While I was away: Multiculturalism articles of interest

2026/10/13 Leave a comment

Siddiqui: No, Mark Carney, Canada is not the most European non-European country

Not seeing much evidence for this in polling data and of course lands once occupied by Europeans were also subject in many cases to periods of conquest by other groups and countries:

… Carney has demonstrated no real feel for this new Canada and seems unaware that when he talks of Canada’s great affinity to Europe, he grates on many, especially Indigenous people and Canadians of non-European stock. His enthusiasm is particularly offensive to those of us who’ve come from lands once occupied by European colonialists — racist, cruel and rapacious.

Contrary to Carney’s assertion, Canada is the least Western of Western nations. As philosopher John Ralston Saul has argued, we are a “Métis nation,” shaped by Indigenous Peoples and their values of moderation and compromise — reflected in the 1867 British North America Act, a compact between the Indigenous, the English and the French. We can draw a line from that to this contemporary blessing: Canadians rate pluralism and multiculturalism as our top virtues when Trump and several European populists have turned skin colour into a major fault line of the West.

Anti-immigrant parties are doing well in Britain and across Europe — Germany, France, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, Finland, etc. They are cheered on by Trump who fans the fears of Europe facing “civilizational erasure” and becoming “majority non-European,” i.e. non-white. Far too many mainstream Republicans are proclaiming the United States to be a “Christian nation” and echoing far-right Europeans in asserting that “Christ is king.”

In Canada, however, no overtly anti-immigrant, let alone racist or religion-based party can hope to win a national election or even muster a few seats….

Urback: Woke 1.0 was crazy. And it’s not over yet

Good discussion of how woke should be interpreted and allowance for growth and change: 

… That’s what made, and makes, Woke 1.0 so “crazy,” to borrow Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s characterization. It wasn’t simply the furor with which the public attacked perceived transgressors, or the haste with which punishments were doled out, but the inherent contradiction of the whole find/shame/banish exercise, which was supposed to be about bettering individuals’ social awareness, but left no space for betterment. “Wokeness” is about recognizing racial (and other) privilege, about understanding our own inherent biases, and about acknowledging the structural barriers that disproportionately affect some people more than others. The whole idea is that through learning and growth, we can make a better, fairer society.

But Woke 1.0 made no allowance for growth – neither past nor present. People were defined by singular statements or actions, flattened into one-dimensional caricatures of themselves. Those who transgressed from accepted dogma were booted from their jobs immediately, without time to actually understand why “reverse racism” could be considered a regressive concept. And those who were fired for historical wrongs were made to wear and serve penance for past indiscretions, even if they could demonstrate they were no longer that person.

Indeed, the moment was all about unlearning prejudices (which is why every company suddenly seemed to have a DEI czar onboard), but no one cared to listen if someone claimed to have already unlearned their prejudices….

Terry Newman: Concordia handbook teaches students to hate Canada, the West, police ….

Link to handbook: https://drive.google.com/file/d/13XQ5sTNcXhrcQfRT73ca-PyuYeeZgzHm/view 

Sigh…Good example of woke 1:

…The next part of the handbook is called a “Survival Guide.” The first section is titled, “Ni Canada, ni Quebec” (neither Canada, nor Quebec). It criticizes Prime Minister Mark Carney for evoking Canada’s “glorified settler colonial past” in his recent forward guidance video, and accuses the Liberals of passing a “massive anti-immigration bill giving the state powers to abandon due legal process and to cancel immigration status for migrants at will.”

The handbook also has strong words for two Quebec political parties. It complains that both the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) and Parti Québécois (PQ) are moving toward more right-wing policies, including the CAQ’s banning prayer in public institutions and the PQ’s call for a referendum. It also complains that: “The Quiet Revolution-era promise of a Québécois welfare state and shared prosperity for all is now more or less a thing of the past, abandoned in favour of xenophobic rhetoric and the so-called “defence of Quebecois and Western culture and values.”

The federal government doesn’t escape the handbook’s criticism either. Students are told that the federal government is only more tolerant of minorities than Quebec “on the surface,” and frames the plight of migrants as one in which they are required to accept that “money rules the land, that you’ll be blamed for the political and economic failures of the government, and that your immigration status can be revoked at any time, resulting in your deportation, especially if you protest in solidarity with Palestine….

Elkouri: Blé d’Inde, hijab, colère

Good column:

…Pour les directions scolaires qui ont l’odieux d’appliquer la loi 94, la situation est intenable sur le plan humain.

Comment annoncer à des parents bénévoles appréciés que l’on ne peut plus accepter leur aide ? Quel message leur envoie-t-on ? Quel message cela envoie-t-il à leurs enfants ?

« Ça nous écœure. On a honte », me confiait la directrice d’une école primaire de la grande région montréalaise. Car cela va fondamentalement à l’encontre des valeurs d’inclusion de la société québécoise.

Comment accepter que l’école québécoise inclusive devienne un lieu d’exclusion ?

Étonnamment, en pleine campagne électorale, cet enjeu qui suscite de vives inquiétudes est passé sous silence.

À la veille des élections, Joanne espère que son cri du cœur nourrira la réflexion et servira surtout à ramener un peu d’amour, d’inclusion et de bon sens dans un monde qui en a bien besoin.

Je l’espère aussi.

Moderate new Muslim group aims to broaden dialogue beyond certain ‘politically charged issues’

Will be interesting to see how active and influential this organization will become:

There are roughly two million Muslims in Canada. But they don’t see themselves in conversations being held in their name in Ottawa, says a leader of the new Muslim Policy Institute (MPI).

The MPI, launched this month, is dedicated to including Canadian Muslims in the dialogue that shapes policy about how they live.

“The questions MPI cares about most, like belonging, opportunity, the pressures families are facing, and what Muslim Canadians actually prioritize, are often overlooked. Meanwhile, the national conversation keeps circling one or two politically charged issues,” said Nika Jabiyeva, the institute’s managing director of operations and partnerships, told National Post.

Jabiyeva said research last year revealed that although Islamophobia was a concern for the community, bigger concerns for Muslim Canadians, like most Canadians in general, were the cost of living and housing.

MPI “doesn’t claim to represent two million people,” she said. The group’s purpose is to learn “what shapes Muslim Canadian life and identity, from youth and professionals to women in leadership and elders, and bringing that to the public and into policy.”…

Immigrants aren’t a monolithic voting bloc in Alberta’s referendum on secession

Immigrants, both overall and within different groups, are never monolithic with considerable variation:

The temptation to portray immigrants as a monolithic pro-Confederation voting bloc, therefore, ignores the complexity of their experience, concerns, and aspirations. Consequently, in this referendum, both sides of the separation debate would be advised to acknowledge that newcomers are neither automatic defenders of the Confederation nor guaranteed supporters of the independence campaign. They are a diverse and evolving constituency whose political choices are formed by the same mixture of fears, hopes and interests that influence every voter.

This referendum may actually prove that the voices of Alberta’s immigrants may not be the loudest in the public square, but they could prove decisive in shaping the province’s political future.

Innocent Madawo is a political commentator based in Edmonton.

Khan: Canadians must not stand for the notwithstanding clause’s pre-emptive use

We will see where the SCC ends up, hopefully with some guardrails given excessive invocation:

…Canada’s judicial system and Charter of Rights say otherwise. When a provincial or federal legislature proposes a law that a court has ruled would deny Canadians of their fundamental freedoms, legal rights or equality rights, it can invoke the notwithstanding clause to override the order. Legislatures can also deny those affected the ability to plead their case before the courts by invoking the clause pre-emptively, as Saskatchewan, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec have done or have threatened to do.

The Supreme Court of Canada has deemed such pre-emptive use legal. But is it just? Quebec’s Bill 21, which the legislature shielded with a pre-emptive use of the notwithstanding clause in 2019, has been making its way through Canada’s courts. It is now being considered by the Supreme Court – but not because it might violate fundamental individual freedoms. Instead, the case is being heard because it allegedly violates English-language minority rights, which the clause cannot override.

The Supreme Court will also hear a case from Saskatchewan in which the government used the clause pre-emptively to remove any challenge to a law requiring parental consent for students under 16 to use preferred pronouns at school. Unlike the courts in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, though, Saskatchewan’s appellate court said that it would examine the case despite the clause being used, and let the public know how it violates fundamental freedoms. Pretty bold on its part, in contrast to the helplessness shown by courts in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. And now Canada’s highest court will decide whether lower courts can do the same: step in and issue a declaration when a Canadian is not allowed to argue for basic freedoms.

So here we are. You can fight a traffic ticket in court; people accused of serious crimes have their day in court to mount a vigorous defence. And yet, our Charter not only allows our legislators the absolute power to override basic rights, it grants the power to deny any opportunity to fight against those violations. It feels Kafkaesque – but the better descriptor might be Trumpian, in how it bullies the powerless. How ironic that Canadians appear largely united in our displeasure with that man, yet accept a system that allows governments to take our vulnerable minorities’ freedoms away without legal recourse….

Amnesty International: Black communities in Canada say reparatory justice must be enshrined in new UN rights declaration

Some issues are more specific to Blacks, some are more generic to all minorities and are class, not identity based. Some are just unrealistic, politically, and are unlikely to change the reality on the ground.

  • Establish an independent Black Equity Commissioner with enforcement authority and protection from political interference
  • Mandate disaggregated race-based data collection under community-controlled governance frameworks grounded in Black data sovereignty
  • Recognize collective rights of historic Black communities, including the ancestral land and cultural rights of African Nova Scotians
  • Invest in Black-led infrastructure through independent institutions, legal-defence capacity, and stable multi-year funding
  • Regulate artificial intelligence and surveillance technologies to eliminate anti-Black bias, including through independent equity audits and meaningful representation in technology governance
  • Reform education systems to centre Black Canadian history, identity, and culturally responsive teaching
  • Address barriers facing Black newcomers in immigration, housing, credential-recognition, and access to culturally appropriate supports

“Black communities in Toronto, Nova Scotia, and Ottawa gave their time and trust to this process, knowing how often consultation has ended without action,” said Lerato Chondoma, a director with the Black Canadians Civil Society Coalition. “They have brought clarity and good faith; the obligation now rests with governments. We call on Canada to show publicly, with timelines and benchmarks, how and when it will act on the recommendations contained in the report.

McWhorter: When White People Like Hannah Gann Pretend to Be Black

Another interesting discussion:

… These cases suggest a subtype of modern white identity. For this person, the commitment to contesting the evil of whiteness is all-consuming, an ideological North Star that orients her entire worldview. It is an extreme expression of the outlook that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called “Woke 1,” in which the world is always neatly divided into wicked white oppressors and virtuous nonwhite victims. For a white person with these beliefs, it is a short step to wanting not to be white, to escape the original sin of that privilege.

To be the victim is to be not just innocent but also more interesting. It also can provide a sense of meaning in a modern world that no longer gives ready answers to the question of life’s purpose. “Who am I? What am I for? I’m … Black!” The decision may be eccentric — skin darkening as part of your morning routine? — but it is hardly counterintuitive….

Modern cases like Gann’s are something else. And because the fetishizing of Blackness and the reviling of whiteness is a natural outgrowth of our progressive intelligentsia’s worldview, I see little that will stop them from appearing from time to time. While Krug disappeared from public life, Dolezal presses on in her simulation, and recently said she’d like to sit down for a meal with Gann. Perhaps Gann, too, will ultimately decide that her self-identification as Black and Palestinian is valid, regardless of biology and family history.

This sort of thing will remain rare but never go extinct — no more perplexing than the occasional four-leaf clover. Get ready for another case in a year or three.

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McWhorter: Euphemism Won’t Save Young Black Men’s Lives

2026/07/13 Leave a comment

Plain speech rather than euphemisms or ignoring reality (e.g., pregnant people):

…Euphemism can feel so right. We imagine that if we create a new term for something we can get people to think about it differently. Surely more will understand that a “bum” isn’t a reprobate if we refer to him as “homeless.” I’m just old enough to remember when “homeless” was the new default in the 1980s — it sounded so polite, open-minded. But before long, sentiments associated with “bum” transferred to “homeless.” We now have the dismissive slang term “homelessy.” So we’re supposed to say “unhoused.”

Hence “gun violence.” The key contrast is that if someone said “knife violence” we’d feel like they were trying to hide something. It’s the same with “gun violence.” We seek euphemism, maybe to avoid thinking about who is doing the shooting. “Gun violence” encourages us to see Black men who shoot one another not as self-destructive killers, but as people beset by a larger force unrelated to blame.

But we need not euphemism, but action, so that eventually there isn’t anything more to euphemize about.

We should think more of initiatives like Save Our Streets, part of a nationwide movement in which former gang members and others who have committed crimes are enlisted to act as experienced mediators between young people on the verge of using guns. A study by the sociologist Patrick Sharkey and co-authors Gerard Torrats-Espinosa and Delaram Takyar has shown that nonprofit organizations that focus on crime and community life can help reduce murder rates. Precision policing or focused deterrence, zeroing in on the tiny percentage of people in a neighborhood committing crimes, rather than canvassing the entire population, has been shown to reduce homicides.

The tragic effects of these shootings, including the convulsive grief of thousands of mothers, demands stark honesty that treats the lives of poor young Black men as reality, not as an abstraction. This includes talking about them rather than around them.

Source: Euphemism Won’t Save Young Black Men’s Lives

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While I was away: Multiculturalism and Identity

2026/06/08 Leave a comment

Some multiculturalism articles other than on antisemitism:

Christopher Dummitt: Nothing says generic left-winger like getting an honorary degree

Useful analysis:

…Is this a conspiracy? Probably not. But it is a textbook case of systemic bias. Universities are populated overwhelmingly by people who share a homogeneous worldview. They are the ones nominating candidates. Those nominations are then filtered through committees explicitly instructed to favour recipients who embody progressive DEI values.

Imagine the reverse. If universities leaned right and committees were instructed to favour those who champion conservative conceptions of social order, Stephen Harper would top the list. Former Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall and former cabinet minister Rona Ambrose would follow. But the more revealing cases come further down. If Desmond Cole can receive an honorary degree, why not Jonathan Kay — journalist, former editor of the Walrus, and a genuine contributor to Canadian public debate? Why not Brian Lee Crowley, founder of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, or Mark Milke, founder of the Aristotle Foundation? These are precisely the kinds of public intellectuals — fighters for their conception of a just society — that universities celebrate on the left. Why not the right?

To be more provocative, but no more so than in the cases of Cole or Rebick: why not former Harper advisor and academic Tom Flanagan? Or John Carpay, whose legal challenges to COVID-19 restrictions represent exactly the kind of principled dissent that universities seem to admire — at least when it comes from the left.

All of these figures are at least as accomplished as many being honoured this year. Many believe deeply in social justice — just with different assumptions about what “just” means.

When Zak Patterson and I published research showing the political composition of Canadian universities some years ago, one of the most striking responses came from those who insisted our numbers were wrong and our surveys flawed. A clearer case of motivated reasoning would be hard to find.

But if hard data on the political beliefs of university faculty isn’t convincing enough, just attend a convocation ceremony this spring. The ideological skew will be on full display — one last kick in the teeth for any non-leftist student or parent. You thought tuition was too high? Here’s one more insult on your way out the door.

McWhorter: A Black Helen of Troy? Fine. A White Obama? Not Yet.

Of interest:

Plus, white actors playing Black figures in “blaccents” of various degrees would verge on minstrelsy. It’s one thing that Black British or African actors such as Idris Elba and Thandiwe Newton do American blaccents in roles (and uncannily well). But Reese Witherspoon or Steve Carell? Um — no.

Or, at least, not now. It would be tragic to expect our current sensibilities to be permanent. If we are truly making progress, then we have to allow that the past becomes history, power relations change, and minstrelsy is too antique to be relevant to our current existences.

In some future time we should have no problem with a talented white man playing the lead in “A Raisin in the Sun,” a white woman cast as Representative Barbara Jordan, or white people singing in “Porgy and Bess.” I didn’t say tomorrow — but sometime.

Whites already talk ever more like Black people, dance ever more like Black people, greet one another ever more like Black people, marry ever more Black people and create ever more half-Black people. There is no reason to assume there is some point at which this melangerie will — or must — halt, regardless of inevitable holdout bigotry. A natural next step would be for white people to be able to portray Black people in performance. Maybe it will be too late for Ryan Gosling to play Barack Obama — but someone like him.

“Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world,” observed the philosopher Eric Hoffer in 1968. That remains true today. Hatred of Israel has become the sty in Western eyes that, as it grows larger, risks making too many people blind.

StatsCan: Preterm births among mothers from racialized groups, 2016-2021

Useful analysis:

Data from the mother-centric data linkages show that:

Compared with mothers aged 25-34, proportions of singleton preterm births were higher for mothers aged 35-39 and 40+ among all racialized groups and non-racialized, non-Indigenous mothers, whereas for mothers under 25, the increase was observed only in non-racialized, non-Indigenous mothers. 

In Canada, the proportions of single births (i.e., singleton births) that were preterm (<37 weeks) were higher among South Asian (6.9%) and Black mothers (6.3%) compared with non-racialized, non-Indigenous mothers (5.5%).

All racialized groups of mothers had higher proportions of extremely and very preterm singleton births (<32 weeks) compared with non-racialized, non-Indigenous mothers.

The proportion of preterm multiple births was more common among South Asian mothers than among non-racialized, non-Indigenous mothers (69.2% vs 58.2%).

The Canadian Armed Forces are right to experiment around recruitment

Nice contrarian and thoughtful discussion compared to the standard outrage largely by right-leaning politicians and media:

…The report was written by the commander of the school responsible for basic military qualifications. It outlined how changes in entry standards, which started in 2022 with the opening of the military to permanent residents, affected training outcomes. The bottom line stood in sharp contrast with the optimism Canadian generals displayed a week prior: the completion rate of basic training declined from a historical average of 85 per cent to 77 per cent. 

These findings sent shockwaves through the defence community, and raised questions around the quality of recruits and future operational effectiveness. But the reaction may miss two key points. First, the report demonstrates that, despite changes in standards to admissions, criteria for success at basic training have not changed. 

Second, the report reflects an important shift toward risk-taking, learning, and adaptation within the military. This is what we want for an organization that wants to win the next war. As retired Australian general Mick Ryan noted in assessing the war in Ukraine, “[a]daptation is THE critical contemporary and future capability for nations and their military organizations to win in war.”

The reality is that any modernization plan must address the critical personnel deficiency that has plagued the CAF for the past 30 years, starting with the poorly managed drawdown of the 1990s. Its effects have been crippling and wide-ranging; contributing to low readiness rates among units and systems, poor morale, high attrition rates, and the delayed transition to new capabilities. Without a robust pool of military personnel to fill existing skill deficiencies, as well as emerging ones as the CAF introduces new capabilities, any effort to create a modern fighting force will continue to stall. Thus, innovation in how the military recruits and trains is an essential element towards this objective.

Immigrants less likely to support freedom of gender expression than people born in Canada: StatCan

Of interest:

…The findings, published in Statistics Canada’s Juristat, were based on self-reported data from the 2018 and 2025 Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces (SSPPS). The survey examined how attitudes toward gender-related issues have changed over time.

When it came to gender expression, people born in Canada were more likely to agree with statements supporting people’s rights to gender expression than those born elsewhere.

The survey found that 80 per cent of women and 71 per cent of men born in Canada agreed that individuals should be able to express their gender however they choose, compared to 70 per cent of women and 67 per cent of men born outside the country.

In addition, a larger proportion of First Nations women (82 per cent) than non-Indigenous women (77 per cent) supported people’s right to express their gender.

The survey also found that support people being able to express their gender however they choose has declined in recent years.

The percentage of women who agreed that people should have this right decreased from 85 per cent to 77 per cent between 2018 and 2025, while support among men dropped from 78 per cent to 70 per cent.

A Muslim wage gap? New study exposes major economic disparities in Greater Toronto and Hamilton

Would be more useful if the tables did not just have the dichotomy between Muslim and non-Muslim for compare for all religious groups. When I did an intersectionality between religious affiliation, visible minorities status and citizenship (all of Canada), it indicated that there was a gap across most visible minority groups.

Muslim Canadians in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area earn less and face greater unemployment and poverty compared to non-Muslims despite higher education levels, gaps that a new report suggests are rooted in systemic racism and Islamophobia.

Overall, 51 per cent of Muslims in prime working age who are employed full time hold post-secondary degrees, compared to 40.5 per cent among non-Muslims, according to data extrapolated from the 2021 census.

Yet they had a median employment income of $61,000, $12,000 less than their non-Muslim counterparts. The aggregate annual income loss could amount to $1.2 billion a year, said the report, which offers a rare glimpse at the economic well-being of a religious minority in Canada. …

Black reps left off federal advisory council on rights, equality and inclusion

Not unexpected and from the usual advocates:

Advocates are calling for Black representation and a more inclusive mandate for the federal government’s new Advisory Council on Rights, Equality and Inclusion.

The calls follow the federal government’s announcement on June 1 of the new advisory council that did not include Black representatives.

Advocates also slammed the federal government for neglecting to include anti-Black racism in the council’s mandate.

“Anti-Black racism was not explicitly identified. At some point, omission becomes difficult to distinguish from indifference,” Nicholas Marcus Thompson, co-chair of the National Employment Equity Council, told reporters in a news conference on June 4.

Indigenous

Aaron Pete: Criminalizing residential school ‘denialism’ won’t help reconciliation

Not the mainstream Indigenous perspective but a valuable one:

A healthier path would be more demanding, but also more democratic: better education, better records, more transparency, more excavation where appropriate, more serious journalism and more honest public dialogue, all carried out in a spirit of kindness, which is the Canadian way. We should confront hatred firmly without turning every difficult or uncomfortable question into a potential criminal matter.

Reconciliation will not be advanced by fear. It will be advanced by truth, humility and mutual responsibility. Canadians should not prejudge one another or assume the worst of intent. This is our shared country, and we all have a duty to seek truth, guard against government overreach and debate complex issues civilly.

The history of residential schools deserves seriousness. So does freedom of expression. A confident democracy should be able to protect both.

Aaron Pete is Chief of Chawathil First Nation in B.C.’s Fraser Valley.

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McWhorter: ‘The Zorg’ tells a story we all must hear

2025/11/14 Leave a comment

Another good column, again a reminder that simplistic Manichean dichotomies don’t reflect historical realities and complexities:

…As the African American studies professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written and I have experienced, people are often uncomfortable learning that Africans sold one another into this living hell. A common objection is that Africans had no way of knowing what conditions their captives would encounter. But they saw those captives being marched all but to death, sold like animals and penned into a slave castle hold. Black African slave traders had more than enough information to understand the fundamental immorality of the undertaking. If whites had seen even only what the Africans saw, we would not hesitate to judge them as unforgivably complicit in sin.

One lesson of “The Zorg” is that history and people are complex. The recently fashionable view of American (or Western) history as just one extended hit job, with whiteness always the oppressor and people of color always the subaltern, is ultimately a childish temptation, excusing us from engaging detail and nuance. Humans of all shades have quite often been awful to one another. Our job is to work against that tendency, not to pretend it doesn’t exist. And to celebrate those who overcome it, whatever their race. Abolitionism — a Western, Anglophone achievement, which Kara recounts in a final chapter — was a keystone example of that effort, and “The Zorg” is invaluable instruction in what made it so important….

Source: ‘The Zorg’ tells a story we all must hear

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McWhorter: Those flubs of Mamdani’s name aren’t necessarily what they sound like

2025/10/31 1 Comment

Always interesting:

…I once heard two colleagues grumbling about the ways that people mispronounced their names. One of those colleagues was Italian; the other was a Black Muslim. They took it as an unquestionable sign of disrespect. I thought they could have eased up a little, given that they themselves surely had occasion to screw up unfamiliar names. It’s quite difficult not to.

If Mamdani is elected mayor, mispronunciations of his name will diminish, and soon sound very dated. Repetition and practice will assure that his name gets more respect than Kosciuszko’s. But in the here and now, it’s worth not leaping to conclusions about why someone might jumble the sounds. Between the human mouth, the power of habit and the vagaries of spelling, “Zor-han Mandami” is an inevitable first step toward, as Mamdani put it, getting it right.

Source: Those flubs of Mamdani’s name aren’t necessarily what they sound like

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McWhorter: A Term So Outdated, Even President Trump Wouldn’t Use It

2025/07/28 Leave a comment

Good take:

On Sunday, President Trump, still on the ropes because of the controversy over the government’s Jeffrey Epstein files, ventured a distraction. With all the usual exclamation points and eccentric capitalization, he sounded the alarm on an issue a reader might have mistaken for a national crisis: the names of professional sports franchises. In particular those franchises that had cast off names that no longer felt culturally appropriate: the Washington Commanders, formerly the Redskins, and the Cleveland Guardians, formerly the Indians.

“The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams,” — by the way, it wasn’t — “with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them.”

With typical subtlety, Trump concluded, “OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!”

The controversy dates back more than a half-century. It was formalized in 1968, when the National Congress of American Indians embarked on a campaign to fight negative stereotypes of native people in American culture.

For a while, however, the evidence on the word “redskin” seemed equivocal. Polls by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, in 2004, and again by The Washington Post, in 2016, reported that a vast majority of actual Native Americans had no problem with the term. Was the whole thing just a politically correct tempest in a teapot, an effort to fix something that wasn’t actually a problem?

In 2020, a new poll was conducted. This one asked respondents for more finely grained responses and gave them more opportunity to consider their answers. The outcome was very different: Almost half of 1,000 Native Americans surveyed indeed found the term “redskin” to be offensive. Organized college athletics had long since forsworn team mascots that were based on caricatures of Indians. Amid the national climate of racial reckoning that George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter movement brought on, the Washington football franchise announced it would change its name.

When Trump claims that “our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen,” there is no reason to wonder if he commissioned his own secret polling. But you don’t need a poll to understand why he’s wrong.

I doubt even Trump himself would be comfortable using that contested term to address a human being. Imagine him inviting a tribal leader to join him at some White House ceremony and introducing him as “my honored guest, a respected redskin.” At best, the term sounds like an artifact from some century-old stage play. To most ears, it simply sounds like a slur.

My grandmother was a laundress for a very wealthy white family, who would grant their staff a lovely week at their Maine island getaway every summer. Grandmom took us there with her for two summers in the mid-1970s. The white staff members there, while at least outwardly kind to my Black family, were acridly unfond of the local Native Americans. I had occasion to hear them late at night hissing about “those redskins.” That’s what we want as the name of a football team?

But even those who agree with me on that point might still quite reasonably ask what was wrong with “Cleveland Indians.” The term “Native American” may sound more respectful, but a vast majority of people who trace their ancestry to America’s tribal nations prefer being called Indians.

That might seem odd, given that “Indian” was a term imposed on them by Christopher Columbus when he mistakenly thought he had reached India. But it’s not that unusual.

As I wrote recently, quite a few Black Americans prefer “Black” over “African American,” despite the fact that “Black” was a term imposed on people with dark skin by people with light skin, and it sure wasn’t meant as a compliment. At the turn of the previous century, even educated Black people such as Sylvester Russell, an editorialist at the Indianapolis newspaper The Freeman, reportedly approved of the usage of “darkey.” In 1908 the doughty Black opera diva Sissieretta Jones asked, “Is there a soul so insensible that it cannot be stirred to the very depths by the heartbroken cry of the poor old homesick darkey?”

The problem with the Cleveland Indians isn’t “Indian.” The Cleveland Native Americans would be just as wrong. The problem isn’t the word choice; it’s the choice to use a human group as a mascot at all. Even if the members of that group are celebrated as brave warriors. No one today would be debating the merits of a team called the Boston Blacks or the New Jersey Negroes. How about the New York Jews or the Pittsburgh Polacks? Shifting to a more seemly Pittsburgh Poles would do nothing to solve the glaringly obvious problem. People are not pets.

Trump is right that the heritage and prestige of American Indians have been “systematically taken away from them,” but that is the work of the United States government, which pursued an explicit policy of dehumanization and dispossession and achieved it with horrifying success. Going back to antique stereotypes only continues the process.

Source: A Term So Outdated, Even President Trump Wouldn’t Use It

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McWhorter: Listen Up. Ketanji Brown Jackson Is Speaking to You.

2025/07/19 Leave a comment

Nice post on the use of language. Plain language vs legalese:

When Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote her ringing dissent in the case of Trump v. CASA, which severely curtailed the ability of lower courts to serve as a check on unlawful executive orders, she wanted to make abundantly clear the danger of what she regarded as a “seismic shock” to American legal norms. “Courts must have the power to order everyone (including the executive) to follow the law — full stop,” she wrote. She continued, in a voice dripping with sarcasm, “The majority sees a power grab — but not by a presumably lawless executive choosing to act in a manner that flouts the plain text of the Constitution. Instead, to the majority, the power-hungry actors are … (wait for it) … the district courts.”

Social media platforms exploded with outrage.

One user asked, in apparent disbelief, “Did Ketanji Brown Jackson actually pop that stupid little ‘wait for it’ gag in a SCOTUS opinion?” Another said the dissent “single-handedly degraded 235 years, four months, and 25 days of SCOTUS precedent.” The worst of them turned the justice’s language back on her as a weapon. “Ketanji Brown Jackson is … (wait for it) …” — well, I won’t repeat the insult here, but for good measure, commenter added, “full stop.”

Her critics were right to note that Justice Jackson was doing something unusual. And it wasn’t just those examples. She peppered the whole dissent with expressions like “Why all the fuss?” “Do not take my word for it,” “Here is what I mean,” and the assessment — again with unmistakable sarcasm — “That is some solicitation.”

You won’t find anything like that in Marbury v. Madison.

What’s striking about Justice Jackson’s turns of phrase is that they employ what we typically regard as oral language — spontaneous, spoken words — in an extremely serious written text. That choice and the blowback it encountered are a chance to consider the arbitrariness and narrowness of the conventions dictating how legal opinions should be written. The expectation that their language be timeless, faceless and Latinate is a matter of custom, not necessity. “Why all the fuss?” indeed.

Justice Jackson is, at 54, the second-youngest justice on the court. She was raised in the 1980s, a time when America’s writing culture was getting markedly less hidebound. Waving aside the hats and girdles and stuffy dance steps of old, the counterculture had shown America how to let its language hang out, too. A new, looser style of writing allowed a play between the oral and the written, and the result enriched the culture rather than impoverishing it.

I can’t speak for Justice Jackson, but that shift had a big impact on a great many people who grew up in that era’s wake. It definitely had a big impact on me. I write in what I hope is a conversational style. Like Justice Jackson, I have sometimes been scolded for it by people who would prefer that I write “with a tie on,” as it were.

Justice Jackson isn’t the only writer to experiment with mixing orality into rarefied texts. Saul Bellow reveled in the highflying lexicographic richness of the English language, but then every so often paused for a fillip of the colloquial. In “Seize the Day,” he describes a character in language so precise and vivid that it verges on poetry: “And in the dark tunnel, in the haste, heat, and darkness which disfigure and make freaks and fragments of nose and eyes and teeth, all of a sudden, unsought, a general love for all these imperfect and lurid-looking people burst out in Wilhelm’s breast. He loved them. One and all, he passionately loved them.” Just a bit later, Bellow renders the character’s thoughts, and he does so in the baggier structure of speech: “That’s the right clue and may do me the most good. Something very big. Truth, like.”

Key is the “Truth, like,” approximate and slangy, the way that the character would really talk and think. In its immediacy and urgency, oral language pulls us in, makes us listen once we have sat still. Weaving it together with a more formal written style is Bellovian jazz.

Back to Justice Jackson. Behind all the harrumphing is an assumption that language that is accessible cannot also be precise. But Justice Jackson’s own words show that this assumption is mistaken. “It is odd, to say the least,” she wrote, “that the court would grant the executive’s wish to be freed from the constraints of law by prohibiting district courts from ordering complete compliance with the Constitution. But the majority goes there.” The second-sentence shift to spoken language conveys fervor, urgency and concern, but it doesn’t lessen the scalpel-like precision of the first sentence. And its “Oh-no-you-didn’t!” informality heightens the sense that this is not a remote matter of merely academic interest.

And, as always, orality grabs your attention. Think about how much less powerful her point would be if she stuck to more traditional, formal language such as “the majority ventures this regardless.”

The evolution of language always encounters resistance, and sometimes outrage. When the word “ain’t” appeared in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary in 1961, purists freaked out — and The Times demanded its removal. That response didn’t age well, and neither does the hue and cry over Justice Jackson’s impassioned attempts to convey a sense of urgency. Call it Jacksonian jazz, if you like. But calling it stupid is just nastiness — full stop.

Source: Listen Up. Ketanji Brown Jackson Is Speaking to You.

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McWhorter: It’s Time to Let Go of ‘African American’

2025/07/15 Leave a comment

Makes sense given recent immigration from Africa in contrast to descendents of the slave trade:

I’m no fan of performative identity politics, and I think racial preferences are long past their expiration date. Yet I don’t think the New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani did anything wrong when, as was reported last week, he checked off “Black or African American” on a college application. As a man of South Asian descent who spent the first part of his life living in Uganda, he was within his rights to call himself African American. The problem is that the term appeared on the application, or anywhere else. Plenty of Black people have never liked it, and ever more are joining the ranks. It’s time to let it go.

“African American” entered mainstream circulation in the late ’80s as a way to call attention to Black people’s heritage in the same way that terms like “Italian American” and “Asian American” do for members of those groups. The Rev. Jesse Jackson encouraged its usage, declaring: “Black does not describe our situation. In my household there are seven people and none of us have the same complexion. We are of African American heritage.” In 1989 the columnist and historian Roger Wilkins told Isabel Wilkerson: “Whenever I go to Africa, I feel like a person with a legitimate place to stand on this earth. This is the name for all the feelings I’ve had all these years.”

Since that time, the United States has seen an enormous change in immigration patterns. In 1980 there were about 200,000 people in America who were born in Africa; by 2023 there were 2.8 million. So today, for people who were born in Africa, any children they have after moving here and Black people whose last African ancestors lived centuries ago, the term “African American” treats them as if they are all in the same category, forcing a single designation for an inconveniently disparate range of humans.

Further complicating matters is that many Africans now living here are not Black. White people from, for example, South Africa or Tanzania might also legitimately call themselves African American. As for the community that Mamdani grew up in, it dates back to at least the late 19th century, when South Asians were brought to Uganda to work as servants for British colonizers. “Mississippi Masala,” the movie for which Mamdani’s mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair, is perhaps best known, tells the story of South Asian Ugandans expelled from the country in 1972 by the dictator Idi Amin. Feeling just as dislocated from the only home they had ever known as I would feel if expelled from the United States, they would be quite reasonable in viewing themselves as African Americans after settling here.

A term that is meant to be descriptive but that can refer to Cedric the Entertainer, Trevor Noah, Elon Musk and Zohran Mamdani is a little silly.

And not just silly but chilly. “African American” sounds like something on a form. Or something vaguely euphemistic, as if you’re trying to avoid saying something out loud. It feels less like a term for the vibrant, nuanced bustle of being a human than like seven chalky syllables bureaucratically impervious to abbreviation. Italian Americans call themselves “Italian” for short. Asian Americans are “Asian.” But for any number of reasons, it’s hard to imagine a great many Black Americans opting to call themselves simply African.

To the extent that “African American” was designed to change perceptions of what “Black” means, it hasn’t worked. The grand old euphemism treadmill has done it in. Again and again we create new terms hoping to get past negative associations with the old ones, such as “homeless” for “bum.” But after a while the negative associations settle like a cloud of gnats on the new terms as well, and then it’s time to find a further euphemism. With no hesitation I predict that “unhoused person” will need replacement in about 2030.

At an earlier point in its life cycle, “African American” could at least be argued to have an air of pride and lineage, free of any historical association with inferiority. Back in the day you could imagine it sung to the same melody as Alexander Hamilton’s name is in the opening song to the musical about him: “A-le-XANder HA-mil-ton”; “A-fri-CAN a-MER-i-can.” But these days “African American” and “Black” strike the same note.

In 2020, when a Black man in Central Park asked a white woman to leash her dog, she dialed 911, warning him, “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” There was nothing euphemistic in the way she used that term.

But all along we’ve had a perfectly good word to describe Black people: Black. We should just use that.

Black power! Yeah. But African American power? Do we imagine Lorraine Hansberry and Nina Simone explaining how it feels to be “Young, Gifted and African American”? And would we want to?

Let Mamdani and other people — of all shades — born in Africa or about a generation past it call themselves African Americans. But here, over centuries, descendants of African slaves have become something else — and proudly, I hope. In American parlance, we are Black. And proud. And (you knew it was coming) say it loud.

“Black is beautiful.” Yes. Truly, “African American” isn’t.

Source: It’s Time to Let Go of ‘African American’

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McWhorter: Viewed From Any Angle, This Station Is a Wonder and an Inspiration

2025/06/14 Leave a comment

Money quote: “That feeling of hunger to see, to know, that sense of awe and joy — that is what education should foster.”

…Which is why it depresses me endlessly when these goals narrow in the way they so often do today. So many teachers or professors seem to think that during the short time we have students under our influence, our primary job is to instruct them in how to illuminate injustice.

The field of education, for example, is a rich subject — “How many miles to the heart of a child?” asked the lead character in Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s 1949 musical “Lost in the Stars.” But in “What’s College For?” the author Zachary Karabell describes something sadly familiar these days: a professor focused on telling students how America’s educational apparatus perpetuates class stratification.

The film critic David Denby, in “Great Books,” his volume about Columbia University’s core curriculum, described an instructor whose only apparent interest in Aristotle was in condemning his sexism and racism, rather than exploring the broader scope of his writings. I once sat in on a course about Black film in which the main theme class after class was how each movie exemplified negative stereotypes. The artistry, the richness, the reasons the films were meaningful to Black people were considered of lesser interest. Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos, every word of George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” William Levi Dawson’s “Negro Symphony” from start to finish — all of these can be laboriously interpreted as demonstrations of the abuse of power. But doing so misses their true value.

I would hate to see anyone put that kind of teaching to use when entering Michigan Central Station — to internalize the idea that upon encountering that magnificence, one’s thoughts should be primarily about injustice. Certainly the Black porters there worked under less than ideal conditions; white passengers often saw them as barely human. (The convention back in the day was to call all Black porters “George,” because who cared what they called themselves?) It’s important to remember these facts. But even amid that bigotry, Black people had the same capacity as white people to see beauty. And they have the same capacity today.

On the way to Michigan Central, I was talking with a Black guy named Anton who had grown up nearby. As the building came into view, rising so majestically into the day’s overcast sky and set diagonally to the main road, I shouted, “Goddamn!” At the very same second, Anton exclaimed “Look at that! There it is, man!”

That feeling of hunger to see, to know, that sense of awe and joy — that is what education should foster.

Source: Viewed From Any Angle, This Station Is a Wonder and an Inspiration

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McWhorter: The Future of Black History Lives on Donald Trump’s Front Lawn

2025/05/22 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

…The proper response to that very real problem, however, is, as President Bill Clinton put it about affirmative action, to “mend it, but don’t end it.”

Mr. Trump’s approach is instead a bleat of tribalist pique, seeking to simply deep-six any discussion of race (or gender or sexuality, or a great many other uncomfortable topics). His executive order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” is a clapback to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that frames any outreach efforts to Black people as by definition a form of discrimination against white people.

A mature, multiethnic society should resist the complacency of birds-of-a-feather hirings and admissions, instead seeking out talent wherever it might reside and whatever it might look like. To be sure, that mission was sullied by identity politics, the temptations of virtue signaling, the opportunity to follow the funding trail and ultimately a tacit commitment to lowering standards. Mend that. Don’t try to force the country back to an earlier, more willfully oblivious era, when the topic of inequality was everywhere to be witnessed but nowhere to be mentioned. That is a kind of barbarity.

So is the idea is that any teachings about Black history are a form of political agitation, “radical and wasteful,” as another executive order on D.E.I. has it. That our country openly addresses Black history in all of its facets is a badge of honor and sophistication, and the institution that Mr. Trump called out as harming our view of American history is an exemplar of all the field could be. The president and his minions should just walk on by. The rest of us should walk on in.

Source: The Future of Black History Lives on Donald Trump’s Front Lawn

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