Multicultural Meanderings

Ethnic media election coverage 15-21 September

2019/09/23 Leave a comment

Latest weekly analysis of ethnic media coverage. For the analytical narrative, go to Ethnic media election coverage 15-21 September:

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism Tagged with DiversityVotes.ca, election, Election 2019, ethnic media

I’m Calgary’s Muslim mayor. We can learn from Trudeau’s ‘brownface’ moment.

2019/09/23 Leave a comment

One of the best articles:

When I saw the picture, it was like a sucker punch. But there it was, smack in the middle of the Canadian election: my prime minister, dressed up in some sort of Orientalist “Arabian Nights” get-up, his face and hands darkened, that smile the same today as in the 18-year-old photo.

Let’s dispense with the obvious: Yes, it was a stupid thing to do, as much in 2001 as now. No, he’s not a racist. Yes, he’s done incredible things for pluralism at home and abroad. He’s apologized honestly and acknowledged how his own privilege blinded him to the impact of his actions on others. No, we don’t need to demand more penance from him. Yes, he should have come to this self-awareness much earlier, particularly as a then-29-year-old teacher who also happened to be the son of a former prime minister. No, he shouldn’t resign over this; he deserves to be judged on the totality of his record and whether Canadians believe in his ability to do good in the future.

But this tawdry incident highlights a much more important conversation all Canadians — and citizens of all liberal democracies — need to have.

First, some context.

Justin Trudeau and I are the same age. He was born when his father, Pierre Trudeau, was prime minister, growing up at 24 Sussex Drive, Canada’s version of the White House. I was born six weeks later; my father and pregnant mother having recently immigrated to Canada not long after Trudeau père announced, in a statement to our House of Commons, that multiculturalism would be Canada’s official policy.

Justin’s and my upbringing were quite different, but we both grew up in a Canada that defined itself by opportunity: a place where a poor, first-generation kid could get a great public education, work hard and do well in his career, supported by a community with a stake in his success. Like the son of a well-to-do prime minister, he can even be elected to public office.

When I was elected as Calgary’s mayor in 2010, I suddenly became well known beyond the boundaries of my beloved hometown. It surprised me. I thought people might want to talk about my come-from-behind win, or how a wonky professor with little name recognition beat better-known opponents. But all anyone wanted to talk about was my faith: How did a conservative municipality known for cowboys, rodeos and hosting the 1988 Winter Olympics end up with the first Muslim mayor of a major Western city?

I was surprised. My faith was not an election issue. It rarely came up, and when it did, citizens protested. He grew up here, he’s one of us, they said on call-in shows. We don’t care that he fasts during Ramadan, we care what he thinks about public transportation.

I could have waved those questions away, but I felt there was an important story to tell. A story of Canada as a multicultural utopia, as a place that has long understood that everyone who shares this land deserves dignity and the chance to be the best they can be. I still believe that.

Even in Canada, people of colour (or color, if you prefer) don’t quite live in the same world as others. We sometimes have to work a little harder, we have to prove ourselves a little bit more, we have to put up with occasional irritations. But it’s part of the deal to live and have great lives here. And we’ve got jokes to help us sort awkward moments: Go back to my camel, you say? I don’t have one. It’s 2019! I use a camel-sharing app!

I guarantee you there were people at parties in Calgary and in your town this past Halloween who darkened their faces for costume. Heck, I’ve even seen pictures of people dressed as me (despite my annual public service announcement that “Sexy Mayor” is not an appropriate look). The folks dressed like me are generally fans. They’re certainly not racists. And “brownface” (Is that even a thing?) doesn’t have the moral weight and historical baggage of blackface. Does it?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada with his face and hands painted in what he described as “brownface,” poses with others at an “Arabian Nights” party when he was a 29-year-old teacher at the West Point Grey Academy in Vancouver, in this photo published in the academy’s 2000-2001 yearbook. This image, published in The View yearbook, was obtained by Time. (The View Yearbook/Via Reuters)

Someone who is seen as an ally can still do senseless things, however. Even in my amazing country, we don’t always know who really gets it, and who, despite their best intentions, still isn’t quite there. And in the past half-decade, something has shifted. Here in Canada, the home of the Global Centre for Pluralism, a nation where our innovation and defense ministers both wear turbans, where another minister is a refugee from Afghanistan, and where, during the Syrian refugee crisis, political parties supported taking in more people, something isn’t quite right.

It’s become easier to be careless with our language and comments, both online and in line at the coffee shop. In the run-up to the 2015 federal election, the incumbent government flirted with haters by pledging to ban face veils at citizenship ceremonies and promising to institute a Barbaric Cultural Practices snitch hotline. Canadians, in their way, responded by reporting, My neighbor wears socks with sandals! I saw someone eat Thai food with chopsticks instead of the correct spoon and fork! That government was defeated.

Yet in this year’s election, we have a (hopefully marginal) political party vowing, “Say NO to Mass Immigration” and accusing politicians of promoting sharia law. (Neither of these things exist in Canada.)

Far more egregiously, it’s no longer just slogans or casual individual acts of racism. It’s moved into actual policy. In Quebec, a new law prohibits people who wear conspicuous religious attire from holding certain public-sector jobs, including teachers and police officers.

Jagmeet Singh, a lawyer, is running for prime minister as leader of a national party, but because he wears a turban, could not serve as a judge in Quebec. I, as a Muslim man, could hold any job I want, but under this law, a Muslim woman who covers with a headscarf cannot. Muslim men who wear long beards could claim it’s just a nod to hipster-dom, and be free and clear, but Orthodox Jewish men with the same beard or a yarmulke cannot. Montreal’s mayor can hold any role, but the leader of her opposition, who wears a kippah, cannot. They’ve stood together against the law.

It’s all flagrantly unconstitutional, but the province of Quebec used the “notwithstanding clause,” a constitutional override provision (ironically, like multiculturalism, a gift from the tenure of the first Prime Minster Trudeau) to protect itself from legal challenge.

What’s funny about all of this is that various national leaders have mumbled platitudes about how much they dislike this law, but also haven’t committed to doing anything about it — including the candidate who wears a turban. Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer leans on the notion of “provincial jurisdiction” in a way that echoes of the language of “states’ rights” in the United States.

Even though the federal government could restrict Quebec’s financing or use its legal power to enjoin the provincial legislation, our federal leaders so far haven’t demonstrated the courage to do so. They’re hardly even talking about it. The law is popular in Quebec, and among others in the country, too. In an election year, they must be thinking, why risk losing those votes?

I‘m grateful every day that I’m Canadian — that my parents chose this country on the other side of the world. There’s no better place to have these conversations. But we have to have them.

We cannot stand on moral high ground calling out leaders for offensive things they did, years ago, if we’re not also willing to stand up against the racist and discriminatory behavior that’s right in front of our faces in 2019. We cannot choose our values a la carte when they benefit us — we need to be all in, all the time.

Canada, like any other country, isn’t black and white. It’s many-hued. Sometimes, it’s brown. We’re a welcoming, diverse country, but we recognize that we have work to do. Now, let’s use Justin Trudeau’s old blunders to think about the links between individual action and real justice.

Source: I’m Calgary’s Muslim mayor. We can learn from Trudeau’s ‘brownface’ moment.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with blackface, Naheed Nenshi, PM Trudeau

When Anti-Immigration Meant Keeping Out Black Pioneers

2019/09/23 Leave a comment

Comparable restrictions I believe in Canadian West:

William Brown managed to get across the river safely, finding work in a small rural Illinois community close to the state’s border with Indiana. He would have known of the new anti-immigration laws, but must have been willing to risk breaking them for a better life. But a sheriff named John Watts soon arrested Mr. Brown for making his illegal crossing. When Mr. Brown could not pay the $50 fine the State of Illinois required of him, Sheriff Watts put him in chains on the Lawrence County courthouse steps and tried to sell him at auction to the highest bidder.

This was the 1850s and Mr. Brown, an African-American, was one of many victims of some of the earliest and harshest anti-immigration laws in America — laws created by white people in Midwestern states determined to keep free black people out.

The river William Brown crossed was the Wabash River, which runs along much of the border between Illinois and Mr. Brown’s home state, Indiana. Sheriff Watts was enforcing an 1853 law created by Illinois whites to add teeth to the state’s 1848 Constitution, which barred African-Americans from entering the state. Senator Stephen A. Douglas (the “Little Giant,” best known for his debates with Abraham Lincoln) strongly defended the State Constitution’s ban by arguing in 1850 that without it, Illinois would be filled with “old and decrepit and broken-down negroes” — a version of the “dumping ground” theme that’s been used by white politicians for so long.

In reality, Senator Douglas had arrived as an immigrant from Vermont in 1833, decades after many free African-Americans had helped to settle Illinois. Indeed, there might not have been a state of Illinois for him to move to if African-Americans had not bravely fought in the Wabash River Valley during the War of 1812.

Because Mr. Brown could not pay the $50 fine (and all the costs of his arrest and imprisonment), the law gave Sheriff Watts the right to sell Mr. Brown to the highest bidder to recover the county’s costs.

We know little about William Brown, but we do know that he was a free man. If he had been enslaved, Sheriff Watts would have worked to find his enslaver and return him. The sheriff would have then received a handsome payout by the federal government for upholding the Federal 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, pushed through by a white Southern slaveholding elite intent on trampling the few rights granted by free states to African-Americans. But the primary concern of Illinois whites at that time was not enslaved people entering Illinois; it was the free people who were continuing to thrive and to rise in what had once been the Northwest Territory of the United States.

By 1860 there were more than 330 rural settlements home to propertied African-American farmers in the five states from that territory — Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. This region had seen the nation’s first Great Migration, the movement of tens of thousands of free black pioneers onto this frontier starting just after the American Revolution. There should have been many more settlements. But a majority of whites in those states — whites who had often arrived after African-American pioneers — were doing everything they could to keep free black people out.

Oddly, in the early 1820s Illinois whites were willing to pick up arms and fight for the right of African-Americans to enter Illinois, as long as they were enslaved. It was the fact that Illinois was home to free African-American pioneers that seemed to bother so many of the state’s whites. Those pro-slavery whites were fighting both other whites and free African-American pioneers over whether Illinois should become a slave state.

Things had not always been like this. Before the Louisiana Purchase, before Iowa or Texas, this territory — the United States’ first — was popularly known as “the Great West.” And its rich soil and forested land were highly desired, causing wars, conflicts and even genocide throughout the 1700s as nations fought to gain control of it from its rightful inhabitants, the Native Americans.

Just a few years after the American Revolution, a group of seven white men worked together to write a document that would govern this new frontier — the Northwest Territorial Ordinance of 1787. In it, they included a clause outlawing slavery, making the Northwest Territory the largest region in the New World up to that time to have done so. And they also left out the word “white” in the document, opening up the potential for equal voting rights to all men, regardless of their color. And, as David McCullough showed in his book “The Pioneers,” African-American pioneers to the territory were voting. But when the white representatives to Ohio’s first state constitutional convention gathered in 1802, a majority decided to reverse the Northwest Territorial Ordinance, adding the word “white” to who could vote, stealing voting rights from African-Americans. And whites in every state formed from that territory would follow suit.

Ohio was not the only place to have early free and propertied African-American pioneers who were aware of their rights. African-Americans had been some of the earliest settlers of the Northwest Territorial frontier. Lawrence County, Ill. — where William Brown had been put up for sale in the 1850s — had been home to African-American pioneers before Illinois became a state in 1818. The Morrises, Andersons, Tanns and many other African-American families had been some of the earliest American pioneers in Lawrence County. They had come as propertied free blacks, building Fort Allison along the Wabash River before the War of 1812. They founded the integrated and abolitionist Mariah Creek Baptist Church in the early 1800s, and had fought in the War of 1812 under William Henry Harrison.

But no amount of success, patriotism or pride could protect these African-American pioneers, for these anti-immigration laws were a backlash against a rising and increasingly successful population of propertied African-Americans across the Northwest Territory states.

By 1851 whites in Indiana and Illinois created new state constitutions and passed laws completely barring any further free African-Americans from entering the states they helped to settle and defend. Whites in other Northwest Territory states from Ohio to Michigan passed laws to make those states unwelcoming to African-Americans. There were the notorious “black code bonds,” which required free African-Americans to find whites to sign for their good behavior and sign up or deposit a bond ranging from $500 to $1,000 in the earliest years of the 1800s, a time when a nice 100-acre farm in Massachusetts with a home and barns on it could be purchased for around $1,000. Ohio whites taxed propertied African-Americans for public schools their children were banned from attending, and whites in almost every one of those Northwest Territory states made it impossible for African-Americans to testify against whites in court.

And before each of these prejudiced laws was passed there was a rise in violent hate speech, much of it threatening genocidal violence against free people of African descent in those states. As the Saint Louis University scholar Silvana Siddali points out, this hate speech was overwhelmingly targeted at African-Americans and broadly published in newspapers. Many of the politicians had successful and propertied African-American residents in their districts, yet their hate speech was filled with false and prejudiced claims about the essential laziness and violence of African-Americans.

This hate speech and the subsequent theft of their rights did not go unnoticed or unchallenged. African-Americans pushed back, creating “Colored Conventions” that worked to undo the damage that racist whites had done in their states. In 1844, African-Americans who were gathering in their own political convention in Ohio, published their opening address asserting that “the Declaration of Independence, the American Bill of Rights, the Ordinance of 1787, as well as the Political Creed of every intelligent, generous and patriotic freeman, are clearly violated, nay shamefully desecrated, by that feature of our constitution that renders the color of the skin a qualification for electors.”

Most of these anti-immigration laws were not reversed until well after the Civil War was won — a victory made possible by African-American soldiers from across the Midwest, including William Brown. Mr. Brown survived the State of Illinois’s attempt to steal his freedom, and when it became possible for him to fight he volunteered from Indiana, his home state, to join the Union army, fighting in the terrible “Battle of the Crater” in Petersburg, Va. But even after he and other black soldiers from the Midwest had helped to preserve the Union and end slavery, whites in most of the Midwest still wanted to preserve white supremacy. When African-Americans started to arrive in Southern Illinois during the Civil War, they were described as “a worthless negro population” and “locusts.” And Indiana did not repeal all of the laws against African-American immigration in the state until 1881, 16 years after the end of the Civil War.

Now, as our own government takes a harsher and less humane stand against migrants, we would do well to remember the old anti-immigration laws that destroyed the rights of early patriots and pioneers all in the name of preserving the prosperity and pride of people who considered themselves “white.”

Source: When Anti-Immigration Meant Keeping Out Black Pioneers

Filed under Multiculturalism

Former Liberal adviser rips party over racial insensitivity in government ranks

2019/09/23 Leave a comment

In 2016, I examined staff diversity which was much less than Cabinet or MP diversity Diversity in political backrooms still lacking):

A former adviser in the Liberal government said he wasn’t surprised by photos of Justin Trudeau in blackface makeup because he encountered racially insensitive behaviour while working in the upper ranks of his government.

Omer Aziz said the photos of Trudeau are of a piece with behaviour he saw while working on Parliament Hill with Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s policy team. According to his Linked In profile, Aziz held the job for seven months. He quit in 2018.

“Sometimes a slip of the tongue is not just a slip of the tongue. It’s a slip of the mask,” he said in an interview with CBC Radio’s The House airing today.

“I basically had to leave my dream job because of racist prejudices that went unacknowledged.”

Aziz said that while he worked in the department, he heard staffers referring to certain communities as “ethnic vote banks.” He said he was assigned to “brown files” in the department — files dealing with non-white-majority countries — and said he was subjected to “whitesplaining” by colleagues who assumed he wasn’t aware of certain cultural nuances because of his skin colour.

Trudeau has been forced to answer uncomfortable questions all week after three instances of him wearing brownface or blackface as part of various costumes surfaced in the media.

The images span about a decade and a variety of situations, and show Trudeau in blackface both as a teenager and as an adult.

“What I did was inexcusable and wrong and hurt a lot of people who considered me to be an ally and that was wrong. And I am deeply, deeply sorry,” Trudeau told a crowd in Saskatchewan Thursday.

Trudeau has now publicly apologized twice — but he also has repeatedly declined to state how many times he may have worn blackface. He said he was “wary of being definitive about this because of the recent pictures that came out, I had not remembered.”

Aziz said almost all of his colleagues in the federal government were white and seemed unaware of subtle racist behaviour in the workplace.

“People in power above me were blind to what I was seeing,” he said.

“I felt like (…) I was a character from the movie Get Out, where my reality was kind of warped and distorted. Obviously people are never racist to your face.”

CBC News’s requests for comment from the Prime Minister’s Office and Freeland’s office were forwarded to the Liberal Party.

“When hiring exempt staff across government, the aim is always to identify high-quality candidates that reflect the diversity of Canada and to build more inclusive work environments,” the party statement reads.

Aziz said he tried to share his concerns with Gerry Butts, then the principal secretary to the prime minister, but was ultimately unable to meet with him.

The India trip

Aziz said his decision to leave the Liberal government permitted him to dodge a bullet: he believes he would have been involved in organizing Trudeau’s early 2018 trip to India.

The trip turned into a colossal PR disaster for the prime minister after news emerged that a Sikh extremist had been invited to a reception at the Canadian High Commissioner’s residence — and after he was roundly mocked for appearing in traditional Indian dress.

“The India trip was brownface without the makeup,” Aziz said.

As for the blackface images, Aziz wondered aloud how everyone managed “to miss this for 18 years.”

Aziz said voters can still count on the Liberals to be progressive in areas like climate change and the economy — but they shouldn’t assume Trudeau “at every instance has been on the side of minorities and the powerless.”

“Don’t have any illusions and still pretend that this is a saviour … It’s not true,” he said.

Trudeau also responded to questions about how voters should analyze his actions.

“I certainly hope that they will continue to support us in the work that we’re doing, but they might not,” he said at a media event in Winnipeg Thursday. “And I know that is something that all Canadians get to decide and they get to bring in all sorts of different factors, because every Canadian has a different way of looking at what matters to them.”

If the Liberals form government again, Aziz said he wants to see changes made at the top.

“One thing I’m going to be looking forward to is if they are re-elected, do they diversify at the top, because I’m kind of tired of hearing about people talking about diversity when everyone around them looks the same.”

Source: Former Liberal adviser rips party over racial insensitivity in government ranks

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with Liberal government, Omer Aziz, political staffers

Japanese camp unearthed in North Shore mountains was likely an escape from racism, until internment intervened

2019/09/23 Leave a comment

Interesting part of our history:

Hidden away in British Columbia’s North Shore mountains are the remnants of a Japanese-Canadian logging camp, shrouded by forest and veiled from memory after it was apparently abandoned because of internment during the Second World War.

Since 2004, Vancouver archeologist Bob Muckle has been visiting and excavating the site; almost everything had been swallowed by the forest and has been gradually and carefully uncovered. There are as many questions as answers, still, but Muckle has a theory that it was an oasis of Japanese culture, on the fringe of Vancouver, decades ago, that was heretofore unknown.

Sherri Kajiwara of the Nikkei National Museum in Burnaby, B.C. says there is no record, yet, of anyone remembering living there, or remembering that their ancestors resided there, although there were plenty of Japanese-Canadians in Canada at the time.

“By the 1940s the community was very established and spread across metro Vancouver and the province,” Kajiwara said.

More than 1,000 artifacts have been collected at the site, researchers say.Bob Muckle

Her museum is putting together an exhibit about the history of Japanese-Canadian internment, and one of the main characters is Eikichi Kagetsu, a successful businessman who had logging rights in the area where Muckle found a settlement.

Muckle’s involvement with the camp began as a search for an area where he could teach his Capilano University students about proper excavation. He found one, a logging camp, by the looks of it, since there were bits of saw blades around. But, the excavation soon revealed it “was not really a typical logging camp at all.”

A typical camp, Muckle explained, would have bunk houses and a mess hall for the men working there. This one has 14 locations that were, to Muckle’s eyes, houses. There is also evidence of a shrine, a garden space and a water reservoir system.

“The most significant find is evidence of what may be a Japanese bathhouse,” Muckle noted. “Very few bathhouses have been excavated outside of Japan.”

Though he doesn’t “have the smoking gun yet,” Muckle’s hypothesis about the origin and life of the camp is that Japanese-Canadians moved to the logging camp around 1918, and remained there even after logging activity ceased. He was most recently on-site for several weeks in May and June.

“In the Vancouver area, where we are, in the 1920s and ’30s there was pretty explicit racism against both Chinese and Japanese, so this would’ve been an escape from that.”

Here they lived, with the men commuting into Vancouver for work, Muckle suspects, until February 1942, when they would have left for internment camps, a policy put in place during the Second World War that relocated families from the B.C. coast.

The evidence for the timing, and reason, for the camp’s abandonment, even in the absence of clear artifacts from the 1940s, is that the departure seems to have been reasonably orderly. Everyone there just walked away, leaving behind clocks, watches, pocketknives, dishes and stoves. There are about 1,000 artifacts in total: beer bottles and teapot pieces and evaporated milk cans, suggesting the presence of children.

“I think (internment) explains why we have so many personal items left behind,” Muckle said. “The dishes tend to be in really good condition, which you wouldn’t expect if people were normally abandoning their site.”

And, some items were hidden, such as a valuable stove secreted away off-site and parts of an early-1900s camera that were inside the walls of the bathhouse.

“I’m thinking this is probably my last season there,” he said. “I’m going through the process right now of figuring out what’s going to happen to all the artifacts.”

Certaintly, some of them are going to go to Kajiwara’s museum. For her part, she’s heard from a number of people about the settlement, as it has received more press, including someone from Japan. “It’s really been quite remarkable that the word has gone out sort of far and wide,” she said. “We’re starting to slowly collect names.”

“That whole generation really didn’t talk about the experience for decades and it’s only now, it’s only recently, that the stories have started to be revealed or shared,” she said. “It will be interesting to see if we can track down any of the descendants.”

Source: Japanese camp unearthed in North Shore mountains was likely an escape from racism, until internment intervened

Filed under Historical Recognition, Multiculturalism Tagged with Japanese Canadians, Japanese Internment

Reflections on the Trudeau brown face/black face photos

2019/09/21 Leave a comment

Observing the media frenzy over the past few days over the Trudeau photos, a number of thoughts came to mind:

The focus on what was viewed as hypocrisy, understandably so, given Trudeau’s inclusion and diversity mantra and the Liberal party’s war room tactics in “outing” Conservative candidates for homophobic or racist remarks;
The overall shallowness of the reporting, focussed almost exclusively on the possible political impact, rather than more substantive issues involving racism;
The contrast between media and pundit outrage and more balanced reaction by many visible minority Canadians in talk shows and other reactions; and,
The lack of assessment of the Trudeau government’s record where, as I have analyzed before, is strong with respect to increased diversity (Taking stock of Ottawa’s diversity promises) and its renewal of the Multiculturalism Program including additional funds for data collection and anti-Black racism initiatives.

As noted by many, Trudeau’s apology was in many ways, his first real apology. One can only wonder whether he had adapted a similar approach to the various ethnical lapses (Aga Khan Island holiday, particularly SNC Lavalin) whether the government would be facing the same electoral challenge.

And most pundits, at least at the time of writing, have not done any meaningful comparison between the Trudeau apology for these photos and Scheer’s non-apology for his 2005 speech in Parliament against same sex marriage.

My quick take:

Trudeau responded quickly, with a second and more comprehensive response within 24 hours;
Scheer waited for the better part of a week before responding;
Trudeau recognized what the photos communicated, recognized their impact, expressed regret and indicated his personal views and behaviour have evolved, and made a strong statement against racism;
Scheer spoke in impersonal and legalistic terms that a Conservative government would not reopen same sex marriage but did not indicate his personal views and behaviour had changed;
Both were in their mid-to-late 20s and thus were adults.

Fundamentally, Trudeau’s insensitivity and obliviousness towards these images is balanced by not by his disavowal but more important by the actions the government he leads.

In contrast, Scheer continues to give the impression that personally, he stands by his 2005 speech but accepts the reality that same sex marriage is the law of the land. His absence in Pride events tends to confirm that.

Two media articles that drew my attention:

First, Samana Siddiqui’s Responding to Justin Trudeau’s Brownface: Memories of a Brown-Skinned Canadian:

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is just a few years older than I am, and he grew up in the same Montreal I did in the 1980s. Which is why I can understand the roots of his “brownface” stunt.

For the record, blackface and brownface are wrong. Dressing up and mimicking another race or culture via costume is nothing less than a modern-day minstrel show. It’s not about humor, but about power and arrogance, intentional or not. The mimicked group is rarely the one in control of the accepted narrative about themselves or others.

My elementary school in Montreal was very racially and ethnically diverse. Most of the kids were like me, second-generation Canadians, the children of immigrants to Canada from all over the world. While we had our fights and disagreements, most of the time, epithets and insults based on race, ethnicity, or religion were rarely, if ever, uttered.

That changed once I reached seventh grade in a new school, in another Montreal neighborhood. There, most of the kids were also second-generation Canadians, with one caveat – their roots hailed from a specific European country (I’ll decline to name it). I was now, literally, a brown face in a sea of white. That was the first time I was called a “Paki” in school.

My response to the insult (which had been imported from Britain to Canada to describe brown-skinned South Asian people) was fairly simple. I responded by insulting the name-caller’s ethnic group. It worked. He never insulted me again.

And life moved on.

Did it scar me? Not really. But it made me wonder what had made him call me a “Paki” when a. I was at my locker minding my own business at the time and b. I had never before insulted his ethnic group?

Part of it was because teenage boys can be exceedingly immature. The other part though reflected something deeper.

It was the understanding that such words and mockery were accepted culturally – even if they weren’t officially. Had I gone to my teacher or principal, I have no doubt that the offender would have been forced to apologize. But that didn’t take into account the fact that “Pakis” like me were unknown to my classmate. We were rarely encountered in person, or in the cultural landscape via movies or on television. And when we were, our brown faces, “smelly” food, “funny” clothes, and our parents’ “accents” were a source of derision.

It was a reminder that we can all talk about multiculturalism until we’re blue in the face in Canada – but in the end, the only acceptable setting is white.

The more interesting part of this whole fiasco though is that it was Trudeau’s father, the late Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who pushed for greater multiculturalism, opening up Canada legally and culturally to diversity when he was Prime Minister.

The elder Trudeau declared in 1971, the year of Justin Trudeau’s birth, that Canada would adopt a multicultural policy. Under his leadership, he emphasized that the Government of Canada would recognize and respect diversity in languages, customs, religions, and so on. In 1982, when he was still in power, multiculturalism was recognized by section 27 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

But laws are one thing. Cultural change takes longer. It takes generations.

I’m grateful that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has apologized. I have no doubt that this sudden revelation is also partly political calculation on the part of his opponents in a heated election campaign. In addition, we should keep in mind Trudeau’s overall record as a leader on issues of diversity when understanding this incident.

We can move on from here. But it has to be with the understanding that this is not about face paint or costumes. It’s about power. And if Canada, or any other country for that matter, wants to establish itself as a society committed to justice, equity, and strength through diversity, it cannot do that by creating an imbalance of cultural power – through insulting practices like brownface, blackface, or any other mockery.

Source: Responding to Justin Trudeau’s Brownface: Memories of a Brown-Skinned Canadian.

Secondly, Mark Kingwell’s Memo to Justin: Who you are today is who you were yesterday. His point on Aristotle “what you do is who you are” applies to Trudeau’s persistent instinct to defend, deny and obfuscate but not, I would argue to his political evolution.

After all, the views of most of us do evolve, both individually and collectively as we have seen with respect to gender equality, diversity, same sex marriage and the like:

So this is what we are forced to imagine. You have been invited to a party. There is a stated theme, or maybe it’s just a general fancy-dress affair. You go to the mirror, look at your handsome face and think: Hey, brown makeup! Or you look at your somewhat less handsome face and think: Hey, Nazi uniform!

Is there any species of dumb that’s dumber than donning a racist or fascist costume under cover of a party? Justin Trudeau, once our “It Boy” Prime Minister, is reeling from revelations that he dressed in brownface for an “Arabian Nights” party in 2001. Some may remember Prince Harry’s equally ill-judged decision to favour a brown shirt and swastika for a swanky birthday party back in 2005. What is it about parties? In both cases, you have to wonder: What were these guys thinking? I mean, really – brownface and brown shirt? I’m older than both of them, but even at their respective ages I think I would have known that these were bad, perhaps despicable, choices. Brownface? Brown shirt? Red flags, guys, red flags.

“I take responsibility for my decision to do that,” the PM said this week on the campaign trail. “I should have known better.” He added: “It was something that I didn’t think was racist at the time, but now I recognize it was something racist to do, and I am deeply sorry.” Things got even worse when it was revealed that, in high school, the youthful Justin performed Harry Belafonte’s hit song Day-O while wearing “makeup.”

Let’s be clear. We are not talking, here, about the nasty N-word dialogue in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or the casual disregard shown for black people in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884). In both those cases, and many similar ones, there is an argument that the quoted characters are not identical with the author. Even T.S. Eliot’s avowed anti-Semitism or Enid Blyton’s racism might be contextualized, if never excused, based on the passage of time. But Mr. Trudeau: 2001. Prince Harry: 2005.

We are forced to recall, in the Prime Minister’s case, his justification, faced with accusations of unwanted groping, that “someone else might have experienced that differently and this is part of the reflections that we have to go through.” Memo to Justin: Some of us do our ethical reflections before the fact, not after.

The issues go beyond parties, japes and half-baked apologies. Recently, comedian Shane Gillis had his upcoming contract with Saturday Night Livecancelled because of racist and homophobic jokes he made, all captured on social media. This ignited an enraged counterattack from mostly white, mostly middle-aged comedians who saw it as an example of “cancel culture” – the new right-wing code for what used to be called political correctness.

Never mind that SNL, and especially executive producer Lorne Michaels, can boast no clean sheet when it comes to racist, homophobic and politically craven humour (the show’s kiss-ups to Donald Trump are especially egregious, though maybe balanced by some other gags). When Bill Burr, Jim Jefferies, Rob Schneider and others lamented this contractual decision as “cancelling,” they were just wrong. Wrong, period. There are consequences to actions, whether or not you consider yourself an “edgy” comedian or a handsome fellow with a fine social pedigree.

Some people, lamenting the new vigilance over what public figures say and do, wonder if there is no statute of limitations on bad behaviour. “Sheesh, guys, it was 2001! I was a kid!” In 2001, Justin Trudeau was 29 years old. Shane Gillis was 30 when he recorded the now-infamous podcast. “But I’m a comedian who takes risks.” Again, no. It’s not being overly sensitive or too social-justice warrior or “millennial” to respond: “Sorry, no free pass on that one, now or ever.”

Personally, I’m with Aristotle. The Greek philosopher taught us that your actions are your character. What you do is who you are. There is no escape hatch from that, just a deep and never-ending responsibility. Who you are today is who you were yesterday. We may forgive, but we never forget. Saying you “take responsibility” does not alter the record.

Have you done bad things in your life? Of course you have. So have I. Let’s hope we all exercised better judgment than even contemplating donning dark facial makeup or a swastika – or finessing a charge of sexual harassment. For the rest, the world must decide. Welcome to ethical life, friends.

Source: Memo to Justin: Who you are today is who you were yesterday

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with blackface, Mark Kingwell, PM Trudeau, Samana Siddiqui

USA: Chinese woman pleads guilty in ‘birth tourism’ case

2019/09/20 Leave a comment

While the practice is legal, it was the fraud in visa applications that committed her.

Seems like there may be similar opportunities to examine the practices of birth tourism consultants in Richmond and elsewhere:

A Chinese woman has pleaded guilty in the US to federal charges of running a “birth tourism” scheme for Chinese nationals who paid so their children would be born American citizens.

Dongyuan Li admitted her company assisted wealthy Chinese nationals in getting to the US to give birth.

Ms Li would give clients training on how to bypass US immigration control and hide their pregnancies.

She amassed more than $3m (£2.4m) in wire transfers.

Ms Li, who is due to be sentenced in December, could face up to 15 years in jail.

What was the scheme?

Ms Li admitted that between 2013 and 2015, her company You Win USA Vacation Services would charge Chinese nationals – including government officials – between $40,000 and $80,000 for coaching in how to have a baby in the US.

With that came the benefits of American citizenship.

On its website, the company boasted more than 500 customers. It said that being American was the “most attractive nationality” and it would ensure “priority for jobs in US government”.

Ms Li told clients to initially fly from China to Hawaii due to the belief it would be easier to get past US customs. From there they could fly to Los Angeles where they would be housed in apartments.

She also admitted that the clients were coached on how to get through the US consulate interview in China, including by falsely stating that they were going to stay in the US for two weeks.

In reality, they planned to stay for up to three months to give birth.

What are the charges?

Ms Li pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit immigration fraud and one count of visa fraud.

As part of her plea deal with federal authorities, Ms Li gave up assets including $850,000, her house worth more than $500,000 and several Mercedes Benz cars.

Why was it illegal?

While it is not illegal to visit the US and give birth, making false visa claims is.

Authorities said Ms Li was promoting the benefits of having babies in the US, which would include helping to get family members immigration rights.

US President Donald Trump has talked of revoking birthright citizenship.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49746063

Filed under Birth Tourism, Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with China, USA

Demandes de Legault: Scheer répond un oui partiel à Québec

2019/09/20 Leave a comment

For Temporary Foreign Workers only it appears:

Mardi, le premier ministre François Legault a soumis quatre demandes prioritaires aux chefs fédéraux en campagne. Parmi celles-ci, une demande sur l’immigration.

En campagne à Hamilton mercredi matin, Andrew Scheer a été invité à répondre au désir de Québec qui réclame un plus grand contrôle sur le système d’immigration.

M. Scheer s’est contenté d’exprimer son ouverture pour l’élimination de la duplication des démarches administratives pour les travailleurs étrangers temporaires. Il n’a rien dit du fait que Québec veut décider du nombre de réfugiés et du nombre d’immigrants acceptés pour réunification familiale dans la province. Pas un mot non plus sur l’imposition de tests de français et de connaissance des valeurs québécoises.

« Nous avons toujours dit que nous sommes ouverts à travailler avec le gouvernement du Québec pour donner plus d’autonomie du système d’immigration, s’assurer que le système puisse répondre aux besoins de la province du Québec », a-t-il dit.

Par le passé, le parti, après débat, s’est prononcé contre l’idée du test des valeurs, a fait remarquer un porte-parole de la campagne conservatrice par courriel, à la suite du point de presse du chef.

« À la lecture de la lettre du premier ministre Legault, il semble que le gouvernement du Québec souhaite mettre en place une “évaluation des connaissances des valeurs québécoises”, comme ce qui existe présentement au niveau fédéral. Quand nous aurons vu l’évaluation en question, nous pourrons commenter davantage à ce moment », a ajouté Rudy Husny.

Source: Demandes de Legault: Scheer répond un oui partiel à Québec

Filed under Immigration Tagged with Conservative Party, Quebec, temporary foreign workers

Canada banning Christian demonstrations? How a private member’s bill sprouted fake news

2019/09/20 Leave a comment

Interesting account of the social media trail and actors:

Imagine scrolling through Facebook when you come across this headline: “Canada Moves to Ban Christians from Demonstrating in Public Under New Anti-Hate Proposal.” If you think it reads too shocking and absurd to be true, that’s because it is.

But this exact headline appeared atop a story that was shared more than 16,000 times online since it was published in May, according to social media tool CrowdTangle. The federal government and Justin Trudeau, who is pictured in the story, are not seeking to ban Christians from demonstrating. In fact, the bill the story is based on was introduced in the Ontario legislature, by a Conservative MPP, and never made it past a second reading.

