The conceit of deceit (The Economist):

YOU are deciding between two magazines to read. The one you choose just happens to feature photos of women in very small swimsuits. But you do not, you claim, pick that particular magazine for the bathing beauties; it happens to have more interesting articles, or better coverage of copper mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. You will say this even in the midst of a lab experiment that has been set up so that the only possible difference between the two magazines is the presence (or absence) of swimsuits.

Such was the finding of Zoë Chance, a doctoral student, and Michael Norton, a marketing professor, both at Harvard Business School. The pair were investigating how people justify “questionable” behaviour (Mr Norton’s word) to themselves after the fact. They asked 23 male students to choose between two sports magazines, one with broader coverage and one with more feature articles. The magazine which also happened to contain a special swimsuit issue was picked three-quarters of the time, regardless of the other content. But asked why they chose that particular magazine, the subjects pointed to either the sports coverage or the greater number of features—whichever happened to accompany the bikinis.

This may not seem surprising: the joke about reading Playboy for the articles is so old Ms Chance and Mr Norton borrowed it for the title of their working paper. But it is the latest in a series of experiments exploring how people behave in ways they think might be frowned upon, and then explain how their motives are actually squeaky clean. Managers, for example, have been found to favour male applicants at hypothetical job interviews by claiming that they were searching for a candidate with either greater education or greater experience, depending on the attribute with which the man could trump the woman. In another experiment, people chose to watch a movie in a room already occupied by a person in a wheelchair when an adjoining room was showing the same film, but decamped when the movie in the next room was different (thus being able to claim that they were not avoiding the disabled person but just choosing a different film to watch). As Ms Chance puts it: “People will do what they want to do, and then find reasons to support it.”

[...]

Via MindHacks:

I recommend reading the original study. It’s very accessibly written, and if you read nothing else, skip to page 9 (page 10 of the pdf file) and read the section entitled ‘Are People Aware That They are Justifying?’.

One of the key insights from psychology and one of the most practically applicable findings (particularly in clinical work) is that people’s explanations for why they do something are not necessarily a reliable guide to what influences their behaviour.

This also goes for ourselves and there are probably many areas in our life where we justify our actions, good or bad, with comfortable, plausible, fantasies.

Links:

• The conceit of deceit (The Economist)
• I only read it for the articles (MindHacks)
• “I read Playboy for the articles”: Justifying and Rationalizing Questionable Preferences (HBS Working Knowledge)
• “I read Playboy for the articles”: Justifying and Rationalizing Questionable Preferences Full Working Paper Text (PDF)

Are you currently unemployed? According to the new Canadian citizenship guidebook for prospective immigrants, over 8.6% of unemployed Canadians are not fulfilling the Canadian responsibility of having a job, which now comes with the rights of having a Canadian citizenship.

The new Canadian citizenship guidebook was unveiled last week, redefining what it means to be Canadian. After all, new Canadian immigrants are more likely to be unemployed, which must mean—according to the authors of the guidebook—that their economic difficulties are a result of their failure adopt Canadian values. In addition, the new guidebook tells prospective immigrants, “Canada’s openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, “honour killings,” female genital mutilation, or other gender-based violence.”

Firstly, earlier this year, a University of British Columbia study found that resumés with English names received 40 percent more callbacks from Toronto employers than identical resumés with Chinese, Indian, or Pakistani names. Canadian employers are engaging in name-based discrimination against job applicants, which has a substantial effect on the employment rate of immigrants, since most Canadian immigrants today originate from Asia (58.3%).

Secondly, the new guidebook suggests that non-Canadians who are thinking of acquiring Canadian citizenship are more prone to barbarism compared to people who were born inside Canada. Additionally, the authors of the guidebook make special mentions of “honour killings” and “female genital mutilation” among non-Canadian prospective Canadians, which normalizes the culture of post-9/11 Islamophobia into government documents.

Most Canadians seem to believe that the post-9/11 rise in news coverage of “honour killings” and “female genital mutilation” done by Muslims reflects an increase in “Muslim fundamentalism” post 9/11. According to their worldview, after September 11th, 2001, Muslims all over the world (separated by different languages and geography) collaborated together to further incense the global anti-Muslim anger by engaging in cultural practices that offended Western sensibilities, and it has nothing to do with U.S. propaganda using Orientalism to justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Sadly, the new Canadian citizenship guide for immigrants reflects what most Canadians fear the most about immigrants (i.e., that they might be Muslim or Arab, and that they might be “barbaric”), not what most immigrants are (i.e., Chinese, Indian, and Filipin@, of various faiths and non-faiths, and, of course, decent people of all ethnicities and religious/non-religious identities). Like before, the federal government under Conservative leadership entrenches more xenophobic attitudes into the institutional systems of Canada.

In 2007, Hérouxville, Quebec—a small rural town where almost everyone is white, French-speaking, and Catholic—created a code of conduct for immigrants, and it was widely criticized for being ridiculous and xenophobic. The code of conduct ruled that immigrants should not stone women in public, burn them alive, burn them with acid, or circumcise them.

Back in 2007, the world rightly recognized that the Hérouxville code of conduct for immigrants was xenophobic and absurd. However, in 2009, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney unveils an eerily similar Canadian code of conduct for immigrants, and very few Canadians recognize it as the very same xenophobic absurdity on a larger scale.

Apology sought after U of T students cause uproar with blackface for Halloween (Globe & Mail):

Five students dressed as members of the Jamaican bobsled team received costume award

A University of Toronto student group is demanding public apologies from organizers of a Halloween party after participants wearing dark makeup were given a costume prize.

Five students, who were dressed as members of the Jamaican bobsled team and covered their faces with brown makeup, received the award from an elected student representative of one of the U of T’s colleges.

