Chicago’s response to migrant influx stirs long-standing frustrations among its Blacks – Voice of America

2024/04/24 Leave a comment

Of note:

The closure of Wadsworth Elementary School in 2013 was a blow to residents of the majority-Black neighborhood it served, symbolizing a city indifferent to their interests.

So when the city reopened Wadsworth last year to shelter hundreds of migrants without seeking community input, it added insult to injury. Across Chicago, Black residents are frustrated that long-standing needs are not being met while the city’s newly arrived are cared for with a sense of urgency, and with their tax dollars.

“Our voices are not valued nor heard,” said Genesis Young, a lifelong Chicagoan who lives near Wadsworth.

Chicago is one of several big American cities grappling with a surge of migrants. The Republican governor of Texas has been sending them by the busload to highlight his grievances with the Biden administration’s immigration policy.

To manage the influx, Chicago has already spent more than $300 million of city, state and federal funds to provide housing, health care, education and more to over 38,000 mostly South American migrants who have arrived in the city since 2022, desperate for help. The speed with which these funds were marshaled has stirred widespread resentment among Black Chicagoans.

But community leaders are trying to ease racial tensions and channel the public’s frustrations into agitating for the greater good.

Political reactions

The outcry over migrants in Chicago and other large Democrat-led cities is having wider implications in an election year: The Biden administration is now advocating a more restrictive approach to immigration in its negotiations with Republicans in Congress.

Since the Wadsworth building reopened as a shelter, Young has felt “extreme anxiety” because of the noise, loitering and around-the-clock police presence that came with it. More than anything, she and other neighbors say it is a reminder of problems that have been left unsolved for years, including high rates of crime, unemployment and homelessness.

“I definitely don’t want to seem insensitive to them and them wanting a better life. However, if you can all of a sudden come up with all these millions of dollars to address their housing, why didn’t you address the homeless issue here?” said Charlotte Jackson, the owner of a bakery and restaurant in the South Loop neighborhood.

“For so long we accepted that this is how things had to be in our communities,” said Chris Jackson, who co-founded the bakery with his wife. “This migrant crisis has made many people go: ‘Wait a minute, no it doesn’t.’ ”

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson declined to comment for this story.

The city received more than $200 million from the state and federal governments to help care for migrants after Johnson appealed to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and President Joe Biden. The president will be in Chicago in August to make his reelection pitch at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

Some see opportunity

Some Black Chicagoans are protesting the placement of shelters in their neighborhoods, but others aim to turn the adversity into an opportunity.

“Chicago is a microcosm to the rest of the nation,” said the Reverend Janette C. Wilson, national executive director of the civil rights group PUSH for Excellence. Black communities have faced discrimination and underinvestment for decades and are justifiably frustrated, Wilson said. The attention the migrants are receiving is deserved, she added, but it’s also a chance for cities to reflect on their responsibility to all underserved communities.

“There is a moral imperative to take care of everybody,” Wilson said.

After nearly two years of acrimony, the city has begun to curb some accommodations for migrants – which has caused its own backlash. The city last month started evicting migrants who overstayed a 60-day limit at shelters, prompting condemnation from immigrant rights groups and from residents worried about public safety.

Marlita Ingram, a school guidance counselor who lives in the South Shore neighborhood, said she was concerned about the resources being shared “equitably” between migrants and longtime residents. But she said she also believed that “it doesn’t have to be a competition” and sympathized with the nearly 6,000 migrant children now enrolled in Chicago’s public schools.

As the potential for racial strife rises, some activists are pointing to history as a cautionary tale.

Hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners moved to Chicago in the early 20th century in search of greater freedoms and economic opportunities. White Chicagoans at the time accused them of receiving disproportionate resources from the city, and in 1919 tensions boiled over.

In a surge of racist attacks in cities across the U.S. that came to be known as “Red Summer,” white residents burned large swaths of Chicago’s Black neighborhoods and killed 38 Black people, including by lynching.

“Those white folks were, like, ‘Hell, no, they’re coming here, they’re taking our jobs,’ ” said Richard Wallace, founder of Equity and Transformation, a majority-Black community group that co-hosted a forum in March to improve dialogue between Black and Latino residents.

Echoes of past

He hears echoes of that past bigotry — intentional or not — when Black Chicagoans complain about the help being given to migrants. “How did we become like the white folks who were resisting our people coming to the city of the Chicago?” he said.

Labor and immigrant rights organizers have worked for years to tamp down divisions among working class communities. But the migrant crisis has created tensions between the city’s large Mexican American community and recently arrived migrants, many of whom hail from Venezuela.

“If left unchecked, we all panic, we’re all scared, we’re going to retreat to our corners,” said Leone Jose Bicchieri, executive director of Working Family Solidarity, a majority-Hispanic labor rights group. “The truth is that this city wouldn’t work without Black and Latino people.”

Black Americans’ views on immigration and diversity are expansive. The Civil Rights Movement was instrumental in pushing the U.S. to adopt a more inclusive immigration policy.

About half of Black Americans say the United States’ diverse population makes the country strong, including 30% who say it makes the U.S. “much stronger,” according to a March poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Many leaders in Black neighborhoods in and around Chicago are trying to acknowledge the tensions without exacerbating them.

“Our church is divided on the migrant crisis,” said the Reverend Chauncey Brown, pastor of Second Baptist Church in Maywood, Illinois, a majority-Black suburb of Chicago where some migrants are living in shelters.

There has been a noticeable uptick of non-English speakers in the pews, many of whom have said they are migrants in need of food and other services, Brown said. Some church members cautioned him against speaking out in support of migrants or allotting more church resources to them. But he said the Bible’s teachings are clear on this issue.

“When a stranger enters your land, you are to care for them as if they are one of your own,” he said.

Source: Chicago’s response to migrant influx stirs long-standing frustrations among its Blacks – Voice of America

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Chicago Tackles COVID-19 Disparities In Hard Hit Black And Latino Neighborhoods

2020/06/10 Leave a comment

Wonder whether any of these types of targeted initiatives are taking place in Montreal and Toronto?

When COVID-19 first hit the United States, it spread through communities of color at alarmingly disproportionate rates.

This was especially true in Chicago. More than 70% of the city’s first coronavirus deaths were African-American. Those numbers have declined, but black residents continue to die at a rate two- to three-times higher than the city’s white residents. Researchers believe underlying health conditions that are prevalent in Latinx and black communities, such as hypertension and diabetes, make residents there more vulnerable to the disease.

While blacks suffer the most deaths, the number of people who have contracted the disease is the highest now in the city’s Latinx communities. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot calls it a public health “red alarm.” She’s worked with community groups to create a Racial Equity Rapid Response Team or RERRT. They are tackling long-standing needs for residents in African-American and Latinx neighborhoods — everything from adequate nutrition to jobs to healthcare.

One of those Chicago neighborhoods is Auburn-Gresham. It’s a predominantly African-American and working class area on the city’s South side. It’s seen its share of troubles — 30% unemployment, gang warfare. Then came the wrath of COVID-19.

The first to die was Patricia Frieson, 61, a retired nurse who lived in the neighborhood. Her older sister, Wanda Bailey, 63, also died from the coronavirus days later.

Recently, a drive-in test site opened up on 79th street, one of the main commercial strips that’s seen better times.

“Oh, this is critical. We’ve been screaming for weeks to get testing in Auburn Gresham,” says Carlos Nelson, CEO of the Greater Auburn-Gresham Development Corporation. He says it’s been dire with more than 1,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and “we are dying, because we don’t have the same resources or access to information.”

Mayor Lightfoot says the racial gap is unacceptable and is the result of a racist system that for generations left black neighborhoods with little access to health care, jobs, education and healthy food. Conditions she adds that aren’t unique to Chicago.

“We’re seeing this manifest in large urban areas with large black populations,” says Lightfoot. “All over the United States — Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee and other places are experiencing the same thing, but we are going to step up and do something about it.”

Distributing free masks, hundreds of door hangers and thousands of postcards about COVID-19 are part of the effort by the rapid response team.

Recently, hundreds of people on foot and in cars lined the blocks for a pop-up food pantry run by Carlos Nelson’s group and the Greater Chicago Food Depository. Volunteers helped Carolyn Bowers load boxes of canned goods, meat and produce into a cart. Bowers works part time caring for seniors and says COVID-19 has caused lots of financial havoc.

“I’m not been able to service as many people as I have been because a lot of people are afraid to let people in their home,” Bowers says.

She’s been working 8 hours a week instead of her typical 30 to 35 hours. But Bowers considers herself lucky since since she and her adult children live with her mother. She says everyone chips in but Bowers says, “the food pantry is a real help to the family because I am not able to buy food.”

In Chicago’s Latinx neighborhoods, there’s the same push by RERRT to educate people about the pandemic with bilingual messaging. There’s also a focus on workplaces where there’s been a cluster of coronavirus cases. Unions are part of the outreach effort.

Efrain Elias is vice president and residential division director of SEIU Local 1. The union represents janitors, security officers and others.

“These are workers who are heading to the front line of this crisis to keep the public clean, safe and healthy every day and our workers are not able to stay at home,” Elias says.

In a neighborhood near Chicago’s downtown, the sound of a vacuum cleaner dies down as Javier Flores goes over the day’s cleaning schedule with his maintenance crew at a nearly 200-unit residential building.

“Thank God, we haven’t had any cases here or any type of incidents what so ever,” Flores says. Both he and his wife are considered essential employees. She is a cook for the Chicago Public Schools and prepares free breakfast and lunch for students that families pick up.

The couple live with their two young daughters in Chicago’s Belmont-Cragin area. With nearly 3,000 confirmed cases, it’s one of the Latinx communities with the most coronvirus cases in the state. It also makes Flores anxious.

“My youngest daughter started coughing, telling me her throat hurt,” Flores says, “and I can’t avoid just thinking about, man, COVID-19?”

His daughter turned out to be fine. Flores says he hopes the city’s racial equity work will help make that true for so many others in communities of color hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Source: Chicago Tackles COVID-19 Disparities In Hard Hit Black And Latino Neighborhoods

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With female and LGBTQ prayer leaders, Chicago mosque works to broaden norms in Muslim spaces

2019/08/06 Leave a comment

Of interest:

The story of Rabia al-Basri is one that Muslim kids learn early.

She ran through her hometown of Basra, Iraq, with a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When townspeople asked her why, she said she wanted to burn down heaven with the torch and put out hellfire with the water so that people could worship without fear of punishment or desire for reward, for the sake of God alone.

“The story defines this space,” said Mahdia Lynn, who co-founded the mosque in 2016 in the Loop that bears the name of Rabia, and, more importantly, she said, the responsibility that comes with it.

At Masjid al-Rabia, the difference from mainstream mosques is immediately apparent. Every Friday, a handful of men and women pray shoulder to shoulder. The khutbah, or sermon, is a discussion, and congregants participate in a group circle. There is no consistent imam, or leader in prayer; rather, anyone can volunteer to stand in the front to lead. It is one of very few public mosques in the world that allows and encourages women to lead prayer in a mixed-gender prayer space.

“Our approach says that wanting to lead a prayer in that moment, that is what makes a person equipped to lead,” Lynn said.

In mainstream mosques where men lead the prayer, men pray in the front and women pray behind them, or in some cases, behind a barrier. Sometimes, women pray in a separate room with an audiovisual setup.

While women-only mosques have existed for hundreds of years in China, it is only in the past several years that imams and scholars have begun to organize more inclusive mosques in Indonesia, Europe and the United States — all with varying styles and levels of success. In 2015, the first women’s-only mosque in the U.S. opened in Los Angeles, according to news reports.

Though men and women often attend private prayer groups together, it is difficult to find any mosques in the world that publicly advertise having a prayer space with no barriers to gender, like Masjid al-Rabia.

“Most of the places it is happening, people are organizing based on who wants to worship and not because they want to publicize it,” said Amina Wadud, an Islamic scholar who has worked for decades at the intersection of Islamic theology and women-centric movements. “Sometimes you do a thing because you feel the thing is good and you don’t need any attention for it. Sometimes you have to combine that intention with some advertisement because how else do you open people up to the story?”

In Chicago, Lynn said the group is moving to a larger space that, in addition to hosting prayers, will serve as a hub for the social justice work the mosque began several years ago. The most important work the mosque does, Lynn said, is its prison ministry, which has grown to more than 600 participants in the past two years.

“Like Muslims who are queer and trans, (incarcerated people) are our family members who are forgotten. And the fact that they are forgotten is both unacceptable and changeable,” said Lynn, who is transgender. “In the faith tradition, there is a strong idea of freeing prisoners and serving those who are oppressed. You are ultimately helping the oppressor by preventing them from oppressing people.”

‘Embodied ethics’

Lynn’s work is only the latest in a long tradition of global attempts to broaden mainstream prayer norms.

Twenty-five years ago in Cape Town, South Africa, Wadud, who is retired and lives in Indonesia, for the first time led a part of the Friday prayer, which is generally performed by a male leader.

She waited more than 10 years to do anything as public as that again, though she was asked. She said she took time in the interim for “spiritual reflection and intellectual research,” to figure out her own intentions. The next time she led a Friday prayer service, it was in New York in 2005 and it made headlines because of the size of the congregation — more than 100 people participated — and a protest was held outside.

She said it was important to take a public step at that time.

“It was about embodied ethics, where it’s not enough to say, ‘I believe women are equal to men.’ I have to demonstrate it with my body,” Wadud said. “Sometimes you have to do that.”

Imam Ibrahim Khader of the Muslim Community Center organization, which has three locations in the Chicago area, said the separation of men and women in a prayer space is based on hadith, or sayings, of the Prophet Muhammad, one of which states that, in a congregation, the best place for a man during prayer is the front row, and the best place for a woman during prayer is the back row. He also pointed to the requirement of Muslim men to attend Friday prayers, which, according to hadith, does not exist for Muslim women.

“At the end of the day, these are narrations,” Khader said. “We can try and reason with these and understand the context, but we still follow them.”

Scholars, particularly those who say they prioritize inclusion over other ideas, lean on the Quran, which they say has higher authority than either the words or the actions of the Prophet Muhammad, to make their case.

“In Muslim patriarchies, men’s authority is underwritten by specific interpretations of ‘Islam.’ I put ‘Islam’ in quotes because, if we are speaking about the Qur’an, then there is nothing in it — not a single verse — that says women cannot lead a prayer and only men can,” Ithaca College professor Asma Barlas, who studies patriarchal interpretations of the Quran, said in an email. “Nor is there a single statement to the effect that men are morally or religiously or ontologically superior to women. Not one.”

Chicago activist Hind Makki runs a blog called Side Entrance, through which she encourages Muslim women to document women’s prayer spaces in mosques around the world: “the beautiful, the adequate and the pathetic.”

“Certain prayer spaces can be spiritually abusive, and we need to collectively create our own spaces,” Makki said.

As some Muslim communities struggle with inclusion, Makki encourages people to create third spaces, away from mainstream mosques and the secular world, where they can follow their faith without some of the cultural baggage.

“In the here and now, people have shown that they need to create their own spaces that are healthy and welcoming for spiritual sustenance, which you can’t get at mosques where your spirituality is not part of the picture,” she said. “Whether that’s creating a mosque like Masjid al-Rabia, or just gathering in someone’s living room, it’s so important for your spiritual health.”

An interfaith environment

Lynn, 31, who is from southeast Michigan, said she has always had an instinct toward community organizing, and she found Islam in her early 20s, at a time when she was living a very different kind of life than now.

“I was not good at being a human being. I was just not understanding what my place in the world was. Who to be, how to live, what to do,” she said. “Islam gave me an understanding and an order.”

She said the first year of being Muslim was a journey she took alone, but in 2014, she attended an LGBT Muslim retreat in Philadelphia.

“It felt like I was among people who knew the importance of the tradition, what it meant to be a transgender woman practicing Islam, what it means to be someone on the outside looking in,” she said. “That got me back into the community organizing and activism, back to troublemaking.”

This year, Lynn conducted her first nikkah, or wedding ceremony, and the masjid’s (mosque’s) first one — for two queer Muslim men in a prison hundreds of miles away. It was a wedding, she said, that ended up being a stack of papers an inch or two thick mailed to Lynn that contained some of the essentials for an Islamic wedding: written statements from witnesses, an exchange of vows, a mahr statement (a financial agreement in the case of separation). Later, she and others from the mosque threw a party that doubled as a proxy wedding with stand-ins for the grooms.

This week, the masjid, which is run by Lynn, who is a part-time employee, and a few other volunteers, moved into a space at GracePlace in the South Loop, sharing a prayer hall with Christian congregations, and hosted its first Friday prayer. At the final prayer before the move, congregants discussed their new home.

“Are they also progressive?” asked one attendee.

“Yeah, we had to make sure they were OK letting all the gay Muslims in,” said Hannah Fidler, a volunteer program coordinator at the mosque. The group laughed, even though for a community like this, security can be a real concern.

The move to a more public forum is a big change for the community, and Lynn said she hopes it will allow Masjid al-Rabia to become more established in Chicago. The focus for the past couple of years has been mission-based activities, like the prison ministry, a joint Eid and Pride celebration, and Quran study groups, she said. But with a larger space, it’s possible to intentionally grow Friday attendance and make sure it’s accessible to everyone.

Wadud, the Islamic scholar, said this kind of space marks an evolution.

“We are seeing, what does it take to start a movement? What does it take to spread a movement?” she said. “What does it take for it to no longer be a movement because it’s just par for the course?”

Source: With female and LGBTQ prayer leaders, Chicago mosque works to broaden norms in Muslim spaces

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The Chicago Dyke March and Chicago SlutWalk aren’t anti-Zionist. They’re anti-Semitic. Slate

2017/07/27 Leave a comment

Valid points by Mark Joseph Stern:

Critics of intersectionality have jumped at the chance to cite these controversies as proof of the theory’s flaws. In a New York Times op-ed, Bari Weiss wrote that “in practice, intersectionality functions as a kind of caste system in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history.” Because of the existence of “the Jewish state,” Weiss explained, “which today’s progressives see only as a vehicle for oppression of the Palestinians,” Jews are considered the oppressors, never the oppressed.

Weiss’ critique implies that the organizers of the Dyke March and SlutWalk were lured toward anti-Semitism via intersectionality—that as they studied the Oppression Olympics, they came to view Jews at the real oppressors. I strongly suspect that this has it exactly backward because the articulation of intersectionality provided by the Dyke March and SlutWalk makes no sense. The organizers allege that, because the oppression of queer women and Palestinians is intertwined, marchers must renounce Israel and not express their Jewishness. But how does that follow? The reasoning makes sense only if expressions of Jewishness are tantamount to endorsements of the Israeli government’s policies toward Palestinians. And the belief that all proudly Jewish people support the current subjugation of Palestinians is self-evidently anti-Semitic.

On July 13, the Dyke March provided further proof that its intersectionality functioned as a flimsy pretense for anti-Semitism. A tweet from the group’s Twitter account used the term “Zio,” an anti-Jewish slur popularized by David Duke and his neo-Nazi followers. The Dyke March later sent another tweet apologizing for the insult—and adding, “We meant Zionist/white tears replenish our electrolytes.” Indeed, the group’s bizarre fixation on Jews frequently manifests itself as alt-right–style trolling. This is a mockery of intersectionality, not a defense of it.

It has long been obvious that left-wing anti-Semitism is a problem and that an overwhelming abhorrence of Israel often blurs into a generalized anger toward Jews. Organizers of both the Dyke March and the SlutWalk have not discovered the praxis of intersectionality; they have merely dressed up their bigotry in updated argot. Their anti-Semitism is not academic or novel but almost depressingly familiar, and we do not need to overhaul the progressive worldview to address it. We need only remind ourselves that anyone who would hold Jews to a different, higher standard is anti-Semitic, full stop. Whether it happens at a far-left march or an alt-right convention, the creation of special rules for Jews is irrational and wrong. By creating a stringent litmus test for openly Jewish demonstrators, the Dyke March and SlutWalk did not protect the oppressed. They became the oppressors.

Source: The Chicago Dyke March and Chicago SlutWalk aren’t anti-Zionist. They’re anti-Semitic.

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Everyone Pays A Hefty Price For Segregation, Study Says : NPR

2017/04/03 Leave a comment

Interesting study:

There’s a compelling question at the heart of a report released this week by the Metropolitan Planning Council: If more people — especially educated professional white Americans — knew exactly how they are harmed by the country’s pervasive racial segregation, would they be moved to try to decrease it?

Researchers from the MPC, a Chicago-based nonprofit, and from the Washington-based Urban Institute tried to create a workable formula for estimating the cost, collectively and individually, of the persistent problem in their report, “The Cost of Segregation: Lost income. Lost lives. Lost potential. The steep costs all of us in the Chicago region pay by living so separately from each other.”

The researchers analyzed segregation patterns in the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the country and found that if Chicago — the fifth most racially and economically segregated city in the country — were to lower its level of segregation to the national median of those 100 cities, it would have a profound impact on the entire Chicago region, including raising the region’s gross domestic product, raising incomes and lowering the homicide rate.

Amanda E. Lewis, director of the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois-Chicago, called the MPC report “very important.”

“The findings are pretty stark,” Lewis said. “They’re hard to ignore.”

The report concluded that the Chicago region would gain many benefits from lowering its segregation level to the national median. Chief among them would be that incomes for African-Americans in the Chicago region would rise an average of $2,982 per person per year, which would increase the earnings of the region by $4.4 billion and raise the Chicago region’s gross domestic product, a leading measure of economic performance, by approximately $8 billion.

Chicago’s notorious crime would also be positively impacted. The region’s homicide rate would drop by 30 percent, which would have saved 229 lives in Chicago in 2016. In 2010, the last year for which regional numbers are available, a 30 percent drop in the homicide rate would have saved 167 lives and saved $65 million in policing costs and an estimated $218 million in corrections costs. In addition, residential real estate values would have increased by at least $6 billion.

Less segregation would also make Chicago and its environs more educated, with an estimated 83,000 more people who have bachelor’s degrees, bringing the region an added $90 billion in total lifetime earnings.

Marisa Novara, vice president of MPC and one of the report’s authors, said the MPC was trying to change the narrative around segregation away from the commonly held view that white people clustered in upper-income communities are not touched by it. “That has absolutely been the way our society has understood this,” she said in an interview. “This report really changes that. It shows that it’s not true that segregation only works in white people’s favor. We all pay a price — billions of dollars. The way we’ve talked about segregation to this point has really left a big part of our region feeling like segregation is not their problem and they don’t need to be part of the solution. That’s problematic.”

Novara said the MPC will follow up “The Cost of Segregation” with another report that details the steps the region needs to take to decrease segregation.

“I think it’s interesting to try to say, ‘Hey this is your problem, too,'” said Anne Dodge, executive director of UChicago Urban, an institute at the University of Chicago that focuses on research on cities. “I like that the report talks collectively about the city. This is one place and we all own it, and we need to own each other’s problems and each other’s successes.”

The MPC report points out that racist government policies initially created segregated neighborhoods in Chicago, when the Chicago Real Estate Board (CREB) instituted racially restrictive covenants in the early 20th century that prohibited African-Americans from purchasing, leasing and occupying housing outside of a small area on the city’s South Side. The covenants led to widespread “redlining” by denying black communities access to financial capital and resources to purchase homes and start small businesses. That kind of institutional racism has continued in the modern era by banks disproportionately saddling African-American home buyers with predatory loans.

At its root, Lewis of the University of Illinois-Chicago said, the issue is racism and the too-pervasive white view that anything associated with black people is bad.

“This isn’t some abstract thing about the market — it’s because white people don’t tend to want to buy in black neighborhoods, and they are still the majority of people buying homes. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Lewis, co-author of Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools, a book about how even liberal white people make individual decisions that exacerbate inequality. “If you don’t have the largest group in society, who happen to control the greatest amount of resources, being interested in buying in certain neighborhoods, the market forces suggest those neighborhoods won’t accrue value as quickly. It has serious consequences for middle and upper middle-class black folks who want to be in communities with folks who look like them.”

Amara Enyia, a municipal policy consultant and 2014 Chicago mayoral candidate, complained on social media that the report spent too much time focusing on getting black people and white people to live together and not enough on gaining equity for black communities. “Yes, I believe there is a significant societal value to diversity and inclusion, but for now I’m focused on the premise of this report as it relates to the public space and public goods (i.e. education, housing, healthcare, etc.),” she wrote.

While she feels the report is valuable, Lewis, who is white, said she is disturbed that it is even necessary to make the case to white people that segregation also hurts them in order for white people to care about segregation.

“Why isn’t it enough to show negative consequences for black and brown people?” she asked. “Why wouldn’t that be enough to motivate us? Why shouldn’t that be the driving thing that says to us, ‘This is unjust.’ Having to make the case that all of us lose says a lot about our society writ large and why we are so segregated.”

Source: Everyone Pays A Hefty Price For Segregation, Study Says : Code Switch : NPR

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Toronto’s culture of harmony stifles debate on race

2015/08/08 Leave a comment

Interesting study by Jan Doering comparing Chicago and Toronto election messaging:

Comparing Toronto and Chicago offers a fascinating contrast. Although the two are often called “sister cities,” their ethnic and racial politics could not be more different. Toronto is a world-famous model of multiculturalism, while Chicago is one of the most segregated and divided cities in the U.S.

In analyzing printed campaign material — those brochures and flyers that cluttered your mailboxes just a few months ago — the study reveals that candidates in Toronto overwhelmingly emphasized their commitment to ethnic and racial harmony. Their messages encouraged inclusion and participation, but did not highlight the important racial challenges that Toronto faces.

Contentious ethnic or racial messages were practically absent in campaign material in Toronto. Candidates did not invoke ethnic or racial tensions and problems. In Chicago, campaign material was a lot more confrontational. African-American and Latino candidates vigorously attacked school closings in minority neighbourhoods, highlighted racist police abuse, and vowed to increase the share of minority contractors working on city projects. Racial politics in Chicago revolved around exposing racial injustice and exclusion.

The most striking feature of campaign material in Toronto was its focus on multicultural harmony and inclusivity. Candidates reliably portrayed members of visible minority groups in photographs. Additionally, the campaign material was full of passages in a multitude of languages other than English — a message of racial and ethnic unity.

There is much to celebrate about Toronto’s style of ethnic and racial politics. Photographs full of diversity and token statements in immigrant languages may seem hollow, devoid of any political substance. But they have symbolic implications for how we think about Canadian citizenship. Including visible minority groups in this way confirms that politicians regard them as legitimate participants in the democratic process. As Berkeley sociologist Irene Bloemraad has found, such messages effectively encourage immigrants to seek citizenship and to become more involved in politics.

Another upside of Toronto’s harmonious culture is that divisive tactics tend to backfire. Neither racism nor charges of racism bore electoral fruit during the 2014 elections. A smear campaign against Ausma Malik, who successfully ran for TDSB trustee, ignited outrage and, as ugly and hurtful as it was, probably ended up rallying support rather than undermining her campaign. Conversely, mayoral candidate Olivia Chow had to dissociate herself from political consultant Warren Kinsella after he described John Tory’s transit plan as “segregationist” because it ignored neighbourhoods with large black populations.

Nonetheless, this robust culture of harmony runs the risk of stifling debate around the ethnic and racial challenges that do exist. The issue of carding and its racial implications were well known in 2014. Yet I found only one candidate for councillor who explicitly took a stand on this issue in his campaign material (Nick Dominelli, who finished third in Ward 12). John Tory has now resolved to end carding, but an opportunity for political debate on this issue during the election was missed — presumably because candidates considered the issue too divisive. This is very disappointing.

…Toronto’s inclusive and harmonious political culture may actually act to silence legitimate racial and ethnic grievances that we should openly confront through public discourse, even if the debate becomes heated or uncomfortable. Our apparent preference for harmony is something we should keep in mind as the federal election approaches. Electoral campaigning has the crucial democratic function of bringing issues to the attention of the public. Are the people who want to serve as our political representatives gamely addressing the most important public issues — including race and ethnicity, but also many others — or are they dodging them in favour of feel-good politics?

Study would benefit from comparing the ethnic mix, both overall,  between and within neighbourhoods, to see if that also is a factor.

Toronto’s culture of harmony stifles debate on race | Toronto Star.

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