If Corporations Really Want to Address Racial Inequality, Here Are 9 Things That Actually Make a Difference

2020/08/06 Leave a comment

A few articles of interest regarding racial inequality and options to address it. While largely focussed on Black inequalities and disparities, broadly applicable to most minority groups.

Starting with the most concrete by Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation. While some of the recommendations pertain to the private sector, some are more broadly applicable:

Since protests over the killing of George Floyd erupted across the country, I’ve received numerous calls from corporate CEOs who want to know what they should do, and where can they quickly donate $10 million dollars to advance the cause of racial justice?

The first thing I do is remind them of Martin Luther King Jr.’s caution that philanthropy must not be used to obscure the economic injustices that make it necessary. The frustration and rage we’re seeing across the country aren’t just about a racist system of policing.

It’s also about original sins–a genocide of Native Americans and enslavement of Black Africans whose stolen land and labor built this country’s wealth, enriching countless white people and their descendants in the process. It’s about the predations of modern-day capitalism that have allowed a privileged few to hoard the lion’s share of the nation’s wealth, effectively consigning Black folks to the bottom rung of the economic ladder.

This time the usual corporate playbook–issue a statement, gather a group of Black leaders for a conference call, give a hefty grant to the Urban League, resume business as usual–isn’t going to work. Here are 9 things every corporate leader can do to improve Black lives.

1. Remake your C suite

Change starts at the top. Do you have African-American board members? Black executives in your leadership team? If you do, are they token appointments, or do they have real power to recommend changes that would make your company more racially equitable?

2. Hire and advance more Black people

As leaders of large corporations, you have the power to transform Black lives immediately, simply by hiring and promoting more of us. Blind tests show that when identical resumes are submitted for the same job – one with a white-sounding name, the other with a Black-sounding one – the white applicant receives a callback 50% more often. Taking racial inclusion seriously means telling your managers that they cannot go forward with a hire or a promotion, at any level, unless the candidate pool is racially diverse.

3. Get involved in the Fair Chance Hiring Initiative

One legacy of the “tough on crime” era is that about one-third of American adults now have a criminal record, mostly for minor crimes that nonetheless hamper their ability to get a job. Black people are hugely overrepresented in that group, in significant part because of the kind of over-policing that sparked today’s protests.

That’s why the Society of Human Resource Management has urged employers to take the Getting Talent Back to Work Pledge as part of the Fair Chance Hiring Initiative by employing qualified job applicants with criminal backgrounds. Five years ago, the Ford Foundation committed to hire 10 formerly incarcerated business associates every year, and they are among our most dedicated employees.

4. Pay your employees a living wage

The federal minimum wage–$2.13 per hour for tipped workers and $7.25 per hour for others–is not a living wage. In 2016, nearly half of government public assistance went to people who worked full-time but still fell below the federal poverty line.

Black workers make up about 11% percent of the workforce, but 38% of Black workers who now work for the minimum wage would get a raise. Raising the pay of the workers at the bottom of your scale would disproportionately help people of color.

Commit to paying your workers a living wage of at least $15 per hour, and more in higher-cost parts of the country.

5. Provide a safe and healthy workplace

Valuing Black lives in a pandemic also means doing everything possible to create a safe workplace. Lack of adequate health insurance coverage are big reasons Black, Latinx and Native American people have contracted the coronavirus at a disproportionally higher rate than white Americans, with Black people dying of COVID-19 at a rate of almost 2.5 times the rate of white people. Does your company manipulate the schedules of your workers to fall just below the threshold for health coverage? Does it label people independent contractors even if they spend the bulk of their days working for you? If so, this is what advocates mean when they talk about structural racism.

6. Provide paid sick and family leave

Black workers often cannot afford to take time off to care for a newborn or sick family member. The lack of paid sick leave is another reason so many people of color have suffered higher rates of illness and death from COVID-19. If there were ever a question about whether paid leave is a moral issue, the pandemic should have laid it to rest.

7. Reconsider executive compensation

You might be asking, “but where am I going to find the resources to give my workers more?” Here, CEOs would do well to look in the mirror. According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO compensation has grown 940% since 1978, while the salary of the average worker has increased only 12%. The economy would suffer zero harm if CEOs were paid less.

We know this, because many of those same executives are steering their excess wealth into philanthropic foundations, which have proliferated in the past two decades as their compensation has skyrocketed. While that charitable instinct benefits some of my foundation’s favorite causes, it would be better for the economy and for racial equity if more of that largesse were directed toward workers.

8. Advocate for a more progressive tax code

Standing up for Black lives means investing in the essential building blocks of social equality, from adequately funded schools to universal health care and affordable housing. These things require government action at scale.

Moving money from police budgets should be just the start. What we really need is a progressive tax code that will reduce income inequality, shore up our crumbling infrastructure, create a proper public health system and provide the social safety net that people need in a crisis. Five months into a pandemic that has shuttered the economy, Canada is subsidizing wages at 75% of full salary, while Americans are left to queue at food banks, wondering whether the next unemployment check will be their last.

Instead of deploying your lobbyists only on issues of narrow self-interest, detail them to advocate for tax reform and the expansion of social programs for poor people.

9. Advocate for shareholder reforms

But I hear you saying, “I have public shareholders to whom I’m accountable. Supporting tax policies that work against my company’s bottom line will only drive down our share price.” Yes, and this is why the current model of shareholder-driven capitalism that puts quarterly profits over people is bad for the long-term social and economic health of the country.

The Business Roundtable acknowledged as much last year, when 181 CEOs signed a statement revising the purpose of a corporation as one that benefits customers, employees, supplies and communities – not just shareholders. This was an important first step. Now, companies must turn that resolution into action, by committing to the kinds of tangible changes in practice and policy that will reduce inequality.

The uncomfortable truth is that if what you’re changing in your corporate practices doesn’t affect your bottom line, you’re not doing enough.

So to my friends in the Fortune 500: while the millions in onetime donations are appreciated, a permanent commitment to reducing racial inequality through changes in your own practices would be more meaningful. Outsourcing the work of racial justice isn’t sufficient when a broken system of capitalism has produced indefensible levels of wealth for owners and daily insecurity for workers. The corporate sector has the responsibility–and the ability–to act now.

Source: If Corporations Really Want to Address Racial Inequality, Here Are 9 Things That Actually Make a Difference

On the more abstract and process side, two examples starting with the call by Mireille Apollon, Sébastien Goupil and David Schimpky of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO:

Earlier this year, the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, put out a call for feedback on efforts underway to achieve the objectives of the International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024).

Given the dramatic events and protests that have marked the year so far, one could say that little has been done to advance the spirit of this important Decade. Unfortunately, it remains too-little known among nation states and institutions.

United Nations international years and decades are not celebratory; they are calls to concerted action on issues that need attention over a long period. The International Decade for People of African Descent expresses an urgent need for states to eradicate systemic racism and ensure recognition, justice, and development for Black people and communities.

For some time now, the UN has done its part to sound the alarm and remind us that our world faces a crisis of racism and racial injustice. In 2001, it convened the Durban Conference, which was intended to unite the world around fighting racism, but was overshadowed by strife among the participants and the 9/11 attacks. The conference nonetheless ended with the adoption of a vigorous program of action to be implemented by member states to fight racism and discrimination.

This conference was also the origin of flagship initiatives, such as the creation by UNESCO of the International Coalition of Sustainable and Inclusive Cities, which are across the world. This network includes our own Coalition of Inclusive Municipalities, whose principal objective is expressly to fight racism and discrimination.

The conference also led to the creation of a Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, which looked at the situation in Canada in 2016. Their well-researched and thoughtful report should be mandatory reading for every Canadian. It concludes:

“Despite the reputation for promoting multiculturalism and diversity and the positive measures taken by the national and provincial governments …, the Working Group is deeply concerned by the structural racism that lies at the core of many Canadian institutions and the systemic anti-Black racism that continues to have a negative impact on the human rights situation of African Canadians.”

An important step was taken in 2018, when Canada recognized the International Decade for People of African Descent, and announced significant funding programs and the creation of an Anti-Racism Secretariat. But let’s return again to the question from the high commissioner: how much progress have we seen over the past five years?

The Decade has been embraced by many Black organizations and activists, and there have been remarkable strides in Nova Scotia, which last year launched a historic action plan related to the International Decade. The Michaëlle Jean Foundation and the Federation of Black Canadians convened historic summits to mobilize Black communities and propose concrete actions.

Our Commission has undertaken new partnerships, including working with the Canadian Institute for Identities and Migrations on two special editions of Canadian Diversity dedicated to the voices of African descent leaders, thinkers, and activists. In addition, we are working with the UNESCO Chair on the Prevention of Radicalization leading to Violence and Project SOMEONE on a recently launched toolkit to tackle racial and social profiling.

That said, the International Decade remains largely overlooked. The past few weeks have demonstrated that anti-Black racism is alive and well, and not just south of the border. Black Canadians are right to demand real action, and governments and intuitions everywhere need to respond. We need to implement policies and significant measures that promote diversity and inclusion, and address racism and discrimination in all their forms.

Let’s have the courage in 2020 to go beyond grand words and promises. This is the time for action. The way forward is clear, we just need to take it.

Source: A roadmap already exists to advance the rights of Black communities

Lastly, similarly efforts by DND and the CAF to address anti-Black racism are heavy on process:

Addressing anti-Black racism in the ranks of the Canadian military is a matter of national security, with recent bad press likely to dampen recruitment, says the head of the Federal Black Employee Caucus.

“For a long time this work has been piecemeal and people kind of do it at the corner of their desk, but now there is such a higher level of importance that [is] being put on it and getting it right,” said Richard Sharpe, founder of the Federal Black Employee Caucus (FBEC).

The Department of National Defence convened a meeting on July 27 to have its management “listen and learn directly from visible minority defence team members about the lived experience and systematic barriers that they and other colleagues face on a daily basis,” according to a July 28 statementfrom outgoing chief of the defence staff Jonathan Vance and national defence deputy minister Jody Thomas.

The meeting came after a June 19 letter that Gen. Vance and Ms. Thomas sent to DND members apologizing for the delay in addressing the outpouring of response to the police killing of George Floyd and reports of systematic racism within DND and the Canadian Armed Forces.

Those members of DND who presented gave three recommendations for the Canadian military to implement: establish a secretariat for members of DND to report on racial discrimination, make clear who is responsible for implementing policies and processes to tackle racism, and align DND with the rest of the public service to collect disaggregated data and renew the Employment Equity Act.

“I don’t want to fawn all over them, but I think they’ve been doing a very good job of addressing some of these issues—at least at the senior levels of the organization—head on,” said Mr. Sharpe, who took part in the July 27 meeting. “I appreciate the fact that we had a very frank and open discussion about race and anti-Black racism.”

He said changes to the Employment Equity Act are “long overdue.” The act, which was passed in the 1980s, outlines four classes of people that receive special protections: persons with disabilities, women, Indigenous people, and visible minorities.

“It refers to Black and racialized people as visible minorities and our experiences are masked within that visible minority term,” Mr. Sharpe said.

During the meeting, Gen. Vance and Ms. Thomas wrote, the leadership of the Canadian military heard about the need to “re-imagine and re-design,” so the new policies work for those without power within the structure of DND.

“The experiences they shared exposed persistent and deeply painful occurrences of aggressively racist behaviours, micro-aggressions, and failures of leadership to address both,” Gen. Vance and Ms. Thomas’ statement read.

The statement also referred to the creation of a DND Black Employee Network, something Mr. Sharpe called “really important.”

He noted that FBEC has been pushing for the establishment of Black employee networks—which create a safe place to gather to establish recommendations and have their own voice within institutions to push for change as a distinct group—across the public service.

“So with DND committing to do this, I think it gives great space for this to happen and a focus that we’ve never had. There’s never been a focus on Black employees in the public service,” Mr. Sharpe said.

The DND Black Employee Network is made up of both military and civilian members, who can “come together to share their experiences and discuss ways to respond to anti-Black racism within the Defence Team,” according to a DND spokesperson, who added that the group’s mandate is provide space for Black members of DND and the Canadian Forces to “explore, discuss, and create ways to tackle anti-Black racism.”

It will be made up of departmental volunteers who will act as a consultative body for senior DND and military leaders.

“It really does continue to feel like historic times here, with all that’s been happening, and there’s been movement on this work [that the FBEC] has been pushing for two years,” said Mr. Sharpe.

Given the new territory of DND’s initiative, Mr. Sharpe said it’s difficult to establish concrete timelines, but added he’s heard from DND leadership that they want to enact changes “very quickly.”

“This is a national security threat for DND. …The bad press, the reputational damage impacts on the ability on the organization to recruit people,” he said. “So I think they’re trying to get this stuff in place as soon as possible, addressing any kind of reputational damage that they may be experiencing due to the ongoing incidents of racism within the ranks and intolerance in the various defence [branches].”

Canadian Forces College professor Alan Okros, an expert on diversity in the military, said the networks provide a way for individuals to have a voice and have their concerns illuminated.

“In the current context, there is more of an interest at the senior leadership level in listening to [advisory groups] and hearing what’s going on,” he said.

Gen. Vance and Ms. Thomas said in their statement that National Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan (Vancouver South, B.C.) is “fully seized with addressing racial discrimination” within DND, adding that he “expects bold, decisive action” from both DND and the Canadian Armed Forces.

Mr. Sajjan told CTV last month that during his early days in the Armed Forces he realized “how intense racism can be.”

“I remember one person … saying to me, ‘I let you join my military.’ Just that position of power and privilege that he was throwing in my face, it just upset me so much,” he said.

Prof. Okros said the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and Canada have given an increased impetus to diversity and inclusion work that started with Marie Deschamps’ 2015 report on sexual assault in the Canadian military, which led the Canadian government to launch Operation Honour to tackle sexual assault and misconduct.

“It’s moved it up a notch in terms of the level of attention and focus on it,” he said, adding that Gen. Vance and Ms. Thomas have made it clear this is how they want to lead.

Prof. Okros said now that the senior leaders have held a meeting to listen, the big question is: what have they heard and what is going to be done?

A DND spokesperson said implementation timelines and funding have not yet been determined.

“As we work towards establishing the appropriate framework and resources for this critical initiative, we are continuing to be open and transparent with the entire Defence Team,” the spokesperson said.

The recommendations being put forward are “good first steps,” Prof. Okros said, adding that there will be individuals who will be expecting more to be done to fully achieve what’s required.

“I think they’re definitely going to be interested in moving as quickly as they can,” he said. “It likely is going to result in some staged or staggered implementation, recognizing that in some of these cases there are legal issues involved and it takes time, and there’s a requirement to be prudent if you are going to make changes that have legal consequences.”

“Creating the secretariat, clarifying roles and responsibilities are things that can be moved forward fairly quickly,” said Prof. Okros. “I think part of what the next steps are is going to depend on having some legal review and some policy review to make sure they get it right.”

Gen. Vance and Ms. Thomas called the July 27 meeting “just a start.”

“We will be meeting with the other defence advisory groups to hear their stories on discrimination and systematic barriers. We know there is so much more to do, and that we will be judged based on our actions and results, not our sentiments and promises.”

Source: ‘It’s a national security threat’: DND launches anti-Black racism initiative

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Confessions of a ‘model minority’: How I’m learning to confront my own biases

2020/08/05 Leave a comment

Seeing more articles like this one by Joanna Chiu on the prejudices and racism of minorities for other minorities, a useful reminder that white/visible minority dichotomies are overly simplistic and do not capture the challenges in reducing racism, discrimination and bias:

Childhood for me was … busy.

My parents, who immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong, rarely took time off work and spent their weekends chauffeuring my brother and me to our lessons.

It was all they knew. In Asia’s cutthroat cities, many parents feel they have no choice but to spend a huge amount of their salaries to help their offspring stand out from the studious masses. We never went camping, or fishing, or whatever other Canadian families did for leisure.

Our Saturday mornings consisted of three hours of Cantonese school. If one of us got a perfect score on our vocabulary test, we would get McDonald’s for lunch as a treat.

After that, we’d head straight to two hours of piano lessons in a neighbouring Vancouver suburb. On Sunday mornings, we attended art class followed by tutoring in music theory, composition or music history. All those lessons were supposed to stimulate our growing brains.

I always felt connected to Hong Kong as my birthplace and embraced its stereotypical work ethic. I cried when my brother brought home a report card that contained mostly B’s and a C.

I didn’t see anything wrong with being a so-called model minority.

Sometimes strangers would say rude or mocking things to us, but racism was something to make peace with. Life would inevitably get better, after all, if we just kept working hard and didn’t complain.

Besides, I volunteered every week and started clubs at my school devoted to equality and human rights issues. That was part of the whole package of becoming an exemplary world citizen, I thought. It wouldn’t be long before there was an ethnic minority prime minister, if we all just kept working hard!

I was taught to brush off racism as a kind of flattery — that it stemmed from people being “jealous” of Asians’ high rate of university admission and higher-than-average salary level in North America.

Last year, I was working downtown and people would give me dirty looks or yell slurs at me on the street. Online, I was regularly getting a litany of abuse. My dad tried to comfort me by saying it was because I looked like “an executive” with my new job. It was a sign of success.

This wishful thinking made sense to me, but now I see why it’s illogical in the face of hate crimes happening around the world against people of Asian appearance.

In Vancouver, a man pushed a 92-year-old man with dementia to the ground outside a convenience store while yelling racist insults about COVID-19. In another incident, someone punched a woman of Asian descent near a bus stop downtown and walked away. Dakota Holmes, an Indigenous woman, was punched in the face and told to “go back to Asia” while she was walking her dog.

A recent Angus Reid Institute poll found that almost 30 per cent of Chinese Canadians surveyed said they had been physically attacked since the COVID-19 crisis began, while 43 per cent said they’ve been threatened or intimidated.

It’s a shock to the system for some of us — a reminder that racism can’t be outworked, outhustled, or out-run.

Rightly so, many people are speaking up to say that Asian communities shouldn’t stop at finally acknowledging that racism against Asians is a serious problem.

Around the world, people are also organizing under the “Asians for Black Lives” banner.

When police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, three other officers were present, including Tou Thao.

Thao’s participation in Floyd’s death has rightfully sparked calls for Asian communities to better address the ways in which anti-Blackness is embedded into many Asian cultures and societies.

Oftentimes, this doesn’t come in the form of overt acts of hate, but in our resounding silence on systemic issues affecting other minorities that cannot be solved by trying to play within the rules of white supremacy.

Steven Zhou argued in an op-ed piece in the Star last week that a sense of superiority based on work ethic is prevalent among Chinese Canadians, and can lead to prejudice.

In recent public discussions in Canada, we’ve mostly heard from Asian millennials referring to racism among our elders, and pledging to speak with our elders about their derision of people with darker skin.

Although our “aunties and uncles” are more likely to say racist things out loud, younger people surely have biases, too.

What can an Asian Canadian who has internalized the model minority myth do?

Personally, I feel like I’ve dug myself into a hole of work and volunteer commitments. My instinct is to sign up for more work on anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous topics. As co-chair of a group that promotes the contributions of women and people of colour on China studies, I put together a resources list for China expert communities to fight anti-Black racism, and have been going through all the readings.

Perhaps, part of the solution is to stop the endless activity. I’m lucky to have multiple sources of income during the pandemic, but exhaustion skews judgement. Instead of writing this essay in a few hours, as I normally would, I asked my editor for more time to reflect on my complicity in social injustices.

It’s been long overdue.

My biases are rooted in not only racism, but also classism and able-ism, where despite having a disability myself (ADHD), I’ve assumed that most people in Canada have similar access to education and can overcome their challenges to pursue conventional success.

When we speak of racism, it’s easy to think it’s a problem that other people have. The uncomfortable truth is that we all have unconscious biases that can grow into hate if we don’t confront them within ourselves.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2020/08/03/confessions-of-a-model-minority-how-im-learning-to-confront-my-own-biases.html

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Ontario government spending $1.6M to fight racism, supporting community-based anti-hate initiatives

2020/07/31 Leave a comment

Small change, more symbolic than substantive:

Ontario is investing $1.6 million over two years to fight racism and hate in the province.

The money will support community-based anti-racism and anti-hate initiatives, focusing on anti-Black racism, anti-Indigenous racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia.

“Racism and hate will not be tolerated and our government is doing everything it can to protect people from being victimized because of their race or religious beliefs,” Solicitor General Sylvia Jones said in a statement.

“This new grant program will be developed collaboratively with community partners across Ontario to ensure it leads to the most effective solutions in the fight against racism and hate in our province. These much-needed solutions cannot come from government alone.”

Evan Balgord, the executive director at the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, said in an interview that allocating the funds from the new Anti-Racism and Anti-Hate Grant has to be meaningful.

“We see grants disproportionately go towards research projects or small-scale education programs or art programs,” said Balgord.

“We’re just not at the point anymore where we need a whole bunch more research on it. We need tangible action, and governments should be prioritizing grants that promise to take tangible, measurable actions against hate speech, hate crimes, and groups that promote organized hate in Canada.”

A press release said beginning in fall 2020, Ontario’s Anti-Racism Directorate (ARD) will collaborate with community groups to learn about individual experiences and local needs to form the grant. The ARD was established in 2016. It works to eliminate systemic racism in government policies, decisions, and programs and advance racial equity for Black, Indigenous, and racialized people.

The grant will focus on increasing public awareness of the impact of systemic racism and hate. It supports Ontario’s Anti-Racism Strategy to fight and mitigate systemic racism in government decision making, programs, and services.

Balgord said people should be concerned about racism and hatred in Canada.

“People feel very emboldened to be racist and spread death threats,” he said. “That’s something we need to bring social accountability back to.”

Source: Ontario government spending $1.6M to fight racism, supporting community-based anti-hate initiatives

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How 20th Century Camera Film Captured a Snapshot of American Bias

2020/07/27 Leave a comment

Fascinating example of systemic racism:

In the 1960s, African American mothers noticed something wrong in their children’s seemingly innocent class photos. Every year, youngsters tidied up in their Sunday best for their school picture, which captured a milestone of childhood. But, after the Supreme Court desegregated schools with the Brown v. Board of Educationdecision in 1954, these Black mothers saw something when their children brought these treasured images home: color photos of schoolmates sitting elbow-to-elbow didn’t capture Black and white children equally.

White children were rendered as they look in everyday life, while African American children lost features of their faces and turned into ink blots. The film could not simultaneously capture both dark and light skin, since an undetected bias was swirled into the film’s formulation. For decades, this flaw of the film remained out of sight, when schools were segregated and Black boys and girls and white boys and girls were photographed separately. But with the integration of schools, Black mothers witnessed that color film left their Black children in the shadows.

In 2015, two London-based photographers, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, excavated this old color film to find out why the film could not capture the likeness of children of all races in a school photograph. When these photographers tested the film, they found that “the film wasn’t calibrated to deal with that kind of range of exposure,” said Chanarin. The film was optimized for white skin. The chemicals to dutifully pick up a range of colors had long existed, ever since the Periodic Table of Elements had become a standard item in most chemistry books. But there was a secret partiality in the combination of these elements used for the film’s chemistries, favoring one range of color over another. It was this film’s hidden history that was the reason faces in a class photo came out so differently.

