radiofree.asia

Tag: Discrimination

  • Ethnic Engineering: Denmark’s Ghetto Policy

    The very word is chilling, but has become normalised political currency in Denmark.  Since 2010, the Danish government has resorted to generating “ghetto lists” marking out areas as socially problematic for the state.  In 2018, the country’s parliament passed “ghetto” laws to further regulate the lives of individuals inhabiting various city areas focusing on their racial and ethnic origins.  The legislation constitutes the spear tip of the “One Denmark without Parallel Societies – No Ghettos in 2030” initiative; its target: “non-Western” residents who overbalance the social ledger by concentrating in various city environs.

    The “ghetto package”, comprising over 20 different statutes, grants the government power to designate various neighbourhoods as “ghettos” or “tough ghettos”.  That nasty formulation is intended to have consequences for urban planning, taking into account the percentage of immigrants and descendants present in that area of “non-Western background”.  One Danish media outlet, assiduously avoiding the creepier elements of the policy, saw it as the “greatest social experiment of the century.”

    Bureaucrats consider the following: the number of residents (greater than 1,000); a cap of 50% of “non-Westerners”; and whether the neighbourhood meets any two of four criteria, namely employment, education, income and criminality.  Doing so enables the authorities to evict residents, demolish buildings and alter the character of the neighbourhood, a form of cleansing that has shuddering historical resonances.  Central to this is an effort to reduce the stock of “common family housing” – 40% in tough ghettos by 2030 – supposedly available to all based on principles of affordability, democracy and egalitarianism.

    The problematic designation of people of “non-Western background” is also a bit of brutal public policy.  It is a discriminatory measure that has concerned the UN Committee on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights (CESCR) and the Council of Europe’s Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (ACFC).  In its concluding observations on the sixth periodic report of Denmark from 2019, the CESCR urged the country’s adoption of “a rights-based approach to its efforts to address residential segregation and enhance social cohesion.”  This would involve the scrapping of such terms as “ghetto” and “non-Western” and the repeal of provisions with direct or indirect discriminatory effects “on refugees, migrants and residents of the ‘ghettos’.”

    The use of “descendants” also suggests the importance of bloodline that would have seemed entirely logical to the Nazi drafters of the Nuremberg Laws.  The German laws, announced in 1935, made no reference to the criteria of religion in defining a “Jew”, merely the importance of having three or four Jewish grandparents.  Doing so roped those whose grandparents had converted to Christianity and the secular. First came the sentiments; then came the laws.

    This irredeemable state of affairs has solid, disturbing implications, though both the CESCR and ACFC tend to be almost mild mannered in pointing it out: You did not belong and you cannot belong.  It is less an integrating measure than an excluding one.  Denmark’s “Ghetto Package”, as the ACFC puts it, “sends a message that may have a counter-effect on their feeling of belonging and forming an integral part of Danish society.”  It also urged that Denmark “reconsider the concepts of ‘immigrants and descendants of immigrants of Western origin’ and ‘immigrants and descendants of immigrants of non-Western origin’.”

    For its part, the Ministry of Interior and Housing finds the package all above board, a mere matter of statistical bookkeeping.  Using “non-Western” as a marker adopted to distinguish the EU states, the UK, Andorra, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, the Vatican State, Canada, United States, Australia and New Zealand.  “All other countries,” the Ministry curtly observed in a statement, “are non-Western countries.”

    Last year, Mjølnerparken, a housing project in Copenhagen’s Nørrebro area, became the subject of intense interest in the application of the Ghetto laws.  With 98 percent of the 2,500 residents being immigrants or the children of immigrants, a good number hailing from the Middle East and Africa, the “tough ghetto” designation was a formality.  Apartment sales were promised, effectively threatening the eviction of the tenants.

    These actions were proposed despite ongoing legal proceedings against the Ministry of Interior and Housing by affected residents.  Declaratory relief is being sought, with the applicants arguing that the measures breach the rights to equality, respect for home, property and the freedom to choose their own residence.

    Three rapporteurs from the United Nations also warned that the sale should not go ahead as litigation was taking place.  “It does not matter whether they own or rent all residents should have a degree of security of tenure, which guarantees legal protection against forced eviction, harassment and other threats.”

    Such policies tend to consume the reason for their implementation.  Disadvantage and stigmatisation are enforced, not lessened.  Former lawmaker Özlem Cekic suggests as much.  “It is not only created to hit the Muslim groups and immigrant groups but the working class as well.  A lot of people in the ‘ghettoes’, they don’t have economic stability.”

    The Ministry has reacted to the protests with proposals that ostensibly reform the legal package.  The word “ghetto”, for instance, will be removed and the share of people of non-Western background in social housing will be reduced to 30% within 10 years.  Those moved out of the areas will be relocated to other parts of the country.  According to Nanna Margrethe Kusaa of the Danish Institute for Human Rights, “the ethnicity criteria has a more sharpened focus on it than before.”  Officials have merely refined the prejudice in one of Europe’s most troubling instances of ethnic engineering.  To this, Cekic has an ominous warning: “How can you expect [immigrants] to be loyal to a country that doesn’t accept them as they are?”

    This article was posted on Sunday, April 25th, 2021 at 3:47pm and is filed under Denmark, Discrimination, Human Rights, Immigration.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Priti Patel and the Death of Asylum

    Nothing makes better sense to the political classes than small time demagoguery when matters turn sour. True, the United Kingdom might well be speeding ahead with vaccination numbers, and getting ever big-headed about it, but there is still good reason to distract the voters.  Coronavirus continues to vex; the economy continues to suffer. In February, the Office of Statistics revealed that Britain’s economy had shrunk by 9.9%.  The last time such a contraction was experienced was in 1709, when a contraction of 13% was suffered as a result of the Great Frost which lasted for three devastating months.

    With Brexit Britain feeling alone, it is time to resort to mauling targets made traditional during the 2016 campaign to exit the European Union: the asylum seeker, the refugee and anyone assisting in that enterprise.  And the person best suited to doing so is the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, who outlined the government’s New Plan for Immigration on March 24th.  It has three objectives with one overarching punitive theme “to better protect and support those in genuine need of asylum.”  The authenticity of that need will be aided by deterring “illegal entry into the UK, thereby breaking the business model of criminal trafficking networks and protecting the lives of those they endanger”.  Those with “no right to be” in the UK will also be more easily “removed”.

    It is in the nature of such policies to conceal the punitive element by extolling virtues.  “The UK accepted more refugees through planned resettlement schemes than any other country in Europe in the period 2015-2019 – the fourth highest resettlement schemes globally after the USA, Canada and Australia,” reads the policy statement. “The UK also welcomed 29,000 people through the refugee family reunion scheme between 2015 and 2019. More than half of these were children.”

    This self-praise ignores the inconvenient fact that the UK received fewer applications for asylum than European states such as France and Germany in 2020.  According to the UNHCR, both countries received four times the number in 2020.  “The number of arrivals in the UK in 2020,” remarks academic Helen O’Nions, “was actually down 18% on the previous year.”

    It does not take long, however, to identify and inflate the threats: people crossing the English channel in their “small boats reached record levels, with 8,500 … arriving this way” in 2020.  Sinister imputations are made: 87% of those arriving in small boats were male.  In 2019, 32,000 illegal attempts were made to enter the UK, but foiled in Northern France while 16,000 illegal arrivals were detected in the UK.

    The Home Office laments the rapid increase of asylum claims; decisions cannot be made “quickly”; “case loads are growing to unsustainable levels”.  Never mind the UN Refugee Convention and human rights: what matters is bureaucratic efficiency.  To achieve that, Patel hopes to “stop illegal arrivals gaining immediate entry into the asylum system if they have travelled through a safe country – like France.”  Any arrivals doing so could not be said to be “seeking refuge from imminent peril”.  Stiffer sentences are also suggested for those aiding asylum.  “Access to the UK’s asylum system should be based on need, not on the ability to pay people smugglers.”

    Much of what the Home Office makes of this is nonsense.  It entails a fantasy about a model cut, idealised asylum seeker: those with state documents from the persecuting state, clearly of the identifiable sort, all morally sound.  The murkier reality necessitates deception as an indispensable part of the process.  To not have documents makes travel impossible.  Alternative routes and means are therefore required.

    The threat to relocate and refuse those seeking asylum would also breach the UK’s own Human Rights Act of 1998, obligating the state to prevent people from being returned to places where they are at the risk of torture, inhuman, degrading treatment or cruel and unusual punishment.  That principle is also a cardinal feature of the Refugee Convention.

    The view from those who actually have more than a passing acquaintance with the field is vastly different from Patel’s.  Politely, some 454 immigration scholars in the UK have told the Home Secretary in an open letter that she does not know what she is talking about.  The New Plan, for instance, may have 31 references, but “there is just one reference to research evidence, a research paper on refugee integration.”  The undersigned scholars suggest that Patel look more deeply, as the plans being proposed “not only circumvent international human rights law, but are also based on claims which are completely unfounded in any body of research evidence.”

    The scholars also note that asylum seekers and refugees lack safe and legal routes, with countries across Europe, North American and Australasia going “to huge efforts and massive expense in recent decades to close down access to the right to asylum.”

    The markings of the New Plan resemble, all too closely, the Australian approach of discrimination which has become an exemplar of how to undermine the right to asylum: an obsession with targeting those people smuggling “gangs” and associated business rackets, merely code for targeting those fleeing persecution; distinguishing the method of arrival in order to demonise the plight of the asylum seeker; the decision that, irrespective of the claims of asylum, no sanctuary would ever be given to certain individuals because they chose to jump a phantom queue and not know their place.

    The open letter also notes the “distinct and troubling echoes” of “the Australian Temporary Protection Visa programme and the vilification of people with no option but to travel through irregular means to flee persecution and seek sanctuary.”

    Another unsavoury aspect of the British turn in refugee policy towards the antipodean example can be gathered by the possible use of offshore detention centres.  Canberra relies on the liberal use of concentration camps on remote sites in the Pacific, centres of calculated cruelty that serve to destroy the will of those whose governments have already done much to encourage their flight.  The official justification is one of killing asylum seekers with kindness: We saved you from almost certain drowning at sea, only to seal you within the confines of legal purgatory.  In the New Plan, one senses a touch of envy for it.

    In October last year, it was revealed that the UK Prime Minister’s office was considering the detention of asylum seekers in places as varied as Moldova, Morocco and Papua New Guinea.  According to documents obtained by The Guardian, the Foreign Office had been charged with a task by Downing Street to “offer advice on possible options for negotiating an offshore asylum processing facility similar to the Australian model in Papua New Guinea and Nauru”.  Patel herself had flirted with the idea of establishing centres at Ascension and St. Helena, though she has had to content herself with ill-suited military barracks on the mainland that facilitated the spread of COVID-19.

    Alison Mountz, in The Death of Asylum, makes much of this transformation of the island from a point of transit to that of hostile containment.  From field research conducted in Italy’s Lampedusa Island, Australia’s Christmas Island and the US territories of Guam and Saipan, Mountz argues that “the strategic use of islands to detain people in search of protection – to thwart human mobility through confinement – is part of the death of asylum.”  Officials such as Patel are happy to help matters along.

    This article was posted on Sunday, April 4th, 2021 at 12:14am and is filed under Asylum seekers, Australia, Discrimination, Migration/Migrants, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Refugees, United Kingdom.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Addressing Potential Bias in AI

    Image Source: Pixabay

    Brookings defines artificial intelligence (AI) as “a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence.”  Replicating human intelligence in machines has positively influenced data collection, manufacturing processes, solving efficiency issues, and other business processes.

    Even with its various benefits, AI has been running into some challenges when it comes to bias. It’s important to continue researching these biases and implementing anything capable of ridding AI of discrimination completely.

    Here are three situations when AI is regularly biased but shouldn’t be, guidance to move forward in each, and a bit more on why it’s essential to innovate AI so we can reap its benefits responsibly.

