A reckoning on Black people and marijuana is a long time coming: Paradkar

2018/02/07 Leave a comment

Important aspect with compelling arrest stats:

As the banned substance begins to burgeon into a multi-billion-dollar industry, the once-petty crooks, many of them Black, with the grassroots know-how of how to run the business and who could become contributing members of society, are once again being shut out because they have criminal records.

The government has talked about amnesty for past marijuana crimes that would mean erasure of those records. But it is unlikely to take any action until after legalization — and already, others with money have plunked their grubby fingers in this pie to make more money.

This includes, of course, that shameless hypocrite and former chief of multiple police forces Julian Fantino, who helped passed into law Bill C-10 that included mandatory minimum sentences on people for having as few as six plants.

On Friday, The Canadian Press reported that a group of frustrated lawyers in Toronto is considering a class-action lawsuit against the government to push it into granting cannabis amnesty.

They should just do it.

Some advocates are also seeking an apology.

A reckoning of the unfairness with which anything related to marijuana has been treated is a long time coming.

Even the usage of the word marijuana — which comes from Mexico—came into being during the Prohibition Era to warn off Americans by appealing to their xenophobic sensibilities with the suggestion that it could lead to the intermingling of races.

In Canada, too, marijuana has proven handy as a system of racial control. In July last year, the Star published an analysis of 10 years of Toronto police data — including two years when Fantino was police chief — to show that Black people with no history of criminal convictions were three times more likely to be arrested for possession of small amounts of marijuana than white people.

The users are Black and white at about equal rates, but the people behind bars are disproportionately Black.

More recently, the American experience shows that even in states where the plant is legalized, while overall numbers of arrests have plummeted, Black people are still arrested at higher rates.

Four times higher in Washington, D.C., 10 times higher in Alaska.

From Richard Nixon’s so-called “war on drugs” to Ronald Reagan’s drug war to Bill Clinton’s “tough on crime” laws, the crackdown on drugs has always been an assault on race.

The scholar Michelle Alexander points out in her seminal book The New Jim Crow that Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman recalled that Nixon “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

The Reagan administration created an indelible link between drug abuse and Black people, she wrote in HuffPost. It hired staff whose responsibility it was “to publicize inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores, and drug-related violence.”

Clinton’s policies wrought the highest increase in number of people imprisoned.

But a change was coming. The face of drug users in the public imagination was getting lighter-skinned. Think Breaking Bad. Ozark.

“Changing attitudes and policies became possible in large part because the media was no longer saturated with images of Black and brown drug dealers,” Alexander said at a Drug Policy Reform conference in 2017. “The colour of drug users and dealers got whiter in the public imagination, and so we, as a nation, got nicer.”

Nicer in Canada would mean erasing criminal records without a fight, the flawed structure of the RCMP’s national criminal record database notwithstanding. That database can show whether someone has a record for possessing an illegal drug, but not necessarily which one, according to a report in Global News.

“That means that erasing marijuana possession (or trafficking) records could turn into a painstaking, manual process, involving searches in court and police archives across the country.”

No reason why people imprisoned for petty crimes should pay for the carelessness of those trafficking in power.

via A reckoning on Black people and marijuana is a long time coming | Toronto Star

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Marketed Multiculturalism Makes Canada A Hostile Homeland: Sarah Beech

2018/02/03 Leave a comment

Some valid points but a bit over the top in words and rhetoric, and too general with few concrete and implementable suggestions:

On January 30, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the Government of Canada will officially recognize the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent, which began in 2015 and runs until 2024. The objective of this recognition period is to highlight and celebrate the contributions people of African descent have made to Canada. But, what does that actually mean for black Canadians?

According to Trudeau, “This means learning more about the issues that affect black Canadians, including improving research and data collection, so we can better understand the particular challenges they face.”

In some respects, additional data is needed, but the collecting of more data will not necessarily produce new ways of thinking about historic problems, like anti-black racism.

Overall, Trudeau’s remarks were lackluster, peppered with symbolism to validate Canada’s selected brand of nationalism without explicitly delineating a strategic plan or any course of concrete action. I do not expect that he or his government would have been able to release a 10-point plan, but to make an address without any definitive next steps is futile in the fight against anti-black racism. His speech, the topic and the timing (two days before Black History Month, and three years late,) appear contrived and symptomatic of marketed multiculturalism.

Marketed multiculturalism occurs when racial and cultural diversity are used by social, political and economic discourses to validate state sponsored messages, amplified by news media, that Canada is a post-racial multicultural society. This marketed myth preserves the status quo, tokenizes racialized people and obfuscates the existence of racism and anti-black racism in this nation.

