employees to complete by September 2022.

As of Jan. 1, 2023, only 51.6 per cent had completed the course. When that data is filtered to include only RCMP members — regular officers and special constables — the figure drops sightly to 51 per cent.

The data is the result of a hybrid survey (using three different ways of collecting responses) of almost 7,000 Canadians, the majority — 5,697 — chosen randomly from across the country.

Foster is quick to point out, though, that the data this survey does not actually allow researchers to make determinations of racial profiling.

“But it does suggest, because the numbers are so disparate for Black communities, that there could be issues there. And they should be looked into.”

He likens it to a patient getting an X-ray and doctors seeing a shadow in the lungs. There’s definitely something abnormal there, but it will take more tests to find out what exactly it is.

The survey results also reveal that Black Canadians see their workplaces as an epicentre of racial discrimination, says Foster.

Seventy-five per cent of Black Canadians said they have experienced workplace racism and think it’s a problem. Another 47 per cent believe they have been treated unfairly by an employer regarding hiring, pay or promotion in the 12 months prior to the survey.

Seventy per cent of other non-whites also see workplace racism as a serious problem. By contrast, 56 per cent of white Canadians don’t see racism in the workplace as a problem or believe it to be a minor issue.

The survey results — which also include Black Canadians’ opinions on racism in health care, child care and social services — go a long way to establishing the importance of collecting specific race-based data.

“Race data has not been collected in this country in any kind of consistent and proper way. Not by Stats Canada, not by anybody,” says Foster.

That’s just beginning to change, though, beginning with Ontario, with Nova Scotia closely following suit. Foster has been involved with both provincial governments in helping them learn to collect that data.

In Ontario, he says, all police services are required to collect race data on use of force incidents and some police departments — Toronto among them — are collecting race data on strip searches as well. In Nova Scotia both the Health and Justice ministries have committed to collecting race-based data.

Beyond the startling numbers in the survey, says Foster, it’s a model for the rest of the country’s police services and public sector services to examine and improve their operations through the lens of collected race-based data.

“The point of this kind of research is that it really maps out these kinds of structural vulnerabilities in these public sector institutions, and it kind of points to the quality of life gaps,” he says.

“We’re a mixed race society that’s never been studied along racial lines. And this is the first salvo into that. And I’d hope that it would be followed up with many, many more.”

Source: Black Canadians gave views on racism in the justice system and experiences with police. Results were ‘stunning’

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , , ,

Hamstrung by ‘golden handcuffs’: Diversity roles disappear 3 years after George Floyd’s murder inspired them

2023/06/12 Leave a comment

Of note:

Diversity, equity and inclusion leaders, who were hired in waves to help companies achieve an ethnically balanced workforce after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, are being phased out, surveys indicate, leaving experts in the field concerned that corporations’ talk of affecting change was just empty words.

DEI roles increased by 55% following demands for broader racial equity and justice after Floyd’s murder, the Society for Human Resource Management reported in 2020. But instead of creating fair opportunities and a comfortable work culture for Black employees, a pair of recent reports indicate, DEI professionals are losing their jobs, as layoffs across the economy have gained momentum.

The attrition rate for DEI roles was 33% at the end of 2022, compared to 21% for non-DEI roles. Amazon, Applebees and Twitter lead the waywith DEI layoffs since July 2022, according to , a New York-based company that uses data to analyze workforce dynamics and trends.

Another survey showed that Black employees represent only 3.8% of chief diversity officers overall, with white people making up 76.1% of the roles. Those of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity make up 7.8% and those of Asian ethnicity make up 7.7%

Reyhan Ayas, a senior economist at Revelio Labs, which surveyed DEI layoffs, said the data shows the pledge to impact change was not followed by genuine effort. 

“I always say that it is so easy to make public statements and commitments because no one will eventually check if you’re committed to the things that you committed to,” she said. “I can say: ‘I will be fully vegan by 2025’ because no one will ever call me in 2025 and ask me if I’m actually fully vegan. And that’s really what is going on here. In 2020, a lot of companies made big commitments, big statements around the DEI roles and goals. And as we are observing a turning of that tide, I think it’s very timely that we actually look into companies to see if they have kept up with those big statements they made.” 

DEI professional Nika White, author of the book, “Inclusion Uncomplicated,” said the studies also reveal “the harsh reality” of many companies’ commitments to diversity.  “This is very disheartening, especially after so many of us were hopeful after George Floyd’s murder that organization leaders would be sensitized and committed to equity and inclusion.

But the opposite has happened. Revelio Labs’ 2023 report on the state of DEI and the impact of last year’s layoffs, found that DEI-focused roles “experienced a nearly 40% churn rate at companies engaged in layoffs, as compared to about 24% for non-DEI roles.” 

The stunning absence of Black people in chief diversity officer roles in companies makes DEI professionals cringe.

