Good piece on ‘Roots’ and how a reboot needs to reflect the current era:
As the great literary and cultural critic Leslie Fiedler noted time and again, Americans only valorize the Other when we know he or she is thoroughly vanquished; The Last of the Mohicans could only be written after the Indians were thoroughly contained in or effectively banished from upstate New York. At the same time that white ethnics were transforming their downscale heritages into sources of pride (Polish Power, anyone?), black Americans in the post-Civil Rights era were doing the same thing: finding a source of cultural power in a history of exclusion and oppression.
Prior to Roots, Haley was best-known as the amanuensis of Malcolm X, compiling an “autobiography” based on interviews conducted between 1963 and Malcolm’s assassination in 1965. In What Was Literature?: Class Culture and Mass Society (1982), Fiedler writes that Roots was for Haley a natural extension of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which combined elements of Booker T. Washington’s gospel of segregationist self-sufficiency and the confrontational politics of the Black Power movement into a message of militant uplift.
Yet Fiedler notes that Roots, despite Haley’s attempt to write a “final Happy Ending” in which African Americans become professors and government functionaries and world-famous authors, replicates the same irresolvable racial tensions that fueled earlier novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (which became the basis on D.W. Griffith’s execrable The Birth of a Nation), and Gone With The Wind. “Scenes of rape and flagellation are as essential to [Haley’s] vision as to that of Mrs. Stowe or Thomas Dixon, or Margaret Mitchell, though his victims are, of course, always black,” writes Fiedler.
Though the brutalization of his ancestors, especially at the hands of slave owners, means that Haley is himself part white, he cannot acknowledge that part of his ancestry. Try as he might, Fiedler argues, Haley doesn’t offer a way out of an unbridgeable gap between the races. Instead, he describes the lurid, racist fantasies from the victims’ point of view.
History Channel
That of course is no small accomplishment and the fact that Roots—the book and the miniseries—made black history visible to white America en masse explains its success. White ethnics especially, who often clashed with blacks in the restricted neighborhoods to which both were remanded by zoning and custom, could understand a far deeper and long-suffering oppression lived out in the golden streets of America.
So here we are now, in the 21st century, eight years into the presidency of a mixed-race president, in a country where the percentage of foreign-born residents is rapidly approaching figures last seen in the 1910s and ’20s. On a profound level, we are more at peace with one another than ever before. For 20 years, the Census has included a “multiracial” category to accommodate basic reality and support for interracial marriage approaches 100 percent (even same-sex marriage, unthinkable even just a generation ago, pulls 60 percent or more approval, with the number bumping each year).
Yet in a commencement speech at Howard University, Barack Obama observed that even as things have markedly improved for African Americans since he himself graduated college, his “election did not create a post-racial society.” To be sure, there is much work to be done. Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as their white counterparts and the unemployment rate for blacks is twice that for whites. The rise of Donald Trump is fueled in no small part by grievances among poor whites who are the one group in America whose lifespans are actually shrinking. Black protestors, especially on college campuses, are at times more inflamed than the Black Panthers ever were — despite objectively better conditions compared to 45 years ago in terms of opportunities.
We have stuck in a dialectical conversation where the horrors of our racial past have been represented poignantly and memorably. What we need now is work that shows how most Americans—black, white, and every other type—have moved beyond to a world that, while replete with problems, allows us to be kinder and better to one another.
As the movement gained traction, I became increasingly visible and increasingly the target of those who oppose our cause. Jerry Agar, a Toronto Sun columnist with a long, well-documented record of enmity to our anti-racist goals, attempted to use my visibility to discredit me. A day after the conclusion of #BLMTOtentcity, he cited the aforementioned tweet in an attempt to delegitimize an entire movement, and to position my community as undeserving of justice.
I am not a public official. I am not a police officer. The state does not entrust me with violent weaponry. I have never contributed to the mass targeting of a community. All I have done is used a turn of phrase, a rhetorical flourish, to voice my frustration and dared to be a person calling for justice.
