Categories
Human rights World Cup

Profit trumps human rights at Qatar World Cup

Like millions of others I have been glued to my TV watching my country play in the Fifa World Cup in Qatar. However, watching the World Cup has felt similar to when I watched Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead: I have enjoyed it while also being struck by the huge problems with the whole thing.

Fifa awarding the World Cup to Qatar raised the question: how bad does a country’s human rights record have to be to disqualify it from hosting? 

Qatar is a non-democratic, country that has been ruled by the House of Thani family monarchy since Mohammed bin Thani signed a treaty with the British in 1868. In early 2017, Qatar’s total population was 2.6 million, with 313,000 of them Qatari citizens and 2.3 million expatriates. Eighty-eight per cent of the population are foreign workers, mostly South Asians, with those from India alone estimated to be around 700,000. Egyptians and Filipinos are the largest non-South Asian migrant group. The treatment of these foreign workers has been heavily criticized with conditions suggested to be modern slavery

This isn’t the first time Fifa, the global football governing body founded in 1904, has awarded the World Cup to a country with a horrible historical and ongoing record of human rights violations. The 1934 World Cup was held in Italy during the reign of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, an ally of Hitler. The 1978 World Cup was in Argentina when military officer and dictator Jorge Rafael Videla was president. Wikipedia describes Videla’s reign as “among the most infamous in Latin America during the Cold War, due to its high level of human rights abuses and severe economic mismanagement”. And the 2018 World Cup was in Russia when Vladimir Putin was in power – and had invaded Crimea in 2014.

And just as we can ask how bad a country’s human rights record has to be to be disqualified from hosting the World Cup, we can also ask: how bad does it have to be for countries to boycott the event? 

Clearly, no country found Qatar’s human rights record bad enough to boycott the World Cup. Norway and Germany’s governing football bodies considered boycotts that they decided against in the end. (Norway’s decision was made easier by Norway failing to qualify for the tournament.) In Germany, this was despite a strong boycott movement that saw fans hoisting huge #Boycott Qatar 2022 banners at German Bundesliga matches.

German fans hoist banner at German Bundesliga game in October 2022

Qatar hosting the World Cup also raises other questions, including: are some human rights more valued than others and do human rights vary country to country? The answer to both questions seems to be a clear yes.

Homosexuality is punishable by death in Qatar (so they probably won’t be hosting the women’s World Cup anytime soon given openly gay superstars like Canada’s Christine Sinclair and American Megan Rapinoe). And Fifa didn’t just tacitly support Qatar’s state-sanctioned homophobia by awarding Qatar the World Cup. It also threatened seven teams whose captains vowed to wear OneLove arm bands with sanctions if they did. The OneLove armbands were originally launched in 2020 as part of an inclusiveness campaign by the Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB). Reuters reported that the KNVB campaign opposes discrimination on the basis of race, skin colour, sexual orientation, culture, faith, nationality, gender, age and “all other forms of discrimination”. Captains from England, Wales, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and Denmark were planning on wearing the armbands to protest Qatar’s laws against same-sex relationships. Fifa threatened to issue yellow cards to any player wearing the armband which could have led to them missing games. All seven teams abandoned their plans.

Some may wonder if Fifa is putting profits above people and considering Fifa recently said it has made $7.5 billion from World Cup commercial deals over the last four years, that appears to be the case. But it’s not only Fifa that put their morals on hold. The sponsors behind those commercial deals – including Adidas, Coca-Cola, Hyundai-Kia, Visa, Anheuser-Busch InBev and McDonalds – have all also apparently chosen profits over people. This is despite companies like Coke issuing statements like Coke’s 2019 How Coca Cola Supports Inclusion and Equality for the LGBTQ+ Community.

The thousands of fans attending in person also decided it’s OK to turn a blind eye to Qatar’s human rights policies and pump millions into the already rich Qatari economy. Will they also continue buying sponsors’ products with this massive stain on those companies’ claims of LGBTQ+ support? And, if they do, what incentive will those companies have to change their behaviour? Clearly, very little…

Another issue is that, although the Qatar World Cup has exposed how capitalism values profit over people, almost every World Cup exposed how unequally those profits are distributed. 

Watching the World Cup one is struck by how many Black faces there are on the field vs Black faces in the stands. This is particularly striking for countries like France, Ecuador and  especially Brazil – where over half the population is Afro-Brazilian – but there’s barely a Black face to be seen among the country’s World Cup fans. Attending any World Cup is expensive so the colors of a country’ fans give some indication who has the money in those countries.

Ecuador World Cup team
Ecuador World Cup fans

Fifa’s actions aren’t that surprising as, since Fifa awarded Qatar the World Cup in 2010, more than half of the 22 members of the FIFA Executive Committee which voted for Qatar have either been implicated in or investigated for alleged corruption or other bad practices, according to DW.com.

It would be great if football fans used their collective power to demand that Fifa do things like adopting the principle that if it wouldn’t award the women’s World Cup to a country because of human rights issues, it shouldn’t award that country the men’s World Cup either. 

North American activists will no doubt ensure that the human rights records of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico will be highlighted in the run up to the 2026 World Cup – and well they should, because clearly Fifa won’t.

Categories
Blackademics Blacktivists Mental health Police

Mental health Blackademics add to Blacktivist toolkit

My post How Blackademics and Blacktivists can support each other said producing research Blacktivists can use for advocacy is one of the main ways Blackademics can help Blacktivists. Another way Blackademics can help is by holding conferences to share that research.

Last week I attended a conference on the theme of Mental Health of Black Communities: Overcoming Obstacles, Bridging the Gaps where mental health Blackademics, mostly from North America, shared their research.

The lead organizer of the conference was Dr. Jude Mary Cénat, an Associate Professor in the University of Ottawa’s School of Psychology and Chair of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Black Health. Cénat is Director of the Vulnerability, Trauma, Resilience & Culture (V-TRaC) Research Laboratory, and holds the Research Chair on Black Health at the University of Ottawa. 

There were sessions on the problems with “color blind” approaches to mental health, the social determinants and racial issues affecting Black folks’ mental health, anti-Black racism in the child welfare system and lots more. (For more sessions, see the full conference program.) 

As a full time Blacktivist, my goal in attending the conference was to get direction on where to most effectively advocate to help improve Black folks’ mental health across Canada – and it didn’t take long to get what I came for! In his opening Wednesday keynote address, Achieving Black Mental Health Equity, Dr. Kwame McKenzie called for the creation of a federal Black Equity Act that would make Black equity a federally legal requirement. The call for such an act supports Blacktivists’ existing demand for the federal government to appoint a Black Equity Commissioner similar to the ones it announced for antisemitism and Islamophobia in the 2022 federal Budget. 

On Day 2, in her session Promoting Health Equity: Mental Health of Black Canadians. Mobilizing, Partnerships: Taking Steps Together for Supported Reintegration, Dr. Barbara-Ann Hamilton-Hench said Black communities need to challenge the federal Tri-Council to remove barriers to funding high quality research about and by Black people, and to fund Black researchers. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) make up the Tri-Council funding agencies. They are the primary mechanism through which the Government of Canada supports research and training at post-secondary institutions and are supposed to support and promote high-quality research in a wide variety of disciplines and areas. This supports the work the 613-819 Black Hub had already begun regarding SSHRC. 

In 2021, we discovered the Ottawa Police Service attempting to continue to try to deploy more cops in the community under the guise of the Neighborhood Resource Team program, which is their latest name for “community policing”. The OPS NRT program had ballooned from $2.5 million and 18 officers in 2019 to over $11 million and 89 officers in 2021. And the OPS was leading an evaluation of the program that was pretty much guaranteed to conclude that the program was great and should be further expanded. The project started in fall 2019 when the OPS hired Carleton professor Linda Duxbury to lead it. After we found out about the project, we met with Duxbury and asked her why no Black groups were included in the project description for her project on the SSHRC website (SSHRC gave her almost $200,000 for the project). She said she had included Indigenous groups. As Duxbury had done a very flawed study of the Peel Regional Police’s School Resource Officer program, we brought that to the attention of the Ottawa police, who said the report was one of the reasons they hired Duxbury. We then filed a complaint with Carleton University’s Research Ethics Board who found no issues with Duxbury. Finally, we filed a complaint with SSHRC who also backed Duxbury. However, after we continued to press Duxbury to do proper research by including the voices of Black and Indigenous people in her NRT report, she and the OPS, instead, canceled the 3-year, $260,000 project. We then took a look at SSHRC’s website and found it appeared to have no research on defunding or abolishing the police but several problematic studies related to police reform. Professor Hamilton-Hinch’s call has reinforced our commitment to challenging SSHRC on these issues.

One problem frequently raised at the conference, but for which few solutions were offered, was the lack of Black mental health professionals. (There was a session called Innovative Training Programmes for Mental Health Professionals on Issues Related to Cultural Safety and Addressing Experiences of Racism, by Ribbon Rouge Foundation Programs Director Dr. Selina Kunadu-Yiadom which may have covered this but I didn’t attend it.) In one session, they did show a CBC article titled Black psychologists say there are too few of them in Canada — and that’s a problem featuring photos of Ottawa-based psychotherapists Helen Ofosu and Kafui Sawyer. However, they didn’t share the main point of the article which was Black mental health care professionals highlighting problems in the accreditation process for psychological professionals as a key barrier to getting more Black ones. The article cited how, to become an accredited psychologist in Canada, students need to be accepted into a graduate program at a post-secondary institution or an internship program. Getting into a program depends on having a faculty member agree to be their supervisor but Ottawa-based psychotherapist Kafui Sawyer pointed out that the faculties are predominantly white and the students they’re recruiting or the students they have in [their] program are also predominantly white. Ofosu and Sawyer have formed a Black psychology section of the Canadian Psychology Association, which will advocate for more diversity in the profession.

Another area where Black students may be facing systemic barriers is getting scholarships. I recently acted as an assessor for the Loran Scholarship. The $100,000 award has existed since 1988 but no one I recently asked had heard of it. I only found out about it last year when our son applied for it – and didn’t make it past the first step, so wasn’t interviewed. One of Loran’s managers asked me to be an assessor to diversify their assessor pool and the training session I participated in showed why. Out of about 60 people, I was the only Black man (there were two Black women) and there was no one who identified as Indigenous. In the question period, I asked what percentage of assessors were Black or Indigenous men. The Loran exec leading the session said she didn’t know but would get me the info. I assessed 37 applications, none of which identified as Black or Indigenous men. The Loran application doesn’t have a self-identification option so you must infer who’s Black or Indigenous from what they write. We need to share info about such scholarships to get more Black students to apply – and more Black assessors.

But Black students will only encounter scholarship or accreditation issues if – and it’s a big if – they manage to make it through a systemically anti-Black education system – and avoid being caught in the systemically anti-Black “justice” system.

On that note, two of the most glaring omissions at the conference were any mention of the impact of policing on Black mental health or the role – and responsibilities – of the Ontario government in addressing the issues raised.

Considering health is largely provincial jurisdiction, this omission was notable. As a full time activist, I came away with little direction on where to advocate, and what to advocate for, at the provincial level. The Ontario government recently created a new Black Equity Branch and hired a director so we plan to work with that person to identify and address the changes needed at the provincial level.

As for policing, the word “police” wasn’t mentioned once in the conference program and there was only one session focussed on justice, called Justice and Mental Health. The 90 minute breakout session had four presentations only two of which were actually about justice: one on restorative justice and one on criminalization of Black refugees. 

Having a conference on Black mental health without a strong focus on the impact of policing is like having a conference on Black physical health without a strong focus on poverty. Canadian police, including in Ottawa where I live and lead the 613-819 Black Hub, continue to kill, or be involved in the deaths of, Black people experiencing mental crises. People who aren’t in crisis – yet – continue to have their mental health negatively impacted by sometimes violent interactions with police. Young Black and Indigenous Ottawa activists are still dealing with the mental impact of the Ottawa police arresting them after they blocked an intersection in November 2020 to protest the acquittal of Ottawa police constable Daniel Montsion in the 2016 beating death of Abdirahman Abdi (the police charged 12 of the about 30 protesters – then “stayed” the charges for one year, which meant that if any of the young people caused any “trouble”, the charges could be immediately reinstated.)

Next conference it would be good to see some research on things like the impact of layered policing on Black mental health. In his March 2021 Spring Magazine article Layered policing’ expands police amid calls to defund, Jeff Shantz describes layered policing as, “In response to community calls to defund police and fund necessary social resources, cities across the country have instituted “layered policing.” From Lethbridge to Saskatoon to Kitchener-Waterloo, these moves would actually deploy more police throughout the community, and embed policing in everyday social life.”

In January 2021, in response to community calls for the police to get out of mental health crisis response, the Ottawa Police Service presented the Ottawa Police Services Board with its initiative to create an alternative mental health crisis response system. The OPS said they had brought together a group of partner organizations to lead the initiative called the Guiding Council. The only problem was, they hadn’t told some of the partner organizations, including the Ottawa Black Mental Health Coalition of which the 613-819 Black Hub was a member. 

After yet another public outcry at the OPS leading such an initiative, the OPS agreed to have it moved under the management of the City. However, instead of removing themselves from any leadership role in the initiative, as the public demanded, they did exactly the opposite and joined the Guiding Council which they weren’t on when they first created it. We later learned that the Guiding Council would, in consultation with the City, decide which community groups get $2 million dollars of the $3 million cut from the OPS’ requested $14 million dollar 2022 budget increase. 

The Guiding Council is yet another place where the OPS appears to be pushing for a mental health crisis response system that still has lots of police involvement and zero impact on their annual multi-million dollar budget increases. The OPS’ influence is already clear in the Guiding Council’s terms of reference which aims for a system that still sends cops, “when the crisis is linked to criminal activity”. Wouldn’t that include a situation like Abdirahman Abdi who people called the cops on because he was allegedly touching women in a coffee shop? And wouldn’t that still include a situation like Greg Ritchie, an Indigenous man who people called the cops on because they said they saw a man with a knife that turned out to be a ceremonial tomahawk? Yes it would. Abdi and Greg would likely end up just as dead under the system currently being proposed by the Guiding Council.

The OPS influence is also clear by the lack of any mention in the Guiding Council’s terms of reference of either the 613-819 Black Hub’s alternative non-police mental health crisis response report or Toronto’s non-police mental health crisis response teams it launched in March 2022. 

The recently released report, Troubling Encounters: Ottawa Residents’ Experience of Policing, confirmed that racialized and low income Ottawa residents have extremely low levels of trust in the Ottawa police. In fact, the report states, “In short, for many people in this city, police do not contribute to individual or community safety, in fact, they appear to do the very opposite.” Allowing the police to remain on the Guiding Council will further erode what little trust there is – and further erode Black Ottawa residents’ mental health.

For the next Black mental health conference Blackademics should engage Blacktivists in the early planning stages so the conference deals more fully with the impact of carceral systems like policing, courts and jails – and has concrete suggestions for where activists should focus their advocacy.

Categories
civil rights movement Jewish activism

Black and Jewish activists share a long history of collaboration

As today marks the start of the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism, we reflect on decades of Black and Jewish social justice activists struggling, living – and dying – side by side in the cause of creating a more equitable world.

I started my activism fighting against South African apartheid and quickly leared about Jewish South African activist and politician, Joe Slovo. “A Marxist-Leninist, Slovo was a long-time leader and theorist in the South African Communist Party (SACP), a leading member of the African National Congress (ANC), and a commander of the ANC’s military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). A South African citizen from a Jewish-Lithuanian family, Slovo was a delegate to the multiracial Congress of the People of June 1955 which drew up the Freedom Charter. He was imprisoned for six months in 1960, and emerged as a leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe the following year. He lived in exile from 1963 to 1990, conducting operations against the apartheid régime from the United Kingdom, Angola, Mozambique, and Zambia. In 1990 he returned to South Africa, and took part in the negotiations that ended apartheid. After the elections of 1994, he became Minister for Housing in Nelson Mandela’s government.” (from Wikipedia). One of our strongest supporters in the fight against South African apartheid was the former Canadian Jewish Congress.

Elements of Jewish involvement in the U.S. civil rights movement, like the June 1964 murders of young, Jewish activist “freedom riders” Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching with Martin Luther King in Selma, Alabama in March 1965, have been well publicized. However, what has gotten less far attention are things like, “…in the early 1900s, Jewish newspapers drew parallels between the Black movement out of the South and the Jews’ escape from Egypt, pointing out that both Blacks and Jews lived in ghettos, and calling anti-Black riots in the South “pogroms”. Stressing the similarities rather than the differences between the Jewish and Black experience in America, Jewish leaders emphasized the idea that both groups would benefit the more America moved toward a society of merit, free of religious, ethnic and racial restrictions.

A 1934 ore-miner strike leading to the killing of several Black miners was the catalyst for physicist Joseph Gelders‘ civil rights activism and labor organizing efforts. Gelders and his wife Esther started hosting a weekly discussion group for students at University of Alabama at Birmingham. He established an Alabama committee to work on the Scottsboro Boys case, [where nine African American teenagers and young men, ages 13 to 20, were accused in Alabama of raping two white women in 1931.] Due to his efforts, on September 23, 1936, Gelders was kidnapped and assaulted by members of the Ku Klux Klan

The American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League were central to the campaign against racial prejudice. Jews made substantial financial contributions to many civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, the Urban League, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. About 50 percent of the civil rights attorneys in the South during the 1960s were Jews, as were over 50 percent of the Whites who went to Mississippi in 1964 to challenge Jim Crow Laws.[5] Julius Rosenwald was a Jewish philanthropist who donated a large part of his fortune to supporting education of Blacks in the South by providing matching funds for construction of schools in rural areas.[14] Jews played a major role in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in its early decades. Jews involved in the NAACP included Joel Elias Spingarn (the first chairman), Arthur B. Spingarn, and founder Henry Moskowitz. More recently, Jack Greenberg was a leader in the organization. 

Cooperation between Jewish and African-American organizations peaked after World War II—sometimes called the “golden age” of the relationship. Leaders of each group joined each other in order to launch an effective movement for racial equality in the United States, and Jews funded and led some national civil rights organizations. Conversely, African-American Civil Rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois wrote testimonies and op-eds in Jewish publications that decried the Nazi violence in Europe after he visited the eviscerated Warsaw Ghetto. Historically, Black colleges and universities also hired Jewish refugee professors who were not given comparable jobs in white institutions because American culture was anti-semitic. This era of cooperation culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial or religious discrimination in schools and other public facilities, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited discriminatory voting practices and authorized the government to oversee and review state practices.

Northern and Western Jews often supported desegregation in their communities and schools, even at the risk of diluting the unity of their close-knit Jewish communities, which were frequently a critical component of Jewish life.

In 1965, Martin Luther King Jr., said,

How could there be anti-Semitism among Negroes when our Jewish friends have demonstrated their commitment to the principle of tolerance and brotherhood not only in the form of sizable contributions, but in many other tangible ways, and often at great personal sacrifice. Can we ever express our appreciation to the rabbis who chose to give moral witness with us in St. Augustine during our recent protest against segregation in that unhappy city? Need I remind anyone of the awful beating suffered by Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld of Cleveland when he joined the civil rights workers there in Hattiesburg, Mississippi? And who can ever forget the sacrifice of two Jewish lives, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, in the swamps of Mississippi? It would be impossible to record the contribution that the Jewish people have made toward the Negro’s struggle for freedom—it has been so great.” (all italics from Wikipedia)

In Canada, Jewish advocacy led to striking down inequitable laws that disproportionately impacted Jews and Blacks. In his 2000 address, Jews, Human Rights and the Making of a New Canada, former Canadian Jewish Congress president Irving Abella spoke about how advocacy by the Congress’ Joint Public Relations Committee (JPRC) led to the Ontario government passing the 1951 Act to Promote Fair Employment Practices in Ontario. He spoke about how, in Dresden, Ontario at that time, “…it was reported that 4 of the town’s 5 restaurants would not serve Blacks nor would the hotels allow Blacks as guests….Blacks were excluded socially and economically from town life; barbershops, beauty salons, taverns and pool halls refused admission and service to all Blacks.”

Abella detailed how, “after the Fair Employment Practices Act had passed, the human rights groups around the Congress’ JPRC began lobbying for a fair accommodations practices law. And Dresden became the focus for the struggle. So outrageous was the anti-Black behaviour of many of the town’s businesses, that a huge lobby led by the Jewish Labour Committee was mounted to compel the government to introduce legislation preventing discrimination in housing and service. And in March of 1954, the [Leslie] Frost government introduced just such a bill in the Ontario legislature.”

The close relationship between Black and Jewish activists during the Civil Rights era waned in subsequent years for various reasons. Despite that, there were notable Jewish activist exceptions who did great work that positively impacted Black Canadians. The progressive powerhouse Lewis family – father Stephen Lewis, son Avi Lewis and Avi’s wife, Naomi Klein, have been doing great social justice work for decades. From Stephen Lewis’ 1992 report on race relations in Ontario, to his work in Africa as the U.N. envoy on HIV/AIDS, to Naomi’s Klein’s work on “disaster capitalism” to Avi and Naomi’s work on climate change, the Lewis family has been at the forefront of highlighting issues affecting Black Canadians and other marginalized groups.  

The global Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s murder and the pandemic have brought Black and Jewish activists together again, this time to address the rise in hate crimes against both groups.

Ottawa’s United for All is a multi-faith coalition of 44 organizations representing 150+ partners committed to overcoming hate-based violence, racism, and extremism in East Ontario. Before his death in 2021, former Canadian Jewish Congress President and Kind Canada founder Rabbi Reuven Bulka was one of United for All’s main proponents. 

Although Black and Jewish social justice activists have always had to contend with those who want to maintain the status quo – including members of their own communities – their collaboration has, and continues to, lead to change and a better world for all.

Categories
Blackademics Blacktivists

How Blackademics and Blacktivists can support each other

How can Blackademics and Blacktivists best support each other? One obvious way is for Blackademics to produce research Blacktivists can use for advocacy. El Jones, who is a full time Blackademic and Blacktivist, did this when she co-authored the report Defunding the Police: Defining the Way Forward for HRM. Carl James of York University has been producing research for decades that Blacktivists have used. James’ work covers intersectionality of race with ethnicity, gender, class and citizenship, accessibility and equity in education and employment and the complementary and contradictory nature of sports in the schooling and educational attainments of racialized students. 

Producing research on systemic racism in institutions outside academia is important but so is doing research that exposes it in academia. Kanika Samuels-Wortley of Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson) did this with her paper exposing the gatekeeper system that blocks effective police research: Black On Blue, Will Not Do: Navigating Canada’s Evidence Based Policing Community as a Black Academic – A Personal Counter Story.  

While initiating research, or having some role in its initiation, is great, making sure important research initiated by other means is done right is also important. Lorne Foster was one of two York University human rights experts who collected and analyzed the Ottawa Police Service’s use-of-force race data after the Province of Ontario ordered all Ontario police forces to collect the data starting in January 2020. The data showed that the OPS used force disproportionately on Black, Middle Eastern and Indigenous people. 

Helping Blacktivists groups understand and use data is another way Blackademics can help. Disaggregated race data – that separates out the data on Black folks in particular – is both crucial to Blacktivism and very complicated to do right. That complexity gives those resisting equity a ready excuse not to collect data. Having Blackademics join data advisory groups with Blacktivists or advise Blacktivist reps on such groups helps groups turn data into tools for advocacy.

Hiring activist minded staff is another way the academy can support Blacktivists. Queens University launched a Minor in Black Studies program in spring 2022 and hired a promising group of Blackademics specializing in radical Black ecologies, Black health and social change, Black religions, Black creative writing and cultural production, Black political thought, and surveillance, anticolonial and gender studies. One of the program’s leads, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies Katherine McKittrick, says one of the new hires, Vanessa Thompson, is an abolitionist. McKittrick says, “Black Studies does not reside solely with the University. It’s also a field that’s inflected with protest, resistance and activism. The field and scholars are committed to non-academic forms of social change and often pair their research with practical on-the-ground struggles”. Another one of the program leads, Daniel McNeil, the Queens National Scholar Chair in Black Studies, says he went into Black Studies, “To hold our institutions accountable and to scrutinize how they do, or do not, live up to their rhetorical commitments to equity.” He says he was inspired by the work of people like Canadian Richard Iton who wrote In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era. McNeil says, “What I took from this type of work is not that we should translate Black cultures for academics to make them a little bit less exotic or a little bit easier for mainstream consumption but how can we open up spaces in the academy for the knowledge of communities? How can we resist the idea that we’re here to help people outside the academy speak or tell them what to say? And how can we push and struggle and demand that we need to learn from their political and moral intelligence?”

This highlights an important issue. Blackademics, being middle class, have the same challenges as middle class Blacktivists: connecting with lower income Black folks to ensure their work is informed by those most impacted by systemic anti-Black racism. And they have the same challenge as all Blacktivists, inside or outside the academy – not losing their jobs by pushing for fundamental change.

Employees challenging systemic anti-Black racism at work usually meet anything from passive aggressive to very aggressive resistance. It’s risky business and must be done carefully, sometimes covertly. One way for Blackademics to do this is to anonymously tip off activists if they become aware of any of their colleagues doing problematic research. My group, the 613-819 Black Hub, had a case about a year ago where this would have been very helpful.

Purely by accident, we found out that the Ottawa Police Service had hired a local professor to evaluate the latest OPS community policing initiative called the Neighborhood Resource Team program. The professor had done some very flawed research on the school resource officer program (that has cops in schools) in another part of the province. Once we found out, we pushed the prof to do proper research but, instead of doing that, she and the OPS cancelled the entire three year, $260,000 project. If we hadn’t found out about the evaluation, the prof and the OPS would have proceeded and produced yet another false justification for increasing the police budget. We don’t know if this prof has any Black colleagues but we raise this to say that Blackademics – and allies – being on the lookout for cases like this, and giving Blacktivists a clandestine heads up, is a relatively low risk way to support the struggle for equity. (We obviously recommend people raising the issues with their colleagues first to see if they’ll make adjustments before contacting Blacktivists.) What would be better, though, is for academic institutions to remove the risk to academics by having policies mandating researchers to report colleagues doing harmful research. This would be similar to the policy that helped greatly reduce use-of-force complaints against Camden New Jersey’s new regional force.

In 2012, long before George Floyd’s murder, Camden disbanded its local police force and replaced it with a regional county force. After Floyd’s death, many people cited Camden as a defunding success story. However, the reality was that excessive force complaints actually went up after the new force was created and only reduced after local activists pushed the new force to adopt a use of force policy requiring officers to intercede if another officer was using force inappropriately. Academic institutions could adopt similar policies regarding research as such policies reduce the risk to people speaking out.

This is why it’s so important for Blackademics to get tenure so they can be free to speak and act without fear of being fired at any moment. Few, if any, Blacktivists have achieved this status without also being Blackademics.

Blacktivists can support Blackademics by telling them what data we need, hiring them to produce it, where appropriate – and taking risks they can’t afford to.

La lutta continua.

Categories
Media Social change movements

The revolution will not be televised (until Black people start burning stuff)

In December 2021, I submitted the text of this blog post to the 2022 Dalton Camp Award $10,000 annual essay contest for the best essay on the link between media and democracy. As I didn’t win, I’m free to share it.

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On Saturdays, I attend an African history class offered by another local Black community group. Our current unit is called 500 Years of Resistance. Our teacher says we’re doing it because historians have largely ignored, or presented slanted versions of, the many rebellions Black and Indigenous people have led against their oppressors. 

The Canadian mainstream media does much the same thing with people and movements calling for social change. Many media outlets either ignore resistance movements completely or frame them in ways that minimize the resistance – especially those led by Black and Indigenous people.

I became aware of one such example following a recent trip to Ghana with my family. In attempting to connect with Ghanaian activists, I learned about the grassroots #FixTheCountry campaign that saw Ghanaians take to social media and the streets in August 2021. On August 4, Al Jazeera reported that several thousand protesters marched in Accra in the latest rally against the government. The story said the protest aimed to demand accountability, good governance, and better living conditions from the government. 

I couldn’t find one story by a Canadian outlet on the #FixTheCountry protests, which some might say is normal because it happened in another country full of people who don’t look like the majority of Canadians. However, shortly after returning from Ghana, I awoke to hear a story on the CBC national news broadcasting live from Barbados about that country cutting ties with the Queen and becoming a republic. My local CBC radio station morning show, Ottawa Morning, did an almost 9-minute live interview with CBC national radio host Marcia Young from a Barbadian beach. The interview provided several examples of the journalistic omissions and commissions that leave an incorrect and ahistorical impression of people’s resistance.

Following the host’s intro in which she acknowledged that Barbados gained independence nearly 70 years earlier, Marcia Young said, “This island is really in the mood for independence.” Paraphrasing from her interview with Barbados’ Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, Young added:

“[She says] it’s time for [Barbadians] to gain the confidence to confront the issues facing Barbadians…She wants to foster resilience and courage in Barbadians. And you just get the sense that there is so much waiting to come out from Barbados – beyond Rihanna.” The host and Young both laughed at that. In response to the host asking what Barbadians had told her about how colonialism impacted their lives, Young said, “Some were waiting for some kind of an apology. A lot of people are just waiting for the reparations conversation where they will finally be paid for the labour that was stolen and forced.” And she added, “What’s left over from colonization…it’s a system. A hierarchy of race and class. Barbadians are working to change that. There are policies in place to help that change. I spoke to the Prime Minister about that and she said you cannot legislate a culture to change. It takes time. And Barbadians are saying to me, let’s wait and see.”

This choice of quotes creates a narrative of Barbadians as passively waiting for change to come from becoming a republic and ignores crucial pieces of history like the Bussa Rebellion which, according the BlackPast website, was the largest slave revolt in Barbadian history that took its name from the African-born slave, Bussa, who led the uprising. Young’s choice of quotes also erases the courageous work of people like feminist and human rights activist, Ro-Ann Mohammed who, in 2012, co-founded Barbados – Gays, Lesbians and All-Sexuals against Discrimination (B-GLAD). In 2018, she helped organize Barbados’ first LGBT Pride Parade. And this in a country that was listed as #8 on Forbes’ 2019 list of the 20 Most Dangerous Places for Gay Travelers – which none of the CBC stories I read mentioned. 

The CBC isn’t alone. The mainstream media has always had a short memory when it comes to history and it appears to have gotten shorter along with their customers’ attention spans. This was evident in coverage of two of the biggest stories in recent years: the #metoo and defund the police movements.

Almost all mainstream reporting on the #metoo movement only started after white actresses started coming forward and largely ignored the fact that the #metoo hashtag was created by Tarana Burke, a Black woman, in 2006 – 11 years before allegations of sexual abuse against Harvey Weinstein made the movement mainstream. Similarly, reporting on the defund the police movement made it seem like it started with George Floyd’s death, when that isn’t true. 

In a June 2020 Politico article, Ruairi Arrieta-Kenna stated, “…“abolish the police” is an idea that had been brewing for decades in academic and activist circles before it exploded into view this summer. An activist from Chicago shocked Fox News viewers four years ago when she told Megyn Kelly, “We need to abolish the police. Period.” The phrase itself dates back to at least 1988, and its deeper roots run further still—and offer some unsettling insights about the origins and history of American policing.”

In Canada, few stories more clearly show the challenges – and failings – of the Canadian mainstream media in covering protest movements than that of the BC’s Wet’suwet’en Nation’s opposition to Coastal GasLink’s natural gas pipeline. In a Feb. 2020 story in the North Bay Nugget, Nipissing First Nation blasts ‘mainstream media’ over Wet’suwet’en coverage Michael Lee, cites the Nipissing First Nation chief and council “slamming the “mainstream media” for misrepresenting Indigenous nations and voices in the ongoing dispute over a natural gas pipeline in British Columbia opposed by Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs…it can be difficult to distinguish facts from rhetoric and truth from hidden agendas in light of the “barrage of information” from social media and the misrepresentation from mainstream media.”

 In a March 2020 NOW Magazine article, Wet’suwet’en: the mainstream media’s big fail, Enzo Dimatteo argues that, “When it comes to mainstream media coverage of Indigenous issues, it’s almost always in a negative light and without the necessary history to offer any real context or clarity.” Dimatteo says, “it happened with Idle No More, when protests spilled into the streets in 2012 over the Harper government’s omnibus bill threatening environmental protections and national waterways. It happened after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report into residential schools. It happened last June when the report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls found Canada guilty of genocide. And so it was again with Wet’suwet’en, an issue that has been simmering for a decade, only that salient fact – along with the legal basis for the Indigenous opposition to Coastal GasLink’s plans – was largely absent in the early reporting.” The legal basis Dimatteo refers to is the 1997 Supreme Court of Canada ruling, Delgamuukw vs British Columbia, which said the Wet’suwet’en people, as represented by their hereditary leaders, had not given up rights and title to their 22,000-square-kilometre territory and that comprehensive consultations with hereditary chiefs are required for major projects in traditional lands.

The media’s short historical memory results in another chronic problem with mainstream media coverage of protest movements: sanitized versions of their leaders. 

Coverage of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela are two of the most blatant examples of this. Media outlets, especially those run by white liberals, often quote MLK’s I Have A Dream speech, but rarely mention things like what he said about white moderates:  

“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens’ Councilor or the Ku Klux, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”

Most mainstream outlets also ignore how King had broadened his focus to all poor people not long before he was assassinated. In a January 2021 Al Jazeera story, Jenn M Jackson said, “Towards the end of his life, King turned his focus to the Poor People’s Campaign, an effort to unify Americans behind issues like equitable pay, unemployment insurance and a fair minimum wage. He never got to see the culminating events of the Campaign as he was killed before the project was completed.”

American political activist and public intellectual, Cornel West, critiqued the “Santa Clausification” of Nelson Mandela, especially following his death. West pointed out how the media portrayed Mandela as an “unthreatening, huggable old man with a smile with bags full of toys” – completely ignoring that Mandela was imprisoned partly for his actions while leading the African National Congress’ armed wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe, or “Spear of the Nation”, a group whose activities TIME Magazine once described as a “low-level guerrilla war.”

Danielle K. Kilgo’s June 2019 study Protests, Media Coverage, and a Hierarchy of Social Struggle, in the International Journal of Press/Politics, supports the argument that the media generally covers protest – especially by Black and Indigenous folks, negatively.  “Media negatively portray protests and protesters that challenge the status quo…media coverage of protests centered on racial issues (discrimination of Indigenous people and anti-Black racism) follows more of a delegitimizing pattern than stories about protests related to immigrants’ rights, health, and environment.”, concludes Kilgo.

So why is mainstream media so bad at covering social dissent, especially those led by Black and Indigenous people?

The Canadian Association of Journalists’ recent Canadian Newsroom Diversity Survey may offer some insights. The survey found that newsrooms are, well, pretty white. Specifically, it found white journalists tend to hold more senior and stable jobs, hold 81.9 percent of supervisor roles and 79.6 percent of top three leadership positions. Approximately 90 percent of outlets that participated have no Latin, Middle Eastern or mixed race journalists on staff and about 80 percent have no Black or Indigenous journalists. 

That so many journalists come from the most privileged group in North American society may partly explain why their collective reporting on protest movements is so bad: they don’t understand it because most of them have never lived it. That fact, combined with the time pressures all journalists face, makes it easier to understand why many journalists go the easy, shallow route – and are allowed to do so by their mostly white editors. That easy route appears to include focussing on social movements only after things get heated, figuratively…and sometimes literally.

Both in Canada and the U.S., media outlets tend to be most interested in covering stories about social change movements when things are being blocked by Indigneous folks…or burned by Black folks. Most Canadians probably hadn’t heard of Oka before they saw the news reports in the summer of 1990 of masked Mohawks facing down police near Montreal in an attempt to stop a golf course from being expanded onto their traditional burial grounds. Most folks had probably not heard of the Wet’suwet’en before the story blew up their TVs, radios and phones.

In the U.S., social change movements have always gotten the most attention when Black people burn down white people’s stuff. This was true with the unrest following the acquittal of the cops who beat up Rodney King in 1991 and we saw it again with the protests following the murder of George Floyd. 

There are always exceptions…a good story, now and then…but the general rule is to swoop in and cover things only when they blow up. And that may only change when the explosions start affecting many more people (i.e. the mainstream media’s customers) in ways beyond just delaying their daily commute.

Note: Sarah El-Shaarawi’s winning essay The Similarities Between Red and Yellow was be posted in the Tyee August 8, 2022.)

Categories
3rdNBCS

Why I’m going to the 3rd National Black Canadians Summit

After being cancelled twice due to the pandemic, the 3rd National Black Canadians Summit is happening July 29-31 in Halifax – and I’m attending for a number of reasons. 

The first Summit was in Toronto in December 2017 and was an inspiring gathering of hundreds of Black folks from across Canada. There were great workshops on pressing topics to Black communities and bold solutions were debated. The conference was co-organized by the Michaëlle Jean Foundation and the newly launched Federation of Black Canadians. The second Summit was in Ottawa in February 2019 and was again co-organized by Michaëlle Jean Foundation of the FBC. This Summit is just organized by the MJF.

Firstly, I’m attending because I can. As Canada’s only full-time paid Black political activist (that I’m aware of) I have the time, money and self-imposed obligation to do so. I’m going to connect with local Blacktivists like elder Lynn Jones, a life-long civil and human rights activist, educator, community and labour organizer and spoken word poet, educator, journalist, and community activist, sister El Jones. I’m also going to find out if anyone else is doing this full time.

I’m going to attend the sessions. On Friday, I’ll attend the Federation of Black Canadians launch of their Black Pulse Toolkit “a digital resource (that is continually updated) to help people combat racism, learn about anti-Black racism, find support, and feel empowered to speak out, and possibly start their own local projects to effect change in their own communities.” Saturday morning I’ll attend From Reimagining to Reinventing Justice that “will explore how Black leaders are reinventing “justice” beyond the colonial “box” that has caused historic harms towards justice that brings about equity, equality and liberation.” I look forward to asking questions of Halifax police chief Dan Kinsella who’s on the panel. In the afternoon, I move to the Black Lives Matter and Beyond Roundtable – Transformative Activism and Building Beauty session with El Jones and Black Lives Matter Toronto co-founder Sandy Hudson.

Outside the formal sessions, I look forward to connecting with old and new folks in the halls, the streets, the restaurants, the bars…

I’m going because I’m from Halifax and look forward to walking around the city (because Halifax is small enough that you can walk pretty much everywhere) and being in spaces that hold wonderful memories from my first 15 years of life. The Public Gardens. Citadel Hill. The Halifax Common (a massive green and sports space in the middle of the city). Dalhousie and St. Mary’s Universities. Point Pleasant Park. And the Atlantic Ocean…

I going to ask what happened to the The International Decade Canadian Strategic Action Plan: 2017-2024 that was supposedly the guiding document for the first two Summits.

And I’m going to find out why the Federation of Black Canadians is no longer a co-organizer and to learn why certain high profile national groups like the Black North Initiative aren’t listed on the Summit program at all.

Finally, I’m going to eat plenty of donairs from Tony’s Donair on the corner of Robie and Cunard streets, right across from the Halifax Common. Now that’s food for thought…

Categories
Anti-Black racism OPS

Two Ottawa companies support systemic white supremacy and anti-Black racism…by working with a Black owned company

Normally, when we claim white-led companies are supporting systemic white supremacy and anti-Black racism it’s because they’re not hiring or partnering with Black companies even though those Black companies are highly competent. However, another way companies support systemic anti-Black racism is by hiring incompetent Black firms, apparently with the goal of having them fail.

A growing body of evidence indicates this is what two Ottawa companies may have apparently done.

On May 30, the Ottawa Police Services Board gave the Ottawa office of global executive search company Odgers Berndtson the green light to award Black-led Hefid Solutions a $76,500 contract to assist with the design and implementation of the community engagement process for recruiting Ottawa’s new police chief. The Board did this despite community groups publicly exposing weeks earlier that Crime Prevention Ottawa (CPO) had awarded a $50,000 contract to Hefid for the development of a new street violence and gun violence strategy in Ottawa despite Hefid having no apparent experience in street violence. 

The Board also did this despite having been previously informed of several things on Hefid’s website which raise questions about Hefid’s competence and credibility, including:

  • The website has no information on who owns or works for, or with, Hefid.
  • It says, “Founded in 2008, Hefid corporation has grown to become trusted (sic) management consultancy with millions of assets under management.”
  • It says “220+ happy clients from largest corporations” (sic).
  • Under Values on the About Us page, it lists Transparency as a key value stating, “There is nothing frustrating than trying to cover up something when it should not be so. Hefid Solution prides itself as ridiculously transparent. We are an open book. This has ensured the public trust us and our clients adore us.” (sic)
  • The website had quotes (since deleted) endorsing Hefid, and at least one Hefid staff member, that appeared to be fake as they appear on multiple websites. 
  • The site plagiarizes an entire 2017 CEO Magazine article, Teams are a reflection of the leader, posting it as a 2019 Hefid blog post
  • There are no details on any specific projects Hefid has done related to either street violence or community engagement.

Furthermore, a leaked presentation Hefid did for CPO identifies the African Canadian Association of Ottawa (ACAO) as the sole “community partner” on the street violence project and six of the eight individuals listed as members of the “Engagement Team” are either current or former ACAO executives, directors or members. This is particularly concerning as, after being asked several times who owns Hefid, CPO executive director Nancy Worsfold finally admitted that ACAO founder and executive member Hector Addison owns it – which makes the central role of ACAO in the proposed street violence strategy a direct conflict of interest. All six members of Hefid’s engagement team for the chief recruitment project are ACAO members – with five being directors or officers.

Finally, Hefid owner Hector Addison is a long time member of the Ottawa Police Service Community Equity Council (CEC) which the OPS funds and acting Ottawa Police Service chief Steve Bell co-chairs. 

The Board hired Odgers Berndtson Ottawa to run the police chief recruitment and Odgers recommended hiring Hefid to run the community engagement. Odgers has, therefore, hired the same person who is a member of the group created, run and funded by the OPS, and chaired by acting chief Bell, to run the community consultations to hire the new chief. There could be no clearer conflict of interest.

Hefid’s presentation to CPO indicates they’re partnering with CTLabs on the street violence project. CTLabs is part of Lansdowne Technologies that lists the Ottawa Police Service as one of its clients.

Why would Odgers Berndtson Ottawa and CTLabs, both highly respected, highly competent firms, hire and partner with a firm with such clearly questionable competence? This could not have been a mistake. We wrote to both companies for an explanation and neither replied. We must, therefore, assume they hired Hefid with the intent for Hefid to fail and to maintain the status quo of systemic white supremacy and anti-Black racism.

If this is the case, it would be very similar to what we have argued Steve Bell has been doing for years with the CEC which Bell has co-chaired since its creation in 2018. 

The stated goal of the CEC is, “To improve relationships between Indigenous, racialized and faith-based communities and the Ottawa Police Service.” However, according to the April 2022 report, Troubling Encounters: Ottawa Residents’ Experience of Policing, the CEC has helped do exactly the opposite as the report shows that racialized and low income Ottawa residents have extremely low levels of trust in the Ottawa police. In fact, the report states, “In short, for many people in this city, police do not contribute to individual or community safety, in fact, they appear to do the very opposite.” This is directly related to the CEC having no measurable success criteria as confirmed by former CEC vice-chair, Gerard Etienne who, in summer 2021, replied to the 613-819 Black Hub’s request for the CEC’s success criteria by saying, “It has yet to be defined.” Bell has, and continues to, enable the CEC’s ineffectiveness and, by doing so, continues supporting systemic white supremacy and anti-Black racism.

Any community engagement to recruit the new chief or street violence strategy led by Hefid will have no credibility with the community. But that doesn’t seem to matter as the aim clearly appears to be to crown Steve Bell as Ottawa’s new police chief and create a street violence strategy that does nothing to reduce street violence – and Odgers Berndtson Ottawa and CTLabs appear to be fully on board for both.

Categories
Cancel culture Corporations

Want to find the real bad guys? Stop looking at Russia and look at your credit card statement.

The non-stop simplistic “good vs evil ” coverage of the war in Ukraine has continued with some people, including Canada’s former foreign affairs minister Peter McKay, calling Vladimir Putin a psychopath and almost all media outlets framing the U.S. and its allies as the all round good guys. The media continues to ignore the role of multinational corporations in the events leading up to the war in Ukraine, some of which I covered in my post The U.S. has treated Ukraine – and Putin – kinda like it treats Black people.

This is a real change from 2003 when the movie The Corporation examined the behaviour of American corporations and found that they were the ones behaving like psychopaths. The film provided a definition from psychology’s Bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness. The DSM-IV (it’s now on the 5th edition) said the symptoms of psychopathy included: callous disregard for the feelings of other people, incapacity to maintain human relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness, incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect the law. The film explained that, due to an 1886 U.S. Supreme Court case, U.S. corporations were legally considered “persons” having the same rights as human beings. The film then examined corporate behaviour and showed that, if the corporations were actually people, they’d meet the definition of psychopaths.

Whether or not some, or many, multinational corporations are acting like full fledged psychos today, what is clear is that many are acting in ways that lead to people being harmed and killed – and that the mainstream media spends very little time covering it.

For example, as I said in one of my previous posts, the war in Ukraine was partly caused by the 2014, U.S.-backed removal of Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych following his rejection of U.S. attempts to open Ukraine markets to giant multinational companies and his restarting negotiations with Russia. The negotiations included the International Monetary Fund pushing Ukraine to implement reforms that were friendly to corporations but very unfriendly to the Ukraine people, including cutting wage controls (i.e., lowering wages), reforming and reducing health and education sectors…and cutting natural gas subsidies to Ukrainian citizens that made energy affordable to the general public. (Bryce Green outlined this in his article What You Should Really Know About Ukraine.)

Corporations were also barely, if ever, mentioned by the protesters, governments or media during the wave of anti COVID measures protests that swept across Canada in February 2022. Despite declaring the protests were about “freedom”, the protesters focused their critique – and anger – exclusively on governments, mentioning almost nothing about the role corporations played in exacerbating the effects of the pandemic on many of the most vulnerable workers. They didn’t critique the companies caught red handed giving the pandemic money they got from the government out to their shareholders like long term care home giant Extendicare. They didn’t critique Amazon for imposing on the “freedom” (and right) of its workers to safe working conditions by firing employees who spoke up about unsafe conditions. (The mainstream media did cover one major story that grew out of this: the successful formation of Amazon’s first union at its Staten Island warehouse by former Amazon worker Christian Smalls.)

The convoy protesters also said nothing about the big Canadian banks.

However, unlike the protesters and the mainstream media, the Government of Canada addressed corporations, including the big banks, directly in its recently released 2022 Budget. The government took some of the strongest action in recent years to make corporations – including Big Tech – pay their fair share of taxes by taxing excess pandemic profits, increasing the corporate tax rate (although only on banking and life insurance companies) and closing several corporate tax loop holes. This is probably partly because the deal between the governing Liberals, who have a minority, and the New Democratic Party, included tax measures, but they’re good steps whatever the reason.

The government went after the big Canadian banks in particular because it said the banks’ made huge pandemic profits partly because of measures the government took that benefited the banks. Budget 2022 said, “While many sectors continue to recover, Canada’s major financial institutions made significant profits during the pandemic and have recovered faster than other parts of our economy—in part due to the federal pandemic supports for people and businesses that helped de-risk the balance sheets of some of Canada’s largest financial institutions.” The government also wanted to curb outright tax avoidance by the banks. On that, Budget 2022 “proposes to examine potential changes to the financial transaction approval process to limit the ability of federally regulated financial institutions to use corporate structures in tax havens to engage in aggressive tax avoidance.”

In my post It’s time to cancel Cancel Culture, I pointed out that the ones actually doing the cancelling are the big media corporations that cancel people’s shows or their hosting opportunities – not people calling out celebrities on Twitter. But it’s the corporations’ bad behaviour that needs to be called out and cancelled, and it’s good to see the Canadian government taking strong first steps to cancel corporations’ ability to avoid paying their taxes.

The other bad corporate behaviour is using things like the war in Ukraine and the pandemic to raise prices more than actually needed. Do you notice that all the media stories about prices are framed like prices just go up on their own – and don’t say who’s actually raising them? This line from an April 20, 2022 CTV story is typical, “With Canada’s annual inflation at its highest point in over 30 years, experts say Canadians can anticipate their cost of living to increase significantly, warning that prices will likely not decrease for some time.”

Canadians need to ask companies to justify their price increases. And workers need to follow the lead of Ontario carpenters and strike if their employers aren’t willing to raise wages to meet the high cost of living. On Monday, May 9, CityNews reported that 15,000 workers went on strike at 12:01 a.m after they overwhelmingly rejected the latest offer from their employers in the industrial, commercial and institutional (ICI) sector.

Power to the people.

Categories
3rdNBCS Budget 2022

Federal Budget 2022 takes steps forward, backward and sideways for Black Canadians

The federal government says the 2022 budget it tabled April 7 builds on the things it already announced for Black Canadians, including:  

  • $100 million in 2021-22 for the Supporting Black Canadian Communities Initiative for Black-led and Black-focused community organizations;
  • $200 million for the creation of a Black Endowment Fund to provide steady and reliable funding for Black charities;
  • Over $19 million for culturally specific approaches to mental health for Black communities in Canada; and
  • Up to $265 million over four years for the Black Entrepreneurship Loan Fund, in partnership Black-led business organizations and financial institutions.

New funding in Budget 2022 includes: 

  • $50 million over two years, starting in 2022-23 for the Supporting Black Canadian Communities Initiative to continue empowering Black-led and Black-serving community organizations and the work they do to promote inclusiveness;
  • $1.5 million in 2022-23 for a federal contribution towards an endowment which would support the ongoing activities of the Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community and Diaspora. The Jean Augustine Chair housed at York University, is focused on addressing the systemic barriers and racial inequalities in the Canadian education system to improve educational outcomes for Black students;
  • $3.7 million over four years, starting in 2022-23 for Black-led engagement, design, and implementation of a Mental Health Fund for Black federal public servants; and
  • $40.9 million over five years, starting in 2022-23, and $9.7 million ongoing to the federal granting councils to support targeted scholarships and fellowships for promising Black student researchers. 

Some of this sounds great and are certainly steps in the right direction. Others, like just $50 million over two years for the Supporting Black Canadian Communities Initiative, sound woefully inadequate. However, really knowing what’s enough will take detailed analysis, including talking to lots of Black folks to find out if the programs are having the intended impact (which would be great projects for some of those student researchers to work on with professionals).

What’s easier to see is what wasn’t included at all.

One of the biggest omissions is no money to specifically collect data on the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black Canadians. The government’s Budget 2021 had $172 million over five years to “enhance our ability to collect disaggregated data, especially on diverse populations, to bring more equity, fairness, and inclusion into federal government decision making”. But without specifically allotting some of this money to study the pandemic impact on Black Canadians it’s likely none will be.

Another big omission in Budget 2022 is connected to the merging of Canada’s anti-racism and anti-hate initiatives. Budget 2022 has $85 million over four years, starting in 2022-23, to support the work underway to launch a new Anti-Racism Strategy and National Action Plan on Combatting Hate. The Budget says the funds, “will support community projects that ensure that Black and racialized Canadians, and religious minorities have access to resources that support their full participation in the Canadian economy, while also raising awareness of issues related to racism and hate in Canada.” The problem is this groups systemic discrimination, including systemic anti-Black racism, with “hate”, when the two are fundamentally different. Systemic discrimination, like that faced by Black and Indigenous people in Canada, refers to discrimination by state bodies – like the police, schools and the health care system – and private institutions – like banks and employers – resulting in disproportionate numbers of Black and Indigenous people being jailed, unemployed or underemployed. It also leads to disproportionate numbers of Black and Indigenous students being suspended, expelled and streamed into non-academic courses and worse health outcomes for Black and Indigenous people. So, although a recently released Statistics Canada hate crimes report shows Black Canadians faced the most hate crimes of any group in Canada in 2020, systemic anti-Black racism is the far worse and fundamental problem. Budget 2022, includes $1.2 million to support the Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism and $1.2 million to support the new Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia. The government should create a similar Special Envoy on Systemic Anti-Black Racism.

Other notable omissions from Budget 2022 are no mention of specific funding for Black Canadians in either Chapter 1 – Making Housing More Affordable or Chapter 4 – Creating Good Middle Class jobs. Regarding housing, on Feb.18, 2022, the federal government announced $10 million for a pilot project to help 200 Black families in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) purchase a first home. However, the project is a partnership with the Black North Initiative and Canada’s Big 5 banks – both of which have been recently critiqued regarding doing things for Black folks. A July 2021 Globe and Mail article revealed most companies had made little progress on diversity a year after signing the BNI pledge to take action. This followed articles by El Jones and Desmond Cole in May 2021 reporting how BNI was benefitting from anti-Blackness partly by accepting a $1 million donation from one of its board members, Prem Watsa, who is the largest investor in the racist U.S. for-profit bail system. 

The big Canadian banks’ involvement in the program is also suspect given an April 6 Globe and Mail article reported how “Canada’s big six banks almost came together to help Black entrepreneurs – but then they went their separate ways.” The article explains how the banks were originally supposed to take part in the Black Entrepreneurship Loan Fund program but pulled out at the last minute after the government refused to guarantee the loans. It would be easier to give the banks the benefit of the doubt for why they walked away – if every one of the Big Five hadn’t refused to tell the Globe and Mail reporter why. Budget 2022 has measures to get the banks to pay back some of the billions they made during the pandemic, in part due to the federal pandemic support for people and businesses that helped de-risk their balance sheets. The government should use its powers to give the banks the incentive to support the Black Entrepreneurship Loan Fund without loan guarantees – or with less favourable ones than the banks are used to – and treat Black folks equitably by giving more Black people personal and business loans.

But giving Black businesses loans only helps if they have business and the Budget was silent on something that Black communities have been requesting for years that would address this: setting aside a percentage of federal government contracts for Black businesses as the government has been doing for years for Indigenous businesses. There was yet again no mention of this.

Although Budget 2022 included $60 million in 2023-24 to increase the federal contribution to criminal legal aid services it was silent on two key justice-related issues: expunging the convictions of the many Black folks found guilty of minor cannabis offences before cannabis was made legal and removing mandatory minimum sentences on drug offences, as called for by Jonathan Rudin, program director at the Toronto-based Aboriginal Legal Services. Rudin says the funding fails to address the root problems inherent in the justice system.

Given one of the impacts of systemic anti-Black racism is high unemployment, and that the legal cannabis industry is now dominated by white male owners, the government should also provide funding and support to help Black Canadians get into the cannabis industry.

Understandably (and happily), some Black groups aren’t waiting for government funding to start the work to comprehensively analyse if the Budget 2022 funding is adequate. For example, the leaders of the Black Class Action suit against the Government of Canada released a statement on the proposed $3.7 million Mental Health Fund for Black federal public servants saying that, “while this represents a step in the right direction, the measure is lacking in resources and details…$925,000 per year is wholly insufficient to design and implement a national mental health program. Secondly, a four-year period to design and implement the program is too long. Workers need help right now and cannot put their mental health issues on hold. We are calling on the government to provide more financial resources for this plan and to implement it quickly. The pandemic & global conflict have shown us the government can move quickly when they see a crisis. This budget is carefully worded to delay any serious & urgent implementation of a response to the mental health crisis facing Black workers in the public service.” They call on Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland to request more funding for the program and to implement it within the next 12 months.

The Budget also includes some things that will benefit middle and lower income Canadians – including the many Black Canadians who are disproportionately lower income. This includes $5.3 billion over five years, starting in 2022-23, and $1.7 billion ongoing to provide dental care for Canadians. The program would be fully implemented by 2025 and restricted to families with an income of less than $90,000 annually. The Budget also commits to continue the ongoing work towards a universal national pharmacare program including tabling a Canada Pharmacare bill and working to have it passed by the end of 2023. The NDP demanded both these measures as part of its supply and confidence deal with the government, proving once again that minority governments are best for Black folks.

Finally, the government is taking concrete action to make corporations – including Big Tech – pay their fair share of taxes by increasing the corporate tax rate (although only on banking and life insurance companies) and closing several corporate tax loop holes.

Black groups across the country need to do more analysis like the Black Class Action folks did – and share it – and the 3rd National Black Canadians Summit, July 29-31 in Halifax would be a great place to do so.

Categories
Neo-colonialism Russia U.S.

The U.S. has treated Ukraine – and Putin – kinda like it treats Black people

I’ve learned to always be skeptical of stories that are too black and white – especially ones with good guys and bad guys – told by the “good guys”. As I suspected that the Ukraine/Russia story we’re getting from most mainstream media is such a story, I asked my African history teacher if he could point me to some sources that could give me a broader perspective on the conflict. He pointed me to Black Agenda Report which provides “news, commentary and analysis from the black left” where I quickly found what I was looking for: Bryce Greene’s article What You Should Really Know About Ukraine.

The article started by describing the official line being parroted by most mainstream media: “Russia is challenging NATO and the “international rules-based [and democratic] order” by threatening to invade Ukraine, and the Biden administration needed to deter Russia by providing more security guarantees to [Ukraine]. The official account seizes on Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula as a starting point for US/Russian relations, and as evidence of Putin’s goals of rebuilding Russia’s long-lost empire.” Greene then provides the all important context, including U.S. involvement in the 2014 coup that toppled Ukraine’s democratically president Viktor Yanukovych, involvement that would have had to have the approval of U.S. president Barack Obama.

Greene explains U.S. efforts, prior to the coup, “to open Ukrainian markets to foreign investors and give control of its economy to giant multinational corporations.” The main tool for this was the International Monetary Fund, which loans countries money in exchange for them adopting policies friendly to foreign investors. “The IMF is funded by and represents Western financial capital and governments and has been at the forefront of efforts to reshape economies around the world for decades, often with disastrous results. The civil war in Yemen and the coup in Bolivia both followed a rejection of IMF terms”, Greene writes. In Ukraine, the IMF had long planned to implement a series of economic reforms  to make the country more attractive to investors. “These included cutting wage controls (i.e., lowering wages), “reform[ing] and reduc[ing]” health and education sectors…and cutting natural gas subsidies to Ukrainian citizens that made energy affordable to the general public. In 2013, after early steps to integrate with the West, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych turned against these changes and ended trade integration talks with the European Union. Months before his overthrow, he restarted economic negotiations with Russia, in a major snub to the Western economic sphere.”

Greene details how, after Yanukovych started talking with the Russians, the U.S. supported his opponents, including far-right and openly Nazi groups, and fueled anti-government sentiment that led to the coup which removed him. Greene then explains why Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.

From Russia’s point of view, the 2014 coup meant a longtime adversary had successfully overthrown a neighboring government using violent far-right extremists – and those extremists now controlled Crimea. Greene explained that, “the Crimean peninsula, which was part of Russia until it was transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1954, is home to one of two Russian naval bases with access to the Black and Mediterranean seas, one of history’s most important maritime theaters. A Crimea controlled by a US-backed Ukrainian government was a major threat to Russian naval access.” So Putin took over Crimea but hadn’t advanced any further – until now.

Greene argues that the change was due to the U.S.’s continued efforts to get Ukraine to join the North American Treaty Organization (NATO), “an explicitly anti-Russian military alliance”. Greene poses the question, “Imagine for one second how the US would behave if Putin began trying to add a US neighbor [like Mexico for example] to a hostile military alliance after helping to overthrow its government…” The answer is clear.

What is also clear are the parallels between the U.S. treatment of Putin and how various levels of the U.S. state have historically treated Black people in U.S. and Africa.

The U.S. has been involved in coups that led to the removal of African leaders that chose polices favoring their countries’ people over Western interests. This included Ghana’s democratically elected president Kwame Nkrumah, and Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara and the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba. The U.S. and Canada were also involved in the removal of Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

As the full context shows Putin defending against American economic and military aggression, the U.S. labelling him as the aggressor is an example of the U.S. government using a central technique of systemic anti-Black racism (although, in this case, against a white guy): labelling Black people who defend themselves from systemic discrimination by calling it out, as aggressive. The label is almost always accompanied by half truths about all bad things the accused Black people have done. The subtext of these claims is that the Black folks are the bad guys and the people whose discriminatory behaviour they’re calling out are the good guys.

The U.S. is doing the same thing by labelling Putin as the aggressor who wants to expand his “dictatorial” control while portraying itself as protectors of democracy.

The reality is that the only place Putin took over since coming to power is Crimea. However, while Putin has been in power, U.S.-initiated attacks have included Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. As for the U.S. – nothing is more anti-democratic than helping overthrow democratically elected leaders which the U.S. has a long history of doing.

The U.S. also has a long history of using black and white narratives to label itself the angel of democracy defending the world against the world’s devilish strong men. From Saddam Hussein to former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to Putin, the U.S. has used the narrative to obscure its own role, driven by its expansionist economic interests, in helping create and empower such men. (In Gaddafi’s case, the narrative leaves out the truth about how he improved the lives of many Libyans by nationalizing the oil industry and using the increasing state revenues to implement social programs emphasizing house-building, healthcare and education projects.)

It’s important to understand the full complexity of history to inform our actions today. As the U.S. is, as Barack Obama said in his November 2020 book A Promised Land, the only remaining superpower, it’s particularly important to understand what it’s doing in general – and to Black people in particular – now…and what it might do in the future.

Note: Obama mentioned nothing about the 2014 removal of Ukraine’s democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych in his book A Promised Land even though Obama met with Arseniy Yatsenyu – who the U.S. were caught on tape choosing to replace Yanukovych – less than two weeks after Yatsenyu became Ukraine’s prime minister.