QAnon Is Thriving in Germany. The Extreme Right Is Delighted.

2020/10/13 Leave a comment

Metastasizing is the appropriate word:

Early in the pandemic, as thousands of American troops began NATO maneuvers in Germany, Attila Hildmann did a quick YouTube search to see what it was all about. He quickly came across videos posted by German followers of QAnon.

In their telling, this was no NATO exercise. It was a covert operation by President Trump to liberate Germany from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government — something they applauded.

“The Q movement said these are troops that will free the German people from Merkel,” said Mr. Hildmann, a vegan celebrity cook who had not heard of QAnon before last spring. “I very much hope that Q is real.”

In the United States, QAnon has already evolved from a fringe internet subculture into a mass movement veering into the mainstream. But the pandemic is supercharging conspiracy theories far beyond American shores, and QAnon is metastasizing in Europe as well.

Groups have sprung up from the Netherlands to the Balkans. In Britain, QAnon-themed protests under the banner of “Save Our Children” have taken place in more than 20 cities and towns, attracting a more female and less right-wing demographic.

But it is in Germany that QAnon seems to have made the deepest inroads. With what is regarded as the largest following — an estimated 200,000 people — in the non-English-speaking world, it has quickly built audiences on YouTube, Facebook and the Telegram messenger app. People wave Q flags during protestsagainst coronavirus measures.

And in Germany, like in the United States, far-right activists were the first to latch on, making QAnon an unexpected and volatile new political element when the authorities were already struggling to root out extremist networks.

“There is a very big overlap,” said Josef Holnburger, a data scientist who has been tracking QAnon in Germany. “Far-right influencers and groups were the first ones to aggressively push QAnon.”

Officials are baffled that a seemingly wacky conspiracy theory about Mr. Trump taking on a “deep state” of Satanists and pedophiles has resonated in Germany. Polls show that trust in Ms. Merkel’s government is high, while the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, has been struggling.

“I was astonished that QAnon is gaining such momentum here,” said Patrick Sensburg, a lawmaker in Ms. Merkel’s conservative party and member of the intelligence oversight committee. “It seemed like such an American thing. But it’s falling on fertile ground.”

The mythology and language QAnon uses — from claims of ritual child murder to revenge fantasies against liberal elites — conjure ancient anti-Semitic tropes and putsch fantasies that have long animated Germany’s far-right fringe. Now those groups are seeking to harness the theory’s viral popularity to reach a wider audience.

QAnon is drawing an ideologically incoherent mixture of vaccine opponents, fringe thinkers and ordinary citizens who say the threat of the pandemic is overstated and government restrictions unwarranted. Not everyone who now aligns with QAnon believes everything the group espouses, or endorses violence.

Until a few months ago, Mr. Hildmann was popularly known merely for his restaurant and cookbooks and as a guest on television cooking shows.

But with 80,000 followers on Telegram, he has since become one of QAnon’s most important amplifiers in Germany. He is a noisy regular at coronavirus protests, which drew more than 40,000 people in Berlin this summer, to bridle against what he considers to be a fake pandemic concocted by the “deep state” to strip away liberties.

He calls Ms. Merkel a “Zionist Jew” and vents against the “new world order” and the Rothschild banking family. He no longer recognizes Germany’s postwar democratic order and darkly predicts civil war.

During a recent interview at his vegan restaurant in an upmarket neighborhood of Berlin, admirer after admirer — a civil servant, a mail carrier, a geography student — approached to thank him, not for his food, but for raising awareness about QAnon.

Experts worry that activists like Mr. Hildmann are providing a new and seemingly more acceptable conduit for far-right ideas.

“QAnon doesn’t openly fly the colors of fascism, it sells it as secret code,” said Stephan Kramer, head of domestic intelligence in the eastern state of Thuringia. “This gives it an access point to broader German society, where everyone thinks of themselves as immune to Nazism because of history.”

“It’s very dangerous,” Mr. Kramer added. “It’s something that has jumped from the virtual world into the real world. And if the U.S. is anything to go by, it’s going to gain speed.”

The QAnon conspiracy theory emerged in the United States in 2017, when a pseudonymous online poster claiming to hold the highest U.S. security clearance — Q — began dropping cryptic messages on the message board 4Chan. Global elites were kidnapping children and keeping them in underground prisons to extract a life-prolonging substance from their blood, Q hinted. A “storm” was coming, followed by a “great awakening.”

For historians and far-right extremism experts, QAnon is both a very new and a very old phenomenon. Made in modern America, it has powerful echoes of the European anti-Semitism of centuries past, which was at the root of the worst violence the continent has known.

The idea of a bloodsucking, rootless elite that abuses and even eats children is reminiscent of medieval propaganda about Jews drinking the blood of Christian babies, said Miro Dittrich, a far-right extremism expert at the Berlin-based Amadeu Antonio Foundation.

“It’s the 21-century version of blood libel,” Mr. Dittrich said. “The idea of a global conspiracy of elites is deeply anti-Semitic. ‘Globalists’ is code for Jews.”

The ignition switch for QAnon’s spread in Germany was “Defender-Europe 2020,” a large-scale NATO exercise, said Mr. Holnburger, the political scientist.

When it was scaled back this spring because of the coronavirus, QAnon followers contended that Ms. Merkel had used a “fake pandemic” to scupper a secret liberation plan.

Then one far-right movement, known as the Reichsbürger, or citizens of the Reich, jumped onto the QAnon traffic online to give greater visibility to its own conspiracy theory.

The Reichsbürger, estimated by the government to have about 19,000 followers, believe that Germany’s postwar republic is not a sovereign country but a corporation set up by the allies after World War II. The QAnon conspiracies dovetailed with their own and offered the prospect of an army led by Mr. Trump restoring the German Reich.

On March 5, the elements of the two movements fused into a common Facebook group, followed a week later by a Telegram channel.

“That’s when QAnon Germany first started taking off,” Mr. Holnburger said.

Two weeks later, in the middle of the lockdown, the German pop star Xavier Naidoo, a former judge on Germany’s equivalent of “American Idol,” joined a QAnon group and posted a tearful YouTube video in which he told his followers about children being liberated from underground prisons. A far-right influencer, Oliver Janich, reposted it to his tens of thousands of Telegram followers.

Since then, the biggest German-language QAnon channel on Telegram, Qlobal Change, has quadrupled its followers to 123,000. On YouTube, it has more than 18 million views. Overall, the number of followers of QAnon-related accounts on all platforms has risen to more than 200,000, estimates Mr. Dittrich of the Amadeu-Antonio Foundation.

On Tuesday, Facebook said it would remove any group, page or Instagram account that openly identified with QAnon.

In the country of the Holocaust, promoting Nazi propaganda or inciting hatred is punishable by up to five years in jail, and two years ago the government passed strict legislation designed to enforce its laws online.

But conspiracy theories and lies are not illegal unless they veer into hate speech and extremist content, and officials admit they have found QAnon’s spread hard to police.

Some QAnon followers are well-known extremists, like Marko Gross, a former police sniper and the leader of a far-right groupthat hoarded weapons and ammunition.

“Trump is fighting the deep state,” he told The New York Times in June. Merkel is part of the deep state, he said. “The deep state is global.”

But many are people who in the early days of the pandemic had nothing in common with the far right, Mr. Dittrich pointed out.

“You could see it in real time in the Telegram channels,” he said. “Those who started in April with worries about the lockdown became more and more radicalized.”

These days you see it on the streets of Germany, too.

Michael Ballweg, a Stuttgart-based software entrepreneur who founded Querdenken-711, the organization that has been at the center of protests against coronavirus restrictions, recently started referencing QAnon.

An eastern youth chapter of the AfD has used “WWG1WGA,” an abbreviation for Q’s motto “Where we go one, we go all,” on its Facebook pages.

Even those on the far right who do not buy into the conspiracy theory have found it useful.

Compact, a magazine classified as extremist by the domestic intelligence agency, has dedicated its last three issues to QAnon, pedophile scandals and the Reichsbürger movement. In August, it had a giant Q on its cover — and had to be reprinted because of high demand.

Jürgen Elsässer, its editor in chief, was at the last big coronavirus protest in Berlin handing out Q stickers and Q flags. He does not believe in a conspiracy of pedophile elites, preferring to look at it as “allegories.”

“Q is a completely novel attempt to structure political opposition in the era of social media,” Mr. Elsässer said in an interview.

After the pandemic, “the far right will reconstitute itself differently,” Mr. Elsässer said. “Q could play a role in this. It’s about elites, not foreigners. That casts the web more widely.”

Asked about the dangers of QAnon, the federal domestic intelligence service replied with an emailed statement saying that “such conspiracy theories can develop into a danger when anti-Semitic violence or violence against political officials is legitimized with a threat from the ‘deep state.’”

The biggest risk, say experts like Mr. Dittrich and Mr. Holnburger, may come when the promised salvation fails to arrive.

“Q always says: ‘Trust the plan. You have to wait. Trump’s people will take care of it,’” Mr. Holnburger said. “If Trump does not invade Germany, then some might say, ‘Let’s take the plan in our own hands.’”

Mr. Hildmann already has some doubts.

“It’s possible that Q is just a psyop of the C.I.A.,” he said.

“In the end, there are no external powers that you can rely on,” Mr. Hildmann said. “Either you deal with it yourself or you don’t bother.”

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Philpott: A call to end #racism in Canada’s health care systems

2020/10/09 Leave a comment

Of note the emphasis on practical initiatives:

I wish I could say with certainty that the death of 37-year-old Joyce Echaquan will be a wake-up call for health systems in Canada. It should be. But history gives us no confidence to make such a claim. Joyce Echaquan is not the first person to die as a direct or indirect result of racism in Canadian health care systems. Tragically she won’t be the last. But her death comes at a point in our history where Canadians may be more attuned to the dangers of systemic racism than we were, for example, when 45-year-old Brian Sinclair died in a Winnipeg hospital in 2008.

We must seize this moment in history and act to prevent more senseless deaths. There is no better place to start than with changing the way we train health professionals. A 2019 international consensus statement on Indigenous health equity notes that “Medical education institutions must acknowledge their historical and contemporary role in the colonial project and engage in an institutional decolonization process.”

Here at Queen’s University, our principal, Patrick Deane, has not shied away from declaring that racism and other forms of oppression, including colonialism, “deeply affect our institution, as they do the systems and formations of our society at large.” Such a categorical admission of institutional racism from the leader of a prominent post-secondary institution is not something we heard a decade ago. The open admission that an organization like ours is plagued with structural injustices, which permit some to be privileged and others to be harmed, is an essential step on our journey to changing those deep-rooted patterns of injustice. That kind of openness leads me to think that we are at a point in time when we can more effectively take on racism and colonialism in health care; in hopes that Joyce Echaquan’s death will not be in vain.

There is no single intervention that leads to the reduction or the elimination of racism and colonialism in health systems or in the training of health professionals. We need comprehensive and collaborative cultural transformation. We don’t need more studies; we need action on a suite of reforms. Steps have been laid out in multiple reports including the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Calls for Justice from the Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. The Association of Medical Faculties of Canada tabled its own commitment last year entitled a Joint Commitment to Action on Indigenous Health.

As dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Queen’s, I’m determined to work with my colleagues to breathe life into those reports. We have hired new staff including an elder-in-residence to provide ceremonial and cultural supports. Last week we opened an Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and we now have over 150 volunteers from students, staff, and faculty participating in a Dean’s Action Table on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.

We have an obligation to expand the Indigenous health workforce by increasing the number of First Nations, Inuit and Métis students in medicine, nursing and rehabilitation therapy. Indigenous Peoples must see themselves reflected in the health professionals who treat them. We must continue to identify structural biases in our admissions processes and make amendments, accordingly, including diversifying the membership of admissions committees and introducing cultural safety training for their members.

We’ve already changed the focus of the Queen’s Accelerated Route to Medical School to enable 10 students who identify as Indigenous or Black to begin a pathway to medical education that addresses some of the well-known systemic barriers to access. We know this means we’ll need a broad community of support for growing numbers of Indigenous and Black students on campus and in our health professions programs, but we’ve already taken steps to enable that, by hiring mentors such as Wendy Phillips, elder-in-residence and former MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes, senior advisor on equity, diversity and inclusion.

Just as important as the diversity of our student body is what we teach our students. Our curricula must include Indigenous perspectives of history and culture. It should include concepts of power, privilege and conflict resolution. This work is underway. We have professional development courses in cultural safety, anti-racism and anti-oppression. We have started to diversify our workforce, recognizing the importance of having staff and faculty from under-represented groups in leadership positions and on decision-making bodies.

We also need tools to help us identify personal, institutional and systemic forms of racism. As we use these tools, there will be an obligation to act on what we learn, with cycles of self-reflection and informed action. Increasingly, we must learn safe and effective ways to speak up when we recognize bias, harassment, and micro-aggressions.

Speaking up is the minimum response. Our collective goal is to change the entrenched patterns of injustice in our health systems. In some cases, it’s a matter of life or death.

Source: A call to end racism in Canada’s health care systems

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Black Germans Say It’s Time to Look Inward

2020/10/06 Leave a comment

Good long read:

In June, when Jelisa Delfeld joined a Telegram channel to help organize a silent demonstration against racism in Stuttgart, Germany, she was one of fewer than two dozen members. The next day, that number grew to 100, and the following, about 1,000 people had joined the channel where the protest was being planned.

