ICYMI: Douglas Todd: Hate crimes against Catholics almost tripled. Do Canadians care?

2022/10/20 Leave a comment

The Canadian Catholic church and its members, many of whom are Indigenous or immigrants, were last year buffeted by a horrendous 260 per cent spike in hate crimes.
Of note, from a small base of 42 in 2020 to 155 in 2021. Suspect largely due to the discovery of possible unmarked graves and greater attention to the Catholic Church’s involvement in residential schools:
Catholics were subject to a far higher escalation in police-reported hate incidents than any other religious or racial group, according to a Statistics Canada study.

Source: Douglas Todd: Hate crimes against Catholics almost tripled. Do Canadians care?

Filed under Hate crimes, Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

Ancient world’s multicultural secrets revealed by handwriting analysis of scrolls

2022/10/19 Leave a comment

Interesting:

Advanced techniques to analyze the Dead Sea Scrolls and Eastern papyri are revealing vibrant secrets about daily life in the ancient world.

Around 2,100 years ago, a Judaean scribe deftly swirled a stylus to dab the final strokes of black ink onto a piece of parchment.

His work, a copy of the biblical Book of Isaiah from the Old Testament, would soon be complete in the form of a seven-meter-long scroll. But was he finishing his own work—or someone else’s?

Though the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered more than 70 years ago, sophisticated computing techniques are now revealing the invisible hands that wrote the famous texts and Professor Mladen Popović at the University of Groningen thinks he knows the answer.

“My simple idea was to use paleography—their handwriting,” he said.

Paleography is the scientific study of ancient handwritten texts. The goal of the paleographer is to identify the location and time of writing. Texts come on parchment but also pottery, metal, cloth and even casual graffiti as discovered on the walls of Pompeii.

Muscle movements

“The way you write, the way I write, is very person-specific,” Prof Popović said. “It is your muscle movements and it is very individual.”

Working with Artificial Intelligence (AI) expert Prof Lambert Schomaker and other team members as part of the HandsandBible project, he developed new machine learning computing methods to analyze ancient handwriting digitally.

“The beauty of the technology we have now is that you can make high spectral images and go down to the pixel level, and then make all sorts of calculations which you can boil down to movement,” Prof Popović said. “Through their handwriting, we can, as it were, shake hands with them.”

Researchers spent many long hours painstakingly tracing Hebrew letters to teach a computer model what was ink and what was not. The results were 3D models of manuscript texts that include more than 5,000 dimensions of calculations.

Isaiah scroll

Back in a lab in the Netherlands, Maruf Dhali, one of the team members, was puzzled by the results the computer model was producing.

It showed that, roughly halfway through the text of the Isaiah scroll, the handwriting changed enough to indicate another scribe took over. While statistically significant, it was barely perceptible visually.

The researchers considered other options. Could he have changed his pen? Or had he perhaps stopped writing and picked up again much later?

“They write so alike, but the most likely explanation really is that there are two different scribes,” said Prof Popović. “One scribe is so good at imitating the other that, with the naked human eye, you can’t really see that.”

While scholars had previously debated whether or not there were multiple writers of the Isaiah scroll, this was the first robust evidence that two scribes had produced it.

Could the AI be wrong? Less likely, according to Prof Popović.

“The human paleographer, the expert, is much more of a black box,” he said. “We don’t really know what goes on in our minds. Of course, we have this expertise, but we cannot explain all of our paleographic reasoning.”

By using a trained computer, he says, paleographers are challenged to better explain the observations they make with human eyes.

Time machine

The ability to drill down to the handwriting of individual scribes and connect them with various works opens up a whole new way for researchers to look at texts, as well as understand their scribal culture.

For instance, there is evidence that some Dead Sea Scroll scribes were just learning how to write. A scribe was discovered who wrote both Hebrew manuscripts and Aramaic (an which was the lingua franca of the Middle East 2-3 000 years ago) ones, giving researchers new insights into their language abilities.

“Another example is how we look at those scribes—is there also some individuality or space for them to maneuver?” said Prof Popović. “We see there is variation there, so they were not just slavish robots copying what they were told to copy.”

With this paleographic approach, these scrolls even act like a sort of time machine.

“We can see a little part of what was the cultural evolution that became the Bible,” he said. “It’s the same sort of scribal culture. The way they write here was also how they worked two to three centuries before.”

Ancient writers

Prof Maria Chiara Scappaticcio has also been using texts to reveal new details from the lives of ancient people.

Stemming from the era when Rome controlled Egypt between 30 BCE and 641 AD, she and her team have been traveling from Berkeley to Berlin to catalog fragmentary papyrus rolls that contain Latin as part of the PLATINUM project.

They have been combing through the papyri using techniques like ultraviolet photography. In this way, they have been able to discover new texts, as well as better understand the meaning of existing ones.

The fragments are revealing much about the daily lives of ordinary people, according to Prof Scappaticcio.

The team has been working on “documents between private people who were lending things, letters between soldiers asking for new shoes, etc.,” she said.

Ancient multiculturalism

But the texts also gave the team a chance to better understand the lives of Roman Egyptians and how their identity mixed with Roman culture of the time.

“Multiculturalism and multilingualism are key words of our reality,” said Prof Scappaticcio. “It was actually almost the same thinking about antiquity, with the necessary caveat due to the chronologic distance.”

Researchers found texts of the Aeneid, the Latin epic verse penned by Virgil glorifying the foundation of Rome, being used in local language instruction.

“In the peripheral areas of the Empire, Latin was the language of power,” she said. “Rome imposed its power, and literature was one of the instruments through which to do that.”

Through their research, her team was even able to uncover the first text showing Arabic transliterated as Latin, as well a literary work by Seneca the Elder (father of the better known Roman philosopher by the same name) thought to have been completely lost.

The team has assembled an exceptional number of texts in this new study. “In 2023, we will publish a corpus of roughly 1,500 Latin texts on papyri,” Prof Scappaticcio said.

A previous collection, from 1958, contained a mere 300 texts. The goal is to allow a broader range of scholars to access Latin works written and circulating from the fringes of the Roman Empire.

“I hope it will be a point of departure, using this corpus as a tool to investigate Roman orientalism,” she said. “It was an open society and a lot of aspects flowed from one culture to another. It was not so much different from today.”

Source: Ancient world’s multicultural secrets revealed by handwriting analysis of scrolls

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McWhorter: What a Report of Extreme Racism Teaches Us

2022/10/19 Leave a comment

Controversial but raises valid concerns:

It’s time for a few words on what we might learn from a Black volleyball player’s claims about what happened at a match she participated in at Brigham Young University this past August. I have refrained from commenting on this for a spell, in case there were further revelations. As there have been none yet, I shall proceed.

Rachel Richardson, a Black member of Duke’s volleyball team playing in a match at Brigham Young University, claimed that she and other Black teammates were “targeted and racially heckled throughout the entirety of the match,” such that they had to face a crowd amid which slurs “grew into threats.”

But a sporting match such as this one is attended by thousands and is well recorded, both professionally and also by anyone in attendance with a cellphone. To date, no one has offered evidencethat corroborates Richardson’s claims of racist verbal abuse, either independently or as part of an investigation by B.Y.U. There is nothing comparable in the security footage or in the television feed the school took of the match. No one at the match representing either school has described hearing such a thing happening. No witnesses have been reported as coming forward.

To be clear: It is possible that some racist spectator shouted a racial slur at Richardson at some point during the match. But it seems apparent that no rising tide of slurs and threats occurred during that match — that would be clear in the recordings. And Richardson’s having possibly exaggerated what happened casts into doubt whether there were any slurs at all, given that people leveling such words tend to do so with the intention of being heard by others, and no one present has come forward and explicitly said they heard it. Richardson and her representatives have presented no explanation as to why recordings via modern technology do not reveal what she claimed.

We cannot know why Richardson made this claim. Maybe she misheard common volleyball chants, as some have suggested. Or perhaps there were members of the crowd who did in fact resort to racist slurs that others either did not hear or are not willing to corroborate. But it’s hard not to sense that all of this is discomfitingly ambiguous — the likelihood that Richardson’s basic claim of being continuously heckled with racist slurs from the stands seems rather infinitesimal.

But this is why the B.Y.U. story is important. The message from this story is not just that interpretations of events will differ, or that in some fashion racism persists in America even if the details on this case are murky. We must also engage with the unfortunate possibility that the B.Y.U. story may be a demonstration of a pattern, one that we must be aware of to have an honest debate about racism in America today.

I have long noticed, in attending to episodes of this kind in our times, that claims of especially stark and unfiltered racist abuse, of the kind that sound like something from another time, often do not turn out to have been true. Accounts of this kind, I have realized, should be received warily. Not with utter resistance, but with a grain of salt.

The people making such claims appear to be thinking of horrors of the past and claiming that what supposedly happened to them shows that those horrors persist. It is difficult not to notice, for example, the parallel between Richardson’s claim and Jackie Robinson’s being called the N-word from the stands in the 1940s.

But while we have not remotely reached a point where racism does not exist, we have reached a point where some people are able to fabricate episodes of racism out of one unfortunate facet of being not Black, but human — crying wolf and seeking attention. This kind of thing was probably less likely when actual episodes of this kind, including lethal ones, were ordinary. Who would, on top of legalized segregation and lynching, make up racist violence? It would have seemed too trivializing of what actual people regularly went through. But today? Things are, while imperfect, quite different.

The classic, and perhaps officially inauguratory, example — and this is in no way to equate Richardson’s possible exaggeration to the prior, extraordinary event — was Tawana Brawley’s claim in 1987 to have been kidnapped and raped by a group of white men and then left in the woods wrapped in a garbage bag, covered with feces and scrawled with racial slurs. The sheer luridness of that scenario was always a clue that Brawley staged the whole thing, which she was proved to have done. A U.S. Justice Department report concluded that in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, Officer Darren Wilson did not callously shoot Michael Brown dead despite his having his hands up in surrender, despite Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson’s claim to that effect.

White lacrosse players at Duke did not rape a Black stripper at a party, despite the 88 Duke professors who published a newspaper ad implying the lacrosse players were guilty. And of course, the actor Jussie Smollett’s story that MAGA-hatted homophobic racists jumped him in the wee small hours and put a noose around his neck has not held water. Nor is it an accident that the scenario sounds less like real life than something that would have happened on the television soap opera “Empire” that Smollett was starring in.

Cases like these are not eccentric one-offs. It is painful to have to write that they are a pattern. The incidents could fill a whole book, and they have: “Hate Crime Hoax” by Wilfred Reilly, a Black political scientist, covers over 400 cases primarily in the 2010s that were either disproved or shown to be highly unlikely. It isn’t that discrimination never happens. But the more extreme and ghastly the story, the less likely I am to believe it.

It is a kind of good news. Today’s hoaxes are often based on claims of the kinds of things that actually happened to people and went unpunished in the past. That today such things are sometimes fabricated shows, oddly, that in real life, progress has taken place.

My point is not remotely to ignore claims of racism. It is to be wary of the especially bizarre, antique-sounding cases. And so: Indeed, the racially offensive trash talk by the Los Angeles City Council members that surfaced this week was egregious, but talk like that, when speakers are unaware anyone else will hear, is common, sad though that is. That story does not disprove my point, because it happened in an ordinary rather than outlandish manner. Grotesque, racist private talk certainly still persists.

