Premier Wynne, give us the data on police carding | Desmond Cole

2015/08/06 Leave a comment

Agree. The data should and needs to be shared:

Last week, the province launched a public consultation on police carding, the controversial practice of stopping and documenting civilians who are not suspected of any crime (some police forces use the terms “street checks” or “proactive policing” to describe the practice). The news is welcome and overdue — for years, police forces across Ontario have been disproportionately carding people with dark skin in the name of public safety.

The consultation includes an online survey, whose opening paragraph claims that “information collected during street checks may help solve and prevent crime.” Our police have never produced any data to back up this critical argument, and the province fails to do so in its consultation. If Queen’s Park wants meaningful public input on carding, it must publish independent, province-wide data showing how often carding happens, whom it tends to affect, and how much relevant information, if any, it produces.

Carding remains controversial in part because police tend to suppress data about it. The few existing stats tell us nothing about the relationship between carding and public safety. But data from police in Ottawa, Hamilton and Toronto is clear about carding’s racial bias; in each of these cities, black residents are overwhelmingly the most likely people to be carded.

Only 5 per cent of Ottawa residents are black, but 20 per cent of people carded in the nation’s capital in recent years have been black. Since 2010, Hamilton police have carded blacks at a rate of three to four times their share of the local population. The total number of people carded in Toronto dropped sharply in 2013, but during the same period the share of blacks being carded actually went up. This is the reality in three of Ontario’s five most populated cities.

The police forces responsible for this skewed policing deny there is any problem, and simultaneously hide relevant info on their activities. In June, Ottawa police chief Charles Bordeleau claimed his force did not collect information on the racial breakdown of carding incidents. A month later under growing public scrutiny, Ottawa police produced the race-based data the chief claimed they didn’t have.

…Officers with the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) have done the majority of Toronto police’s carding in recent years. TAVIS has refused the Star’s requests for data on the number of its contacts that result in arrests or the recovery of guns. However TAVIS data from 2008, the most recent year available, shows that officers failed to lay charges during 98 per cent of carding interactions; that same year, TAVIS officers recovered a firearm once in every 650 times they carded a resident.

Premier Wynne, give us the data on police carding | Toronto Star.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

The suffocating experience of being black in Canada

2015/08/04 Leave a comment

Anthony Morgan on the Black experience:

As we enter early adulthood we are collectively realizing that, despite what many think, blacks in Canada cannot speak about their lived experience and the ongoing injustices they face without being met with silencing indifference, dismissal and sometimes hostility.

While tolerating degrees of anti-black racism may have been a successful survival strategy for a previous generation of blacks in Canada, our generation has never known a Canada without a Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or provincial human rights codes that enshrine our universal entitlement to equality as Canadians.

As such, we find it impossible to accept today’s black Canadian experience: extreme marginalization and disadvantage; restricted access to housing; racial profiling in policing, security, education and child welfare; criminalization; over-representation in the criminal justice system; high levels of unemployment; and disproportionate and extreme poverty.

This is part of the reason why when you tell the upcoming generation of social justice-oriented black Canadians to “Go back to your home country if you don’t like it here,” we stare at you with blank confusion, if not in angry defiance. Canada is the only home country we’ve ever known.

Our righteous resistance is not an expression of hatred for Canada, cops, or Confederate flags. It’s a thrashing attempt to break the stranglehold of Canadian-brand anti-black racism and wake our society up to an irrefutable fact:

We have the right to be treated equally as human beings, but also as Canadians. And as such, we resist suffocating racism because we are true black strong and free.

The suffocating experience of being black in Canada | Toronto Star.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

Antiracism, Our Flawed New Religion: McWhorter

2015/07/29 Leave a comment

John McWhorter’s take on antiracism as a religion, and the risk this holds with respect to more open conversations:

Yet Antiracism as religion has its downsides. It encourages an idea that racism in its various guises must be behind anything bad for black people, which is massively oversimplified in 2015. For example, it is thrilling to see the fierce, relentless patrolling, assisted by social media, that the young black activists covered in a recent New York Times Magazine piece have been doing to call attention to cops’ abuse of black people. That problem is real and must be fixed, as I have written about frequently, often to the irritation of the Right. However, imagine if there were a squadron of young black people just as bright, angry and relentless devoted to smoking out the bad apples in poor black neighborhoods once and for all, in alliance with the police forces often dedicated to exactly that? I fear we’ll never see it—Antiracism creed forces attention to the rogue cops regardless of whether they are the main problem.

The fact is that Antiracism, as a religion, pollutes our race dialogue as much as any lack of understanding by white people of their Privilege. For example, the good Antiracist supports black claims that standardized tests are “racist” in that black people don’t do as well on them as other students. But Antiracism also encourages us to ask why, oh why black people are suspected of being less intelligent than others—despite this take on the tests, and aspiring firefighters and even teachers making news with similar claims that tough tests are “racist.” Now, to say that if black people can’t be expected to take tests then they must not be as smart is, under Antiracism, blasphemous—one is not to ask too many questions. The idea of a massive effort—as concentrated as the people battling cop abuse against black people—to get black kids practice in taking standardized tests doesn’t come up, because the scripture turns our heads in other directions.

And too often, Antiracism doctrine loses sight of what actually helps black people. Ritual “acknowledgment” of White Privilege is, ultimately, for white people to feel less guilty. Social change hardly requires such self-flagellation by the ruling class. Similarly, black America needs no grand, magic End of Days in order to succeed. A compact program of on-the-ground policy changes could do vastly more than articulate yearnings for a hypothetical psychological revolution among whites that no one seriously imagines could ever happen in life as we know it.

Antiracism as a religion, despite its good intentions, distracts us from activism in favor of a kind of charismatic passivism. One is to think, to worship, to foster humility, to conceive of our lives as mere rehearsal for a glorious finale, and to encourage others to do the same. This kind of thinking may have its place in a human society. But helping black people succeed in the only real world we will ever know is not that place.

Real people are having real problems, and educated white America has been taught that what we need from them is willfully incurious, self-flagellating piety, of a kind that has helped no group in human history. Naciremian Antiracism has its good points, but it is hopefully a transitional stage along the way to something more genuinely progressive.

Antiracism, Our Flawed New Religion – The Daily Beast.

Filed under Racism Tagged with ,

How Minority Job Seekers Battle Bias in the Hiring Process

2015/07/25 Leave a comment

More evidence (USA) on the impact of bias and prejudice in the hiring process:

For example, research has shown that white job applicants receive 50% more callbacks for interviews than equally qualified African American applicants. And, in the low-wage labor market, scholars have found that African American men without criminal records receive similar callback rates for interviews as white men just released from prison. Researchers have also documented discrimination in hiring against women, with particularly strong penalties against mothers.

But how does this reality affect these groups – African Americans and women – as they hunt for jobs? Do they tailor their searches narrowly to help them avoid discrimination, sticking to job opportunities deemed “appropriate” for them? Or do they cast a wider net with the hopes of maximizing their chances of finding a job that does not discriminate?

Until now, we have known little about this issue, largely because no existing data source has closely followed individuals through their job search.

New research that we recently published in the American Journal of Sociology attempts to address this limitation by drawing on two original datasets that track job seekers and the positions to which they apply.

The results of our study point to three general conclusions about the job search process:

  1. African Americans cast a wider net than whites while searching for work.
  2. Women tend to apply to a narrower set of job types than men, often targeting roles that have historically been dominated by women.
  3. Past experiences of discrimination appear to drive, at least in part, the broader job search patterns of African Americans.

On an important side note, these racial differences exist for both men and women and these gender differences exist for both whites and African Americans.

The study’s conclusion:

Together, the findings from our study suggest that the job search process plays an important role in shaping, reinforcing and sometimes counteracting inequality in the labor market.

At the same time, discrimination and other barriers to employment must be considered to fully understand how labor market inequality is generated.

And, as the comparison of race and gender suggests, how individuals adapt to workplace barriers can take different forms and have distinct consequences.

Our research points to the importance of systematically examining both job search processes as well as discriminatory behavior and other constraints in the workplace if we hope to fully understand and rectify persistent racial and gender inequalities in the labor market.

How Minority Job Seekers Battle Bias in the Hiring Process | TIME.

Filed under Racism Tagged with ,

Emma Teitel’s advice to gropers and the Washington Redskins

2015/07/18 Leave a comment

On those who feel the need to cling to racist symbols and labels (Confederate flag, Washington Redskins), good piece by Teitel:

But team owners, convinced of their moral superiority, intend to appeal the decision right away. In fact, they maintain, in the words of team president Bruce Allen, “the facts and the law” are on the side of their franchise, which “has proudly used the name Redskins for more than 80 years.” Team owner Dan Snyder, employing the logic of the party-groping apologist above, argues that the Redskins name is complimentary to Native Americans. “The Washington Redskins fan base represents honour, represents respect, represents pride,” he said last year. To illustrate this point, Snyder has pointed repeatedly to Native Americans who are linked, positively, to the team’s history: The franchise was named after William Henry “Lone Star” Dietz, its first head coach, who claimed he was of Native American descent. (Some contest his claim.) And Walter “Blackie” Wetzel, a former president of the National Congress of American Indians, helped to develop the Redskins logo.

Snyder’s historical justification for the team’s name, applied to the groping scenario described above, amounts to this: “You may not be happy that I groped your rear end, but I assure you that my grope was a compliment, justified by the long and storied history of groping—one full of women who are reported to have relished the occasional uninvited pinch on the tush.”

It takes a special kind of ethical blind spot to dismiss the feelings of a present-day offended party because someone else, long dead, saw it your way. “Redskins” is, plain and simple, a racist term, as racist as any ethnic slur under the sun. If we wouldn’t celebrate a sports team called the (insert bigoted, derogatory term here), we should not celebrate this one. But it appears that slurs used to denigrate certain groups (see Native Americans) are taken less seriously when white nostalgic pride is at stake.

Snyder and company would do well to follow the lead of the white Texan man who reportedly had his Confederate flag tattoo removed when, in the wake of the Charleston shootings, he saw an elderly black woman grimace at the sight of it.

When faced with the distress the symbol on his arm caused another human being, nostalgic pride seemed suddenly crude and insignificant. This is the reaction of a normal, compassionate person. Worshipping a controversial flag or insignia doesn’t make one automatically bad or bigoted. People make mistakes; nobody is born enlightened. But continuing to worship such a symbol despite the harm it causes others? Clinging to your racist flag or jersey with a passion and intensity most people reserve for their loved ones? That’s more than a little weird. It’s scary.

Emma Teitel’s advice to gropers and the Washington Redskins.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

How we can all stand up against carding | Desmond Cole

2015/05/28 Leave a comment

Desmond Cole, the author of the Toronto Life article on his experiences with discrimination, on the role that all of us can play:

As the realities of police carding become more known in Toronto, the public is increasingly rejecting the practice. Sixty per cent of respondents to a recent Forum poll disapprove of carding, the Toronto police practice of stopping civilians who are not suspected of any crime, and documenting their personal identification. Black voters, who admittedly made up a small sample size in the survey, rejected carding to the tune of 81 per cent. Given that innocent black people are disproportionately the targets of carding, this is no surprise.

Since I wrote a Toronto Life feature on discrimination, in which I documented the many times I have been needlessly stopped or carded by Toronto police, I’ve received hundreds of messages from people asking what they can do to counter this shady practice. I propose a simple but revolutionary intervention that nearly anyone can take up: if you see a black person being stopped in public by Toronto police, simply approach that person and ask, “Are you OK?”

In my experience, this suggestion evokes a curious amount of anxiety in people, particularly white people, the vast majority of whom are never arbitrarily stopped by police. They wonder if they might be putting themselves in danger by intervening in a police interaction.

To this I can only reply that in 2013, black Torontonians were up to 17 times more likely than white residents to be carded by police in certain neighbourhoods, particularly those with a majority of white residents. Those who are not targeted in this way might consider how scary it is for those who live it every day.

How we can all stand up against carding | Toronto Star.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Expats Find Brazil’s Reputation For Race-Blindness Is Undone By Reality

2015/05/25 1 Comment

Not really new but nevertheless good examples:

There is a joke among Brazilians that a Brazilian passport is the most coveted on the black market because no matter what your background — Asian, African or European — you can fit in here. But the reality is very different.

I’m sitting in café with two women who don’t want their names used because of the sensitivity of the topic. One is from the Caribbean; her husband is an expat executive.

“I was expecting to be the average-looking Brazilian; Brazil as you see on the media is not what I experienced when I arrived,” she tells me.

As is the case for many people from the Caribbean basin, she self-identifies as multiracial. The island where she is from has a mixture of races and ethnicities, so she was excited to move to Brazil, which has been touted as one of the most racially harmonious places in the world.

“When I arrived, I was shocked to realize there is a big difference between races and colors, and what is expected — what is your role, basically — based on your skin color,” she says.

Moving to a new country can be difficult; when you throw racial issues into the mix things can get even more complicated.

The other woman is from London, and she also relocated to Brazil because of her husband’s job. She describes herself as black.

“My skin is very dark, so going out with my children, on occasions people would say to me, ‘Are you the nanny for these children?’ And I’d have to explain to them, no, these are my children, I look after them,” she says.

A quick lesson on race and class in Brazil: The country was the last place in the Americas to give up slavery. It also imported more than 10 times as many slaves as the U.S. — some 4 million. That’s meant that more than 50 percent of the population is of African descent, but those numbers haven’t translated to opportunity.

For example, these days among the whiter, wealthier classes, it’s common to have a nanny, or baba, who is darker-skinned. The woman from London says that the babas are required to wear all white.

“I promptly stopped wearing white,” she says, because it was tiresome to have to constantly explain that her children were in fact her children, despite Brazilians’ assumptions. “I got rid of the white that’s in my wardrobe, and I do not wear white anymore.”

Expats Find Brazil’s Reputation For Race-Blindness Is Undone By Reality : Parallels : NPR.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with

A half-century of progress and black America’s still burning: Saunders

2015/05/11 Leave a comment

Doug Saunders on the endemic problem of racism and studies that show the impact of deprived neighbourhoods on outcomes:

The answer is found in the cities and towns where these explosions of violence and deprivation are taking place: Once an institution (a city, a police force, a school system, an economy) is set up to create a racial divide, it will continue to do so, regardless who’s running it, unless there’s a dramatic intervention.

Too many Americans don’t see these institutions, but only their victims, who then get blamed for the outcomes: It has become popular again on the North American right to claim, in pseudo-scholarly language, that “that’s just how they are” – that African-American culture, or families, must be to blame (even though culture and family structures are always consequences, not causes, of larger ills).

This view has been decisively disproven this month in a vast and expensive study by economists Raj Chetty, Lawrence Katz and their colleagues at Harvard University, in which thousands of randomly selected low-income (mainly black) families were given vouchers in the nineties to move out of deprived neighbourhoods (and thousands more stayed put as control groups).

The results, a generation later, found that poor, crime-addled families prone to intergenerational poverty and broken homes become, within a generation of leaving their context, prosperous, educated and marriage-prone families, with outcomes similar to those of average Americans.

The Obama administration has attempted the sort of big interventions (such as the ones of the sixties and nineties) that are needed turn around this trajectory of inequality. The post-2008 stimulus and the “Obamacare” medicare system have stopped the rise in inequality and poverty. But many large urban-policy and education programs have been blocked by a recalcitrant U.S. Congress. It might take flames from the cities, as it did 50 years ago, to provoke a change.

A half-century of progress and black America’s still burning – The Globe and Mail.

Filed under Racism Tagged with , ,

Baltimore shows police killings America’s real state of emergency

2015/04/30 Leave a comment

Neil MacDonald on police killings in the US and the relative risk of being killed in the US by the police is much greater than being killed by terrorists. Of course, as all the numbers show, the likelihood is much greater for Blacks:

Today, though, even the conservative voices that have for so long defended law enforcement are wavering.

Take some time and browse the libertarian Cato Institute’s online National Police Misconduct Reporting Project.

It’s a scholarly work, and evidence gathered is weighed carefully; in fact, the last full year for which they have issued a definitive report is 2010.

That report identified 4,861 formal incidents of police misconduct involving 6,613 law enforcement officers and 247 civilian fatalities for that year alone.

If just a fraction of those fatalities were criminal, then the inescapable conclusion is that more people have been murdered by police in America in the last 10 years than by terrorists.

Of course, we are told, we don’t know how many terrorists have been thwarted by vigilant behind-the-scenes enforcement.

Well, true. But given the minuscule number of prosecutions, let alone convictions, neither do we know how many of the people who are supposed to be guarding us have gotten away with murder.

Baltimore shows police killings America’s real state of emergency – World – CBC News.

Filed under Racism Tagged with , ,

Uncomfortable Conversations: Talking About Race In The Classroom

2015/04/28 Leave a comment

Good interview with Richard Milner of the Center for Urban Education at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Rac(e)ing to Class: Confronting Poverty and Race in Schools and Classrooms:

So how can teachers incorporate those outside realities into curriculum? You mention a case study in the book that involves a robbery that happened right around the corner from a middle school. When you talked to teachers at that school, what did you recommend?

I was doing a professional development session with the teachers, and I just posed a question. I said, “I’m wondering why you guys didn’t mention the robbery in the classroom,” and the educators in the room just got offended.

There was a guy who sat in the back and said, “I teach math and science, what does a robbery have to do with my teaching math and science?”

So I gave some examples: You could talk about the relationship between well-lit communities and those that aren’t. You could count the number of streetlights in a particular vicinity. You could pull up Google Maps and have the students guesstimate the amount of time it would take the police to drive from the police precinct to the robbery scene at different rates of speed. You could have the students look at the relationship between gun shop access and crime.

There are all these mathematical ways of engaging the incident and being responsive to the things that the students are concerned about. But it takes the teachers’ willingness to delve into, to be creative, and to be consistent with and align with the things that they’re supposed to be teaching. I would never tell a teacher to teach anything that they are not supposed to teach. Teachers can make lessons relevant and accessible to students and still align with and be consistent with the Common Core standards and so forth.

In the book you give examples from your classroom visits — but you don’t always offer solutions or answers. Why? Is that intentional?

So this work is contextual. With the cases, I really want teachers to read them to reflect about their own practices, to problematize them, to call me out and say “I disagree with this.”

Just because it’s complex and we don’t know for sure what’s going on doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be interrogating and trying to figure it out. And that’s where I think we really fall short.

We see that particular groups of students, like black and brown male students, are constantly being suspended and expelled from school, and we’ve got to stop it. We’ve got to recognize what’s going on, and we’ve got to address it. So with each case, it invites readers to strategize about what they would do in a particular situation.

Uncomfortable Conversations: Talking About Race In The Classroom : NPR Ed : NPR.

Filed under Racism Tagged with ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →