Cynicism giving way to optimism

In my earlier post today I mentioned in passing that I was cynically optimistic about some of the changes I’ve seen in how governments in Canada think of and behave toward First Nations communities. I think when I wrote that I fully intended to explain what I meant, but for whatever reason (read: laziness) I didn’t. I’ll take this opportunity to do just that.

I am all for governments, corporations and other large, powerful entities doing the right thing. I think it’s fantastic when an oil company pledges to clean up a spill, or when a politician crosses the partisan divide to vote for something that is ethically right, even if it isn’t expedient with her base. I’ve tried to be mostly fair with the Catholic Church when it does things that are in line with secular morality. However, in each and every one of those cases, I am immediately suspicious of the motive behind the action. Is the oil company trying to cover up the fact that it caused the spill? Is the politician trying to brand herself as ‘centrist’ or curry favour with a power interest group? Is the Catholic Church not raping children anymore, or just trying to get people to stop equating “Catholic priest” with “child rapist”?

In light of my cynicism (which I think is reasonable and justifiable), it can be hard to get too optimistic about things. To be sure, I am generally optimistic that life will get better over time – that has been the story of humankind throughout history. However, whether a specific story represents a genuine step forward for society or a clever act of obfuscation is a judgment call I often have a difficult time making.

For example, this:

After years of conflict, including a Supreme Court of Canada battle, the Taku River Tlingit First Nation of northwest British Columbia signed a land and resource management and shared decision-making agreement today with the provincial government — the first of its kind in B.C. Premier Christy Clark said the agreement creates 13 new protected areas and provides resource development opportunities and investment certainty in more than three million hectares in the Atlin Taku region. She added that is the size of all of Vancouver Island.

<snip>

“We are emerging from a dark period in our history with hope and promise,” said Taku River Tlingit First Nation spokesman John Ward. “It’s so great to come out of the darkness and silence we’ve experienced for so many years and be acknowledged.” Ward said the land use agreement gives aboriginals a say on how industry “can access and conduct themselves in our traditional territory.”

It is my cynicism that is preventing me from jumping up and down and doing cartwheels all around my apartment right now (well, that and the fact that I have never been able to do a cartwheel). This kind of thing is exactly how not only the political system is supposed to work, but the legal system. The courts are supposed to overrule the government when it acts in its own best interests rather than those of its people. First Nations people should control their own lands and not only have a stake in how they are managed, but to reap the benefits of resource exploitation. This deal is likely to mean infrastructure and industry jobs for people living in the region – if these positions are structured properly it could mean real long-term development and sustained economic strength in the region.

That’s the optimist in me talking. Considering the number of First Nations bands that have complained about corruption in their leadership, and considering the ease with which groups that have abundant resources but little education on how to manage them get exploited by multinational interests, my inner optimist is losing the arm-wrestling match to my inner cynic. Until we see a sea change in the way we think of First Nations issues, and how First Nations communities are supported/encouraged to grow, I don’t see this as resulting in anything more than more money in the hands of a few people while the general quality of life remains unchanged.

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Burnaby: We can be human beings

Every now and then, a story comes along that restores some of my faith in humanity:

The Burnaby school board approved a controversial anti-homophobia policy on Tuesday evening. Trustee Ron Burton said it is comparable to an anti-racism policy implemented several years ago. “It was quite prevalent in the schools — racist slurs were everywhere,” Burton said. “[The anti-racism policy] gave teachers the ability to correct that behaviour, to say, ‘That’s inappropriate’ and make it a teaching moment when it happens. We’re hoping the same thing will happen with homophobic slurs — and educate kids in general.”

He pointed to the 2001 killing of Aaron Webster, a gay man who was beaten to death by a group of former Burnaby students because of his sexual orientation. “Perhaps if we had this policy in place [then], they wouldn’t be in jail now and that man would be alive,” Burton said.

Anti-gay bullying is a serious problem, particularly because it happens at an age where kids are particularly susceptible to the taunts and disapproval of their peers. I’ve spoken about this before, but the argument bears repeating. Gay kids get particularly singled out not just by individual bullies, but by society at large. “Gay” is a slang term that means blanket condemnation of LGBT people, and it gets tossed around with seeming unthinking ease. Add to that the fact that anti-gay attitudes are passed off as “traditional family values” – as though families with gay people don’t have values of their own. Kids are made to feel ashamed of themselves for no good reason, and then bullied on top of that.

There is a common objection that usually accompanies stories like this: all bullying is bad; why should we give gay kids special treatment when straight kids are being bullied too? I sometimes wonder when I hear these objections if the speaker has put any thought into that statement, or if it’s simply a knee-jerk reaction fueled by anti-gay sentiment. Nobody is saying “straight kids aren’t important” or “we are not interested in stopping bullying in general unless you’re gay”. It’s recognizing that there is a unique problem in a subset of a population that requires particular attention.