Within the marketed multicultural framework, when an acknowledgement of racism is made by institutions responsible for the systemic oppression of racialized people, the surreptitious ways in which racism operates become more nuanced. The prime minister’s announcement was a representation of this phenomenon. The particulars of his speech reinforced multiculturalism in Canada more than they declared a commitment to combatting anti-black racism. While the two are not mutually exclusive, in order for either to be fully realized the commitment has to be more than just promised.

For multiculturalism to be legitimately realized in Canada, the policy needs to go beyond the page. Acknowledgements need to be met with action. Cultural inclusion, equity and other principles upon which authentic multicultural ideology is premised must not conflate performance with progress. The absence of this distinction makes Canada a hostile homeland for black Canadians, Indigenous people, racialized immigrants and other people of colour.

As politicians make (more) policy, they both have a propensity to succumb to the effects of marketed multiculturalism, where acknowledgement and accountability are systemically destined to never meet within the status quo. While accountability is not impossible, it does require all Canadians to interrupt the political performance, forgo the politeness and promote political progress for racialized people in Canada.

via Marketed Multiculturalism Makes Canada A Hostile Homeland

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ICYMI – Black job seekers have harder time finding retail and service work than their white counterparts, study suggests | Toronto Star

2018/01/10 Leave a comment

Interesting study:

Black applicants may have a harder time finding an entry level service or retail job in Toronto than white applicants with a criminal record, a new study has found.

For a city that claims to be multicultural, the results were “shocking,” said Janelle Douthwright, the study’s author, who recently graduated with a Masters of Arts in Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies from the University of Toronto.

Douthwright read a similar study from Milwaukee, Wis., during her undergraduate courses and she was “floored” by the findings.

“I thought there was no way this would be true here in Toronto,” she said.

She pursued her graduate studies to find out.

Douthwright created four fictional female applicants and submitted their resumes for entry level service and retail positions in Toronto over the summer.

She gave two of the applicants Black sounding names — Khadija Nzeogwu and Tameeka Okwabi — and gave one a criminal record. The Black applicants also listed participation in a Black or African student association on their resumes.

She gave the two other applicants white sounding names — Beth Elliot and Katie Foster — and also gave one of them a criminal record. The candidates with criminal records indicated in their cover letters that they had been convicted of summary offences, which are often less serious crimes.

 

Both Black applicants applied to the same 64 jobs and the white applicants applied to another 64 jobs.

Douthwright explained that she didn’t submit all four applications to the same jobs because the applications for the two candidates with criminal records and the two applicants without criminal records were almost identical except for the elements she used to indicate race, so they might have aroused suspicions among the employers if they were all submitted for the same jobs.

Though the resumes were nearly identical — each applicant had a high school education and experience working as a hostess and retail sales associate — the white applicant who didn’t have a criminal record received the most callbacks by far.

 

Of the 64 applications, the white applicant with no criminal record received 20 callbacks, a callback rate of 31.3 per cent. The white applicant with a criminal record received 12 callbacks, a callback rate of 18.8 per cent.

The Black applicant with no criminal record, meanwhile, received seven callbacks, a rate of 10.9 per cent. The Black applicant with a criminal record received just one callback out of 64 applications, a rate of 1.6 per cent.

Lorne Foster, a professor in the Department of Equity Studies at York University said Douthwright’s study bolsters the thesis that “the workplace is discriminatory on a covert level.”

“We have a number of acts that protect us against discrimination and many people think that because of that strong infrastructure discrimination is gone,” he said.

That’s not the case. “Implicit” or unconscious bias is a persistent issue.

“All of these implicit biases are automatic, they’re ambivalent, they’re ambiguous, and they’re much more dangerous than the old-fashioned prejudices and discrimination that used to exist because they go undetected but they have an equally destructive impact on people’s lives,” Foster said.

“It’s an invisible and tasteless poison and it’s difficult to eliminate.”

Individual employers, he said, should take a proactive approach to ensure their hiring practices are inclusive or at least adhering to the human rights code by testing and challenging their processes to uncover any hidden prejudices.

He pointed to the Windsor Police Service, who shifted their hiring practices when they discovered their existing process was excluding women, as an example.

They were one of the first services to do a demographic scan of who works for them, said Foster, who worked on a human rights review of the service.

Through that process they realized there was a “dearth” of female officers. They realized that the original process, which involved a number of physical tests “where there was all this male testosterone flying around,” was inhibiting women from attending the session.

In response they organized a series of targeted recruitment sessions and were able to hire five new women at the end of that process, Foster said.

