The truth about race, the police and Ferguson – Macleans.ca

2014/11/28 Leave a comment

Sobering look at the enduring prevalence of racism, and how engrained attitudes are:

Yet, a look at the research suggests the problem of police officers killing unarmed black men is not all about white police forces. In 2002, University of Chicago psychology professor Joshua Correll published The Police Officer’s Dilemma, a landmark study testing racial bias. Correll and his team devised a video game-type experiment in which test subjects were shown images of black and white males, some armed, some not. The subjects had to decide when and when not to shoot.

The results speak for themselves. “Participants fired at an armed target more quickly if he was African American than if he was white, and decided not to shoot an unarmed white target more quickly than an unarmed African American target.”

Here’s the kicker, though: Correll found little difference in the willingness or not to shoot between black and white test subjects. In 2007, he replicated the study with actual police officers, and came to a similar conclusion: A young black male is as likely to be a target of a black police officer as his Caucasian partner.

….In a sense, Michael Brown was victim to the most deadly demonstration of how black males (and blacks in general) are less likely to be given the benefit of the doubt. Even if his life doesn’t end at the hands of a cop, a black youth will face myriad examples of as much throughout his life.

Statistically, as a recent Kirwan Institute study suggests, he is more likely to be singled out as aggressive, mean and/or intellectually deficient for similar behaviour than a white kid. Should he enter into the justice system, he is more likely to be charged with a greater crime than someone with lighter skin; even if he isn’t, the black kid is more likely to be treated more harshly by judges and jurors.

Several studies have shown how blacks are more likely to be sentenced to death when their victims are white; yet another shows a correlation between death penalty sentences and typically black features. In America, the darker your skin and the fuller your lips, the higher the likelihood you will be sentenced to die for your crimes.

The truth about race, the police and Ferguson.

Much more serious than Barbara Kay’s piece:

Barbara Kay: Ferguson is the exception, not the norm in U.S. race relations

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

The Racial Divide Over Ferguson « The Dish

2014/11/27 Leave a comment

racial-divide-fergusonNo surprise in the different perceptions, but still striking.

The Racial Divide Over Ferguson « The Dish.

Filed under Racism Tagged with , ,

When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 4 – Kristoff

2014/11/18 Leave a comment

Kristoff on the enduring legacy of race and history:

Yet one element of white privilege today is obliviousness to privilege, including a blithe disregard of the way past subjugation shapes present disadvantage.

I’ve been on a book tour lately. By coincidence, so has one of my Times Op-Ed columnist colleagues, Charles Blow, who is African-American and the author of a powerful memoir, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” I grew up in a solid middle-class household; Charles was primarily raised by a single mom who initially worked plucking poultry in a factory, and also, for a while, by a grandma in a house with no plumbing.

That Charles has become a New York Times columnist does not mean that blacks and whites today have equal access to opportunity, just that some talented and driven blacks manage to overcome the long odds against them. Make no mistake: Charles had to climb a higher mountain than I did.

WE all stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. We’re in a relay race, relying on the financial and human capital of our parents and grandparents. Blacks were shackled for the early part of that relay race, and although many of the fetters have come off, whites have developed a huge lead. Do we ignore this long head start — a facet of white privilege — and pretend that the competition is now fair?Of course not.

If we whites are ahead in the relay race of life, shouldn’t we acknowledge that we got this lead in part by generations of oppression? Aren’t we big enough to make amends by trying to spread opportunity, by providing disadvantaged black kids an education as good as the one afforded privileged white kids?

Can’t we at least acknowledge that in the case of race, William Faulkner was right: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 4 – NYTimes.com.

Filed under Racism Tagged with ,

Racism still an uncomfortable truth in Canada

2014/11/14 Leave a comment

Interesting experiment and pretty convincing results and analysis:

Subjects are shown a series of black faces and white faces on a computer screen. Researchers track the subject’s eye movements, to measure what the subject looks at, and for how long.

More than a thousand subjects were tested. White subjects tended to look deeply into the eyes of white faces, and were less likely to look into the eyes of black faces. Instead, they were almost three times as likely to focus on the lips or noses of black faces.

“It suggests they’re processing them not as individuals, but as members of a group,” said Kawakami.

This split-second eye bias can have some important consequences, according to Kawakami. When we don’t make eye contact with someone, we’re less likely to be able to decode their emotions, and less willing to trust or remember that person.

“Even though it might happen within the first 100th of a second, we know that downstream that can tell us whether you might hire a person, whether you have positive or negative associations with that person and whether you’re willing to interact with that person,” Kawakami explained.

Kawakami’s latest work is consistent with what some psychologists call “aversive racism.”

Unlike overt racism — blatant expressions of hatred and discrimination against racial minorities — aversive racism is characterized by more complex and subtle expressions of ambivalence toward members of a minority group.

“People are very careful about what they say about people from other categories. They’re really egalitarian, they try to be fair, but when we measure them in more subtle ways, when they’re not conscious of their responses and they’re not able to control them, then we find that racism is still quite prevalent in North America,” said Kawakami.

Mindfulness and greater self-awareness can help mitigate but not an easy or automatic process.

