How Big Business Got Woke and Dumped Trump

2021/11/03 Leave a comment

Good long read:

The CEOs started calling before President Trump had even finished speaking. What America’s titans of industry were hearing from the Commander in Chief was sending them into a panic.

It was Nov. 5, 2020, two days after the election, and things weren’t looking good for the incumbent as states continued to count ballots. Trump was eager to seed a different narrative, one with no grounding in reality: “If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” he said from the lectern of the White House Briefing Room. “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.”

The speech was so dangerously dishonest that within a few minutes, all three broadcast television networks spontaneously stopped airing it. And at his home in Branford, Conn., the iPhone belonging to the Yale School of Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld began to buzz with calls and texts from some of the nation’s most powerful tycoons.

The CEOs of leading media, financial, pharmaceutical, retail and consulting firms all wanted to talk. By the time Tom Rogers, the founder of CNBC, got to Sonnenfeld, “he had clearly gotten dozens of calls,” Rogers says. “We were saying, ‘This is real—Trump is trying to overturn the election.’ Something had to happen fast.”

For decades, Sonnenfeld has been bringing business leaders together for well-attended seminars on the challenges of leadership, earning a reputation as a “CEO whisperer.” A committed capitalist and self-described centrist, he has informally advised Presidents of both parties and spoke at Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell’s wedding. Now he suggested the callers get together to make a public statement, perhaps through their normal political channels, D.C. industry lobbies such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable (BRT). But the CEOs wanted Sonnenfeld to do it; the trade groups, they fretted, were too risk-averse and bureaucratic. And they wanted to do it right away: when Sonnenfeld, who issues invitations for his summits eight months in advance in order to secure a slot on CEOs’ busy calendars, suggested a Zoom call the following week, they said that might be too late.

The group of 45 CEOs who assembled less than 12 hours later, at 7 a.m. on Nov. 6, represented nearly one-third of Fortune’s 100 largest companies: Walmart and Cowen Inc., Johnson & Johnson and Comcast, Blackstone Group and American Airlines. Disney’s Bob Iger rolled out of bed at 4 a.m. Pacific time to join, accompanied by a large mug of coffee. (Sonnenfeld, who promised the participants confidentiality, declined to disclose or confirm their names, but TIME spoke with more than a dozen people on the call, who confirmed their and others’ participation.)

The meeting began with a presentation from Sonnenfeld’s Yale colleague Timothy Snyder, the prominent historian of authoritarianism and author of On Tyranny. Snyder did not beat around the bush. What they were witnessing, he said, was the beginning of a coup attempt.

“I went through it point by point, in a methodical way,” recalls Snyder, who has never previously discussed the episode. “Historically speaking, democracies are usually overthrown from the inside, and it is very common for an election to be the trigger for a head of state or government to declare some kind of emergency in which the normal rules do not apply. This is a pattern we know, and the name for this is a coup d’état.” What was crucial, Snyder said, was for civil society to respond quickly and clearly. And business leaders, he noted, have been among the most important groups in determining whether such attempts succeeded in other countries. “If you are going to defeat a coup, you have to move right away,” he says. “The timing and the clarity of response are very, very important.”

A lively discussion ensued. Some of the more conservative executives, such as Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, wondered if the threat was being overstated, or echoed Trump’s view that late ballots in Pennsylvania seemed suspicious. Yet others corrected them, pointing out that COVID-19 had led to a flood of mail-in ballots that by law could not be counted until the polls closed. By the end of the hour, the group had come to agreement that their normal political goals—lower taxes, less regulation—weren’t worth much without a stable democracy underpinning them. “The market economy works because of the bedrock foundation of the rule of law, the peaceful succession of power and the reserve currency of the U.S. dollar, and all of these things were potentially at risk,” former Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer tells TIME. “CEOs are normally hesitant to get involved in political issues, but I would argue that this was a fundamental business issue.”

The group agreed on the elements of a statement to be released as soon as media organizations called the election. It would congratulate the winner and laud the unprecedented voter turnout; call for any disputes to be based on evidence and brought through the normal channels; observe that no such evidence had emerged; and insist on an orderly transition. Midday on Nov. 7, when the election was finally called, the BRT immediately released a version of the statement formulated on Zoom. It was followed quickly by other trade groups, corporations and political leaders around the world, all echoing the same clear and decisive language confirming the election result.

Sonnenfeld thought the hastily convened “Business Leaders for National Unity,” as he’d grandly dubbed the 7 a.m. call, would be a one-off. But Trump’s effort to overturn the election persisted. So in the ensuing weeks, the professor called the executives together again and again, to address Trump’s attempt to interfere with Georgia’s vote count and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. “This was an event which violated those rituals of America and created a visceral reaction,” Nick Pinchuk, CEO of the Kenosha, Wis.–based toolmaker Snap-on, tells TIME. “Talking about this, it kind of transformed from the realm of politics to the realm of civic duty. CEOs wanted to speak out about this, and Jeff gave us a way to do that.”

To Sonnenfeld, the effort—much of which has not been previously reported—underlined a generational shift taking place in the collective civic attitudes of the CEO class. Its effects are evident in Washington, where Big Business’s longtime alliance with the Republican Party is foundering. Congressional Republicans have divorced the Chamber of Commerce; the GOP’s corporate fundraising is diminished; Fox News anchors and conservative firebrands rant about “woke capital” and call for punitive, anti-free-market policies in retaliation. Many of the companies and business groups that implacably resisted Barack Obama have proved surprisingly friendly to Biden, backing portions of his big-spending domestic agenda and supporting his COVID-19 mandates for private companies. Political observers of both parties have tended to attribute these developments to the pressures companies face, whether externally from consumers or internally from their employees. But Sonnenfeld, who is in a position to know, argues that just as much of it comes from the changing views of the CEOs themselves.

Snyder, the scholar of authoritarianism, believes the CEOs’ intervention was crucial in ensuring Trump left office on schedule, if not bloodlessly. “If business leaders had just drifted along in that moment, or if a few had broken ranks, it might have gone very differently,” he says. “They chose in that moment to see themselves as part of civil society, acting in the defense of democracy for its own sake.”

It was perhaps inevitable that Trump, the corporate-showman President, would force the private sector to reconsider its duty to society—and that Sonnenfeld would be the one to force the issue. For 2020 was not the two men’s first confrontation. Back in the mogul’s reality TV days, the business guru was a harsh critic—before burying the hatchet and giving Trump the idea for Celebrity Apprentice.

A Philadelphia native, Sonnenfeld, 67, was drawn from an early age to the human side of business. “He was always irrepressible, uninhibited—just a barrel of monkeys,” recalls the public relations guru Richard Edelman, who rowed crew with Sonnenfeld at Harvard. “You always knew he would be either a politician or a professor, not one of the gray-suited soldiers coming out of Harvard Business School.”

Sonnenfeld authored several scholarly publications before his 1988 book, The Hero’s Farewell: What Happens When CEOs Retire, became a surprise best seller. CEOs sought his counsel, and he realized they were starving for such insights: surrounded by subordinates and yes-men, powerful executives had plenty of opportunities to pontificate but few venues for learning from their peers. Yet Sonnenfeld’s interest in leadership psychology was unfashionable in an M.B.A. field focused on the technical workings of companies and markets. Denied tenure at Harvard, he started his “CEO College” at Emory University in 1989. After a decade, he moved it to Yale, where his Chief Executive Leadership Institute helped put its School of Management on the map. Today, Sonnenfeld’s executive seminars have many imitators, including CEO summits put on by Forbes, Fortune, Bloomberg and the New York Times.

When The Apprentice premiered in 2004, Sonnenfeld reviewed it for the Wall Street Journal. The show, he wrote, was teaching aspiring leaders precisely the wrong lessons while fueling public disdain for business. “The selection process resembles a game of musical chairs at a Hooters restaurant,” he wrote. “No new goods or services are created, no business innovations surface, and no societal problems are solved.” A real-life leader who tried to run a business that way would quickly fail, he added.