“This is a role that is essential to advocating and advancing the progress for underrepresented talent at these organizations,” said Wade Hinton, founder of Hinton and Co., a DEI firm in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “And so, you want to make sure that it reflects the diversity of our communities and this country, and it’s clear that we’ve got work to do on this.” 

Together, the studies mean something more to Chris Metzler, senior vice president, corporate DEI and environmental, social and governance strategies at the National Urban League. The influx of DEI officer hires in 2020, he said, was disingenuous and the positions have largely been weakened to the point of being toothless.

“Most of your diversity professionals at these companies report to human resources, which are headed by white women and in some cases, white men,” he said. “So, it doesn’t surprise me that Black diversity officers . . . are being moved out. It’s increasingly becoming a dead-end job. Corporations are saying one thing and demonstrating something else. It’s going back to checking the box versus hiring and keeping qualified workers who can impact change in the company.” 

Tai Robinson, a human resources professional in Houston, said the value of Black DEI officers can be significant, if given in-house support because they are specifically trained for the role. “When a white human resources person listens to African Americans voice their concerns,” she said, “they can end up sounding like complaints, although they are just concerns. And that’s a problem.”

Some in the field say two other concerns helped make DEI positions expendable: a lack of support from higher-ups and the hiring of workers who have little or no experience in executing this specialized job.

“So many of these individuals were receiving these great salaries,” Robinson said. “But in reality, they were wearing golden handcuffs, unable to do but so much because the organization leaders didn’t want much done.”

Metzler agreed, adding that without support, the DEI officers are set up to fail.

“They have the title; they don’t have the authority. In some cases, they don’t have the budgets, so it’s difficult to navigate that terrain,” he said.

“There is a value proposition to this work. It’s an important job that requires trained professionals,” Metzler added. “It is time for organizations to retool the description and to hire the right people for these positions and not just fill a position with someone who has no idea where to even begin.”

Metzler insists the focus should shift from DEI to environmental, social and governance strategy, which has three pillars: how a company’s practices impact the environment; the social consequences of a company’s performance; and governance over an organization’s decisions and ramifications of those decisions. 

“ESG is the way forward,” he said. “We’re still in that old, affirmative action, equal employment opportunity definition of diversity, which is part of the reason why we’re not moving in any significant way.”

Still, while bothered by the drop-off of DEI officers, Hinton said he remains encouraged that the trend can be reversed.

“I’m optimistic because I consult with clients every day,” he said. “I know first-hand that there are organizations that truly want to see progress made. But collectively we’ve got to make sure that we’re encouraging those organizations to encourage their peers to work with them  to advance this work.”

But the opposite has happened. Revelio Labs’ 2023 report on the state of DEI and the impact of last year’s layoffs, found that DEI-focused roles “experienced a nearly 40% churn rate at companies engaged in layoffs, as compared to about 24% for non-DEI roles.” The stunning absence of Black people in chief diversity officer roles in companies makes DEI professionals cringe.

Source: Hamstrung by ‘golden handcuffs’: Diversity roles disappear 3 years after George Floyd’s murder inspired them

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CRTC erred in its decision on Radio-Canada N-word broadcast, court finds

2023/06/12 Leave a comment

Of note. Needed sending back of original decision:

A federal court has ruled that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) erred in its decision penalizing Société Radio-Canada (SRC) for broadcasting the N-word.

In a unanimous decision released Thursday, the Federal Court of Appeal said that the broadcast regulator made several mistakes when it ruled against SRC in response to a complaint.

In particular, the court ruled, the CRTC cited sections of the Broadcasting Act which do not give it the authority to regulate speech on the airwaves. The court sent the decision back to the CRTC for reconsideration.

Source: CRTC erred in its decision on Radio-Canada N-word broadcast, court finds

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Canadian Muslim charity wins ‘milestone’ settlement after being falsely accused of funding terrorism

2023/06/12 Leave a comment

Of note and welcome accountability:

One of Canada’s largest faith-based charities has won a settlement over a set of publications that falsely claimed it was a “front” to fund terror groups abroad.

Islamic Relief Canada reached the out-of-court settlement earlier this month in a lawsuit against Thomas Quiggin — a former military officer turned self-described researcher who last year emerged as one of the more recognizable names in the truck convoy protests — and six others who it argued made “false, malicious and defamatory” statements aimed at harming the charity.

Along with Quiggin, the $2.5-million lawsuit from December 2018 took aim at Benjamin Dichter, who later emerged as a convoy spokesperson; writer Tahir Aslam Gora and an online television channel of which Gora is CEO; writer Raheel Raza and her husband Syed Sohail Raza; as well as a Yarmouth-based man named Joseph Hazelton who interviewed Quiggin about the charity in a YouTube video that garnered over 10,000 views.

Source: Canadian Muslim charity wins ‘milestone’ settlement after being falsely accused of funding terrorism

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