Allegations of bullying and racism within the Cabinet Office have been revealed in a leaked internal report.
The review, seen by the BBC, found one-in-ten members of staff had experienced bullying or harassment.
It also said there was a perception that those accused of bad behaviour were not being disciplined.
The Cabinet Office said the report showed “how seriously we take addressing this issue”.
The department, which is at the heart of the government machine and is in charge of delivering key policies, is dominated by people with “posh” London accents, according to a staff survey.
“This could lead those from other socioeconomic backgrounds to feel like outsiders and self-conscious about the way they speak,” the leaked report says.
Another staff member, quoted in the report, said: “We have to be a certain way in order for people around us to perceive us as being just as valid as someone who went to Oxbridge”.
‘Microaggressions’
Ethnic minority staff “described feeling as if they had to sometimes change their behaviour to fit in”, the report says.
“This included changes to how they speak and present themselves to be less like their own identity or the communities they come from,” it adds.
Some described how they “would often be the only ethnic minority individual in the room and described how this could make them feel like they did not belong”.
They described how they felt their ideas were taken less seriously than those of their white colleagues, and reported “microaggressions, such as being mistaken for another colleague”.
The report says gender was the second most cited reason for discrimination, with female participants describing “times where they felt their ideas were not respected”.
Female staff members who took part in the survey described a “macho culture at the top of the organisation”.
Formal complaints
A 2021 survey of staff found the Cabinet Office, which employs about 10,000 people, has the joint highest rate of bullying and harassment of all government departments, and the third highest rate of discrimination.
French amateur football tournament aimed at celebrating ethnic diversity is attracting talent scouts, sponsors and increasing public attention, by uniting young players from low-income neighborhoods with high-profile names in the sport.
The National Neighborhoods Cup is intended to shine a positive spotlight on working-class areas with large immigrant populations that some politicians and commentators scapegoat as breeding grounds for crime, riots and extremism.
Players with Congolese heritage beat a team with Malian roots 5-4 on Saturday in the one-month tournament’s final match, held at the home stadium of a third-division French team in the Paris suburb of Creteil. The final was broadcast live on Prime Video.
The event competition grew out of local tournaments modeled after the African Cup of Nations that have been held in recent years in suburbs and towns across France where former immigrants with African backgrounds have lived for years or generations.
This tournament, however was broader, and international in scope.
Along with teams from former French colonies in Africa, the participants included teams from European nations like Portugal and Italy. Players from France’s former colonies in Asia also competed.
The tournament, which was launched in 2019, challenges the French ideal of a colorblind republic that doesn’t count or identify people by race or ethnic background.
The ideal was intended to provide equal opportunity by treating everyone as simply French; in practice, people in places like Creteil experience discrimination and ethnic tensions daily.
HIGHLIGHT
The France team — like its World Cup-winning national team — is made up of white, Black, Arab and multiracial players that reflects the country’s diversity.
“We are Afro-descendants, we are claiming our roots and we are proud,” said tournament founder Moussa Sow, who works at the Red Cross and grew up in a Creteil neighborhood with a tough reputation.
“It’s not because we carry this heritage that we are going to erase our French identity.”
Fifty-eight per cent of Canadian youth say they have seen kids insulted, bullied or excluded based on their race or ethnicity at school, according to new survey data from the Angus Reid Institute in partnership with the University of British Columbia.
Fourteen per cent say they’ve experienced it themselves, with visible minority children three times as likely, and Indigenous children twice as likely, as white children to say that they have faced personal abuse themselves, the study finds.
The study, which surveyed 872 Canadian youth aged 12 to 17, is the third in a series created in partnership between the Angus Reid Institute and UBC. The first study helped inform a three-day virtual event, the inaugural National Forum on Anti-Asian Racism, hosted by UBC in June. The latest study is being published in tandem with a report on the key takeaways from the National Forum event that aims to mobilize community and government stakeholders to take action against anti-Asian and other forms of racism in Canada. Ryerson University will host the next National Forum on Anti-Asian Racism: Building Solidarities event on Nov. 9 and 10.
“No child should ever experience bullying and exclusion because of their race or ethnicity, but sadly, this study finds that racism is a daily reality for many Canadian children,” says UBC President and Vice-Chancellor Santa J. Ono (he/him). “I am hopeful that this study, along with our report from UBC’s inaugural National Forum on Anti-Asian racism, will spur urgently needed national conversations in the fight against racism in Canada.”
Survey respondents were also asked about a number of issues and events related to racial discrimination throughout Canada’s history to gauge their self-reported level of awareness of these issues and events. One-quarter (26 per cent) of respondents say they learned a lot about racism in Canada throughout history at school, but nearly as many (21 per cent) say they haven’t learned anything at all about it. Furthermore, one-third of kids say they never learned anything about slavery in Canada, half say they didn’t learn of the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, three-in-five say schools didn’t teach them about the head tax on Chinese immigrants, and four-in-five say the Komagata Maru ship never came up in their classrooms.
Source: UBC
Also Read: Hospital staff complain to regulator about bullying, harassment and racism
The U.N. General Assembly acknowledged a link between terrorism antisemitism in its recently passed Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy (GCTS) for the first time—a move that has been applauded by pro-Israel and Jewish organizations.
The GCTS, which lays out the world body’s strategy for combating terrorism, is required to be reviewed and passed every two years.
The latest version, passed on June 30, “Recognizes with deep concern the overall rise in instances of discrimination, intolerance and violence, regardless of the actors, directed against members of religious and other communities in various parts of the world, including cases motivated by Islamophobia, antisemitism, Christianophobia and prejudice against persons of any other religion or belief.”
Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan pointed out the condemnation of antisemitism in a speech to the General Assembly on July 6.
“For Israel, the adoption of the GCTS is, unfortunately, not a theoretical or academic exercise,” he said. “During the weeks we sat here debating this resolution, Israeli civilians from our capital in Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and Ashkelon, sat in bomb shelters because of Hamas’s relentless terror attacks.”
The addition is the first time that GCTS has officially recognized the existence of anti-Semitic terrorism.
“We welcome the GCTS’ acknowledgment of the upswing in hate speech and terrorist attacks targeting religious and ethnic communities, which included an explicit condemnation of antisemitism, in line with the findings of the Secretary General’s report on global terrorism,” he said. “We have all witnessed anti-Semitic attacks against Jewish communities around the world, including here in the streets of New York, in recent weeks. It is critical that the international community take a clear stance against these attacks and develop additional tools to combat such appalling assaults against Jewish and other groups.”
Read the complete article: Cleveland Jewish News
In the week after the Dr Seuss estate announced it would cease publication of six of his titles due to racist tropes, some conservative talking heads have been quick to label Seuss as the latest victim of “cancel culture”. But over the decades, many beloved children’s books have been quietly updated to remove racist content: some people will have never read their childhood favourites in their original form, because they were updated long before modern audiences saw them.
The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, which debuted in 1927 and 1930 respectively, were originally packed with unflattering portraits of ethnic villains, who were “swarthy”, “hook-nosed”, or “dark, and rather stupid looking”. In The Hardy Boys’ Hidden Harbor Mystery, the criminal exploits are executed by Luke Jones, a Black man who wears stolen diamond rings, speaks in a heavy dialect and refers to himself in the second person: “Luke Jones don’t stand for no nonsense from white folks! Ah pays mah fare, an’ Ah puts mah shoes where Ah please.” Meanwhile, Nancy Drew solved The Mystery at Lilac Inn by means of racial profiling: spotting a “dark-complexioned” girl at an upscale dress shop, