Non-white travellers’ Canadian citizenships angers White Canadians.

The perpetual foreigner stereotype strikes again. If you are Canadian and died while travelling abroad, being White instead of Asian will protect you from the anger of Canadians. These Canadians will not be angry about you dying, but they will be angry that you were legally Canadian. Here are some better CBC comments responding to the racism, via Chinese in Vancouver:

I bet if the victims in question were white Canadians, we wouldn’t hear so much as a single blip from those loudly croaking about “Canadians of convenience”.

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Why is it SOOOOO hard to believe that Chinese Canadians, might well have traveled during the summer holiday to Hong Kong to visit friends and relatives and then go over to Manila (a short 2 hour hop from Hong Kong) for a simple bus tour???

All the comments about “handing out” passports and Chinese Canadians should “stay in the country” are insane and touch on blatant racism!!!

Should Canadians of European descent also be restricted from traveling?

How to act if refugees come to Canada on a boat

What To Do If People Come To Canada On A Boat And Ask To Be Admitted As Refugees (via funkaoshi):

1. Don’t panic!

Take a deep breath.

2. Remember that there is a process in place to deal with this issue.

According to Citizenship and Immigration Canada:

The Canadian refugee system has two main parts:
– the Refugee and Humanitarian Resettlement Program, for people seeking protection from outside Canada; and
– the In-Canada Asylum Program for people making refugee protection claims from within Canada.

If you can see the boat full of people from your house, that means they will likely be processed under the In-Canada Asylum Program. To calm your fears, Citizenship and Immigration Canada further explains that:

Refugees come from around the world and many make their claims in Canada….The asylum program works to provide refugee protection to people in Canada who are at risk of torture, or cruel or unusual punishment in their home countries.

Not everyone is eligible to seek asylum. For example, people convicted of serious criminal offences and people who have had previous refugee claims denied by Canada are not accepted.

3. Don’t kill asylum seekers.

Even if you are still alarmed after reading about Canada’s refugee process, don’t kill these strange newcomers, regardless of what the Toronto Sun helpfully suggests.  Killing asylum seekers is a violation of their rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. 

If you look carefully at your copy of the Charter, you’ll notice that some rights are only for Canadian citizens (like the right to vote, article 3) and some rights are for “everyone” (like the right to life, liberty and security of the person, article 7).

Do asylum seekers and refugee claimants who arrive in Canada on a leaky boat count as “everyone” under Canadian law? The Supreme Court of Canada answered this very question in their April 4, 1985 decision in Singh v. Minister of Employment and Immigration. According to the Supreme Court, foreign nationals in Canada have Charter rights, so killing them would be illegal.

Read the rest at Kanakaweb

The Myth of White Male Geek Rationality

People who consider themselves fully rational individuals are ignorant about basic psychology and their own minds.

It is easy for white men in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields to perceive themselves as more rational than other groups, because our society associates rationality with whites, men, and STEM professionals. When white men in STEM fields believe in this stereotype, they might assume that bias is more common in non-white people, women, and people in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. After all, these other groups seem to want to discuss bias more often, and unexamined associative “reasoning” would link bias to those who bring up the topic of bias. Under logical scrutiny, however, it does not follow that the act of thinking about bias makes one more biased.

Green Red Blue
Purple Blue Purple

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Blue Purple Red
Green Purple Green

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the Stroop effect refers to the fact that naming the color of the first set of words is easier and quicker than the second.

A basic tenet of contemporary psychology is that mental activity can be unconscious. Unconscious simply refers to any mental activity that is “not conscious”, and it is not equivalent to the unscientific New Age concept of the Subconscious. A good example of unconscious mental activity interfering with conscious intentions is the Stroop effect (right). If you try to name the colours of the colour words aloud, the first set of colours will be easier to name than the second set of colours, because you unconsciously read the words. This means that you do not have full control over your thoughts and behaviour, and your willpower or logical reasoning cannot overcome the unconscious cultural bias of being able to read in English. Of course, there are other unconscious cultural biases aside from English literacy bias.

Commercials conflate whiteness with modernity.

In Romanticizing Ancient Chinese Wisdom at Sociological Images, Lisa Wade writes:

This 40-second commercial for HSBC bank, sent in by Michelle F., is an excellent example of the way that non-white and non-Western people are often portrayed as more deeply cultural, connected to the past, and closer to nature than their white, Western counterparts. Sometimes this is done in order to demonize a culture as “barbaric,” other times it is used to infantilize them as “primitive.” In this case, it romanticizes.

[…]

Running on both English and Chinese language channels, the commercial contrasts the wise Chinese man with the young, white man. The music, the boats, their clothing and hats, and their fishing methods all suggest that the Chinese are more connected to their own long-standing (ancient?) cultural traditions, ones that offered them an intimate and cooperative relationship to nature. Simultaneously, it erases Chinese modernity, fixing China somewhere back in time.

I write like science fiction writers.

I submitted several writing samples from my blog to the statistical analysis tool I Write Like. Apparently, I write like H. P. Lovecraft most of the time, of whose writings I am a fan.* The second writer who came up consistently was Cory Doctorow, and I have read and enjoyed many of his short stories as well.

Both are writers of science fiction short stories, and their writings are available either in the public domain or under the Creative Commons license, which means you can find their short stories for free on the Internet. If you are lucky enough to have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, you can install the free app Stanza and find these and other free works under the “Feedbooks – Free Content” catalogue.

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* I am not a fan of his pathological racism, however.