While we must always be maximally aware that racism does still exist, we must also know that not all claims of racist abuse hold water and that being aware of this does not disqualify one from being an antiracist. True antiracists know that Black people exhibit the full scale of human traits and tendencies, including telling tall tales — and yes, even about matters involving racism.

Source: What a Report of Extreme Racism Teaches Us

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

Dangzalan: Half-Cooked, and Under-Seasoned: IRCC’s Haste To Move to Online Applications for Permanent Residence

2022/10/19 Leave a comment

More on the online hopefully teething problems:

Before the pandemic, I stumbled into a pub and ordered their buttermilk fried chicken with waffles. The server happily took my order, and after about ten minutes, the order arrived. I was impressed with the speed. When I took my first bite, I suddenly spit it out – it was raw, with blood gushing through the undercooked flesh. It was not at all ready. It was clearly done in a hurry. In life, most things that are rushed do not end well. This is also true for institutions.

On September 1, 2022, IRCC came out with a news release, “Transitioning to online applications for permanent residence.” The announcement was promising until you read on: “…Starting on September 23, 2022 … IRCC will begin transitioning to 100% digital applications for most permanent residence programs.”

Twitter went into a frenzy – in just three weeks, applications for Permanent Residence will only be accepted through IRCC’s application portal. While the portal was soft-launched on March 31, 2021, the impression at the time was that IRCC would continue to iron out the problems with the online infrastructure. In the meantime, the department continued to accept paper applications for permanent residence.

We in the immigration bar understood this to be a good sign: IRCC appeared committed to ensuring that the transition to a digital application platform will have minimal technical issues at best. The backstop was there – in that people who have technical issues or are simply unsure if they trust the new platforms had the choice to submit a paper application.

We have also experienced nightmare scenarios where applicants needed to submit their applications on the same day but were not able to because of technical issues. The list of reasons is long, but it includes issues ranging from the website crashing, to the lack of space to submit complex humanitarian and compassionate applications that require heavy papering of evidence, to sudden portal outages, to files not being accepted due to ill-explained formatting issues.

Folks who have been trapped in these nightmare scenarios stand to lose a lot: they lose their status in Canada and endure long family separations. Sometimes the remedy involves filing a separate application that increases the ever-growing inventory of applications. Transitioning so recklessly to a zero-sum online intake system may have the unintended consequence of exacerbating the already politically toxic immigration backlog. Surely the Minister or the Prime Minister’s Office will not want this.

Make no mistake: this transition is a critical part of IRCC’s push for digital transformation in the department. Converting applications from paper to digital will accelerate the collection of big data that will allow IRCC to develop further its deployment of advanced analytics and machine learning in triaging an ever-growing pile of applications. Let’s also be very clear: electronic application platforms allow for a more accessible government. E-governance is generally a good thing. But this requires a proper and well-thought-out strategy for the deployment of technology. What is not good is a forcible ramming through the door of a system that has no emergency backstops.

To be sure, a lot of advocates have long pushed for online applications for Permanent Resident candidates. Yet the manner of hurried and almost cloak-and-dagger execution, with portals still riddled by technical problems, does not bode well among advocates and members of the bar.

It’s not too late. IRCC and Minister Sean Fraser can still put a pause to this. Minister Fraser should delay the compulsory implementation until a dialogue can be opened between the department and its stakeholders to hear what the issues are. As always, we at CILA are open to collaborating with the department to ensure that this project enjoys the highest possible chance of success.

Source: Half-Cooked, and Under-Seasoned: IRCC’s Haste To Move to Online Applications for Permanent Residence

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With 271,000 vacant jobs, Quebec business leaders challenge immigration targets

2022/10/19 Leave a comment

Nothing new here except the degree to which the CAQ will revised levels in response to ongoing business pressures:
Quebec business leaders say newly re-elected Premier François Legault will have no choice but to accept more than 50,000 immigrants per year  — a target the premier has said would be “suicidal” for the province’s French culture.
“Unless you want to downsize your economy and you’re ready to let go of some companies and even some regions (in Quebec), … you have no other way than to increase integration levels,” said Véronique Proulx, president and CEO of Quebec Manufacturers & Exporters.

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Ditchley Conference: Impact of Food Security on Migration and How to Respond

2022/10/19 Leave a comment

I recently had the pleasure of attending this conference (virtually). Interesting and stimulating discussions, high level summary here.

My working paper for the conference is below:

There is little doubt that migration pressures will increase given greater food insecurity in countries and regions that are expected to be most exposed to climate change. While this is mainly with respect to the global south, even more temperate zones are being affected as recent extreme weather events have demonstrated. How governments and societies should respond is an easier question than how can they respond given domestic and international politics, with the ongoing challenges of climate change being perhaps the most pertinent example.

From an immigration perspective, there are some realities that need to be considered:

• Increased political and social polarization, reflecting driven by social media and political tactics at both national and international levels, resulting in greater mis- and disinformation;

• Increased economic and social inequalities within countries;

• In many countries, immigration is divisive politically, Canada being one of the rare exceptions. Irregular arrivals rather than more managed immigration tend to provoke more negative public reactions;

• Migration policies and programs of the global north are largely designed for the benefit of receiving countries, with little to no attention to the needs of sending countries and potential migrants. The overall focus on addressing the demographics of aging societies as well as the recent focus on healthcare labour shortages and immigration are examples.

• Public opinion in Western countries generally, but not exclusively, favours more “familiar” migrants with perceived shared values as recently seen in the case of Ukrainian refugees in contrast to other groups. While consistency of treatment must be the objective, the reality is more complex; and,

• There is generally greater public support for economic immigrants who contribute directly to the economy in sectors as diverse as healthcare, tech and agriculture than for refugees and asylum seekers, as the benefits are more clearly perceived.

Canadian perspective

Canada’s geography has largely provided a barrier to large scale irregular migration compared to most other countries given the USA to the south, oceans to the east, west, and north, making it easier for Canada to manage migration flows and maintain public confidence.

While my fellow Canadians at the conference may disagree, some of the factors that will influence Canadian public reaction to larger scale immigration include:

• The degree to which irregular arrivals, perceived as queue jumping, particularly those at land crossings between official border points, continue to increase (2022 average to date of 3,000 per month), with birth tourism raising similar issues;

• While public opinion research shows general support for immigration and a general understanding of the need for immigrants to address labour shortages and demographic aging, there is less support for refugees and family class, and some worries regarding immigrant group cultures;

• Given the large numbers of immigrants and their descendants, concentrated in electoral districts (41 ridings out of 338 are visible minority majority ridings, with another 16 ridings over 40 percent) and the Canadian political first-past-the-post system, no political party can win an election without their support;

• Immigrants often perceive irregular arrivals as people jumping the queue rather than applying as they did and there is a diversity of views among immigrant and visible minority groups on overall immigration levels;

• The current government has ambitious immigration targets (increasing 341,000 pre-pandemic to 450,000 by 2024) that enjoys broad support among stakeholders and have so far attracted little to no criticism by mainstream political parties (Quebec, which selects its economic immigrants, is far more restrictive); and

• The ability (arguably inability) for the government to deliver these increases has become an issue with large backlogs across all immigration programs.

Possible broader lessons from Canada

Mitigation through greater support to countries with food insecurity and greater climate change impacts may reduce pressures on receiving countries. While it is likely impossible reduce long- term pressures, the impact ideally can be made more gradual allowing more time to prepare and increase absorptive capacity.

Key to public support is the perception that migration flows are being properly managed and not just arriving at the border. To the extent that migration and refugee flows have orderly processes and procedures, public understanding and support should be easier to attain. This is clearly easier for some countries than for others but even countries that have geographic and other barriers can expect to be tested more and more.

Messaging that links immigration to a country’s interests (e.g., labour shortages) will be more powerful than general humanitarian messaging. Policies and programs that triage food and climate refugees based upon their ability to contribute to the receiving country economy and society are likely to be better received than those without such selection criteria.

Stories that focus on individual situations have greater influence than more overall analysis for the public. For example, the death of Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi galvanized support for accepting more refugees during the 2015 Canadian election and, more recently, the likely murder of Iranian Mahsa Amini over how she wore her hijab has galvanized protests in and outside Iran. Given that

the impact of individual examples and stories is more short-term, broader evidence and analysis are needed for governments and sophisticated stakeholders in order to effect sustainable change.

In short, longer term migration pressures are similar to climate change in terms of the political challenges at national and international levels. However, the Global Compact for Migration only provides a framework in contrast to the legally binding Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Moreover, the longer history of global and national environmental debates and negotiations has resulted in greater political consensus regarding the need for international cooperation to address climate change.

Issues related to climate change are largely economic in terms of the changes required while international migration is as much about more complex social change as it is about simple economic change, as we see in various debates over immigrant and national values.

Given that current narratives in receiving countries have focussed on economic benefits of immigration for receiving countries, shifting the focus to the benefits and costs to both receiving and sending countries would be extremely difficult given polarized public opinion and politics.

Source: https://www.ditchley.com/sites/default/files/2022-10/Andrew%20Ditchley%20Conference%20October%202022.pdf

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The Open Secret of What Works—and What Doesn’t—for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – By Elizabeth Weingarten

2022/10/18 Leave a comment

Good and informative study:

The 1960s heralded all kinds of innovations—lava lamps, bubble wrap, the birth control pill, and the BASIC programming language, just to name a few.

Today, most of us use more modern versions of the inventions the 1960s produced.

With one notable exception: corporate antibias and diversity training. “There are dozens, if not hundreds, of studies [of these programs], most of them showing that diversity training has no effects,” says Alexandra Kalev, an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University, and coauthor with Harvard sociology professor Frank Dobbin of the new book Getting to Diversity.

And yet, despite the stack of evidence, “it is hard to find a Fortune 500 company without a diversity and harassment training these days,” they write.

When antibias trainings first emerged, they were rooted in mainstream psychological beliefs at the time: that attitudinal change precludes behavior change. In other words, you need to change what you think before you can change what you do.

Many corporate trainings were a by-product of President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 legislation to stop racial discrimination, Dobbin and Kalev explain. Eager to prove that they were on the right side of history, organizations swiftly developed recruitment and training programs for Black employees and “race relations training” for others on staff, despite there being no federal mandate to do so. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made sex discrimination illegal, organizations expanded these trainings to cover sex discrimination.

In their new book, Dobbin and Kalev explore not only why these trainings have endured despite the evidence, but also what works to make progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion inside organizations. Their book is informed by two big questions: “What goes on within companies to prevent women and people of color from flourishing in the way that white men with the very same qualifications flourish?” And, “How can firms tear those barriers down and work toward true inclusion?” To answer them, Dobbin and Kalev use data from over 800 companies captured between 1971 and 2015, as well as interviews with managers from another 100 companies conducted after 2007. The result is a book that is tailored for anyone who is craving actionable, evidence-based advice about how to create effective programs.

The week they published their book, I spoke with Dobbin and Kalev about why we continue to rely on unconscious bias training, the most impactful interventions for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) progress, a DEI “stealth program,” and why organizations tend to lay off more women and people of color during recessions. Our conversation, edited for clarity and length, is below.

What have we learned from the past few decades of studying the effectiveness of diversity trainings?

Kalev: For decades, there has been so much research, and most of it shows that diversity training has no effect. Usually, the effects examined are short term changes—understanding of certain concepts, or plans for future behavior or, attitudes. Some studies find positive short-term effects, and some of them find negative effects.