To date, I have directly received many disturbing death threats from white supremacists across the country. Somehow a tweet I wrote out of anger months before our protest began has become a bigger media story than our protest’s many and profound accomplishments. The noise surrounding this tweet has also drowned out the discussion we sought to spark about the black lives of those who have died at the guns of police in this country. Journalists have incessantly harassed me, desperate to get a comment on the tweet. Where were they during the entire two weeks of #BLMTOtentcity? The media is part and parcel of how anti-black racism works. Too often black people are ignored or vilified when we speak the truth about our condition.
To be black in Toronto is to have been or know somebody who has been brutalized, violated or battered by the Toronto police. Our lives are plagued by institutional and individual anti-black racism that compromises our access to safety, economic freedom, proper health care, food, housing, employment, education and culturally restorative support services. To be black in this city is to fight to survive.
Mayor John Tory responded to reports of my tweet less than 24 hours after they emerged. Yet for the more than two weeks black people fought for our humanity in protest outside of police headquarters, he ignored us. That is something everyone in this city should be concerned about. Despite all the violence we endure when we resist, we can never lose sight of the issues; we must continue to seek justice and accountability for our community. We only have more work to do, and this is only the beginning. Black lives matter, here as everywhere, and they always will.
Words and turns of phrase matter. Being in the political arena and pushing for change means greater care in language in order to gain support in the broader community.
A better approach would have been a simple apology for her words, rather than politician-style avoidance, to allow discussion to move on to valid substantive issues she raises.
Kristof on some of the ongoing biases and their effects:
In one study, researchers sent thousands of résumés to employers with openings, randomly using some stereotypically black names (like Jamal) and others that were more likely to belong to whites (like Brendan). A white name increased the likelihood of a callback by 50 percent.
Likewise, in Canada researchers found that emails from stereotypically black names seeking apartments are less likely to get responses from landlords. And in U.S. experiments, when blacks and whites go in person to rent or buy properties, blacks are shown fewer options.
Something similar happens even with sales. Researchers offered iPods for sale online and found that when the photo showed the iPod held by a white hand, it received 21 percent more offers than when held by a black hand.
Discrimination is also pervasive in the white-collar world. Researchers found that white state legislators, Democrats and Republicans alike, were less likely to respond to a constituent letter signed with a stereotypically black name. Even at universities, emails sent to professors from stereotypically black names asking for a chance to discuss research possibilities received fewer responses.
Why do we discriminate? The big factor isn’t overt racism. Rather, it seems to be unconscious bias among whites who believe in equality but act in ways that perpetuate inequality.
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, an eminent sociologist, calls this unconscious bias “racism without racists,” and we whites should be less defensive about it. This bias affects blacks as well as whites, and we also have unconscious biases about gender, disability, body size and age. You can explore your own unconscious biases in a free online test, called the implicit association test.
One indication of how deeply rooted biases are: A rigorous study by economists found that even N.B.A. referees were more likely to call fouls on players of another race. Something similar happens in baseball, with researchers finding that umpires calling strikes are biased against black pitchers.
If even professional referees and umpires are biased, can there be any hope for you and me as we navigate our daily lives? Actually, there is.
The N.B.A. study caused a furor (the league denied the bias), and a few years later there was a follow-up by the same economists, and the bias had disappeared. It seems that when we humans realize our biases, we can adjust and act in ways that are more fair. As the study’s authors put it, “Awareness reduces racial bias.”
That’s why it’s so important for whites to engage in these uncomfortable discussions of race, because we are (unintentionally) so much a part of the problem. It’s not that we’re evil, but that we’re human. The challenge is to recognize that unconscious bias afflicts us all — but that we just may be able to overcome it if we face it.
Not surprising, given the focus of his campaign and the demographics of those who support him:
If Donald Trump somehow falls three delegates short of reaching the magic 1,237 delegates needed for the Republican nomination, he may be haunted by an obscure outcome from the primary voting in Illinois on Tuesday. There’s clear evidence that Trump supporters in Illinois gave fewer votes to Trump-pledged delegate candidates who have minority or foreign-sounding names like “Sadiq,” “Fakroddin” and “Uribe,” potentially costing him three of the state’s 69 delegates.
This pattern appears to be a phenomenon unique to Trump’s supporters.
