The Oscars’ Racist Refusal to Honor Modern Black Heroes – The Daily Beast

2016/01/19 Leave a comment

The Academy member numbers say it all:

As of 2014, the Academy was 94 percent white, 76 percent male, and an average of 63 years old. Do 63-year-old white men readily identify with a gangsta rap biopic set in the late ‘80s? Do they see it in the same grandiose fashion as they would, say, a film about a ‘50s country star or ill-fated ‘60s rock ‘n’ roller? Do the “fucks” and “niggas” in the soundtrack make it hard for them to view it in the same light as a movie about Steve Jobs or Brian Wilson? Maybe they can only relate to black struggle when it’s couched in a package they find acceptable, like a biopic about a soul singer they grew up listening to or a period piece about an embattled slave fighting for his freedom. Maybe old white men don’t know shit about new, black cinema.

Source: The Oscars’ Racist Refusal to Honor Modern Black Heroes – The Daily Beast

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Canada Council’s diversity focus brings new opportunities, challenges

2016/01/18 Leave a comment

Ironic that this story comes out the week of the #OscarsSoWhite nominations. And interesting that this initiative dates from the Harper government, not the new government’s diversity and inclusion agenda:

The Canada Council for the Arts is getting a new funding model in April of 2017 – a total rethink of the Ottawa-based granting council that reduces its number of programs from 148 to a streamlined six.

As details of this shift have started to emerge in recent weeks, however, the most striking change may be the direct tying of diversity to funding for large arts organizations for the first time since the Canada Council was established in 1957. It’s not just the diversity of art and artists that will come under scrutiny in the future at institutions with revenue of more than $2-million. If the administration or backstage crew at your opera or ballet company, or the audience for your symphony or theatre company, or the board of directors of your art gallery, does not demonstrate a “commitment to reflecting the diversity of your organization’s geographic community or region,” this will now affect the size of grant received from the federal arts council.

“It’s clearly an assessment criteria – it’s no longer a wish,” says Simon Brault, appointed the director and CEO of the Canada Council in 2014 for a five-year term. “The companies that are performing the most will get more money – it’s a real incentive.”

With the Canada Council’s budget expected to double over the next two years – from $180-million to $360-million, if the Liberal government keeps its campaign promise – Brault will actually have the new funds needed to achieve his objectives. “We want to make sure [the doubled budget] is not a money pit – to make sure that we are advancing the quality of production and the progression of diversity.”

With this move, the Canada Council finds itself in line with current thinking in other multicultural countries. Just over a year ago, for example, Arts Council England (ACE) shifted its priorities – announcing that arts organizations that did not show progress in diversifying their programming and audiences could see their grants cut. And results are already being seen, with Black and Minority Ethnic (a British term) representation in the arts work force supported by ACE increasing from 13 to 13.7 per cent – the equivalent of an additional 576 jobs.

Judging by conversations with many of the artistic directors, executive directors and administrators at Canada’s top theatre and dance companies and orchestras this week, the initial reaction to the Canada Council’s new assessment criteria – where diversity is second only to artistic excellence – has been overwhelmingly positive, even if these arts heads eagerly await more concrete details on how it will work.

Source: Canada Council’s diversity focus brings new opportunities, challenges – The Globe and Mail

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#MemeOfTheWeek: The Racial Politics Of Nikki Haley : NPR

2016/01/18 Leave a comment

Some real ugliness here in the comments by conservative pundits and individuals, but captures the current atmosphere in the Republican party:

In some ways, Haley seems to face the same conundrum former Louisiana Gov. and failed Republican presidential candidate Bobby Jindal did — not seeming “brown enough” for some voters of color, while being “too brown” for others. (We won’t bore you with the details, or subject you to some of the graphic tweets, but just take a look at the #JindalSoWhite hashtag to see what we’re talking about.)

Of course, Twitter is not exactly or entirely representative of the real world, and even thousands of tweets for or against Nikki Haley might not accurately depict actual support or disapproval of her.

A September 2015 Winthrop poll found Haley’s approval rating among South Carolina voters was 55 percent. That number was similar before Haley gained praise for helping bring down the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse in the aftermath of a Charleston church shooting that killed nine black parishioners. But she did drop 10 points with Republicans. (By December, she was back up to 81 percent with Republicans.)

Giridharadas in his New York Times article wasn’t just critical of Haley; he said it was “thrilling” to see Haley attempt to “create a broader, two-party consensus on the simple, exceptional idea that an American is defined by shared hope, not shared blood.”

But wherever you stand on Haley, her story speaks to a certain truth in politics: race is tricky — and there’s always going to be someone unhappy with how you talk about it.

With Haley, we see a multi-dimensional (and, in fact, multicultural) tilt to America’s ongoing struggle with race. A dichotomy of justblack and white isn’t big enough to comprehend or explain a Sikh Indian-American daughter of immigrants, who helped bring down what is, for many, a longstanding symbol of the enslavement of Africans and their descendants in America.

Haley’s story has layers. It is nuanced. It is not simple. And maybe that’s how it should be.

Source: #MemeOfTheWeek: The Racial Politics Of Nikki Haley : NPR

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Syrian Family’s Tragedy Goes Beyond Iconic Image of Boy on Beach – The New York Times

2016/01/18 Leave a comment

Syrian_Family’s_Tragedy_Goes_Beyond_Iconic_Image_of_Boy_on_Beach_-_The_New_York_TimesA good in-depth profile of the extended Kurdi family and how they have been dispersed as Syria fell apart:

When Alan Kurdi’s tiny body washed up on a beach in Turkey, forcing the world to grasp the pain of Syria’s refugees, the 2-year-old boy was just one member of a family on the run, scattered by nearly five years of upheaval.

As a Turkish officer lifted the boy from the shallow waves at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea, one of Alan’s teenage cousins was alone on a bus in Hungary, fleeing the fighting back home in Damascus.

An aunt was stuck in Istanbul, nursing a baby, as her son and daughter worked 18-hour shifts in a sweatshop so the family could eat. Dozens of other relatives — aunts, uncles and cousins — had fled the war in Syria or were making plans to flee.

And just weeks after Alan’s image shocked the world in September, another aunt prepared to do what she had promised herself to avoid: set sail with four of her children on the same perilous journey.

“We die together, or we live together and make a future,” her 15-year-old daughter said, concluding, as have hundreds of thousands of other Syrians, that there was no going back, and that the way to security led through great risk.

This image of Alan’s body washed up on a beach in Turkey led to an outpouring of concern for Syrian refugees. Since then, at least 100 more children have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. Nilufer Demir, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 

Alan, whose mother and brother drowned with him, belonged to a sprawling clan from Syria’s long-oppressed Kurdish minority. But for most of his closest relatives, that identity was secondary to the cosmopolitan ethos of the Syrian capital, Damascus, where they grew up. They barely spoke Kurdish, identified mainly as Syrian and joined no faction.

So when war broke out, and political ties, sect and ethnicity became life-or-death matters, they were on their own.

Interviews with 20 relatives, in Iraqi Kurdistan, in Istanbul, in five German towns and by phone in Syria, tell a story of a family chewed up by one party to the Syrian conflict after another: the Syrian government, the Islamic State, neighboring countries, the West.

Source: Syrian Family’s Tragedy Goes Beyond Iconic Image of Boy on Beach – The New York Times

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Cologne assaults revealed hazards of closed borders and vague policy: Saunders

2016/01/18 Leave a comment

Doug Saunders on the Cologne attacks and European policies that contributed:

There are two key lessons here, ones that European leaders need to learn fast.

The first is that even a large-scale, liberal-minded immigration and refugee system needs to be accompanied by a quick and decisive deportation system. This is both for the sake of the non-accepted migrants themselves, who do not deserve to linger in ambiguity, for the peace of mind of the general population, and, especially, for the genuine refugees and immigrants, who are horrified to find their families subjected to mass demonization and bigotry because a similar-looking group has become a menace.

Deportation is neither cheap nor easy, which is why so many of these guys have stuck around. The European Union’s 28 countries have repeatedly failed to develop a co-ordinated international system of registration and deportation, and existing efforts are hampered by “non-refoulement” laws that prevent many from being returned to their country of origin. But since mass immigration will be part of the continent’s future, a faster, better system is urgently needed.

The second lesson is that this is a result not of Europe’s open internal borders, but of Europe’s closed external borders. Before the late 1990s, such men entered Europe for a few months at a time, on legal short-term visas and with airplane tickets, to do casual labour such as fruit picking, and then returned home, benefiting their communities. After the EU’s Maastricht Treaty led to a closed and policed external border, suddenly these temporary, legal figures became permanent, illegal figures who paid thousands to cross the Mediterranean and did not dare move back home seasonally.

Blocking quick movement – either into the continent or out of it – has created a situation that is bad for these men and their families, bad for legitimate refugees and immigrants, and bad for the safety of European streets.

Source: Cologne assaults revealed hazards of closed borders and vague policy – The Globe and Mail

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With the Rise of Justin Trudeau, Canada Is Suddenly … Hip? – The New York Times

2016/01/18 Leave a comment

While this is largely a puff-piece, it reflects some of the rebranding taking place after the election. And in terms of the 17 Canadians it profiled in entertainment and fashion, 7 were women (41 percent) and 5 were visible minority (29 percent):

As Mr. Trudeau and his wife, Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau (along with their three young children, Xavier, Ella-Grace and Hadrien), create a Canadian Camelot, they are casting light on a wider eruption already in progress.

An expanse once stereotyped as the home to square-jawed Mounties and beer-swilling “hosers” has quietly morphed into a multicultural breeding ground that has given us the Weeknd, who can’t feel his face; the director Sarah Polley, who makes films of subtle power; and the upstart fashion designer Tanya Taylor, whose creations have been worn by Michelle Obama.

The rapper Drake, of Toronto, comes in for a little ribbing now and then, but none other than Jay Z called him the Kobe Bryant of hip–hop. And even the latest albumfrom Justin Bieber, the pride of Stratford, Ontario (population 33,430), is — gulp! — pretty terrific.

It’s all very exciting, eh? But still … Canada? The land of hyper–politeness and constant apology? The home of maple syrup, poutine, the gentle sport of curling and 10 percent of the world’s forests? The country that Spy magazine once said had “cultural Epstein-Barrness”?

As Joe Zee, 47, the Toronto-raised editor in chief of Yahoo Style, said: “There was always the feeling of being in the shadow of the U.S. For a treat we would take family trips to Niagara Falls, and I’d always want to cross the border and go to Buffalo, to go shopping! Buffalo, N.Y., was my rainbow growing up — it’s where the pot of gold was.”

“Even our national anthem sounds like a sigh: ‘O Canada,’” said the writer and editor Sarah Nicole Prickett, who was born in London, Ontario, and has written for T: The New York Times Style Magazine. “Drake, more than anyone, is the prophet who’s changing that, because, unlike a lot of talented Canadians before him, he accepts embarrassment as a cost of making big art.”

The niceness factor is something that may distinguish Canadian cultural producers. “The first month I lived in Manhattan, in the spring of 2012, I heard that I was ‘nice’ from seven people,” Ms. Prickett said. “That’s when I realized I was Canadian.” But like her confreres Grimes, Ms. Polley and the Weeknd, Ms. Prickett does not produce work that is meant to comfort.

True, Canada has delivered sultans of cool in the past. Amid the polite folk rock of Gordon Lightfoot and Anne Murray, there was the melancholy genius of Joni Mitchell, who was hip enough to win the blessing of Charles Mingus. And we would be foolish to forget the alternately sensitive and raucous Neil Young, who never met an expectation he did not defy. (“Obviously people are delighted with the change that has taken place,” Mr. Young, a California resident, said after Mr. Trudeau’s election. “It’s very positive news.”)

And let us not ignore the coolest cat in a hat, Leonard Cohen, still capable of multiple encores at 81.

Then there are the Canadian kings and queens of comedy like David Steinberg, Lorne Michaels, Mike Myers, Martin Short and Catherine O’Hara, who started out as foils to mainstream American pop culture and ended up shaping it.

Canadians have always been funny, according to the Toronto-born editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter. “S.­J. Perelman used to think that Stephen Leacock was the funniest writer in the world,” Mr. Carter said, referring to the multifaceted author who moved to Canada from his native England at age 6. “And he was. The trouble is, the self-deprecation so regularly on display is often lost on Americans. Now Marty Short is the funniest person in the world — although he’s far too modest to admit it.”

Mr. Zee agrees that Canada has not become hip all at once, with the election of the mediagenic Mr. Trudeau. It is partly a dawning of self-recognition.

“We’ve always had Frank Gehry,” he said.

Source: With the Rise of Justin Trudeau, Canada Is Suddenly … Hip? – The New York Times

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Express entry, foreign worker reforms attract ‘fewer’ skilled workers: chamber report

2016/01/16 Leave a comment

Express Entry Draws 2015.001Another item on Minister McCallum’s to do (or at least consider) list, passage below on Express Entry (the above chart shows the 23 rounds in 2015, and how the program has settled at around 1,500 invitations per draw, with a minimum score of about 40 percent of the total possible 1,200 points):

“The concept of attracting ‘the best and the brightest’ is missing in action,” says the new report, “as the competitive model of Express Entry is currently undermined by the protectionist policy embodied in the labour market impact assessment tool.”

As CBC reported in September, businesses say the labour market impact assessment (LMIA) — a new requirement borrowed from the newly reformed Temporary Foreign Worker Program — is the biggest flaw with Express Entry.

Under Canada’s new immigration system, highly-skilled foreign workers not only have to line up a job before applying to come to Canada but their job offer has to be backed by what the government calls a positive LMIA. That assessment is a document all employers now need to hire a foreign worker over a Canadian one.

The chamber calls the introduction of this new requirement a “misstep” that has made it “extremely challenging” for businesses to attract highly-skilled workers such as video game developers, top-flight researchers and workers in the trades.

Chamber calls for ‘sober, thoughtful review’

The 32-page report titled “Immigration for a Competitive Canada: Why Highly Skilled International Talent Is at Risk” lays out what Canadian businesses see as “missteps” with the immigration changes and offers 20 recommendations.

The recommendations include:

  • Removing the new requirement of a labour market impact assessment from the Express Entry system.

  • Tweak the points system under Express Entry to benefit high skilled workers applying under the International Mobility Program.

  • Reduce processing times for study permits and visas.

Source: Express entry, foreign worker reforms attract ‘fewer’ skilled workers: chamber report – Politics – CBC News

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Halifax man helped thousands pretend they were in Canada to get around citizenship rules

2016/01/16 Leave a comment

Good detailed account of citizenship application fraud and how it worked (in the overall context, CIC data suggests that the percentage is low – see “Protecting Canadian Citizenship” – Citizenship Fraud Update – Numbers Still Small). Sentence appears small in relation to the scale of the fraud committed:

If anyone dialed the Halifax phone number Mohd Morelley wrote in his application for citizenship as proof he was integrating in Canada, it would ring out in an office on the outskirts of Halifax. Someone might answer, but it wouldn’t be Morelley or his wife or three children, who all wanted to be Canadians.

They were all living in Kuwait.

Along with the bogus phone number, Morelley and his family bought a full-service bogus citizenship package from an immigration consultant, including a Halifax address for a home he never lived in, tax returns and employment records for a job he never held, payment of utility bills he never used, ATM withdrawals to show local transactions he didn’t make and a letter from a local Islamic society saying he was deeply involved in the activities at a mosque he didn’t attend.

Morelley’s phantom phone — and fake life — were far from unique: more than 140 cell phones, labeled with the number and name of a client, were organized in the Bedford Highway office of the Canadian Commercial Group, run by immigration consultant Hassan Al-Awaid.

At least 1,244 clients were listed in Al-Awaid’s files, most accompanied by family members.

And he is but one of several crooked consultants caught recently peddling easy ways around the residency (and other) requirements for foreigners to gain Canadian citizenship.

Here is how they did it.

Hassan Al-Awaid, 62, an Iraqi national, worked in public relations and marketing for a government-owned petrochemical company in Kuwait before immigrating to Canada in 1992 and settling in Nova Scotia, where he and his wife had three children, including twin girls.

He might have once been a legitimate immigration consultant when he started, at least as far back as 1997. He was a member of the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants until he was suspended in 2006. And he didn’t join the Immigration Consultants of Canada Regulatory Council, Canada’s current regulatory body, making him another “ghost consultant,” working in the shadows.

Increasingly, Al-Awaid shifted to black market services and relied on referrals from clients, since his specialization was hard to advertise.

“My office is one of the famous offices in Nova Scotia and my services differ from any other office, especially after arrival, and everyone know that,” he boasted in an email to a client.

…Al-Awaid’s furtive and sometimes frantic business began to unravel in 2007, when Shawna Woodin, an intelligence officer with the Canada Border Services Agency in Halifax, noticed two different signatures for the same person in a citizenship application.

The CBSA and the RCMP started a lengthy investigation. Several of his clients confessed to investigators of the duplicity. Searches in 2010 at Al-Awaid’s office, home and car revealed his meticulous record keeping.

Police found more than 140 labelled cell phones and a stack of ATM cards with their PINs among the 20 filing cabinets of records seized, including reams of emails with clients and detailed records.

He was arrested in 2011

Al-Awaid eventually pleaded guilty to eight offences under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and ten under the Citizenship Act, for cases stretching from 2002 to 2011.

At his sentencing this summer, court heard he was being treated for hypertension, hypothyroidism, elevated cholesterol, gout and diabetes.

“I am simply not satisfied that the Correctional Service of Canada can safely and effectively monitor and treat Mr. Al-Awaid’s very significant health issues,” provincial court of Nova Scotia judge Anne Derrick said.

That allowed him to avoid jail, instead getting a conditional sentence of two years less a day, a $4,000 fine and 240 hours of community service.