Kodak executives interviewed decades later reported that their company, the primary producer of color film, was made aware of its film’s flaw, but dismissed it. Addressing complaints from Black mothers in the 1950s and 1960s might have been prescient, since this was the dawn of the civil rights era. Black was beautiful, but the status quo was more. All that changed, however, when large corporations made a fuss about Kodak’s film, which they bought in bulk for advertising. A team of two unlikely businesses—furniture makers and chocolate manufacturers—protested against Kodak’s films for discriminating against dark hues.

Both industries needed not only for dark browns to come out, but for the details to be obvious and beautifully displayed. A customer needed to be tantalized by milk chocolate, or semisweet chocolate, or dark chocolate that were differentiated in a photo. Newlyweds needed to be enticed by elm or walnut or oak tables plainly shown for their dream home. Kodak employees worked hard to fix the film, making new film formulations and testing them by taking photos, sometimes gaining weight from all the chocolate they photographed. While the complaints from Black mothers could not change Kodak, those from these companies could. By the late 1970s, new—and more inclusive—formulations of color film were in the works, and the new and improved Kodak Gold film was on the market by the following decade.

To advertise this new product, Kodak did not want to bring attention to their initial film’s bias, so they announced that the new film had the ability to take a picture of a “dark horse in low light.” This poetic phrase was code to signal that darker human skin could now be registered with this new film. This time Kodak distilled the bias out of their chemical formulation, making it possible that dark woods, dark chocolates and dark skin were able to be captured.

Technologies, such as photographic film, sometimes capture the issues and beliefs and values of the times. This bias built into technology has echoes today. Today, silicon pixels in digital photography are not optimized to register dark skin well. Additionally, some web cameras, following instructions from algorithms, are unable to recognize and follow a dark face, but do so easily for a white one. Even interracial couples, who might struggle with awkward family dynamics at Thanksgiving, struggle with getting a great photo together, too. When lovebirds of light and dark complexions want to take a selfie, they will find that one will come out, but the other will be a ghost; or that one will come out and the other will be a shadow.

What the makers of film and cameras and other technologies have experienced is a tacit subscription to a belief of a standard. In other words, they have gotten on the escalator of “this is how we do things” without asking why. Scholars would describe this type of bias as one that implicitly and uncritically accepts norms and it pervades the cellphones in our pockets. But it isn’t the cameras’ fault; they are only doing what the lines of code written by humans tell them to do. These devices capture the biases that exist in our world and, in turn, speak to whom a culture values. As our technologies become more pervasive in our lives, whom they were built for and optimized for will be an important discussion. The goal is to make sure that, moving forward, technology captures what we really want captured about ourselves.

Source: How 20th Century Camera Film Captured a Snapshot of American Bias

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‘Why don’t they just work harder?’ This kind of anti-Blackness is prevalent in Chinese-Canadian communities. It’s time to address it

2020/07/25 1 Comment

A good reminder that racism, discrimination and prejudice exist among all communities.

One of the positive changes under former Minister Jason Kenney was to broaden the discussion from a white/visible minority quasi-dichotomy to an understanding and appreciation of tensions and issues between visible minority groups, not just with the white majority. Shree Paradkar’s makes comparable points (Star ColumnistsDear brown people: I’m about to wash some dirty linen in public. Consider this an overdue act of tough loveJun. 28, 2020):

The idea that we live in a happy multicultural mosaic is one of Canada’s boldest lies.

Vote-thirsty politicians constantly dog-whistle at emboldened white supremacists on the Canadian fringe. Institutions across the board are being exposed for mistreatment and neglect of racialized voices. Not even Parliament escapes scrutiny as Canadians saw footage of Jagmeet Singh, the NDP’s brown and turbaned leader, getting kicked out of the House for calling out racism.

But the problem doesn’t lie exclusively with white people. Rather, it has long metastasized into communities of colour that internalize discrimination in order to spew it at groups they see as inferior — usually Black Canadians.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in parts of the Chinese Canadian community, of which I’m a proud member. While covering the election last fall, I ventured into neighbourhoods in Toronto filled with individuals of Chinese descent who, aside from the usual headaches over money, health care, or employment, were worried about “illegal border crossers” making their way onto their streets. They were clearly being fed that language by right-wing campaigners, but the pervasive fear showed how easy it is to capture people of colour with narratives that, though often rooted in racist untruths, galvanize a sense of superiority vis-à-vis those who “don’t belong.”

Which brings us to the question of anti-Blackness in communities of colour. I think it’d be hard to find a young person of Chinese descent in Canada who can’t recount at least one instance of hearing an older member of their family repeat a well-worn anti-Black trope. It might not be routine dinner conversation, but it happens all the time. Slogans of underclass ideology are robotically repeated: “Why don’t they just work harder?” “Black parents have a problem raising their kids the right way.” Or the popular, “I came to this country with [insert small dollar amount]; don’t talk to me about discrimination!” And so on.

Part of the problem is internalizing an implicit hierarchy based on race that only gets reinforced by “model minority” ideals in a country that operates on white normality.

This leads to envious worship of those above you in the arbitrary ethnoracial hierarchy, along with contempt or fearful hatred of those who you think can’t get to your level. The latter have always tended to have darker skin.

More optimistic activists may suggest that common experiences of discrimination should lead to people of different races (and from all walks of life) to automatically form political and social solidarity. Or that they naturally amount to a tangible political constituency because they all faced racism at some point. This is a naive assumption, even for people within the same race, which makes the current Black Lives Matter moment — spurred by the death of George Floyd — a valuable wake-up call.

Now more than ever is an opportunity for communities of colour, including the Chinese community, to question how their racist bias affects the world around them and why there’s such widespread anger among the Black community. It’s an uphill battle for progressive community organizations like the Chinese Canadian National Council (CCNC), which have a history of advocacy against racism that extends into the COVID-19 era of anti-East Asian discrimination.

Their battle today will have to be led by youth, who have an opportunity to extend the broader conversation of racial and social justice into their neighbourhoods and, perhaps more importantly, into their homes.