Illinois Republicans hold a convoluted “loophole” primary: The statewide primary winner earns 15 delegates, but the state’s other 54 delegates are elected directly on the ballot, with three at stake in each of the state’s 18 congressional districts. Each campaign files slates of relatively unknown supporters to run for delegate slots, and each would-be delegate’s presidential preference is listed beside his or her name. As a result, the top presidential candidate in each congressional district usually claims all three of the district’s delegates.
Except on Tuesday, a handful of congressional districts split their delegates in ways that cast doubt on voters’ racial motivations. Did voters have genuine personal preferences for the mostly anonymous individuals running for these slots, or was it a case of “what’s in a name?”
A FiveThirtyEight analysis of the dozen highest vote differentials within district-level Trump slates reveals a startling pattern: In all 12 cases, the highest vote-getting candidate had a common, Anglo-sounding name. But a majority of the trailing candidates had first or last names most commonly associated with Asian, Hispanic or African-American heritages. Of the 54 Trump delegate candidates in the state, two of the three worst-trailing candidates were the only two Trump candidates with Middle Eastern-sounding names.
Doug Saunders calls out those who deny the impact of environment on opportunity:
People don’t talk about “inferior races” any more. The new language of racial hierarchy appears, at first, to be discreet and indirect: It looks at black people in the United States and indigenous people in Canada as those who have made “bad life choices,” and who face “broken families” and “community breakdown.”
This sounds reasonable: After all, people with histories of deprivation and marginality tend to live in broken-down communities; their families are often fractured; they can be prone to educational failure, criminality and life paths that lead to despair. These are infamous symptoms.
But these commentators and politicians aren’t calling these symptoms of a larger wrong, but rather root causes: Bad choices have led to marginality, not vice versa.
You learn what this view really means when you ask the obvious next question: If you think personal and family failure are not symptoms but root causes, then why do they occur so much more often among native Canadians, black Americans and other downtrodden groups? What is causing these bad life choices?
This is when the theories of racial inferiority appear. The notion that significant aspects of behaviour, intelligence and aptitude are genetically determined – a notion that still lacks any credible scientific basis – has quietly become gospel in some conservative circles.
A handful of books and articles by notorious racial thinkers, ignored or dismissed elsewhere, have taken on an outsized life: Consider the 1994 book The Bell Curve by right-wing activist Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein (its claims of racial intelligence differences were based on the discredited 1980s racial theories of Canadian psychologist Philippe Rushton); the racial rantings of pioneering geneticist James Watson (which led to him being drummed out of the scientific community); and most recently journalist Nicholas Wade’s book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. This latter book claims that the successes and failures of the world’s “racial” groups were genetically determined. Its key racial claims have been denounced as false not only by major scientific journals but also by a group of 139 top human-population geneticists, including the ones whose research Mr. Wade drew upon to reach his conclusions.
The notion that success is a product of good genes, rather than surroundings and circumstances, has an obvious ideological appeal to people who would rather not spend public money mending wrongs. So they seize upon crumbs: Yes, some aspects of intelligence have been shown to be passed on to children – but only when parents and children are all more or less middle-class.
Poverty and deprivation have a much larger effect in lowering IQ and other key measures; only when they’re eliminated does any heritability of intelligence appear.
With no support from scientists or their research for theories of racial success and failure, what we are left with are slogans and clichés that justify inaction – exactly how they were used the last time around.
Commentary from community activists on Ontario’s planned anti-racism directorate and their proposed additional measures to reduce racism. Overly ambitious, given resource and other constraints (e.g., across all ministries and institutions – some prioritization would be helpful), but helpful to internal and external discussion of scope:
The Ontario Anti-Racism Directorate, on the other hand, is understood to be part of the government apparatus and is tasked with, among other things, helping the government to “apply an anti-racism lens in developing, implementing and evaluating government policies, programs and services.”
A promising start, but this anti-racism lens should also be used to evaluate legislation. Moreover, we are not convinced that the adoption of an anti-racism lens alone will eradicate racism. Clearly, there are a few more things that the directorate should and can do.
The directorate can be a repository of anti-racism expertise that different government departments can draw on in order to address racism systematically, and be responsible for research, analysis, and policy development based on the data collected and expertise of staffers.
It should take the lead in the creation of provincial standards for race-based data collection, and intra-governmental and inter-governmental implementation of the disaggregated data collection policies.
It must support the policy, legislation and program development and design process across the Ontario government by applying a racial justice lens so as to mitigate any harmful impacts on racialized communities (both First Peoples and peoples of colour).
And finally it should be a point of contact for communities to share their experiences, concerns and ideas about identifying and dismantling all forms of racism in Ontario
And to ensure greater accountability and government support, the head of the Anti-Racism Directorate should have the same power and role as a deputy minister, and be given similar capacity and budget as that assigned to the Ontario’s Woman Directorate and the Office of Francophone Affairs.
The establishment of the Anti-Racism Directorate is an important first step to redress racial inequality in this province. More must be done, however, if the government is serious about eradicating racism.
The government of Ontario must implement other necessary structural, program and policy changes including:
Establishing an Employment Equity Secretariat fully mandated and adequately resourced in order to implement a mandatory and comprehensive employment equity program in Ontario.
Collecting and analyzing ethno-racially and otherwise appropriately disaggregated data across all provincial Ministries and public institutions.
Amending the provincial funding formula for publicly funded elementary and secondary schools by introducing an Equity in Education Grant – a more robust redistributive mechanism rooted in a range of relevant equity and diversity measures and considerations – to ameliorate Ontario’s growing ethno-racially and otherwise defined learning outcome inequities and disparities.
Applying equity principles to all current and future government infrastructure investments – particularly renewable energy and “green collar” job-creating initiatives – to best ensure stable and sustainable futures for all Ontarians.
Establishing both the Anti-Racism as well as Disabilities Secretariats as mandated under the Ontario Human Rights Code.
Minister Coteau has indicated that he will set up an advisory body to assist him with the next step. It is critical for the minister to engage in a full and meaningful consultation process to ensure that the voices of racialized communities are heard and included.
Lawrence Hill makes valid points regarding the teaching of To Kill a Mockingbird in Canadian schools:
However, the rote and ongoing use of To Kill a Mockingbird in the classroom points to our very Canadian-ness, and to our collective disinclination in Canada to examine racism and black history in our own backyard. How utterly convenient it is for Canadian children and adults from Dawson City to St. John’s to read about racism in the Deep South of the United States in the Great Depression, and to avoid discussions about slavery, segregation, other forms of racial injustice as well as the civil-rights movement in Canada itself.
In my experience, one of the unfortunate offshoots of the success of To Kill a Mockingbird and its hold on our psyche has nothing to do with the author or the book, but rather, how we have allowed it to dominate our meditations – especially in school – about racial injustice in Canada.
Harper Lee cannot be blamed for her own success. She is not at fault for our own collective disinclination to look beyond her novel and acknowledge the existence and eventual rooting out of slavery in the Maritimes and present-day Quebec and Ontario.
We have only ourselves and our own reticence to confront history to blame for the fact that many Canadians to this day are more familiar with the American Civil War and with the life of Martin Luther King Jr. than they are with the struggle to eradicate racial segregation in Southwest Ontario and in Nova Scotia; the movement of the black Loyalists from New York to Nova Scotia in 1783 and then, for many, back to Africa a decade later; the movement of 600 blacks from California onto Vancouver and Salt Spring Island in the mid-19th century; the settlement of blacks from Oklahoma and Texas in the Canadian prairies at the outset of the 20th century; the waves of immigrants coming to Canada from Caribbean nations starting in the late 1960s, and the simultaneous bulldozing of Africville in the north end of Halifax.
Black history in Canada is as complex and varied as the history of any racial or ethnic group, but we have lost sight of that, partly as a result of our obsession with evil in another era and another country.
Although it richly written and wonderfully drawn, To Kill a Mockingbirdemploys a narrative approach that has been used time and time again to address racism in North America. Racism and injustice is perceived through the eyes of benevolent whites, and the stories feature white characters over black. Indeed, in To Kill a Mockingbird, as well as in Harper Lee’s follow-up novel Go Set a Watchman, published in the last year of her life, black characters are minimally sketched. With the exception of Calpurnia, a black woman who works in the house of Atticus Finch, Harper Lee presents to her readers racism and evil, minus dimensional black characters.