“When the video of George Floyd being killed came out, it was also shocking in Germany,” said Ms. Delfeld, 24. “Even though it happened in the U.S., it’s a Black man, and we’re Black. If there’s pain in our community, you can feel that pain everywhere.

”Over five days of Zoom meetings, calls and texts, this group of young strangers, most of whom had little experience in activism, organized a demonstration that brought between 7,000 and 10,000 people into the streets of Stuttgart, a city of roughly 620,000, on June 6.

The same day, thousands more people across Germany protested against racism and in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, with police estimates of crowds reaching as high as 15,000 in Berlin, 25,000 in Munich and 14,000 in Hamburg. The numbers reflected an international galvanizing of protesters after the death of George Floyd.

Despite the overwhelming public show of solidarity in June and July, many activists in Germany said that Germans seemed more eager to support Americans than to look inward.

In the last few years, Germany has been criticized by the United Nations and the European Union for racial profiling and police violence. And while the country is known worldwide for its “culture of remembrance” around the Holocaust, German textbooks and mainstream history narratives largely ignore its colonial history. Many Black people in Germany say that they do not feel a sense of belonging, and that their presence here has been rendered practically invisible.

“The assumption is that if you’re Black, you are not, nor will you ever be, German,” said Angelo Camufingo, 28, one of the organizers of the group Black Lives Matter Berlin.

Part of it, many Black Germans say, has to do with a culture of denial around racial discrimination. “There was solidarity with the protesters,” said Julia Wissert, 36, the artistic director of the Dortmund Theater in western Germany, who, with a lawyer, developed an anti-racism clause for theater contracts in 2018. “At the same time, there is the imagined idea of racism being an American problem because America always had issues with racism due to slavery.”

Ms. Wissert described racism in Germany as a mist. “You can’t really see it if you stand in it, but you experience it if you stand in it because it makes you hyper-visible and invisible at the same time,” she said.

‘We Are Here’

Though Germany doesn’t maintain data on racial demographics because of the atrocities of the Nazi era, it does document where migrants arrive from. By that count, about one million of the country’s residents have roots in Africa, though the actual number is likely higher. Organizations that research Germany’s colonial history have traced the presence of people from the African continent as far back as the early 1700s.

“Black communities in Germany are so diverse,” said Siraad Wiedenroth, 33, who sits on the board of the Initiative for Black People in Germany, in a phone interview. “There are Black people here in the second, third and fourth generations. There are people who arrived 10 years ago via guest worker visas or to study, Black people here who sought refuge.”

Artists have worked to bring visibility to Germany’s nonwhite populations. Last year, working together with local youth, Ms. Wissert created a play in Bochum called “2069: The End of Others.” Experiences with racism came up repeatedly through stories her teenage collaborators told about their lives. “They know something is wrong, that they’re being treated differently,” she said.

Rhea Ramjohn, 36, one of the founders of Black Brown Berlin, a digital platform that connects Black and brown people, said: “The history of Black people in Europe and Germany is often a narrative that they were never here. We were never here. We just arrived here. We are all refugees.”

The platform showcases Black-owned businesses and produces anti-discrimination events. One of its projects is a series of portraits of Black and brown people along with their interpretation of the phrase “We Are Here.”

This summer, cultural institutions reached out to Black artists to commission work in response to the global unrest. Black Brown Berlin was approached in July by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, a prominent museum in the capital, to produce a piece for a digital series on racism during the pandemic. 

The result was a short film that pairs a spoken-word poem with visuals of dancers performing spontaneous movement in the Grunewald forest in Berlin, where Audre Lorde would walk with mentees and friends, including the activist May Ayim, during the years Ms. Lorde lived in Berlin. The poem includes references to the “mothers of the movement,” those whose Black children were killed by police, and “I can’t breathe,” a phrase that has taken on sharper significance during the coronavirus pandemic, which has disproportionately affected people of color.

Femi Oyewole, 31, one of Black Brown Berlin’s founders, said that many of Germany’s demonstrations suggested that racism was “an American issue. Like, ‘Germany’s fine, we don’t have this issue.’ But people here were tired. What about people here in Germany who suffered at the hands of the police?”

Policing, Racial Profiling and Far-Right Violence

“When I was growing up and thinking about being Black, it was so shaped by the U.S.,” said Ciani-Sophia Hoeder, 30, a founder of RosaMag, an online lifestyle magazine for Black women in Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

“Anti-Black racism was always something people thought the U.S. or U.K. or France have, but not Germany,” Ms. Hoeder said. “We don’t talk about police brutality.” 

Some monitoring bodies have been trying to change that. In 2017, the United Nations’ Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent reported that while the German constitution guarantees equality and prohibits race-based discrimination, “it is not being enforced.” The report also said that the lives of people of African descent “are marked by racism, negative stereotypes and structural racism” as well as “racist violence and hate crimes.”

The report lists several examples of racial discrimination and violence that were not properly investigated, including the death of Oury Jalloh, an asylum seeker from Sierra Leone who burned to death while tied to a bed in police custody in Dessau in 2005.

Since 2005, a group of friends and family has uncovered various inconsistencies in the police’s version of events surrounding his death. For example, Mr. Jalloh did not have a lighter with him when he was admitted, but one was found later in the fire rubble bag. An independent examination of Mr. Jalloh noted that he had fractures all over his body. The mattress he was tied to was fire resistant.

In 2018, the state parliament in Saxony-Anhalt tasked two investigators with re-examining the details of Mr. Jalloh’s death. This summer, Der Spiegel reported on the resistance the investigators have run into.

The report from the U.N. also described racial profiling in Germany as “endemic.” A report from the European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance last year emphasized that in Germany, “though there is strong evidence for extensive racial profiling, numerous police services and representatives are unaware of or do not admit its existence.”

“We have no racism problem in the police here,” Thomas Blenke, the interior minister for the state of Baden-Württemberg said in a news release. Some politicians say that racial profiling does not exist in Germany because discrimination is banned by the constitution. But rules of police conduct allow police officers to stop and search people without suspicion in trains or in train stations all over the country or in “criminal hot spots.”

According to Die Zeit, Horst Seehofer, the minister of the interior, canceled a planned study into racial profiling because there is “no need” for it. (A spokesperson for the minister said that he commissioned a study on “right-wing extremism in security authorities” that will be completed this month.)

Mr. Seehofer recently criticized a new law in Berlin that allows people who have been discriminated against by representatives of “the state,” such as police officers, teachers and judges, to seek damages and compensation, calling it “basically madness,” in an interview with the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. He added that “there is no justification for questioning the integrity of our police officers in such a structural way.”

This summer, Mr. Seehofer, whois on a new government committee against right-wing extremism and racism, threatened to file a criminal complaint against Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, 28, a journalist who had written a satirical column that criticized the police after the peak of the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and abroad. Two German police unions filed lawsuits against Mx. Yaghoobifarah.