What we’ve learned is that it’s very hard for people to be forced to change their attitudes. They act with reactance, needing to take control over their decisions and regain autonomy. We’ve learned that trying to suppress stereotypes makes those stereotypes more accessible. We’ve learned that the message of multiculturalism makes white men feel excluded. And when it comes to attitudes, we gain them through the life course, so no single afternoon session will undo that.

The barriers to diversity are diverse. Different companies, departments, groups, and industries have different barriers. If you bring on an over-the-counter diversity training, what are the chances you’ll be spot on with what’s going in your organization?

Nothing I told you is a secret. That research is not the innovation of our book. It’s out there and ignored.

Why do so many organizations opt for trainings that aren’t supported by evidence?

Dobbin: Part of it is that it’s easy to do. It’s an easy way to show that you’re trying to do the right thing, and it’s conspicuous because every person in the organization is exposed to it. Part of the reason it remains popular is that it doesn’t change what executives and managers have to do from day to day. Business can go on as usual.

“Part of the reason trainings remains popular is that it doesn’t change what executives and managers have to do from day to day. Business can go on as usual.”

We also tend to think, erroneously, that our behavior is driven entirely by our values and our ways of thinking about the world. So, if you can change people’s values and ways of thinking about the world, you can change their behavior. But often it goes the other way. If you change their behavior, you can often change how they think about the world.

The main indicator you look at to understand whether a program is working, or not, is how it impacts the numbers of women and people of color in management. Why is this so important? 

Kalev: Our data looks at several decades, and we look at the change in the number of managers from each demographic group over time. Getting to management means that you succeeded in getting promotions, that you get opportunities, you feel included, your talent is visible, you’re able to show your skill. We think that looking at the numbers actually includes all other dimensions of diversity and inclusion, because the number of people of color, or women or whatever underrepresented group in management is the bottom-line outcome of all other dimensions.

You find the two most impactful programs are formal, democratized mentoring systems and having a diversity manager or task force. Let’s talk about mentoring systems first. Why do they work?

Dobbin: We think mentoring systems work so well because they do several things at once. They help managers to see the obstacles that people of color and white women face in moving up the ladder. They make managers aware that there are fixable structural problems that they could begin to address, or at least they could look out for. Part of it is just making one person higher up in the organization aware of you, aware of your strengths and your aspirations. People mostly get superior jobs in an organization because somebody’s noticed them—they need mentors and sponsors to move up.

What are the most important components of a mentoring program?

Kalev: You want to have a formal program. Mentoring does occur informally, but it excludes women, people of color, other underrepresented groups that don’t have those natural networks. You want to have someone in charge of the program to make sure it is actually happening. You want to match based on interest. People might think for cultural comfort you would want to match based on demographic identities, but there are not enough potential mentors, like Black female mentors or Asian American women that can serve as mentors. So there’s simply not enough senior people from underrepresented groups to mentor. And those who are underrepresented senior leaders are usually overloaded with diversity related tasks.

Probably the most important reason to match by interest is that you want the relationships to break down the segregation, those glass walls between people like white men, for example, and women or people of color. You want to create matches that are actually cross-cultural, but based on interests, because that’s what we do in organizations: we work in functions like finance or AI, based on disciplines or interests.

Finally, you want to make sure that mentoring is open to everybody, not only to the potential stars, because those who you think are stars have already succeeded. Those that you don’t recognize as stars are exactly the ones who need the chance. Not everyone can be promoted, but you want to give everybody the opportunity to show their skill.

You also talk about an intervention I wasn’t familiar with, perhaps because it’s not typically seen as a tool to enhance DEI: self-managed teams. This is a group of employees inside an organization charged with managing and executing on their work without being guided by a manager. You call them a “stealth diversity program.” Why can they have such a positive impact?

Kalev: Usually work in modern organizations is divided by color and gender lines. For example, men and women can work side-by-side, but the woman is the assistant, which reproduces stereotypes, because we don’t see women outside of supporting roles.

Self-managed teams were designed to increase productivity from workers. But an unexpected consequence of them, or maybe expected if you think about it, is that they put together people that never worked together to collaborate, to be dependent on each other to design a product that will have the best consumer interface, or the best technology. They have to solve problems together.

That’s one of the best ways to reduce stereotypes, to propel awareness. It’s a different type of awareness, right? Because now I see you as a person. And because I’m dependent on you, in this task, I also devote more cognitive resources to evaluate you and cannot treat you as a category.

During recessions, firms are more likely to lay off women and people of color, and also less likely to hire them. I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about why you think that is the case.

Kalev: There’s a structural bias component and an individual bias component. For the individual bias component, basically, when the ship is going down, you want to have the ones you trust most to manage the ship. Even when women and people of color reach management, they are still suspect. In times of stress, we rely more on our biases.

We think mentoring systems work so well because they do several things at once. They help managers to see the obstacles that people of color and white women face in moving up the ladder.

And then there is a structural bias component. Women and minorities are usually the later comers. So I would have a lower tenure in management than my white male colleague. And many of the layoffs and downsizings are “last to come first to go.”

Women and minorities are also still in marginalized jobs, such as in human resources, public relations, even in management. So women and minorities are more likely to be in units that are more likely to be axed.

One of the things that I was surprised by in the book was that having a diversity task force or diversity manager was such an impactful intervention. That’s because I’ve seen so many companies appoint someone a diversity manager, or create a task force, but then give that person or group virtually no budget or power to do anything. I’d love to hear why I’m wrong and why these interventions can be powerful.

Dobbin: We interviewed hundreds of diversity managers who would often say, “I have no power, I have no budget. I feel like I’m not doing anything.” But a number said there are a few things they can do, and one of the things that’s most effective is “I just ask a line manager why they made that decision.” Essentially what diversity managers do is they activate social accountability in people, and the knowledge that someone might ask you about your decisions.