Prosecutors lamented the growing presence of citizenship fraud.

“That these ‘address of convenience’ cases went from virtually unheard of a short number of years ago to making regular appearances in news reports across Canada is indicative that the scheme has served to foster an overseas industry that thrives on immigration fraud,” prosecutors Timothy McLaughlin and Ronda Vanderhoek told court.

For the charges against Al-Awaid, police focused on 53 clients who used eight Halifax addresses to falsify residency. Of those 53, seven provided states to police; nine of the applicants had already obtained their citizenship, 19 withdrew from the process, while the rest were still in the application process at the time his case went to court.

Source: Halifax man helped thousands pretend they were in Canada to get around citizenship rules

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Anti-Semitism review: The flaw at the heart of Frederic Raphael’s argument

2016/01/16 Leave a comment

Richard King on how Raphael’s conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism undermines his account of the history of antisemitism:

Rejecting the argument that anti-Semitism owes as much to the Enlightenment as it does to Christianity, Raphael suggests that the Jews’ original crime was the historically unique one of deicide, which is to say the murder of God Himself. It is this that led to their reputation for treachery and furnished the world with a reliable scapegoat for everything from epidemics to economic catastrophe.

From the death of Jesus to the Black Death, it is on the heads of the Jews that blame falls – a trend that reaches its apogee with the “stab in the back” myth of post-First World War Germany and the “last crusade” of Nazism (a subject so large, as Raphael notes, that its history has a history of its own).

All of this is perfectly sound. But Raphael runs into serious problems when he tries to expand the phenomenon of Jew-blaming to include criticism of modern Israel. For while it is undoubtedly true that the miasma of anti-Semitism surrounds much dark talk about the Israel “lobby”, and true too that many liberals and left-wingers are apt to downplay the anti-Semitism extant within the Muslim community for fear that they will sanction anti-Muslim prejudice, it is not true to say that Israel is “the sole licensed target for unguarded malice” in the West.

Disproportionate our emphasis on Israel may be, but this imbalance stems as much from a desire to highlight Western hypocrisy as it does from any loathing of “the Judas state”. As for Raphael’s suggestion that the images of Palestinian children injured or killed in the Gaza war were a modern version of the “blood libel” according to which Jews used the blood of Christian children to make the matzo bread eaten at Passover – such a thought is unworthy of an intelligent author.

Though Raphael is right to say that anti-Semitism and “anti-Zionism” cannot always be neatly separated and that criticism of modern Israel is not without its sinister elements, his determination to make these things identical is profoundly wrong-headed. Intended or not, its effect is to make Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s crimes against the Palestinians into the expression of Jewish identity. Many are the Jews (not all of them “self-hating”) who would regard that proposition as evil.

Source: Anti-Semitism review: The flaw at the heart of Frederic Raphael’s argument

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ICYMI: Michael Smolander: Canadian literature is intimately linked to multiculturalism | Ottawa Citizen

2016/01/16 Leave a comment

On how multiculturalism is reflected in, and reflects multiculturalism, and some of the limitations and mixed nature of Canadian literature and the multiculturalism narrative:

It is unsurprising that Canada’s literature reflects the practical challenges of multiculturalism. Queen’s University professor Will Kymlicka says that although multicultural policies are difficult to implement and maintain, they are necessary to sustain a well-functioning democracy.

Kymlicka argues that multicultural policies can take many forms such as re-tooling education curriculums “to include the history and culture of minority groups” and even “teaching police officers, social workers and health-care professionals to be sensitive to cultural differences in their work.”

In this way, novels expressing dissatisfaction with the level of inclusion immigrant groups experience are an important measure of democratic vitality and can act as a guide for policy reformers.

Frances Brooke, the English essayist, correctly described Canadian literature as “bilingual, multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic, postcolonial, postmodern and even multinational.” The many examples of novels by Canadian writers detailing their experiences with immigration and cultural difference give weight to Brooke’s definition.

Indeed, Canada’s literary identity crisis can be relaxed given the persistence of the uniquely Canadian theme that highlights the challenges associated with the multicultural mission.

While works by Choy and Ondaatje reflect a less-than-rosy history of immigration in Canada prior to the widespread legal guarantees of free cultural expression, Hage has since advanced the idea that inclusion into Canadian society remains an elusive challenge for many immigrants.

To forge a more inclusive and democratic order, it is crucial that Canadian literary works exposing the shortcomings of the multicultural project be understood and addressed.

Source: Michael Smolander: Canadian literature is intimately linked to multiculturalism | Ottawa Citizen

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