After pushback from various sources, including from a petitionsigned by more than 1,000 people, Mr. Seehofer backtracked. Mx. Yaghoobifarah found out last week that 150 lawsuits that had been filed because of the column were being dropped.

Mx. Yaghoobifarah and Fatma Aydemir, 33, the editors of a recent book of essays on racism, spoke about the reluctance in Germany to address the root of the violence against Black people.

“On all the talk shows in which Black Lives Matter was discussed, there was a hesitation to talk about the German police,” Ms. Aydemir said. “And whenever a person did that on a popular or mainstream platform, they always invited someone from the police or a politician very close to the police, or three of them even, to destroy this argument.”

Mx. Yaghoobifarah said: “They would, for example, say the police training in Germany is way longer than in the U.S., so people are more skilled here or they would say the history of the prison industrial complex and anti-Black racism in the U.S. is different than in Germany. And of course, it is different, but it doesn’t mean that Germany is doing well.”

The country has seen rising incidents of far-right violence; in 2019, more than half of politically motivated crimes in Germany were committed with right-wing motivation, according to the Federal Criminal Police Office.

Earlier this year, a gunman killed nine people at two hookah bars in Hanau. “There wasn’t a big outcry, a big protest, it was not at all comparable to what happened now,” said Tarik Tesfu, 35, a performer, presenter and talk show host. “It’s really easy for German media to criticize something so far away, and claim at the same time we don’t have these problems here.” 

“White German people can’t keep turning up only when someone dies in America,” said Diana Arce, 38, an organizer of Black Lives Matter Berlin. “They’re saying Black Lives Matter, but they still refuse to really fully investigate what happened to Oury Jalloh. There already is a history of violence here. There has always been a history of violence.”

Historical Revisionism

In 1884, leaders of various European powers, including Germany, gathered in Berlin to carve the African continent into colonies. The German state of Brandenburg had held a slave-trading outpost in Ghana in the late 1600s and early 1700s.

During the three decades that Germany maintained colonies in Africa, from 1884 to 1918, it committed what historians refer to as the first genocide of the 20th century against the Nama and Herero people of present-day Namibia.

The German colonizers and troops created concentration camps, where they used forced labor, sexual violence and starvation to kill their prisoners in an early form of the horrific methods the National Socialists used during the Holocaust. During the Maji-Maji War, a large-scale rebellion against German colonial rule in present-day Tanzania, at least 100,000 resistance fighters were killed, historians estimate.

Since 2015, Namibia and Germany have been involved in negotiations over reparations. Germany has yet to formally apologize for its crimes. The country has returned some of the skulls of the victims of the genocide to Namibia, which were taken by scientists studying “racial purity,” but many still remain in museums and in hospitals. And for the most part, this history is glossed over in school.

“Young kids growing up in Germany don’t realize or remember that Germany had colonies, and there were, for example, predecessors to concentration camps prior to World War II in Namibia,” said Mr. Camufingo, of Black Lives Matter Berlin. “They don’t know about Germany’s participation in the slave trade. None of that is taught.”

The Initiative for Black People in Germany has been campaigning for years to change street names that celebrate colonizers and to classify two German words as racial slurs. The organization recently had a big win: A district in Berlin voted to rename a street and a subway station that used a slur to Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Strasse, in honor of the first known Black scholar at a German university, where his law thesis was on the topic of the rights of Black people in Europe.

“They hold on to these words like their life depends on it,” said Ms. Wiedenroth, a board member for the initiative, who said the word in question was used by “the white Europeans to describe the foreigners, the ‘not humans.’”

Dekoloniale, a new organization that seeks to bring colonial history into the mainstream, will open its headquarters on Nov. 15, on top of the site where the 1884 Berlin conference took place. Anna Yeboah, Dekoloniale’s project leader, and Christian Kopp, a historian in charge of the group’s exhibitions, both recalled first learning about German colonialism in Africa on trips to the continent. “It wasn’t a known subject,” Mr. Kopp, 52, said. “It felt like a secret.”

“It’s weird that we as German people have to go to Ghana to learn about this,” Ms. Yeboah, 30, said, recalling a visit in her teenage years to a German fort in Ghana from which hundreds of thousands of enslaved people were transported across the Atlantic Ocean.

On a walking tour, Mr. Kopp pointed out a sign across the street from Dekoloniale’s office explaining how in 1919, a group of men from East and West Africa who lived in Germany submitted a document calling for “equal rights and independence.” Mr. Kopp said that one of the aims of Dekoloniale is to shed a light on the personal histories and resistance efforts of Black people in Germany over the centuries.

“Many people in Germany have not thought about anti-Black racism or could afford not to think about it,” Mr. Kopp said. “There has been a long history of oppression and repression here, and a struggle for equal rights.”

Berlin Postkolonial, another group Mr. Kopp is part of, has been giving similar tours for 15 years. “In the beginning we did three tours a year,” Mr. Kopp said. “Now it’s 50.” He said that more and more teachers have been requesting tours for their students. Before, the tour groups mostly consisted of young adults curious about part of history that had been skipped over in school.

“History is a construction,” Ms. Yeboah said. “We need to know it to shape our future. It’s the only way you can move forward in a better direction.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/04/style/black-germans-say-its-time-to-look-inward.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=World%20News

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Cross-country forum of professors, students aims to tackle anti-Black racism on campuses

2020/10/03 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see what practical recommendations they come up with:

When Binta Sesay was accepted into the University of British Columbia, the international student was thrilled.

She didn’t think that being Black would play a major role in her life at university, but over the past few years at UBC’s Okanagan campus, Sesay said, she has been strongly affected by negative stereotypes and misconceptions of Black people and the racism she’s encountered.

From receiving little school support to mark Black History Month to a false accusation of theft against a Black students’ organization on which she served, Sesay said she has felt frustrated with anti-Black racism on campus.

“I’m so sick and tired of people … being ignorant of the Black experience or just choosing not to be educated about the Black experience, because if people say they don’t know what’s going on, then they choose not to know what’s going on,” the third-year international studies student said from Kelowna, B.C.

Sesay and hundreds of other Black students and faculty, along with community members, staff and senior administrators from more than 50 Canadian post-secondary institutions, are meeting virtually this week for a national forum on anti-Black racism and Black inclusion in higher education.

The cross-Canada forum comes after a summer that saw renewed attention on the Black Lives Matter movement and identifying anti-Black racism across many sectors of society, including academia.

“The university years are a huge part of a person’s life. Imagine if you go through university and your experiences are not good at all. It’s also going to affect your frame of reference when you go out into the world,” said Sesay, who is originally from Gambia but lived in Britain and Jerusalem before coming to Canada.

“It’s going to affect how you see the world. It’s going to affect how you interact with the world and it’s going to affect how you carry yourself as well.”

Organized by the University of Toronto, the two-day conference, which began Thursday, is expected to attract more than 3,000 participants. Nine different sessions tackle such topics as ensuring accessibility and success for Black students, staff and faculty; addressing the lack of Black representation in leadership and in the curriculum; mentoring and support networks; and collecting race-based data to combat inequities.

The goal is for a co-ordinating committee to turn these conversations into a charter of principles and actions that the participants can then adopt and employ as they address anti-Black racism on their own campuses.”We can do things individually, but it’ll be much … stronger if the whole ecosystem is working in tandem, where we are mutually reinforcing our individual commitments,” said co-organizer Wisdom Tettey, vice-president and principal of the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus, in the city’s east end.

“How do we make sure that we create pathways for people to come into the institutions?… How do you create a sense of belonging? How do you make sure that support systems are responsive to their needs?”

Students, faculty speak out about racism

The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May galvanized attempts on school campuses in North America and beyond to seek justice and address anti-Black racism. Students are shining a light on the racism they experience on campuses across the country, scholars have held protests against police brutality and alumni have called on their alma maters to address their racist legacies.

“There’s no unified policy across Canadian campuses to deal with racism, so [this conference] is a first step in actually getting universities together in one place,” said Toronto-based journalist and author Eternity Martis.

“Students have been demanding accountability, have been persistent in wanting something like this to happen.”

In her recent memoir They Said This Would Be Fun, Martis revisits her undergraduate years at Western University in London, Ont., as a jumping-off point for exploring the reality and experiences of myriad young Black women on Canadian university campuses today. What she’s most interested in seeing from this week’s conference is what real-world actions and change will be enacted by the institutions participating.”Considering what’s been happening in the world with the renewed anti-Black racism movement, there’s been a lot of saving face,” Martis said.

“Schools have been doing town halls and putting reports together for a long time. I’m hoping at this time, it actually sticks, that there are some regulations around it.”

Dozens of Canadian post-secondary institutions are holding a two-day national dialogue on anti-Black racism in academic spaces and how to break down barriers. Barrington Walker, a professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University, is addressing the group Thursday.  7:31

Conference co-organizer Tettey said it is critical that definitive commitments and mechanisms to hold institutions accountable come out of this week’s sessions — the first of what will be a series of national forums addressing equity and inclusion in Canadian post-secondary education.

School leaders have ‘obligations’

“We have to have some concrete actions, and we recognize that those actions will vary from institution to institution, because we’re all at different levels of progress,” he said.

“But there’s some broad kinds of actions that we can all identify as important … guidelines that we can pursue. It allows us to focus on particular areas where we’ve got challenges, where we’ve got barriers and say, ‘Let’s address these things together.'”It won’t be easy challenging the structures of post-secondary education, Tettey said, but he considers it an obligation for the sector’s leaders to have these tough conversations and make difficult decisions leading to fundamental change.

“People have had to fight for the rights and freedoms that we have. And we cannot renege on our obligations as this generation of educators [and tell] the next generation to do it. We need to do it now. And it’s imperative that we don’t waste any more time,” he said.

“If we are indeed a mature democracy or if we aspire to be one, one of the fundamental pieces of that is to have citizens who are treated equitably or seen as equals.”

Source: Cross-country forum of professors, students aims to tackle anti-Black racism on campuses

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Racism at Quebec hospital reported long before troubling death of Atikamekw woman

2020/10/02 Leave a comment

Of note:

From the moment she was admitted to the hospital in Joliette, Que., Joyce Echaquan started filming her interactions with staff.

It was an impulse, friends and family say, driven by long-held concerns about the way Indigenous people are treated at the hospital 70 kilometres north of Montreal.

Ultimately, two days after she walked in with stomach pains, she would broadcast her final pleas for help, capturing insulting and foul language directed at her by attending staff.

Sebastien Moar, Echaquan’s cousin, said she had several health problems, and felt she didn’t receive adequate care at the hospital.

“She always said, at the hospital, they never did anything. They just made sure she wasn’t hurting. She always had appointments and she said the nurses seemed fed up with her,” Moar said.

Echaquan used her phone, Moar said, to make sure her experience was documented.

“She was able to communicate what was happening and what had already happened.”

Her mistrust in the health services provided at the Joliette hospital, the Centre hospitalier de Lanaudière, is widespread in Echaquan’s Atikamekw community of Manawan, 180 kilometres further north.

It was flagged as a problem in the Viens commission, a provincial inquiry into the discrimination faced by Indigenous people.

One year after the Sept. 30, 2019 release of the report, Paul-Émile Ottawa, chief of Conseil des Atikamekw de Manawan, said he has started advising people to seek services elsewhere, for example Trois-Rivières or La Tuque, where signs in the hospitals are translated in Atikamekw.”The racism problems at [the Joliette] hospital did not start yesterday,” he said Wednesday.

“Even during the commission we came to devote a whole week to listen to the testimonies of the people of Manawan who suffered discrimination in this hospital.”

According to the Grand Chief of the Atikamekw First Nation, Constant Awashish, people are hesitant to file complaints because they distrust the system.

With no clear directives coming from the Quebec government following numerous recommendations and reports that have identified systemic racism, including the Viens commision, Awashish wants change.

“We’re in 2020. I think we need the government to step up on this and we need them to work on mitigation,” he said.

Mistrust in Manawan

For Alexia Nequado, who is also from Manawan, the death of her friend Joyce Echaquan was all too familiar.

Like Joyce, Nequado said she was admitted to the Joliette hospital two years ago with stomach pain.

Lying on a hospital gurney, Nequado said a nurse came to check on her. When she explained she was still in pain despite the dilaudid injection she had received, the nurse went to fetch a syringe of morphine.

Nequado, who was wearing a bracelet that indicated she was allergic to the drug, passed out.

“When I came to, the nurse told me I was an idiot for not telling her I was allergic,” Nequado said Wednesday.

“I didn’t feel safe and I felt awful for being treated that way.”Nequado said she filed a complaint to the hospital, but when she followed up later she was told it had not been reported to management.

Alland Flamand, a witness at the Viens commission who is also from Manawan, said he’s avoided going back to the hospital after trying and failing to get treated for an undiagnosed back problem.

Over six months, he said he went five times and each time was told nothing was wrong then given pain medication and told to rest. He was often asked, he recalled, if he was on drugs.

At one point, Flamand said, he saw a white man at the hospital for his own back problem being treated with a degree of respect he had not been given.

“It showed me clearly that there was racism there,” he said Wednesday.

After half a year of hardly being able to stand up, let alone walk, Flamand finally went to the hospital in Trois-Rivieres where he was taken in for emergency surgery for a herniated disc.”I could have been in her place,” Flammand said of Echaquan.

The local health authority, the Centre intégré de santé et de services sociaux de Lanaudière, did not return a request for comment Wednesday about those incidents.