To draw an analogy, the objection is about as reasonable as saying “why should we raise money to feed starving people? Some people have heart disease – everyone’s got problems! We should just focus on solving all bad things, rather than giving starving people special attention!” It’s a ridiculous position that assumes a sort of zero-sum game, where targeting a solution to one community takes something away from another. Anti-gay bullying is a subset of bullying in general, and because the consequences are more dire and immediate, and because that particular subset has been ignored for so long, we can devote some extra attention to it, which ultimately reduces general bullying.

Of course, the part that I like the most about this story is the following:

A group called the Parents’ Voice had gathered thousands of signatures for a petition against the policy, saying it violates parental and religious rights. The group accused the district of trying to camouflage a discriminatory policy by calling it an anti-bullying measure.

If your religion requires you to bully gay kids, then your religion is fucked up and you need to change it. I’m not sure where parents got the idea that they have the right to teach their kids to hate other people, and the rest of the world has to respect that. If your beliefs are stupid, then you’re going to find that the rest of the world is going to be against you (with a few caveats if you live in Alberta). Just as it isn’t a violation of “parental and religious rights” to tell kids that black people aren’t the result of an ancient curse and deserve the same respect as white people, it’s not a violation of those same imagined rights to tell them “some people are gay, and that’s not an abomination or a sin – it’s just the way some people are.”

But despite the objections from the lunatic asylum, the board did the right thing and moved their policy into the later part of the 20th century. Those who are demanding the right to propagate their small-minded bigotry against gay people through their children are losing a battle against the tide of history. While it’s not happening fast enough for my tastes, soon all that will be left of these “traditional family values” will be an unpleasant memory of howling hordes of ignorant, backward people, and we will look back and say “how could anyone actually believe that?”

If you’re frightened by that last sentence, you should be.

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Vancouver after the riots – it’s about love, peace, foundation and family

As some of you know, I live in Vancouver, British Columbia. Recently, after the Vancouver Canucks (local professional hockey team) lost in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals, there was a huge street riot. It was immediately clear that those instigating the riot were not simply disgruntled fans. People had brought backpacks full of chemical accelerant, masks, rocks and other tools designed to destroy property and injure police officers. There would have been a riot regardless of the outcome.

While the riots made international news, the city’s response to the disaster has had much less attention. Vancouver is a beautiful city that is predominantly inhabited by caring and tolerant people. The riots do not really reflect the average denizen of my fine city, but I think the response does:

Thousands of Vancouverites flocked to the downtown core the next day to volunteer for cleanup duty. The boarded up windows that had been smashed the night before were literally covered with written messages of condolence, apology, anger, frustration and hope from disappointed residents.

 

You can see these pictures and more in this gallery. I was also lucky enough to spot this fantastic busker who put into music what I think everyone in the crowd was feeling:

Especially the part about Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups!

Anyway, it’s easy to focus on the negative aspects of humanity, but for the sake of our mental health we should remember that people are also capable great acts of kindness and justice. Vancouver will heal, and become stronger for the process. Those who tried to destroy my city have failed.

It’s bigger than you and me

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What does winning look like?

It is easy (tantalizingly so) to rail against racism, pointing out only the negative aspects. After all, it doesn’t take a great deal of creativity or courage on my part to say ‘racism is bad’ and for readers to say ‘I agree’. I doubt I will ruffle any feathers making such proclamations, although I know there are definitely some of you that weren’t completely with me at first and have since come around to my way of thinking. This is encouraging, as it means that there is some collision of persuasion and open-mindedness happening on these pages. It takes only a few such interactions to make major change.

And it may… just may be that we are seeing some of that change happening before our eyes:

In 1994, Ellis Cose surveyed successful, middle-class African-Americans and uncovered an often unspoken rage. He described his findings in the book The Rage Of A Privileged Class. Now, 17 years later, Cose has discovered a major change among middle-class blacks: They have become one of the most optimistic groups in America. He reveals his findings in a new book, The End Of Anger.

This is encouraging news indeed, for a few reasons. First, it suggests that at least some progress has been achieved toward a harmonization of the middle class, despite racial differences. Second, it shows a decline in the narrative of ‘us vs. them’ that often seems to pervade the discussions of black/white racism. Third, it flies in the face of those who would claim that black people prefer to play victim rather than work to advance. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, it may be possible to learn what things have worked and what haven’t and to use those lessons to inform future social progress.

To the first point, it is important to be cautious. This study does not say that black people no longer feel like racism is a problem:

Cose tells NPR’s Neal Conan that the rise in optimism is not linked to perceived end of discrimination. “No one black who I talked to thinks we have arrived at a point where we are an equal opportunity nation,” Cose says.

What it does say is that the perception of opportunity is greater, and this has begun to pervade the general consciousness. Spurred perhaps by the existence of prominent models of colour in high-ranking positions (other than the sport or other entertainment industry), black kids have grown up with a substantially different understanding of the possibilities of achievement than their parents did. At the risk of reading way more into this than the evidence warrants, this exact effect is one of the goals of affirmative action policies: increase the number of high-profile professionals that are people of colour (PoCs) so as to provide role models for others. Whether or not that is the reason for this shift is debatable, but it certainly nods in that direction.

Second, this study seems to corroborate what we saw last week: namely, that the entrenched conflict between black and white seems to be diminishing (at least in the eyes of black people). Instead of general frustration at the barriers in place to advancement, young black professionals are reporting belief that with hard work, they can advance. Again, these are perceptions, not observed data, so we must be cautious when interpreting what this actually means. This culture of advancement works to benefit both sides: black professionals can begin to assert themselves and change the narrative about what it means to have dark skin, while white professionals will begin to see that having intelligent and hard-working black colleagues is not a zero-sum game, but rather a boon to their business and productivity.

Critics of anti-racism often charge them (us) with coddling PoCs, and promoting a culture of victimhood. Black people wouldn’t be where they are, these critics say, if the liberals didn’t spoon-feed them and convince them that all their problems were someone else’s (whitey’s) fault. Of course, as is the way with this brand of criticism, it comes without evidence. When the attitudes are measured, we see that as we work to improve society’s permeability for PoCs by legislating against some forms of discrimination, PoCs are ready not only to take advantage of the opportunity but to adjust their expectations. Black people (at least those in this study) are happy to take control when opportunities are presented and barriers are taken down.

This is good and useful information, and this phenomenon must be explored more thoroughly. Considering the increasing visibility of the Latin and Arab communities in the United States, South and East Asians in Canada, and the looming spectre of systemic race problems in Europe, it is vital to have an understanding of what works and what doesn’t. While different minority groups have their own unique issues, we can learn what narratives are conducive to progress and which ones simply allow the status quo of single-group supremacy to maintain indefinitely.

Many of these issues are generational, meaning that children born in this era will likely not see the same kinds of racism that, for example, I saw while I was growing up. They will have a profoundly different understanding of what race means, and they will have to grapple with brand new issues that we can’t even conceive of now. However, it is good to see that their parents will be bringing them up in a world that gives them a positive attitude about what they can achieve with hard work. Some of that may be illusory, some of it may be true only thanks to policies enacted in their parents’ lifetimes, and some may indeed have always been true.

So while we are far from a true version of a ‘post-racial’ utopia, we may be seeing some of the initial signs that point the way to a more productive and equitable conversation about race.

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Arming the rebels

The recent war/conflict/military police action in Libya has kind of overshadowed the fact that something really important is still happening in the middle east. Shit has seriously got out of control in Syria and Bahrain, and that’s disturbing enough. What is far more disturbing to me is what’s being discussed in Libya. Yes, the rebels are still fighting and NATO forces are becoming progressively more entrenched in what has become a full-blown civil war.

Many commentators in the United States (who you would think should know better than I do) are talking about providing weapons and training to the rebels. While they sorely need it, the USA doesn’t exactly have the greatest track record when it comes to arming groups of insurgents. For reasons that surpass understanding are completely understandable, those rebel groups tend to use those weapons and that training to kill people that the US wishes they wouldn’t. Sometimes they’re Americans.

But there may be other ways that the United States can arm the rebel groups – ways that are far less likely to get someone killed.

US Government invests in activist technology

The United States government is spending millions of dollars developing technology to help pro-democracy activists in the Middle East and China. Washington has begun to open-up about the projects which include a “panic button” that lets protesters wipe their mobile phones if they are arrested. State department official Michael Posner said that the US was investing money “like venture capitalists”. He also revealed that it was providing campaigners with technology training.

It’s hard to understand to those of us that wake up to technologies our grandparents couldn’t have possibly imagined, but there is a significant portion of the world that doesn’t have the kinds of access that we take for granted. That being said, cell phone technology has become pretty much ubiquitous, and with it has come new opportunities. As I’ve outlined as one of the central theses of this blog, the antidote to tyranny is free speech. By providing the ability for anti-government groups to communicate undetected, the United States hopes to keep any future governments from becoming tyrannical.

Who is this good for? As far as I can tell, only the people who live in the countries using the technology. There is no guarantee that this will work in the US’s favour, except insofar as democratic governments tend to be more motivated by trade and the opinions of the international community – both things that the United States can exert quite a bit of influence over. However, it is entirely possible that the technology will be used to overthrow pro-American tyrannical governments (like the one that just left got booted out of Egypt on its own terms after a huge popular revolt).