“We all need to be vigilant about our thoughts about other people, our hidden biases and images of them,” he said.

via Black job seekers have harder time finding retail and service work than their white counterparts, study suggests | Toronto Star

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Racist cyberattacks at U of T highlight barriers to addressing anti-Blackness: Shree Paradkar

2017/12/06 Leave a comment

Good long read by Paradkar on the ongoing use of the n-word among some at UofT:

Justice Huyer of BSA said, “There is a list of penalties (in the code of student conduct) that was not created by us. We demand they be upheld. That’s what is acceptable for us. And going forward we will accept nothing but a safe space for Black people on campus and to do better in terms of dealing with cases of racism.”

An adequate space where Black students can feel supported is one of the other demands of the BSA, which is also seeking funding toward an anti-Black racism campaign and for the National Society of Black Engineers program, which has no physical space at all. Its members are contactable only by email, Huyer said.

“We have LGBTQ positive spaces that have signs and invitations,” she said. “We have a First Nations House for Indigenous students to come together.

“But the Black Students’ Association, we have the third-largest student association on campus. We have a cubicle that is semi-private with glass windows in a basement that can hold approximately five people and we serve hundreds.”

The students say when they tried to raise the other issues at the meeting, the faculty didn’t engage with them. “We were just met with blanks stares. And kind of silence,” said Mark.

Then the faculty suggested another meeting, a move Mark sees as a “derailing tactic” to tire them out.

“There certainly have been discussions around (office) space issues for Black students,” Welsh said. “I think these are things we are talking about right now.”

It’s past time to still be in the discussion phase of these changes. And the university could extend some of its own solutions used for other marginalized groups.

At an orientation for international students on campus, the complainant who is anonymous, says, “We were taught about how the university is an LGBTQ-friendly space and we were made very aware of the fact that we needed to use neutral pronouns, that we needed to not be transphobic, not be queer phobic because a lot of our backgrounds are countries where homophobia is unfortunately the culture.

“There shouldn’t be a reason they can’t do that as well with anti-Blackness,” she said.

There shouldn’t be a reason they can’t do that with all students. An Asian Canadian, a South Asian Canadian and a white Canadian were involved in the N-word and digital Blackface messages, she said.

“We know anti-Black racism exists on our campuses and I know there is more that we can do to address it,” said Welsh. “We need to continue to listen — and hear — what are the concerns of our students, our faculty and our staff.”

“More than anything else, students are saying, we want to see change,” said Bain.

“We’re asking for something fundamental, something concrete. We want to see the institution itself start looking at the way it functions on a day-to-day basis.”

via Racist cyberattacks at U of T highlight barriers to addressing anti-Blackness | Toronto Star

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Black people awaiting trial in Ontario jails spend longer in custody than white people

2017/10/23 Leave a comment

Good data-based analysis and discussion on the factors behind the data:

Black people in Canada’s most populous province spent longer behind bars awaiting trial than white people charged with many of the same categories of crimes in each of the past five years, according to data obtained by Reuters.

Between April 2015 and April 2016 — the most recent period in which data is available — black people awaiting trial in Ontario jails were there longer, on average, than white people charged with the same crime in 11 of 16 offence categories Reuters examined. There were approximately 6,000 black people and nearly 26,000 white people remanded to pre-trial detention during the period.

The data showed similar patterns in the four prior years.

Among the categories examined, black people spent almost twice as long in remand in 2015-2016 for weapons offences, equivalent to an additional 38 days. They also spent 46 per cent longer for serious violent offences and 36 per cent longer on charges of obstructing justice.

In three categories, white people awaiting trial were held longer in remand during the same period. Those included drug possession, theft and traffic offences. In two categories, the difference was 1 per cent or less.

The data also showed black people arrested and held in custody between 2011 and 2016 were more likely than white people to spend more than a year in pre-trial detention.

Reuters obtained the previously unreported data through access-to-information requests from Ontario, which asks inmates to indicate their race when they enter jail. Other provinces either do not collect this data or categorize it differently.

A spokesperson for Ontario Attorney General Yasir Naqvi said the province “takes systemic racism seriously and is working to address racial inequities,” but declined to comment on the data. The Ontario Crown Attorneys’ Association, which represents the province’s prosecutors, and the Association of Justices of the Peace, which represents the people who decide most of Ontario’s bail cases, declined to comment.

More than a dozen defence lawyers as well as prosecutors, criminologists, and a judge interviewed by Reuters said shortcomings in Canada’s bail system appeared to play a role in the racial disparities shown in the data.

Unlike the United States, Canada virtually eliminated cash bail almost half a century ago. Instead, courts often require prisoners awaiting trial to secure a surety, meaning a relative or close friend who can appear in court and subsequently monitor them.

A surety needs assets to pledge, a crime-free record and, often, a home where the accused person can live until the case is complete. A surety cannot represent more than one defendant at a time.

