Polgreen: If Kamala Harris Is a D.E.I. Candidate, So Is JD Vance

2024/07/23 Leave a comment

Good reminder of the importance of class in DEI, so often forgotten:

…Personally, I think powerful institutions should value this kind of diversity. Over the course of my career I have hired and promoted many people, and diversity in the broadest sense has always been important to me. I have found that the best leaders I have worked with are eager to build teams from as wide a range of geographic, religious, class, ideological and, yes, racial and ethnic backgrounds as possible.

Kamala Harris and JD Vance, despite their political differences, have a few things in common. They were raised by tough, charismatic matriarchs. They both pursued legal careers. They both sought and won high elected office. They both come from backgrounds that are underrepresented in the halls of power. And now they are both engaged in the core work of politics — translating their stories into power. We would do well to ask why only one of these two remarkable Americans stands accused of getting where she is based on D.E.I. The answer, I fear, is written on their faces.

Source: If Kamala Harris Is a D.E.I. Candidate, So Is JD Vance


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How French immersion inadvertently created class and cultural divides at schools across Canada

2023/10/18 Leave a comment

Relevant class analysis. Longer term implications both in terms of class and cultural divisions, as well as interest in French compared to other non-official languages:

Up until a decade ago, Blake Street Junior Public School was an English-only school that sat on a street populated mostly by public housing buildings in Toronto’s east end. The kids who lived there and attended Blake primarily came from low-income and racialized families.

New families to the gentrifying community – many of them white and upper-middle class – avoided the local school, citing Blake students’ performance on standardized tests, a controversial but popular yardstick for measuring how “good” a school is. They found ways to enroll them in schools nearby, in much whiter and more affluent neighbourhoods.

In 2015, enrolment at Blake was so low the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) contemplated shuttering the school. But then things turned around. In less than a decade, the school’s population swelled by 70 per cent, from 229 to 388, almost all of that growth owing to the introduction of a new French immersion stream in 2014.

Although it was recent immigrants from French-speaking African countries that first pushed for the program at Blake, those who raced to register for it were mostly wealthier and predominantly white parents from the wider area.

TDSB data show the change seen at Blake is a city-wide phenomenon: White students are overrepresented in French immersion, as well as students from families with very high socioeconomic status who have Canadian-born, university-educated parents.

According to Statistics Canada, the same thing has historically been seen in most provinces. And in total, French immersion enrolment across the country has grown from 261,450 students in 1997-98 to 482,769 in 2020-21, the latest year for which data is available.

While this trend has been decades in the making, governments, school boards and parents are finally taking action on equity issues surrounding French immersion programs, and grappling with its future.

In New Brunswick, Canada’s only officially bilingual province, the government attempted to address access issues by removing the full-day French immersion program in favour of half-day French instruction for all anglophone students – an initiative they cancelled earlier this year after a massive pushback from parents.

At the same time, in 2022, Canada set a record for the most immigrants welcomed in a single year, and one in four residents now reports a mother tongue other than English or French. This has prompted demand in some jurisdictions for immersive teaching of languages besides the two official ones.

Ultimately, in keeping with how a group of mothers originally brought French immersion to the country, parents – who now wield more power than they ever have in the choices offered in public schools – could be the chief determinants of what bilingual education looks like in the country in the years to come.

The roots of French immersion go back to October, 1963, in the Quebec community of Saint-Lambert. There, three anglophone mothers got together to discuss how their children – all of whom attended English schools – could improve their French.

The women organized extracurricular programming and summer camps based around what was then a controversial approach: having a teacher exclusively speak French to students who were anglophones. The program was soon implemented by the local school board and then began to spread across the country.

The adoption of the program was initially slow. But in the last quarter-century, as the potential benefits of the program became known, enrolment exploded. Studies suggested learning multiple languages at a young age could stimulate cognitive development, and parents believed French immersion could also be a ticket to greater career opportunities.

But after decades in practice, it’s become clear the lofty promises of French immersion didn’t always stand up to scrutiny. In most school boards, demand has outstripped supply when it comes to recruiting qualified teachers who are fluent in French. Special education resources have also been limited for students in French immersion, which has meant many children with learning disabilities often transfer out of the program and into an English one where they can get better support.

The rate of attrition increases as French immersion students move through the grades. Many drop out after elementary school, and by the time they reach high school, where there is often a wider course selection in English, plenty of others abandon the program. And then there’s been a wider growing concern over whether French immersion – which in many communities has come to be seen as an elite program for keener learners – is driving segregation within schools and communities.

At Toronto’s Blake Street Public School, part of the fallout of its demographic changes has been losing its status as a “Model School” – a designation in the TDSB that brings additional funding to 150 schools based on a mix of factors, including median family income, the percentage of families on social assistance and the number of single-parent families. Among other benefits, Blake’s Model School status gave it breakfast and snack programs, subsidies for school trips, a thriving chess program, visits from theatre groups, and in-school eye and dental exams.

Some saw Blake’s descent on the Model Schools list as a triumph rather than a loss. Bringing in French immersion also brought in more affluent families, which in turn “fixed” the school; this was how it was framed by parents to Meaghan Phillips-Shiner, the co-chair of Blake’s school council. But as long as the public housing was on the same street as Blake, she pointed out, the 150 to 200 families that needed extra support through the Model Schools program would be there.

“The data gets saturated because now we have all these other people there. But those kids’ needs haven’t gone away,” she said.

It became known that the families who lived on the street were beginning to feel intimidated by or resentful of the outsiders who now outnumbered them, says Mohammad Yousuf, who serves as a representative for the TDSB’s Parent Involvement Advisory Committee and whose daughter attends the school. Because he’s an Indian immigrant and his wife is visibly Muslim, he says racialized and immigrant parents have been candid with them about feeling like “second-class citizens” at the school.

He predicts the loss of Model School status this fall will only widen the chasm. “The divide between rich and poor, whites and non-whites will be bigger, stronger,” he said.

The changes at Blake have reverberated in the wider community. Laurette Jack, who is Black and has worked at Eastview Neighbourhood Community Centre just down the block from Blake for 23 years, saw it early on.

For the longest time she’d worked primarily with the population living on the block, a mix of Afro-Caribbean, West African, North African and Chinese kids. About 60 to 100 who lived in the social housing complex accessed the centre’s programming. Now, there are maybe only five to 10 kids who are “Blake Street Kids” as she calls them – the vast majority are “gentrified community kids.”

As the French immersion population grew and Blake’s Model School status was under threat, then-principal Jennifer Zurba made it clear at school council meetings that this was something all families should be concerned about.

The call to action prompted serious self-reflection in Valerie Laurie, the council’s former co-chair. When she first heard that some families in the area felt “the French stream parents were taking over,” she bristled. She didn’t put her two kids in French immersion to segregate them from racialized or poor kids, she says, but it was undeniable that it was a byproduct of her choice.

“I think it’s super amazing when I hear my kids speaking French to each other at home … it makes me warm and fuzzy. But that shouldn’t take away a food program from my neighbour’s kid. It’s hard to justify,” she said.

Ms. Laurie and others on the school council – the majority of them French-immersion parents – formed an advocacy group to petition the school board to overhaul the way it determined its Learning Opportunities Index (LOI), the calculation that decides which schools get Model School status. They proposed that LOI be calculated separately for the two streams, as they believed it would be clear that many English students came from families in need.

In a recent report, the TDSB said it was reviewing the way it calculates LOI and is planning public consultations as part of this process. This work is scheduled to begin this fall and a revised policy will be presented to the board of trustees for final approval in winter 2024.

Still, the advocacy work hasn’t smoothed over all tensions.

Ms. Zurba, who has moved to be principal at a different school, said she understands why it’s difficult for families who have been in the neighbourhood for years to trust the parents who are advocating for them now. The long-time families, she says, “have seen firsthand what the change in the community has been” and thinks it can’t be easy to witness the French immersion families who once walked past Blake embrace the school now that it’s home to a desired program.

Many parents who send their kids to French immersion don’t want any changes to the program, which was recently witnessed in New Brunswick, where the provincial government tried to scrap French immersion.

Micah Peterson’s wife initially worried about enrolling the couple’s children in French immersion at their local school in Saint John. She had never attended the program herself and wondered if she’d be able to help her kids with their homework.

Mr. Peterson lent a reassuring voice: He thrived as a French-immersion student despite having anglophone parents. And he shared the research with his wife that showed studying multiple languages can enhance a child’s brain development.

The Petersons enrolled six of their seven children in the program. They plan to send their youngest there, too.

So when Mr. Peterson learned last fall that the New Brunswick provincial government had planned to replace French immersion with a program where all anglophone children entering kindergarten and Grade 1 would spend half their day learning French and the other half in English, he was appalled – and joined the fight against the plan.

The government argued that the proposed changes would allow more students in the country’s only official bilingual province to graduate high school with at least a conversational level of French.

“It’s not a streaming program for a small portion of our students. It’s for all of our students,” Education Minister Bill Hogan said at the time.

In January, Mr. Peterson and more than 300 others attended a government-run public consultation session in Saint John on the future of the program. Every speaker who addressed the room spoke in opposition to the government’s plans to eliminate the French-immersion program.

“If you want high-quality French-speaking people that are going to be joining the government, that are going to be doing things that are exciting, that are going to become French-immersion teachers … you think they’re going to be able to do that when you cut it in half? That’s ridiculous,” Mr. Peterson said at the session.

Mr. Peterson’s voice was among thousands across the province that spoke up against the changes proposed by Premier Blaine Higgs. In consultations held by the province, parents filled conference rooms in Bathurst, Moncton, Saint John and Fredericton to strongly voice their opposition to the government’s plan. They crowded virtual town halls. And they flooded social media with a campaign to save the French-immersion program.

It proved too much for the government. Or, depending on your perspective, just the right amount.

In February, New Brunswick backtracked on its plan. It was a shift that highlighted the power that parents – in this case, New Brunswick’s anglophone community – increasingly hold in the public education system, particularly those with children in French immersion and other optional programs of choice.

“I think it’s a positive example of people coming together and making their voices heard and advocating for what they want,” said Kaitlyn Gillis, a mother of two who attended a public consultation session in Fredericton.

Successive governments, she said, have fiddled with the province’s French-as-a-second-language programs. In 2008, they moved the entry point to French immersion from Grade 1 to Grade 3. It was then moved back to Grade 1 in 2017 under then-premier Brian Gallant.

If it weren’t for the forceful voices of hundreds of parents in New Brunswick, Ms. Gillis believes families would once again be thrown for a loop.

Since the 1990s, there’s been an undeniable shift toward a public school system that caters to the wishes of parents, said Université de Saint-Boniface education professor Corinne Barrett DeWiele.

“The parents are saying, ‘yes, we want French immersion in New Brunswick and yes, we want it to start in Grade 1 and don’t take that away from us,’ ” said Prof. Barrett DeWiele, who is also a former principal of a French-immersion school.

In 2017, a similar scene played out at the Halton Catholic District School Board in southwestern Ontario. The school board had looked at phasing out the French-immersion program as it grappled with a shortage of qualified teachers. Parents pleaded with trustees to save the program. Others considered leaving, which would mean less funding for the board. In the end, trustees saved the program.

In a research paper published two years ago, Prof. Barrett DeWiele described publicly funded French-immersion education as a paradox: Its benefits are meant to be universally accessible but end up unequally distributed as a result of demand outstripping supply. The tendency is for parents of middle and upper socioeconomic status, who tend to have more free time and thus are more involved, to realize the benefits of French immersion for their children and to pursue it more frequently than the rest of the population, she wrote.

To Mr. Peterson, taking away French immersion in an attempt to avoid streaming is like eliminating Advanced Placement courses, or high-level science classes students take in preparation for university. He believes school boards should be expanding their language offerings further rather than limiting them in the name of equity.

“We should be able to splinter kids out into their interests and they should be able to pursue that with ferocity,” he said.

While French immersion may be the program of choice among many families, in some corners of the country, change is afoot.

In Edmonton, for instance, other languages from Mandarin to Arabic and Spanish are carving out a place in the public education system, a reflection of the changing demographics of the city.

Carolyn Wang chooses to drive her children 14 kilometres to southwest Edmonton each day so they can attend Parkallen School’s Chinese (Mandarin) bilingual program, where half of the day’s instruction takes place in the second language.

“I had already chosen the fact that, you know what, I am sacrificing the next seven years to drive my kids to and from school for their education,” Ms. Wang said. “I already had my heart set on sending them.”

In the Edmonton Public Schools division, there are just as many students enrolled in bilingual programs as there are in French immersion. Almost 5,000 students attended bilingual programs in the last academic year, and 4,300 studied French immersion. Other school boards in Canada are expanding language programs as well. The Winnipeg School Division, for example, started a Filipino bilingual program in one of its schools this fall with 11 kindergarten and Grade 1 kids enrolled. It also offers bilingual programs in Cree, Ojibwe, Ukrainian, Hebrew and Spanish.

Ms. Wang is herself a graduate of the Chinese (Mandarin) bilingual program, which Edmonton piloted in the early 1980s. She credits the program with allowing her to receive a federally funded postgraduate scholarship to study at China’s Xiamen University.

In her first job, she beat out other applicants because the company appreciated her language skills. “The opportunities are endless,” said Ms. Wang, who is also president of the parent-driven Edmonton Chinese Bilingual Education Association.

In the Edmonton school division, the French-immersion program and the half-day ones have been around a similar amount of time. French was introduced in 1974. The Hebrew language followed a year later, then German in the late 1970s, and Arabic and Chinese in the early 1980s. The Spanish bilingual program rolled out in 2001.

Valerie Leclair, the division’s supervisor of programs and student accommodation, says new programs are introduced if there is sufficient demand from families and enough space in schools to accommodate students. She says that parents often want their children to learn more about their culture and language in a school setting – an extension of what happens in the home. Ms. Leclair heard from some parents that learning Chinese or Spanish was important because it was the “language of business,” meaning there were future career paths for children.

Ms. Leclair is unclear what the proliferation of other languages means for French. The number of students studying a second language, whether it’s French or Mandarin, has been steadily climbing. However, the French-immersion program still garners more interest from families than other languages, she says.

Ms. Wang appreciates that Canada’s official languages are French and English, but she wonders whether other languages will soon be seen as equally important on a job application, especially in government. Her eldest child’s class is not only made up of Chinese-Canadian students, but children who are white, South Asian and biracial.

“I understand their standpoint,” she said of employers who prioritize knowledge of French. “But I feel that they are minimizing the opportunities that could come from the people they could employ.”

For now, she’s content with her children being able to converse with elders, and preserving their language for another generation. “I feel that French immersion is a fabulous program, don’t get me wrong,” she said. “There’s definite benefits to that.”

However, when she looks at her children and which second language she thinks will open a few more doors in their future, she’s doesn’t mince words about how she feels about the Mandarin bilingual program: “It was an easy choice.”

Source: How French immersion inadvertently created class and cultural divides at schools across Canada

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Malik: France has been laissez-faire on race, the US proactive. Clearly, neither of them has it right

2023/07/10 Leave a comment

Another call for greater analysis by class, but one that does not ignore identity and race:

Should public policy be “race conscious” or “colour blind”? Should it target the specific inequalities faced by minority groups or treat all citizens equally without any reference to individuals’ racial and cultural backgrounds?

The contrast between these two approaches has often been seen as that between Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism and French assimilationism, the one “based on the right of ethnic minorities, of communities”, the other “based on individual rights”, as Marceau Long, then the president of France’s Haut Conseil à L’Intégration, put it in 1991, adding that the Anglo-Saxon approach, unlike that of the French, was that of “another way of imprisoning people within ghettos”.

Thirty years on, we can see the issues as more complex and less given to simple binary oppositions. Two recent high-profile events illustrate this complexity: the debates around the US supreme court’s decision to strike down affirmative action and those around the riots that ripped through France after the police killing of teenager Nahel Merzouk.

While affirmative action improved prospects for middle-class black people, it left untouched those of the working-class

The supreme court’s verdict that Harvard’s race-based admission policy was illegal has led many to fear that the progress of African Americans in higher education will now stall. Yet, as the African American writer Bertrand Cooper observed even before the decision: “The reality is that for the Black poor, a world without affirmative action is just the world as it is – no different than before.”

Why? Because while affirmative action has improved prospects for middle-class black people, it has left untouched the lives of working-class African Americans. By 2020, the percentage of African Americans admitted to Harvard stood at almost 16% – higher than the proportion of black people within the US population. Black students in Harvard are, though, anything but representative of the African American community.

In most discussions about race, black Americans are regarded as constituting a singular community. However, black America has been, for most of the past half-century, the most unequal racial or ethnic group in the nation. White Americans in the top income quintile possess 21.3 times the wealth of white people in the lowest income quintile. For black people, that figure stands at a staggering 1,382. The poorest black people earn just 1.5% of the median black income.

This disparity shapes everything from education to incarceration. More than 70% of Harvard students come from the wealthiest 20% of families; 3% come from the poorest 20%. There were almost as many students from the wealthiest 1% as from the poorest 60%.

The greatest lack of diversity in America’s elite universities, in other words, is not racial but class-based. It is, though, one that deeply affects black Americans, because that same pattern of elite recruitment applies to African Americans as it does to the population as a whole. Affirmative action is action largely for the black elite.

This is not a new argument. In his seminal 1978 work, The Declining Significance of Race, the sociologist William Julius Wilson noted the changing contours of race and class and the development of a “deepening economic schism” within African American communities, “with the black poor falling further and further behind higher-income blacks”.

The title of Wilson’s book may seem ironic, given the centrality of race in public debate today. In material terms, Wilson’s thesis has proved largely accurate. Politically, though, there has been an increasing fixation with racial identities. This mismatch between material developments and political perceptions has ill-served the majority of African Americans.

It is not that racism does not continue to play an immense role in the lives of black people. It is rather that, as Cooper has observed: “Ignoring class divisions in Black America over the last 40 years has allowed the benefits of racial progress to be concentrated upon the Black middle and upper classes while the Black poor have largely been excluded.”

Many critics of race-conscious policies argue instead for the pursuit of “colour blind” policies that take no account of an individual’s race or culture. Perhaps the nation that most embodies such an approach is France. It is also the one that most reveals the problems with it.

‘Universalism’ has become a weapon with which to point out the ‘difference’ of particular peoples

French policy is rooted in its republican tradition and universalist principles, and a refusal to recognise racial distinctions in policymaking. The universalist belief that one should treat everyone as citizens, rather than as bearers of specific racial or cultural histories, is a valuable principle.

In practice, however, French policy has entailed being blind to racism in the name of being “colour blind”, and of using the demand for “assimilation” as a means of marking out certain groups – Jews in the past, Muslims and those of North African origin today – as not truly belonging to the nation. “Universalism” has become a weapon with which to point out the “difference” of particular peoples and to justify their marginalisation. France, as much as America, too often treats its citizens not as individuals but as members of racial or ethnic communities.

The French state not only refuses to recognise racial distinctions but also bans the collection of race-based data, making it far more difficult to evaluate the extent of racial discrimination, while providing a free pass to deny that such discrimination exists. A host of academic studies, attitudinal surveys and the use of categories, such as parent’s country of origin, that can act as surrogates for race and ethnicity, have exposed the degree to which France’s race-blind ideals are freighted with race-based assumptions, from racial profiling in policing to racial discrimination in employment.

And then there is the brutality of police violence, Nahel’s killing is but the latest example. Police perceptions of minority communities can be gauged by an extraordinary statement put out by two of France’s police unions during the riots, claiming that the police were “at war” with the “savage hordes” and warning that “tomorrow we will be in resistance” to the government.

In France, the refusal to recognise the social reality of racism in the name of “universalism” has helped create the very “ghettos” for which French politicians used to deride the Anglo-Saxon approach. In America, the preoccupation with policymaking by racial categories has neglected the very communities those policies are supposed to have benefited, by ignoring the many other features, such as class, that shape black lives, while also creating new social frictions – witness the tensions between African Americans and Asian Americans. What needs to be forged, beyond these two approaches, is a universalist perspective that embraces equal treatment but does not deny the reality of racial inequality

Source: France has been laissez-faire on race, the US proactive. Clearly, neither of them has it right

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Supreme Court Decisions on Education Could Offer Democrats an Opening

2023/07/03 Leave a comment

Interesting take. Welcome return to “class” as a differentiator, although there is intersectionality with race and identity:

Ever since President Bill Clinton advised “mend it, don’t end it,”affirmative action has had an uneasy place in the Democratic coalition, as omnipresent as the party’s allegiance to abortion rights and its promises to expand financial aid for higher education — but unpopular with much of the public.

Now, in striking down race-conscious college admissions, the Supreme Court has handed the Democrats a way to shift from a race-based discussion of preference to one tied more to class. The court’s decision could fuel broader outreach to the working-class voters who have drifted away from the party because of what they see as its elitism.

The question is, will the party pivot?

“This is a tremendous opportunity for Democrats to course-correct from identity-based issues,” said Ruy Teixeira, whose upcoming book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” looks at the bleeding of working-class voters over the last decade. “As I like to say, class is back in session.”

Conservative voters have long been more animated by the Supreme Court’s composition than liberals have. But the last two sessions of a high court remade by Donald J. Trump may have flipped that dynamic. Since the court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, energized Democratic voters have handed Republicans loss after loss in critical elections.

Republicans’ remarkable successes before the new court may have actually deprived them of combative issues to galvanize voters going into 2024. Several Republican presidential hopefuls had centered their campaigns on opposition to affirmative action. And the court’s granting of religious exemptions to people who oppose gay marriage, along with last year’s Dobbs decision, may take the sting out of some social issues for conservatives.