Sesame Street goes Pashtun

The United States is funding a Pakistani remake of the popular TV children’s show Sesame Street. In a new effort to win hearts and minds in Pakistan, USAID – the development arm of the US government – is donating $20m (£12m) to the country to create a local Urdu version of the show. The project aims to boost education in Pakistan, where many children have no access to regular schooling.

Just as free speech is a poison pill to tyranny, education is a poison pill to religion. The more educated the populace, the more likely they are to question the religious authority that controls them. Encouraging reading means encouraging critical thinking skills, which in turn encourages criticism. The irony is not lost on me that we have the religious establishment in Europe to thank for public education today. Once again, arming the rebels works for the rebels themselves (which would be us), but not so well for those that provide the arms. In the case of providing education to Pakistanis, the United States does indeed stand to benefit. The status quo there… isn’t exactly working out well for them these days.

There can be a benefit to arming those who are enemies of your enemies. However, despite what the cliche would have us believe, the enemy of my enemy may not remain my friend for long. It’s imperative that we take the long view when we provide powerful tools to those who share a common opponent, lest we someday find those same tools arrayed against us. By providing help in the form of non-lethal technology, we can ensure that at least we don’t have those tools fired at our heads. By providing help in the form of education, we can ensure that we find ourselves in a world filled with people who we can at least have a conversation with.

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Mining a silver lining

First off, I want to apologize for shirking my duties this past week. I squandered my weekend, when I should have been writing the posts for last week, doing other stuff. When Monday came around, I had decided to write a post-mortem on the election after the results were in. However, by the time I got home from working at the polls I was so tired and disgusted with the outcome that I couldn’t really marshal my thoughts enough to write anything that I could feel good about. This is the reason why I usually set up a buffer of posts, so as to avoid this exact type of thing.

Secondly, I find it troubling that the week that I decide not to post, my hit count explodes

Finally, this post is going to be a sort of amalgamation of some thoughts that have been kicking around my head for the past week since the election. I’ve titled this post ‘mining a silver lining’, because while it pretty much goes without saying that I am disappointed and fearful about what it means that the Republican North party has a legislative fiat (both in the Parliament and ostensibly in the Senate), I think there are some real good news stories to come out of the election. The political content of the archives of this blog should be sufficient to explain why a Republican North majority is a bad thing for Canada; I will instead focus on some good news speculation.

ALL THE PROGNOSTICATION MEANS ABSOLUTELY DICK

There will be a lot of political commentators (myself among them) who will make predictions about what will or won’t happen under a Republican North majority. The sheer variety of opinions and predictions ensures, mathematically, that most of them will be wrong. Political decisions are influenced by ideology and promises, but occur on a day-to-day basis and are affected by human events. Nobody can predict exactly what human beings will do, as this world is a chaotic place. Nobody would have expected U.S. foreign policy to make a dramatic series of shifts based on events in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Fewer still would have predicted that Japan’s economy would take a tumble after an earthquake and resultant nuclear accident.

My point here is that no matter who makes the predictions, policy will adapt to the the immediate circumstances around it. Changes in technology, in climate, in foreign politics, in any number of things will have a strong influence on how Stephen Harper’s policy decisions will be made. Trying to predict specific actions over a four-year period is a complete waste of time, and can be enjoyed only as an intellectual masturbatory exercise.

Now I will commence to fapping.

STEPHEN HARPER IS THE LEADER OF A DIVIDED PARTY

The Republic North party is made up of two core constituencies: social conservatives and fiscal conservatives. The perhaps unspoken (or certainly under-spoken) reality that accompanies such a grouping is that while they may claim to be related ideologies, the two are in fact orthogonal. There is nothing in the doctrine of social conservatism that lends itself to fiscal conservatism – in fact the two are often at cross purposes. Libertarians and Classical Liberals believe that the government has no business whatsoever legislating either social issues or economic issues – only in safeguarding individual liberties. The reason the Republican North party was able to pick up so much support is because they catered to the economic centre/right, which is also a part of the Liberal party’s core constituency.

The only way (as far as I can see) that the RNP was able to stitch these two groups together was to simultaneously forge a false equivalence between these two perpendicular political perspectives, and to publicly proclaim disinterest in social policy while quietly whispering assurances to their social base that those issues would come to the fore once a majority was achieved. Now that this is a political reality, Prime Minister Harper will have to ‘pay the piper’, so to speak, by advocating positions that are wildly unpopular among the Canadian majority. If he fails to do this, social conservatives who have long felt ignored by the federal government will abandon the RPN and revive the Reform party. Should he capitulate to their whims, he will alienate the Libertarian/Classical Liberal wing of his party.

This must be a deft balancing act that will take an extraordinary statesman and leader to accomplish. Stephen Harper is neither of these.

JACK LAYTON MAY EXERCISE A GREAT DEAL OF CONTROL

Part of the success of the RPN during their successive minority governments was Stephen Harper’s ability to keep the reins of his party tightly held. Information did occasionally leak, but for the most part the government spoke from one perspective only. Considering the number of wingnuts in the party, keeping that communication clamped down was an extraordinary achievement that served the party’s interests well. Jack Layton may be able to exercise the same kind of party discipline, albeit in a dramatically different way.

Nobody really predicted that the NDP would make the strides they did in this past election (owing largely to Quebec, but also partially due to the implosion of the Liberal party). Jack Layton now finds himself the leader of a party with 102 seats, many held by rookie politicians. The NDP brand has been, since the early 2000s, consistently centred on Jack Layton himself, rather than a particular policy position. The rookie MPs will be looking to Mr. Layton for guidance and instruction, more so than would a team of seasoned veterans. While Jack will have to pull in some of his own wingnuts and handle more than the ordinary number of blunders born of inexperience, he will also have a party that gets virtually all of its cues from him. In this way, the NDP can appear more organized and credible than they legitimately are. This means that progressive decisions and policies can be articulated without seeming like they’re coming from the hippie fringe.

ELIZABETH MAY WAS ELECTED

I am not a Green voter. I did vote Green in 2006, because my riding was a safe bet and I supported electoral reform. I think the Green party can articulate a non-corporate perspective that is sorely and noticeably absent from the other three major parties. Elizabeth May is a gifted speaker and is able to articulate environmental policy issues well. She’s also shown herself to be indomitable and highly resistant to intimidation in the face of overwhelming opposition. While I don’t necessarily agree with her party’s platform on many issues (medicine and health care being chief among those), I am glad to see a more pluralistic Parliament.

Her election also serves the purpose of giving the Green party legitimate political status. Voting Green is now a legitimate alternative, and while the party is still in its infancy in terms of credibility, having elected an MP (over a RPN cabinet minister, no less) certainly vaults it into the standings. After all, they only have 3 fewer seats than the Bloc, who used to be the official opposition

POLARIZATION IS BAD, BUT NOT ALL BAD

One doesn’t have to look much further than the United States (a name that is becoming progressively more ironic) to see how dangerous political polarization can be. Polarization forces people to make choices to support positions they don’t agree with in the name of party affiliation. Having a plurality of perspectives means that government will be more stable, rather than erratically jerking back and forth from right to left. Canada has elected a far-right government with a far-left opposition (although I don’t think either of those descriptions are really fair in the general scheme of things), meaning that for the first time in a long time we see a stark separation between the usually moderate people of this country.

However, there is one upside to polarization that has to do with a necessary consequence of good government. When the government is largely running things behind the scenes and caters to the will of the majority, people become complacent. Why bother getting up in arms about a government whose actions are largely invisible and that I agree with for the most part? Having the debate happen more to the extremes, with policies to match, means that government activity will become increasingly salient to the average Canadian. People will see that their actions (or inactions, as the case may be) can allow dangerous legislation that is contrary to their personal interests to be passed largely without comment. Perhaps having a RPN majority government is what Canada needs as a kick in the pants to spur increased political involvement by its populace.

SUMMARIZING THOUGHTS

As I’ve made clear, I’m not happy about this election. My best-case scenario would have seen a diminishing Harper minority with a strong NDP opposition – allowing the further fragmentation of the right and bringing progressive issues to the fore. What I got instead was a bizarro world in which a 2% increase in political support for the RPN means 30 more seats and the Bloc has all but evaporated. It is an interesting time for Canadian politics, and while there will undoubtedly be some serious damage done in the interim (I’m thinking specifically of crime, climate change and the strength/direction of the Canada Health Act), there may yet be some positive stories to come out of this.

I am back to my regular self, and am recommitting myself to articulating my position. I promise – no more weeks of rage (well… hopefully).

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Well I’ll be…

Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – something will happen that catches me completely by surprise:

A [city] church has voted to stop signing marriage licenses in protest of the state of [state]‘s denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples. Douglass Boulevard Christian Church made the unanimous vote Sunday. The Rev. Derek Penwell, senior minister of the church, said it’s unjust that heterosexual but not homosexual couples can benefit from marital rights involving inheritance, adoption, hospital visits and filing joint tax returns, saving thousands in annual taxes.

A Christian church defies not only public opinion but state law to support gay rights. In what bastion of freedom-hating, Democratic liberalism did this happen? Oregon? Massachusetts? Connecticut?

Kentucky.

In 2004, Kentucky voters passed an amendment to the state constitution by a three-to-one margin, banning same-sex marriage and unions and reinforcing what had already been state law. Large religious groups were among the drivers of that amendment, with endorsements from leaders in Kentucky’s two largest denominations — the Kentucky Baptist Convention and the Catholic Conference of Kentucky. The state’s largest congregation, Southeast Christian Church, ran an advertising campaign before the referendum, promoting traditional marriage. Some congregations, however, support the right of same-sex couples to marry and will perform same-sex ceremonies in their services, even though they have no legal standing in Kentucky.

While the gesture is symbolic, it certainly injects some measure of dissonance into the narrative that you can’t be a good Christian and support gay rights. Especially in the American South, with its deeply-entrenched conservative Christian tradition – and the mountains of bigotry that go along with that – someone taking a stand against the tide of anti-gay hatred is a rare and welcome sight indeed.

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Canada DOESN’T have a race problem… grading on a curve

I make a lot of hay on this blog by pointing out negative things in Canada, the country I love. As a blog about race and racism (with some gay shit sprinkled in there for flavour), I go out of my way to find, illustrate and criticize things that happen here that are to the detriment of minority groups. Reading my writings here, some may walk away with the impression that I think that Canada is a particularly bad place to be a person of colour (PoC), a gay person, a woman, or member of another disadvantaged group. This is simply not true.

Part of the reason I am so passionate about Canada and the issues facing Canadians is because I recognize that our country has the overwhelming potential to model positive values to the entire world. Perhaps uniquely, Canada is making the experiment of multiculturalism work and has found a way to maintain a level of civility and understanding that transcends any kind of formal legal protection, but that has simply become a feature of our national identity. How could I approach such an important issue with anything less than my full attention and fervor?

However, all the doom and gloom that I cast around may serve to distract from the fact that Canada is a really amazing country:

Canadians are hard-working, great readers, the most tolerant people in the developed world, and enjoy more “positive experiences” than everyone but Icelanders, according to a new analysis of social trends released here Tuesday. “At 84 per cent on average, Canadians report the highest community tolerance of minority groups — ethnic minorities, migrants, and gays and lesbians — in the OECD, where the average is 61 per cent,” the report said. Residents of the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and the Nordic countries were among the most tolerant, while those in southern and eastern Europe, as well as Japan and Korea, were less tolerant.

This is something to celebrate – among countries in the developed world, Canada still stands out as a place where minority groups are, by and large, respected and tolerated. The kinds of racial strife and discord that seem to run rampant in many developing countries (particularly those in the Middle East and Africa) are completely foreign to us, and aren’t likely to degenerate to Rwanda or Bosnia levels ever. We should be happy about this.

However, and I cannot stress this enough, we should not be satisfied. It’s wonderful that we’re at the top of the OECD, but racial and cultural tolerance are not a competition. We are not trying to win the “world’s nicest people” award, at least we shouldn’t be. And while accolades are nice, it is dangerous to judge our successes by the failures of others – downward comparisons are a bitch.

While we are doing very well, we can still do better. By highlighting and discussing the issues that I do, I am trying my best to keep these conversations from getting swept under the rug of complacency. There are many areas to improve, and by doing so we can show the rest of the world how they can make the same improvements.

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Well that’s good to know…

Hey Jews! Good news for you guys? Remember how generations of Catholic leaders said that you were collectively responsible for a murder that supposedly happened 2000 years ago? Pope Ratzinger is letting y’all off the hook:

A new book by Pope Benedict XVI offers a sweeping exoneration of the Jewish people for the death of Jesus Christ, tackling one of the most controversial issues in Christianity. Wednesday, Benedict uses a biblical and theological analysis to explain why it is not true that the Jewish people as a whole were responsible for Jesus’ death. Interpretations to the contrary have been used for centuries to justify the persecution of Jews

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am no friend to the current pope, but I will always give credit where credit is due. First of all, it should be very clear that this is not a new pronouncement from the current administration that reverses Church policy. Jews were let off the hook for the murder of Jesus many years ago, and Church doctrine has been clear about that fact. Reminding Catholics of this fact is a positive step, and hopefully will help stem the tide of anti-Jewish sentiment around the world, at least from Catholics. There is nothing negative to be said about this announcement, which is simply an excerpt of a much longer work by the pope.

Having said all that, it is still a stupid thing to have to say. A group of people cannot be collectively responsible for the actions of a few of their ancestors. The very idea is ludicrous. First of all, there are strong reasons to doubt that the account of Jesus’ trial and execution is anywhere near accurate, or that Jesus as a single person even existed at all. Second, even granting the accuracy of the collective account in the New Testament, some of the Jews in the crowd were trying to secure Jesus’ freedom, a good many of them knew nothing about the case at all, and still thousandsfold more weren’t anywhere near Jerusalem at the time and couldn’t have done anything about it even if they wanted to. Third, even if they were responsible, Jesus’ death was part of the original plan of God, so their involvement was pre-ordained. Fourth and perhaps most importantly, the decisions of a group of people do not carry forward to their offspring. It is only the most profoundly evil mind that could possibly punish a child for the sins of its forebears (yes, apparently that is how the word is spelled).

I should, at this moment, attempt to stem the tide of “aha!” accusations from those who think that the above paragraph also applies to the issue of reparations, affirmative action, or white privilege. Reparations were a promise made on behalf of the Union government, which still exists as the United States government – promises made should be kept. Affirmative action is not punishing white people for the sins of their forebears, and I have explained in depth why this is so. White privilege refers to the fact that children of white parents start their lives with a set of assumptions that benefit them (or at least do not count against them) from day one, which means that they continue to benefit from the actions of their ancestors – Jews are afforded no such benefit, and are usually detrimentally treated for their religious/cultural affiliation (except within their own in-group, obviously).

It is perhaps not unique to religion, this punishing of children for things that their parents did, but it is certainly a hallmark of religious teaching. The doctrine of original sin, for example, is based on the slight disobedience of a fictional ancestor, and punishment is meted out against not only the species supposedly involved in the transgression, but against all other species as well. The Old Testament is replete with examples of innocents being punished for the actions of others. The Qu’ran treats nonbelief with torture – nonbelief which is surely the fault of whatever religious instruction one receives (unwittingly) as a child. Hinduism states that entire families are forever cursed to live as subservient to others based on nothing more than ancestry. The idea that guilt is a heritable trait is certainly one that, if it does not find its authorship there, certainly finds succor and support from theology.

The pope, by declaring that each individual Jewish person in the world is not responsible for the torture and murder of a person who a) may never have existed, b) even if he was, did not experience universal persecution at the hands of Jewish people, c) even if he did, whose persecution and execution were part of a divine plan… by declaring that this is not the fault of their two millennia distant descendants, the pope has basically come to the same realization that a normal and non-god-blinded person would have reached in about 5 minutes of reflection (if they were distracted). To treat this announcement as some kind of mercy or generous gesture is to grant license to the series of fallacies that the idea of deferred transgenerational responsibility requires to carry any force, not to mention the deep and abiding evil that is inherent in the idea of punishing someone for what someone else has done.

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You finished cleaning that glass ceiling yet, sweetheart?

Today is the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, which should be some cause for celebration. After all, 100 years of progress is an incredibly long time in human history. In the past 100 years we moved from horse-drawn carriages and plows to an international space station orbiting the planet. In 100 years we went from a largely-illiterate population with extremely limited access to information to a planet-wide network that puts virtually the sum total of all human knowledge at ready access from something that we can slip into our pockets. Our understanding of the universe has gone from the deterministic passage of small particles to a nuanced, varied and complex probabilistic model, allowing us to probe concepts previously written off as unsolvable “mysteries”.

Surely in all that time, with all that progress, we’ve made similar strides in the way we treat each other. The answer, as always, seems to be “yes and no”.

Why Feminism Still Matters:

Across the globe by almost every measure, women lag well behind men. Even though women do 66 per cent of the work and produce half of the food, UNICEF reports that they earn only 10 per cent of the global income and own just one per cent of the property. Nowhere in the world do women account for even a third of the national parliamentarians and, in most regions, including Canada, it is considerably less.

Still, this represents progress.

This article, published in the Vancouver Sun, is a pretty decent overview of the various stalls and starts of the movement for women’s equality, but it doesn’t do an explicit job of answering the question implied by its own title – why does feminism still matter? Why should we be focusing on issues that affect women? Anti-feminists, in their attempts to resemble reasonable and decent human beings (rather than reactionary dicks) often refute the feminist position by arguing that we should focus on having equal rights for everyone, and that focusing on women is the same as ignoring men. And while feminists sometimes just want to scream “men are doing just fine, shut your face hole!”, that’s a quick way to lose an argument for a stupid reason.

Canadian companies lack strategies for promoting women:

In the U.S., 70 per cent of companies surveyed lacked strategies for promoting women, compared to 71 per cent internationally. Despatie noted that the Canadian survey also showed that 43 per cent of companies didn’t feel they had a problem with promoting women to top jobs. To women, however, the lack of support strategies was clear. More than half (53 per cent) of all Canadian women and about 38 per cent of American women thought their organization provided “no or minimal support” for their promotion.

It’s right here that the importance of feminism is revealed: companies think they’re doing an excellent job promoting women, but the reality is that they are even worse here than they are in the United States, a place that we’re all happy to look down on socially (to my great chagrin). When there is such a huge gap between perception and reality, the status quo becomes deeply entrenched and progress becomes next to impossible. I am somewhat reminded of the bromide from Alcoholics Anonymous – the first step is admitting you have a problem.

When confronted with this kind of information, the usual reaction of the anti-feminists is to go with the old standby excuse of “maybe there aren’t enough qualified women for the positions”. To me that seems to invite the question: why the hell aren’t there? Women are statistically better educated, are supposedly guaranteed by law to be free from official discrimination based on sex, and equally intelligent as their male counterparts – wherefore the disparity?

Women are underutilized in executive workforce – study:

In both years, a full 30 per cent of the largest companies in Canada did not have a single woman in their executive ranks. ”Time is up for ‘give it time’,” Gillis said, though she added that the solution is not simple tokenism. Research indicates that on average, companies with more women senior officers outperform those with fewer (emphasis mine).

That agrees very much with what one of Canada’s largest companies has found in its efforts to reduce the homogeneity of its executive ranks. ”If you start to see it as one versus the other, you miss the point,” TD Bank CEO Ed Clark said of the bank’s efforts to promote more women in a recent CBC interview. ”By framing it as a people development issue, you don’t get this zero-sum game; everybody wins.”

More and more we are finding that the stereotypical underperformance of women in “men’s fields” like sciences and mathematics are a product of the stereotypes, and not due to any actual difference in cognitive ability. Tearing down stereotypes is a process that requires the intentional encouragement of cognitive dissonance – creating highly visible and immediately recognizable violations of the stereotype. Faced with observed reality and “what I’ve always heard”, reality wins out in the end. Add to that the fact that encouraging women appears to have beneficial outcomes above and beyond being the right thing to do, and you’ve got the recipe for a winner.

(There is an important fact raised in that article that doesn’t fit the overall theme of the argument, but I thought it should be raised anyway. While Crown corporations had the largest proportion of women in executive positions, the private sector came in second place, a number that has increased slightly in the past 2 years. It appears that the private sector is doing a better job of promoting women than the public sector. Just food for thought.)

The premier-designate is a woman:

It may not be kosher to discuss the premier-designate (Christy Clark) in terms of her sex, given we are conditioned to believe that a person’s capability has nothing to do with gender, but it’s clearly a factor, because when it comes to positions of power, whether it’s Parliament Hill or a corporate boardroom, a skirt is still an anomaly in Canada.

And it is relevant. The majority of the population is female, and yet women remain woefully under-represented at the top -be it by historical choice or entrenched sexism. Women, despite making up the bulk of the workforce, are still traditionally considered custodians of the home and hearth and, as such, are often viewed as weaker than men, slower to decision and less likely to be strong political leaders who will go the distance.

My home province of British Columbia (or at least those who are registered members of the provincial Liberal party) recently appointed a new leader… and it’s a lady! If you scratch the surface of the image of the B.C. granola hippie yoga hipster, you’ll find that B.C. is still a western province with deep entrenched Conservative (note the capitalization) values. It is indeed, therefore, a big deal that the person with her finger on the button is a “her”. Despite the fact that the provincial Liberals would pass for Conservatives just about anywhere else in the country, a female premier (designate) is just the kind of high-profile stereotype-busting position I was talking about, and I wish premier-designate Clark success.

Ivory Coast women protesters shot:

Soldiers backing Ivory Coast’s defiant leader mowed down women protesting his refusal to leave power in a hail of gunfire Thursday, killing at least six and shocking a nation where women’s marches have historically been used as a last resort against an unrestrained army. Because the president’s security force has shown almost no reserve in opening fire on unarmed civilians, the women decided this week to organize the march in the nation’s commercial capital Abidjan, assuming soldiers would be too ashamed to open fire. But at least six of the thousands of women demonstrating Thursday were killed on the spot, said Mohamed Dosso, an assistant to the mayor of Abobo, a suburb of the city.

Women bring another set of sensibilities to the table when discussing issues, and a diversity of viewpoints is a strength. Whatever the final decision, having a plurality of insight allows decision-making authorities to consider a variety of potential outcomes. In the Ivory Coast, women have traditionally exercised a different kind of power to their male counterparts, and have been able to blunt the more outrageous actions of a male-dominated culture. Their execution by the army signals a disturbing new development in an already-disturbing conflict.

Closing thoughts

Which brings me back to the question I tried to address earlier: why does feminism still matter?

Well, do women experience disproportionately little political and economic power? Is the improvement of the standing of women irrevocably linked to the improvement of society in general? Have gains been made? Is there still work to do?

The answer to all of the above questions is “yes”. We are not yet, as a society, in a position to let feminism slide into history as obsolete. While I am primarily a commentator on race and associated issues, I am not so blind as to fail to recognize that the same societal forces that are stacked against black people are stacked against women. A victory for women is a victory for all of us, and there can be no equality until we see the advancement of women as being part of our own self-interest. In order to achieve that, people need to be talking about it.

Happy International Women’s Day.

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