Good cautionary advice, noting the need for more emphasis on enforcement of existing policies. However, there is a strong case for a ‘race’ or diversity lens being applied to policies and programs, just as there is for gender:
The woman who ran Ontario’s since-shuttered anti-racism secretariat two decades ago is today unconvinced the province needs to reopen the office under a different name.
Anne-Marie Stewart was the head of the Ontario Anti-Racism Secretariat, opened in 1992 under then-premier Bob Rae. She oversaw the office for three years, and helped implement programs to tackle racism and discrimination within the Ontario Public Service and in the community, until it was shuttered by Mike Harris’s government.
But with 23 years of hindsight, Stewart is unconvinced another office is the answer.
“It sounds like they are going to more or less repeat something that was disbanded. I’m not sure that that’s an effective way to go about addressing the situation,” she said on a call from Trinidad. “I think this is a knee-jerk response to the situation. I’m sure the government is well-meaning. I’m sure that the people who are pushing for it are well-meaning. But it’s not going to work if it’s not done properly and I don’t think they’re doing it the right way.”
Premier Kathleen Wynne announced Tuesday that Minister Michael Coteau would have “anti-racism” tacked onto his existing profiles. He would be in charge of the new office, which would aid government in reviewing issues through a “race lens.” The hope is to combat recent issues like violence by police against people of colour or hate crimes targeting Syrian refugees. But the announcement, packaged as part of a response to Black History Month, included no cash or timelines.
“I’m not enamoured of this at all….I’m not even sure that today something so elaborate is needed. What is needed is to enact the policies. Make sure right across the government they do what is required and it will work,” Stewart said. “As with any kind of the thing the government is trying to do, there should be legislation and policies and people should follow them and the government should enforce them.”
The office she ran had an annual budget of $743,000 in 1994/95 (about $1.1 million today), according to a government briefing note from 1997. It ran grant programs, education efforts and hiring equity efforts. Its broad mandate “was to increase the capacity, self-sufficiency and leadership of racial minority and Aboriginal communities and to assist them in gaining equitable access to all government and non-government programs and services.”
NDP leader Andrea Horwath, who started pushing for a secretariat last year, said the government plan, without a mandate and funding attached, seems half-written.
“Well I mean again I don’t now what the government has up its sleeve, I don’t think anybody does,” she said, adding that her party’s proposal was to get something up and running quickly to start seeing action for those who need it.
Work is already underway to find an assistant-deputy minister to start running a shell of an office and draft its mandate and budget, minister Coteau said Thursday afternoon. He sees value in the standalone office as a place for ideas to to flow through and policies to be analyzed. He compared it to a “think tank” for good ideas to increase equity.
“I think that a standalone directorate is strategic because it allows for us to capture best practices. It’s almost like creating an internal think tank, a place where ideas can be brought forward,” he said.
A lesson from the past, and how little would appear to have changed (I am less pessimistic, there has been progress, imperfect as it is, and the issues are more widely discussed than before).
But having a ‘race or ethnic origin lens’ (along with gender, sexual orientation etc) should improve policy making and outcomes.
However, there is a real challenge to ensuring that both a ‘race lens’ and a separate office become not merely a paper exercise but rather one that leads to concrete and tangible results:
Spurred on by protests over police violence against minorities, frustrated with an education system ostensibly public but systemically biased against darker skin, faced with a children’s aid society anything but colourblind, an Ontario premier vows to act.
A top academic drafts a report that claims “the soothing balm of ‘multiculturalism’ cannot mask racism.” He finds “a great deal of anger, anxiety, frustration and impatience amongst those with whom I talked in the visible minority communities.” They were filled with a “bitter sense” the exercise was “yet another reporting charade.”
“It was truly depressing.”
And it was 23 years ago.
The premier wasn’t Kathleen Wynne, but Bob Rae. The party loyalist tapped for expertise was former provincial NDP leader Stephen Lewis and his report on racism in Ontario was not written in bureaucratese, but as a poignant, personal letter to Rae. It was sparked by what came to be known as the Yonge Street Riots — protests over police violence against young, black men.
It was a call to action. It touted the newly created Anti-Racism Secretariat as one way to start stitching together gaping wounds between communities.
And for three years it sought to do that, sought to analyze government policies through a “race lens,” pushed for greater equity in legislation.