In that sense, the staunchly conservative new Supreme Court is doing the ugly political work for Democrats. Its decision last year to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion elevated an issue that for decades motivated religious conservatives more than it did secular liberals.

Friday’s decision to strike down President Biden’s student debt relief plan enraged progressive Democrats, who had pressed the president to take executive action on loan forgiveness. A coalition of Generation Z advocacy groups, including Gen-Z for Change and the climate-oriented Sunrise Movement, said on Friday that the court “has openly declared war on young people.”

But while the Supreme Court made retroactive higher education assistance far more difficult, it may have boosted the Democratic cause of financial aid, through expanded Pell grants and scholarships that do not saddle graduates with crushing debt burdens. Democrats have long pushed expanded grant programs and legislative loan-forgiveness programs for graduates who embark on low-paid public service careers. Those efforts will get a lift in the wake of the court’s decision.

The high court’s declaration that race-based admission to colleges and universities is unconstitutional infuriated key elements of the Democratic coalition — Black and Hispanic groups in particular, but also some Asian American and Pacific Islander groups who said conservatives had used a small number of Asian Americans as pawns to challenge affirmative action on behalf of whites.

“They were using the Asian community as a wedge,” said Representative Judy Chu, Democrat of California, after the decision was handed down on Thursday. “I stand with the unified community.”

But while they have expressed anger and disappointment over the conservative decisions, Democrats also acknowledge their inability to do much to restore affirmative action, student loan forgiveness and the right to an abortion in the foreseeable future, as long as the 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court holds.

“There’s a constitutional challenge in bringing it back,” said Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia, a longtime Democratic leader on the House education committee.

Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist pressing his party to expand its outreach to the working class, said adding a new emphasis on class consciousness to augment racial and ethnic awareness would fit well with Mr. Biden’s pitch that his legislative achievements have largely accrued to the benefit of workers.

Infrastructure spending, electric vehicles investment, broadband expansion and semiconductor manufacturing have promoted jobs — especially union jobs — all over the country but especially in rural and suburban areas, often in Republican states.

“By next year, Democrats will be able to say we’ve invested in red states, blue states, urban areas, rural areas,” he said. “We’re not like the Republicans. We’re for everybody.”

But bigotry, discrimination and the erosion of civil rights will remain central issues for Democrats, given the anger of the party base, Mr. Rosenberg said. The Supreme Court’s siding on Fridaywith a web designer in Colorado who said she had a First Amendment right to refuse to provide services for same-sex marriages cannot be separated from the affirmative action, student loan and abortion decisions.

Mr. Teixeira said Democrats were not likely to see their new opportunities at first.

“If you want to solve some of the underlying problems of the party, this should be a gimme,” he said of pivoting from racial and ethnic identity to class. But, he added, “in the short term, the enormous pressure will be not to do that.”

Indeed, the initial Democratic response to the Supreme Court’s actions was not to elevate economic hardship as a key preference in college admissions. Instead, Democrats seemed focused on striking down other areas of privilege, especially the legacy admission preference given to the children and grandchildren of alumni of elite institutions.

“What we’re fighting for is equal opportunity,” said Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas. “If they get rid of affirmative action and leave rampant legacy admissions, they’re making merit a slogan, not a reality.”

Republicans saw a political line of attack in the Democratic response to the court’s decision. Even before 1990, when a campaign ad by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina featured white hands crumpling a job rejection to denounce “racial quotas,” Republicans had used affirmative action to their political advantage.

Mr. Clinton’s “mend it, don’t end it” formulation came after a 1995 speech before California Democrats in which he said of affirmative action programs: “We do have to ask ourselves, ‘Are they all working? Are they all fair? Has there been any kind of reverse discrimination?’”

A June survey by the Pew Research Center found that more Americans disapprove than approve of colleges and universities’ using race and ethnicity in admissions decisions, and that Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters are largely unified in their opposition, while Democratic voters are split.

After Mr. Biden expressed his opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision, the campaign arm of the Senate Republicans issued a statement calling out three vulnerable Senate Democrats up for re-election in Republican states: Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

“Democrats are doubling down on their racist agenda and want to pack the Supreme Court to get their way,” said Philip Letsou, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Will Democrats like Joe Manchin, Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown denounce Joe Biden’s support of racial discrimination and state unequivocally that they oppose packing the court?”

The House Republican campaign arm called Democratic outrage “the great limousine liberal meltdown.”

But the Supreme Court has offered Democrats a way forward with many of its decisions — based on class. The affluent will always have access to abortions, by traveling to states where it remains legal, and to elite institutions of higher education, where they may have legacy pull and the means to pay tuition.

Those facing economic struggles are not so privileged. Applicants of color may have lost an edge in admissions, but poor and middle-class students and graduates of all races were dealt a blow when the court declared that the president did not have the authority to unilaterally forgive their student loans.

Representative Marilyn Strickland, Democrat of Washington, said her party now needs to recalibrate away from elite institutions like Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the defendants in the high court’s case against affirmative action, and “respect all types of education and all types of opportunity,” mentioning union training programs, apprenticeships, trade schools and community colleges.

Mr. Scott agreed. “This is going to cause some heartburn,” he said, “but what we need to campaign on is that we’re opening opportunities for everybody.”

Source: Supreme Court Decisions on Education Could Offer Democrats an Opening

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McWhorter: Reparations Should Be an End, Not a Beginning

2023/06/24 Leave a comment

Thoughtful discussion of the issues and approaches, and the need to shift the focus to class and class-based orientation to race:

For a long while, reparations for Black Americans has been more a debate topic than a reality. But of late, the reality may be catching up with the debate. Since last year, Evanston, Ill., has been granting $25,000 payments to be applied to housing to Black people and their descendants who were discriminated against during the redlining era. This year, the program has been extended to enable grantees to take simple cash payments. In San Francisco, a task force has suggested that eligible Black people receive onetime payments of $5,000,000 each; a statewide task force has proposed a somewhat more modest plan with a sliding scale of payments topping out at $1.2 million. The New York State Legislature has passed a bill that would create its own commission to consider reparations, and there will doubtless be more such proposals nationwide.

I’ve never been a fan of the idea of reparations. I know that various groups of Americans have been granted reparations in the past, such as the descendants of Japanese Americans placed in internment camps during World War II. And I certainly believe that Black Americans have deserved reparations. It’s more that I have questioned the idea of what I would regard as newreparations. I see us as having already been granted reparations on multiple occasions.

Affirmative action can be seen as an enormous reparations policy, although the term is rarely used in that context. In the late 1960s, welfare payments were made easier to receive and maintain at the behest of organizations such as the National Welfare Rights Organization, in what we would now call reparation for past injustices. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, if we rolled the dice again, could well have been called a “Reparation Act,” linking banks’ requests for mergers and new branches to their assisting the credit eligibility of people in lower-income neighborhoods.

And there are, of course, thorny questions that prevail in any discussion of reparations: If payments are to be made to individuals, what would qualify a person as Black and discriminated against? (William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen’s “From Here to Equality” has a proposal for this.) If payments are to organizations, which ones could we designate as best for Black people and on what basis? (The pioneer analyst of the subject, Boris Bittker, raised this question decades ago.)

But one does not wish to ossify. I’m not interested in contrarianism for its own sake; I seek what is good for Black people. And if 77 percent of Black people approve of something — as a recent Pew poll suggested — I had better have solid grounds to oppose it.

If your opinions never evolve, you’re either not paying attention or not genuinely interested. One example: School vouchers looked very promising for Black kids 20 years ago, and I used to speak up for them despite it making me seem as though I were a Republican. But they do not seem to have had much effect on achievement in the long run, and my enthusiasm has decreased. There’s a reason I haven’t devoted a newsletter to vouchers lately.

Opposition to reparations would make sense if they were actively harmful — for instance, by encouraging a sense of dependence or entitlement — but that seems unlikely of a one-time dispersal. It would also make sense to oppose reparations if the funds seemed likely to go to waste, such as those given with insufficient directives as to what they were to be used for. But the most common idea now, largely sparked by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s landmark 2014 article in The Atlantic, is to focus on housing assistance specifically to compensate for the redlining era, decades in which residents of “Black” neighborhoods were denied mortgages, insurance and other benefits that lead to homeownership.

This newer focus is different from simply sending a check in the mail for racial injustices writ large that were suffered in a distant past. Redlining was not all that long ago. It played a major role in the wealth gap that exists between white and Black people today. And being able to afford better-quality housing would be of concrete and immediate benefit to Black people, enabling them to escape many of the manifestations of inequity based on race.

So I am open to experiments with this new conception of reparations. I could imagine supporting them with articles, talks, podcast appearances and the like. But I would do so only under an impression of a general consensus that these reparations would also offer a form of closure, a signature turning of the corner in American race relations.

Brilliant work by Black intellectuals such as Barbara Fields and Adolph and Touré Reed has long argued that fixing today’s America will require a focus on class rather than race. After reparations, it would be time to stop sidelining this work. Racism and inequity would not disappear. Policies that address those issues and help Black people succeed would of course continue, but they would focus less on race than on specific economic needs, such as fostering jobs that don’t require a college degree, giving preferences in admissions and hiring based on socioeconomics, rethinking the War on Drugs and teaching reading via the phonics method that science has demonstrated to be the strongest tool.

In a scenario such as this one, reparations would serve not only as a compensation for past injustice but also as the start of a new, class-based orientation toward the nation’s progress on race. Is such a compromise possible, as opposed to a continuation of the mantra that “America doesn’t want to talk about race”? I have my doubts. But I would be happy to be proved wrong.

Source: Reparations Should Be an End, Not a Beginning

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Patrick Luciani: You don’t have to be a conservative to be anti-woke

2023/06/05 Leave a comment

Provocative but needed reminder of the importance of class, rather than just identity and intersectionality. My experience with analysing and discussing birth tourism indicates that many academics and activists have forgotten the importance of class with respect to birth tourists who are among the more affluent given the travel, medical and related costs of being a birth tourist:

When philosopher Susan Neiman decided to write Left Is Not Woke, friends warned her to avoid the word “Woke” in the title. They were concerned it might be taken as a move to the political Right and push her into the camp of Ron DeSantis, Rishi Sunak, or even Eric Zemmour in France. I suspect they were more worried that any attack on wokeness might mean banishment or cancellation by a political movement with all the characteristics of a religious cult. Neiman agonized over the title but stressed in the book that she was still a card-carrying socialist with all the proper credentials. But even that would not have spared her grief and ostracization if she were teaching at a North American university. She is safe for the time being teaching in Germany. 

Most attacks on woke ideology usually come from the defenders of classical liberalism, such as Francis Fukuyama, who stresses free speech, the evils of cancel culture, and policies that relentlessly push the trinity of diversity, inclusiveness, and equity. Professor Neiman now confronts wokeness from the Left and how it has broken with traditional socialist ideals of universality, justice, and progress. Neiman isn’t willing to accept the suggestion that you aren’t Left if you’re not woke.

Her first concern is that wokeism has gone off the rails by abandoning the universal principle of worker solidarity. That concept was too general for today’s politically sensitive crowd. Wokeness pushed the idea that unfair treatment of minorities and the powerless had to be fought at the micro level of society. Throw in the concept of intersectionality and political oppression is now supercharged. It is no longer a question of traditional domination of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. The hierarchy of power dynamics now includes men oppressing women, straight over gays, Whites dominating Blacks, White women over women of colour, the abled over disabled people, ad infinitum. A few years ago, American Black students at Cornell University demanded preferential treatment over foreign Black students since the latter represented a higher proportion of spots on campus. Any group or tribe can claim a special status regarding policies on compensation for past discrimination and grievances. The only groups that don’t qualify in this hierarchy of oppression are Jews, Asians, and rich men who are White. 

Woke thinking compartmentalizes groups according to their identity rather than class oppression. Wokism breaks this connection by moving us into tribes disconnected from each other. And since everyone can claim membership to one group or another, most can claim victimhood. 

Second, Neiman condemns woke attacks on enlightenment thinking. The Enlightenment wasn’t a Eurocentric invention of White men to oppress and justify the subjugation of other nations but a way to use reason to move away from religious and superstitious beliefs that held humans from their full potential. Enlightenment thinkers were some of the harshest critics of colonialism and slavery, including Rousseau, Diderot, and Immanuel Kant. Kant’s teaching was universal when he said that humans should never be treated as a means to an end. The Black scholar Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò—no apologist for the Enlightenment—insists we put Enlightenment ideas in their proper historical context. As he says, ideas must be historicized, not racialized. He even refers to the prominent anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon, who wrote, “The elements for the solution to the major problems of humanity existed at one time, or another in European thought.”

Her final objection to wokeism is the movement’s influence by the work of Michel Foucault and his concepts of power, progress, and truth. Foucault, considered the godfather of wokeism, promoted that power is the defining force between all human interactions and that truth is a naïve conviction of no value. Foucault had a profound contempt for reason and the notion that there was any improvement or progress in social interactions, an idea contrary to socialist thought. Even Noam Chomsky believed that Foucault was thoroughly amoral in his thinking. That isn’t hard to believe, knowing that Foucault endorsed sex between children and adults. For the Left, reason and freedom would liberate humans from superstition, prejudice, poverty, and fear. Foucault had no such faith. 

Professor Neiman has written a brave book against a philosophy cutting through our cultural institutions. And she is right in her criticism. Finding a government, university, or major corporation that doesn’t follow a hiring policy dictated by woke protocol is almost impossible.  

Liberalism was about centring the individual with freedom in personal affairs and commerce. Socialism added rights and entitlement to housing, education, health care, and a decent wage. Wokeness is about victims and victimhood with claims on society’s resources for past and present injustices. Who determines the injustices and compensation? Those are questions we aren’t allowed to ask. But the pushback is out there, and not just from Florida. 

Source: Patrick Luciani: You don’t have to be a conservative to be anti-woke

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The Liberal Maverick Fighting Race-Based Affirmative Action

2023/03/31 Leave a comment

Of interest and agree on need for more focus on class issues rather than conflating them with race:

For the college class he teaches on inequality, Richard D. Kahlenberg likes to ask his students about a popular yard sign.

“In This House We Believe: Black Lives Matter, Women’s Rights Are Human Rights, No Human Is Illegal, Science Is Real,” it says.

His students usually dismiss the sign as performative. But what bothers Mr. Kahlenberg is not the virtue signaling.

“It says nothing about class,” he tells them. “Nothing about labor rights. Nothing about housing. Nothing that would actually cost upper-middle-class white liberals a dime.”

Since picking up a memoir of Robert F. Kennedy at a garage sale his senior year of high school, Mr. Kahlenberg, 59, has cast himself as a liberal champion of the working class. ‌ For three decades, his work, largely at a progressive think tank, has used empirical research and historical narrative to argue that the working class has been left behind.

That same research led him to a conclusion that has proved highly unpopular within his political circle: that affirmative action is best framed not as a race issue, but as a class issue.

In books, ‌articles and academic papers, Mr. Kahlenberg has spent decades‌ ‌arguing for a different vision of diversity, one based in his 1960s idealism. He believes that had they lived, Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have pursued a multiracial coalition of poor and working class people, a Poor People’s ‌Campaign that worked together toward the same goal of economic advancement in education, employment and housing. ‌ ‌

Race-conscious affirmative action, while it may be well intentioned,‌ ‌does just the opposite, he says — aligning with the interests of wealthy students‌ and creating racial ‌animosity.

With class-conscious affirmative action, “Will there be people in Scarsdale who are annoyed that working-class people are getting a break? Probably,” he said in an interview. “But the vast majority of Americans support the idea, and you see it across the political spectrum.”

His advocacy has brought him to an uncomfortable place. The Supreme Court is widely expected to strike down race-conscious affirmative action this year in cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. He has joined forces with the plaintiff, Students for Fair Admissions, run by a conservative activist; the group has paid him as an expert witness and relied on his research to support the idea that there is a constitutional “race-neutral alternative” to the status quo.

That alliance has cost him his position as a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, the liberal-leaning think tank where he had found a home for 24 years, according to friends and colleagues. (Mr. Kahlenberg and the Century Foundation said he left to pursue new opportunities and would not elaborate.)

Critics‌ ‌dispute everything from his statistics to his rosy outlook on politics. They say that the concept of race-neutral diversity underestimates how racism is embedded in American life. They say that class‌-conscious affirmative action will bring its own set of problems as universities try to maintain high academic standards. ‌

And they argue that his class-based solution could backfire.

“It may well be where we wake up,” said Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia who has been involved in litigation on the side of universities. “But if you get rid of affirmative action, then you create racial hostility in the other direction.”

Mr. Kahlenberg is unfazed.

“I think people will have to come around,” he said, “because class will be the only game in town.”

The Harvard Legacy

Mr. Kahlenberg’s own life shows the complicated calculus of college admissions.

He grew up in White Bear Lake, Minn., a suburb of St. Paul, where his father was a liberal Presbyterian minister and his mother was on the school board. His father had gone to Harvard, and when he came of age, so did Mr. Kahlenberg. His grandfather paid for his college tuition.

Decades later, he seemed a little defensive about possibly having benefited from the “tip” that Harvard gives to the children of alumni.

“This will sound incredibly insecure or something, but I was gratified that I got into Yale and Princeton, because it made me feel like, OK, it wasn’t just legacy, hopefully,” he said.

Around the time he was accepted to Harvard, he was smitten by a memoir of R.F.K. by the Village Voice journalist Jack Newfield. Mr. Kahlenberg wrote his senior thesis on Kennedy’s campaign for president. And today, a nicked and scratched poster of his idol hangs in his study at home.

At Harvard, Mr. Kahlenberg was surrounded by “immense wealth,” he recalled. “I didn’t feel like an outsider. I was second-generation Harvard, I was upper middle class and a lot of my friends went to boarding school.”

But his roommate, who came from more modest circumstances, “helped educate me on the idea that working-class white people had a raw deal in this country, too,” he said.

Mr. Kahlenberg studied government and went on to Harvard Law School, where he wrote a paper about class-based affirmative action, advised by Alan Dershowitz, his professor, known for defending unpopular causes and clients.

The paper inspired him to write his influential 1996 book, “The Remedy,” which developed his theory that affirmative action had set back race relations by becoming a source of racial antagonism.

“If you want working-class white people to vote their race, there’s probably no better way to do it than to give explicitly racial preferences in deciding who gets ahead in life,” he said. “If you want working-class whites to vote their class, you would try to remind them that they have a lot in common with working-class Black and Hispanic people.”

The book caused a stir, in part because of the timing. California voters adopted a ban on affirmative action in public colleges and universities the same year. Such bans have since spread to eight other states, and California voters reaffirmed it in 2020.

Today, as in the mid-1990s, polls show that a majority of people oppose race-conscious college admissions, even as they support racial diversity. Public opinion may not always be right, Mr. Kahlenberg said, but surely it should be considered when developing public policy.

What has changed, he said, is the political environment. Universities and politicians and activists have hardened their positions on affirmative action.

And the Supreme Court supported them, at least until now.

A Different Measure of Diversity

If Mr. Kahlenberg had his way, college admissions would be upended.

His basic recipe: Get rid of preferences for alumni children, as well as children of faculty, staff and big donors. Say goodbye to recruited athletes in boutique sports like fencing. Increase community college transfers. Give a break to students who have excelled in struggling schools, who have grown up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, in families with low income, or better yet, low net worth. Pump up financial aid. Look for applicants in towns that do not normally send students to highly selective colleges.

It’s an expensive punch list and requires more financial aid for working class and poor students, which is the main reason, he believes, that universities have not rushed to embrace it.

Meanwhile, elite colleges have become fortresses for the rich, he said. Harvard had “23 times as many rich kids as poor kids,” Mr. Kahlenberg testified in 2018 at the federal court trial in the Harvard case, referring to a 2017 paper by Raj Chetty, then a Stanford economist, and colleagues. 

Mr. Kahlenberg said the civil rights movement has made strides, while overall, poor people have been left further behind. He points to studies that found that the achievement gap in standardized test scores between rich and poor children is now roughly twice the size of the gap between Black and white children, the opposite of 60 years ago.

He said his theories are working in states with affirmative action bans, pointing to his 2012 study that found seven of 10 leading universities were able to return to previous levels of diversity through race-neutral means.

Even the University of California, Berkeley, which was having trouble achieving its pre-ban levels of diversity, has made progress, he said. In 2020, Berkeley boasted that it had admitted its most diverse class in 30 years, with offers to African American and Latino students rising to the highest numbers since at least the late-1980s, without sacrificing academic standards. 

Mr. Kahlenberg’s analysis of Harvard’s outlook is also optimistic.

In a simulation of the class of 2019, he found that the share of Black students at Harvard would drop to 10 percent from 14 percent, but the share of white students would also drop, to 33 percent from percent from 40 percent, mainly because of the elimination of legacy and other preferences. The share of Hispanic students would rise to 19 percent from 14 percent and the Asian American share would rise to 31 percent from 24 percent.

The share of “advantaged” students (parents with a bachelor’s degree, family income over $80,000, living in a neighborhood not burdened by concentrated poverty) would make up about half of the class, from 82 percent. SAT scores would drop to the 98th percentile from the 99th.

Because he is focused on class-based diversity, Mr. Kahlenberg is satisfied with these results, but for many educators, the rise in low-income students does not make up for a drop in Black students.

Harvard, for instance, says it crafts every class carefully, looking for diversity of life experiences, interests and new ideas — and to cultivate potential leaders of society. Fewer Black students make that mission harder.

In the affirmative action trial, Harvard said that Mr. Kahlenberg’s model would produce too little diversity, and water down academic quality. Its actual class of 2026 is 15.2 percent African American, 12.6 percent Hispanic and 27.9 percent Asian American.

Universities should not turn to class-conscious admissions, “under the illusion that it will automatically produce high levels of racial diversity,” said Sean Reardon, an empirical sociologist at Stanford.

“It’s just sort of the math of it,” Dr. Reardon said. “Even though the poverty rates are higher among Blacks and Hispanics, there are still more poor whites in the country.”

Dr. Reardon does not dispute that society should provide more educational opportunity for low-income students. But, he said, “I think in recent years, there’s been much more of a perspective that there’s structural racism in America society. The idea that race and racial differences are sort of explainable by class differences is no longer the dominant idea.”

An Uneasy Alliance

Edward Blum, the conservative activist behind the lawsuits against Harvard and U.N.C., said Mr. Kahlenberg came to his attention when “The Remedy” was published. The focus on class seemed like a powerful bridge between the left and the right, Mr. Blum said.

“If we’re going to agree on one thing,” he said, “it is that colleges and universities should consider lowering the bar a little bit for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are maybe the first in their family to attend college, who come from very modest if not low-income households.”

“I don’t know who could be against that,” he said. “That’s the unifying theme that Rick Kahlenberg — he’s the godfather of it.”

Although the two men have had a long correspondence, Mr. Kahlenberg said they are more strange bedfellows than ideological soul mates, and that his views have been unfairly conflated with Mr. Blum’s.

“If the choice were race-based preferences or nothing, I would be for race-based preferences,” Mr. Kahlenberg said, his delivery more emotional than usual. “For those who think in terms of guilt by association, that point is lost.”

There are those who think that Mr. Kahlenberg is being used by Mr. Blum, who has made a specialty of challenging laws that he believes confer advantages or disadvantages by race. He  orchestrated a lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court gutting a key section of the Voting Rights Act, and was responsible for litigation against the University of Texas, charging discrimination against a white applicant, which failed.

Dr. Laycock, of the University of Virginia, expects that once the Supreme Court rules, conservative groups that are now promoting race-neutral alternatives will claim they are racial proxies and turn against them. “Everybody knows that’s why it’s being used,” he said. (Mr. Blum said his group will not, though other conservative groups could do so.)

In other words, that Kennedy- and King-style multiracial coalition may not come easily.

Since leaving the Century Foundation, Mr. Kahlenberg still consults for the organization on housing. He has a few unpaid gigs at the Progressive Policy Institute and at Georgetown. 

He recently moved from Bethesda, Md., to a modest house in Rockville, now strewn with baby toys from a visiting daughter and grandchild. Mr. Kahlenberg’s wife, Rebecca, works with homeless people.

There is no “We Believe” sign in the yard. But on the living room wall, a sign says, “Live simply, dream big, be grateful, give love, laugh lots.”

In that spirit, his stubborn campaign might be traced to being the son of a pastor whose family could afford to make him a Harvard graduate, twice over. “I do have some measure of class guilt,” he said. “I wish people who are far richer than I am had more class guilt.”

Source: The Liberal Maverick Fighting Race-Based Affirmative Action

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Their work is keeping Canada safe. But they earn a fraction of the national average

2020/04/01 Leave a comment

Another example of the COVID-19 class divide (‘White-Collar Quarantine’ Over Virus Spotlights Class Divide):

They’re the workers keeping Canada safe and healthy in the midst of a pandemic. But some — like cashiers — bring home just around a quarter of the average Canadian’s annual income.

From food processing to warehouses to delivery services, the workers deemed essential to maintaining the country’s vital supply chain are significantly more likely to be low-wage and racialized compared to the rest of the labour market, according to new statistics from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

In some cases, they are bringing home less than half of the average Canadian worker a year.

“In the midst of a pandemic, many of us are going back to the essentials. We need to put food on the table for ourselves and our families. We need to have the medications that we require. And as there have been many new reports on, we all need toilet paper,” said Sheila Block, a senior economist with the CCPA.

“To keep us in these essentials, we rely on these workers whose work has often been undervalued and who are often marginalized.”

The CCPA study relied on 2016 census data, which showed average annual earnings across the entire Canadian economy stood at around $49,500. Analyzing the earnings of workers in essential jobs by both industry and occupation, Block’s research found that grocery store workers — a category that includes managers — earned on average half of that. Cashiers took home just 26 per cent.

Light duty cleaners fared poorly too, earning just over 40 per cent of the national average. Couriers and door-to-door messengers brought home just over 50 per cent.

Racialized workers make up 21 per cent of the total workforce in Canada, but they were overrepresented in sectors deemed essential during the COVID-19 pandemic, the CCPA’s analysis found.

In warehousing and storage, for example, racialized workers made up 37 per cent of the workforce; in food manufacturing, that figure was 30 per cent.

Kulwinder Singh, a truck driver based out of Mississauga, says he is working 10 to 12 hour days bringing goods to Shoppers Drug Mart, Sobeys, and the LCBO. He says the deliveries he makes every day are “essential” — but he’s afraid to come home at the end of his shift to his wife and daughter.

“It’s very risky,” he said.

As an independent owner/operator, he is technically self-employed — meaning he has no health insurance, no medical leave, and no access to protective equipment except for what he purchases himself.

“Everything I’m paying for out of my own pocket,” he said, adding that some companies will not let him use washroom facilities to wash his hands.

The CCPA study notes that many of the sectors deemed essential have low unionization rates; in Canada, less than 8 per cent of retail workers have a union.

Many essential workers — including truck drivers and most gig workers — are classified as independent contractors, meaning they struggle to join unions and or access basic employment protections.

“There is a real divide between the people who can self isolate and who can work from home and the people that we rely on to make that possible,” said Block.

“We have to be particularly concerned that we are relying on industries that have a history of rights violations in this time. These rights violations have historically been threatening to workers’ health for sure and sometimes lives,” she added.

“Now we are actually putting the health of the public at risk if we don’t have good enforcement of health standards.”

Some companies, including Amazon and Loblaws, are offering employees a $2 an hour premium for working during the COVID-19 pandemic — measures Block called a “welcome but insufficient response.”

“We have to really look at governments to respond in a longer term manner by increasing minimum wages, easing access to unionization, and increasing both protections and enforcement under minimum employment standards,” she added.

Last week, federal labour minister Filomena Tassi said experts at the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety were drawing up best health and safety practices to share with provincial labour ministries for at-risk workplaces such as trucking and food processing.

Enacting 21 emergency leave days during the pandemic — plus seven permanent paid sick days — is also a critical step at the provincial level, Block said.

Source: Star ExclusiveTheir work is keeping Canada safe. But they earn a fraction of the national average A new study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives shows low-wage and racialized workers are overrepresented in jobs deemed essential during COVID-19 pandemic.

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The latest hiring taboo: class

2018/09/21 Leave a comment

Linda Nazareth on class bias in hiring decisions, citing a HBR blind cv study:

We love stories of rags to riches, and rightly so.

In North America, we adore hearing about the scholarship student becoming a CEO, or of the person who immigrates with a few dollars to his name then ends up a mega-success. We are all about income mobility, and are happy to talk about it. What we do not talk about is “class,” maybe because it is a so distasteful a topic as to be taboo. And yet, class diversity exists and arguably should be a consideration in building a balanced and effective workplace, and by extension a productive economy.

The issue of “class migrants” was bravely taken on by researchers Joan Williams, Marina Multhaup and Sky Mihaylo in a recent piece in the Harvard Business Review. Making the argument that those who started out in what they call “working class” backgrounds bring unique skills to the workplace, the authors assert that savvy companies should actively seek out those from diverse income backgrounds, or at least stop discriminating against them.

But wait, goes the argument, no one is likely to ditch a résumé from someone who started out with humble beginnings, because no one would know that they did, right? It is not like ignoring every applicant with a female-sounding name, for example. And while it is true that economic discrimination may not be as easy as ditching everyone named Jill in favour of all the Jacks, it tends to happen even if those who are discriminating do not realize it.

In a study done by researchers Lauren River and Adras Tilscik, fictitious résumés were sent to 316 offices at law firms across the United States, ostensibly from students looking for summer positions. All listed hobbies, although some were “upper class” (sailing, polo and classical music) while others were”‘lower class” (pick-up soccer, track and field and country music). The result? Sixteen per cent of the first group got a callback, compared to 1 per cent of the second.

The managers at the law firms may not have gone as far as thinking that they did not want to hang with the kind of people who ran track, but more that they felt that the polo players would be a good fit with their firms. In economics, this is known as the “signalling” hypothesis, whereby some characteristics are considered signals of other qualities even if the characteristics themselves are not being sought (unless there are billable hours for polo, which there might be).

From a job-seeker’s perspective, the best advice seems to be to just leave your hobbies off your résumé, or at least to lie about what they are (which is to say, if you like Lady Antebellum, for goodness sake keep it to yourself). Or, if you did not grow up with the right bona fides, do as legions of women have been told and just learn to play golf and talk about it as much as you can if you want to succeed in the corporate sphere.

The thing is, this is not just a job-seeker’s problem, but a company’s problem as well. For firms looking for the best talent, limiting the pool in any way seems kind of foolhardy. Leadership qualities are often correlated with having transcended income levels (one study of those in the U.S. Army, for example, found that class migrants were the most effective leaders). If you are trying to build the best workforce, you want to have access to the best workers, so figuring out how to attract those from a wide swathe of economic backgrounds should arguably be part of any policy on diversity.

In their Harvard Business Review article, the researchers assert that to do this you have to do more than just go to the top schools and look for diverse candidates when bringing in entry-level candidates, you have to actually look at schools that might not be considered top-tier: a top student from one of those schools could be a much better hire than an average one from the usual choices. Perhaps more controversially, they also suggest going easy on referral hiring (which many find an effective way to get good candidates) since the friends and relatives of employees are likely to give you more of the same in terms of economic characteristics.

Looking at this from a wider perspective, we are not exactly serving the wider economy by making it difficult for people to be accepted and assimilate into the workforce in a way that makes the best use of their talents. We have long talked about the barriers that stop some from making their way through high school and getting into postsecondary institutions. More recently, there has been a recognition that those who come from a background where acquiring a postsecondary education is unusual are much more likely to drop out without finishing than those where it is the norm. In both cases, there has been a recognition that fully engaging people helps them, but also helps create a better labour force and a stronger economy.

And so perhaps we need to take it one step further and talk about the last thing we want to talk about.

Source: Linda Nazareth

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How underprivilege made me a better doctor: Zhou

2017/08/26 Leave a comment

Interesting and pertinent account by Stephanie Y. Zhou of another aspect of diversity: social class in medical school and among doctors:

My family was supported by a homeless shelter before we moved into subsidized housing — the attic near the hospital. Food came from the food bank or soup kitchens. Clothing was second hand from the church donation bins. My parents did not have a university education, but they found jobs as factory workers and on most days, we seemed to have enough to get by.

To me, these were all part of a mundane, normal life, but in the context of privilege, these aspects suddenly became salient as a mark of “underprivilege.” Placed at a school attended by mostly middle-class students, this underprivileged experience became part of my identity, and to be different was incredibly isolating.

This identity of subordinance provided the impetus for me to pursue higher education. To be told that fields such as medicine or law were not in the realm of my socioeconomic class, that they carried an enormous financial investment with uncertain admission, made me resent my underprivileged identity even more. I wanted to be able to give my family the privileges we didn’t have and to break away from a cycle of poverty.

I studied hard and worked two part-time jobs during university to fund my medical school applications, but throughout the whole process, it was clear that one had to come from privilege to easily apply and assimilate into the medical culture.

In fact, not only are a disproportionate number of students from families of higher socioeconomic class, they come prepared with the social and cultural capital to navigate the medical school environment. Upon acceptance, I became a part of this new culture. Not wanting to be different, I hid my identity to feel included.

It wasn’t until I left the classroom that these sentiments began to change. I remember the single mother, with limited time to take off work, miss her own appointments to attend her daughter’s appointments instead. I saw patients who did not take their medications because they were too expensive. Patients with a language barrier who incorrectly interpreted their treatment plan because they didn’t understand. I saw myself and the experiences of my family in the lives of these patients, and I realized that I did fit into medicine — I fit in with my patients.

Although I initially tried to distance myself from my identity, I now acknowledge that it is a part of me I shouldn’t erase. To come from this background grants a different, more subtle form of privilege beyond that of wealth and social networks. I call it an “empathic privilege” that allows one to be more cognizant of the social determinants of health that patients often leave unspoken when seeking medical care.

In another sense, I also feel comfort in the presence of patients with lower socioeconomic status, whereas others might feel unease and frustration, because working with these patients helps close the gap between my identities.

I share my story because those with the underprivileged identity do exist in medicine, but they are a silent minority. Race and gender are easy to see, but low socioeconomic status may not be visible. Speaking about underprivilege may seem out of place, when now, as a result of luck and circumstance, you land among the most privileged.

Medical schools continue moving toward making the admissions process more equitable and diverse. However, measures to maintain and support diversity beyond the intake stage are often not in place. Students are then put in the position of negotiating a dual identity — one consistent with the medical culture, the other staying true to their social and cultural origins.

Medical schools should look one step back and one step forward in the admissions process. Before students from under-represented backgrounds can begin to use application subsidies or affirmative action initiatives, getting them to contemplate medicine in the first place requires an alignment between their identity and the identity associated with this vocation.

I encourage medical students and practicing physicians to be open about their stories, to humanize the identity of medicine so it doesn’t seem so lofty to those at a lower starting line — to show that a lived experience in poverty is valued by medical schools as much as, if not more than, having volunteered at a homeless shelter.

Looking forward, schools should continue diversity initiatives postadmission, whereby physicians from under-represented backgrounds support a culture of mentorship for like students, to facilitate development of their identity and strengths.

I am grateful to have lived in the dual worlds of underprivilege and privilege. I know what it feels like to not have choice, to have external factors, such as money and other people, dictate the path of my life. For many patients, it may feel the same — when their bodies and their lives are now in the hands of others.

Underprivilege has also taught me the importance of valuing chances, to hold on to them, offering my wholehearted effort toward these opportunities, because they were the threads of luck that helped pull me to the side of privilege. These experiences have taught me more about empathy and hard work than any medical school class could, and for that, to have been underprivileged is perhaps the greatest privilege in medicine.

Source: How underprivilege made me a better doctor | Toronto Star

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