The “First In the Family” Humanist Scholarship

Here’s a cool thing:

Black Skeptics Los Angeles is pleased to announce its first annual “First in the Family Humanist Scholarship.” Two $500 scholarships will be awarded to college-bound Los Angeles Unified School District students in South Los Angeles. Preference will be given to students who are in foster care, homeless, undocumented and/or LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning). Students must have a record of service and participation in school and/or community-based organizations. Scholarships will be awarded in June 2013.

As a big proponent of education as a means of not only breaking the cycle of poverty, but as a way of better understanding the world around us, I am excited that this idea is moving forward. I am a little familiar with what Sikivu Hutchinson has been doing in LA, and I think this is a great project. I am happy to lend it my support.

If you would also like to contribute, there is a donation widget here. Sikivu has told me that even though they have reached their initial goal, they will be able to expand to four scholarships, so if you are able, please donate to this worthy cause. For those of you who are not in a position to donate, fear not – the money I am donating is coming from the money generated by your hits to this blog, so you’re still contributing in your own way.

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Black History Month: Re Eskimos (1939)

This year for Black History Month I will be examining Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950 by Constance Backhouse. Please read the preamble post if you haven’t already.

The first case that Backhouse examines is a Supreme Court decision regarding whether or not to classify “Eskimos” (now properly known as Inuit) as Indians under the Indian Act.

The case concerned a conflict between the province of Quebec and the government of Canada, regarding the status of Inuit people living in northern Quebec. The disruption of their way of life (subsistence hunting and fur trading having been made all but impossible by the encroachment of European settlers and the disruption of the migratory patterns of carbiou) had created a dire situation for the Inuit, and there was some dispute over who had to foot the bill: the federal government or the province. The relationship between the British Crown (i.e., the Canadian government as a representative of the British Crown) and aboriginal people was codified by a legislative act, meaning that the Crown had certain fiduciary duties toward ‘Indians’, but not to non-‘Indians’. [Read more…]

Crommunist marks black history month 2013

Well folks, it’s February once again, which means that it’s time for my annual observance of Black History Month. For those of you who are new to the blog, every year I produce a series of posts about black history as I work my way through a particular theme. In the blog’s first year, I released a number of the posts that underpin its central dogma when it comes to race:

In the second year, I took a broad-brush approach to Canada’s black history, highlighting stories from Canada’s different geographic regions:

Last year, I took a more focussed approach and walked through a text on black Canadians, with both historical and contemporary flavours, giving a sort of ‘guided tour’ of a book by sociologist Joseph Mensah:

“Why isn’t there a white history month?”

One of the staples of black history month is legions of white people generating faux outrage in an ever-expanding variety of media wondering why there isn’t a “white history month”. There’s a black history month, the argument goes. Isn’t the goal for everyone to be equal? Why can’t we celebrate white history? Is it because you’re racist? I think it is!

The rejoinder that I and many others usually give (at this point it’s nearly perfunctory) is that the very existence of black history was denied for generations. Either by omission or by naked assertion, the possibility that blacks had contributed not only to American history but indeed to world history was precluded from contemplation, let alone taken seriously as scholarly pursuits. It is only very recently that this area has been considered worthy of academic exploration. As a result, we have a hole in our cultural understanding, requiring a special effort to acknowledge the role that a previously-excluded group of people played in our heritage.

The same cannot be said for white people, which is why there isn’t a “White History Month”. [Read more…]

Good news for UBC professors

I got notification about this story a couple of days ago:

All University of British Columbia all full-time, female-identified tenure and tenure-track professors are getting a raise to counteract gendered pay inequity.

The two per cent salary increase, retroactive to July 1, 2010, is part of a three-year process between the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the UBC Faculty Association (UBCFA) to solve pay inequity among full-time tenure-track faculty. The study did not look at pay inequity among UBC academic or administrative support staff.

Inspired by pay equity reports in 2007 and 2009 from UBC’s Equity Office, the University and UBCFA created two separate working groups: the DATA Working Group for collecting data on pay equity and the SMART Working Group to devise solutions.

According to a joint message from UBCFA and UBC’s two provosts sent to faculty today, the DATA Working Group’s “analyses indicated that after accounting for the factors of under representation of females at the full professor level, experience, and differences in the gender balance across departments, a pay differential of 2% remained, that could only be explained by gender. This unexplained female pay disadvantage is considered a systemic discrimination issue.”

This is a ‘win’ story for not only female-identified faculty at UBC, but for the university at large. They identified an issue (eventually), took it seriously enough to collect and analyze the data, and then committed to make restitution for an arbitrarily unfair system. What is most interesting is that, while there was a strong financial and psychological incentive for them to attempt to explain away this difference as “assertiveness” or “different time commitments” or any of the other ‘just-so stories’ that are used to justify administrative inaction, they were sensible and aware enough to treat it as an issue that warranted a system-wide response.

I say that this is good news for the university because they will likely gain a great deal of (justified) goodwill for taking the issue of gender equality seriously. UBC is a large, wealthy, and old institution. Groups like that don’t often make changes like this, even in the face of data like this. It will be interesting to see if Canada’s other venerable institutions follow suit (or, indeed, if UBC is actually the last to do this – it’s certainly possible).

So thumbs up for that!

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Colonialism is the corruption

Unfortunately, events have conspired to rob me of my blogging juice for today, but all is not lost. There is a great article by historian Tony Kaye that looks to debunk one of the central claims of the opposition to the #IdleNoMore movement, and I think instead of reading what I would say about it, you should read this:

Canada belongs to a significant group of countries whose modern nationality is a result of British expansion overseas. The colonial history of Canada and the West African country of Ghana, for example, have their beginnings with the British Crown. British agents used treaty making in each region as legal justifications to themselves and their competitors that specific native leaders would “Cede and Surrender” their traditional rights over land in exchange for the Protection of the English Monarch. In both colonies, the altruism of “protection” in the treaties hid the British plan to gain control over the region without the expense of projecting its full military force.

(snip)

Years after colonial rule in Ghana ended in 1957, generations of scholars, politicians and activists from throughout the world examined the accusations of wrongdoing among chiefs under British rule. Not a single voice concluded that chiefs were the only cause of the scandals. Nor did they advocate that increased accountability would have protected people from injustice. Instead, scholars contextualized abuses of power among chiefs within the more important discussion about the effect of colonial rule in Ghana.

The take-home message here is that what Canada is doing to its chiefs – focussing on ‘wrongdoing’ by chiefs (which is, more often than not, ludicrously hypocritical), is precisely the behaviour that has been modeled by other colonial states. Examination after the fact reveals that it is colonialism, not ‘corruption’, that best explains the issues facing colonized people.

Read the rest of the article. It’s really good.

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One of these things is eerily like the other

Because I was raised Catholic, I sometimes feel the call to do penance for my sins. If I have done something mildly naughty, I say a few ‘Hail Mary’s. If I’ve done something particularly bad, I might wear a hair-shirt for a couple of days. But if I have sinned so egregiously that nothing but the most severe punishment will do, I read the things people write about Ophelia Benson. The level of brain-exfoliating stupidity evinced by her committed claque of ‘enemies’ is usually painful enough to ensure that I will never transgress so profoundly again.

Today’s bit of mental self-flagellation comes courtesy of a podcast host by the name of Reap Paden: [Read more…]

Another stake in the heart of colour blindness

I hate “colour blindness” as a racial philosophy. Well-intentioned though it may be, it’s a profoundly unhelpful and unworkable proposed solution to a very serious intercultural issue. Is there any other problem on the planet that we think is best addressed by simply pretending as though it isn’t there*? For every other social issue I can think of, failing to at least appreciate the existence of reality is seen as a vice, not a virtue. And yet, when it comes to race, we have somehow managed to convince ourselves that the ostrich has the right idea.

Liberals and conservatives alike have expressed serious resistance to the idea that ignoring race doesn’t solve race. As I’ve explained before on this blog, a couple of times actually, colour blindness not only doesn’t bring us any closer to solving racial issues, it actually makes us less able to describe and address those issues. Far from being a solution, it makes us silent on the problem, meaning that the unacceptable status quo of racial inequalities is allowed to run its course unopposed.

So once again, it’s skeptics to the rescue, this time with a study examining a novel downside of the “colour blind” approach. Researchers at Tufts and MIT examined the effect of “colour blind” approaches to problem-solving in an experimental setting. [Read more…]

Who’s laughing?

A little while ago I got into a silly fight with someone who I used to (before this fight) think was a pretty decent person. Ze had posted a comic that poked fun at people who misrepresent themselves on social media. Because it was the internet, a lot of the panels made fun of fat people. I pointed out that while the overall premise of the joke was funny, it could have made the same point equally as effectively without mocking people for their body size/shape. After all, surely they got enough of that just being out in public?

The discussion quickly devolved (with the help of one of her friends) into accusations of me grandstanding for attention because I was a blogger – a charge that even if it were true would be completely orthogonal to whether or not I was right. One of the recurring themes in the conversation – indeed, in any conversation in which a person is asked to consider the harm their comments make – is that I should somehow forgive the comic because it’s “just a joke”, as though the fact that someone finds it funny somehow makes it not harmful. As though nobody has ever been hurt by being the butt of a cruel joke before.

The very premise itself seems silly, but it’s a depressingly common refrain. And it seems there is no level of depravity in which it will not be pressed into service: [Read more…]

On the wrong side of justice

This post is going to be a bit of a pedantic rant about a figure of speech, but I hope you’ll bear with me because I don’t think it’s a trivial issue. Progressive liberals often describe conservatives as being “on the wrong side of history” when it comes to things like gay rights, gender or race equality, and generally most progressive causes. History indeed shows us that the people who make arguments standing in opposition to social changes often find themselves left in the dust – defenders of Jim Crow segregations laws lost, as did those who opposed women getting the vote, as did those who said that gay people shouldn’t be allowed to serve in the military.

There is something missing from that “left in the dust” statement though, and that’s the word “eventually”. The people who opposed Jim Crow were highly relevant right up until Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act. People who opposed gay equality in Canada (at least insofar as marriage was concerned) were highly relevant up until 2004, when the Supreme Court ruled that marriage discrimination violated the Charter rights of gay Canadians – people who oppose gay people serving openly in the U.S. armed forces only became ‘the wrong side of history’ last year.

Indeed, we can also see this starry-eyed phrase crop up in our ongoing social justice struggles: [Read more…]