The costumes and award became intensely controversial after the Torontoist blog posted a story and photo of the men. Some argue the makeup deeply offended blacks and should never have been recognized with an award. Those on the other side say the costumes were innocent and that detractors are overreacting.

The debate was expected to bubble over last night at a town hall meeting organized by the U of T’s Black Students’ Association. The group says the costumes perpetuate blackface, the theatrical makeup associated with biased portrayals of blacks, and are as offensive as wearing Nazi regalia. A Facebook posting generated more than 300 comments, many of them heated.

“Using blackface as a costume, I think it’s wrong in any context,” said Dawn Samuel, president of the BSA. “It’s hard because some people unwittingly do things, but at the same time you need to recognize it for what it is.”

The BSA is demanding that student party organizers from three colleges – St. Michael’s College, University College and Victoria University – publish apologies in their colleges’ newspapers.

“The issue for most people was not the students that were in the costume, but the fact that they were praised,” said Daniella Kyei, vice-president of equity for the U of T students’ union.

Catherine Brown, president of Victoria University’s Student Administrative Council, said that while the three colleges organized the Oct. 29 Halloween party, only representatives from St. Michael’s College decided to award a costume prize.

“We regret that this insensitive costume was documented as one of the best costumes of the night,” she said.

Officials from St. Michael’s College Student Union did not return messages yesterday.

In a post on the Torontoist website last week, Deryn, the student who awarded the prize the day after the event, apologized and said he didn’t think the costumes would cause offence. But, after reading up about blackface, he wrote that he “felt embarrassed and upset over my own ignorance in how potentially offensive something of this nature could be.” The costume award consisted of free admission to the group’s next party, worth $5.

In a separate post, the students who dressed as the Jamaican Bobsled Team said they didn’t intend to offend anyone and were trying to portray the characters in the movie, Cool Runnings, a comedy based on the Jamaican national bobsled team’s debut at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary.

The group consisted of four white students who wore brown makeup. One also sported a black wig. In addition, a Trinidadian student wore white makeup to portray the movie’s coach, played by John Candy.

“This movie played a large part in our childhoods, and we simply wanted to express our feelings towards it with realistic costumes, which in this case included skin color,” the post says.

They also wrote: “Would things be different if we dressed as Barack Obama, the leader of the free world? We believe so …”

(Several years ago, I came across a webpage listing all blackface party incidents in universities up to that year. It was a very long list. If you have the link, please drop it in the comments.)

Related posts:

• Canadians tolerate white racism against blacks, even in Toronto. by Restructure!
• Let’s Have a Racist Hallowe’en, Part II by Jenn at Reappropriate!
• Your annual Halloween post (October 30, 2009) by resistance at Resist racism – “Reminding you Just Don’t Do It. Because it’s not about interpretation or intention.”
• Canada’s integration problem is racism, not multiculturalism: study by Restructure!

Sometimes a white person says something about people of colour that is untrue, and when you correct her, the white person will insist that she is right because she read it in a book.

You know that it is untrue because you do not (or somebody you know does not) fit into that generalization; thus, it is inaccurate to say that people of colour have that property, without qualifiers. For some reason, the white person believes that the written word should override the lived experiences of people of colour, even when that book is a fictional portrayal of, a study of, or an interpretation of our lived experiences.

Note that to give priority to one’s lived experience over a book in this case is not a case of anti-intellectualism. (However, it is probably often dismissed as anti-intellectualism by the white person, because of the assumption that people of colour are against book learnin’ and are opposed to something because it comes from a book.) Instead, disproving a universal claim by using one counterexample is an application of predicate logic.

To disprove the claim, “All X have property P,” all you need to do is to show, “There exists an X without property P.”

For example, in the documentary Bowling for Columbine (which won numerous awards, including an Oscar and a Cannes Film Festival award), Michael Moore claims that Canadians don’t look their doors. However, I am Canadian and I lock my door, so obviously, Moore’s claim is false. (Other Canadians I know also lock their doors, and most have installed alarm systems as well.)

Another example is that certain books about Asian culture may claim that in Asian families, the husband is the head of the household and the wife is subservient. However, I know several Asian families consisting of a wife and a husband, in which the wife is the head of the household and the husband is subservient. Obviously, this claim about male dominance in Asian families is false.

In books and other media published in white-majority countries, the same stereotypes of people of colour appear over and over again, because stories by people of colour that challenge those stereotypes are often deemed inauthentic, and are thus rejected for publication or mass distribution. White liberals, and even white anti-racists, may read one book or several books relaying the same themes and conclusions about the lives of people of colour. They are usually unaware that the visibility of books about the lives of people of colour—even those authored by people of colour—are subject to the selective pressures of white approval, in both publication and popularity. They are not fully aware of their white privilege, that even when they read books about people of colour, authored by people of colour, these books may still be catering to their white lens and reaffirming their racial preconceptions.

Again, when you challenge these single stories in published books with our own diverse stories from our lived experiences, we are dismissed again, simply because what we say contradicts the book, or multiple books of the same type, perhaps all referencing the same classic text of a single story that became canonical (at a time before the Civil Rights Movement), and set the precedent for all derivative works on the topic. When we try to educate white people through our own volition and attempt to expose them to the world outside of books, racial stereotyping allows them to assume that we oppose books in theory, not the content of most books in practice.

There is nothing wrong with encoding stories and information into written text. However, when a white person assumes that the books she reads about people of colour tell the whole story, it is yet another demonstration of her white privilege.

Male doctors earn £15,000 a year more than women, study reveals (The Guardian):

There is an average salary gap of £15,245 between men and women among the UK’s 135,000 medics, according to a report by the British Medical Association. After excluding differences owing to age, experience and area of specialism, the study found that female consultants typically earn £5,500 less than their male peers and female junior doctors’ pay is around £2,000 below that of their male counterparts. The research, to be published on Friday, is the first to investigate differences in doctors’ salaries.

