All Posts Tagged With: "race"
Israel scratched from U. Windsor globes
Jewish student complained
The University of Windsor’s Leddy Library removed three globes earlier this month because of what appeared to be anti-Israeli vandalism. Gavin Wolch, a third-year law school student who is Jewish, told The Lance student newspaper that he complained more than once about the globes before they were removed. A library official denied that he’d received earlier complaints. This is not the first time that ethnically-motivated graffiti has been reported at the university. In November, anti-Arab and anti-South Asian graffiti was found in the washrooms near Windsor’s multi-faith space.
U of T Anti-Racism Office censors its own play
Black-Jew Dialogues couldn’t use poster
From theblackjewdialogues.com
Ahead of a recent show in Toronto, The Black-Jew Dialogues, a two-man comedy that tries to break down racial stereotypes, was told it could not use the same poster that they’ve used for six years.
The University of Toronto’s Anti-Racism and Cultural Diversity Office, which co-sponsored the event, censored the poster that shows the two comedians, a white guy wearing an afro and a black guy in a yarmulke who’s giving a thumbs-up.
Ron Jones, who appears in the yarmulke, joked to The Globe and Mail that he was going to the Anti-Racism Office to “give them a little bit of the old USA.” But then he explained his interpretation for the decision: “I think the Office was concerned that the logo could be misinterpreted. They didn’t want the message to be warped or put out there without a chance for discussion.”
There’s a new social media obsession on campus
And it’s a haven for racist, sexist trolls
Facebook. Twitter. MSN. Google Plus. There’s no shortage of places for students to chat, opine, or procrastinate during finals. Yet there’s a new digital obsession spreading across Canadian campuses. It’s called OMG and it’s simple. Students submit short “Oh My Gods” about anything. Then, they’re posted to the site.
As a Waterloo student who found myself distracted by OMGUW far too often in December, I got thinking about what makes it so hard to look away. I wanted to know what makes it so enticing that it has spread from Waterloo to Guelph, Saskatchewan and Toronto, with tens of thousands of views.
Continue reading There’s a new social media obsession on campus
South Asians say teaching staff is too white
But gov’t won’t track race of teachers
In Toronto’s Peel Region, where 57 per cent of people are minorities, South Asians are demanding more non-white teachers. “We’re still seen as outsiders, we’re not part of the team because schools are kind of clique-ish to those who aren’t Caucasian,” teacher Krishna Nankissoor told the Toronto Star. He had complained to the Ontario Human Rights Commission after failing to be promoted, but since made a deal with the board. Tony Pontes, the director of education for Peel Region told The Star that it takes time to get more minority teachers. Dean Alice Pitt of York University similarly explained that although the supply of teachers in recent years is very diverse (33 per cent at York) boards aren’t hiring much, so the face of classrooms is changing slowly. The Ontario Ministry of Education told school boards earlier this year to make equity a focus in hiring, but the government will not force boards to track the races of teachers.
Are men with prostate cancer “privileged”?
Anti-Movember editorial is offensive and just plain wrong
Photo by termie on Flickr
I rarely have trouble distinguishing seriousness from mirth when it comes to a piece of writing, but I had to read this post by Alex Manley more than once. Despite multiple, brow-furrowing reads, I’m still hesitant to say I think the Concordia student journalist is being genuine. But, no he can’t be! Surely he just forgot to write “PSYCH!” at the end.
If only. In his column entitled “No to Movember,” Manley lambastes all you dirty bigots who donated your money and mustaches to prostate cancer. The Movember campaign to which he refers sees men from all over the world grow their mustaches during the month of November to raise money for prostate cancer research.
“Racialized ethical vegan” alleges discrimination
Wants $15,000 from Ryerson University
A master’s graduate has filed a complaint asking for $15,000 from Ryerson University because she says she was discriminated against for being a “Racialized Ethical Vegan.” Sinem Ketenci, a 37-year-old from Turkey, says that a senior professor at Ryerson disagreed with her comparison of maltreated animals with marginalized people, which caused another professor to withdraw his recommendation of her for a PhD in social work. “This systemic discrimination and harassment that silences marginalized minority peoples’ voices, such as me as a Racialized Ethical Vegan, is a serious threat towards freedom of speech and freedom of belief,” Ms. Ketenci wrote in her complaint to Ontario’s Human Rights Tribunal, which will now decide whether the complaint should move ahead to mediation. It’s unclear what this has to do with race, but Ketenci told the National Post: “If I were white, born here, this case would not have happened.” Ryerson has not yet responded.