Incorrect and misleading content is common on social media, but it’s not always obvious where it originates. To learn more, CBC News tracked this particular example back through time on social media to uncover where it came from and how it evolved over time.

March 20: Private member’s bill introduced in Ontario

In this case, it all started with a bill. In March, Roman Baber, a freshman member of the Ontario provincial legislature introduced his very first private member’s bill. Had he known how badly the bill would be misconstrued online, he might have chosen something else, he later told CBC News.

“I expected that people would understand what prompted the bill, as a proud member of the Jewish community who’s been subjected to repeated demonstrations at Queen’s Park by certain groups that were clearly promoting hate,” said Baber, Progressive Conservative member for York Centre.

The bill was simple. It sought to ban any demonstrations on the grounds of Queen’s Park, where Ontario’s provincial legislature is located, that promote hate speech or incite violence. Baber said the bill was prompted by previous demonstrations that occurred at the legislature grounds.

“In 2017, we saw a demonstration that called for the shooting of Israelis. We saw a demonstration that called for a bus bombing and murder of innocent civilians,” he said.

The bill went through two readings at Queen’s Park and was punted to the standing committee on justice, where it’s languished since.

March 27: Canadian Jewish News covers story

At first, the bill garnered modest attention online. The Canadian Jewish News ran a straight-forward report on the bill that included an interview with Baber shortly after he first introduced it. It was shared only a handful of times.

But a few weeks after the second reading, the bill drew the attention of LifeSiteNews, a socially-conservative website. The story was shared 212 times, according to CrowdTangle, including to the Yellow Vests Canada Facebook group.

In its story, LifeSiteNews suggested that a bill banning hate speech might be interpreted to include demonstrations like those that opposed updates to the province’s sex education curriculum.

Baber said this isn’t the case, because hate speech is already defined and interpreted by legal precedent.

“The words ‘hate’ and ‘hate-promoting’ have been defined by the courts repeatedly through common law and is enforced in courts routinely,” Baber said. “So it would be a mistake to suggest that the bill expands the realm of hate speech.”

April 24: The Post Millennial invokes ‘free speech’ argument

But the idea stuck around. A few weeks later, on April 24, the Post Millennial posted a story labelled as news that argued the bill could infringe on free speech. The story was, however, clear that the bill was only in Ontario and had not yet moved beyond a second reading. It was shared over 200 times and drew nearly 400 interactions — likes, shares, comments and reactions — on social media, according to CrowdTangle.

May 6: Powerful emotions evoke response on social media

On May 6, a socially conservative women’s group called Real Women of Canada published a news release on the bill calling it “an attack on free speech.” In the release, the group argues that hate speech isn’t clearly defined in Canadian law, and draws on unrelated examples to claim that Christian demonstrations, in particular, could be targeted.

For example, the group pointed to the case of British Columbia’s Trinity Western University, a Christian post-secondary institution that used to require all students sign a covenant that prohibited sex outside of heterosexual marriage. A legal challenge around the covenant and a potential law school at Trinity Western occurred last year, but it had nothing to do with hate speech.

May 9: LifeSiteNews republishes news release

Though this news release itself was not widely shared, three days later it was republished by LifeSiteNews as an opinion piece. That post did better, drawing 5,500 shares and over 8,000 interactions, according to CrowdTangle It also embellished the release with a dramatic image and sensational headline: “Ontario Bill Threatens to Criminalize Christian Speech as ‘Hate.'”

LifeSiteNews published the news release as an opinion piece, drawing 5,500 shares and over 8,000 interactions. (Screengrab/LifeSiteNews)

At this point, the nugget of truth has been nearly entirely obscured by several layers of opinion and misrepresentation. For example, the bill doesn’t specifically cite Christian speech, but this headline suggests it does.

These tactics are used to elicit a strong response from readers and encourage them to share, according to Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher on the Computational Propaganda project at Oxford University.

“People like to consume this kind of content because it’s very emotional, and it gets us feeling certain things: anger, frustration, anxiety, fear,” Bradshaw said. “These are all very powerful emotions that get people sharing and consuming content.”

May 11: Big League Politics publishes sensational inaccuracies

That framing on LifeSiteNews caught the attention of a major U.S. publication known for spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation: Big League Politics. On May 11, the site published a story that cited the LifeSiteNews story heavily.

The headline and image make it seem like Trudeau’s government has introduced legislation that would specifically prohibit Christians from demonstrating anywhere in the country, a far cry from the truth.

While the story provides a few facts, like the fact the bill was introduced in Ontario, much of it is incorrect. For example, in the lead sentence, the writer claimed the bill would “criminalize public displays by Christians deemed hateful to Muslims, the LGBT community and other victim groups designated by the left.”

The disinformation and alarmist headline proved successful: the Big League Politics version of the story was shared more than 16,000 times, drew more than 26,000 interactions and continued to circulate online for over two weeks.

This evolution is a common occurrence. Disinformation is often based on a nugget of truth that gets buried under layers of emotionally-charged language and opinion. Here, that nugget of truth was a private member’s bill introduced in the Ontario legislature. But that fact was gradually churned through an online network of spin until it was unrecognizable in the final product.

At the end of the day, democracy is really hard work. It’s up to us to put in that time and effort to fact check our information, to look at other sources, to look at the other side of the argument and to weigh and debate and discuss.– Samantha Bradshaw, researcher at Oxford University

“That is definitely something that we see often: taking little truths and stretching them, misreporting them or implementing commentary and treating someone’s opinion about what happened as news,” Bradshaw said. “The incremental changes that we see in these stories and these narratives is something very typical of normal disinformation campaigns.”

Bradshaw said even though disinformation is only a small portion of the content online, it can have an outsized impact on our attention. With that in mind, she said it’s partly up to readers to think critically about what they’re reading and sharing online.

“At the end of the day, democracy is really hard work,” Bradshaw said. “It’s up to us to put in that time and effort to fact check our information, to look at other sources, to look at the other side of the argument and to weigh and debate and discuss.”

Source: Canada banning Christian demonstrations? How a private member’s bill sprouted fake news

Filed under Social Media Tagged with Facebook, fake news

TTC commits to using race-based data to eliminate discrimination: ‘Every rider’ should feel ‘safe and respected’

2019/09/20 Leave a comment

Of note:

The TTC says it’s taking steps to combat concerns about racial bias at the agency, including making a commitment to use race-based data to identify and eliminate discrimination, and strengthening its policies for investigating complaints about its transit officers.

The measures are part of ongoing anti-bias efforts the TTC has embraced following two race-based controversies it was forced to grapple with earlier this year: a Star investigation that raised concerns transit officers were disproportionately targeting Black riders for tickets and recording their personal information when they were issued warnings; and a damning city ombudsman report that found serious flaws with the agency’s investigation of three fare inspectors who pinned a Black teen to the ground at a streetcar stop in February 2018.

In a staff report released Wednesday that provides an update on those efforts, the transit agency acknowledged “the public’s concerns regarding racial profiling and anti-Black racism in transit enforcement activities should be taken seriously,” and described taking “proactive” measures to address the issue as vital to “restor(ing) public trust.”

The TTC had already moved to take action in the wake of the Star investigation and ombudsman report, including a review of its policies around the collection of riders’ personal information and creating an agency-wide anti-racism strategy.

The new report, which will be debated at the TTC board meeting Tuesday, adds to those initiatives by making a clear commitment to start collecting and analyzing race-based data to combat discrimination.

Few details were provided about the plan, which is still in development. But it follows the Toronto Police Services Board moving toward what appears to be a similar policy that would have the force document the race of citizens its officers interact with in a broad range of circumstances.

While institutions collecting race-based data about members of the public has been controversial in the past, anti-racism groups have more recently thrown their support behind the idea. They argue that if it can be done while protecting citizens’ privacy and human rights, it can help document and fight discrimination.

Nigel Barriffe, president of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations, argued the TTC collecting comprehensive racial information about its riders would provide data to support the assertion common among many Black transit users that they face discrimination on the system. That in turn would help the TTC develop evidence-based policies to address the problem.

“It takes it from being just anecdotal to being, here’s the hard data that demonstrates that they’re overpoliced, that they’re unfairly targeted when they take the TTC,” he said.

The Star investigation published earlier this year found that since 2008 TTC officers had collected the personal information of more than 40,000 riders who were issued warnings for alleged offences on the transit system, and the numbers suggested a disproportionately high number of them were Black. For years, transit officers used the same forms to collect the information that Toronto police used for “carding,” a practice widely criticized as discriminatory. The TTC kept the data, which could include a rider’s name, address, driver’s licence number, physical appearance, for 20 years.

The Star also found Black riders appeared to be overrepresented in tickets issued to TTC users for fare evasion and other offences.

While acknowledging public concerns about bias, the TTC maintained the transit agency database the Star analyzed hadn’t been recorded in a reliable way and couldn’t be used to draw conclusions. It denied its officers were “carding” riders or discriminating against any group.

The agency discontinued use of police-style forms in March, and stopped collecting personal information from riders not charged with an offence pending a review.

The report says the agency is hiring an unspecified third-party expert to conduct that review, which is aimed at improving and standardizing the TTC’s collection of personal information, and ensuring its data collection policies align with privacy and human rights legislation, according to the report.

The experts will examine the TTC’s historical use of data and develop a “framework for the collection, analysis and retention of race-based data for equity purposes that will eliminate bias within the system.”

Agency staff will report back to the board in early 2020.

The report states that in addition to improving data collection policies, the TTC has taken steps to implement recommendations in the July report from Toronto Ombudsman Susan Opler into fare inspectors’ violent takedown of a Black teen named Reece Maxwell-Crawford along the St. Clair streetcar route last year.

The TTC’s original investigation, released in July 2018, all but completely exonerated the officers involved. But Opler determined the transit agency’s investigator failed to examine evidence of potential racial bias. She also found he wasn’t sufficiently independent from the officers he was tasked with scrutinizing because before taking on the investigator role he’d worked for the transit enforcement unit for more than 10 years and knew many of its members.

The TTC has now appointed an interim investigator “with no previous connection” to the unit, according to the new report. The interim investigator will handle allegations of minor misconduct against fare inspectors, while third-party investigators would be called in for more serious cases.

In the longer term, the TTC plans to establish “a new, independent, dedicated team of internal investigators” to look into allegations against members of the transit enforcement unit.

In addition to pledging to implement all the ombudsman’s recommendations, TTC CEO Rick Leary announced in July the agency would take further steps, including setting up an anti-racism task force, adopting the city’s Action Plan to Confront Anti-Black Racism, reviewing TTC policies using an anti-racism analysis, consulting with affected communities, and providing enhanced anti-bias training to all employees. Those initiatives are ongoing.

In a written statement, TTC Chair Coun. Jaye Robinson (Ward 15, Don Valley West) said that while the agency “has taken tangible steps” to improve its policies, the measures to date are “the beginning of a long and complex process.”

“It is imperative to make (sure) every rider and operator feels safe and respected across the TTC network,” she said.

Source: TTC commits to using race-based data to eliminate discrimination: ‘Every rider’ should feel ‘safe and respected’

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with TTC

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Multicultural Meanderings

Ethnic media election coverage 15-21 September

I’m Calgary’s Muslim mayor. We can learn from Trudeau’s ‘brownface’ moment.

When Anti-Immigration Meant Keeping Out Black Pioneers

Former Liberal adviser rips party over racial insensitivity in government ranks

The India trip

Japanese camp unearthed in North Shore mountains was likely an escape from racism, until internment intervened

Reflections on the Trudeau brown face/black face photos

USA: Chinese woman pleads guilty in ‘birth tourism’ case

What was the scheme?

What are the charges?

Why was it illegal?

Demandes de Legault: Scheer répond un oui partiel à Québec

TTC commits to using race-based data to eliminate discrimination: ‘Every rider’ should feel ‘safe and respected’

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