    Three Cases of AI Bias

    Artificial intelligence is an excellent idea in theory. There’s a thin line between responsible and irresponsible when it comes to using machines to predict future behavior based on past interactions, sift through data, identify critical information, or make decisions without emotional distraction.

    But with its continued use, scientists, data analysts, and developers are noticing some apparent biases that have to be addressed for AI to be used effectively.

    Here are three hurdles AI has been running into regarding bias and tips on how to overcome these challenges to leverage the benefits of artificial intelligence.

    Recruiting and Hiring

    One of the most highlighted bias challenges in artificial intelligence is when it’s used in hiring and recruiting processes. Chatbots, résumé-screening tools, and online assessments, among other tools, are all used to automate various hiring and recruiting strategies. Bias in recruiting and hiring processes is hugely detrimental to forming a diverse workforce.

    Your application may never make it past an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) if the system’s data is biased. Gender, names, and race have excluded perfectly qualified candidates from being invited for interviews because the AI system was trained this way. Eliminating bias in AI used for recruiting and hiring would ensure that every candidate is getting a fair shot at a position based on their qualifications versus being eliminated despite them.

    Recruiting and hiring processes should be personalized. Ensure that you’ve found a balance between human influence and AI use to ensure candidates are consistently chosen based on the proper company criteria.

    Creation and Development Process

    The creation and development process is largely where bias starts in AI. If the people who create and develop artificial intelligence machines, tools, and software are biased, they’ll consciously or subconsciously program the system with that same bias.

    Artificial intelligence is only as good as the data inputted and the quality and fullness of the data collected. Those involved in the creation and development process should be required to detach their personal experiences from anything created at work.

    The AI field should be diversified first to help dismantle any bias in the creation and development process. When bringing people on board for your implementation of AI, structure your hiring process to eliminate any candidates that display any significant bias, discriminatory, or racist behaviors and thought-processes. Ensure anyone you hire is committed only to diversity, change, and wholly supporting individuals across various cultures, races, ethnicities, and backgrounds.

    Social Media Algorithms

    Billions of people in the world use social media. If you’re one of those people, you know how vital algorithms are to the content we’re showed and how our content shows up on other people’s timelines and pages. When algorithms are biased, it adversely affects the relevancy of content offered and how influential you can become on these platforms.

    For example, in 2019, Facebook allowed its advertisers to intentionally target adverts according to gender, race, and religion. Women were shown jobs geared toward nurturing roles and excluded from seeing job ads for masculine roles like janitors, drivers, and construction work. After discovering this bias in their options for targeted ads, they eliminated any ability to target individuals based on race, gender, or age in their ads.

    All social media platforms should follow Facebook’s lead and be intentional about eliminating any ability to target people based on things like age, gender, race, and ethnicity. If you’re running an ad of any sort, ensure they’re rooted in diversity.

    Why it’s Important to Innovate AI

    AI can help identify and reduce the impact of human bias. The benefits of artificial intelligence include:

    • Reducing the costs of labor.
    • Streamlining production.
    • Collecting and organizing large amounts of data.
    • Interpreting data.
    • Guidance on how to move forward with the data.

    Will AI ever be completely unbiased? Not without innovation, further research, consistent monitoring, and improved implementation techniques. If we’re unable to achieve an entirely fair AI system, we’ll never fully be able to leverage all of the benefits of machine learning.

    Someone should also monitor your AI use and pinpoint when it’s displaying a bias and redirect it, reset or retrain it.

    Addressing potential bias in AI starts with acknowledging the current challenges. To move forward, we need to explore how humans and machines can work together to mitigate bias.

    Beau Peters is a freelance writer based out of Portland, OR. He has a particular interest in covering workers’ rights, social justice, and workplace issues and solutions. Read other articles by Beau.

    This article was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2021 at 11:26pm and is filed under Artificial Intelligence (AI), Biotechnology, Discrimination, Racism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Attacks On The Rights Of Transgender People Are Rising; Fight Back

    A growing and coordinated attack on the rights of transgender people is taking place through state legislation and sadly it is receiving support from people across the political spectrum. The attack is successful because its proponents are using myths about transgender people to cloak their efforts under a veneer of feminism and concerns about children’s health. In reality, this attack is anti-feminist and threatens the well-being and lives of not only the transgender community, particularly the youth, which is one of the most vulnerable communities in our society, but also of all of us.

    It is necessary to understand where this attack is coming from and the facts that dispel these myths so we can all take action to protect the rights of transgender people. The media is largely silent about what is happening. We need to raise awareness and halt these bills. Solidarity is critical to stop the assault and protect us from being divided against each other at a time when we need to struggle together for our People(s)-Centered Human Rights.

    This week, I interviewed Chase Strangio, a lawyer with the ACLU who is a national leader in the fight for the rights of transgender people, on Clearing the FOG (available Monday night). We discussed the state bills, the impact they will have if they are made into law and how to stop them.

    Anatoliy Cherkasov/SOPA Images/Getty.

    A coordinated attack on transgender rights in the states

    The number of states that have introduced bills restricting the rights of transgender people has increased from 20 states in 2020 to 26 states so far in 2021. The bills range from those that prevent transgender people from participating in sports, using gender-appropriate facilities or obtaining identification documents to ones that make providing health care to transgender youth a felony and allow religious discrimination. You will find a list of the states, the bills and their current status here.

    One bill that is imminent in Alabama would make it a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison and up to a $15,000 fine for health professionals who provide hormone therapy, hormone blockers or surgery to transgender youth. The bill also requires school staff to inform parents if a student has the “perception that his or her gender is inconsistent with his or her sex.” A version of the bill recently passed in both the Alabama House and the Senate. Sixteen other states have introduced similar legislation.

    Both of these measures put transgender youth at a serious risk of lifetime harm or suicide if they are not able to receive appropriate medical therapy during puberty or are outed to parents who may not support them. A study from 2018 finds that suicide, the second leading cause of death in teenagers, and self-harm rates are higher in transgender adolescents than cisgender teens. In the Minnesota study of teens aged 11 to 19, nearly a third of transgender girls and more than half of transgender boys had attempted suicide, two-thirds had suicidal thoughts and more than half had injured themselves. The National Center for Transgender Equality finds that of the 1.6 million homeless youth in the United States, 20 to 40% of them are transgender youth while transgender people are less than 1% of the overall population. They face family rejection, denial of access to spaces in homeless shelters that are consistent with their gender and discrimination when they seek to rent or buy a home.

    The bills also run counter to standard medical practice. After more than 100 years of work to provide gender-affirming health care to transgender youth and adults, this area of medicine is well-documented and supported by major institutions such as the American Association of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society and the American Psychological Association. At a time when the medical establishment is working to improve care for transgender people in all settings, these state bills would be a huge impediment to that progress.

    Another major set of bills currently present in 26 states would prohibit transgender students from participating in school sports on the same teams as their cisgender peers. As the ACLU writes, these bills are less about sports and more about “erasing and excluding trans people from participation in all aspects of public life.” The fight to exclude trans people from restrooms that are consistent with their gender failed, so this is the new tool to attack their rights.

    Transgender girls and boys and women and men already compete in sports all over the world and their participation is supported by major institutions such as the Women’s Sports Foundation, the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education and the National Women’s Law Center. Nearly two dozen organizations signed onto a letter supporting the full inclusion of transgender people in athletics. Depriving transgender youth of the right to participate in sports harms their physical, social and emotional well-being. Transgender youth already face obstacles to being accepted in society and not being allowed into sports worsens that while preventing them from crucial areas of their development such as being part of a team and discovering their physical capabilities.

    Creating barriers to participation in sports harms everyone, but especially women who as a group already face discrimination over their gender and attempts to control their bodies. In order to exclude transgender people from sports, all participants will be required to ‘prove’ their gender. As the National Women’s Law Center states, “The law allows anyone, for any reason, to question whether a student athlete is a woman or girl, and then the student has to ‘verify’ her gender by undergoing invasive testing.” They add that by “allowing coaches, administrators, and other athletes to become the arbiters of who ‘looks like’ a girl or a woman,” the  laws “will rely on and perpetuate racist and sexist stereotypes.”