University of Manitoba apologizes for residential schools
Some are moved by the apology. Others ask questions.
The University of Manitoba’s President, David Barnard, has apologized for his institution’s indirect role in the residential schools that negatively impacted as many as 150,000 Aboriginal Canadians.
At a Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing in Halifax, Barnard said that the U of M made a “grave mistake” by educating people who perpetuated the assimilation of Aboriginal Canadians.
The apology brought some Aboriginal Canadians in the audience on Thursday to tears. Assembly of First Nations National Chief Shawn Atleo, welcomed the words.
But some public relations experts and Native leaders questioned the motivations for the apology, because the University of Manitoba had no direct involvement in the residential schools.
Barnard responded on Thursday. “The university and other organizations in Canada stood by while this was happening, and we didn’t speak out against it early enough,” he told the National Post.
But why not apologize to other groups harmed indirectly by the inaction of the University? “It’s clear that this has been a significant, damaging, traumatic experience for people that are served by the University of Manitoba. This is something that has deep meaning to people in Winnipeg and in Manitoba,” he told the National Post, adding that it may help “bring more people to university.”
The University of Manitoba is already one of Canada’s biggest centres for Native Studies and drew more than 1,900 self-declared Aboriginal students to campus this year—more than most other schools.
Of course, the U of M isn’t the only university that’s working to make universities work better for Aboriginal Canadians. Read Ken MacQueen’s feature article Success, one student at at time in the 2011 Maclean’s University Rankings issue to find out what universities from Victoria to Nipissing are doing to help Native Canadians succeed. Pick up your copy on newsstands today.
Hip-Hop courses proliferate
Students explore Jay-Z, Rap Poetics, Religion and Hip Hop
Religion and Hip Hop by Erik Quinn on Facebook
Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. has launched a new course centred on the works of rapper Jay-Z, reports The Nation.
It’s getting a lot of attention, but it’s certainly not the first time that a prestigious university has used hip-hop to help students explore big questions.
Sociology of Hip Hop: Jay-Z has units on “Hustling Hermeneutics” and the “Monster of the Double Entendre.” The course is popular so far, with 140 signed up—about three-times the normal enrollment for a Georgetown seminar.
“Many are white kids—they bring a level of criticism about the culture they have emerged from… because they’ve seen that culture through Jay-Z’s eyes,” course instructor Michael Eric Dyson told The Nation, explaining the course’s popularity among a student body that’s only 6.7 per cent African-American.
So much for the ‘People of Einstein’ myth
A student makes Jews look bad. But that’s a good thing.
Photo by wokka on Flickr
By Emma Teitel. Republished from Macleans.ca.
There’s an inside Yiddish expression used by Jews to describe other Jews behaving badly in the public sphere: “shanda for the goyim” — shanda meaning “shame” and goyim denoting “gentiles” (non-Jews). The phrase is most commonly employed by Semitic seniors, when the modern media informs them that Jews can in fact be lechers (Dominique Strauss-Kahn), alcoholics (Amy Winehouse); unsuspecting nudes (Scarlett Johansson); and now, thanks to one 22-year-old Toronto Jewish girl, dangerously obtuse.
The woman in question—with whom I share at least one mutual Facebook friend (I am also a 22-year-old Jewish girl and it’s very possible we crossed paths, maybe at B’nai Brith summer camp, or perhaps in the annual United Synagogue Youth Limousine Sukka Hop)—is a York University senior named Sarah Grunfeld, who last week made shanda-esque headlines when she put her social science professor’s career in jeopardy over an anti-Semitic remark that turned out to be—well—not. The statement “All Jews should be sterilized,” Professor Cameron Johnston explained in the introductory lecture to his class, was an example of an invalid and dangerous opinion; his point was that in academia especially, opinions must be reasonably qualified. Grunfeld failed to catch that qualifier, though, perhaps because before the prof had a chance to offer it, she had stormed out of class and enlisted the on-campus Israel-advocacy group, Hasbara (Hebrew for “Explanation”), to call for his immediate resignation.
Word of Johnston’s so-called racism exploded virally online by way of what National Post columnist Jonathan Kay has dubbed the “Bubbie-net” (Jewish grandparents frantically emailing their kin with fresh findings of alleged anti-Semitism); at the same time widely-respected Canadian Jewish civil rights association, B’nai Brith (Children of the Covenant), leaped in with equal gusto to champion Grunfeld’s claim. Then came the big reveal: Ms. Grunfeld had made a mistake. Not only was professor Johnston not an anti-Semite, he was a Jew. To borrow a more accessible Yiddish phrase, political correctness at York University had effectively schtupped itself. Not to mention Sarah Grunfeld.
The maligned university student has since “qualified” her accusations against Johnston with claims twice as ludicrous as the original. “The words, ‘Jews should be sterilized’,” she told the Toronto Star recently, “still came out of his mouth, so regardless of the context I still think that’s pretty serious.”
A lot of Canadian Jews are embarrassed and ashamed by this kind of doublespeak, and so was I, until I re-examined the root of my disquiet. There’s a reason why this particular shanda—and not, let’s say, Woody Allen’s marriage to his adopted daughter, or Garth Drabinsky’s defrauding of his shareholders, or The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart’s changing his name from John Stewart Liebowitz—ignites such fierce indignation in the Jewish community: Because Grunfeld doesn’t simply make us look bad (like the guys above); she makes us look stupid, and in doing so debunks the cultural stereotypes of intellectual superiority that we sometimes not-so-secretly enjoy.
Jewish American author Michael Chabon explored the seductiveness of this stereotype to Jews themselves in the New York Times last year in considering the calibre of the discussion following Israel’s botched raid of the Gaza bound Turkish flotilla, Mavi Marmara, in which nine activists died at the hands of Jewish soldiers (a debacle Diaspora Jews had trouble reconciling with our supposed “cultural” cleverness):
“I would look around the Passover table, say, at the members of my family, and remark on the presence of a number of highly intelligent, quick-witted, shrewd, well-educated people filled to bursting with information, explanations and opinions on a diverse range of topics. In my tractable and vainglorious eagerness to confirm the People of Einstein theory, my gaze would skip right over—God love them—any counterexamples present at that year’s Seder.”
Sarah Grunfeld—God love her—is one such counterexample. But we’d be wrong to let our gaze skip right over her, because there’s another, more disturbing lesson to be drawn from the Grunfeld affair and it’s this: as Jews, we hold the moral high ground to call out anti-Semitism. That’s why, in part, Grunfeld’s accusation had the legs it did, and why, perhaps, it got the backing from the Jewish infrastructure organizations such as B’nai Brith, which still hasn’t distanced itself from Grunfeld or denounced her fallacious claim, but has instead published her unapologetic letter blasting Professor Johnston for a sin he didn’t commit, with a logic even more addled than before. And there lies the biggest shanda of all: Grunfeld’s false allegations and the group’s uninformed decision to support her are bad mistakes, but both parties’ inability to own up to those mistakes renders them inexcusable. Because when we cry wolf —especially on one of our own—serious apologies are in order.
But it’s doubtful that apologies of any kind will be made, and B’nai Brith will continue sniffing out anti-Semitism where there may not be any, all the while undermining cases where there is. If anything good does come from this debacle, however, it’s that our enemies and unsolicited friends (Glenn Beck comes to mind) may think twice before attributing all things grave and glorious to the “People of Einstein.” Because if public representatives of the Jewish faith continue to make exceedingly stupid mistakes, then the various calumnies the conspiracy theorists like to heap on all of us—the blood libel, the plague, AIDS, the Iraq War, and our obvious plans to take over everything from Saturday night TV to the World Bank—start to ring kind of hollow. After all, with Sarah Grunfeld leading the way, for what exactly can they blame us?
Is this bake sale racist?
Campus Republicans could lose funding over cupcakes
Photo by Mr. T in DC on Flickr
Campus Republicans at the University of California Berkeley will be selling cupcakes on Tuesday — a move some are calling racist.
At the “Diversity Bake Sale” white men will pay $2 per cupcake, Asians will pay $1.50, Latinos will pay $1, African Americans will pay 75 cents and Native Americans 25 cents per cupcake. Women will get a 25 per cent discount, said the original Facebook event invitation, which has since been changed according to student newspaper The Daily Californian.
Campus Republican president Shawn Lewis told KGO TV that the bake sale is meant “to cause people to get a little upset” and to draw attention to a proposed bill that would allow (but not require) universities to consider race, nationality and gender in admissions policies. Such affirmative action was outlawed in the state in 1997.
The Associated Students of the University of California, the school’s student union, has called a special senate meeting to decided whether to take away the club’s funding. The event may have violated the student senate’s anti-racism policy, says the ASUC, which condemns the event.