Trump fired back, insulting Sonnenfeld as a know-nothing academic. But he also tried to win him over, offering Sonnenfeld the presidency of Trump University, which he turned down, and an invitation to his Westchester golf club, which he accepted. Over lunch, Sonnenfeld said he’d stop criticizing the show if the players were cranky B-list celebrities instead of earnest young strivers. Trump liked the idea, and the following season he transitioned to an all-celebrity cast.

Sonnenfeld finally gave in to Trump’s pestering and invited him to one of his CEO summits at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel. “You would have thought it was the Pope, people were so amazed,” Sonnenfeld recalls. “But at the same time, the top tier of CEOs told me, ‘When he walks in, we’re walking out.’ And they did.” After Trump won the presidency, Sonnenfeld paid him a visit at Trump Tower and reminded him of the incident. “Funny thing about that, Jeff,” Trump said, “they’re all coming by here now.”

Over the course of the 2016 campaign, Sonnenfeld’s surveys of his seminar participants found that although around 75% identified as Republicans, 75% to 80% supported Hillary Clinton, he says. And while many were optimistic about Trump’s pro-business Administration, their enthusiasm soon dimmed. It wasn’t just the chaotic way he operated; he seemed determined to pit them against one another. “I started hearing from the CEOs of Lockheed and Boeing, saying, ‘Wait, he’s trying, over chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago, to get a fight going between us over the cost of a fighter jet,’” Sonnenfeld recalls. It was the same with Ford vs. GM, Pfizer vs. Merck.

Sonnenfeld realized Trump was repeating the tactics from The Apprentice,the same zero-sum mentality that had buoyed him to political success: divide and conquer. “Trump’s whole modus operandi, his one trick his whole life, is to break collective action,” Sonnenfeld says. “The whole NAFTA battle was pitting Canada against Mexico. He constantly tried to divide France and Germany, the U.K. vs. the E.U., Russia vs. China. He tried to build up Bernie vs. Hillary, just like he did with the Republican primary candidates. As pathetically puerile a device as it is, with the GOP it worked magnificently well.”

But business leaders, unlike the Republicans, banded together to resist. In August 2017, when Trump opined that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the deadly white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va., Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier, who is Black, announced that he would step down from Trump’s American Manufacturing Council. Others—some prodded by Sonnenfeld behind the scenes—quickly followed. Within a few days, that council, along with another business advisory group, had disbanded. It was, Sonnenfeld says, the first time in history that the business community turned its back on a President’s call to service.

“He lost the business community in Charlottesville,” says Matthias Berninger, who heads public affairs for Bayer. “Ken leaving his council, that was the starting point of everything that followed.” Deregulatory actions Trump expected Big Business to appreciate were rebuffed: oil and gas companies publicly opposed his repeal of methane regulations, and many utilities shrugged off his rollback of CO₂ limits. The auto industry united against Trump’s attempt to eliminate mileage standards, only to be investigated by the Department of Justice.

Trump’s antagonism to immigration and free trade ran counter to business’s interests, says the D.C. corporate fixer and former GOP strategist Juleanna Glover. “Many corporations and CEOs had an abiding fear of being attacked in a Trump tweet, so staying out of Washington was a good risk-mitigation strategy,” she says. “The Republicans have largely abandoned their pro-business values, and it’s hard to negotiate in good faith when one of the parties is seen as continuing to undermine democratic values.”

Trump may have been the catalyst. But the recent shift of the corporate class is only the latest in the long history of Big Business’s dance with Washington.

While many remember the robber barons of the Gilded Age, the same era produced a generation of innovative entrepreneurs (Thomas Edison, Luther Burbank) who were folk heroes. “The business leaders of the early to mid-1900s were the original ‘progressives,’” Sonnenfeld says. “They were for infrastructure, sustainability, safe workplaces, urban beautification, immigration.” Midcentury CEOs saw themselves as patriotic industrialists, allies of government and builders of society. During- the World Wars, they famously answered the call to contribute. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower appointed three sitting CEOs to his Cabinet.

By the 1970s, pollution and price-fixing scandals had tanked Big Business’s image. A few CEOs decided to break with the conservative politics of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers and came together to found the BRT. But the succeeding generation, in Sonnenfeld’s view, didn’t live up to the BRT’s original promise of civic virtue, focusing instead on attacking government interference and avoiding taxation. “It wasn’t that we had a few bad apples,” Sonnenfeld says. “There’s something wrong with the whole orchard in that period.”

The tech bust, corporate scandals such as Enron and the 2008 financial crisispushed Americans’ esteem of business to historic lows. When the Obama Administration tried to get health care companies on board with the Affordable Care Act, not a single member of the industry came to the table. “They were like little kids throwing stones and hiding in the hedges,” Sonnenfeld says. “The business community was not trying to solve problems.”

But over the past decade, Sonnenfeld believes, a new generation of leaders has stepped into the public sphere to do well by doing good. In 2015, opposition from corporations like Eli Lilly and Anthem helped kill a proposed Indiana state law that would have allowed businesses to refuse to serve gay people. The following year, American Airlines, Microsoft and GE were among the companies protesting a North Carolina ordinance barring transgender people from using their preferred bathrooms. Similar bills were defeated in Texas and Arkansas. The business leaders who thwarted these efforts weren’t just stereotypically “liberal” corporate behemoths like Apple, Starbucks and Nike, Sonnenfeld notes. “It was the bedrock of traditional American industry in the heartland: UPS, Walmart, AT&T. They’re the ones who led the charge, saying, ‘This is not America. We don’t want our workforces divided over this.’”

Today, Wall Street firms grade companies on their climate and diversity initiatives as well as their balance sheets. In the wake of the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., both Dick’s Sporting Goods and Walmart announced they would no longer sell assault weapons or ammunition. Dozens of companies cut ties with the NRA. In 2019, the BRT revised its charter to redefine “the purpose of a corporation,” saying companies should be accountable not only to their shareholders but also to the wider array of “stakeholders,” including customers, employees, suppliers and communities.

“The role of the CEO has changed, and I don’t think anyone can sit on the sidelines,” says Paul Polman, the London-based former CEO of the consumer-goods giant Unilever, whose new book, Net Positive, argues that sustainability can go hand in hand with profit—one of a raft of recent do-gooder tomes by CEOs (including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, the co-owner of TIME). Under Polman’s leadership, Unilever set ambitious climate goals and sought to improve its human-rights record, lobbying against the death penalty for gay people in Uganda and deforestation in Brazil. “Smart CEOs realize that their business cannot function in societies that don’t function,” Polman tells TIME. “We have to be responsible and speak up, not just lobby in our own self-interest.”

Skeptics on the left see this kind of talk as cynical posturing. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren denounced the BRT’s “stakeholder” announcement as an “empty gesture,” and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich called it a “con.” Many of the statement’s signatories, liberals note, still preside over abysmal working conditions, environmental violations and racially segregated workplaces, while employing armies of lobbyists to resist government attempts to hold them accountable.

The right has revolted as well. GOP Senator Marco Rubio decries “woke corporate hypocrites,” while Trump has taken up the slogan “Go woke, go broke!” In the new book Woke, Inc., Vivek Ramaswamy, a tech entrepreneur turned self-styled class traitor, decries “corporate America’s game of pretending to care about justice in order to make money.”

The public, too, appears skeptical. In recent research conducted by Edelman, 44% of Americans say they trust CEOs to do the right thing, about on par with government leaders (42%) but lagging behind clergy (49%) and journalists (50%). A far greater share, nearly three-quarters of employees, trust the CEO of the company they work for.

In the spring of 2020, as the spread of COVID and Trump’s attempt to undermine the vote began to raise fears of an election meltdown, Sonnenfeld began privately raising the issue with prominent CEOs. He urged them to promote political participation to their employees and customers. For the first time, thousands of companies gave millions of workers paid time off to vote and volunteer at the polls. By October 2020, you could scarcely visit a retailer or open a mobile app without encountering a pro-voting, nonpartisan corporate message.

After the CEOs’ Nov. 7 statement, many—including Sonnenfeld—assumed their work was done. Despite Trump’s refusal to concede, dozens of courts rejected his challenges, all 50 states certified their electoral votes, and the presidential transition began. But on Jan. 3, the Washington Post published a recording of Trump’s phone call to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, in which he cajoled and berated the election official to “find” the nearly 12,000 votes it would take to reverse his loss of the state.

So on Jan. 5, Sonnenfeld reconvened his executives. This Zoom was better attended than the first, with nearly 60 CEOs—and more concerned. Nobody quibbled with the “coup” terminology this time. There were CEOs Sonnenfeld had never met who had demanded invites after hearing about the November call. There were right-wing executives and former Obama and Bush Cabinet secretaries. The group voted unanimously to suspend donations to the GOP members of Congress who contested the election.

The next day, Jan. 6, validated their fears. In the aftermath of the Capitol riot, the group met again, and this time, 100% of the CEOs favored impeachment, Sonnenfeld says. The National Association of Manufacturers, known as the most conservative of the major trade lobbies, subsequently called for impeachment publicly, to the political world’s astonishment. Nearly a year later, 78% of the companies that pledged to withhold donations have kept true to their word, according to Sonnenfeld’s analysis of the latest campaign-finance data. One D.C.-based fundraiser for Republican candidates tells TIME she has virtually given up seeking money from corporate PACs as a result.

Sonnenfeld’s efforts didn’t end with Biden’s Inauguration. He was particularly disturbed by the election law the Georgia legislature began considering in the spring, one of many GOP-backed measures to make it harder to vote and easier to interfere with vote counting in future elections. In 1964, it was the former president of Coca-Cola who publicly shamed the white Atlanta business community into honoring Martin Luther King Jr. after he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Now Georgia’s 34 Fortune 1000 companies were largely silent in the face of a modern civil rights issue. In late March, Sonnenfeld and a former UPS executive penned a joint Newsweek op-ed calling out their “cowardice.”

On a subsequent Zoom, two leading Black executives, Merck’s Frazier and Kenneth Chenault of American Express, got more than 100 fellow CEOs to sign on to a statement opposing the Georgia voting law, which was published as a full-page ad in the New York Times and Washington Post.“The people who signed the letter did so because they didn’t see it as a partisan issue,” Frazier tells TIME. “They felt, as business leaders, that they shouldn’t stand on the sideline when our fundamental rights as Americans are at stake.”

But these moves also sparked a political backlash. Executives who had interceded during the election’s aftermath began to fall away from the group, leery of liberal activists seeking to apply similar pressure on other issues, like Texas’ new abortion law. The coalition that rallied with such alacrity to defend American democracy now appears splintered, unsure of the extent of the continuing threat or how to confront it.

“I really thought Jan. 6 was a turning point, a tipping point, but now I think maybe it was just an inflection point,” says Mia Mends, the Houston-based CEO of Impact Ventures at global food–services giant Sodexo. Companies including hers that spoke out against voting restrictions in Texas faced threats of retaliation from state GOP officials. “When that day of reckoning comes, on what side will you be? On what side were you?”

There have been no more pop-up Zooms. Sonnenfeld is back to his old grind, gathering CEOs and nudging them toward public-spiritedness. On a recent Tuesday in New Haven, he led a frenetic virtual discussion with the leaders of Starbucks, United, Xerox, Dell, Pepsi, Kellogg’s, Duke Energy and others, along with members of Congress and current and former Administration officials from both parties. Adam Aron, the CEO of AMC Entertainment, dialed in from his bedroom, looking disheveled, only to be hit with an aggressive Sonnenfeld question about whether the tech-stock mania that had sent his company’s value skyrocketing was really a scam.

Sonnenfeld understands that the CEOs feel whipsawed by the political chaos. “They’re being pelted with so many different causes,” he tells me after the Zoom, his town car speeding to the airport so he can make a board meeting in Miami. But he is scathing in his contempt for financiers who have ostentatiously embraced socially conscious investing while failing to speak up on voting and democracy issues. “The sheer, screaming cowardice of these institutional investors—they own 80% of corporate America, and they never miss a stage to proclaim their commitments to [environmental and social justice],” he says. “Where are they now? Why are they the last to take a stand?”

Yet Sonnenfeld has no doubt that having stepped up for democracy at a crucial time, the CEOs would do it again. “The GOP has created these wedge issues to divide society, and the business community is saying, ‘Wait a minute, that’s not us, those are not our interests,’” he says. “That doesn’t mean they’re going to rush off and support Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Party. But they’re trying to break free and find their own way.”

Source: How Big Business Got Woke and Dumped Trump

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BIPOC or POC? Equity or Equality? The Debate Over Language on the Left.

2021/11/02 1 Comment

Good discussion of the various positions and rationales, along with the risks of language debates distracting from addressing the harder intractable issues. I share the latter concern, as these debates are much easier than actual initiatives to reduce barriers and improve inclusion.

And a reminder that BIPOC is an American term, reflecting their reality, as Joseph Heath correctly called out in his The term ‘BIPOC’ is a bad fit for the Canadian discourse on race:

In California, a Black college freshman from the South is telling a story about his Latino friends from home when he is interrupted by a white classmate. “We say ‘Latinx’ here,” he recalls her saying, using a term he had not heard before, “because we respect trans people.”

In Philadelphia, Emma Blackson challenges her white neighbor’s assertion that Black children misbehave in school more than others. “It’s just my implicit bias,” the neighbor offers, saying that she had recently learned the phrase.

In Chicago, Kelsey O’Donnell, 31, wonders why colleagues and friends have suddenly started saying “BIPOC,” an acronym that encompasses individuals who are Black, Indigenous or other people of color. Where had it come from? “There was really nobody to ask,” says Ms. O’Donnell, who is white. “It was just, ‘This is what we say now.’”

Americans have always wrestled with language when it comes to describing race, with phrases and vocabulary changing to meet the struggles and values of the moment. But especially in the wake of last summer’s protests for social justice, there is a heightened attention to this language, say scholars and activists, as some on the left try to advance changes in the culture through words.

“You can’t change what you can’t name,” Cathy Albisa, vice president of institutional and sectoral change at the racial justice nonprofit Race Forward, said.

For some people, though, the new lexicon has become a kind of inscrutable code, set at a frequency that only a narrow, highly educated slice of the country can understand, or even a political litmus test in which the answers continually change. Others feel disappointment, after so many protests last summer demanded far deeper change on issues like criminal justice and voting rights.

“I really believed America was having a reckoning when it came to race,” said Ms. Blackson, a Black graduate student in epidemiology who has expressed her disillusionment on Twitter. “So far it’s been a lot of words.”

Unsurprisingly, the language itself has become contested, especially by conservatives who have leveraged discomfort with the new vocabulary to energize their base of white voters, referring to it as “wokespeak.” One conservative think tank circulated a list of words — including “microaggressions” and “Black Lives Matter” — that it said could alert parents that what has been labeled “Critical Race Theory” is being taught in their children’s schools. 

The new language extends beyond race, adding phrases and introducing ideas that are new to many Americans. Gender-neutral terms like “Latinx,” for people of Latin American descent, “they/them” pronouns that refer to a single person, and “birthing parent” or “pregnant people” instead of “mother,” to be inclusive of trans people, are also gaining traction.

Some activists defend the focus on language, saying that the way people use words is not mere symbolism but is necessary to achieving justice.

“Saying something like, ‘Black people are less likely to get a loan from the bank,’ instead of saying, ‘Banks are less likely to give loans to Black people,’ might feel like it’s just me wording it differently,” Rashad Robinson, president of the racial justice organization Color of Change, said. “But ‘Black people are less likely to get a loan from the bank’ makes people ask themselves, ‘What’s wrong with Black people? Let’s get them financial literacy programs.’ The other way is saying, ‘What’s wrong with the banks?’”

Mr. Robinson added, “When you’ve been on the margin, being able to claim a language and a narrative and a set of words to express yourself is incredibly important.”

Still, some other self-identified liberals who said they care deeply about social justice feel uncomfortable with some of the changes and the pressure that can be associated with them.

Ms. O’Donnell of Chicago said that, especially when she is among other white, college-educated liberals, “I’m exhausted by the constant need to be wary or you’ll instantly be labeled racist or anti-trans.”

And Stephen Paisley of Ithaca, N.Y., said he cringed at hearing libraries described at an academic conference as “sites of violence,” which is intended to reflect biases in how their rare books collections are curated. Rather than language that “tries to guilt people into action,” he said, he wishes the message was “white people, too, suffer from living in a society in which racial injustices and inequities persist.”

Many of the words surfacing in today’s language debates are not new.

“Implicit bias” traces to the work of psychologists in the 1990s, when the field began to document the subconscious associations that cause people to harbor stereotypes. The effort to substitute “enslaved people” for “slaves” has been long advocated by many Black academics to emphasize the violence that defined American slavery and the humanity of those subjected to it, said Anne Charity Hudley, a linguist at Stanford.

But it is only recently, Dr. Hudley said, that “all these terms are swirling around more in the public consciousness.”

The murder of George Floyd by the police and the outraged protests that followed — in large cities but also in small towns and suburbs across the country — was one catalyst for spreading the terms. The words reverberated across social media and book groups. The word “racism” is being looked up online twice as often as before the killing of Mr. Floyd, according to Merriam-Webster, which has updated its definition to illustrate how racism can be systemic. And more companies, small and large, began requiring language training as part of broader programs they say are aimed at creating a more welcoming culture for diverse work forces.

In a reflection of its surging popularity, “BIPOC” (pronounced “bye-pock”) received its first Merriam-Webster dictionary entry this year, though a number of linguists said they were not sure how the term emerged.

One reason BIPOC has engendered both backlash and bewilderment, said Nicole Holliday, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, is because it seems to be an example of “top-down language reform.” Widely shared over social media last year, its champions have said it is intended to emphasize the severity of racial injustice on Black and Indigenous people. But few Black or Indigenous people use it, language scholars say.

In a national poll conducted by Ipsos for The New York Times, more than twice as many white Democrats said they felt “very favorably” toward “BIPOC” as Americans who identify as any of the nonwhite racial categories it encompasses.

In “Why BIPOC Fails,” an essay in a recent issue of the Virginia Law Review, Meera Deo, a sociologist and professor at Southwestern Law School, notes that the term can end up being “confusing” or “misleading.”

The acronym, which was widely adopted only in the last year or so, is often misread as meaning “bisexual people of color.” Asian and Latino Americans are often left to wonder whether they are covered by the “POC” part of the acronym.

Racial justice activists have also long distinguished “equality” from “equity,” but the latter has filtered into the mainstream more recently. Supporters of the word say that it is preferable to “equality,” which they argue suggests that equal treatment is sufficient to achieve fair outcomes — a premise they maintain disregards built-in disadvantages caused by past and present discrimination, and the need for policies to counteract them.

The terms can seem to change swiftly too. Some scholars are now arguing that “implicit bias” should be replaced with “complicit bias,” saying that the former has been used as a kind of exoneration from the biases one holds rather than a call to address them.

In another example, “L.G.B.T.Q.,” the abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer or questioning, has recently incorporated an “I” for intersex, for people whose biological sex characteristics don’t fit the traditional definitions of female or male, and an “A” for either asexual — someone who experiences little or no sexual attraction — or ally. And the addition of a “+” at the end is aimed at indicating that the term should not be seen as comprehensive.

“I’m trying to think why it makes me so angry that they keep adding letters,” said Laura Bradford, 52, of Nashville, Tenn., who is bisexual and married to a woman. “It’s like, ‘We’re trying to understand, but you’re making it too complicated!’’’

Still, like many Americans, Ms. Bradford said that she had felt “woken up” last summer after educating herself about racism in America. And the identity-politics term that disturbs her most is the pejorative use of “woke,” a word that has cycled through several meanings, including one that reflected her own experience but now carries the implication that social justice ideals are absurd or insincere.

“It’s mean,” she said. “Being woke is about realizing that you’ve been hurting someone for a long time.”

Whether using certain words is an indication of a willingness to upend the traditions that reinforce social inequalities, however, is unclear. For white liberals especially, “there is social pressure to engage with these words in the social moment,” Dr. Hudley said. “They see this as part of what it means to be an educated white person in certain places and spaces, whether they agree with it or not.”

The current struggles over language reflect meaningful shifts in thinking on some essential issues, experts say.

The addition of the word “structural” or “systemic” ahead of “racism,” for instance, stems from a broader acceptance of the idea that racism is not just personal prejudice but a set of disadvantages that start with the average white child being born into families that are wealthier than others, and extend to laws related to housing and voting, bank-lending policies and education systems.

“Compared to 18 months ago, the term ‘systemic racism’ is being used across the board, whether people are talking about it or denying its existence,” said the historian Ibram X. Kendi, whose book “How to Be an Antiracist” has been widely read.

For Nancy McDonald Ladd, a white senior minister at a Unitarian church in Bethesda, Md., that is made up of mostly white progressives, the fixation with language stems at least partly from a sincere desire to reorient one’s worldview. It can be hard to stay on top of lexical tweaks, which include words that distinguish between defining a person and describing a situation — “unhoused” instead of “homeless.”

Although the Rev. Ladd has sometimes seen her congregants’ deliberations over words as a substitute for more substantive action, the language is “not just virtue-signaling,’’ she said, referring to expressions of opinion intended to publicly demonstrate a person’s good character.

“It’s this deep-seated anxiety about failing,” she said. “So they’re reaching, we are reaching, reaching, reaching for the perfect language.”

Language change, linguists say, has long been a tool in shaping social perceptions of identity.

“Queer,” once a pejorative for gay, has been reclaimed as a self-affirming term, especially by a younger generation of the LGBTQIA+ community. “African American,” which became prevalent in the 1980s after the Rev. Jesse Jackson objected that “black” reduced the complexity of race to a skin color, is now being superseded by “Black,” with a capital “B,” to underline a shared political identity among disparate groups.

Changes in language, of course, also make people feel anxious because they signify changes in society.

The honorific “Ms.” for instance, encountered decades of resistance before it became a widely preferred alternative to identifying women by their marital status.

Still others see the attention on language as a dodge.

Increasingly prevalent statements known as “land acknowledgments,” in which officials mention that a speech or public event is taking place on land once occupied by Indigenous people, have recently come in for criticism. Summer Wilkie, a member of the Cherokee Nation, suggested in a recent essay that they can simply seem shallow and take focus away from policies that support Indigenous people.

Those statements that are meant to convey “thank you” or indicate that the speaker is a “guest,” Ms. Wilkie said, are especially “empty and alienating.”

Lucia Martel-Dow, an immigration lawyer in liberal Marin County, has had a similar thought about white progressives who reflexively use “Latinx.” She has no problem with the term, which has been adopted by a small fraction of U.S. adults who identify as being of Latin American descent, to avoid defaulting to the masculine “Latino” and to be inclusive of people who identify as neither male nor female. But how many white Marin residents making a point to use inclusive language, she wondered, also supported changing the zoning laws to create more housing opportunities for Latin American immigrants?

“You can say ‘Latinx’ all day,” she said, “but if you’re not doing the work, I don’t care.”

Such observations are borne out in a national survey this year by Jennifer Chudy, a political scientist at Wellesley College. Even white Americans with the highest levels of concern about racial discrimination, she found, ranked activities like “listening to people of color” or “educating myself about racism” as more important than “choosing to live in a racially diverse community,” “bringing racial issues to the attention of elected officials,” or voting.

One risk of using words without really meaning them, said Dr. Holliday, the linguist, is the overuse of a term — like “inclusion” — to the point where its meaning is diluted, which linguists call “semantic bleaching.”

Lucia Martel-Dow, an immigration lawyer in liberal Marin County, has had a similar thought about white progressives who reflexively use “Latinx.” She has no problem with the term, which has been adopted by a small fraction of U.S. adults who identify as being of Latin American descent, to avoid defaulting to the masculine “Latino” and to be inclusive of people who identify as neither male nor female. But how many white Marin residents making a point to use inclusive language, she wondered, also supported changing the zoning laws to create more housing opportunities for Latin American immigrants?

“You can say ‘Latinx’ all day,” she said, “but if you’re not doing the work, I don’t care.”

Such observations are borne out in a national survey this year by Jennifer Chudy, a political scientist at Wellesley College. Even white Americans with the highest levels of concern about racial discrimination, she found, ranked activities like “listening to people of color” or “educating myself about racism” as more important than “choosing to live in a racially diverse community,” “bringing racial issues to the attention of elected officials,” or voting.

One risk of using words without really meaning them, said Dr. Holliday, the linguist, is the overuse of a term — like “inclusion” — to the point where its meaning is diluted, which linguists call “semantic bleaching.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/01/us/terminology-language-politics.html

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How can universities in the US tackle anti-Asian racism?

2021/11/02 Leave a comment

Seeing more opinion pieces like this, not just focussed on Asian international students:

In 2011, I moved to the United States for my graduate studies in Boston. Having lived all my life in China until that point, I had never needed to analyse the world through the lens of race because race was, and still is, not a salient social category in Chinese society. 

“You speak very good English” was not an offensive comment to me at all, but rather I received it as a compliment about my many years of learning the language. 

“Where are you from?” at the beginning of a conversation was not a xenophobic remark or a denial of my Americanness, but instead, a genuine curiosity about my background. At least, that’s how I felt back then.

Political tensions between the United States and China in the past few years – and then-president Donald Trump’s labelling of COVID-19 as the ‘China virus’ or ‘kung flu’ – have made conversations about race and racism for Chinese students in particular more real as racism against them and the larger Asian communities has become more rampant. 

It is a crushing realisation for many Asian international students – who comprise 70% of all international students in the United States (China alone accounts for 35% of that total) – that, despite their foreign upbringing, they are instantly racialised once they set foot in the United States. 

The thought that their skin colour alone could see them subjected to physical or verbal violence is unfathomable back in their home countries.

Historic roots

Fear of the ‘yellow peril’, the racist and dangerous view of Asians as dirty, disease-ridden, invasive and perpetually foreign, is nothing new in US history, of course. 

The pandemic was only a catalyst that has exposed, and arguably augmented, this systemic, centuries-old ‘American tradition’ in its ugliest form.

Reports of anti-Asian incidents across all Asian populations – and towards the Chinese in particular – are on the rise, as is violence targeting these groups, the murders of six Asian women in Atlanta in March 2021 being the most horrific example of this. 

And in spite of protests, awareness campaigns and pleas from such non-profits as Stop AAPI Hate, anti-Asian incidents show no signs of abating and the fear is still palpable.

So what can we do to stop this insidious movement? US colleges and universities can play a critical role. 

Countering anti-Asian racism on campus

We should continue to voice our support and solidarity with Asian students on campus and provide tangible short- and long-term action plans to educate the entire campus community on anti-Asian racism. 

Such support should come directly from college presidents and chancellors in order to raise campus-wide awareness. If done right, according to American rhetorician Lloyd Bitzer’s rhetorical situation theory, it has the potential to alter human action. 

Not issuing any statements or issuing statements that ring hollow not only misses the opportunity for campus-wide learning, but further distresses Asian students, leaving them feeling more invisible and forgotten.

Second, instead of seeing Asian international students simply as a source of revenue, we need to recognise and acknowledge their unique experiences of navigating racism on college campuses and in the greater American society. 

One way to do that is to create on-campus spaces and support groups facilitated by college administrators to validate their experiences and create a safe environment for Asian international students – and all other international students of colour – dedicated to community building and conversations. 

One example of this is a programme at Amherst College, where I work, called Racialization of International Students, organised jointly by the Center for International Student Engagement and the Multicultural Resource Center. It focuses on international students’ own experiences and struggles around race and racism.

Third, it is important for colleges and universities to consider incorporating workshops or training that introduce the concept of race and racism in the United States for all incoming international students during orientation. 

This will equip international students as well as domestic students with proper knowledge and tools to contextualise their unique positions in dialogues on race and racism and prepare them to voice their needs and seek help when they experience racial hatred. 

This is a critical step that will also empower international students to become change agents in combating systemic and institutional racism on and off campus. 

One recent example of this is Princeton University’s new first-year orientation training module required for all entering first-years on the university’s racist history and the power of student activism.

Last but not least, colleges and universities should enhance their counselling centre staffing by hiring more counsellors who are proficient in foreign languages or are from international backgrounds, to provide more culturally responsive counselling services to international students. 

In general, international students experience mental health issues related to transitioning from their home culture to a different culture, that of the host country. 

Since the onset of the pandemic, many of them have been dealing with extra layers of stress, including isolation in a foreign country away from their families and navigating health concerns and racial violence in a non-native language and environment that are different from the experiences of their domestic peers. 

All of these acute realities warrant dedicated institutional attention. For example, Tufts University’s Counselling and Mental Healthteam hires a culturally sensitive generalist clinician who is bilingual in English and Mandarin and has expertise in counselling international students on life transitions, cultural adaptation and racial dilemmas.

Time for action

One of the biggest strengths of the United States as a study destination for international students is its diversity – the diversity of the student body on college campuses and the ‘melting pot’ signature of the nation that is known worldwide. 

But underneath the surface of diversity, race and racism permeate almost every aspect of American life. That reality often overwhelms many newly arrived international students, particularly those from homogenous societies. 

As the United States undergoes an awakening to racism against the backdrop of anti-black and anti-Asian racism, there is no better time than now for US colleges and universities to take concrete actions to orient international students better for a more complete American experience. 

We cannot afford to do nothing because doing nothing will further marginalise and devalue Asian international students on our campuses. We also cannot afford to lose their voices in the fight against racism because that will make our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion just another empty promise.

Xiaofeng Wan is an associate dean of admissions and the coordinator of international recruitment at Amherst College, United States. He is also a doctoral candidate in the Executive EdD in Higher Education programme at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development, United States.

Source: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post-nl.php?story=20211025095928462

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First Rizal monument in Alberta, Canada unveiled

2021/11/02 Leave a comment

Signs of the increased Filipino community in Canada (Rizal was influential in the Philippine independence movement in the second half of the 19th century and was executed by the Spanish colonial authorities):

Amid the rainy and cold weather on a Saturday afternoon, the first Dr. Jose Rizal Monument in Alberta, Canada, was unveiled in Nose Creek Regional Park in the City of Airdrie on Oct. 23, 2021.

A three-foot bust of Dr. Rizal on top of a seven-foot pedestal covered with granite now proudly stands on a 36 foot x 38 foot spot within Airdrie’s Nose Creek Regional Park, where most of the gatherings of the Filipino community in the city takes place.

Consul General Zaldy Patron of the Philippine Consulate General (PCG) in Calgary led the unveiling ceremony of the monument. The installation of the Dr. Jose Rizal Monument is the PCG’s biggest cultural diplomacy project to date.

In his remarks, the consul general emphasized that the monument, the first Rizal monument in Alberta province and Western Canada, was the PCG’s “humble way of honoring the Philippine national hero, paying tribute to the hard-working Filipinos in Alberta, and promoting Philippine heritage and culture.”

The PCG implemented the project in partnership with the Airdrie City Council, the Filipino Airdrie Association (FAA), and the seven-man Rizal Monument Project Team (RMPT), which Consul General Patron formed and headed.

Muhammad Yaseen, Alberta associate minister of immigration and multiculturalism, who represented the provincial government of Alberta, Airdrie Mayor Peter Brown, and FAA president Jun Martin joined Consul General Patron in the unveiling ceremony.

The PCG and FAA commissioned renowned Filipino sculptor Toym Imao to make the Rizal bust. The bust was shipped from Manila to Calgary, then brought to Airdrie.

About 400 attendees from Airdrie and other parts of Alberta braved the inclement weather to witness the historic unveiling of the Rizal Monument in Airdrie.

“I wish to invite the Filipinos in Alberta and their Canadian friends to come to Nose Creek Regional Park in Airdrie to visit and enjoy our community’s Rizal Monument,” Consul General Patron told the Filipinos in Alberta.

Source: First Rizal monument in Alberta, Canada unveiled

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Ibbitson: Trudeau’s decision over Quebec’s seats puts him at risk either way

2021/11/02 Leave a comment

Expect government will bend with no opposition from other parties, given precedents of Bills 21 and 96, even if questionable to do so:

When Justin Trudeau returns from his European travels, he will need to decide, and quickly, whether to prevent Quebec from losing a seat in the House of Commons.

Politically, all options are bad for the Prime Minister.

Back in 2011, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government moved to correct the problem of chronic underrepresentation in the House of Commons for the fast-growing provinces of Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario. In the final version of the formula enshrined in the Fair Representation Act, Quebec was also awarded extra seats, to ensure its representation in the House fairly reflected its share of the national population.

As required by law and the Constitution, Elections Canada applied the 2011 formula for its latest calculation of the distribution of seats in Parliament. The results, released two weeks ago, show the House of Commons growing by four seats, from 338 to 342. Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario will receive additional seats. But Quebec will have one seat taken away, reducing its representation from 78 to 77.

Not surprisingly, the Bloc Québécois and the Quebec government are demanding that the province’s representation not diminish, on the grounds that its MPs have a special mandate in the House to speak for and protect Quebec’s culture and language.

The Liberal government has two options. The first is to do nothing and allow Elections Canada to proceed with redistribution by establishing electoral commissions for each province that will redraw riding boundaries based on the latest census data. That process is scheduled to begin in February.

The second option is to introduce a new redistribution formula through legislation. That formula could ensure that Quebec’s seat count does not fall below its current 78 seats, though the province’s relative weight would decline as the House expands in size.

As an alternative, the formula could guarantee that Quebec’s representation never drops below, say, 25 per cent of all seats in the House. That was a provision in the Charlottetown accord of 1992, which was defeated in a referendum.

Any legislation would need to be introduced soon, so that Elections Canada knows whether, when and how to proceed with redistribution. But moving to protect Quebec’s interests will prove contentious.

“There’s risk if he does do it and there’s risk if he doesn’t do it,” Professor Lori Turnbull, director of the School of Public Administration at Dalhousie University, told me. Allowing the existing representation order to stand would anger Quebec voters, who would face a future of steadily weakening influence in Ottawa.

But moving to protect Quebec’s standing in the House would further anger Western voters who believe French Canada’s interests are protected while theirs are ignored.

This is especially true in the wake of the new cabinet announced last week, which weakened Prairie influence and emphasized the fight against climate change over oil-and-gas interests.

When asked how he would address the problem, Benjamin Forest, who researches the political representation of minorities at McGill University, said, “I would take the easy way out and add enough seats” so that Quebec once again has 78 seats in the House.

Many voters complain about sending more and more MPs to Ottawa. But Canada itself is growing, adding a million people every two or three years, mostly through immigration. The House should reflect that growth.

As well, previous federal governments at different times guaranteed smaller provinces a minimum number of seats, resulting in a House of Commons skewed in favour of rural interests. The riding of Cardigan, Prince Edward Island, has a population of just over 36,000; Cypress Hills—Grasslands in Saskatchewan has 68,000. But Vancouver East has 110,000 and the riding of Burlington, in Greater Toronto, has 121,000.

Adding more urban seats would make the House more democratic by diminishing the relative weight of the countryside, and increasing the importance of urban issues, such as transit, over rural, such as dairy supports.

Of course the best solution to Quebec’s declining demographic influence in the House would be for the province to increase its population through immigration. Instead, Premier François Legault has cut back on immigration. So long as that continues, the influence of Quebec must ultimately decline, however much politicians rejig the House of Commons to prevent it.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-trudeaus-decision-over-quebecs-seats-puts-him-at-risk-either-way/

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Canada, Australia embrace more Indians but US passport remains the most coveted

2021/11/02 Leave a comment

Australia highest on per capita basis:

India regained its position as the top country of origin of the newly naturalised citizens of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries in 2019, following a sharp increase in the number of Indians granted citizenship of Canada and Australia. India had lost that position to Mexico in 2017.

More than 1.56 lakh individuals surrendered Indian citizenship for more powerful passports of the OECD countries in the pre-pandemic year, a recent report from the 38-country economic bloc said.

The number of Indians who secured Canadian and Australian citizenship rose 61 percent, faster than the 28 percent rise in the Indians getting citizenship in any OECD country.

Yet, more Indians secured the US passport than the combined total of those who acquired the Canadian or the Australian passport that year. A total of 63,578 Indians became naturalised US citizens in 2019, the highest since 2008 when nearly 66,000 individuals did.

At 31,329, the number of Indians securing Canadian citizenship was the highest since 2006. A large number of highly skilled Indians, particularly techies, rushed to apply for residency in the vast but thinly populated country after the Justin Trudeau government that came to power first in 2015 eased migration rules.

Australia conferred citizenship to 28,470 Indians, perhaps a record number for any year, the latest edition of the International Migration Outlook, published annually by the OECD reported.

The UK was the fourth most sought after passport among Indians but at 14,680, the number of new citizens of Indian origin in Britain was the lowest since 2008.

The OECD data also shows that 40 percent of the 1.56 lakh who surrendered their Indian passports in 2019 had become US citizens, while 20 percent chose Canada, 18 percent Australia and 10 percent the UK.

Despite the large intake of Indians as citizens of the US, they were just 8 percent of all the foreigners who became American citizens that year.

In contrast, Indians were 22 percent of those who gained Australian citizenship and 13 percent of the newly naturalised Canadians.

New Zealand, Italy and Germany were also among the top countries where Indians took up citizenship. Nearly 4,800 Indians became citizens of New Zealand in 2019, the third consecutive year that more than 4,750 Indians acquired the nationality of the island nation in the Pacific Ocean.

About 4,700 became Italians that year but the numbers getting Italian citizenship had halved since 2016. Other OECD countries that granted citizenship to 500-1,000 Indians in 2019 were Sweden, the Netherlands, Portugal and Ireland.

The COVID stop 

The report also showed a sharp rise in the flow of Indian migrants, including students to the UK. About 92,000 Indians moved to the UK in 2019, nearly 50 percent more than in the previous year.

The flow of Indians into the UK has been on the rise since 2017, the year the Theresa May government formally began the country’s exit from the European Union.

In all, 3.94 lakh Indians migrated to OECD nations in 2019. Not surprisingly, the flow of Indians to Canada also gained that year, with 85,600 individuals migrating to the North American country. The US, Germany and Australia also received a large flow of Indian migrants during the year.

China continued to be the top country of origin for international migrants in the OECD, with their numbers rising from 4.30 lakh to 4.66 lakh. Romania was in the third position.

The OECD said that it expected a 30 percent drop in the flow of migrants due to the pandemic in 2020 to about 37 lakh, the lowest since 2003. The data on the flow of migrants to all OECD nations was not available when the report was published.

The impact on permanent migration was estimated to be much higher. It said that there was a sharp drop in all categories of migration—family migration, inter-company transfers, temporary labour and students.

Study permits issued by the US and Canada were estimated to have dropped 70 percent and those by the OECD EU countries by 40 percent.

Source: Canada, Australia embrace more Indians but US passport remains the most coveted

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Dowd: A.I. Is Not A-OK

2021/11/01 Leave a comment

Interesting conversation with Schmidt:

The first time I interviewed Eric Schmidt, a dozen years ago when he was the C.E.O. of Google, I had a simple question about the technology that has grown capable of spying on and monetizing all our movements, opinions, relationships and tastes.

“Friend or foe?” I asked.

“We claim we’re friends,” Schmidt replied coolly.

Now that the former Google executive has a book out Tuesday on “The Age of AI,” written with Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher, I wanted to ask him the same question about A.I.: “Friend or foe?”

“A.I. is imprecise, which means that it can be unreliable as a partner,” he said when we met at his Chelsea office. “It’s dynamic in the sense that it’s changing all the time. It’s emergent and does things that you don’t expect. And, most importantly, it’s capable of learning.