    Chase Strangio and Gabriel Arkles dispel four of the common myths about transgender athletes. They point out that the effort to exclude transgender women from sports is being done in a way that “reinforces stereotypes that women are weak and in need of protection. Politicians have used the ‘protection’ trope time and time again, including in 2016 when they tried banning trans people from public restrooms by creating the debunked ‘bathroom predator‘ myth.” These myths are being spread widely, so it is critical that we understand the facts so we can stop them.

    Katherine Jones / Idaho Statesman via Getty Images file.

    The groups behind the attacks on the rights of transgender people

    There are a host of right-wing and conservative groups behind the attacks on transgender people. The major players involved in the state legislative efforts are the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Heritage Foundation and ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council). The Alliance Defending Freedom is a conservative Christian group formed in 1994 that does legal advocacy against women’s right to an abortion and for discrimination against lesbian, gay and transgender people. It is a well-funded ($35 million budget) and powerful group that trains “future legislators, judges, prosecutors, attorneys general, and other government lawyers.” It is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its support for the criminalization of same sex marriage, sterilization of transgender people and bigoted beliefs.

    One way that conservative groups have gained credibility with liberals is by portraying their work as in the interest of women’s rights. They project a zero sum view that somehow advocacy for the rights of transgender women takes away from the long struggle for ciswomen’s rights, as if transgender women and men have not struggled for recognition and for their rights for a long time too. They falsely argue that transgender women spent part of their life as ‘privileged’ males and so they either cannot understand what women have experienced or they are bringing patriarchal views into women’s spaces. This view conflicts with the reality that transgender women experience greater discrimination and violence than cisgender women. They are hardly a privileged group. Similarly, they falsely portray transgender men as ‘victims of patriarchy.’

    This bigotry has entered some radical feminist spaces that actively exclude transgender woman and portray them as threats to their safety. Left Voice provides a history of the rise of what is called “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists” or TERFs,” their violence against transgender women and their alliances with the alt-right. Katelyn Burns explains who some of these groups are and their attempts to dominate political space in the United Kingdom. Fortunately there is not much support for them in the United States, but it does exist.

    Trans-exclusionary groups use fear as a weapon against transgender women by portraying them as threats to the physical safety of cisgender girls and women without solid evidence to back this claim. The National Resource Center on Domestic Violence finds that around half of transgender and nonbinary people have been sexually assaulted and more than half have experienced domestic partner violence. This is far less than the 18% of cisgender women who are victims of sexual violence. This use of a concocted threat of violence to discriminate against transgender women is similar to that used to justify repression against Muslims, immigrants and Black people.

    Penelope Barritt/Rex/Shutterstock.

    Building an inclusive society

    The increasing attacks on the rights of transgender people in the United States needs to be a concern to all of us. We cannot create an inclusive society that supports the healthy development and rights of all people if we remain silent as the most vulnerable among us are targeted with damaging and deadly discrimination. We cannot teach our children tolerance if they see their friends being prohibited from basic childhood activities such as participation in sports. We cannot deny people the right to determine who they are and to live in ways that support them. Transgender people are our neighbors, our friends and our family members.

    Chase Strangio describes five specific ways we can take action to end discrimination against transgender people and to affirm them as members of our communities. There is something for everyone to do no matter where you are. We can all strive to point out and correct bigotry where we see it, work to educate people around us and donate to groups doing this work that are led by transgender people. If you live in a state where these bills are introduced, contact your state lawmaker and let them know of your opposition to them. You can also join local groups to advocate for the rights of transgender people.

    Let’s stop the attack on transgender people in the United States before it is allowed to escalate further.

    This article was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2021 at 10:27am and is filed under Children/Youth, Discrimination, Sports, Transgender.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • What is a “Strong” Charter School Law?

    Every year the billionaire-funded National Alliance for Charter Schools (NAPCS) produces a glossy report ranking state charter school laws. This year’s 72-page report is titled: Measuring up to the model, a ranking of state public charter school laws, twelfth annual edition.

    The main goal of the report is to rank state charter school laws in terms of how “strong” or “weak” they are. This is supposed to signal to privatizers and neoliberals which states are most conducive to privatizing public schools and which are the least conducive to privatizing public schools.

    When the report refers to a state’s charter school law as being “strong” what it means is that the door is wide open in that state to unfettered privatization of public schools. In other words, a state with a “strong” charter school law enables and empowers privatizers and neoliberals to create more privately-operated segregated charter schools than a state with a “weak” charter school law. States with “strong” charter school laws, for example, have less charter school accountability and fewer laws, rules, and regulations upholding public standards for non-profit and for-profit charter schools. Being able to dodge teacher unions and being exempt from collective bargaining agreements is also considered a feature of a state with “strong” charter school laws. States with “strong” charter school laws also tend to have more “charter school authorizers,” which means that it is easier to start a charter school in that state because if one authorizer rejects a charter school application, the applicant can always “hop” down the road to another charter school authorizer and see if they will authorize the school’s charter, which they usually do. This reveals the arbitrary and chaotic nature of charter school authorizing. Further, in states with “strong” charter school laws segregated charter schools can operate with a large degree of impunity and not be held accountable for a range of widely-reported unethical practices.

    “For the sixth year in a row,” Indiana, according to this latest NAPCS report, is number one in the nation because it has the “strongest” charter school laws in the country. This is terrible news for public schools and the public interest but great news for privatizers and neoliberals. What makes Indiana particularly attractive to privatizers and neoliberals is that it allows an infinite number of deregulated charter schools, multiple charter school authorizers, and almost no rules or regulations for charter schools to uphold. Indiana has also taken steps to funnel even more public school funds into the hands of the private interests that own-operate segregated charter schools.

    The NAPCS states that Maryland “has the nation’s weakest charter school law, ranking No. 45 (out of 45).” In other words, Maryland is the least attractive state to privatizers and neoliberals because it limits the number of charter school authorizers, upholds some rules and standards, and limits the amount of public funds that can be seized by private owners-operators of segregated charter schools. The report considers Iowa, Wyoming, Alaska, and Kansas to be insufficiently friendly to owners of capital as well.

    The issue at stake here is not whether charter school laws are “strong” or “weak” but rather: why are privately-operated charter schools permitted to exist in the first place? A related question is: why are private businesses like charter schools allowed to access public funds, assets, and resources? Charter schools are not public entities in the proper sense of the word. They are not state agencies like public schools. They are not political subdivisions of the state. They differ legally from public schools. They are contract schools that represent the outsourcing of public education to the private sector. Why are they legally permitted to siphon billions of public dollars that belong to public schools?

    Currently, 45 states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, and Guam have laws enabling the creation of charter schools. At this time, about 3.2 million students are enrolled in roughly 7,200 deregulated non-profit and for-profit charter schools. Privately-operated charter schools are notorious for consistently enrolling far fewer special needs students, homeless students, and English Language learners than public schools. It should also be noted that every 1-2 days a news report documents fraud, corruption, and arrests in the charter school sector.

    This article was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2021 at 10:00pm and is filed under Charter Schools, Discrimination, Education, Public Schools, Students.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Great Divider: Covid-19 Reflects Global Racism, Not Equality

    The notion that the COVID-19 pandemic was ‘the great equalizer’ should be dead and buried by now. If anything, the lethal disease is another terrible reminder of the deep divisions and inequalities in our societies. That said, the treatment of the disease should not be a repeat of the same shameful scenario.

    For an entire year, wealthy celebrities and government officials have been reminding us that “we are in this together”, that “we are on the same boat”, with the likes of US singer, Madonna, speaking from her mansion while submerged in a “milky bath sprinkled with rose petals,” telling us that the pandemic has proved to be the “great equalizer”.

    “Like I used to say at the end of ‘Human Nature’ every night, we are all in the same boat,” she said. “And if the ship goes down, we’re all going down together,” CNN reported at the time.