“Our results show that men and women with identical experience and expertise are paid differently – which suggests evidence of discrimination,” concludes the report, which has been funded by the BMA, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, Imperial College London and the Medical Women’s Federation.

via brinstar.mp

Women IT professionals earn 13% less than men IT professionals, according to BCS. In other words, men in IT are paid 15% more than women in IT.

(Note that the Y axis does not start at £0.)

(Via The F-Word via Geek Feminism Blog)

Question: How does racism hurt white people?

Answers:

1. Racism sharply reduces white people’s chance opportunities in life to acquire new knowledge or new perspectives from intelligent or wise people.*
2. Racism causes white people to overestimate their abilities and to underestimate their own weaknesses. It prevents them from knowing themselves and stunts their personal growth.
3. Racism reduces white people’s chances of receiving help from others in times of desperation.
4. Racism compromises white people’s physical safety.**
5. Racism prevents white people from empathizing with and understanding human beings.

If a white person takes racism seriously only when it hurts “white people”, then the white person does not see the humanity or equality of people of colour. An anti-racist framework should not encourage or reinforce white in-group bias. Nonetheless, it is interesting that racism actually harms white people.

* resistance of Resist racism claims that racism reduces white people’s ability to think critically, but I claim that racism is a manifestation of critical thinking failure, not a cause of it.

** See also: The Cripocalypse (Trigger Warning) by Kateryna Fury at Texual Fury.

Related links:

• fail to see how racism harms white people by Macon D at stuff white people do
• How does racism harm white people? comments at Resist racism

We are multifaceted.

And stories in which we neither suffer nor resist are just as authentic. They are a part of our daily lives.

(Click on “View subtitles” to turn on the subtitles.)

Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story (TED Talks) transcript:

I’m a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call “the danger of the single story.” I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader. And what I read were British and American children’s books.

I was also an early writer. And when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading. All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples. And they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn’t have snow. We ate mangoes. And we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story.

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books, by their very nature, had to have foreigners in them, and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren’t many of them available. And they weren’t quite as easy to find as the foreign books.

But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized.

Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.

I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So the year I turned eight we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn’t finish my dinner my mother would say, “Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.” So I felt enormous pity for Fide’s family.

Then one Saturday we went to his village to visit. And his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket, made of dyed raffia, that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them is how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.

Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listed to what she called my “tribal music,” and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.

What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning, pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa. A single story of catastrophe. In this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her, in any way. No possibility of feelings more complex than pity. No possibility of a connection as human equals.

I must say that before I went to the U.S. I didn’t consciously identify as African. But in the U.S. whenever Africa came up people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity. And in many ways I think of myself now as African. Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country. The most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in “India, Africa and other countries.”

So after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate’s response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves, and waiting to be saved, by a kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide’s family.

This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Locke, who sailed to west Africa in 1561, and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as “beasts who have no houses,” he writes, “They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts.”

Now, I’ve laughed every time I’ve read this. And one must admire the imagination of John Locke. But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West. A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet, Rudyard Kipling, are “half devil, half child.”

And so I began to realize that my American roommate must have, throughout her life, seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not “authentically African.” Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places. But I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. In fact I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore they were not authentically African.

But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the time, was tense. And there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.

I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself. So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is “nkali.” It’s a noun that loosely translates to “to be greater than another.” Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali. How they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story, and to start with, “secondly.” Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have and entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.

I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called “American Psycho” — and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation.

I would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. And now, this is not because I am a better person than that student, but, because of America’s cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America.

When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me. But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family.

But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our firetrucks did not have water. I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education, so that sometimes my parents were not paid their salaries. And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives.

All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience, and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes. There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo. And depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe. And it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them.

I’ve always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.

So what if before my Mexican trip I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? What if my mother had told us that Fide’s family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls “a balance of stories.”

What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Mukta Bakaray, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don’t read literature. He disagreed. He felt that people who could read, would read, if you made literature affordable and available to them.

Shortly after he published my first novel I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview. And a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, “I really liked your novel. I didn’t like the ending. Now you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen …” And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. Now I was not only charmed, I was very moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. She had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel.

Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Fumi Onda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music? Talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers. What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband’s consent before renewing their passports? What if my roommate knew about Nollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds? Films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce. What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse ambition?

Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government. But also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer. And it is amazing to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories.

My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust. And we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist, and providing books for state schools that don’t have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories. Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.

The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her southern relatives who had moved to the north. She introduced them to a book about the southern life that they had left behind. “They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained.” I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. Thank you.

Via Thea Lim at Racialicious.

Slideshow by Terri Oda:

Click on the play button to advance to the next slide.

(via Geek Feminism)

Undercover job hunters reveal huge race bias in Britain’s workplaces (18 October 2009):

A government sting operation targeting hundreds of employers across Britain has uncovered widespread racial discrimination against workers with African and Asian names.

Researchers sent nearly 3,000 job applications under false identities in an attempt to discover if employers were discriminating against jobseekers with foreign names. Using names recognisably from three different communities – Nazia Mahmood, Mariam Namagembe and Alison Taylor – false identities were created with similar experience and qualifications. Every false applicant had British education and work histories.

They found that an applicant who appeared to be white would send nine applications before receiving a positive response of either an invitation to an interview or an encouraging telephone call. Minority candidates with the same qualifications and experience had to send 16 applications before receiving a similar response.

[...]

It also finds that public sector employers were less likely to have discriminated on the grounds of race than those in the private sector.

One reason for this discrepancy, according to the conclusion, is the use of standard application forms in the public sector which hide or disguise the ethnicity of an applicant. The research is also understood to have found that larger employers were less likely to discriminate than small employers.