“It will be everywhere. What does an A.I.-enabled best friend look like, especially to a child? What does A.I.-enabled war look like? Does A.I. perceive aspects of reality that we don’t? Is it possible that A.I. will see things that humans cannot comprehend?”

I agree with Elon Musk that when we build A.I. without a kill switch, we are “summoning the demon” and that humans could end up, as Steve Wozniak said, as the family pets. (If we’re lucky.)

Talking about the alarms raised by the likes of Musk and Stephen Hawking, Schmidt said that “they think that by unleashing A.I., eventually, you’ll end up with a robot overlord that’s 10 or 100 or 1,000 times smarter than the humans. My answer is different. I think all the evidence is that these A.I. systems are going to think, not like humans, but they’re going to be very smart. We’re going to have to coexist.”

You don’t think Siri and Alexa are going to kill us one night?

“No,” he said. “But they might become your child’s best friend.”

Opinions on A.I. are wildly divergent. Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality, rolls his eyes at the digerati in Silicon Valley obsessed with the “science-fiction fantasy” of A.I.

“It can sometimes become a giant, false god,” he told me. “You’ve got these nerdy guys who have an awful reputation for how they treat women, who get to be the life creators. ‘You women with your petty little biological wombs can’t stand up to us. We’re making the big life here. We’re the supergods of the future.’”

We have known for a while that Silicon Valley is taking us down the drain. Preposterous claims that once could not have gotten traction — on everything from Democratic pedophilia rings to rigged elections to vaccine conspiracy theories — now spread at the speed of light. Teenage girls can be sent spiraling into depression by the glossy, deceptive world of Instagram, owned by the manipulative and greedy company formerly known as Facebook.

Schmidt said an Oxford student told him, about social media poison, “The union of boredom and anonymity is dangerous.” Especially at the intersection of addiction and envy.

The question of whether we will lose control to A.I. may be passé. Technology is already manipulating us.

Schmidt admits that the lack of foresight among the lords of the cloud about where technology was headed was “foolish.”

“I’ll say, 10 years ago, when I worked really hard on these social networks, maybe this is just naïveté, but we never thought that governments would use them against citizens, like in 2016, with interference from the Russians.

“We didn’t think it would then stitch these special interest groups together with these violently strong belief systems. No one ever discussed it. I don’t want to make the same mistake again with a new foundational technology.”

He said that the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which he chaired earlier this year, concluded that America is still “a little bit ahead of China” in the technology race but China is “overinvesting against us.” The authors write that they are most worried about other countries developing A.I.-facilitated weapons with “substantial destructive potential” that “may be able to adapt and learn well beyond their intended targets.”

“The first thing for us to look at between the U.S. and China is to make sure that there’s no ‘Dr. Strangelove’ scenario, a launch on a warning, to make sure there’s time for human decision making,” he said. “Let’s imagine you’re on a ship in the future and the little computer system says to the captain, ‘You have 24 seconds before you’re dead because the hypersonic missile is coming at you. You need to press this button now.’ You want to trust the A.I., but because of its imprecise nature, what if it makes a mistake?”

I asked if he thought Facebook could leave its troubles behind by changing its name to Meta.

“The problem is, what do you now call FAANG stocks? MAANG?” he said of the biggest tech stocks — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google. “Google changed its name to Alphabet, and yet, Google was still Google.”

And what’s with that creepy metaverse Zuckerberg is trying to lure us into?

“All of the people who talk about metaverses are talking about worlds that are more satisfying than the current world — you’re richer, more handsome, more beautiful, more powerful, faster. So, in some years, people will choose to spend more time with their goggles on in the metaverse. And who gets to set the rules? The world will become more digital than physical. And that’s not necessarily the best thing for human society.”

Schmidt said that his book poses questions that cannot yet be answered.

Unfortunately for us, we won’t know the answers until it is too late.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/30/opinion/eric-schmidt-ai.html

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Mallick: Ban ‘Lord of the Flies’? In the age of Donald Trump, it’s required reading

2021/11/01 Leave a comment

Legitimate critique of excessive wokism, woke bullying and craven public administration. :

“Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!”

It’s a shame that many Ottawa high school students will no longer be able to read murderous quotes like that from the very instructive “Lord of the Flies” in class.

The trouble began when an Ottawa student wrote in her school paper that William Golding’s 1954 novel about white boys stranded on an island turning savage and killing their own, did not reflect what she as “a Black, Jewish, feminist and social justice activist” wished to read.

“I do not need to learn about … how these boys cannot act in a civilized manner to protect one another without desiring power, hierarchy and having a thirst for blood.” And the Ottawa-Carleton school board listened, as have others, banning Golding’s novel and other novels too. 

Breathes there a high school student that doesn’t feel that the world should reflect her personally? It’s part of the maddening sweetness of the teenagers we all were once.

The student didn’t like memorizing Orwell either. But memorization is a gift. As climate change advances, it will give people something to do as they wait in cooling centres or sinkholes or planes stuck in melted tarmac.

I recite F. Scott Fitzgerald (“I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanitarium”). She of course may only have “Do it to Julia! Not me!” or a description of George Orwell eating boiled cod with turnips and enjoying it out of socialist idealism.

I fear for students like her. The novel is at base about bullying. A plane full of children crashes on a tropical island. Their means of survival is a plot that will be re-enacted in every workplace, social justice enclave, airplane flight and Green party meeting she will ever encounter. 

What she seeks, she wrote, is “to learn about why it is important to protect one another and to be allies to those who are less privileged.” But this was precisely what “Lord of the Flies” revealed.

If she wants to read about groups cohering peacefully, in other words novels without plots, the Peppa Pig stories are a go-to. Or those terrific Sally Rooneys about smart women dating inert men. Or Nigel Slater’s “Real Fast Puddings.” Then there’s Margaret Atwood’s “Cat’s Eye” about girl-on-girl terror.

So it’s back to Peppa, really.

I can’t see how she missed the novel’s slide into group madness led by frat-boy Jack and the killing of Simon and his fat, asthmatic, bullied friend Piggy. But then I frequently finish murder mysteries and have no idea who the killer was.

As she wrote, Golding’s boys were all white so perhaps they seemed much of a muchness, fair enough, but blood is blood and by the end Simon and Piggy were simply covered in it, so there’s a plot flag right there.

Every class has such students; what troubles me are the adults who don’t worry about them. Rather they cater to them, a mistake because we’re all living a Lord of the Flies moment.

The Trump years ended with the portly post-president gleefully presiding over the Capitol assault on Jan. 6, a truly rancid Lord of the Flies gang crawling and battering their way into the building.

Think back to Sep. 11, 2001 and the 40 passengers and crew of Fight 93 who realized their hijacked plane was likely aimed at Washington’s Capitol. A random group of people — various Todds, Jeremys, Sandras and Marks — decided to protect the Capitol, seat of the very chambers that 20 years later, a different kind of American would casually invade, hijack and terrorize.

On Flight 93, passengers teamed up and attacked the cockpit, knowing they would all die in minutes. The terrorists, unable to shake them off, flew the plane into the ground, vaporizing everyone.

In today’s Lord of the Flies, which gang would make the better novel, the Saudi terrorists, the American terrorists, or the American passengers? Does modernity make any difference?

We are at this impasse now too. Think of the loud, violent gangs at Trudeau rallies this fall, the shaggy marches of the unmasked and unvaccinated in Toronto, and the hollowing of the Toronto transit system left unsupervised and a magnet for angry unmasked people.

Look at Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole, bullied by his doctrinaire MPs and afraid to tell them to get vaccinated. O’Toole resembles Piggy. I wonder if he knows this.

The Ottawa student wants to study different tales in school, chosen not for their brilliance but for their newness and the diversity of their characters but it puzzles me that she hasn’t suggested anything. 

It has been said that there are only seven basic plots: Overcoming the Monster; Rags to Riches; The Quest; Voyage and Return; Rebirth; Comedy; and Tragedy. Lord of the Flies is the first, its plot eternal. We have many lords, many flies, in our future.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2021/10/30/ban-lord-of-the-flies-in-the-age-of-donald-trump-its-required-reading.html

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Yakabuski: Quebec and France join forces against cancel culture

2021/11/01 Leave a comment

Yakabuski points out the irony given the cancel culture aspects of their policies and the intolerance of Bill 21:

When France’s education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, learned that a francophone Ontario school board had held a book-burning ceremony involving titles banned because of their negative portrayal of Indigenous people, he contacted his Quebec counterpart to commiserate.

Mr. Blanquer, who has been on a mission to turn back the tide of “cancel culture” on French university campuses, was incredulous at the news – which made the pages of the prestigious Paris-based Le Monde – of the Providence school board’s “flame purification” ceremony.

Included among the books incinerated during the ceremony – held in 2019, but which only came to light last month in a Radio-Canada report – were titles from the cartoon collections Tintin, Lucky Luke and Asterix, beloved by generations of young francophones on both sides of the Atlantic.

The result of Mr. Blanquer’s commiserating with Quebec Education Minister Jean-François Roberge was a joint op-ed, published last week in Quebec and France, denouncing the “pernicious influence of a culture of intolerance and erasure” embodied by the book-burning.

“We have a duty to prepare our youth to exercise active, respectful and enlightened citizenship. A citizenship that allows for debate, the opinions of others, the confrontation of ideas and the questioning of all our beliefs,” Mr. Blanquer and Mr. Roberge wrote. “That is why we affirm with force and conviction that public schools, the first line of defence against ignorance and darkness, must be the preferred location for the construction of a common civic project.”

The op-ed was just Mr. Roberge’s opening salvo in his own crusade against wokeism in Quebec public schools. Two days later, the Coalition Avenir Québec minister announced his government would introduce a new “Quebec culture and citizenship” (QCC) course to replace the “ethics and religious culture” (ERC) curriculum now taught in public schools.

The current ERC course was adopted by former premier Jean Charest’s Liberal government in 2008, a decade after Quebec replaced its Catholic and Protestant school boards with linguistic ones. The ERC, which replaced the catechism courses that had long been taught in French Catholic schools, aimed to familiarize primary and secondary school students with the panoply of religions practised in Quebec. But critics have long argued that the course is an affront to modern Quebec’s secularist values.

That is an exaggeration. Even the children of non-believers should understand the influence of religion in the lives of most people, and the role the Catholic faith played in shaping modern Quebec. But the anti-clericalism espoused by francophone intellectuals since the Quiet Revolution has hardened attitudes toward the separation of church and state in Quebec.

The Mouvement laïque québécois (MLQ), an organization dedicated to the “total secularization of the state and public institutions in Quebec,” called the abolition of the ERC course “a breath of fresh air.” The ERC, the MLQ said, has been “an aberration and a disaster on the social level.”

Given its populist leanings, the CAQ government to which Mr. Roberge belongs is not particularly popular in Quebec intellectual circles. But Quebec nationalists and intellectuals have found common ground when it comes to secularism.

Both support Bill 21, though for different reasons. Nationalists see the law that prohibits some public-sector employees from wearing religious symbols as an assertion of Quebeckers’ distinct identity in the face of the multicultural ethos that prevails elsewhere in Canada. Intellectuals see it as protection against the incursion of religion in the public square, which they argue should be a faith-free zone.

The CAQ government’s move to replace the ERC with a new Quebec culture and citizenship course is similarly welcomed by nationalists as a blow to multiculturalism and an affirmation of Quebec’s dominant francophone identity. In a video promoting the new curriculum, Premier François Legault says the new course will lead to “a prouder Quebec.”

Mr. Legault’s re-election in 2022 is about as close as you can get to a sure thing in Canadian politics. And his plan to push ahead with the new course will certainly not hurt his chances.

Still, there is something deeply disturbing about the CAQ’s exploitation of Quebeckers’ cultural insecurity for political gain. It is one thing to express concern about the pernicious effects of cancel culture on democratic debate or the excesses of a multiculturalism that denies the existence of a core national identity. But it is quite another to depict critics of Bill 21 and the new citizenship course as an existential threat to the survival of the Quebec way of life, as Mr. Legault and his ministers do.

It almost makes you wonder whether Mr. Roberge even read his own op-ed.

Source: Opinion: Quebec and France join forces against cancel culture

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Globe editorial: This is a story about race in Canadian politics. And it’s hopeful

2021/11/01 Leave a comment

Agree. Recent federal election largely confirms:

This is not a story about race.

But to understand how it isn’t, we have to talk about how, in another, less successful country, it could be.

In 2016, the census found that 31 per cent the residents of the City of Calgary were immigrants. Thirty-six per cent of the population were members of a visible minority, including 9.5 per cent who were South Asian. The picture is almost exactly the same in Edmonton: 30 per cent of residents are immigrants and 37 per cent are visible minorities, including 9.5 per cent who identify as South Asian.

Two weeks ago, the people of Edmonton and Calgary went to the polls and elected new mayors. Both were born outside of Canada. Jyoti Gondek, Calgary’s top magistrate, was born in England to parents of Punjabi descent and came to this country as a child; Edmonton’s Amarjeet Sohi was born in India and immigrated in his teens. On the census, both would be counted among the roughly one in 10 city residents of South Asian descent.

We bring up race not because it was an issue in the elections of Ms. Gondek and Mr. Sohi, but because it was not. And let us give thanks for that.

In many other countries – less happy, less peaceful countries – the story would have been very different. There, race, religion or ethnicity are the basis for politics. Sectarian divides slice through the possibility of shared citizenship, with lives and politics organized along those lines.

That’s how much of the world is. (Ask an immigrant.) In the worst cases, it results in the failed state of Lebanon, or the violently extinguished state of Yugoslavia, or the Rwanda genocide.

But here’s what we believe can safely be said about the mayoral elections in Calgary and Edmonton: The race of the candidates, their religion (or lack thereof), and their status as first-generation Canadians appear to have been irrelevant to most voters. Maybe not all voters, whether pro or con, but surely most.

Consider: Nine out of 10 voters in Calgary and Edmonton are not of South Asian heritage. Yet Ms. Gondek and Mr. Sohi each won 45 per cent of the vote. That means that most of those who voted for them were from “another” community.

And we put the word “another” in quotation marks because, this being Canada in 2021, most voters don’t see it that way. They weren’t marking their ballots through a prism of race. They didn’t see the winning candidates as coming from some other community, but rather as part of their shared community – Calgarian, Edmontonian, Albertan, Canadian – that transcends where you or your parents came from, where you pray or do not pray, and what colour your skin is.

Canadians are not saints, and Canada is not some magic land where racism never existed. It is not some place where no lines have ever been drawn labelling some people as “us” and others as “them.” Canada has a long history of evolving varieties of sectarian divisions.

But Canada also has a long and accelerating history of expanding the definition of “us,” and extending membership in the shared community to people who, in another place or another time, might have been excluded. For example, until 1954, the mayor of Toronto had always been a Protestant from the Orange Order. But that year, the citizens of Toronto ended all that, electing Nathan Phillips. Phillips was Jewish; nearly all of the city’s residents were not. Most were Protestants. It didn’t matter.

It was a similar story half a century later, in the three mayoral elections won by Naheed Nenshi in Calgary. The vast majority of the people of Calgary are not Ismaili Muslims; it didn’t matter. Overwhelming majorities chose Mr. Nenshi as their representative. And though three-quarters of the residents of Brampton, Ont., are visible minorities, in 2018 they elected Patrick Brown as mayor.

This ability to see beyond differences and biology and faith is something that Canada will need ever more of in its future. Canada is on the road to becoming a majority-minority nation, where no ethnic or racial group is the majority. That’s already the situation in Metro Vancouver and Greater Toronto, and the other big cities are not far behind.

The voting in Calgary and Edmonton is a reminder that this future is hopeful, not ominous. If a Canadian is defined by all that we hold in common, in spite of differences, then everybody’s part of the majority.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-this-is-a-story-about-race-in-canadian-politics-and-its-hopeful/

Filed under Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with , , ,

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