Then Rae lost power and Mike Harris turned the province Tory blue. Shutting down the secretariat was a key campaign pledge.
Two decades later, and everything that’s old is new again. Wynne announced Tuesday she’s going to create an anti-racism directorate, admitting she didn’t now how that differs from a secretariat. Minister Michael Coteau will tack the responsibility onto his existing files and report back soon with what exactly the office will do and what kind of budget it will require.
Her reasons why are, upon reading Lewis’s decades-old letter, like government on syndication.
“The Black Lives Matter movement, the issue of carding, the debate surrounding the Syrian refugee crisis – these events and many others illuminate and illustrate a systemic racism that runs the length of our shared history right up to this very moment,” Wynne said. She promised a “a wide anti-racist lens” will be used to shape government policy.
Change the date line and one could easily believe Lewis penned his letter this decade. He wrote “there must surely be a way to combine constructive policing with public confidence that to serve and protect is not a threat to visible minority communities.”
He notes all minority communities face discrimination, but anti-Black (his capital B) is the most pervasive: “It is Blacks who are being shot, it is Black youth that is unemployed in excessive numbers, it is Black students who are being inappropriately streamed in schools, it is Black kids who are disproportionately dropping-out.”
‘We haven’t dealt with the problems… and it’s not for lack of good intentions’
The Liberals are acting now, but they also bear responsibility for a decade of inaction, having 10 years ago passed a bill that allowed them to create essentially the same office. But they didn’t.
Those who remember the 90s, the Yonge Street Riots and Rae’s best intentions have what can best be described as a cynical optimism about this latest attempt.
“Every effort should be made but made understanding there are greater chances for failure and disillusionment than there are for real success and improvement,” said Lennox Farrell, a retired teacher who co-chaired one of Rae’s anti-racism secretariat advisory committees. That process also began with the highest of hopes, but he soon found the meetings exhausting, circular, counterproductive. He worries the new directorate will just be “more paper.”
One of the more interesting takes on the half-show:
Both Beyoncé and Bruno wore black. They dressed the same as the people they stood shoulder to shoulder with. And then, before being interrupted by a strange retrospective video about past halftimes, they offered a reminder that synchronized dancing can be the best kind of spectacle there is—better than Left Shark, better than a middle finger to the camera, better than a crotch slide from Springsteen. There was no racial subtext to this, just text. Mars’s crew was B-boying. Beyoncé’s was channeling black radical movements and Michael Jackson in 1993. These were displays of cultural power coming from specific places, with specific meanings. They were rooted in history, but obviously spoke to the present.
In the short time since it arrived online without warning the day before the Super Bowl, “Formation” has already generated a monograph’s worthofwritings about Beyoncé’s choice to tie her famous swagger explicitly (and hilariously, and cleverly) to her race, gender, and cultural heritage—to “Jackson Five nostrils” and dates to Red Lobster. The video features her on stoops and in parking lots and in old-money New Orleans drawing rooms, looking fly. Everyone has the potential to appreciate her infectious attitude, the song’s strange squeaky beat, and the video’s instantly iconic visuals. But among the group of people she is directly addressing, many say “Formation” feels like something more than just a great pop song—it feels life-giving and maybe even revolutionary.
But forgoing the universal also involves risk, as Beyoncé surely knew. The aggregating of social-media users who find her totally humane imagery “anti-police,” or who hear a song about a person’s lived experience and reply with the inanity of “all lives matter,” has begun. So too has concern trolling about her acclaim from people who’ve never connected to her music. If you find “Formation” tuneless or offensive, fine. Just don’t go impugning the motives of all the people in the weeks to come walking down the street in a very specific rhythm, internally chanting “I slay.” Beyoncé no longer asks that everyone get in formation, and that’s why so many people probably will.
A lot of headlines today say that Beyoncé won the Super Bowl, and a lot of memesare fixing on the moment toward the end when she, Mars, and Martin all sang together. It was meant to be a beautiful sight, but it ended up feeling awkward; Martin seemed weak, pitiful, next to the two of them and what they’d just done. There are probably a lot of reasons for that perception. One might be that he had pretended to stand for everything, but actually stood for very little. Beyoncé did not make that mistake.
Multicultural Meanderings 