Current and former prosecutors interviewed for this story said securing a surety can be onerous and the requirement is perhaps relied upon too often; but some said sureties remain the best way to protect the public and ensure defendants show up for trial.

Harder on the poor

Critics of the system say the poor are less likely than middle-class or wealthy people to have connections to provide the assets to pledge or housing to act as a surety. They add that this has an outsized impact on minorities, who are over-represented among Canada’s poor.

“Surety is a huge issue in Ontario,” said Nicole Myers, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. “If you are from a marginalized community or a criminalized community, it can be very difficult to find a surety the court deems appropriate.”

The data did not take into account specifics of each case, the person’s criminal record, the frequency of plea deals, whether the person had a bail hearing and why bail may have been denied.

Reuters focused on offences with the largest pre-trial populations when comparing the average periods in remand, to minimize the impact of outliers. Inmates charged in multiple offence categories were counted in only the more serious one; multiple charges could affect someone’s chances of getting bail.

Studies, including one published last year by the Ottawa police, have found Ontario’s black communities are more heavily policed than white ones.

Source: Black people awaiting trial in Ontario jails spend longer in custody than white people – Toronto – CBC News

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Does Ontario’s Black Youth Action Plan do enough? – Melayna Williams

2017/10/18 Leave a comment

The paragraphs on data collection, part of Ontario’s Anti-Racism Strategic Plan are key (the question of enough is more rhetorical as governments have to balance priorities, and activists will never admit that there is “enough”):

Indeed, a conversation about Black youth in Ontario cannot be viewed in isolation. The layers of oppression that characterize a system that fails to serve Black youth is a failure of many systems that often work in conjunction: our education system, justice system, and child welfare system. That consideration is bolstered a timely report recently released by the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent on its Mission to Canada. While the report’s buzziest recommendation may have been its suggestion for the federal government to consider paying reparations to African Canadians and apologize for past injustices and slavery, it also offered insight into the shortcomings of Ontario’s plan.

For one thing, the working group flagged the lack of nationwide data collection that’s disaggregated by race, colour, ethnic background, nation of origin, and other identities, something that the racial justice community in Canada has long been lobbying for. While activists and citizens living in neighbourhoods consistently targeted by law enforcement are instinctually aware of realities like carding, educational streaming and over-incarceration without statistics, a lack of data often makes it easy to ignore or disbelieve realities of oppression and inequality. Data is raw policy-driven proof that is indisputable, and simply helps to create better policy.

“Lack of disaggregated data obscures the degrees of disparity and in this case, highlights the inequities that we noticed in the treatment and specific human rights concerns of African Canadians,” says Ahmed Reid, a member of the UN Human Rights Council and one of the five independent experts on the working group who visited and met with groups in Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Halifax. “We hope the government will take it on board; Canada has a serious lack of race-based data.”

The report also noted issues around racial profiling, citing research on carding and street checks from York University and the Ontario Ombudsman. It flags the “excessive use of force and killings by the police, especially in response to cases involving vulnerable people of African descent, who are mentally ill or otherwise in crisis,” and the working group calls for a trained mental health professional to be on the ground when police are called to a scene. “We looked at interactions and noticed where you see an African Canadian being killed by law enforcement, oftentimes you will read this person had a mental problem,” says Reid.

The link between deficiency of police accountability for killing Black people cannot be separated from the failure by governments to collect and analyze the data. The report notes that Ontario’s police watchdog, the Toronto Police and the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services do not collect race-based statistics on fatal police incidents; Statistics Canada and the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics only track fatal police shootings if an officer is criminally charged, and doesn’t track data on race.

Also, the compounding of issues that Black women confront—which also affects their children and families—have a wide-ranging effect on the Black community in Canada. An understanding of intersectionality can go a long way in addressing the unique issues Black youth face by contextualizing not only their circumstances, but their caregivers.

“Every city that we went to, we realized that people understood the racialization of the issues, but the feminization understanding was stark from our vantage point,” says Reid. “We hope the provinces deal with issues of intersectionality—this goes back to disaggregated data—this is where you can identify disparities and issues, as it relates to education, housing, and other issues.”

The report cites the alarming rates of Black child apprehension by child welfare agencies across the country, stating that 41.8 per cent of the children and youth in the care of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto are of African descent, despite Black Canadians making up only 6.9 per cent of Toronto’s population and just 8 per cent of the city’s population is under the age of 18. These are the same youth that Ontario’s action plan seeks to lift up. If the state lacks the cultural competency to support and trust Black women in building and sustaining their families, how can communities have faith that the government has the tools to encourage Black youth to succeed?