Much of this comes down to genuine progressive engagement with newcomers — a task that, in contrast to years-long forays by Canada’s conservative right, the political left is only beginning. The current opening to speak candidly about race and racism can help fill that vacuum, but only if civil society steps in on the ground level. Young people will, again, likely have to do the work of communicating, and even translating, to those who are unfamiliar with progressive narratives or vocabulary in an intelligible fashion.

In any case, the current hold of right-wing tropes and politics on significant swathes of the Chinese Canadian community (some of which have bled into alt-right territory) is not inevitable. The stereotype of wealthy, apolitical Chinese buying up land and condos can be challenged by engagement on universal issues of racial justice, among other progressive concerns.

It is necessary work for any era, but our time is one of fascist revanchism compounded by a pandemic and economic stagnation. More understanding between communities can be one of the few antidotes if collective solidarity leads to tangible successes in creating more equity in our institutions and accountability in our centres of power toward racialized people.

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What if we treated Confederate symbols the way we treated the defeated Nazis?

2020/07/03 Leave a comment

Good contrast that points out the thoughtlessness of defending Confederate symbols and statues:

Earlier this month, amid America’s confrontation with its racist legacy – which has seen monuments to Jefferson Davis toppled, the Mississippi state flag lowered, Gone With the Wind pulled from HBO’s streaming service, and music groups such as Lady Antebellum and the Dixie Chicks rebranding in an effort to distance themselves from memory of the Confederacy – I came across a tweet that put these headline-grabbing goings-on, and the backlash to them, in perspective: “Trying to imagine a version of WW2 where the Nazis just get pushed into Bavaria and surrender, but keep the swastika on the state flag, slap it on their cars and say stuff like ‘The Third Reich is my heritage.’”

The tweet, by the popular history YouTuber Three Arrows, was tagged with “lol” – as if to drive home just how absurd it would be to see the grandkids of former Nazis puttering around Munich in VWs adorned with swastika bumper stickers, like something out of a pulpy alt-history novel. It’s an idea so sinister as to seem cartoonish, and laughable. But something similar goes on in America all of the time.

In Germany, you won’t hear debates about Nazi statues. As the moral philosopher Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, notes, there’s a good reason for that: there aren’t any Nazi statues. The program of denazification began almost immediately after the second world war, established as one of “Four Ds” (along with demilitarization, decentralization and democratization) outlined in the Potsdam agreement of 1945. An Allied order in 1946 declared illegal “any monument, memorial, poster, statue, edifice, street or highway name marker, emblem, tablet, or insignia which tends to preserve and keep alive the German military tradition, to revive militarism or to commemorate the Nazi Party”.

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Belgian King Conveys ‘Deepest Regrets’ For Brutal Colonial Past In Congo

2020/07/02 Leave a comment

Long overdue:

The policies of Belgian King Leopold II left millions of people dead more than a century ago in the region that is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Now, in a first for the Belgian monarchy, King Philippe has expressed his “deepest regrets” for a colonization campaign that remains notorious for its brutality.

“Our history is made of common achievements but also of painful episodes,” Philippe wrote in a letter to Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi that was published Tuesday in Belgian media. The note commemorated the 60th anniversary of the Central African state gaining its independence from Belgium.

Philippe acknowledged “acts of violence and cruelty” under the colonial administration spearheaded by his ancestor.

The decades straddling the turn of the 20th century saw vast swaths of the region’s population die of disease, famine or violence under Leopold’s rule. He plundered rubber, ivory and other raw materials.

In Philippe’s letter, which did not explicitly name Leopold, he wrote that the regime’s violent practices sowed “suffering and humiliation” among the people of Congo.

“I would like to express my deepest regrets for those wounds of the past,” the king added, “the pain of which is today revived by the discrimination that is still all too present in our societies. I will continue to fight all forms of racism.”

Tshisekedi did not offer an immediate public response to the letter on what has been a relatively subdued holiday for the country as it battles the coronavirus.

The country’s colonial past has been thrust into headlines in recent weeks with protests seething worldwide over racial injustice.

Catalyzed by a string of police killings of Black people in the U.S., protests have erupted beyond American borders as well. Across the Atlantic — in the U.K. and Belgium, in particular — statues with racist, colonial legacies have been vandalized and have seen widespread calls for removal.

And statues of King Leopold II have attracted particular vitriol.

The long-reigning monarch claimed the region as his own private property, calling it — unironically — the Congo Free State. Shortly before his death, he was forced to cede the territory to the Belgian state, which maintained formal ownership of the colony until 1960.

Leopold, his successors and the Belgian government drew riches from a system that featured the widespread abduction, mutilation and forced labor of natives.

Several statues of Leopold across Belgium have been the targets of arson and dashes of paint recently, and at least one has been removed by authorities. A petition demanding that Brussels, the Belgian capital, remove all of its Leopold statues has also garnered tens of thousands of signatures.

Meanwhile, a commission approved earlier this month in the Belgian parliament has pledged to investigate and more broadly acknowledge the country’s colonial past. It’s an effort that Belgian Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès heralded in a speech Tuesday marking Congo’s independence day.

“The point is not to rewrite history, but to better understand it,” she said in Ixelles, where she dedicated a commemorative plaque for the Belgian city’s Congolese residents. “After all, we cannot start a new chapter without knowing all the previous ones. This is necessary to build the future.”

Source: Belgian King Conveys ‘Deepest Regrets’ For Brutal Colonial Past In Congo

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@Shree Paradkar Dear brown people: I’m about to wash some dirty linen in public. Consider this an overdue act of tough love

2020/06/30 Leave a comment

A good reminder that racism occurs among visible minorities too:

A South Asian man wrote me an email recently about my columns on the Peel District School Board. “I have not seen you focus as much on the South Asian students in that board as you have been on the Black students,” he wrote. He grew up in Peel, where he said South Asians faced “bigotry at the hands of white teachers and students and hostility at the hands of Black students.”

Most of the South Asian students he grew up with worked hard, persevered and are very successful, despite their working-class roots, he wrote.