    Such statements, like that of Madonna, and Ellen DeGeneres as well, have generated much media attention not just because they are both famous people with a massive social media following but also because of the obvious hypocrisy in their empty rhetoric. In truth, however, they were only repeating the standard procedure followed by governments, celebrities and wealthy ‘influencers’ worldwide.

    But are we, really, “all in this together”? With unemployment rates skyrocketing across the globe, hundreds of millions scraping by to feed their children, multitudes of nameless and hapless families chugging along without access to proper healthcare, subsisting on hope and a prayer so that they may survive the scourges of poverty – let alone the pandemic – one cannot, with a clear conscience, make such outrageous claims.

    Not only are we not “on the same boat” but, certainly, we have never been. According to World Bank data, nearly half of the world lives on less than $5.5 a day. This dismal statistic is part of a remarkable trajectory of inequality that has afflicted humanity for a long time.

    The plight of many of the world’s poor is compounded in the case of war refugees, the double victims of state terrorism and violence and the unwillingness of those with the resources to step forward and pay back some of their largely undeserved wealth.

    The boat metaphor is particularly interesting in the case of refugees; millions of them have desperately tried to escape the infernos of war and poverty in rickety boats and dinghies, hoping to get across from their stricken regions to safer places. This sight has sadly grown familiar in recent years not only throughout the Mediterranean Sea but also in other bodies of water around the world, especially in Burma, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have tried to escape their ongoing genocide. Thousands of them have drowned in the Bay of Bengal.

    The COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated and, in fact, accelerated the sharp inequalities that exist in every society individually, and the world at large. According to a June 2020 study conducted in the United States by the Brookings Institute, the number of deaths as a result of the disease reflects a clear racial logic. Many indicators included in the study leave no doubt that racism is a central factor in the life cycle of COVID.

    For example, among those aged between 45 and 54 years, “Black and Hispanic/Latino death rates are at least six times higher than for whites”. Although whites make up 62 percent of the US population of that specific age group, only 22 percent of the total deaths were white. Black and Latino communities were the most devastated.

    According to this and other studies, the main assumption behind the discrepancy of infection and death rates resulting from COVID among various racial groups in the US is poverty which is, itself, an expression of racial inequality. The poor have no, or limited, access to proper healthcare. For the rich, this factor is of little relevance.

    Moreover, poor communities tend to work in low-paying jobs in the service sector, where social distancing is nearly impossible. With little government support to help them survive the lockdowns, they do everything within their power to provide for their children, only to be infected by the virus or, worse, die.

    This iniquity is expected to continue even in the way that the vaccines are made available. While several Western nations have either launched or scheduled their vaccination campaigns, the poorest nations on earth are expected to wait for a long time before life-saving vaccines are made available.

    In 67 poor or developing countries located mostly in Africa and the Southern hemisphere, only one out of ten individuals will likely receive the vaccine by the end of 2020, the Fortune Magazine website reported.

    The disturbing report cited a study conducted by a humanitarian and rights coalition, the People’s Vaccine Alliance (PVA), which includes Oxfam and Amnesty International.

    If there is such a thing as a strategy at this point, it is the deplorable “hoarding” of the vaccine by rich nations. Dr. Mohga Kamal-Yanni of the PVA put this realization into perspective when she said that “rich countries have enough doses to vaccinate everyone nearly three times over, whilst poor countries don’t even have enough to reach health workers and people at risk”. So much for the numerous conferences touting the need for a ‘global response’ to the disease.

    But it does not have to be this way.

    While it is likely that class, race and gender inequalities will continue to ravage human societies after the pandemic, as they did before, it is also possible for governments to use this collective tragedy as an opportunity to bridge the inequality gap, even if just a little, as a starting point to imagine a more equitable future for all of us.

    Poor, dark-skinned people should not be made to die when their lives can be saved by a simple vaccine, which is available in abundance.

    This article was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2020 at 9:08pm and is filed under Africa, Classism, COVID-19, Crimes against Humanity, Discrimination, Economic Inequality, Global Inequality, Human Rights, Hypocrisy, Pandemics, Poverty, Propaganda, Racial Justice, United States, Vaccines.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.