The Ontario Black Youth Action Plan is an important step in recognizing the unique barriers faced by Black youth. But it remains to be seen if the provinces and the federal government will divest in the systemic barriers that manifest institutionalized anti-Black racism; without that, plans, strategies and consultations will continue to fail in achieving real change for Black Canadians.

Source: Does Ontario’s Black Youth Action Plan do enough? – Macleans.ca

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New head of Peel school board vows to support marginalized students

2017/09/06 Leave a comment

Good set of initiatives, will be interesting to see how they work out through the ongoing evaluation planned:

“Teaching is very much about meeting students halfway through understanding and empathy,” he said. “And some of our students need more from us. They need us to identify, understand, minimize and eliminate the marginalization they experience so they can rise.”

That includes Black, LGBTQ and Indigenous students, and those who live in poverty, he said.

It was Joshua’s first opportunity to introduce himself at the annual back-to-school kickoff held by the Peel board. But it wasn’t long before he was sharing the stage.

…The voices of students who are struggling or feel marginalized “are sometimes difficult to hear,” he said in his remarks. “Our backs go up. We think, ‘have I said this to a student?’ Our discomfort should lead to self-reflection.”

Those voices also underscore the need for more training to help staff meet the diverse needs of the children and youth they teach. In a survey last year, mental health was an area staff requested more help with, he noted. And additional training will be provided to help equip them with strategies to support students with anxiety and other conditions.

In the past year, the board has announced initiatives to address the needs of Black students after surveys revealed many felt excluded, subject to suspicion and harsher discipline, and that they faced lower expectations for careers and university and were streamed into courses below their abilities.

In response, the board presented a plan starting with mandatory bias and anti-racism training for all staff, which begins this fall. It also pledged to revise curriculum to include the history and experiences of Black Canadians throughout, and to create mentoring programs aimed at getting more Black students involved in taking on leadership roles.

It committed to collecting race-based statistics at a time when boards across the province are being encouraged to take that step.

Peel’s first student census to provide that information is expected to be completed by December 2018.

Its first workforce census earlier this year found that while visible minorities make up more than half of Peel Region, only about a quarter of staff and teachers at the board identify as “racialized.”

Joshua says Peel’s 153,000 students need to see themselves reflected in the people who teach them and what they learn in their classrooms.

“If students see themselves reflected in the curriculum, if they believe their identities are validated and their narratives are included they will be engaged,” he told staff last week.

He said the board will be working with York University professor Carl James to measure the impact of the steps it is taking and what more should be done.

“I’m encouraged with the conversations we’ve had, and the fact the board has had these discussions with the community,” said James, who last spring published a major study on the barriers faced by Black students in the GTA.

“They’ve put in place a number of processes that I think should bode well,” he said in an interview, adding that it has the potential to become a model for other boards.

Source: New head of Peel school board vows to support marginalized students | Toronto Star

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Get ready — Toronto’s next wave of Black voices will be more urgent, strident and radical: James

2017/07/25 Leave a comment

More analysis of the Black Experience Project and potential implications:

Astonishingly, half of Black youths aged 16 to 24 identify racism as the greatest challenge facing the Black community. These are kids born here. In 2011, for the first time, the majority of young Black adults in the GTA were Canadian-born, outnumbering those born in the islands. But instead of building security on top of their parent’s angst, they report anxiety beyond that of their elders.

And still you wonder why Black Lives Matter has such resonance.

Hundreds filled the auditorium of the downtown Y on Wednesday night to receive the report, six years in the making. Black folk interviewed themselves, in depth, 250 questions over two or more hours, each posed to more than 1,500 respondents in the GTA, buttressed by the polling expertise of the Environics Institute.

Findings? No surprises here. The gathering had a vibe of self-prescribed group therapy where victims comfort each other with nodding heads and sighs that breathe, “the story of my life.”

Validation is good, one woman said, providing feedback. “Now I know it’s not just me; I’m not crazy,” she said.

Another summed up the daily toll of racism encountered in a society steeped in the ethos of colonized and colonizer. “It drains you,” she said.

Then she asked the tough question. “How are you getting this information in front of the people who need to hear — so it’s not just us talking to ourselves, telling us what we already know?”

Almost 40 years ago when I took pictures and wrote stories for Contrast Newspaper, the parade of headlines had a numbing sameness: Man beaten by police. Mother says school discriminates. Youth says racism kept him from job.

In the 1980s when I joined with Toronto Star colleague Leslie Papp to examine life in Metro Toronto for Black folk compared with whites, little had changed. In daily interactions large and small, Black folk endured the slings and arrows of outrageous racism.

In 2002 the Star unleashed its study on racial profiling, Black pain and suffering finally received an official stamp of institutional and scientific approval. No one who was serious could deny the reality anymore. Black people were being targeted, harassed, arrested, imprisoned and victimized at a rate three to four times their white neighbours — not because of wanton crimes but for the same misdemeanor and behavior that left white citizens free of censure.

When the Star verified in 2010 what Black youths complained about from my Contrast days — that they are systematically watched, targeted, surveilled, had their movements recorded and “carded” as a matter of police policy — one would have thought the jig was up.

But no, the racism deniers only got bolder and intransigent.

Police chiefs and mayors and citizens defended the most outrageous violation of the human and civil rights of its Black citizens — in the name of a safety no one could identify or specify.

I sat at a police services board meeting and watched my mayor support carding — immediately after Black and white citizens begged the board to please, stop, in the name of God or justice. Former metro councillor Bev Salmon was in tears. Former police board member Roy Williams was near depressed. Desmond Cole renounced his journalism credentials and attempted to shame the bastards into doing the right thing. And they sat there unmoved.

I wept that day — at police headquarters.

I wept many other nights that year as I watched the systematic de-humanization of Black people, across America and the globe.

Why do we matter so little?

Fowzia Duale Virtue, one of the presenters Wednesday night, in a moment of revelation, put her finger on the trigger:

“I’ve been Black in a lot of places in the world. I’ve lived on four continents, lived in 22 countries” and encountered racism “so overt that I didn’t want to spend another” dollar in that place. And she’s experienced the “refreshing welcome of humanity in places without the history of colonization.”

Right here, Black response evolved into Black Lives Matter (BLM) — young, accented in Canadian lilt and vocabulary. Where Dudley Laws and Charles Roach and Black Action Defence Committee (BAD-C) once roamed, BLM occupies. The youths seem more strident, more forceful, direct and impatient and radical.

And some GTA teacher posted or retweeted the sentiment that says BLM is our local terrorist group.

Dude! You should be ecstatic. The alternative will be unrecognizable — more combustible and radical and urgent and disruptive than the 2017 version of BLM.

Consider that the majority of young Black adults is now Canadian born. They have more white friends and connections than their immigrant parents. One might expect their reported experiences in Toronto society would leave them with a more hopeful, less victimized existence. Yet this latest report says:

“Young Black Canadian-born adults are more likely to identify racism as an obstacle they face; more likely to say they experience some forms of unfair treatment because they are Black; and more likely to be adversely affected by these experiences. It appears, therefore, that young Black adults are more impatient with the failure of Canadian society to deliver on the country’s promise of equality.”

That’s what should bother us. BAD-C leads to BLM. What will BLM morph into, if current conditions persist?

Carding had to go because it was just too odious. The disrespect so obvious that regular middle-class folk, Black and white, could see its devilish design. But the racism that’s part of our DNA is so much harder to erase.

Black people have shown they won’t stop pushing for equality. Toronto’s next wave of Black voices will be more urgent, strident, boisterous and radical. You can count on that.

Malcolm X talked about the ballot or the bullet, even as Martin Luther King marched in non-violent protest. One day, the idea of Black Lives Matter as an incendiary terrorist group will be as absurd as calling the Black Action Defense Committee dangerous. Current requests will pale in the face of future demands.

“We are just like everyone else,” Virtue said Wednesday, her form steady, poised, articulate and resolute. “We will fight and demand that our humanity is respected and honoured and received.”

We won’t be able to send these kids home — back to Africa or Jamaica. They are home. What too many of them are telling us — if we open our ears and hearts — is that our beloved Toronto doesn’t feel like home.

We have been warned.

Source: Get ready — Toronto’s next wave of Black voices will be more urgent, strident and radical: James | Toronto Star

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Groundbreaking project explores Black experience in the GTA

2017/07/21 Leave a comment

Good detailed coverage in the Star and Globe (not much if anything in the Sun):

Whenever he is asked about his racial identity, Carl James always says “Black” instead of Antiguan, especially in Canada, where race is often defined by skin colour.

But there is more to the York University education professor’s preferred response to the question.

“I generally see myself as a Black person who happens to be from the Caribbean,” said James, who came to Toronto in the 1970s as a university student.

“It’s the politics about being Black that we are thinking in skin-colour terms. That’s the way we have come to define and see ourselves in our struggles.”

He is not alone in feeling that way.

According to the Black Experience Project, a groundbreaking survey of 1,504 self-identified Black individuals in Greater Toronto, 53 per cent of the participants identified themselves as Black regardless of their heritage, country of origin, and ethnocultural and other identities.

The participants were sampled to represent the population across census tracts, taking into account age, gender household income and ethnic/cultural backgrounds.

The study led by the Environics Institute, released Wednesday, posed 250 questions to participants about their daily experiences as Black people in the GTA. Most interviews were conducted in person and each took between 90 to 120 minutes.

“What struck me is how the experience of the Black community is so similar,” said Marva Wisdom, the project’s director of outreach engagement, whose family moved here from Jamaica 40 years ago.

“Being Black is an important identity for us despite our diversity. It is our shared experiences that help bind us together.”

Black people make up 400,000, or 7 per cent, of Greater Toronto’s population and the community has more than tripled in size over the last three decades.

Until 2011, young Black adults living in GTA were much more likely to be born in the Caribbean than in Canada, but the trend has reversed. Black youth today are twice as likely to be born in Canada than in the Caribbean, while those from Africa have been on the rise.

While people with Caribbean heritage make up 55 per cent of GTA’s Black population, those with African origins now account for 31 per cent of the community, with the rest being a mix of both and/or with other ethnicities.

The study also found:

  • Two-thirds of survey participants said they frequently or occasionally experience racism and discrimination because they are Black;
  • Eight in 10 reported experiencing one of several forms of day-to-day “microaggression” such as having others expect their work to be inferior or being treated in a condescending or superficial way;
  • Although those with lower incomes are affected more intensively by these incidents, when it comes to getting randomly stopped in public by the police, those in the higher socio-economic stratum are not immune;
  • About four respondents in 10 said they felt accepted by their teachers “only sometimes” or “never”;
  • One-third identified challenges in the workplace linked to being Black, whether those involved explicit racism or discrimination, or an uncomfortable workplace culture in which they do not feel they are treated professionally accepted.

“Teenagers growing up feel they’re experiencing all these things on their own. You feel you have to work hard to prove Blackness is a positive thing. Now we can confirm and validate our experiences with data,” Wisdom said.

“There have been incremental changes, but things haven’t changed that much, either.”

Source: Groundbreaking project explores Black experience in the GTA | Toronto Star, Black Experience Project a heart-rending snapshot of Black lives in Toronto: Paradkar

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Carl James, an education professor at York University and one of the researchers behind the study, explains the lasting effect frequent police interactions has on the black population as a whole and how wealth and education offer little protection against profiling.

Half the black people you surveyed said they’ve been stopped by police in public but that number surges to 80 per cent when it comes to black males between 25 and 44. What’s behind the targeting of this demographic?

I think it has to do with how black males are thought about in society. These stereotypes operate to influence the relationship we’re going to have with the police, with teachers, with our neighbours. The sense [police] have of these people is that they are probably up to no good, probably mischief makers. In order to prevent any of those things that might take place, let us take pre-emptive action.

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What’s the effect of having so many of these interactions with police?

One youth sent me an e-mail where he talked about going home at 11:30 and police stopped him and searched him and in the process roughed him up. We then think we can’t be out at 11 at night or drive a nice car or live our lives. It affects how we might trust police or a teacher.

We’ve seen a lot of reports in the past couple of months prepared by judges or human-rights organizations that look at policing and the recommendations are always the same: collecting race-based data, providing implicit bias training to police. Are these the right solutions?

I think collecting the data is absolutely important and critical but what we do with it is important afterward. Even though the data might be there, in a society where institutional racism exists, people might not believe the evidence because that’s not their personal experience.

With personnel training, I’m not sure it helps unless people start thinking about how they’re complicit, and also responsible for working at the issues, instead of, “I got some training. Black people aren’t exactly all what I thought.” I think we need a deliberate attempt coming from federal policies and programs.

We need different representations in media. It’s not just when we hear about issues related to blacks that we get a black person on the radio. If a personal story is the only way that the larger society can be able to respect and understand and get to know the black person, I think that’s a very sad situation.

Your results show that black people from the GTA from all class backgrounds had negative interactions with police. Your social standing, your education, it can’t really protect you. Was that surprising?

No. If you’re a doctor, a lawyer, a professional, the fact is, outside of those contexts, you’re seen as who we construct you to be. We have to shift the thinking, shift the ideas to challenge the stereotypes.

You have a Ph.D. You’re a faculty chair at York University. How does that have an effect on your experience being black in this city?

There are assumptions of what my research might be about. Assumptions I might be biased based on how I come to my research. The assumptions of how I might teach or perceive some students. We all are marinated in the same stew of stereotypes and we’re going to bring that to the world and interactions we’re going to have.

Eighty per cent of the people you surveyed said that they believed that others – specifically non-black people – saw them in a somewhat negative or very negative light. Do you think it’s worthwhile trying to change the perception of adults? Or are those stereotypes too ingrained?

We have to get at the perception of adults. These are the people that set the laws, set the rules, set out the school curriculum, set out the kinds of processes that people need to live by. If they are allowed to maintain their ideas, nothing will change. Even if we worked with kids to have them see the world differently than the adults, after a while, they’re inculcated by ideas held by adults and are going to think they’re right. To be able to succeed, you might not be able to challenge the existing ideas, the status quo, so sooner or later these kids will have to fall in line.

I don’t think it’s just the individual ways it must be done. It has to be done with institutional practices. Since the police occupy a very significant place in society in which we live, the government’s going to have to play a significant role in bringing them into understanding and respecting the role that they play and their relationship with the community.

Source: Majority of black people in Toronto feel targeted and disrespected: study 

Other commentary of note, from a more activist perspective:

Black Experience Project exposes Canada’s big lie: Mochama – Multiculturalism is a national policy that promises to embrace diversity while doing nothing to address a long history of punishing Black people.,

The tragic echoes in the cycle of Black death – As a verdict loomed in the Andrew Loku inquest, Pierre Coriolan was killed in Montreal—reminders of why Black Canadians fight for change

 

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Graduation season sparks pride — and hope — for Black community [private school bursaries]: James

2017/06/12 Leave a comment

Good initiative to improve the opportunities for Black Canadian kids and improve the diversity of private schools, even if numbers are small. Of particular note are the efforts made to prepare them for the private school [elite] experience, :

It’s that time of year when graduates leave a lump in our throats and hope in our hearts.

The awkward child who found purpose and now clutches a diploma. The son who struggled mightily just to stay in school, before connecting with a teacher who cared beyond duty and made all the difference. The brilliance and awesome wonder of youth on a mission.

It could be found in the hundreds walking from Westview and C.W. Jefferys to York University in the annual statement that education is the path out of the social housing traps.

Or the 40 or so who will graduate from Crawford Adventist Academy, an independent church school where 38 of them will go on to tertiary education. Not just once. Every year.

To prepare for the annual season of uplift, I attended an unusual recruitment drive at North York Civic Centre last week. Hundreds of parents and students of African and Caribbean descent were kicking the tires on a schooling opportunity that’s as rare and unlikely as, well, as a Black kid at Upper Canada College (UCC).

Oh, that’s not so rare? Not anymore? So I discovered.

Since 2007, 120 Afro-Caribbean students have received scholarships to attend the elite private schools known to churn out prime ministers and business moguls. Most of the 120 have been to UCC. But the tables displaying recruitment literature last week boasted about the rarefied life at Branksome Hall, Havergal College, St. Clement’s, Crescent School, Sterling Hall, Royal St. George’s College, Appleby College and others, 20 in all.

These elite private schools brag about low teacher-student ratio, high academic standards and expectations, deep and worldwide alumni network, a balanced and varied school life and the making of solid men and women out of unsteady boys and girls.

And here they were reaching out to Black students — the very students we fret about every time we peruse reports on dropout rates and lagging academic achievement in our province’s public schools.

The parents and their children in tow are a mix of wonder, anticipation, anxiety and resolve. These are families willing to take a path less travelled, one that begins far from their familiar neighbourhood and class and friends and promises to land the voyager in unimaginable places.

The pioneers file reports of launching out into a world where few look like them, sound like them, have their experiences. “I told him he’ll likely be the poorest kid in the school, but to hold your head up,” one parent tells the gathered mass looking for tips on what life is like at the schools of the privileged, where a $30,000 tuition tab is not unusual.

They go in timid and tentative. By November their chests are out. They are leaders, articulate, sure-footed, integrated and part of the UCC brotherhood or the sisterhood at Havergal.

“A new world has opened to them. They can shine,” says Anne White, who helps prepare the students for the unexpected world of Canada’s elite private schools.

Just after the Year of the Gun (2005) the Ontario government funded the African-Canadian Christian Network (ACCN) to administer grants to various church-based organizations committed to community “ministry.”

I know about this because then-premier Dalton McGuinty announced the funding at my church, where Amon Beckles was shot and killed on the front steps while attending a funeral of his slain friend. The idea was that churches might be able to reach “at risk” youths that government institutions were unable to contact.

One funding success is the creation of outreach to African and Caribbean families to prepare them for entrance exams and the steps to apply for scholarships to attend elite schools.

“We got an invitation from (former) principal Jim Powers of UCC,” recalls Cheryl Lewis, executive director of ACCN. “He’d looked around and saw the tapestry of his school did not reflect the city. So, he offered two boardings (residential places) for boys.”

The ACCN was a fledgling organization. The government funding allowed it the capacity to reach out to several churches and establish the educational initiative. Word got out. Parents and students took up the offer to prepare the applicants for life at the elite schools.

Just outside the council chamber at North York city hall I’m surrounded by male and female Black students, in crested uniform, waxing about their experiences. The head spins.

Source: Graduation season sparks pride — and hope — for Black community: James | Toronto Star

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