Diversity managers usually have access to the human relation information system, and they’re looking at the numbers, and they’re looking at them by department, and they’re looking at hiring slates. One thing they frequently do is talk to managers after, say, a seasonal round of hiring or promotions. And they’ll ask, “So it seemed like half the applicants were women, but you didn’t find any women that you wanted to hire. Should we be searching somewhere else? Is there something wrong with the candidates we’re getting?”

There’s this sociological idea of the looking-glass self, which is when you put yourself in the perspective of somebody who’s observing you. You’re looking in the mirror at your own behavior and asking, How does this look to someone observing my behavior? How does it look if I interviewed 15 men and 15 women and hired seven men and one woman? It’s not the same as a grievance procedure where you’re being threatened through a formal complaint process. This is just social influence—what are the norms, and how is this going to look to someone else?

Source: The Open Secret of What Works—and What Doesn’t—for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – By Elizabeth Weingarten

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Nadeau: L’insulte fasciste

2022/10/18 Leave a comment

Of note:

Le mot « fasciste » est de retour sur toutes les lèvres. Pour parler du monde dans lequel nous vivons désormais, convient-il encore ? Nombreux sont ceux qui, de plus en plus, voient dans la situation présente des correspondances avec les crises successives qui plombèrent les années 1930. Est-il anachronique de penser qu’un passé peut revenir nous hanter sous une forme recomposée ?

Au fil du temps, l’étiquette « fasciste » s’est décollée de la bouteille où on a mélangé trop de réalités politiques différentes. Aujourd’hui, ceux qui sont les plus susceptibles de faire sortir les mauvais génies de cette bouteille en refusent l’étiquette. Ils la savent infamante, c’est-à-dire de nature à les déconsidérer en société.

Il serait naïf de croire que le fascisme est mort avec Hitler dans un bunker ou au crochet de boucherie où fut pendu le corps de Mussolini. La guerre n’était pas terminée que bien des adorateurs des droites radicales — lesquels n’avaient pas toujours le Duce et le Führer comme modèles — cherchaient déjà à la faire regermer, plantant ses vieilles idées délétères en de nouveaux terreaux.

George Orwell prévenait que le fascisme reviendrait sur la place publique en portant un chapeau melon et un parapluie roulé sous le bras, selon l’image de l’homme respectable en son temps. Au Canada, le leader fasciste Adrien Arcand lui donnait en quelque sorte raison. Les crânes rasés, les uniformes et les démonstrations de force appartenaient au passé, disait Arcand après-guerre. L’avenir de l’extrême droite dépendait désormais de sa capacité à se parer des apparences de la respectabilité, prévenait-il. À cette fin, il fallait la présenter cravatée, puis trouver à investir les médias pour se faire valoir ainsi endimanché.

Le ridicule et la naïveté des antifascistes, clamait Pier Paolo Pasolini, étaient de continuer de traquer l’extrême droite dans ses formes anciennes. Le fascisme avait muté à mesure que la société de consommation prenait de l’expansion, plaidait-il à raison.

Comme le ridicule ne tue pas plus d’un côté ou de l’autre du spectre politique, les esprits de droite les plus radicaux exigent aujourd’hui d’être exonérés de l’étiquette de fasciste, sous prétexte qu’ils ont changé de costume. Ils ne précisent pas qu’ils ont bel et bien conservé, au creux de leurs poches et dans la doublure de leur veste, un même fond d’idées.

La Hongrie d’Orban, habituée de piétiner les droits démocratiques, est enthousiaste au possible devant les avancées de Georgia Meloni, la nouvelle tête de la droite radicale italienne au passé fasciste avoué. Vincenzo Sofo, une des figures fortes de Fratelli d’Italia, le parti de Meloni, est le mari de Marion Maréchal, l’égérie de l’extrême droite française, par ailleurs petite-fille du fondateur du Front national. Sa tante, Marine Le Pen, a multiplié par le passé les révérences de son parti, le Rassemblement national, envers le régime autoritaire de Poutine. En Suède, contre toute attente, l’extrême droite a refait son nid. Au Brésil de Bolsonaro, la dictature des militaires et ses bourreaux sont célébrés. Tout ce beau monde s’est montré ravi des pirouettes antidémocratiques proposées par Trump. Ces mouvements se portent assistance mutuelle, dans une sorte de fraternité d’idées qui n’a nul besoin d’organisations dûment constituées pour être constatée.

Les néofascistes se présentent comme des anticonformistes valeureux bravant les élites. Dans les faits, ils défendent encore et toujours la même vieille hiérarchie sociale. Les inégalités, ils les tiennent pour naturelles, tel un simple reflet du mérite individuel. Dans leur univers brutal et darwinien, où la loi du plus fort règne, chacun est livré à la merci de ses propres malheurs. Et tous sont vendus à l’illusion qu’il faut se battre les uns contre les autres pour survivre.

Ces régimes d’idées qui veulent en finir, une fois pour toutes, avec les modèles de la social-démocratie, favorisent une fiscalité à l’avantage des puissants, en prenant pour bouc émissaire les immigrants. Devant le paravent d’un nationalisme doctrinaire, l’obsession de l’immigration est ramenée à l’avant, comme aux heures les plus sombres des années 1930. La menace fabulée d’un « grand remplacement » habille désormais le vieux mannequin de la xénophobie la plus obscène, comme pour détourner l’attention du catastrophique démantèlement progressif des services publics et de menaces planétaires autrement plus profondes.

