All Posts Tagged With: "racism"
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.”
“Nazi Ring of Fire” drinking game leads to broken nose
Jewish student objected
Photo by Ben Alford on Flickr
Students at the famous London School of Economics are facing discipline after a Jewish student objected to a Nazi-themed drinking game during a school ski trip and received a broken nose.
A video of the drinking game, which took place in early December in France, was uploaded to YouTube, shared of Facebook and then removed, according to The Beaver student newspaper.
The game, called “Nazi Ring of Fire,” involved arranging cards on a table in the shape of a Swastika. The game compelled players to commit antisemitic acts including “saluting the Fuhrer.”
Continue reading “Nazi Ring of Fire” drinking game leads to broken nose
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
Kwantlen students vote to oust troubled board
Meeting marked by pepper spray, fire alarms, chants of “racism”
Photo courtesy of Matt Law for The Runner
Kwantlen University students who were meeting on campus Wednesday to oust their student leaders were temporarily interrupted after someone released a spray into the air—likely pepper spray— forcing coughing and teary students to flee.
Then, someone pulled the fire alarm.
After being let back into the building by fire officials approximately one hour later, students were just about to vote when someone pulled the fire alarm again, forcing them back outside.
But students were patient. Instead of losing quorum—250 voters—the crowd grew so large that organizers were able to spare 30 students to guard each fire alarm against troublemakers. Then, students voted nearly unanimously to remove the current board of directors and prevent them from running again. The vote signals a turning point on a campus where the student association has been the target of unusual scrutiny for months. At the end of the day, Kwantlen Student Association directors were escorted by security into their offices to collect their belongings.
Continue reading Kwantlen students vote to oust troubled board
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.
Racist graffiti found on two campuses
Haters target Arabs
Members of the University of Windsor community are shocked by racist graffiti found in a washroom near the new multi-faith space. The space recently had sinks installed to accommodate Muslims who want to wash before prayers, reports the Windsor Star. The graffiti included anti-Arab and anti-South Asian wording, which campus Muslims felt targeted them.
This week, racist graffiti that targets people of Arab decent was found at Ryerson University too, reports The Eyeopener.
Other Canadian universities have dealt with racist graffiti, including slurs against Jewish and black students at York University in 2008, which resulted in a new Human Rights Officer position.
Jewish groups call for cancellation of Muslim seminars at U of T
Would that stop hate or stifle free speech?
Photo by mrehan on Flickr
Jewish organizations are calling on the University of Toronto to cancel an 18-week seminar series led by Toronto-based Islamic scholar Abdullah Hakim Quick. They say Quick has made homophobic and antisemitic comments in the past and should not be allowed to speak on campus.
The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center (FSWC), Hillel of Greater Toronto and other Jewish groups have expressed their concerns to U of T, reports The Canadian Jewish News.
“The unfortunate truth is that when you have speakers like this, that are divisive, it hurts communities,” says Avi Benlolo, President of the FSWC. “We hope that the unviersity will make the right decision to cancel it or put it on hold pending review,” he adds.
U of T spokesperson April Kemick told CJN that the “event is a booking by a campus group—one of hundreds that happen over the course of the year—and there is no connection to the university.”
Continue reading Jewish groups call for cancellation of Muslim seminars at U of T
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.
Minority job applicants get fewer callbacks
Study reminiscent of 1948 Maclean’s article by Pierre Berton
Photo by |Mahin| on Flickr
A new study has shown that Canadians with English-sounding names on their résumés get many more responses from employers than those with foreign-sounding names, even when applicants have identical qualifications and make it clear they can speak English or French proficiently.
Philip Oreopoulos and Diane Dechief of the University of Toronto found that of the 8,000 fake job applications they sent out, those with English-sounding names at the top were 47 per cent more likely to receive callbacks in Toronto than resumes with Greek, Indian or Chinese-sounding names. In Montreal, English names had a 39 per cent advantage. In Vancouver it was 20 per cent.
Oreopoulos told The Globe and Mail that subconcious discrimination may partially explain the difference. Another part of their study showed that human resources professionals cite concerns over language or social skills for the possible differences in their reactions—despite the fact that such skills can easily be determined with a simple phone call.
Continue reading Minority job applicants get fewer callbacks
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.
Student drops out after backlash to racist video
Claims the rant was an ‘attempt to produce a humorous YouTube video’
Alexandra Wallace, the third-year political science student from UCLA who posted a video on YouTube in which she complained about Asian students speaking on their cell phones in the library, recently announced that she would no longer attend the university. The announcement was part of an apology letter released to the Daily Bruin on Friday.
“In an attempt to produce a humorous YouTube video, I have offended the UCLA community and the entire Asian culture. I am truly sorry for the hurtful words I said and the pain it caused to anyone who watched the video,” her statement said.
Wallace says that her “mistake”- which included mocking students who were trying to reach family members the day of the disastrous tsunami and earthquake in Japan- has “lead to the harassment of my family, the publishing of my personal information, death threats, and being ostracized from an entire community,” prompting her to no longer attend classes at UCLA. Earlier on the same day, UCLA announced that it will not discipline Wallace for the video.
At one point in the YouTube video, Wallace speaks in a fake Asian language, saying “Ching, chong, ling long, ting tong.”
Fortunately, someone has recently attempted to explain what “ching chong, ling long, ting tong” actually means in a new YouTube video.
Should racist rants on YouTube lead to expulsion?
Asian students mocked for ‘checking on everybody from the tsunami thing.’
A student at the University of California in Los Angeles recently posted a video on YouTube in which she ranted about Asian students at her school, complaining about the “hordes of Asian people” who talk on cell phones in the library. She spoke in a fake Asian language at one point, and complained about Japanese students calling home about the tsunami and earthquake.
“I swear they’re going through their whole families, just checking on everybody from the tsunami thing. I mean, I know, that sounds horrible. I feel sorry for all the people affected by the tsunami,” she said during the three minute video.
“But if you’re going to go call your address book, like you might as well go outside, because, if something is wrong, you might really freak out and you’re in the library, and everybody’s quiet. Like, you seriously should go outside if you’re going to do that.”
After the video went viral, gathering millions of views and creating a serious backlash, Alexandra Wallace, the third-year political sciences student who posted the video, issued an apology on Monday. Apparently campus officials are still considering whether the video warrants disciplinary action.
When I first heard about the video (a commenter posted a link in my last blog post) I was shocked and disturbed that someone would not only think this way, but actually post a three minute rant on YouTube. But it gets even worse: the student was apparently planning on creating a series of videos.
“My daughter wants to start a blog,” her father wrote on Facebook, saying that she’s asking for domain suggestions for “Asians on their cellphones in the library.”
An editorial in the New York Times argues that although the student is rightly being criticized for her racist video, “the university would do a great disservice to itself and the First Amendment if it goes ahead and disciplines her for the content of her words.” The editorial categorizes her offensive words as an “ethnic slur” rather than a “form of harassment against a group of students.”
In other words, the First Amendment could protect her from being officially sanctioned in any way by her university. Of course, her racist rant on YouTube might follow her around for a while, providing an unofficial document for future employers to one day consider.
What the Huck?
A new edition of Huckleberry Finn will remove the offensive words.
New South Books has just announced that its forthcoming edition of Mark Twain’s landmark novel Huckleberry Finn will be published without the n-word, that notoriously negative name for those Americans of African descent. In this new edition the n-word will be replaced with “slave.”
As most people know, the novel is a first-person narration from the view of a boy who, after becoming friends with Jim, an escaping slave, begins to question the deep-seated racism that he has always taken for granted. The son of an abusive alcoholic ignoramus, Huck can identify with the degradation of slavery and ultimately turns his back on the people he had thought were his own to protect the man he used to dismiss as just another, ahem, n-word.
Not surprisingly, the reaction has been clamorous, and the objections are both predictable and right. Huckleberry Finn is a classic of literature and should not be rewritten, even if the rewrites are small and the intent honest. It offends the memory of the author, and sets a terrible precedent. Still worse, it prevents its school-aged readers from learning an important and timely lesson: if we want to fight against racism, we can’t be afraid to confront the realities of racism.
At its best, the substitution mutes the intensity of the novel since the n-word is meant to suggest a lesser being than a white man. Thus Huck criticizes two con-men he encounters: “if ever I struck anything like it, I’m a nigger. It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.” Substituting “slave” here empties the first sentence of meaning because in our modern ears “slave” does not suggest a bad person, only a mistreated and oppressed one. Of course, Huck is a racist for saying what he says, but that is the point. Huck helps Jim despite his upbringing, even when he doesn’t understand it himself. That Twain doesn’t allow Huck to simply and immediately adopt modern progressive notions of race is a testament to his skill as a writer, for it would have made the novel silly and over-sentimental.
Worse, though, is that in some places, the changes will make a hash of important passages, because, as everyone knows, the n-word is not a synonym for slave. To be sure, in many instances, an innocent reader of the novel might read a reference to Jim as a “slave” and never notice the difference. But consider the following passage from the novel in which Huck’s deplorable father rails against the government:
Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio—a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane—the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was ‘lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin. Them’s the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me—I’ll never vote agin as long as I live. And to see the cool way of that nigger—why, he wouldn’t a give me the road if I hadn’t shoved him out o’ the way. I says to the people, why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold?—that’s what I want to know. And what do you reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn’t be sold till he’d been in the State six months, and he hadn’t been there that long yet. There, now—that’s a specimen. They call that a govment that can’t sell a free nigger till he’s been in the State six months. Here’s a govment that calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it is a govment, and yet’s got to set stock-still for six whole months before it can take a hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger, and—”
Now, go through that passage and substitute “slave” for the offending word and see what happens. It becomes nonsense. “Free slave” is a contradiction, and how could a slave be a well-to-do professor? And what will editor Alan Gribben substitute for “mulatter”? Half-slave? But more than that, the whole point of the passage is to point out the possibilities of racial progress, that there are places where, given the opportunity, African Americans have prospered, and that it is the narrow-mindedness and self-righteousness of men like Huck’s father (men to whom words like the n-word come easily) that holds them back, not any inherent limitation related to their race. If it isn’t what it is, it’s something else.
To be sure, reading Huckleberry Finn today can be supremely discomforting, and many young people might have difficulty trying to contextualize and interpret the racist language in the book. But faced with that challenge, surely saving the actual book for a later grade is a better solution than giving them a more comfortable version now.
But if that’s the case, let’s not let “later” come to mean “never.”
They spent student money on what?!
Student unions pour money into political causes that many members don’t even know about, let alone support
The story made headlines everywhere: it was Feb. 11, 2009, and Daniel Ferman was a member of Drop YFS, a group dedicated to overthrowing the York Federation of Students. Drop YFS was presenting a petition with 5,000 signatures—enough to stage a coup of sorts. They were protesting the student union’s support for a teachers’ strike, which would potentially leave students on the hook for missed class time. They were also against the union backing the Israeli Apartheid Week, which many pro-Israel students despised. As the press conference began, Ferman and his fellow Drop YFS members were faced with a crush of student union members who came in to denounce the petition rally. After a volley of shouting, the crowd moved to the Hillel student lounge where some of the Drop YFS members took refuge. “Students were barricaded in the lounge,” says Ferman, who was Hillel @ York’s president at the time and helped organize the Drop YFS effort. “It got very nasty. Police were called. There were racist slurs.”
Students like Ferman don’t think it’s the student government’s role to take sides on political issues. “I think students have every right to speak up when they feel student dollars are promoting hate and a toxic atmosphere on campus,” says Ferman. Since the 1980s, student unions have been growing in power. They take money from undergraduates every year, which is charged separate from but alongside tuition, and they’re supposed to work for students. Some of that cash funds services, such as health and dental coverage, and student athletics. But much of it goes to advocacy and clubs students may find offensive. “They’d taken very controversial stances on what to fund in pro-life versus pro-choice issues, on Tamil issues going on in Sri Lanka. On every worldwide issue, they’d taken a position,” Ferman says of the YFS, which operates with a $2-million budget. They rarely take the position he would take.
The Canadian Federation of Students—an umbrella organization for student unions—has been heavily criticized for rash advocacy using student funds. The national organization, with its provincial subsidiaries, lobbies on behalf of 600,000 student members across Canada. These “members,” who automatically gain that status if their student union is a member organization, each pay $4.01 per semester to the CFS. In 2010, that came to $3.7 million in membership fee revenue—money used to fund the not-for-profit’s advocacy work. Students also pay an average of $4 per semester to be members of their provincial CFS. That’s before student union fees, which average out at around $30 per student, depending on the school. CFS national chairperson David Molenhuis acknowledges that some of the national campaigns, such as its current effort to fight the Canadian Blood Services’ decision to ban gay men from donating blood, are hot issues—but he doesn’t think they’re controversial. “They attempt to address head-on issues that perhaps college and university administrators don’t feel comfortable addressing,” he says. Some students also feel uncomfortable with their fees going to such politically sensitive issues.
For example, last June, the CFS wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty joining the cry for a public inquiry into the “unprecedented curtailment of civil liberties” that took place at the G20. “The federation stands up for the rights of students to participate and to assemble publicly and to participate in demonstrations,” said the letter. “We defend the rights of students to mobilize in public, and the G20 is no exception.”
Some students at the University of Ottawa were upset to learn that not only does the CFS take a political stand on the G20, their own student union spent at least $1,000 to rent a coach bus to shuttle about 50 protesters to Toronto during the G20. Student Peter Flynn, who also heads up the University of Ottawa Campus Conservatives, blasted the expenditure as a “blatant misuse” of student fees. “I highly doubt that every single student who has to pay those fees would be happy to know their money was being spent to send a few individuals to protest for the weekend,” Flynn told the Ottawa Citizen.
York student Gregory Kay was also irked by his student union’s support for G20 protests. The YFS and the student union at the University of Toronto co-sponsored “Toronto vs. the G20: a teach-in.” Class included Black Bloc tactics, which ended up seeing storefronts and public property smashed during the summit in downtown Toronto. “That’s something most students don’t believe in at all,” says Kay, who is the business representative for the YFS board of directors. “Most students aren’t anti-capitalist. They’re not interested in civil disobedience.”
Of course, if students are unhappy with their student government, they aren’t doing much to change it. While voter turnout tends to be higher when contentious issues can be resolved with a ballot, the average voter turnout sits at between 25 and 30 per cent. Many students see student government as too divisive—or too inflexible—to even bother running. Ferman, for one, considered running for a seat on the executive in 2009, but couldn’t put his academic career on hold for a year as the bylaws dictate. He ran for—and won—a seat on the board of directors instead.
“It’s an interesting dichotomy—that the student president isn’t even a student,” he says. “There are lots of inherent problems with the organization, but the lack of flexibility is a major one.” In late August 2010, the university’s ombudsman released a report saying the student union’s electoral process needed a massive makeover, making recommendations Ferman believes might one day legitimize the organization. “Now the onus is on the student federation to take some of these recommendations to heart.”
Photo: Christinne Muschi/Reuters
A prof’s view of the Ryerson racism report
Academic life gets complicated when tolerance and freedom clash.
Ryerson University released its sweeping report into racism on campus, yesterday, and the full text of the report was just made available on its web site today. Looking over its recommendations, one sees numerous suggestions that will, if implemented, surely make Ryerson a better place. Still, in the areas where the report deals with the issues of warming the “chilly climate” at the University, especially when it comes to teaching, I suspect many readers will be struck by just how vexing the intellectual problems are.
Related: Ryerson racism probe seeks to coddle students
These questions are not unique to Ryerson, of course. I arrived at the University of Western Ontario as an undergraduate when the furor was raging over psychologist Phillipe Rushton and his research on racial differences; my view then was the same as it is now, that Rushton’s work should be judged by his peers in the field of psychology, not by protesters or politicians. Not too long after that, a scathing report came out at Western about the “chilly climate” for women on campus, which sparked wide-spread debate. Here at my own university, I was once shocked when student advocates told members of my school that we should never use racist language, even if it meant avoiding teaching classics of literature like Huckleberry Finn. We didn’t have the skills, we were told, to deal with the complexities of the issue.
I have been to Ryerson, by the way, though I did not spend enough time there to know it intimately, so I freely admit that I cannot speak to the specific conditions there. But I do find the larger questions intriguing, and would like to venture a few more thoughts occasioned by the new report.
Consider, for example, recommendation 6C, which calls for a stronger anti-discrimination policy at the school, and for every course outline to include a statement to the effect that all individuals are to be treated “with respect and dignity.” So far, so good. I include such a statement in my own syllabi, though my university does not require it. But note carefully what follows:
UBC study finds people with foreign names face job discrimination
Prof says more research is needed to determine if behaviour is intentional
The answer to the age-old question “What’s in a name?” may well be plenty of discrimination, according to a new University of British Columbia study.
UBC economics professor Philip names even if they have the same education and experience as those with English names. “Some individuals at the margin are not getting interviews because of their name,” Oreopoulos said Wednesday, adding that the employers involved may be contravening the Human Rights Act.
“It is illegal and there is some element of unfairness.”
As part of his research, Oreopoulos tailored 6,000 mock resumes to specific job requirements in 20 occupational categories and sent them to employers with online job postings in the Greater Toronto area.
Each resume listed a bachelor’s degree and up to six years of experience but the study found resumes with names like Jill Wilson or John Martin received interview callbacks 40 per cent more often than identical resumes with names like Sana Khan or Lei Li.
Oreopoulos said the findings help to explain why skilled immigrants arriving under Canada’s point system – with university degrees and significant work experience – fare poorly in today’s labour market.
“Despite this policy, they don’t seem to be doing as well as expected,” Oreopoulos said, adding that he was surprised by the study’s results.
“I wasn’t expecting the gap by name alone to be so large,” he said. “It defined as much of a gap as another study found between blacks and whites in the U.S.”
The professor said he chose to conduct the study in Toronto because of its position as Canada’s largest and most multicultural city and he cautioned against accusing employers of blatant racism.
He said more research is needed to determine whether the behaviour is intentional.
“In settings where people are making split-second decisions like going through piles of resumes and making decisions based on uncertain ambiguous criteria, that’s the environment where people may be making subconscious, stereotype decisions,” Oreopoulos said.
Police investigating after CFS-Ontario receives racist mail
Kenyan students called “refugee dog” in hateful letter, group says
Police in Toronto are investigating after racist hate mail was delivered to the Ontario office of the Canadian Federation of Students.
The federation says the mail was received late last month following the launch of its province-wide task force to study racism on college and university campuses.
The envelope contained a recent editorial cartoon from the New York Post that was accused of having racist overtones, and a picture of federation representative Hildah Otieno, a student from Kenya.
On the clippings, words such as “refugee dog” and “KKK” were written.
Otieno said that after much discussion, the group decided to make the incident public.
The federation’s Task Force on Campus Racism is holding hearings through April and will then prepare a report to be released this fall.
- The Canadian Press
Tensions rise over Israeli Apartheid Week
“Two wrongs don’t make a right, and two rights make nothing but trouble.”
Coinciding with the start of “Israeli Apartheid Week” on campuses across the country, the National Post is taking a front-page look at the controversial event.
Running from March 1 to 8, the protest, which started in 2005 in Toronto, is set to take place in more than 40 cities worldwide. For students on all sides, even those who try not to get involved, on-campus tension leading up to and surrounding the event can get extreme.
According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish organization, the event is “a worldwide campaign to demonize Israel and intimidate students and faculty who support the Jewish State” that has “grown in scope and viciousness.”
In January, the University of Manitoba banned three posters advertising the event, commonly referred to as IAW. “One of them depicted a Jewish fighter plane targeting a baby stroller. Another featured a caricature of a hooked-nosed Hasidic Jew with a star of David, pointing a bazooka at the nose of an Arab carrying a slingshot; a third one showed an Israeli helicopter with a swastika on top, dropping a bomb on a baby bottle,” says the Post.
Coleman OnCampus: Carleton should have allowed Apartheid Week poster
A month later, the University of Ottawa and Carleton University banned a poster featuring a scary-looking helicopter labelled “ISRAEL” dive-bombing a small Arab boy holding a teddy bear. Both universities are allowing the week-long events on their campuses to continue, although at Carleton, the university’s provost sent an email to all students warning them that they could be expelled if their activism violated university policies.
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.”
Queen’s cans dialogue facilitator program
Students and faculty felt the university atmosphere was “poisoned,” says committee
After outcry from students and faculty, and on recommendations made by an advisory panel, Queen’s University is cancelling its dialogue facilitator program.
In an announcement made Feb. 11, Patrick Deane, vice-president academic for the university said the Intergroup Dialogue Pilot Program in Residences will be terminated, although its six trained facilitators will complete their year’s engagement by assisting “generally” with diversity issues.
The program was introduced in response to a series of racist incidents at the school, including derogatory vandalism on university and student property and an attack on a faculty member.
It drew immediate attention from the media and in December, the university assembled an advisory panel made up of a student representative, a former political science professor, and a law school alumnus who is also a former Ontario Cabinet minister and former chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission.
In their final report, the group stated that while they found no evidence of unwarranted intrusion into students’ privacy in residence, the impression conveyed by the media and shared by faculty and graduates was that the program invited it.
“Many members of the university community found that this possibility made them feel very uncomfortable and that it poisoned the university atmosphere,” said the group’s report. “The adverse reaction to [the program] on campus and outside has damaged its credibility so severely that even the pilot stage should be discontinued.”
When the program was first announced, some public officials publicly supported it, although with various caveats
Barbara Hall, chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission said it sounded like an “innovative tool” that could be effective if done well by well-trained people. However, she said students were going to have to feel comfortable with the initiative.
In its final conclusions, the panel said alternative means of confronting diversity issues in residences should be explored. However, the report’s final statement warns against initiating programs that appear to threaten full expression and exchange of ideas on campus, which should never be implemented at the expense of the university’s academic mission.