Read the rest of the article at the Guardian.

This is the British version of the Canadian and American studies which found widespread discrimination against job applicants with names perceived as belonging to non-white people.

The existence of racism is why Affirmative Action/Employment Equity/positive action for racial minorities is necessary (and still insufficient) for attenuating white privilege in the job market.

• Canadian resumés with English names are 40% more likely to secure a job interview, study finds by Restructure!

If a white person takes what a person of colour says seriously, it does not imply that the white person does not question the claims of the person of colour. If a white person takes what a person of colour says seriously, it means that the white person does not dismiss the claims of the person of colour. “Dismissing” includes the white person considering what a person of colour has said and then rejecting it because he has never experienced it himself and has never heard of such a thing before, and then reconsidering it later only because enough people of colour started telling him the same thing.

That you have never experienced something yourself is not a valid reason to reject another person’s experience. If you are white and a person of colour mentions something that you have never experienced before, it does not mean that the person of colour must be lying or hallucinating. It could mean that you are not omniscient, and not more knowledgeable about everything than any person of colour. Given these two possibilities—either you are (i) not omniscient and not more knowledgeable about everything than any person of colour, or (ii) the person of colour must be lying or hallucinating—there is a higher probability that you are ignorant about something, and the person of colour is telling the truth and not suffering from hallucinations.

That you have never heard of a claim before is not a valid reason to reject the claim. The truth of a claim is independent of how many times you have encountered the claim, and whether or not you have encountered it previously. If you are white and a person of colour makes a claim that you have not heard from other people of colour, it does not mean that this person of colour is wrong. It could mean that you have a tendency to think of people of colour as monolith with a shared singular racial experience instead of as individuals with diverse experiences. It could also mean that you are not omniscient, and that there exist some true claims of which you are unaware. (It could also mean that you do not have as many friends of colour as you would like to believe.)

All claims should be examined and questioned using reason, but prejudiced dismissal or incredulity is not critical thinking. The common problem with white people is not that they analyze the claims of people of colour too much, but rather not at all.

• The cost of racism by resistance at Resist racism
• question non-white knowledge and authority by RVCBard at Stuff White People Do
• Stuff White People Say: “If more POC than just you complained, I would reconsider” by Restructure! at Stuff White People Say
• Stuff White People Say: “Does ‘listening’ to people of color mean letting them vent?” by Restructure! at Stuff White People Say
• Stuff White People Say: “Then how am I supposed to generalize the racial experiences of people of color?” by Restructure! at Stuff White People Say

Nerd Assertiveness and Blindness To Privilege (guest post) by Matt Kopas at Sociological Images (emphasis mine):

Today’s XKCD strip bothers me, a little. It reminds me of the discussion about assertiveness amongst nerd guys brought up when Gabe and Tycho at Penny Arcade were talking about “pick-up artists” (PUAs) a while back.

[...] But I also think that messages like the XKCD strip really reinforce that idea of isolation and make the world out to be filled with potential mates — if only you’d just talk to them! There’s some truth here, in that it’s pretty hard to meet people if you find it hard to talk to communicate with others. But the more insidious, unintended message I’m seeing is one that just feeds into the PUA logic — given enough confidence and skills, all women are yours for the taking.

myoxisbroken of the XKCD forum said it best:

Because so goddamn many of you [nerd-men] believe, for whatever reason, that interacting with women is like solving a Rubik’s cube that turns into a Fleshlight when you win.

Generally, I like XKCD because it’s geeky and normally not sexist—something quite rare in the geek community. Randall portrays both male and female geeks in his comics, which undermines the male geek assumption that geekiness is unique to men.

However, this particular “Creepy” comic, along a few other XKCD comics, is problematic and reinforces problematic behaviours among heterosexual male geeks. “Creepy” promotes the pick up artist logic, a.k.a., women work like dating sims.

Another thing that bothers me about the “Creepy” comic is the stereotype that netbooks are best suited for women and that “cuteness” is some kind of salient property of a woman’s computer.

If I had a netbook on the subway and some man told me that it was “cute”, I would think that he was sexist, and therefore a creep. I have an XO “laptop”, but I would think that its power-saving features, its electronic-paper-like display, and the fact that it was built to run Linux are more salient features for me than its “cuteness”. A netbook is not a purse.

• Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced by Phaedra Starling at Kate Harding’s Shapely Prose

Only 36% of Canadians would vote for the Conservative Party if a federal election was held the next day, according to an EKOS poll conducted in late September. The votes of the other 64% of Canadians are fractured among the centre-left Liberal Party and three left-wing parties: New Democratic Party (NDP), Green, and Bloc Québécois.

The problem is our first-past-the-post or plurality voting system, in which the party that receives the most votes wins, regardless of not being the absolute majority.

An alternative voting principle is proportional representation, which is being advocated by Canadian groups for electoral reform, such as Electoral Reform Canada and Fair Vote Canada.

When a newspaper publishes an article about a recent scientific study concerning humans, it is almost expected that people with a political agenda will pick and choose parts of the article that support their view, and ignore those parts that invalidate it. The science writers may even intentionally and deliberately insert clarifications and disclaimers to make sure the article is inconsistent with a popular incorrect political view, but people with an agenda will ignore the clarifications and disclaimers because they don’t understand it, they reject nuances, or because they simply ignore information that does not fit into their worldview.

However, sometimes members of the public will also take into account the public’s tendency politicize controversial studies, and then accuse the study’s researchers of “knowing” that their study could be used to support a political agenda and conducting the study with the “intention” to stir up controversy and support said political agenda.

Of course, this is a complete misunderstanding of how scientific research works. Almost all scientific studies are not done to educate the general public; they are done to explore the unexplored territory in the field. The primary audience of a scientific paper is other scientists in the field. Only after the original paper endures years of debate and replications among the scientific community do the new findings make it into the canon of an undergraduate textbook. Most published studies do not make it into this canon, and are read by only a small circle of specialists.

In other words, many members of the public assume that scientific studies are conducted for them instead of for other scientists. Given this assumption, it is not too much of logical leap for them to suppose that the scientists conducted a particular controversial study with the nefarious intention to advance a political (e.g., right-wing) agenda.

One way to avoid the possibility of misinterpretation is to hide the results of scientific studies from the general public, but this is unethical, it keeps the general public scientifically illiterate, and it creates distrust when information is restricted to an elite few.

Another way to avoid misinterpretation is to somehow teach the general public that scientists are even more aloof and detached from practical concerns than they had initially assumed. Scientific studies are not conducted for the general public and taxpayer in mind, but for other scientists to discuss among themselves. The literature generated through government-funded scientific research does not benefit the public directly, but indirectly, after a collection of scientific studies finds a practical application in some indeterminate time in the future. However, this explanation is complex, requires an understanding of the sociology of science (which is another poorly understood topic), and may also generate public distrust.

Noticing a person’s skin colour is natural. You are not “color blind” when it comes to race.

An example is the politically controversial notion that humans process skin colour at a basic perceptual level, i.e., vision-enabled humans cannot be “color blind” when it comes to skin colour. There are many psychology and neuroscience studies that support this. However, since the general public assumes that noticing race makes you racist, such studies could be interpreted as suggesting that racism is innate and natural.

Again, hiding these studies on race perception from the general public is unethical, and telling the general public that the study was not intended to be read by the hoi polloi is offensive. White liberals may object to the study’s coverage because it could support the right-wing idea that racism is natural, so it is okay to be racist. However, by preventing this research from reaching the general public, white liberals would also be protecting the common, white-privileged, and white liberal idea that they can and should be racially “color blind”.

In other words, the idea that it is natural for humans to notice skin colour would be perceived as a “right wing” idea by a typical white liberal, but the same idea would be perceived as “left wing” by a typical anti-racist person of colour who is sick of white liberals preaching racial “color blindness” and assuming that the problem is race instead of racism. By suppressing or dismissing such studies that do not fit into the standard white liberal discourse, white liberals again ensure that they direct the liberal conversation about race, and define what is and is not a progressive racial idea.

• Seeing Race and Seeming Racist? Whites Go Out of Their Way to Avoid Talking About Race (APA)

In 1979, some White Canadians believed that Chinese Canadian university students were “foreign” students taking the places of “Canadians” in Canadian universities. They produced a program about it, called, Campus Giveaway, which aired on CTV’s W5.

However, in 1979 and 1980, a group of Chinese Canadians formed an ad hoc Council of Chinese Canadians, rallied and marched against the Campus Giveaway program, and took legal action against CTV. The protesters chanted, “Red, brown, black, yellow, and white! All Canadians must unite!” outside CTV’s offices.

Here is a transcript of Protesting racism on TV, a CBC News clip from 1980 covering the W5 incident:

Reporter: A protest movement is gaining momentum in metro against the CTV television network and its public affairs program, W5. Last September, W5 aired a program called Campus Giveaway, which focused on “foreign” students in Canadian universities. Protesters say the show implies that foreign students, and Chinese students in particular, are taking the places of “Canadian” students in universities, an implication they say “smacks of racism”.

Wong [with an embarrassingly thick Cantonese accent, which is not representative of the English ability of Chinese Canadians in general]: We are concerned about the W5 program, because it gives the viewers the image that Canadians equals, ah, Chinese students equals foreign students, by selectively showing only the Chinese faces as representing foreign students [...] We are asking CTV network to give the public an apology, because of the distortion and exaggeration of statistics that it [uses] in the program, and also that it smacks of racism in the program.

Reporter: The committee says that one example of misleading statistics quoted in the show is that there are at least 100,000 foreign students in our schools. Wong says he has evidence that there are only half that many. He’s also angered by pictures from the program portraying Chinese students as foreigners. Wong says most of the Chinese students shown are actually Canadian citizens.

Reporter: A rally and a march are being organized this weekend in front of CTV headquarters. Many other ethnic groups and university organizations are expected to attend. The Council of Chinese Canadians has taken legal action against CTV over the controversial program. Because the issue is before the courts, CTV is withholding comment, but they do say that they support the W5 program, and no clarification or apology has been made for its contents.

In a recent Globe & Mail article (with a title that reinforces the stereotype that Asians are quiet, when the article is about Asian activism) Tom Hawthorn interviewed some Chinese Canadians who were university students in 1980:

Victor Wong was studying science at the University of British Columbia when Campus Giveaway aired on the popular program W5 (today known as W-Five ).

“It touched many of us,” he said Tuesday. “The message was: Because of your skin colour, or your ethnic heritage, you don’t belong here. You’re just taking up someone’s space.”

Sid Tan was also studying at UBC in 1979.

“They were calling a bunch of Canadians foreigners. It was quite disgusting and quite off the mark,” he said. “I remember it as a galvanizing experience.”

Anthony Chan, a communications professor born in Victoria, recalls the shock.

“We’re going, ‘Huh?! They’re saying we’re foreigners. They can’t be serious.’ ”

The report alleged that Canadian students were being prevented from studying medicine and engineering because foreign students were occupying their rightful place in university classrooms. Much of the segment focused on the plight of a student from Ontario who was thwarted in her aspiration to study pharmacy at the University of Toronto.

[...]

Even 30 years later, Dr. Wong is baffled by the airing of footage in which any Asian face was presumed to be non-Canadian.

[...]

The committee had identified all of the unnamed students shown in the report. Not one was a foreign student.

The W5 incident occurred thirty years ago, but many White Canadians in 2009 still feel that Chinese Canadians and other Asian Canadians in universities are taking away spots belonging to White Canadians.

Many White Canadians still conflate Asian students with foreign students, and vice versa. When many graduate students consist of international students from China, India, and Europe, White Canadians perceive the international students from China as evidence that Chinese Canadians are doing very well educationally.

These pervasive assumptions arise from the two primary and persistent stereotypes about Asians:

1. All Asians are the same; which inevitably leads to
2. All Asians are foreigners.

When White Canadians fail to distinguish between Asian individuals, the fact that some Asians are foreigners is going to lead them to believe that all Asians are foreigners. Conversely, when White Canadians fail to distinguish between Asian individuals, the fact that many graduate students are Asian international students leads them to believe that Asian Canadians are a model minority.

• Unintentional Whitening of U. of California? by Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed (February 5, 2009)

Figure 1. German (blue) versus Chinese (red) opinions, according to a German art exhibit. The piece was created by a German-educated Chinese woman named Yang Liu. Compare this symbolism with the term “Chinese fire drill”.

Excepted from East meets west: How the brain unites us all [HTML] [PDF] by Ed Yong (via MindHacks):

AS A SPECIES, we possess remarkably little genetic variation, yet we tend to overlook this homogeneity and focus instead on differences between groups and individuals. At its darkest, this tendency generates xenophobia and racism, but it also has a more benign manifestation – a fascination with the exotic.

Nowhere is our love affair with otherness more romanticised than in our attitudes towards the cultures of east and west. Artists and travellers have long marvelled that on opposite sides of the globe, the world’s most ancient civilisations have developed distinct forms of language, writing, art, literature, music, cuisine and fashion. As advances in communications, transport and the internet shrink the modern world, some of these distinctions are breaking down. But one difference is getting more attention than ever: the notion that easterners and westerners have distinct world views.

Psychologists have conducted a wealth of experiments that seem to support popular notions that easterners have a holistic world view, rooted in philosophical and religious traditions such as Taoism and Confucianism, while westerners tend to think more analytically, as befits their philosophical heritage of reductionism, utilitarianism and so on. However, the most recent research suggests that these popular stereotypes are far too simplistic. It is becoming apparent that we are all capable of thinking both holistically and analytically – and we are starting to understand what makes individuals flip between the two modes of thought.

One of the pioneers of this research is Richard Nisbett from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. [...]

[...]

Time and again, studies like [those by Nisbett and others] seem to support the same basic, contrasting pattern of thought. Westerners appear to perceive the world in an analytic way, narrowing their focus onto prominent objects, lumping them into categories and examining them through logic. Easterners take a more holistic view: they are more likely to consider an object’s context and analyse it through its changing relationships with its environment.

Nisbett has suggested that historical cultural factors are the key to understanding these differences. The intensive, large-scale agriculture of ancient China involved complex cooperation among farmers and strict hierarchies from emperor down to peasant. “You had to pay attention to what other people were doing and you had to obey orders,” he explains. “These kinds of strong social constraints on behaviour have been characteristic of east Asian life ever since.” The situation in ancient Greece, often thought of as the fount of western culture, was very different: agriculture on such a scale was impossible and most occupations did not require interactions with large numbers of people. The Greeks led independent lives and valued individualism. That allowed them to focus better on objects and goals in isolation, without being overly constrained by the needs of others – traits that persist to this day in western culture. “If that story is all correct, it’s not east versus west, it’s interdependence versus independence,” says Nisbett.

False dichotomy?

Certainly it is appealing to think that a single dimension – individualism/collectivism – can account for much of the difference in people’s behaviour around the world. That might explain why many psychologists have been happy to go along with it. However, recently it has become apparent that the east-west dichotomy is not as clear-cut as this.

For a start, the simplistic notion of individualistic westerners and collectivist easterners is undermined by studies designed to assess how people see themselves, which suggest that there is a continuum of these traits across the globe. In terms of individualism, for example, western Europeans seem to lie about midway between people in the US and those in east Asia. So it’s not all that surprising, perhaps, that other studies find that local and current social factors rather than the broad sweeps of history or geography tend to shape the way a particular society thinks. For example, Nisbett’s group recently compared three communities living in Turkey’s Black Sea region who share the same language, ethnicity and geography but have different social lives: farmers and fishers live in fixed communities and their trades require extensive cooperation, while herders are more mobile and independent. He found that the farmers and fishers were more holistic in their psychology than herders, being more likely to group objects based on their relationships rather than their categories: they preferred to link gloves with hands rather than with scarves, for instance (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 105, p 8552). A similar mosaic pattern of thought can be found in the east. “Hokkaido is seen as the Wild West of Japan,” says Nisbett. “The citizens are regarded as cowboys – highly independent and individualistic – and sure enough, they’re more analytic in their cognitive style than mainland Japanese.”

Is it time we moved beyond simplistic notions of eastern and western psychology? Daphna Oyserman from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor certainly thinks so. She is not happy invoking history to explain modern human behaviour. “We can’t test if history mattered,” she says. “But we can test how contexts can evoke one or other mindset.”

[...]

Clearly, the dichotomy between holistic eastern and analytical western thinking is more blurred than the stereotypes suggest. If we all flip between different modes of thought depending on social context, says Oyserman, psychologists should be trying to find out which contexts provoke the holistic and which the analytical mindset, rather than perpetuating a false divide.

This approach is all the more important, she says, because the supposed dichotomy is based on limited evidence, with China and Japan representing the east in most studies and the US and Canada flying the flag for the west. In many regions, from southern Asia to Latin America, studies are extremely scarce, and even better-studied Europe is mostly embodied by the unrepresentative duo of Germany and the Netherlands. “The kind of things that cue analytic or holistic thought may be very different in these [neglected] societies,” Oyserman says. “Honour, for example, is a hugely important issue in areas that haven’t been studied very thoroughly, like the Middle East, Africa or Latin America.”

What is clear is that the minds of east Asians, Americans or any other group are not wired differently. We are all capable of both analytic and holistic thought. “Different societies make one option seem to make the most sense at any given moment,” says Oyserman. But instead of dividing the world along cultural lines, we might be better off recognising and cultivating our cognitive flexibility. “There are a lot of advantages to both holistic and analytic perception,” says Nisbett. In our multicultural world it would benefit us all if we could learn to adopt the most appropriate mode of thought for the situation in which we find ourselves.

(Note that the article’s author, Ed Yong, also wrote the excellent post Gender gap in maths driven by social factors, not biological differences at Not Exactly Rocket Science, which was also covered on this blog.)

Figure 2. German (blue) versus Chinese (red) way of life, according to a German art exhibit. The piece was created by a German-educated Chinese woman named Yang Liu. Compare this concept with Undifferentiated Groups of Asians as Ad Props.

The psychology research on the supposed East-West dichotomy in thinking styles may be a subtle and contemporary manifestation of scientific racism. After all, the research project of finding differences between “the East” and “the West” is based on the Orientalist tradition of Western European colonial societies attempting to define their identities against the societies they were colonizing (which happened to be towards the east of where they were located). Moreover, the “scientific” conclusions about Westerners thinking analytically and being individualist, and Easterners thinking holistically and being collectivist, fit in too well with popular stereotypes (see Figure 1 and Figure 2).

Recall that in 2008, an employee at a university in Wales prevented a potential student from taking an accounting course because the course required “analytical skills” and he perceived the student as “Oriental”:

“The man said something like ‘I’m not saying you’re Chinese but people like you, Oriental people, tend to accept what is written in the books and what the lecturer says, whereas this kind of course is nothing like you have studied in the past, it requires more analytical skills, you will have to do more yourself.”

Not only is the research project of finding the essence of the “Eastern mind” versus the “Western mind” based on the Eurocentric East-versus-West social construct, and not only are the studies’ conclusions supported by popular stereotypes and clichés, but this same exact reasoning is used to rationalize racial discrimination in education against people perceived as East Asian.

It is difficult to conceive of this psychology research project as something other than an academic extension of cultural bias, and a product of its time.

• David Brooks, Social Psychologist by Mark Liberman at Language Log
• The cognitive fallacy of East is East and West is West by Vaughan at Mind Hacks
• First among equals in the mind of a child by Vaughan at Mind Hacks
• “Black or white”, “East or West” are not racially or culturally exhaustive. by Restructure!

Both people of colour and “computer expert” (a term that less computer-literate individuals use to refer to computer-literate individuals) friends and relatives are perceived as public resources whose raison d’être is to educate white people about race or provide personal technical support, respectively. While the two groups are not mutually exclusive, both people of colour and “computer experts” are perceived to have no lives or other interests, and are treated as if educating white people or providing technical support is “their job”.

This is why white people and less computer-literate people often complain loudly and indignantly during certain interactions, as if people of colour and “computer experts” are providing poor “customer service”. White people often complain that if people of colour do not present racial issues in a way that is appealing to whites, then white people will not want to learn about racism. (For some reason, they believe that promoting social awareness about a particular issue should be similar in process to a company promoting a product.) Less computer-literate individuals even speak condescendingly to or yell at “computer experts” with a similar sense of entitlement, as if their computer-literate relative/friend/acquaintance has the same social obligation to them as the paid technical support staff of, say, Dell.

Among anti-racist circles online, a common admonishment is something along the lines of “people of color are not responsible for educating white people about race”, which belongs in a list of Racism 101 axioms. However, this advice is often accompanied by the suggestion to ask a friend of colour about race, instead of a random person of colour.

While a white person’s expectation that any person of colour is required to act as a personal assistant to any white person is racist, white-centric, and perpetuates the assumption that people of colour exist to serve whites, the white person’s expectation that his friend of colour has some obligation to educate him about race is still problematic.

Friends of colour also have their own lives and other interests, just as random people of colour do. While a person of colour may be much more tolerant if her white friend asked her to educate him about race than if a white stranger did the same, this does not mean that educating her white friend is her job or responsibility. A person of colour may invest much of her time and effort into educating a close white friend because she deems the white friend as worthwhile, but it is at the person of colour’s expense. A person of colour has to deal with time- and energy-depleting racial burdens that people with white privilege do not have, and doing the work for a white friend consumes even more resources.

There are actually people of colour who are paid to educate white people about race, so it makes the most sense to engage with these people (during their work hours and at their work location) who have made the decision to deal with unscripted Racism 101 questions from people with unexamined white privilege. The same applies to “computer experts”: it makes more sense to call paid technical support to fix your internet problem than to ask your relative to drop whatever she was doing to help you fix your internet.

Excerpted from Whitey Don’t see that: The rising recognition of ‘white privilege’ in Western academia (PDF) by Momoko Price at The Ubyssey, November 2006:

Laurence Berg, Canada Research Chair for Human Rights, Diversity and Identity, disagrees with the
idea that PC language and policies are oppressive. Why? Because he doesn’t really believe that PC policies existed in the first place.

“What [they]’re calling the ‘PC movement’ I would call a social movement by marginalised people and the people who support them,” he said. “[A movement] to use language that’s more correct—not ‘politically correct’—that more accurately represents reality.”

Berg is referring to a way of thinking that many of us students were too young to catch the first time around. For us, the term ‘politically correct’ survived the 90s, but the term ‘human rights backlash’ did not. Will Hutton, former editor-in-chief for the UK publication the Observer, described in his column how the term ‘PC’ was never really a political stance at all, contrary to popular belief. It was actually perceived by many as a right-wing tactic to dismiss—or backlash against—left-leaning social change. Mock the trivial aspects of human rights politics, like its changing language, and you’ll succeed in obscuring the issue altogether.

Berg believes this is what political correctness is all about: “The term politically correct is a reactionary term,” he said. “[It was] created by people who were worried by [social] changes…that affected their everyday understanding of the world in ways that pointed out their role in creating or reproducing dominance and subordination.”

According to Berg, the indignation people feel against PC ideas reflects the discomfort we feel when language and politics begin to pull away from the dominant values we grew up with—in other words, white, middle-class values. It’s no small coincidence that the concept of political correctness originated in the 80s and 90s, just after human rights concerns and visible minority groups started getting real attention in politics and the media.

Berg explains that in its original context, PC was a pejorative term used by people who felt they were losing something. Exactly what they were losing is very hard to describe, especially to them. But many sociologists and historians today have come to a consensus on what they call it: it’s a loss of privilege—and in terms of race, a loss of white privilege.

• The Greatest Cliché: The Unexamined Propaganda of “Political Correctness” by Kai Chang at Zuky

UPDATE: In the comments, DaisyDeadhead points out that the term “political correctness” was in use during the 70s by the political left. Berg is wrong, as Kai, Daisy, and Wikipedia cite its pre-1990s and leftist origins in China.

Excerpted from Whitey Don’t see that: The rising recognition of ‘white privilege’ in Western academia (PDF) by Momoko Price at The Ubyssey, November 2006:

Dominique Clement, a human rights historian at the University of Victoria, said researching the First Nations social movement during the 20th Century is a funny thing, because there are very few documents on the topic to research.

“First Nations is interesting. There’s very, very little written on First Nations human rights activism. There’s this weird period between 1910 and 1969 where First Nations were not terribly politically active.”

You might wonder why this might be the case. And unless you’re up-tospeed on graduate-level Canadian history, you probably won’t guess the real reason. It wasn’t simply because First Nations were poor, or displaced, or lacked support (though these reasons obviously contributed.) It was because Aboriginal activism was explicitly against federal law.

“In the early 20th Century, Aboriginal groups formed organisations to basically call for better conditions on reserves and call for education rights and things like that,” Clement explained. “Sometime in the early 1920s, the federal government essentially criminalised and put in the Indian Act that Aboriginal groups could not form political associations and they were also not allowed to litigate land claims…That lasted until about 1969.”

So until around 1970, less than 40 years ago, Aboriginal communities were not only legally ripped apart by abusive residential schooling systems, they were also legally prohibited from publicising or protesting their circumstances. Moreover, they were unable to fight for their own land.

It’s stains like these in the history of our cultural quilt that affect the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal community today, but as Berg said about the nature of historical privilege and marginalisation, privilege to the privileged is nearly invisible, while marginalisation to the marginalised is glaring.

[...]

Clement, Baum, Bercuson and Berg— all prominent Canadian social scientists— agree that education
and awareness of our real history, with all the racism and injustice, is key to understanding how our
society works today. Because when it comes to race issues, the reason why things are ‘the way they are’
rarely, if ever, reflects solely what you think you see in front of you.

A black and Muslim Canadian woman, Suaad Hagi Mohamud, was falsely arrested in Kenya for identity fraud and stranded for three months, because both Kenyan and Canadian officials claimed that she was not a Canadian citizen. Even mainstream Canadians blamed the Harper government for discriminating against her because she was not white.

Now Mohamud is suing the Canadian government.

Kenyan stranding triggered by skin colour: Mohamud:

A Toronto woman who was stranded in Kenya over false claims she was an impostor said she believes the colour of her skin played a role in her ordeal.

In an exclusive interview with the CBC’s Diana Swain, Suaad Hagi Mohamud was asked if she thought things would have been different if she were white.

“I wouldn’t be stopped at the Kenyan airport if I’m a white,” Mohamud said.

“The Canadian High Commission wouldn’t be treating me the way they treat me. If I’m a white person, I wouldn’t be there in one day. I wouldn’t have missed the flight.”

Mohamud, 31, who was visiting her mother in Kenya, had been stranded in the country since May after Kenyan authorities said she didn’t look like the picture in her passport photo.

Mohamud, who filed a $2.5 million lawsuit against the federal government on Friday, said the reaction by officials to her situation was “really frustrating” because “deep inside I thought we all the same.”

[...]

Despite Mohamud’s insistence from the beginning that she is a Canadian citizen and providing other forms of identification, in July, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon had claimed that there was “no proof” that she was Canadian citizen, further stating, “The individual has to be straightforward, has to let us know whether or not she is a Canadian citizen.” (A timeline of the Mohamud’s ordeal is available here.)

Officials claimed that she did not look like her passport photo because her lips were different. She has been cleared recently with a DNA test, but in May, the High Commission of Canada in Nairobi sent a letter to Kenyan officials that stated, “Please be advised that we have carried out conclusive investigations, including an interview, and have confirmed that the person brought to the Canadian High Commission on suspicion of being an impostor is not the rightful holder of the aforementioned Canadian passport.”

Mohamud’s case is similar to the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik, a black Muslim Canadian man who stranded in Sudan for six years. After he was cleared from having ties with al-Qaeda, the Canadian government refused to issue him an emergency passport and allow him to return to Canada. The Federal Court of Canada had to force the Canadian government to do so, successfully arguing that the government violated his constitutional rights guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Despite multiculturalism being a national policy of Canada, systemic racism continues to exist, because Canada does not have a national policy of anti-racism. When the Canadian federal government itself racially discriminates against its own citizens, to continue to believe that racism does not exist in Canada is delusional.