Health authority promises to work with Manawan

Earlier, Daniel Castonguay, the executive director of the health authority, said he was “shocked and disappointed” to hear the language captured on video coming from one of his staff members.

But he denied there is systemic discrimination at the Joliette Hospital against Atikamekw patients.

“We receive complaints from people from all backgrounds, and those complaints are taken very seriously,” Castonguay said.

“But to say that residents from Manawan are systematically treated this way? No, that’s not true.”Castonguay said staff have to follow a cultural awareness training program. He wants to replace that with a working committee in collaboration with Atikamekw communities.

“The goal of that partnership is to ensure people feel safe, no matter where they are from.”

With pressure mounting on provincial authorities, Echaquan’s death is now the subject of three investigations: a coroner’s inquest, an investigation by the local health authority into her treatment and broader investigation by the same organization into practices at the hospital.

One of the nurses involved has been fired.

Sylvie D’Amours, Quebec’s minister responsible for Indigenous Affairs, said that whatever the outcome of the investigation, what was captured on video was “totally unacceptable and must be denounced loud and clear.”

“This shows that, unfortunately, there is still racism in Quebec, in particular against Indigenous communities,” she said Wednesday. She also said that 51 of the 142 recommendations from the Viens report have an action plan.

But she too, like Premier François Legault, has continued to deny systemic racism is a problem in the province.

Source: Racism at Quebec hospital reported long before troubling death of Atikamekw woman

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‘Words alone will not be enough’: Black caucus, community cautiously optimistic about feds’ Throne Speech pledges

2020/09/30 Leave a comment

Initial reactions (and wait for the budget for initiatives to be concretized or not):

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Throne Speech further elevates the priorities long advocated by the Black community, say MPs, Senators, and advocates, though some say the lack of specificity on certain planks gives the government too much wiggle room to follow through on its commitments.

Mr. Trudeau’s (Papineau, Que.) parliamentary reset last week featured a grab bag of mostly old commitments that are likely to compete with one another for resources against the immediate threat posed by the global pandemic.

It featured a separate section devoted to “addressing systemic racism,” reflecting, in sweeping terms, many of the priorities that the Black Parliamentary Caucus had lobbied for in response to the anti-Black racism rallies that hit many cities around the world over the summer. Some of its commitments include addressing standards on the use of force; implementing a plan to increase representation in public service; and finding new ways to support the “artistic and economic contributions of Black Canadian culture and heritage.”

Liberal MP Greg Fergus (Hull-Aylmer, Que.), chair of the cross-party caucus that includes MPs and Senators, said the attention focused on grappling with racial inequities in the speech is a testament to the caucus’ and the Black community’s drive to prevent the momentum from fading. The caucus’ statement, a document that set out policy prescriptions for achieving racial equity that was released in June, received the endorsement of nearly all cabinet ministers and more than 150 Parliamentarians.

For Mr. Fergus, who is also parliamentary secretary to the Treasury Board president and to minister of digital government, said seeing the caucus’ agenda adopted in the speech means members have a “green light” to keep pressing for reforms. Had the speech not reflected those priorities, Mr. Fergus said, there would be “screaming headlines” registering that omission—and it would have been justified.

“It’s all forward thrusters on in terms of moving on this file, and given that we are in a pandemic, for us to recognize we have to address the real fault lines that exist, and make that a priority in the Speech from the Throne, it means I got a green light for the Black caucus to continue [its work],” he said.

Mr. Fergus pointed to the “down payments” the government has made on the collection of disaggregated race-based data, which started with Statistics Canada’s move to publish, for the first time, a Labour Force Survey tracking job losses by race and ethnicity. Though such data is likely to confirm the existence of longstanding inequities linked to structural forces, having hard figures, advocates say, would help further illustrate the scope of the problems. The speech picks up on that priority advocated by the caucus, in committing to developing an approach across the government around “better collection of disaggregated data.”

Mr. Trudeau, in response to the wave of protests in June, promised action “very quickly” and enlisted his cabinet ministers to develop a “summer work plan.” A request for comment from the Prime Minister’s Office was not returned by deadline.

Independent Senator Rosemary Moodie (Ontario) said when hard data is available, it makes the inequities that have long been apparent, “much more indisputable,” and “easier for us to speak with authority.”

Independent Senator Wanda Thomas Bernard (Nova Scotia) echoed that sentiment, saying that degree of commitment on data collection suggests the government could make a push to apply an “intersectional lens” on policies. Such an approach, she noted, is already happening in the files overseen by Diversity Inclusion Minister Bardish Chagger (Waterloo, Ont.).

“Part of the problem is that, in government, change happens very slowly. Through the pandemic, it’s slowed down even more,” Sen. Bernard, a caucus member, said. “There’s a great need, in this country, for policy development to be more inclusive, and so, bringing the voices of all stakeholders in policy development is something we really haven’t been doing.”

While Sen. Bernard said the speech gave profile to the concerns of Black and Indigenous Canadians, where it didn’t “go far enough” for her was in providing specific and substantive reforms around criminal justice. During the pandemic, Canada has seen the pandemic collide with racial injustices, she said, pointing to several incidents involving police that have led to violent encounters and in some cases, the deaths of Black and Indigenous people such as Chantel Moore and Regis Korchinski-Paquet. Both women died during so-called “wellness checks” carried out by police.

“I often look at the decal on the side of police cars; it says, ‘To serve and protect,’ and there are many Black Canadians and Indigenous Canadians who don’t feel well served or well protected by police and, in fact, feel fear,” she said. “That has to shift; that requires major change, major reform, and the Throne Speech references this a little bit.”

Sen. Bernard said she had hoped the speech would have made specific references to the development of a Black-Canadian justice strategy—an acknowledgement that underscores that the community has been disproportionately affected by the criminal justice system and “state violence.” She noted that Nova Scotia has already moved in that direction. Instead, the speech states a pledge to “take action to address the systemic inequities in all phases of the criminal justice system, from diversion to sentencing, from rehabilitation to records.”

Sen. Moodie agreed that a lack of specifics would make it “harder to hold people accountable.” “I don’t think it lessens our responsibility as Parliamentarian; I don’t think it lessens our mandate to pursue that,” she added.

NDP MP Matthew Green (Hamilton Centre, Ont.) said while pledges in the speech are wrapped up in the “words of equity and the language of racial justice,” the government isn’t responding with the urgency required. He added the government doesn’t have a solid track record of implementing policies it endorses.

“The government has all the power to immediately act on the priorities outlined in the Black caucus’ statement. From procurement to policing, they have failed,” said Mr. Green.

He pointed to the government’s policy requiring that companies with more than 100 employees that are interested in bidding on contracts worth more than $1-million to set diversity targets, saying that, without audits, it’s a toothless measure.

“That is a good policy that the Liberals put forward, but how many audits have actually happened?” he said.

Federal audits of companies were scrapped under the Harper government and have not been brought back, according to The Toronto Star.

“It was not through the goodwill of the government,” he added of the government’s move to adopt priorities pushed for by the caucus and protesters. “It was the tens of thousands of Canadians led by the Black Lives Matter movement, demanding that they move beyond performative actions.”

Mr. Green cited getting rid of mandatory minimums and amnesty for those convicted of recreational marijuana possession as examples of other policies the government can move on without delay.

Even as he expressed frustration over the pace of the government’s response, Mr. Green said the work of the caucus, of which he is a member of, has been meaningful, saying it’s been an “overwhelmingly non-partisan” vehicle for change.

“We are looking at creating a governing structure to institutionalize the work we’ve done to date,” he said. “I stand by that work. My job, in opposition, is to ensure that I continue to point out the uncomfortable truths.”

‘Rare’ for speeches to have hard timelines

Sen. Moodie said the speech, which gave a “prominent place” to the concerns of Black and Indigenous communities, sends a reassuring signal that the government is serious about delivering on its commitments.

“It’s my sense there’s a will and perhaps a plan,” Sen. Moodie said. “We know the prime minister has spoken about it. He will need to follow through, or he risks losing credibility when he speaks on the issue. Words alone will not be enough for the country, for Black and Indigenous Canadians who have heard him.”

Sen. Moodie is feeling upbeat about the prospects for change, a shift from where she was at before the speech was released in late August, when she said, in an email response, “any continued delay” on responding to calls from the Black community could not be “wholly blamed on prorogation.”

Alfred Burgesson, a member of the Prime Minister’s Youth Council and founder of advocacy group Collective Action, said the main “missing piece” from the speech was the lack of “tangible targets” for measuring the pace of progress.

Mr. Fergus noted that Throne-Speech commitments rarely come with timelines.

“It’s cool to see we’re going to make progress on systemic racism, but without tangible targets, then how are we measuring our success?,” he said, speaking for himself, not on behalf of the council. “Are we just striving towards saying we’re doing it, or are we doing it to have an impact across Canada?”

He said the budget or the promised fiscal update in the fall will be indicative of whether the government is “truly putting their money where their mouths are.” Mr. Burgesson said the feds’ launch of the Black Entrepreneurship Strategy, which promises close to $221-million in partnership with banks to help thousands of Black business owners recover from the pandemic, earlier this month was a positive development, but said “that can’t be it.”

At the same time, Mr. Burgesson, who participated in a council meeting that was an hour and half long with Mr. Trudeau on Friday, said he left feeling a “great deal of optimism.”

“He’s not afraid of the criticism. …When others challenged him, he received it very well,” he said, adding that Mr. Trudeau did not respond defensively in the face of criticism about the speed of the government’s response to pressing issues.

Velma Morgan, chair of Operation Black Vote, said the speech was a “good start,” with many of the broad commitments reflecting what the community has been campaigning on for in countless meetings with government officials, but the real work has yet to begin in earnest. (Ms. Morgan is also working on Green Party candidate Annamie Paul’s leadership campaign; the two are personal friends, and Ms. Paul is the only Black candidate running for the Greens.)

“It’s time we move from aspirational to action. We need for that work to be expedited. The time should’ve been last year. There’s a little bit of catchup,” she said. “The government has been really good at speaking to the community. It has been said over and over again, ‘Let’s get it done.’ The ball is in their court.”

Source: ‘Words alone will not be enough’: Black caucus, community cautiously optimistic about feds’ Throne Speech pledges

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UK barrister mistaken for defendant calls for compulsory anti-racism training

2020/09/29 Leave a comment

One would hope that this would not occur in Canada:

The barrister who was mistaken for a defendant three times in one day at court has called for compulsory anti-racism training at every level of the UK legal system.

Alexandra Wilson, who specialises in criminal and family cases, put in a complaint on Wednesday and spoke of her frustration about the incident on Twitter. Her tweets, which quickly went viral, resulted in an apology by the head of the courts service in England and Wales.

Since tweeting about what happened to her, Wilson said she has been flooded by responses from other black and minority ethnic lawyers who have had similar experiences. She added the frequent occurrence of such incidents points to the failure of current training in the legal system that only focuses on unconscious bias or diversity.

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The RCMP’s atrocious response to racism in Alberta

2020/09/28 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Gary Mason:

A couple weeks ago, a group marching under the banner of the Black and Indigenous Alliance Alberta organized a demonstration in Ponoka, Alta. But it didn’t go so well: People drove by and called the protesters names, accusing them of belonging to “antifa.” Some reportedly told them to go back to where they came from. And then, the group alleges that a truck intentionally swerved into them, striking a protester. He was taken to hospital with an injury to his eye and later released.

When they reported the alleged hit-and-run, an RCMP spokesperson said that police didn’t have the video footage needed to investigate.

A few days later, on Sept. 14, alliance members, including the man who was allegedly struck by the truck, held a news conference at the RCMP detachment to alert media to what happened. As they tried to begin, a small group of counterprotesters began shouting the alliance members down. One of the men brought a megaphone to drown out anything the group was saying to reporters. They also hurled vicious epithets at the alliance members who were there.

It was an ugly scene. But it got uglier.

Rachelle Elsiufi, a reporter with CityNews Edmonton, asked the head of the Ponoka detachment, Sergeant Chris Smiley, why nothing was done to deter those who arrived to disrupt the news conference. “Are you suggesting one side’s voice is more important than the others? Because it’s not,” he replied.“So we let everybody say what they need to say as peacefully as they can and that’s how this country works.” According to Ms. Elsiufi, two men “with connections to hate groups in Alberta” were standing beside her, and “celebrated” the officer’s response.

But as disconcerting as that moment was, things would get even worse.

The following weekend, the alliance decided to hold a demonstration in a park in Red Deer, Alta. Soon after they arrived to begin their rally, so did a convoy of trucks carrying a group of men that appeared to be looking for trouble. Again, many were identified by reporters as wearing the symbols of hate groups such as the Soldiers of Odin.

It didn’t take long for things to turn violent. The men walked up to the alliance demonstrators, many of whom were people of colour, and screamed into their faces, telling them to go home. Video from the scene shows a couple of clear assaults on alliance demonstrators, one of whom was punched in the face. Footage later shows three RCMP officers standing off to the side monitoring the situation.

Initially, the RCMP said there would be no investigation into what happened at the park. When video from the scene went viral on social media, the RCMP changed its tune, saying it would open a criminal investigation into two alleged assaults. The police defended their initial decision, saying the violence happened before their officers had arrived.

It sure looks like the RCMP has a problem here. The fact that people with racist ties can disrupt a peaceful news conference and be defended by police is outrageous. No one’s voice is more important than another’s? Are you kidding me? When one of those voices is that of a bigot and white supremacist, it is not as important as someone peacefully advocating against racism.

Alberta Justice Minister Kaycee Madu, who is Black, seemed genuinely upset by what happened in Red Deer. But I don’t think it’s enough to simply say it’s “unacceptable” and that it should never happen. He needs to have a conversation with senior officials in the RCMP about the type of people it has representing the force in the province and whether or not they are part of the problem here.

It sure sounds like they are.

It shouldn’t take long for the RCMP to lay criminal charges in the Red Deer incident. The people responsible for the assaults are clearly visible in the footage. But beyond that, the RCMP has to do a far better job of ensuring the safety of people who are demonstrating for a cause that police know will upset some who will then come looking for trouble.

The idea of a convoy of trucks arriving and disgorging a group of angry white men with menace in their eyes brings back terrifying images of the American South in the 1950s.

I realize police have a difficult job. But trust in the RCMP is undermined when some among them exhibit behaviour that makes us question whose side they’re on.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-rcmps-atrocious-response-to-racism-in-alberta/

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Army commander orders Canadian soldiers to call out racism in the ranks

2020/09/26 Leave a comment

Clear message:

Soldiers who witness — or become aware of — racism and hateful conduct in the ranks will be expected to blow the whistle to their superiors under a sweeping new order issued today by the commander of the Canadian Army.

The new directive, which is being distributed to all army units across the country, also warns of consequences for those who turn a blind eye.

“We will hold our members accountable for their actions,” Lt.-Gen. Wayne Eyre wrote in the order, a copy of which was obtained by CBC News.

Soldiers “at all levels will be expected to intervene and report incidents,” he said, “and where necessary, we will provide support to those affected by these behaviours.

“Failure to act is considered complicity in the event.”

Eyre, who verbally outlined his expectations last week at a virtual meeting of commanding officers from across the country, promised he would give explicit direction on how to handle a growing number of cases of far-right extremism in the ranks.

He made the pledge as the army conducts an investigation of the 4th Ranger Group. That probe was triggered by a series of CBC News reports about a reservist who was allowed to continue to serve after being identified as a member of two far-right groups.

The order also comes as prosecutors in the U.S. are pursuing firearms charges against former Canadian army reservist Patrik Mathews, who is accused of recruiting for a white supremacist organization in the States.

Eyre was not available for an interview Thursday. He’s told CBC News previously that he is deeply concerned about the spread of a far-right ideology across the army.

While only a handful of such cases have been made public to date, Eyre said “one is too many” and vowed the army would take action in concert with the rest of the Canadian Armed Forces.In his interview with CBC News earlier this month, Eyre said it “sickens” him to see racism and intolerance in Canadian society — especially when people holding those views want to join the military.

The 25 page order, which was signed late Wednesday, said that a commanding officer is now “directed to take a proactive response to concerns of hateful conduct and does not need a written complaint to investigate any concerns.”

Those in charge of army units and formations now also have the authority to “temporarily” relieve someone accused of racist behaviour from duty “until the appropriate investigation or follow up has concluded.”

There are limits to that authority, however: the order says that commanders must “balance the public interest, including the effect on operational effectiveness and morale, with the interests of the member” before taking the formal step of relieving soldiers of duty.

And the order still depends on the willingness of soldiers to call each other out over racist and inappropriate behaviour.

“Bystander intervention training will be key in our efforts to eliminate hateful conduct, because we all have a responsibility to act and respond if we witness hateful conduct and associated incidents,” says the order.To that end, commanding officers have been told they need to keep an eye out for whistleblowers and “investigate any reports of threatening, intimidating, ostracizing, or discriminatory behaviour taken in response to a hate incident report.”

Some aspects of the order still need to be worked out. The order cites the need for a way to identify soldiers who “may be leaning towards a hateful ideology, or who are exhibiting troubling conduct.”

The army says it plans to develop a mechanism to monitor and track reports of hateful conduct in the ranks, which will plug into an existing Department of National Defence system announced last summer.

Range of penalties includes dismissal

Evan Balgord, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, has suggested in the past that commanders take the proactive step of regularly monitoring the social media accounts of soldiers under their command.

The army also plans to train soldiers in identifying hateful conduct in the ranks.

Balgord said his group is pleased with what it sees in the order but remains concerned about the amount of discretion allowed when it comes to punishing those caught engaging in in hateful conduct.”The devil in the detail here is really going to come down to how this new order is put into effect,” he said, adding that “any member caught participating in a hate group” should be ejected from the Armed Forces.

There are a range of sanctions available under the military’s disciplinary and administrative systems, up to and including dismissal from the Forces.

The order also explicitly gives the commander the option of rehabilitating the individual.

Source: Army commander orders Canadian soldiers to call out racism in the ranks

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Cost Of Racism: U.S. Economy Lost $16 Trillion Because Of Discrimination, Bank Says

2020/09/25 Leave a comment

From Citigroup:

Nationwide protests have cast a spotlight on racism and inequality in the United States. Now a major bank has put a price tag on how much the economy has lost as a result of discrimination against African Americans: $16 trillion.

Since 2000, U.S. gross domestic product lost that much as a result of discriminatory practices in a range of areas, including in education and access to business loans, according to a new study by Citigroup. It’s not an insignificant number: By comparison, U.S. GDP totaled $19.5 trillion last year.

And not acting to reverse discriminatory practices will continue to exact a cost. Citigroup estimates the economy would see a $5 trillion boost over the next five years if the U.S. were to tackle key areas of discrimination against African Americans.

“We believe we have a responsibility to address current events and to frame them with an economic lens in order to highlight the real costs of longstanding discrimination against minority groups, especially against Black people and particularly in the U.S.,” wrote Raymond J. McGuire, a vice chairman at the bank and the chairman of its banking, capital markets and advisory team.

Wall Street itself has also faced accusations for years of discriminatory practices against African Americans, such as limiting approval for mortgages or not providing enough banking options in minority neighborhoods, which are among the damaging actions identified by Citigroup researchers.

Specifically, the study came up with $16 trillion in lost GDP by noting four key racial gaps between African Americans and whites:

  • $13 trillion lost in potential business revenue because of discriminatory lending to African American entrepreneurs, with an estimated 6.1 million jobs not generated as a result
  • $2.7 trillion in income lost because of disparities in wages suffered by African Americans
  • $218 billion lost over the past two decades because of discrimination in providing housing credit
  • And $90 billion to $113 billion in lifetime income lost from discrimination in accessing higher education

As a result, Citigroup urges a slew of actions to reverse discriminatory practices and boost GDP over the next five years, including addressing the wage gap suffered by African Americans and promoting diversity at the top within banks and companies.

Citigroup’s recommendations aren’t new: Various studies have shown similar findings, and experts have called for similar action for years, though so far progress has been slow.

Source: Cost Of Racism: U.S. Economy Lost $16 Trillion Because Of Discrimination, Bank Says

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