Les ayatollahs du nationalisme identitaire ont sans cesse à la bouche les mots « culture » et « civilisation ». Jamais pour autant on ne les entend parler plus de cinq secondes de littérature, de théâtre, de danse, de cinéma, de patrimoine, ni du fait d’ailleurs que l’écrasante majorité des artisans de ces sphères sont opposés à leurs pensées carrées. Jamais on ne les entend rappeler que cette civilisation, certes chrétienne, occidentale et aristocratique, a été aussi cosmopolite, qu’elle a produit la pensée critique, que son histoire a été traversée de puissants appels à l’égalité, la justice, la démocratie, l’humanisme, la tolérance. Ce versant les laisse indifférents.

Au nom d’un ressentiment populaire contre les élites qui pillent allègrement la terre, les néofascistes séduisent. Ils jouent pourtant double jeu. D’une main, ils flattent la chèvre au cou tandis que, de l’autre, ils arrosent le chou. Leur rébellion de surface, qui souffle sur les braises d’une grogne générale, ne remet jamais en cause le système économique et sert l’autorité de ceux qui en sont déjà les maîtres.

Les néofascistes s’assurent de prendre le relais de l’ordre établi, en promettant de le pousser plus loin. En se laissant de la sorte porter au pouvoir, au gré de la peur et du ressentiment, ils entendent parvenir à piloter à leur tour un système néolibéral déjà hégémonique, lui offrant tout au plus un supplément d’âme avec ses appels opportunistes à la nation, seule forme de fraternité qui les émeut. Et à vouloir mieux foncer sur cette vieille voie, ils nous conduisent tout droit à un renouveau du pire.

Source: L’insulte fasciste

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Marchi: Moving on from the monarchy, incrementally [change the citizenship Oath]

2022/10/18 Leave a comment

Coming back to the charge (Australia useful precedent) without the institutional and constitutional issues. Other options include currency and coins:

The passing of Queen Elizabeth II will no doubt herald change – from within and externally. Indeed, the conversation about the future of the monarchy under King Charles has already begun in a number of Commonwealth countries.

Let me say at the outset that I am not a monarchist. Never have been, never will be. It is a concept, I believe, that is no longer relevant to today’s Canada and our diverse citizenry. Nor will it help us forge a more prosperous nation. However, I do salute the 70-year public service record of the late Queen. The dedication and stability that she brought to her reign was truly remarkable. She was deserving of the outpouring of respect that came from all corners of the globe following the announcement of her death Sept. 8.

Notwithstanding her record, I believe that Canada should join the conversation about the future of the monarchy.

Polls consistently have shown it has lost considerable support across Canada. A Pollara survey in September suggests only 35 per cent of respondents want Canada to continue as a constitutional monarchy, while only 24 per cent of them want to feature King Charles III on our currency.

Rightly or wrongly, Charles has always generated indifference among many Canadians. As prince, he consistently was less popular than his mom and his two boys. Now that he has the crown, will he be able to win over hearts? He has giant shoes to fill, and how he manages those expectations will critically impact the success or failure of his tenure.

But Charles is intelligent enough to understand that by the time Prince William takes the throne, the so-called “sovereign realms” around the Commonwealth will mostly be gone.

So, how should our country move forward at this juncture?

I would counsel moderation rather than revolution. After all, Canada’s DNA is gift-wrapped by prudence. Typically, we don’t rush into major decisions. We reflect, we analyze and we stew over options until the timing and strategy is right. Or, until the problem goes away on its own.

In addition, reopening the Constitution would prove most difficult, as it always has. At the end of his mandate, Pierre Trudeau won his constitutional battle, but not without fighting most premiers and having to go to the Supreme Court. Brian Mulroney was not as fortunate. Both his initiatives – the MeechLake and Charlottetown accords – went down in flames.

Moreover, any constitutional initiative would likely overwhelm the government’s agenda, and divert political energies from focusing on the bread-and-butter issues that are weighing heavily on Canadians – the economy, inflation, climate, energy, COVID and health care.

Yes, incremental moderation has been our path of choice for almost 60 years when it has come to dealing with our ties to the “motherland.” It was former prime minister Lester Pearson who gave Canadians our own flag on Feb. 15, 1965, and “O Canada” was proclaimed as Canada’s national anthem two years later, almost to the day. Initially, both measures were met with fierce debate and hostility. Today, both are symbols of great national pride.

Much later, Pierre Trudeau built on that record, by repatriating our Constitution from Britain in April of 1982. In the process, he also created the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which moved us closer to his vision of a “just society.”

That brings us to his son, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He offered his condolences uponthe death of the Queen, saying she was one of his “favourite people.” Who knows? He may have a soft spot for Charles, as well. Trudeau strikes me as a reluctant reformer as it relates to the monarchy. That is why I would encourage him to take a page from his father’s and Lester Pearson’s playbooks. Move slowly but do move.

I would suggest that he modernize our citizenship oath.

Until her death, the oath of allegiance (part of the citizenship oath) was sworn to “Queen Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors…” (Now it’s to King Charles III.) When I was minister of citizenship and immigration and attended citizenship ceremonies, these words would cause people’s eyes to glaze over. They had no meaning for them and there was no personal connection. Plus, many of our would-be citizens would actually proclaim “her hairs and successors!”

It is high time to transition our oath. Rather than paying homage to a monarch, we should swear allegiance and loyalty to Canada. Period. Full stop.

As the responsible minister back in 1995, I came within one cabinet meeting of doing precisely that. After coming up with several superb, moving renditions, drafted by some of Canada’s most eloquent writers and poets, then-prime minister Jean Chrétien asked me to “park it” at the last minute. The rationale was that he did not want to fight the monarchists and the separatists (during that year’s Quebec referendum) at the same time.

I argued that reforming the oath would help us with the provincial battle because the monarchy did not enjoy much popularity with most Quebecers. In the end, I did not win the day. I always suspected, though, that the real reason was Chrétien’s affection for the Queen. He had a warm relationship with Queen Elizabeth and I believe he was concerned about offending her.