“However, as was the case when we were growing up, the Black community and students are basically monopolizing the public’s and school board’s attention and resources.” He dived into predictable comments about Black family structures being to blame, “though external obstacles no doubt continue to exist as they do for all minority communities.”

The letter, sent in late April, expressed commonly held views among South Asians: the myth of the “model minority” — or the false perception of universal success among brown people; an ahistorical view of anti-Black racism; and racist ideas about Black “family structures.”

And we’re surprised Black people don’t trust us?

Dear brown people: a warning. I’m about to wash some dirty linen in public. Consider this an overdue act of tough love.

Two years ago when I called out various forms of discrimination within South Asian communities in a keynote for the Council of Agencies Serving South Asians (CASSA), I was a minority voice within a minority; while many in the audience were supportive, we all knew there simply wasn’t a widespread movement to hold the anti-Blackness within to account.

That is changing.

In the wake of Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin’s callous disregard for George Floyd’s life and several botched — racist — police interventions against Black and Indigenous people in Canada, the reckoning of anti-Blackness steeped in the very pores of our existence has become urgent.

In recent days, Hasan Minhaj called out fellow brown people in a 12-minute special on his Netflix show “Patriot Act.” CASSA hosted a series of panels on anti-hate conversations including one on racism within racialized communities. (Full disclosure: I was on that panel.) The U.K.’s Burnt Roti magazine hosted a discussion named Dismantling Anti-Blackness in South Asian communities.

On June 19, three education experts — York University assistant professor Vidya Shah, former Toronto school board education superintendent Jeewan Chanicka and Herveen Singh, an assistant professor at Dubai’s Zayed University — spoke in a brutally frank session titled “Brown Complicity in White Supremacy.”

While anti-Blackness is also rampant among Hispanics, East Asians, Middle Eastern people and any people who are neither white nor Black, “brown” here refers to people of South Asian ancestry and their diasporic communities.

In the artificial racial hierarchy created by Europeans who placed themselves at the top and enslaved Africans at the bottom, brown folks reside in the uneasy middle.

“We shift towards Blackness when it’s cool, when it demonstrates some sort of street cred or street smarts and then we shift right back to whiteness when we need to maintain access or mobility within the system,” Shah told the panel. “We’re chameleons.”

At least a couple of factors make us ripe for this role in the grey zone. One, as architects/participants of a caste system that in practice transcends religion, we inherently understand hierarchies. Two, our own vitriolic colourism — further cemented by waves of colonization — means we’d rather kiss the ring of whiteness than be associated with Blackness.

This has turned us into white supremacists in brown skin, useful tools in the project of whiteness. Our presence enables white people to look like multicultural progressives — some of us are the checkbox diversity hires that help them avoid addressing anti-Blackness. Our success is then used to absolve whiteness: look, Black people are told, if these people can succeed, why can’t you?

In constantly aspiring to whiteness we make ourselves more palatable to a system that does not wish to dismantle the status quo, Singh told the panel. This makes us easier to hire and be promoted through the ranks than a Black person. “In this way we become honorary whites, meaning that we are accepted in white spaces by white people upon the condition that we continue to be passive, compliant and constantly striving for whiteness.”

That compliance requires us to not talk too loudly, especially on matters of racial equity.

Brown people, we love to pat ourselves on the back for our “success” — look at our high household incomes, look at our high-achieving kids, look how far we’ve come and how quickly. So hardworking.

But we forget to see whose activism even made it possible for us to arrive here. Whom we’re stampeding on in our rush for success. Whose activism has the effect of making us appear compliant — and therefore palatable. And whose scholarship, despite it all, saves us.

“I want brown folks to remember we’re not just ascending on the backs of Black people, we have our feet on their necks as well,” Chanicka told the panel.

The fight for civil rights opened up North America to non-white immigrants in the 1960s. But immigrants were required to be highly educated people and in perfect health. These requirements a) filtered out those marginalized in their home countries and b) set those early migrants up for success even if they faced racism in the job market upon entry.

Some were able to fall back on their education and prior experience to became entrepreneurs while others sacrificed professional fulfilment for their children’s prospects. Fit in, they told their kids. Behave, study, fit in. Why would we not? Disrupt and we could end up at the bottom of the heap.

This, however, is a deal with the devil. Many of us gave up language, cultural practices, even names — anglicizing them or reducing them to monosyllabic ones.

“In this process of emptying ourselves of our core brown assets we’re filled with tremendous anxiety and insecurity,” said Singh. “And it is due to this insecurity that we lack the integrity to dismantle anti-Blackness within ourselves.”

However, no matter how much we strive for whiteness, we never can be white. It doesn’t matter how we sound, how we dress, how light-skinned we think we are, how much class privilege we enjoy to buffer racism, how many personal relationships we have that transcend race. Collectively, we are marked The Other.

When we’re rushing up the ladder we may not care that we’re crushing Black fingers on every rung. It’s when we or our children invariably hit glass ceilings — because racism against brown people is very real — that we begin to search for answers.

The shallowest of those questions is, “Why is everything just about anti-Black racism? What about us?” Chanicka calls this a way to silence the conversation. “It keeps dividing us as opposed to the understanding that racism is built on anti-Blackness. You cannot solve racism without addressing anti-Blackness.”

An awakening of our critical consciousness comes from the deep well of Black knowledge and activism — there is no equivalent South Asian activism to turn to here although there is growing Dalit (formerly called “untouchables”) scholarship; Anti-Black racism has centuries of intergenerational roots in Canada, running parallel and at times intersecting with anti-Indigeneity.

There is yet another steep cost for brown folks in the white man’s game. When we look down upon dark skin, view it as inferior, we implicitly accept our inferiority to whiteness. That’s the most cruel cut we could inflict on ourselves.

It makes anti-Blackness among brown folks the ultimate act of self-hate, one that all the Fair & Lovely cream in the world cannot erase.

Source: Shree ParadkarDear brown people: I’m about to wash some dirty linen in public. Consider this an overdue act of tough love20 hrs ago 

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Police Researcher: Officers Have Similar Biases Regardless Of Race

2020/06/24 Leave a comment

Interesting study. But watching the visible minority officers doing nothing during the Floyd killing …:

One common recommendation for reducing police brutality against people of color is to have police departments mirror a given area’s racial makeup.

President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing recommended that law enforcement “reflect the demographics of the community”; the Justice Department and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said diversity on police forces can help build trust with communities.

Rashawn Ray, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, studies race and policing. He says that diversity helps but that “officers, regardless of their race or gender, have similar implicit biases, particularly about Black people.” Ray says it’s not enough to have Black cops in a Black neighborhood if they don’t know the area.

Ray and his University of Maryland colleagues have amassed policing data through tests and interviews with hundreds of officers. He talked with Morning Edition‘s Noel King about this research. Here are excerpts of that interview:

What kind of biases do police officers — implicit, explicit — say that they have?

The first big thing is that when officers take the implicit association test, they exhibit bias against Black people. They are more likely to make an association between Black people with weapons than they are with white people with weapons. We also know that officers speak less respectfully to Black people during traffic stops as well as during other sorts of settings. And they are particularly less likely to respect Black women in these encounters, even if they’re more likely to slightly use more force on Black men relative to other people.

I was talking to a former police officer whose job is now to recruit more Black and brown police officers into [the Minneapolis] force. It sounds like what you’re saying is if she is recruiting Black and brown officers from Phoenix or from Houston and bringing them over to Minneapolis, that is not likely to solve the problem.

That’s exactly right. So the optics look good, but we can’t make the assumption that simply because a person is Black that they’re going to know about the neighborhood. Part of the fundamental problem when it comes to policing that I’ve noticed is that when police officers interact with a white person, there is a pause, a slight pause, a slight benefit of the doubt. The reason why that exists is because subconsciously, implicitly, when they interact with that person, they see their neighbor, a parent at their kids’ school, and when they interact with a Black person, they are less likely to have what we call in sociology those “social scripts” that allow them to view people in those multitude of ways.

And if we’re going to change this, one big recommendation I have: Police officers need housing assistance that mandates that they live in the metropolitan area where they are policing. Because community policing isn’t about getting out, playing basketball with a kid in uniform. Community policing oftentimes is what you do when you’re not on duty. The way that you’re investing in a neighborhood.

Source: Police Researcher: Officers Have Similar Biases Regardless Of Race

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Anti-Chinese racism is Canada’s ‘shadow pandemic,’ say researchers

2020/06/23 Leave a comment

Disturbing that so many appear not to be able to distinguish between the Chinese regime, with all its abuses, and Chinese Canadians:

Many Chinese Canadians fear that Asian children will be bullied when they return to school due to racial tension arising from the COVID-19 pandemic.

A survey of more than 500 Canadians of Chinese ethnicity by the Angus Reid Institute and the University of Alberta has found that anti-Chinese racism is rife in our society, what the researchers call a “shadow pandemic.”

That parents are afraid to send their children to school is “heartbreaking,” said ARI executive director Shachi Kurl. “Racism is the secondary virus that has had an outbreak since the pandemic was declared.

“We have this notion of Canada as an endlessly accepting, embracing country because we are multicultural,” she said. “It’s not the case and it’s never been the case.”

“The data show that these micro-aggressions are frequent and plentiful,” said Kurl. “People say they are being treated as though they are somehow carriers of COVID-19.”

More than 60 per cent of those surveyed said they have adjusted their daily routines because of the threat of racial backlash and about half fear that Asian children will be bullied if they return to school.

Vancouver-born Gloria Leung says her daughter of mixed race has been jeered by other children for her Chinese ancestry just steps from their home.

“We have informed our daughter’s teacher without naming any names and her teacher has shared that information with school staff so they can increase awareness of racism and bullying,” she said.

Her daughter’s harassers are from just two families in an otherwise diverse and welcoming neighbourhood, but the seven-year-old has felt anxious and stressed since the incident.
“We understand that everyone is struggling and hurting in this pandemic,” Leung said. “Our hope in sharing these lived and uncomfortable experiences is not to shame people, but to provide insight into systemic racism and shed light on how we can learn from these experiences.”

The survey also found that just 13 per cent of respondents feel that people in Canada view them as fully Canadian “all the time.”

“There’s a notion that because our schools are diverse and our workplaces are diverse that racism isn’t a thing anymore,” said Kurl. “It’s one thing to hear about this anecdotally, but it’s important to ask these questions to see just how widespread this is.”

About 30 per cent of the respondents say they have been exposed to anti-Chinese sentiment in the news, on social media or through graffiti.“Just this weekend (U.S. President Donald) Trump used a pejorative term for the virus, calling it the ‘kung flu,” noted Tung Chan, a former Vancouver city councillor and former chair of the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21.

“The parents learn from the media, the children learn from the parents and you have this fear that extends into schools,” he said.

Chan was particularly discouraged to learn that 60 per cent of people surveyed changed their daily routine to avoid negative interactions and “unpleasant encounters.”

“I have always chosen my words carefully when talking about racism, because I don’t want to make people feel insecure,” said Chan. “But looking at these numbers I think that I was too mild in my remarks. This is far worse than I thought in terms of people fearing for their personal safety.”While it is important to hold the government of China to account for its belligerence and human rights abuses, news media need to distinguish between the actions of the People’s Republic of China, the Communist party of China, and the Chinese people.

“The term Chinese is too all-encompassing and it reflects the actions of the Chinese government back on the people in our community,” said Chan.

“I am proud of my Chinese heritage and I won’t walk away from that, but if you ask me who I am I always say I am Canadian,” he said.

The survey was conducted online between June 15 and 18 among a randomized representative sample of 516 adults who identify as ethnically Chinese. The margin of error is +/- 4.3 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

Source: Anti-Chinese racism is Canada’s ‘shadow pandemic,’ say researchers

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