The planned protest has prompted ample discussion of Bill 185 on Facebook. Some students have shown their support on the Campus Republicans. Others have called them racist.
One recent poster says, “for full accuracy, make sure black students aren’t allowed to buy anything until 12:30, and then they have to let white students skip ahead of them in line until 1:15. Women can’t buy until 12:45, and they’re limited to two items per customer….”
Another recent poster writes: “We need a candid discussion on how Asians will be affected by the new policies.” Asian Americans made up 12 per cent of California’s population in 2008, but represent 43 per cent of UC Berkeley’s student body, reports USA Today.
Fired Ottawa prof sued for racist defamation
Denis Rancourt is in trouble again
Denis Rancourt, the University of Ottawa professor who was fired in 2009 for turning his physics course into a class on social activism and for giving everyone an A+, is being sued by an Ottawa law professor for defamation. Joanne St. Lewis, Assistant Professor of law, alleges that Rancourt wrote racist and professionally-damaging statements about her on his blog, U of O Watch. She wants $1-million in compensation.
He wrote that her evaluation of a student-produced report alleging systematic racism at the school was “an academic fraud” and he accused St. Lewis, who is black, of being a traitor to her race. She asked Rancourt to take down the offending post, but he refused.
After being served with papers Thursday, he said he plans to fight the charges. In an interview with the Ottawa Citizen, he defended the use of a particular word that St. Lewis called racist in her statement of claim, which he posted on his website. “This is a term that is understood, well-defined. It has societal and historic meaning,” he said. “It’s used often by public intellectuals and critics. There are many media examples of that in the United States.”
To read more Maclean’s On Campus coverage of Denis Rancourt, click here.
Merit: the best and only way to decide who gets into university
We find the trend toward race-based admissions policies in some U.S. schools to be deplorable
Maclean’s annual University Rankings issue is our most popular and most discussed magazine of the year. The 2010 edition, released two weeks ago, was no exception. Alongside our comprehensive rankings of Canadian schools, we also tackled the biggest issues facing today’s university students. There were stories dealing with school stress, problem roommates, difficult school choices and sex. And when students told us race is becoming a conversation on Canadian campuses, we took a closer look at that as well.
Our reporters Stephanie Findlay and Nicholas Köhler spoke to university students, professors and administrators about campus racial balance and its implications. The resulting story was titled: ‘Too Asian?’: a term used in the U.S. to talk about racial imbalance at Ivy League schools is now being whispered on Canadian campuses—by everyone but the students themselves, who speak out loud and clear.”
The article has generated a great deal of response, a representative sample of which is included in this week’s Letters (page six). Some of the comments we have seen on the Internet and in other media have suggested that by publishing this article, Maclean’s views Canadian universities as “Too Asian,” or that we hold a negative view of Asian students.
Nothing could be further from the truth. As our story relates, the phrase “Too Asian?” is a direct quote from the title of a panel discussion at the 2006 meeting of the National Association for College Admission Counseling where experts examined the growing tendency among U.S. university admission officers to view Asian applicants as a homogenous group. The evidence suggests some of the most prestigious schools in the U.S. have abandoned merit as the basis for admission for more racially significant—and racist—criteria.
We find the trend toward race-based admission policies in some American schools deplorable, as do many of our readers. Our article notes that Canadian universities select students regardless of race or creed. That, in our view, is the best and only acceptable approach: merit should be the sole criteria for entrance to higher education in Canada, and universities should always give preference to our best and brightest regardless of cultural background. This position was stated clearly in the article: “Canadian institutions operate as pure meritocracies when it comes to admissions, and admirably so,” reporters Findlay and Köhler wrote.
Through hard work, talent and ambition, Asian students have been highly successful in earning places in Canada’s institutions of higher learning. They, like all of our high achievers, deserve respect and admiration. Every one of them is a source of pride to their fellow Canadians.
One final note about the headline. Although the phrase “Too Asian?” was a question and, again, a quotation from an authoritative source, it upset many people. We expected that it would be provocative, but we did not intend to cause offence.
From the editors
Problems with free expression
The U of T blackface case raises important questions about the complex nature of freedom.
Elsewhere, my fellow blogger Scott Dobson-Mitchell notes the irony whereby in one comment I acknowledge that I occassionally edit comments on my blogs, while in another comment, I defend the right to free expression.
I’d be flattered that someone is reading me so closely, even if it is only other OnCampus bloggers, except that I’m pretty sure Dobson-Mitchell thinks I’m a douchebag. To wit:
I believe that racism, even those acts of racism that an educated, white, university professor of English literature deems to be otherwise, continues to be a “real problem” in today’s world.
Well, of course, racism itself is a real problem, but is the writer really suggesting that some guys wearing poorly thought-out costumes to a halloween party is an important issue? Compared to what? If Dobson-Mitchell can’t find plenty more serious problems than that in the world, he’s not paying attention.
As for the supposed contradiction over free speech, my colleague, I would say, misunderstands the freedom part of the expression. The right to free speech does not guarantee the right of anyone to say anything anywhere anytime. I am free to write a book, but publishers are free to refuse to publish it. I am free to speak my mind about politics, but Global Television is not bound to put me on the air. A reader may think that I’m an asshole, but unless he finds a nicer word for it, it’s not going in the comments on my blog; they call them moderated comments for a reason. He can call me immoderate names on his own blog. What the right to free speech should guarantee is that third parties should not be able to intervene and force others to speak and think as they would prefer.
Which brings us back to the halloween costumes. In my view, these guys had the right to wear their ridiculous costumes, and the party organizers would have been within their rights to say, “sorry guys, not at this party.” But where the whole thing changes is when some other group of people comes along — government, special interests, whoever — and starts holding meetings, demanding public apologies and the like. Then we start to move away from people choosing for themselves as to what they find offensive, and we move towards the policing of free action and opinion — and that becomes a very real problem indeed.
PS: why does Dobson-Mitchell point out my own race in his comments? What difference does it make that I am white? I certainly hope that he does not mean to imply that someone like me could not be expected to understand the issues involved.
USask turns down $500,000 “race-based” donation
Says request for scholarship for “non-aboriginals” violates university policy
The University of Saskatchewan turned down a donation of $500,000 because the donor wanted the funds used to support scholarships for “non-aboriginal” students, reports the National Post.
The university states a race-based scholarship would violate both university policies and human rights legislation.
I’ve always been bothered by race-based scholarships because they do not directly target the factors that disadvantage students.
Yes, students of aboriginal backgrounds are more likely to be social-economically disadvantaged. Yes, the history of how we treated (and continue to treat in some cases) aboriginals has resulted in a lot of the disadvantages that aboriginal students face.
That said, the problem is not their race and I’ve always seen scholarships that use race as a determining factor leaving the impression that race may be the problem.
Bursaries should be targeted to the actual disadvantages they are supposed to address. I find it perfectly acceptable to have bursaries designed to assist students moving from a rural reserve into a university town. There are plenty of bursaries that have geographic restrictions. Having funds with the criteria of being a descendant of someone who was put in residential schools is acceptable. The trauma of those schools continues to be passed down generation by generation. It is actually targeting a real problem. A scholarship based purely on need would be even better.
Unless race is the problem then why do we use it as a criteria to find a solution? Simple: because it makes things easy. Why go further than the skin layer of the problem?
(Hattip: Dale Kirby)
Racism: why yes, now that you mention it, it is everywhere
Student panel to try to find it. We bet they will.
A medical textbook that calls black people’s hair thick and kinky and Asian hair smooth and silky exemplifies Eurocentric teaching materials at Ontario’s colleges and universities, a forum exploring campus racism heard Wednesday.
Such textbooks are woefully inadequate when it comes to teaching how to care for visible minority patients, nursing student Liana Salvador, 24, told the panel as it launched provincewide hearings.
“They use white as the reference point and everyone else is pigeonholed or extra,” said Salvador, a student at Ryerson University, who cited an example from one textbook that discusses hair type.
“It said, ‘black people have kinky, thick hair that is often dry, and Asians have smooth, silky hair.’
“Just the way that it’s written and the language that it’s written in often can encourage stereotyping.”
Committees need to be struck that have broad representation, including students, when it comes to the selection of teaching materials for post-secondary programs, Salvador told the panel.
The forum at George Brown College was the first of several the Ontario chapter of The Canadian Federation of Students will be holding across the province before the end of April.
The concept was born from another task force that, two years ago, examined the needs of Muslim students. Federation representative Hildah Otieno said incidents of Islamaphobia were identified at campuses across the province, but so too were incidents of racism and discrimination involving other religions and ethnicities.
“We’re trying to look at individual acts of racism, discrimination and hate, and see how that impacts those racialized students, faculty and staff on campus,” Otieno said at a news conference prior to the hearing.
“But we’re also going to try and look at the systemic way in which institutional structures may be affecting the same people.”