In politics, however, when you park an initiative, you usually end up losing the moment. And that’s what happened. After the referendum, I moved on to a new portfolio and my successor opted for other priorities.

Now, we have an even better window of opportunity. We should take advantage of it and revisit our oath and build on previous accomplishments. For those who believe that this represents not enough ambition in addressing the future of our monarchy, I would say better an additional single, sure step than a giant leap that goes nowhere.

Eventually, in the fullness of time, the right circumstances for altogether severing the umbilical cord to the monarchy will present themselves.

Source: Moving on from the monarchy, incrementally

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Canada deports more than 200 North Korean escapees who took South Korean citizenship

2022/10/18 Leave a comment

Of note:

Canada has deported 242 North Korean escapees since 2018, and is in the process of sending home 512 more, after finding that many had gained South Korean citizenship before coming to Canada, RFA has learned from two Canadian government agencies.

Most of the deportees are sent back to South Korea, where they initially landed after escaping from the North – usually a harrowing journey through China where they must avoid capture and forced repatriation. And because Seoul claims sovereignty over the entire Korean peninsula, escapees are granted citizenship upon arrival.

But some then go on to Canada, after having a hard time adjusting to life in the South – and that’s where the problem arises in obtaining refugee status.

Typically, to be granted refugee status, an asylum seeker must present evidence of being persecuted in their home country. But because the North Korean escapees found refuge in the South, and were granted citizenship there, they could be excluded from refugee protection, the government agency that provides protection to refugees, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), told RFA.

Essentially, if the asylum-seekers had gone directly to Canada, they would have a better chance of gaining refugee status and be allowed to stay in the country.

The IRCC said that while there may still be instances in which a North Korean requires protection, many asylum petitions have been turned down due to applicants’ South Korean citizenship.

The statistics on deported North Korean escapees were compiled by the Canada Border Services Agency, which is responsible for border control, immigration enforcement and customs services.

“The Canada Border Services Agency places the highest priority on removal cases involving national security, organized crime, crimes against humanity, and criminals – regardless of country of origin,” the agency told RFA’s Korean Service.

“Removals of failed refugees and individuals with other immigration violations are also necessary to maintain the integrity of Canada’s immigration system,” it said.

Difficult Adjustment

More than 33,000 North Koreans have found their way to the South and resettled over the years, most of them having arrived after the 1994-1998 North Korean famine that killed as many as 2 million people by some estimates,  and pushed the country to the brink of collapse.

They risked their lives to escape, most having traveled more than 3,000 miles through China, all the while avoiding capture and forced repatriation and dealing with shady brokers and traffickers. From there they navigated through several southeast Asian countries in the hope of one day boarding a plane headed for Seoul’s Incheon International Airport.

The South welcomes such escapees. They are sent to government-funded orientation programs and given startup money and a living stipend as they settle into their new lives.

But for many escapees, the South is not the land of milk and honey they expected.

The fast-paced life of South Korea seems too hectic, and the people speak Korean peppered with unfamiliar loan words from the English language. Job skills the escapees may have had in the North might not translate into an equivalent position in the South Korean workforce.

And while they may physically blend in, many are made to feel that they are on the lower end of the social hierarchy in the South, due to discrimination and a resulting lack of opportunity to make their situation better.

Almost half of all North Korean refugees that settle in the South said they experienced discrimination in a 2017 poll by the South Korean government-backed National Human Rights Commission of Korea.

“Discrimination against North Korean defectors [in South Korea] is a very serious problem,” Ethan Hee-Seok Shin, a legal Analyst at the Seoul-based Transitional Justice Working Group, told RFA’s Korean Service.

Shin used the politically charged colloquial term “defector” which describes both defectors, who were part of the military or government at the time of their escape, and refugees, civilians who flee starvation or North Korea’s depressed economic situation. The term can, in some contexts, carry a negative connotation.

International Rights groups prefer to differentiate between defectors and refugees, depending on the circumstances of their escape.

“Of course, going abroad does not mean that there is no discrimination, but there is no such thing as being branded as a defector [outside of South Korea],” he said.

Hundreds therefore made the decision to move on from South Korea to Canada, where under the Resettlement Assistance Program they can get benefits that may include a household startup allowance and monthly income support.

Hiding immigration history

Since having a Republic of Korea passport is grounds to immediately reject an asylum application, many of the North Korean asylum-seekers in Canada try to hide evidence that they ever naturalized in South Korea.

According to a Canadian federal court document published Sept. 16, a North Korean refugee surnamed Kim, her husband with the family name Shin and their children were deprived of their refugee status in 2018 for concealing their South Korean citizenship. The document said deportation proceedings were to start.

Another refugee, surnamed Kang, was on the verge of being deported after it was discovered that he resided in South Korea in 2019.

Once the deportation order goes out, the refugees have a few options if they wish to remain in Canada.

According to a 2019 RFA report, over an 18-month period starting in January 2018, some 352 North Korean refugees in Canada lost their refugee status as the government at that time began revoking it in cases where they had lived in South Korea in 2013 or later.

The Canada Border Services Agency explained that a removal decision by an immigration officer can be subject to judicial and administrative review, during which the individuals involved in the case may seek leave to remain in the country.

Additionally, many of the refugees can apply for the Humanitarian and compassionate considerations program, said Sean Chung, the executive director of HanVoice, a Toronto-based nonprofit organization that assists North Koreans with settling in Canada.

Successful applicants to the program can obtain permanent residency in Canada if they are an exceptional case, such as when they have lived in Canada for a long period of time, or if there are special reasons that prevent someone from returning to their home country, he told RFA.

Source: Canada deports more than 200 North Korean escapees who took South Korean citizenship

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