Continue reading »]]> A brief note from Jamie on the piece of writing (by another author) that takes up the majority of this post:

For readers who are unfamiliar with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this is a government-implemented program in Canada, which visits indigenous communities primarily for the express purpose of hearing the experiences of residential school survivors, which are then reported to the Canadian government along with any insights shared by those communities about how the government can take steps towards reconciling with indigenous communities. Residential schools were geographically isolated institutions initiated by the Canadian government and run by the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, in which more than 150,000 indigenous children over the course of more than a hundred years were forced to face horrific physical, sexual, and spiritual abuses while being racially and culturally brain-washed, in a campaign of systematic cultural genocide. Many children were assigned Anglicised names or even referred to only by numbers, many healthy children were intentionally exposed to tuberculosis, and countless children died alone in remote wilderness trying to escape. The last Canadian residential school closed in 1996, in Alberta. A majority of Canadian public schools do not even acknowledge this facet of Canadian history, and as a result, a significant majority of settler Canadians have literally no understanding of the continued legacy of trans-generational violence within indigenous families and greater communities. As a result, that majority tends to harbour dehumanizing and blatantly racist attitudes towards this country’s indigenous peoples, which prevents reconciliation between indigenous peoples and settler society, continues to maintain serious social barriers against the social growth and empowerment of indigenous communities, and prevents the Canadian government from being held accountable for its actions and racially selective policies against indigenous peoples (thus contributing to the perpetuation of debilitating racial injustice on the scale of genocide, merely repackaged to appear otherwise). This is all especially important given that indigenous populations across the country are once again on the rise (e.g., it is estimated that within the next ten years, up to a third of the province of Saskatchewan will be of indigenous heritage) and yet currently, approximately one half of all children currently in the custody of child care services are of indigenous heritage (i.e., child care services taking custody of indigenous children has become the new residential school system — there are now more indigenous children separated from their families by this abuse of power than there were during the 60s scoop). The following is a two-page essay that was handed to me by the author (a residential school survivor) at a recent consciousness-raising rally for indigenous rights.

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In 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized to the naive people of Canada for one hundred years of Indian residential schooling. Mr. Harper said that the Indian residential school system was the wrongful implementation of a policy of “forced assimilation”. The purpose, here, is for a former resident of one of those schools to expose Canada’s apology as a lie. The government of Canada is now trying to complete the policy of forced assimilation in the ongoing comprehensive treaty process. Furthermore, since Canada is still pursuing a policy of forced assimilation, it seeks not to reconcile with Indians but to extinguish them as a people.

The above will be covered, but first, the term forced assimilation must be understood. Politically, forced assimilation is the imposition of one aspect of self-determination to the exclusion of the other. The two possible outcomes of native internal colonialism, assimilation or sovereignty, are not mutually exclusive. Contemporary native internal colonies (in Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand) pose complex national questions. The resolution of these questions can be no less complex. Allied to the native national questions are the larger national questions posed by the existence of African-Americans and Mexican-Americans in the US. Due to the histories of slavery and annexation, these peoples also have the right of self-determination. The not necessarily conflicting objectives of Canada’s native internal colony were exemplified in the 1960s and 1970s by the seemingly opposed leadership of people such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Similarly, organizations such as the Black Panther Party and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People could be perceived as having conflicting objectives, and yet, their practices often paralleled each other. Even immigrants from the third world figure into this equation of unknown outcomes. The oppressed nations of the third world have contributed, fundamentally, to development in the imperialist nations. They, therefore, have (as yet undetermined) national rights in the oppressor nations.

Treaty-making resumed at the initiative of the federal government of Canada. The federal government saw that treaty-level agreement was required to bring about forced assimilation. Treaties are, by definition, made between nations or peoples. The “new relationship” declared by Canada involves wholesale change in the relationship between Canadian Indians, as defined by the Indian Act, and the Canadian people.

That Canadian Indians are a people is, of course, known to the government of Canada. Canadian Indians, as an internal colony, were created by the government of Canada and administrated through the Department of Indian Affairs. This started in 1867 when the settlers took control of the remaining British colonies in North America. Under the terms of the British-North America Act, they became the Dominion of Canada. That Canadian Indians, along with all the indigenous of Canada, are a people is a pivotal point of theory for understanding colonialism in Canada. That Canadian Indians are a people is also a pivotal point in determining whether modern-day treaties are bona fide or bogus. The position, here, is that the remnants of tribal nations, beautiful as they are, no longer constitute national entities. This is attested to not only by law but also by the events of history before Confederation.

British imperialism, and also French imperialism, reduced the populations of the tribal nations beyond the point whereby they could be sustained as independent entities, economically or politically. Some of the tribal nations, such as the Beothuk of Newfoundland, were completely wiped out. All this by war, disease, starvation, and murder. Treaties in the period of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 reflected a reality different from that of today. The peoples of the then-existing tribal nations vastly outnumbered the Europeans. Britain found it necessary to ally with some tribal nations in order to defeat other tribal nations, the French (1760), the Americans (1812), and to facilitate settlement.

In contemporary narrative, the existence of modern nations that were once colonies and, before that, numerous separately existing tribal nations, is also pivotal. Tribal nations, all over the world, were defeated precisely because they were tribal nations contending with competing empires of European capitalism. Today, modern nations in the third world, still oppressed, have demonstrated the capacity to expel or defeat imperialism. This spells the beginning of the end for oppressive social systems. In the vision of the native internal colony, the Inuit and Métis people figure largely. The Inuit and Métis are impacted somewhat differently by the Indian Act than Indians. All, however, have categorically the same historical experience, even in relation to residential schools and treaties, and a common relationship to Canada. All, therefore, form distinct parts of the native internal colony. So, from vulnerable entities, the concept of the native internal colony sees the existence of an exceptional national entity that, still small in relation to Canada, requires unity not only of its tribal components but also with Canadian and world peoples.

The point at which the federal government signalled a changed in the implementation of its policy of forced assimilation, and began re-directing its priorities and funding, was 1969. In 1969, the federal government proposed the White Paper Policy on Indians (WPP). The WPP was proposed to unilaterally abolish the Indian Act and nullify any distinctions between Canadian Indians and the Canadian people. Indian protest against the WPP grew. In 1971, the WPP was retracted. In 1971, also, the Core Funding Program was initiated by the Trudeau government. The Core Funding Program was the source of applied-for funding by which means social reforms could be carried out in native communities. These reforms included the building of a captive native leadership, from the band, to the tribal, to the provincial, to the national levels. In 1973, the Comprehensive Land Claims Settlement Policy (CLC) was created by the federal government to circumscribe the treaty process. Under CLC policy, two non-negotiable requirements of all treaties are the removal of the native communities from the jurisdiction of the Indian Act, and the incorporation of these communities into Canadian, municipal, or territorial jurisdictions. Not being able to achieve forced assimilation through WPP legislation, the federal government is seeking to achieve the same objectives, bilaterally, in the comprehensive treaty process. The coercion inherent in the treaty process is to be found in multi-billion-dollar resources, in money and land, earmarked for treaty payment. In reality, these resources are the long-awaited entitlements, of underprivileged native communities, that are being withheld in order to force natives into the treaty process. Treaty coercion is compounded by the fact that, in negotiations involving two opposing interests, the Canadian imperialist settler-state, in effect, pays the representatives of the native internal colony. The native leadership that is funded by the federal government has legitimacy in that integration, of some sort, is one aspect of native self-determination. In so far, however, as sovereignty is concerned, this leadership can make no determination.

For the purpose of treaty-making, the federal government has extended false national recognition to native communities or groups of native communities (i.e., First Nations). The resulting treaty process began with the James Bay Cree (1975). This treat allowed for the development of a mega-project to produce hydro-electric power for Boston investors. From there, the native communities of northern Quebec reached agreement, followed by the native communities of the entire north (i.e., Nunavut). The treaty process, now, has on board many native communities of the south, some of whom have already signed. In BC, this includes the Nishga’a (2000), the Maa-nulth of Vancouver Island and the Tsawwassen. The Tsawwassen agreement is allowing for Robert’s Bank with, mainly, Jimmy Pattison’s investment to become the largest coal export terminal in the world. The natives of almost one-half of Canada’s land area have signed comprehensive treaties. This provides much “certainty” for investors. In comprehensive treaties, legal recognition of native, pre-contact, heritage is extinguished along with their post-Confederation identity.

If treaties are made between nations, what, ten, are these agreements being made between Canada and native communities? They are, effectively, agreements forced upon parts of the native internal colony in order to secure their members’ compliance in the renunciation of Canadian Indian nationality, and the annexation of their land by Canada. Indian nationalists can see that the incorporation of native communities into a Canadian, municipal, or territorial jurisdiction is wrong. Some Indian nationalists, however, find themselves on side with the federal government in wanting to abolish the Indian Act. Strategically, it is true, the Indian Act should be done away with. Tactically, however, the Indian Act should be defended because, at this time, the federal government is trying to deprive Indians of ther identity in order to put Indians in an even weaker position tan that existing in the colonial relationship. The defense of the Indian Act is a necessary tactical retreat from the massive federal government initiative that the comprehensive treaty process represents. What is important is that the identity and unity of the people be salvaged under the present political attack.

Native people are often spoken of as being socially dysfunctional. Statistics are used to bolster this negative image. In fact, the native refusal to accept the outlook of an imperialistic settler-society is the response of people who, in spite of everything, still maintain their humanity. Many horrible, racist events occur against native people in Canada, especially native women. Perpetrators at the bottom of society are afforded impunity from the top, where hateful Indian policy is created.

Ray Bobb, Seabird Island Indian band, February 2013 Email: RayBobb@shaw.ca

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Editorial note (Jamie): Only very minor mechanical changes (plus or minus a few commas) have been made to the original piece of writing. The author granted me permission to re-post this piece of writing on his behalf.

Here is a link to my previous writing on the Indian Act, which in tl;dr amounts to “if keep, then cultural genocide; if abolish, then cultural genocide”.

Here is a link to the current revision of the Indian Act, which you can read in full and which I personally think should be mandatory reading for every sufficiently English-speaking citizen of Canada, as well as new immigrants. We are all treaty people.

Here is a link to the Wikipedia page for the British-North America Act.

Here is a link to the Wikipedia page for the White Paper Policy on Indians. The name of that policy alone is enough to induce vomiting.

Here is a link to the Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development “fact sheet” for the Comprehensive Land Claims Settlement Policy.

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Depending on who you read or listen to, either Islamophobia simply isn’t real, or it’s not as pervasive as people think it is, or sometimes it’s a legitimate criticism, but it’s often used incorrectly to shut down someone legitimately criticising Islam, or else it’s just some word (without any legitimate meaning) that people use to shut down conversations. To which I say: bullshit. I have to grant, of course, that there is possibly some people out there do these things, but I have to admit that I haven’t actually seen any of them. Even in articles where these claims are made, no evidence is provided.

Most often, people who haven’t ‘picked sides’ in this particular debate are left wondering what this term means, exactly. So I’m going to sketch out what I think it means, and how I see it used (which are, oddly enough, the same thing). Note that ‘what the term means’ isn’t the same as ‘what the word is defined as’.

The term is primarily used to call out bigoted behaviour, and not necessarily restricted to bigotry against Muslims: there is splash damage that goes beyond the targeted group. For example, the murder of Sunando Sen (an Indian, who was targeted because his murderer believed him to be either “a Muslim or a Hindu”) is a clear cut case of Islamophobia  Here is a guy who wasn’t a Muslim, and shared no characteristics with the majority of Muslims, and yet was killed because… He was brown.

And that’s really the crux of it. When you ask people to describe “a Muslim”, they’ll typically give you a description of someone who is either Arab or Persian (or, more vaguely, brown), male, bearded, and speaks Arabic. If they get past their gender-bias, they might describe a woman covered from head to toe in cloth showing only their eyes. And straight off, this image is generally false. Why? Because the largest single ethnic/nationality of Muslims don’t live in the Middle East: they live in Indonesia (13% of all Muslims). Yet, in Europe and North America, “Muslim” and “brown person” have become somewhat synonymous, such that even when people are making an effort to be as politically correct and dress up bigoted statements in vague and non-specific language, their policy ideas invariably target brown people.

So the problem here is that when one makes claims about “Muslims”, 1) those claims aren’t necessarily true about Muslims (generally), and 2) there’s a whole bunch of non-Muslims being caught up in this.

Exhibit A is, of course, Sam Harris. I don’t want to make this about Harris; I’m just using his comments as exemplars, so I’m not interested in rehashing ‘what he really meant’ in the comments.

I do also realise that Harris is low-hanging fruit, but he illustrates my point and yet he (along with many others) is often defended as simply being anti-Islam, and not Islamophobic,  Allow me to disabuse you of that notion. Harris says

“We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.”

And attempts to clarify that with

“When I speak of profiling “Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim,” I am not narrowly focused on people with dark skin. In fact, I included myself in the description of the type of person I think should be profiled (twice).”

So in that case, who exactly does Harris think “looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim”? By including himself, he’s essentially arguing that ‘anyone’ could “look Muslim”, which largely defeats the argument he was attempting to make. Which is unsurprising, given that it’s Harris, but it’s hard to say that “he’s lying” is a more charitable interpretation. I’ll leave that to ye to judge. Moreover: where in these statements is he being “anti-Islam”? I can see where he’s being anti-Muslim, but the anti-Islam part eludes me (and no, these are not the same thing).

The bottom line here is, to take data from the recent Pew survey, that Muslims span the globe. Pew interviewed people from 39 different countries, and had to run interviews in 80 different languages. “What’s that?” I hear ye say, “Couldn’t they just interview everyone in Arabic?” And thus does the spectre of Islamophobia raise its head.

Islamophobia is bigotry, and bigotry is (at its root) the application of blanket beliefs about what kind of a person is represented by a certain word, and how we believe that kind of person to be. Nevermind the fact that Farsi is the primary language in Iran, or that Pakistan is home to 60 languages (and Arabic is far from the dominant language), we make the (completely wrong) connections between “Arabic” and “Muslim” that make only slightly more sense than connecting “Latin” with “Catholic”. Yet if we go back a generation: my father learned Latin in high school in Ireland, and found as much use for it as (I suspect) the majority of Muslims find for Arabic. Getting people kicked off of an airplane because you don’t understand what they are saying…?  Yeah, that’d be Islamophobia too.

In the Middle East, alone, the generalisations about Muslims don’t hold even for Middle-Eastern Muslims. This is a many and varied group.

So I think (and hope) that these should be somewhat obvious cases of Islamaphobia. I’m going to move into one that’s likely to be a little more contentious: a response to the Pew Survey. Please note that I’m not generalising this on to ‘atheists in general’; I’m not attributing this response to any particular group of people, I’m saying that this particular response is an expression of Islamaphobia. Of course, the person I’m going to quote on this is Harris. On May 1^st, Harris tweeted (and was retweeted into my timeline):

“85 percent of Egyptians support capital punishment for those who leave the faith: http://econ.st/ZSxbYl Must be the fault of the West.”

Now given that this was retweeted 165 times, and favourited 65 times (at the time of this writing), he’s not alone in thinking this.

“But Brian,” I hear ye ask, “This is a factually correct statement. What’s the problem? And please get to the point without this ridiculous 3^rd person crap.”

Geez, you guys are pushy… Anyway, the point here is the immediate leap to the stats for Egypt. The Economist has a good graphical breakdown of these stats and it can be seen that 1) Egypt is clearly the worst-case scenario, and 2) there is a massive variation in what percentage of Muslims believe that apostasy (leaving the faith) is a crime deserving of execution. So taking the stats for Egypt to make proclamations is just off-base. Bigotry? Perhaps. Harris’s tweet, in fairness, is too short and thus too vague for me to start making claims about what he was thinking.

Also, factually correct? In Egypt, the sample size was 2000 people, of whom 1,798 were Muslim (from page 39 of the Pew study). Bearing in mind that Egypt has a population of over 79 million people, a sample of 2,000 people is a tiny drop in that ocean. The margins for error, in any case, are given on page 150.

But let’s, for the sake of argument, accept that this survey is represents the populations surveyed extremely well. Then you must take seriously the other claims presented, such as (from page 68):

“In nearly every country surveyed in these regions, at least half of Muslims say they are very concerned or somewhat concerned about extremist groups. In Indonesia, nearly eight-in-ten Muslims say they are worried about religious extremism (78%), including more than half (53%) who are worried about Islamic extremists.”

From the graphic on that page, 67% of Egyptians surveyed are somewhat or very concerned about religious extremism (Christian, or Muslim, or both). Are there contradictions here, where clearly many of that group don’t see ‘execute people for apostasy’ as ‘religious extremism’? Absolutely. And many American Christians are in favour of the death penalty. People be complicated, and hold inconsistent beliefs simultaneously. Also this just in: water is wet.

Ultimately, what’s Harris’s point? What did 165 people think was so insightful that it deserved retweeting? Sure, I fully agree that apostasy should not be considered a capital crime. Just as I believe that owning a bible written in the vernacular shouldn’t be considered a capital crime either. This does not appear to me to be an issue with Islam, per se, but how various religions attempt social control. Additionally, Harris is (again) not being “Anti-Islam”; in this particular case, he’s being anti-Egyptian.

Let’s look at this another way: blasphemy laws. I think that the odds are that the vast majority of readers of this blog are anti-[blasphemy laws]. Yet look at how these one issue is dealt with: when people talk about blasphemy laws in Ireland, it’s an Irish thing (even though the country is over-overwhelmingly Catholic). When people talk about blasphemy laws in Pakistan, it’s suddenly a Muslim thing. Why the double-standard?

(Sidenote: I find this switch to be quite bizarre. Whenever a bomb goes off, news articles from North America can’t emphasize the [non-existent] religious affiliations of the IRA and the UVF enough. Talking about blasphemy laws (something clearly fucking religious)? It’s like Ireland was always a secular state. I am confused by your inconsistencies, North America)

The bottom line is that once you start taking the actions and/or attributes of a few members of a particular group and start making claims about the group as a whole (or even generally) based on those few, you’ve wandered into Doing Bigotry territory.

When you criticise the position that these particular Muslims hold you are not criticising Islam, you are criticising these particular Muslims. When you then generalise the beliefs of these particular Muslims and criticise Muslims-in-general… Well, like the song almost says: that’s Islamophobia.

The standard pushback here is to proclaim that “we should be free to criticise Islam without being called racist“: by all means, please criticise Islam (and Armin’s post does exactly that, while completely missing the boat when it comes to the Islamophobia criticism). But the moment you start holding up individual Muslims for what they have done, and then going “See? Freaking Islam!”, then all you have done is is cherry-pick a particular Muslim acting badly, and claim that that one individual is (somehow) representative of Muslims generally. Yet the bulk of the Muslim population *wasn’t* doing what that individual did.

Is Islam homophobic? Sure. Does it advocate the abuse of women? Without a doubt. Is it hypocritical and self-contradictory? Of course it bloody well is.

Is homophobia interwoven throughout Muslim communities? Sure. More than Christian communities? I have no idea (and I don’t know how we’d even begin to quantify that). Are Muslim communities very anti-woman? Sure. More than Christian communities? I’m not sure (I’m inclined to say ‘yes’, but I’m just working off of my media-infused prejudices here).

Are “Muslim communities” and “Islam” synonymous? Fuck no. Take a look at Christianity: it hasn’t changed a whit in the last thousand years, but how the adherents interpret it and implement it into law has.

To claim that Islam is worse than Christianity, or the greatest force for evil today… I mean, *really*? There’s quite a lot of ‘awful’ out there, and I really have no idea how one quantifies Islam as worse than the institutionalized rape of children. Seriously, Dawkins, this shit is embarrassing.

Anywho. This is how I see Islamophobia being used: to call out people who imprecisely generalise traits-specific-to-cultural-subgroups-that-have-Muslim-members to Muslims-in-general, and reading non-Muslims-who-are-part-of-cultural-subgroups-that-have-Muslim-members as Muslims.

This be Islamophobia.

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Continue reading »]]> Just dropping a note here to say that I am, in fact, not dead. Lot of irons in the fire at the moment, and writing has been the lowest on my list of priorities. Am currently working on something rather large, so expect that in a few days. My apologies to anyone for whom this blog is a daily read for interrupting your routine.

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This past week, the United States has experienced a horrific series of civil rights violations: the Boston Marathon bombing, followed by the lockdown of the entire city under martial law (during which several civilian homes were burst into with military might, in SWAT raids searching for one of the suspects, both of whom were considered armed and highly dangerous), and the passing of a bill (CISPA, or Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) that allows the United States government to monitor traffic on the internet at its whim and fancy. And that’s not just American citizen’s internet traffic — that includes monitoring of non-Americans accessing US websites too. Canadian civil liberties organizations have asserted that this is very likely to result in further violations of Canadian citizens’ civil liberties as a result (e.g., extradition to the states for alleged “cyber crimes” against the US government).

Also this past week, I observed someone on my Facebook comparing the Boston SWAT raids to the Nazi invasion of Poland and rounding up of Jews at gunpoint. And to my utter shock, not one but two philosophy dudebros came along to defend this individual, on the basis that they think my emotions have clouded my ability to think critically about this outrageously offensive comparison (which directly equates Jews to terrorists, no matter which way you attempt to slice that). This post is going to get personal.

Concern troll warning: Take your “reverse sexism” claims right now and stuff them where the sun doesn’t shine—unless you’re homophobic, in which case, get ready to chew and swallow. If I could literally force-feed it to you, I most certainly would not hesitate.

I’m going to make a full disclosure right now. I am part Jewish. Like the two bombing suspects, I am also part Caucasian. I am even part Polish. That’s all just one side of my family. On the other side of my family, I am part Danish and part English, and my Danish grandfather was just a teenager during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. I am deeply suspicious that he was also a Nazi sympathizer, as there are several things he has said and done, and several things going on in that side of my family, that simply do not add up otherwise. These parts of my identity are all the reasons why I’m typing in English, sitting in an apartment on the west coast of Canada (where I maintain zero contact with my blood family), instead of learning to speak my ancestral tongues while I learn about the land I am connected to by blood.

To suggest that I get emotional about people co-opting the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust (during which, I will remind you, ten million people were murdered) as if to extract the emotional gravity of this part of world history—my history… tens of millions of peoples’ histories—and heap it on top of an already heinous abuse of power as the United States has seen this past week, is to have already grossly understated what I feel when I see this taking place. But to suggest that because I feel such strong emotions, I therefore am unable to think clearly about it, is just fucking ignorant. It is because I can feel all of that emotion that I am more able to think critically about what is happening here.

I am now going to introduce a metaphor for what I think must be going on in the minds of people who actually think that any free speech argument they can muster is in any way a legitimate defence for having radically decontextualized the fucking Nazi Holocaust of all the fucking things in world history. These people—especially the dudebros who voluntarily came to the initial offender’s defence, despite not being prompted to at all by anyone—are Numb Nuts©. They are being repeatedly kicked in the balls, yet are somehow completely desensitized to it, and appear perplexed by anyone who isn’t equally desensitized. (Though I’m confident very few women will fully comprehend this paradox, I can assure you from direct personal experience that being kicked directly in the clitoris is exactly the same scale and magnitude of pain as being kicked in the balls.) They observe someone clutching their pelvis whilst curled up in the fetal position on the ground, trying not to throw up, and shouting “Why the fuck would you do that?!” when they can finally breathe again after the first couple of minutes. Numb Nuts© continue to observe the victim as the pain spreads over their entire body and the urge to vomit slowly creeps up from just below their navel all the way into their throat, tears forming in their eyes and spreading across their reddened face. But rather than, say, demand an end to testicle-kicking everywhere, Numb Nuts© tell this heaving person who is clearly in pain and in need of assistance that if they would just stop feeling it, they could have a rational discussion with them about how their experience of being kicked in the balls really isn’t as bad as they think it is. “I mean, look at me!” they’d say. “I could be getting kicked in the balls right now, and you don’t see me getting all emotional about it!”

This is precisely the problem of philosophy dudebros and their disingenuous attempts to “debate” abortion politics, but truly, only a complete fucking Numb Nuts© could minimize the Nazi Holocaust to defend someone who had already decontextualized it. Maybe they had a point in there, somewhere, about civil liberties. I can’t fucking tell, and I wouldn’t want to have that conversation with them anyway. Not after they’ve just finished defending a comparison as offensive (to literally anyone currently living on the planet) as the Boston lockdown to the invasion of Poland and rounding up of Jews by Nazis.

Maybe these idiots have somehow “forgotten” about these events in world history. Only, they’d also have to live under a fucking mountain to be equally ignorant of the conflict in Gaza, the current renewal of the American Indian Movement of the 60s and 70s that recently gained global attention as Idle No More, the treatment of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians on the west coast during WWII (i.e., being raided at gunpoint, forced internment, and often enslavement as well), and innumerable other conflicts that continue to re-shape and re-structure our world. I suggest everyone reading this post also take a moment to read this article on Huffington Post from George Takei about his experiences in a Japanese internment camp, and this article on Al Jazeera on the instant clamouring in mass media to appoint blame for the Boston Marathon bombing on the suspects’ ethnicities alone.

Civil liberties violations should make us feel angry. Human rights violations should make us feel several times more outraged. That enough people are so desensitized to both that even as I limited my social media engagements as much as possible this past week, I was exposed to three separate people who were all trying to shield themselves from criticism, for either perpetrating or defending a grossly inappropriate and offensive comparison between Jews and terrorists (while mass media was promoting the same principle mindset as much as possible across the United States, and the government was passing a bill into law that radically undermines civil liberties — potentially worldwide), should make anyone angry enough to take to the streets in protest over it. That people of the exact same desensitized mental state show up, without fail, at protests of all kinds and try to bait people into endless meaningless debates, as some sort of misguided “tactic” is yet another sign of how prevalent this desensitization to violence really is. You know. In case you didnt already have enough evidence from the moment you realized even a rudimentary grasp of the concept of oppression.

As a society, we have a collective responsibility to keep our social conscience accurately informed by our histories. When we fail to maintain this responsibility, we can be terrorized by the governments that are in place to serve us into being complicit with anything, even though we know that the majority is not held by those in power over us. Those in power know this, maintain society’s collective ignorance of this fact (e.g., mass media corporations in Canada are legally obligated to not express dissent against the Canadian government), and then exploit that collective ignorance to keep us distracted while our remaining liberties are rapidly being chipped away. As is stated in this film (demanding a militant resistance movement in defence of the rights of indigenous peoples—and by extension, everyone else on the continent—to a future for their children), at every phase of the Nazi Holocaust, it was in the Jews’ rational self-interest to comply, even as they were being marched to their deaths into the gas chambers. Meaningful dissent and active resistance are our most important day-to-day decisions.

Numb Nuts© and philosophy dudebros alike seem to have “forgotten” that too. If we want to raise consciousness about what’s recently happened in Boston, and incite people to take meaningful action against an increasingly tyrannical government under which corporations have greater liberty than the nation’s own citizens and corpses have more rights than pregnant women, comparing Boston to the Nazi Holocaust isn’t going to do it. And telling people to just stop feeling that testicle-kicking because it’s somehow “clouding their judgement” isn’t going to work either.

Learn about and always remember where you come from. Acknowledge daily all that it has cost for you to get here. Then do something about it when you recognize that history is beginning to repeat itself. Educate people. Protest. Lobby if you even think it’s possible to have a voice under a government that allowed hundreds of corporations to gain legal personhood under a law that was written to protect Black people from the abuses of slavery. Just don’t fucking sit down and give up trying to fight it. And don’t dare try to convince other people to be just as complacent, or before you know it, those in power over you will find your threshold (loose though it may be) and violate that too.

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Continue reading »]]> Our beleaguered and religion-soaked cousins south of the border may, from time to time, look northward with envy at Canada’s largely non-religious civil society. Our politics are not replete with the same invocations to the intercession of the supernatural that plague the American landscape; indeed, it is considered somewhat gauche in most circles to make large public shows of one’s private belief. Canada’s approach to religion is largely a ‘live and let live’ one, with the exception of certain rural areas where religious affiliation is held in the same grip as one’s self-identity.

As I’ve discussed at various points in the past, this laissez faire approach to religion has not stopped the Republican North government of Stephen Harper from deciding that Canada’s international role should be to protect religious freedom, despite the repeated warnings of those American officials who have tried the same and realized what a mine-field it becomes. An entirely unnecessary ministry has been created in order to oversee Stephen Harper’s desperate attempt to look after the evangelical base that he needs to be re-elected, but whose actual priorities (destroying women’s health care, legislating Biblical morality) he cannot espouse for fear of triggering a centrist backlash.

Yesterday, while discussing this mission, MP Scott Reid had this to say:

If our goal is to assign guilt, and this is point number three, then it is also true that advocates of all major religions are, or in the past have been, guilty of repressing others.

Atheists have been and continue to be among the world’s worst oppressors of religious minorities. I draw the attention of the House to North Korea, an atheist regime, and the People’s Republic of China and its oppression of Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Muslims in the Uyghur region and Falun Gong practitioners to make the point. That is probably the world’s largest source of human rights abuse right there: atheism. We might want to look at Stalin’s Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and so on.

The reverse is also true, and this is very important. Members of each faith have done much to assist others to carry on their own faith. If we want to see how true that is, we should go to the Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles in Jerusalem to take a look at the people who are commemorated there. We will see members of all religions, including atheists, many Christians, some Muslims and some people who are members of none of those religions.

Now, some context is crucial before losing our shit (as I did yesterday, before the text was available). This statement comes in the middle of a statement speaking out against the idea of blasphemy laws. His statement, which I encourage you to read in context, is more or less exactly what you would expect to hear from a secularist, the above paragraph notwithstanding. Indeed, when I first heard about this statement on Twitter, I was shocked to note who the speaker was, because Scott Reid is a Unitarian. There is very little to object to in the rest of his statement, and I would encourage you to look at the whole thing in its entirety.

That being said, the abstracted piece is troubling for a number of reasons. First, it is ridiculously hyperbolic and inaccurate to brand atheism as “the world’s largest source of human rights abuse”. Considering that the majority of religious persecution occurs in countries with a strong religious majority who has the ability to enforce its beliefs through the use of state power, and that the most atheistic countries in the world (China notwithstanding, for reasons I will elucidate below) are also the most peaceful, Mr. Reid has decided to abandon anything like facts or reason in his rush to score a bizarre point against atheists.

As I have laid out before, even the examples that he invokes of China, North Korea, Cambodia and Stalinist Russia are piss-poor evidence to support the claim that atheism qua atheism is responsible for human rights abuses. I will absolutely agree that a state mandated belief, or a state mandated non-belief, are dangerous and harmful. I doubt even most atheists would support the idea of state-enforced atheism.

The problem with Reid’s statement, aside from its inaccuracy, is that atheism and religion are not opposite sides of the same coin. Whereas religious belief is often (but not always) accompanied by prescriptions to convert unbelievers or long passages explaining the unworthiness of those who believe differently (and near-pornographic detail of the ways in which they will be punished), atheism has no such claim. There is nothing that logically follows from ‘there are no gods’ that leads to ‘and those who believe should be converted or punished’. If Mr. Reid wishes to lay particular blame, he has undermined the credibility of his own argument by holding atheism out for particular opprobium, and then trying to say “oh and religions are sometimes like this too”.

The timing of this statement is particularly interesting, given that Mr. Reid represents a west Ottawa riding, and Ottawa’s atheist/skeptic community is about to rally specifically in favour of religious freedom:

An international coalition of atheist and humanist organizations, led by the Centre for Inquiry and our partners the International Humanist and Ethical Union and American Atheists, will protest the arrest and persecution of atheist bloggers and other dissenters in Bangladesh with demonstrations in New York, Washington, London, Ottawa, and other cities around the world on Thursday, April 25.

Bangladesh has recently been at the centre of a human rights crisis as authorities have detained several prominent bloggers for “hurting religious sentiments,” followed by the arrest of a newspaper editor who printed quotations from the targeted bloggers, and two more young people for making “derogatory remarks” about Islam on Facebook. Tens of thousands of people have rallied in the country’s capital to demand more arrests, tougher blasphemy laws, and have threatened violence if their demands are not met by April 25.

These global demonstrations will be unprecedented for the freethought movement, as secularists around the world express their solidarity with those jailed for speaking their minds about religion. Protesters will draw the world’s attention to the plight of those persecuted for exercising their rights to freedom of belief and expression, and attempt to spur the international community to take action and compel the government of Bangladesh to change course.

It would be a powerful statement of his alleged commitment to religious pluralism and tolerance if Mr. Reid were to attend the event, or speak out in support of its aims. His statement certainly demands an explanation to his atheist constituents, or at least a retraction and apology.

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Continue reading »]]> One of my favourite standup comedians is a guy called Hari Kondabolu. He talks about race from a non black/white standpoint, and does so in a way that is consistently hilarious. Yesterday, he Tweeted this:

“I’m a brown dude in New York City & I’m nervous to walk around alone today. This is how racism works.”

I thought this was a particularly sad commentary on reality for many Asian Americans, forced to pay the price for the ignorance of the violent reactionaries among their countrymen. Hari, born in New York, has Indian ancestry, which would (in an even slightly less-insane world) preclude him from being suspected for a crime – a crime whose author we don’t know. However, because those who would reflexively blame “Muslims” for pretty much everything aren’t going to spend a whole lot of time studying the history of India, or devote too many brain cells to the parsing of the likelihood of a random person with brown skin being actually connected to anything unsavoury, Hari’s caution is warranted.

Especially in the wake of how even people who are supposed to be responsible adults are behaving:

With security anxieties heightened following the deadly bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon Monday, two flights at Logan International Airport were disrupted Tuesday morning, one due to concerns about two passengers onboard and another due to a suspicious bag.

A United Airlines flight that was about to take off for Chicago was brought back to the gate after passengers expressed concern over two people speaking a foreign language, according to aviation authorities. Passengers and bags were taken off the plane and rescreened, and two people were rebooked on a later flight. The aircraft was then “swept and cleared for takeoff,” according to United Airlines spokeswoman Christen David.

Breathe deep and say it with me, folks: English is a foreign language in America.

Other outlets are reporting that the passengers specifically feared that the two men, who weren’t even sitting next to each other, were speaking Arabic. Unless they were linguists or Arab speakers themselves, my cup of confidence in their ability to correctly distinguish Arabic from Urdu, Farsi, Tagalog, Bengali, or Sḵwx̱wú7mes for that matter, is far from overflowing. And even if it was Arabic, the correct response was for the flight crew to say “this is America, and speaking a language isn’t a crime”. Instead, they subjected the two passengers to the humiliation and stigma of having the entire flight re-screened (re-screened! For speaking!). Let’s hope they didn’t have to catch a connecting flight somewhere.

Hari’s tweet put me in mind of this film I saw a while back:

It depicts a (fictionalized?) story of a young man of Afghan descent whose car is vandalized by anonymous racist bullies who spraypaint ‘Go Home Arab’ on it (omitting, I suppose, the fact that Afghans aren’t Arabs). He and his friend joke about the myriad ways they could turn it into an interesting film project, but interspersed between their humorous reactions are shots of the real pain associated with being attacked for a crime based on nothing more than the land of your ancestor’s birth. That pain is real, and even if my own experiences with it are (thankfully) few, it is one that I can understand viscerally.

Finally, Glenn Greenwald says everything I said this morning, but more, and better:

One continually encountered yesterday expressions of dread and fear from Arabs and Muslims around the world that the attacker would be either or both. That’s because they know that all members of their religious or ethnic group will be blamed, or worse, if that turns out to be the case. That’s true even though leading Muslim-American groups such as CAIR harshly condemned the attack (as they always do) and urged support for the victims, including blood donations. One tweeter, referencing the earthquake that hit Iran this morning, satirized this collective mindset by writing: “Please don’t be a Muslim plate tectonic activity.”

As understandable as it is, that’s just sad to witness. No other group reacts with that level of fear to these kinds of incidents, because no other group has similar cause to fear that they will all be hated or targeted for the acts of isolated, unrepresentative individuals. A similar dynamic has long prevailed in the domestic crime context: when the perpetrators of notorious crimes turned out to be African-American, the entire community usually paid a collective price. But the unique and well-grounded dread that hundreds of millions of law-abiding, peaceful Muslims and Arabs around the world have about the prospect that this attack in Boston was perpetrated by a Muslim highlights the climate of fear that has been created for and imposed on them over the last decade.

This is a good point to keep in mind as we have our own internal conversations about Islamophobia within the atheist community. Although it is often derisively framed as such (by both critics and the criticized) as being about “the feelings of Muslims”, Islamophobia has real, and sometimes violent, consequences for people – many of whom are not even Muslim. People invoking the bromides of “you don’t have the right to not be offended” seem to omit these consequences from their self-defence, or at least pay them mere lip service.

Our collective failure to come to terms with our contemporary racism, built as it is on the strong foundation of our racist history, means that we will be collectively incapable of reacting appropriately to situations like this. Sadly, the brunt of our failure will be borne by those who, paradoxically, know the most about the issue by dint of the fact that they’re being forcibly educated by the ignorance of those around them.

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Continue reading »]]> As you’ve no doubt heard from countless media sources, two devices exploded yesterday at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing two and wounding dozens. No group or individual has claimed responsibility for what appears to be an attack. I am trying to cage my language as much as possible here, for reasons I will make obvious over the course of this post.

Boston is my favourite city in the United States. It is also home to my closest friend, who was thankfully nowhere near the site when the explosions happened (although he had biked the route earlier in the day). Obviously there are no words sufficient to the task of expressing the shock and grief that Bostonians and Americans are feeling today, so I won’t waste much time in trying.

I did get a bit of a taste of it yesterday though, when I wasn’t sure if my friend was okay – standing at a marathon finish line sounds like something he’d be into, and when he didn’t answer his phone a part of my brain decided, despite having zero evidence, that he had been killed. The next half hour was black hell for me, as the thought refused to be shouted down by the voices of reason detailing the 90,000 other places he was more likely to be than at the epicentre of a bomb blast. He was fine. Working in his lab (a logical place for him to be on a Monday), with no phone reception.

That fear, that grief, that terror that was rampaging through my brain and playing fun percussive tricks with my autonomic nervous system, is not something I would wish on anyone – not even whoever is responsible for engendering it in me.

It is in that emotional turmoil that the true success of terrorism (if that is indeed what it is) lies: human beings rush to discard reason in circumstances like that. We lose our illusion of safety, our view of a fundamentally fair and just world (particularly in a place like the USA) is instantly shattered, and the axiomatic, reflexive habits that create civil society are temporarily suspended as we rush headlong into the terror from which these kinds of acts get their name.

And while this fear is natural, it also makes us very, very dangerous:

[Update, 8:36 p.m. ET] Investigators have warned law enforcement officers to be on the lookout for a “darker-skinned or black male” with a possible foreign accent in connection with Monday’s bombings at the Boston Marathon, according to a law enforcement advisory obtained by CNN.

The man was seen with a black backpack and sweatshirt and was trying to get into a restricted area about five minutes before the first explosion, the lookout notice states.

I am planning a trip to Boston next month. I am a darker-skinned or black male, and someone might take my accent for foreign (which it undoubtedly is). At the same time, I sincerely doubt that this description, although it matches me perfectly, is intended to describe me. It’s meant to describe people who are foreign foreign. You know, those guys. The guys who bomb people (please disregard the fact that the last handful of acts of mass murder have been committed by white American-born men).

I can’t imagine a less useful descriptor, or one that could be more perfectly suited to random acts of racial profiling against any brown-skinned man who has the misfortune of being caught after hours on the streets of Boston – a city that is more than 40% black or Latin@. A city that, I don’t know if you heard, hosts a marathon that brings runners from all over the world. Male runners. With dark skin. And foreign-sounding accents.

I hope they had the good sense to stay indoors last night.

The New York Post, a rank tabloid with a respectable-sounding name and a long history of race-baiting and factual inaccuracy, began running a story about a “Saudi National” who was a suspect in the bombing being monitored by police in a nearby hospital. Of course, because it’s the New York Post, it was wrong and specifically denied by police. But it doesn’t matter – the target audience of the New York Post is not people who care about things like factual accuracy or corroboration. The target audience of the New York Post is the people who would be forming the drunken street vigilantes that roam the streets of South Boston looking for the unnamed “possibly foreign” person to administer the same kind of justice that Emmett Till found in 1955.

This is the target audience of the New York Post.

The New York Post is speaking directly to the part of our brain that is so offended by these kinds of bombings – the part of us that takes over when the fear and grief kick in and vacate our rational faculties. The part of us that looks for some kind of justification, regardless of facts. The part that swims with rage and seeks someone, someone possibly foreign, to punish for their pain. And in a country that has barely begun to grapple with its own history of racial othering, the spectre of the lynch mob is never too far below the surface.

The last time I was in Boston I visited the grave of Crispus Atticus – a black freeman and one of the first people (possibly the first) to die in the American Revolutionary war. Since literally the moment of its birth, people of all colours have bled for America. And yet, when America bleeds, it is the people of colour who are the suspects; who must justify their right to live in a country that has never regarded them as equals.

Far be it from me to suggest that law enforcement was wrong about the description of the suspect – if that person is indeed a suspect or just a “person of interest”. Only time will tell what colour of person was responsible for what happened, or what their motivations were. But until we have facts, as hard as it is, we cannot give in to those parts of our fear-throttled mind that, in moments of sober clarity and reflection, we would likely describe as being “possibly foreign”.

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UPDATE: I am unforgivably remiss in not mentioning that the overwhelming response from Bostonians has been to offer up their homes to people left stranded, to react with compassion and all of the things that we wish people would like to associate with humankind. There were reports of marathoners crossing the finish line and then immediately going to donate blood. The Red Cross tweeted that their shelves were fully stocked within 3 hours of the incident. The outpouring of sympathy and aid was instantaneous. There is abundant triumph of human spirit to be found within the shadows of this tragedy. I deeply regret not putting this into the body of the piece.

UPDATE 2: The Saudi National from the New York Post’s story is considered a witness, not a suspect. Fox News still went after his roommate.

Continue reading »]]> Haven’t done one of these in a while. I have a gig with the band tonight and a solo gig tomorrow at the King’s Head Pub, the place where I got my start in Vancouver. Should be interesting. I also bought a new effects pedal that I am slowly learning to use (so many options, so little knowledge).

I will try to get some electric stuff recorded soon, but until then, here’s a new acoustic cover I’ve been working on:

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Continue reading »]]> I mentioned this story briefly in passing on Tuesday, but an atrocity has occurred in Nova Scotia (trigger warning for suicide):

Rehtaeh Parsons had a goofy sense of humour and loved playing with her little sisters. She wore glasses, had long, dark hair and was a straight-A student whose favourite subject was science. On Sunday night, the 17-year-old’s family took her off life-support. Three days earlier, on Thursday night, she hanged herself in the bathroom.

Suicide of a young person is always tragic (of course I would be remiss if I failed to point out that suicide rates are highest among Canada’s Aboriginal youth, and highest in the world among Inuit youth), but in this case the details are particularly gruesome (trigger warning for pretty much everything):

It was 17 months before that when “the person Rehtaeh once was all changed,” her mother wrote Monday on a Facebook memorial page. “She went with a friend to another’s home. In that home, she was raped by four young boys,” wrote Leah Parsons. “One of those boys took a photo of her being raped and decided it would be fun to distribute the photo to everyone in Rehtaeh’s school and community, where it quickly went viral.”

(snip)

After Rehtaeh left her school, other kids were relentless. “People texted her all the time, saying ‘Will you have sex with me?’” she remembered. “Girls texting, saying ‘You’re such a slut.’” But then there is the question of how the adults handled the alleged sexual assault that Rehtaeh described to her mother. The RCMP investigation took a year, said Parsons.

(snip)

Parsons said she was unhappy with what she saw of the investigation. “They didn’t even interview the boys until much, much later. To me, I’d think you’d get the boys right away, separate them.” When it came to the photo or photos taken that night, “nothing was done about that because they couldn’t prove who had pressed the photo button on the phone,” she said. She was told that the distribution of the photos is “not really a criminal issue, it’s more of a community issue,” she said.

The suicide is a tragedy. The rape is an absolutely revolting crime. But the community response and the apparent lack of a thorough investigation by the RCMP defies description. As is the case in Steubenville, the complicity for Rehtaeh’s death reaches far and wide, and an in-depth inquiry is needed to understand the full scope of what happened, so that steps can be taken to protect other children from suffering as Rehtaeh did before she died.

A few people have pressed social media and hacktivism into the fight:

A group reported to be the infamous hackers Anonymous says it will avenge the death of Rehtaeh Parsons, despite a plea from police urging people not to take justice into their own hands. The 17-year-old died Sunday she was taken off life-support, three days following her attempt to take her own life. Her mother, Leah Parsons, alleges Rehtaeh was raped by four boys who took photos of the incident, which she says sparked bullying and harassment.

No charges have been laid. The unidentified group said it has identified four boys connected to the case. “What we have learned is certainly appalling, but it wasn’t the act of rape that shocked us. It was the behavior of the adults in Rehtaeh’s life that we found most disturbing,” wrote the group in a release sent out Thursday morning.

(snip)

Anonymous is calling for people to hold a peaceful demonstration outside police headquarters to demand justice this weekend.

The first thing I’ve got to point out is how depressing it is that the national broadcaster cannot figure out how to report on Anonymous. They are not a group of “infamous hackers” – they’re anyone with an internet connection who are interested in this case. There could be 2 of them or 200,000, depending on the particular issue. It’s not exactly complicated.

The second thing to say is that I have serious misgivings about unaccountable vigilante groups getting involved in legal matters. I am therefore extremely relieved that Anonymous has chosen to specifically advocate for public protest, and is implicating the whole community in the crime rather than just the individual rapists. This is a level of maturity and forebearance that I am not accustomed to seeing from netizens, so I am encouraged by this.

The third thing to point out is that there is a Change.org petition trying to build public pressure for a thorough investigation:

After Rehtaeh’s rape, the RCMP investigated for a year but said there was not enough evidence to lay charges.

How is this possible?Everyone knows what happened. Everyone knows about the photos. Everyone knows she was 15 when those photos were taken. Everyone saw her being bullied and shamed at school. How can police say they didn’t have the evidence they needed to pursue charges? Do we not have laws that cover this kind of abuse, from photo-sharing to cyberbullying?

Nova Scotia’s Justice Minister Ross Landry must call an independent inquiry into this situation. The Minister must find out if the police ran this investigation properly and determine if there is important evidence that was not taken into account when they decided to close this case.

Please sign it if you feel so moved (I have).

The fourth thing that I wish to reiterate is that, while it takes nothing away from the tragedy of Rehtaeh’s death, these tragedies happen with far more alarming frequencies in Aboriginal communities, but they do not see an equivalent outpouring of consternation and sympathy. I hope that we do not lose the will to push for positive social change to investigate these cases and to protect all our children.

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Continue reading »]]> It has become a sort of pop-psychology truism that people who engage in prejudicial behaviour are doing so from a place of insecurity. It makes intuitive sense that if you don’t feel good about yourself, you can bring yourself up by tearing others down. Indeed, there is some evidence that threats to self-concept are likely to result in a preference bias toward the majority group (even among minority group members).

In a study by Ashton-James and Tracy, the authors propose a new hypothesis. They refer to the psychological literature that suggests that pride has two basic forms: hubristic and authentic. Hubristic pride refers to the kind of pride that is directed at one’s innate self-worth and deservedness – a kind of self-congratulatory, self-centred pride that is associated with narcissism and defensive self-esteem. Authentic pride, on the other hand, refers to pride taken in one’s accomplishments based on hard work rather than, for lack of a better term, special snowflakeness – it is associated with secure self-esteem.

The authors posit that hubristic pride will lead to increased prejudicial attitudes and behaviours, whereas authentic pride will lead to more compassionate attitudes and behaviours. They arrive at this hypothesis based on literature that suggests a relationship between self-esteem insecurity and prejudice. They go on to suggest that empathic concern is the mechanism by which this relationship manifests itself, since people who are more secure in their self-esteem are more likely to be able to be outwardly focussed and respond to the needs of others.

In order to test this hypothesis, the authors conducted three experiments, as well as a pilot study.

The Pilot Study

The first question to answer is whether or not there is an association between prejudicial attitudes and hubristic vs. authentic pride. To test this, the authors had 2,200 undergraduate students fill out the Modern Racism Scale, and the trait version of the Authentic and Hubristic Pride Scale (AHPS). Correlation statistics were calculated, and hte authors found a statistically significant low-moderate association between hubristic pride and racist attitudes toward black people.

Of course we know that correlation and causation are related but not synonymous. It’s possible (indeed, plausible) that people who are predisposed to racist beliefs feel more proud of their own race as a result. An experimental observation was needed.

Experiment 1

In the first experiment, 138 white students completed a task designed to moderate their levels of either hubristic or authentic pride. A ‘control’ group completed a task that did not moderate their levels. The level of modification was evaluated using the AHPS. Participants were then asked to judge the proportion of either the white or Asian population of Canada that was adequately described according to 4 traits (2 positive, 2 negative). Prejudice was defined as the difference between the means of the positive traits – people were not willing, in either group, to assign negative traits differentially between groups.

The results of the experiment suggest that, as hubristic pride is increased, so too is the likelihood to have preferential prejudices toward one’s own racial group (or against another group). Interestingly, while the control group reported roughly equivalent evaluations of both groups, people expressing higher levels of authentic pride responded more favourably to members of an outgroup, suggesting that authentic pride makes you more outwardly prosocial.

Experiment 2

In the second experiment, 83 participants were again conditioned to exhibit either hubristic or authentic pride, and were then asked to assign a financial penalty to someone charged with committing a crime. The crime was identical except for the gender of the alleged criminal, making the crime either heterosexual or homosexual (the crime was sex in the men’s bathroom).

Again, we can see the difference between hubristically and authetically proud people – hubristic pride motivated a greater penalty to be waged against the gay defendant, while authentic pride lowered the penalty. The penalty was equal for both the straight defendants. What is interesting here is that the authors did not seem to measure the sexuality of the participants, or their levels of anti-gay antipathy. While randomization is done for the purpose of ensuring that these factors will be equal between the two groups, with a sample size this small, it may be a mistake to assume successful randomization for all relevant factors.

Experiment 3

The third experiment attempted to demonstrate a plausible psychological mechanism for this effect. The authors suspected that authentic pride is associated with empathic concern for others. As mentioned above, as people’s self-esteem becomes more stable, they are able to become less self-centred, and become more aware of the needs of others.

In order to test this, the authors had 61 white students fill out a scale that measures empathic concern, as well as the same pride manipulating exercise from the previous experiments. When the results were analyzed, they found that the effect of pride on prejudice was moderated by empathic concern (i.e., the effect disappeared when you ‘control for’ the effect of empathic concern).

What these findings suggest is that it is not pride per se that affects the evaluation of in-groups vs. out-groups, but that authentic pride motivates someone to be more concerned for others, which then leads them to have more favourable views of out-groups than their own group.

Discussion

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the weaknesses in this study, some of which I have presented as caveats below. First off, these are single experiments, with relative small numbers, performed on undergraduate students in the USA and Canada – we have to be conservative in the extent to which we can draw global conclusions.

Second, I am not at all confident about the use of Asian people as a stigmatized group in this context – not that Asian people are not stigmatized, but the reality is far more complicated (particularly in the context of a Canadian university that I assume to be UBC) than a simple ‘positive/negative’ axis. The authors do not seem to have measured whether or not there is a detectable stigma against Asian people in the study population, they simple assert its existence. This seems to be to be a critical flaw in their design.

Third, I am not confident about their description of the crime in the second experiment. They cannot, for example, determine that their target is stigmatized because he is gay, since they are manipulating sex, not sexuality, in the task. They simply assume that the study participants are evaluating a gay man, and do not check this assumption. Again, this seems like a potentially serious flaw.

Fourth, I am surprised that the authentic pride group expressed differential levels of outgroup preference while the control group did not (see Figure 1). I do not know why authentic pride would make someone prefer an out-group, rather than advocate for equality. It may be the case that the authentic pride group is a reflection of a positive bias toward Asian people that is counteracted by an equally negative bias in the control group (and overpowered in the hubristic group), but because no attempt was made to measure stigma about Asian people, it is not possible to know

Despite these flaws, this paper is attractive for a number of reasons. First, the description of authentic vs. hubristic pride made me laugh as I considered some of the people I run into in online debates about racism (or, to be honest, a lot of topics). Any supremacist group that believes it is intrinstically superior to another may be doing so out of psychological insecurity. It is not an accident, therefore, that these groups exhibit little compassion, or in some cases antipathy, toward outgroups.

Second, it prescribes a specific remedy for getting people to demonstrate externally pro-social attitudes: shore up their levels of authentic pride. Focus praise on what a group has accomplished, rather than its moral or intellectual superiority. By boosting authentic pride (hopefully at the expense of hubristic pride), we can potentially increase empathic concern. Any group that is looking to make its mission one that is focussed on serving others, and which wishes to combat prejudice, should pay attention to these findings.

I would like to see how hubristic pride correlates with cognitive burden, given what we already know about the association between cognitive ability and prejudice. Are people under greater cognitive strain more likely to adopt hubristic pride as a method of low-effort mental processing? Does hubristic pride fall along the same lines as system justification? Is there an association between cognitive burden and empathy – i.e., do you have to be mentally able to put yourself in the shoes of others?

Whatever the answers to these question, it may be the case that we can use these findings within the secular community. We know, for example, that misogynistic prejudice (and, to a somewhat lesser extent, racist prejudice) is a serious concern. I know that, to my admittedly biased eye, I recognized a lot of atheists in the description of behaviours typical of hubristic pride (arrogance, superiority, narcissism, defensive self-esteem), particularly among those who are strong opponents of making changes to combat inequality (although I am sure they’d make the same accusation about me). The question becomes whether or not we can use the knowledge of the difference between authentic and hubristic pride to promote more positive messaging within the community (e.g., “we are atheists because we grappled with difficult questions and developed good techniques” rather than “we are atheists because we’re smart and religious people are stupid”), and whether that would have a positive effect on our levels of prosocial interaction in other areas.

What this finding also seems to suggest is that undermining the self-esteem of others is a counterproductive method of increasing their levels of empathy. Far be it from me to suggest that anyone has an obligation to safeguard the self-esteem of bigots, but if one is specifically engaged in trying to increase empathy, attacking the self-esteem of your opponents would seem to produce the opposite effect.

In any case, I enjoyed this study a lot, and it has given me quite a bit to think about.

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