Racism still an uncomfortable truth in Canada: Duncan McCue – Canada – CBC News.

Filed under Racism Tagged with ,

The face Canada showed the world – Margaret Wente

2014/11/10 Leave a comment

Margaret Wente’s cheery piece on what Canada got right, referring to the Hamilton video experiment on attitudes towards Muslims (Hamilton racism social experiment ends with a punch | Toronto Star) and the community efforts to clean up the damage at the Cold Lake Mosque (Volunteers help clean vandalism from Cold Lake mosque):

When I wear the poppy, I sometimes think of my dad and grandfather, who fought so that some day we could live in a nation just like this. But why us? Why are we the lucky ones? How have we managed to escape the racial and ethnic strife that plagues most of the rest of the world?

One reason is that Canada is so new. Almost all of us are immigrants – newcomers ourselves not so long ago. And our dual English-French identities have been a great test of our ability to accommodate our differences without tearing each other to shreds. So far, so good. We’ve learned a lot from that.

Our identity is not defined by blood, or by our sense of destiny. We have no concept of Volk. We’re just folks. We don’t care who you are or where you came from or who or what you worship, as long as you share our good Canadian bourgeois values. Don’t litter. Send your kids to school. Wear a poppy.

We are blessed with a lot of elbow room, and we have borders that are relatively impermeable. No massive waves of refugees and migrants wash up on our shores. We never imported guest workers who we thought would go home, but didn’t.

Unlike Europe, our immigrants come from all corners of the planet. We’ve dodged the problem of large subgroups that self-ghettoize and don’t assimilate. Here, everyone gets thrown together and winds up at Tim Hortons or maybe Starbucks. And the locals are extremely friendly, which means that the whole world wants to come here, so we get our pick. We have created a virtuous circle of tolerance and openness that is rivalled only by Australia, a nation just like ours, only with a better climate and a worse accent.

As my friend and colleague Sheema Khan said of Mr. Albach’s video, “This is the face that Canada is showing to the world.” After two terrorist attacks, people punched out the bigots and took flowers to the mosque. No wonder we’re the envy of the world.

The face Canada showed the world – The Globe and Mail.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , ,

Why I don’t believe people who say they loathe Islam but not Muslims

2014/11/07 Leave a comment

Valid point (like saying “some of my best friends are Jewish”):

Racial and religious hatreds have one thing in common: they are not inspired by the race or religion of the hater, but by the religion or race of the victim. This is clearest in the case of antisemitism, which can appear as either a racial or a religious hatred, or indeed both. What’s constant is that it involves hating Jewish people, whatever the reasons given. Similarly, if you hate black people, you hate them on racist grounds whatever the colour of your own skin, and if you hate Muslims, Catholics, Quakers or Mormons, you hate them for their religion – whatever your own beliefs. So it is perfectly possible for religious hatred to be motivated by atheism and it may be quite common in the modern world.

The claim that Islam isn’t a race and so it is entirely rational to hate and fear it gains its moral force from the implicit claim that there is something uniquely horrible about racial hatred. I don’t think there is, though I see why we assume it: 50 or 60 years ago racial prejudice was an entirely natural part of English life. In order to change that, it was necessary to mark it as a uniquely dreadful and disfiguring condition: racism became a kind of moral leprosy. Without in any way wishing to roll back that progress, it’s worth noting that in other societies and at other times racial prejudice has not been the most urgent incitement to communal hatred.

Why I don’t believe people who say they loathe Islam but not Muslims | Andrew Brown | Comment is free | theguardian.com.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Hamilton racism social experiment ends with a punch | Toronto Star

2014/10/30 Leave a comment

More dramatic than polling on attitudes:

One man immediately pushes back:

“You know, you can’t stereotype and judge people by their clothes, or their nationality or anything else, you know what I mean? What happened there, it was incident of fanatics.”

A woman pipes up, too:“It was awful and tragic, but I don’t think that’s any reason to persecute someone just because what they’re wearing.”

But Giamou keeps making his case, eventually trying to physically remove his fellow actor. At that point, someone jumps to the Muslim man’s defence and slugs Giamou in the face.

After a brief clip that shows him talking to a police officer, Giamou, who has a bloody face, offers this conclusion:

“So the social experiment had a negative ending to it, but its positive because he stood up for him and I appreciate that, that’s good, that’s good.”

Hamilton racism social experiment ends with a punch | Toronto Star.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

Most Chinese and South Asians in B.C. report discrimination

2014/10/20 Leave a comment

Regional survey on discrimination in British Columbia. Consistent with other polling and equivalent:

Insights West found 28 per cent of the Chinese and South Asian British Columbians who answered the online poll said they had “frequently” or “sometimes” lost a potential employment opportunity because of their ethnicity. Another 24 per cent claim to have been treated unfairly in the workplace.

Chinese and South Asians who were older than 55 were the most likely to say theyve experienced unfairness on the job.South Asians 28 per cent were also more likely to cite workplace discrimination than Chinese 23 per cent. There was a significant gender gap when respondents were asked if their ethnicity had ever excluded them from being considered a prospect for dating.

While 37 per cent of B.C.s Chinese men in the poll believed they had experienced dating discrimination, the proportion was much lower for Chinese women, at 19 per cent.

In addition, about 25 per cent of Chinese and South Asians in B.C. said they have been verbally harassed. But only 11 per cent reported being been physically harassed because of their ethnicity, and nine per cent said they had been denied goods or services.

“I’m not saying its a cause for alarm, but it could be a cause for concern,” Mossop said of the poll findings, adding that Insights West plans to do more surveys into how different ethnic groups in Canada feel about social issues ranging from teachers strikes to the proposed Enbridge pipeline through northern B.C. Mossop said that people of any ethnic group could be discriminated against in a workplace dominated by another ethic group.

[Farid Rohani, a board member of the Laurier Institution and former vice-president of the Asian Heritage Month Society] said people of Italian or Irish backgrounds may also at times feel discriminated against or stereotyped in Metro Vancouver, where 45 per cent of the population is non-white.

“I guarantee you, if you do the same polling on discrimination with people of non-Asian background, you’ll get similar numbers,” Rohani said. “It might be less or more, but it will still be there.”

For instance, Rohani said, if the Richmond residents of European and English-speaking backgrounds who are protesting the expansionof Chinese-only signs were asked if they felt discriminated against based on their ethnicity, Rohani said, they would cite “reverse racism.”

Noting that Canadians with Asian backgrounds come from countries where its common for parents to arrange marriages with people of the same cultural and religious group, Rohani also wasnt surprised some South Asians and Chinese feel excluded from dating people of certain ethnicities.

Most Chinese and South Asians in B.C. report discrimination.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , ,

Race and racism central issue of Toronto election

2014/10/16 Leave a comment

Margaret Hageman on racism and “white privilege:”

… We know that differences under the skin barely exist. Talking about race only becomes uncomfortable when we talk about different experiences among races in our shared society — such as why over-qualified brown people are driving Toronto’s taxis, or why so many young black men get questioned by police for no good reason, and why white men are over-represented in high-powered positions. It turns out you can’t talk about race without talking about racism.

There is a head-in-the-sand logic that needs to be called out when people deny white privilege. It denies the experiences of black people who get followed around in a store, over-scrutinized by security; or the voice of a black person driving a high-end car who has been stopped by police, over and over again. White privilege is invisible protection against all forms of racial profiling, including a pervasive form on Toronto’s streets called “carding,” where thousands of black and brown youth have been questioned and documented by police in Toronto over the past 10 years. White privilege is not having been carded, and subject to its cascading negative consequences. Investigative journalism done by Jim Rankin of the Star, reveals the numbers that tell the undeniable story about racial profiling by Toronto Police Services.

White privilege is an invisible protection in the streets and in the job market as well, where as a white person, your credentials are generally not called into question, your pay cheque is higher and your networks open doors. This is not opinion. Again, the facts and statistics in the workplace prove that unchecked systemic racism works to the advantage of white people, as shown by Grace-Edward Galabuzzi and Sheila Block’s research on the colour-coded job market in Canada. Denying this injustice will not make it go away.

I have heard people say that if we just stop talking about race, then racism will go away — like pundits who think that we must become colour-blind because the history of racism, the kind of deliberate discrimination against blacks and other non-white races has been discredited and legislated out of existence.

Race and racism central issue of election | Toronto Star.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Appeal court overturns racial profiling case involving customs officer

2014/10/16 Leave a comment

The Government’s favourite non-Supreme Court judge (Supreme Court rejects Harper appointee Marc Nadon) delivers a ruling likely in line with the Government on racial profiling:

Writing for the panel, Justice Nadon said there was no evidence of racial profiling.

“The officer simply asserted in his statement that in his experience it was not uncommon for Chinese persons to bring agricultural products with them upon returning from China. The officer’s hunch, based on his experience and his observance of the respondent’s demeanour, was confirmed by the secondary examination.”

It was “totally devoid of merit,” he said, to find that the officer had engaged in racial profiling.

The decision represents an important development in the law that surrounds racial profiling since the Federal Court of Appeal is among the nation’s highest.

The country’s highest court, the Supreme Court of Canada, has yet to hear a case that speaks directly to the issue.In Canada, racial profiling has been defined by a number of criminal cases in which defendants have sought to exclude evidence obtained by what they contend were racially motivated pedestrian stops or car searches. The courts have defined racial profiling as “the targeting of individual members of a particular racial group on the basis of the supposed criminal propensity of the entire group.”

There’s a chicken-and-egg quality to the debate. Police officers have argued that their actions are informed by years of on-the-street experience, while minority groups maintain that experience has been built on old, discriminatory attitudes.

The issue is also alive at Canadian airports where Muslim passengers have often complained of being singled out for interviews and inspection in the years since 9/11. Last year, a fine imposed against Youssef Bougachouch for illegally importing meat was thrown out after a tribunal found that he was among a group of Arab passengers targeted based on their race at Montreal’s Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport.

Appeal court overturns racial profiling case involving customs officer | Ottawa Citizen.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →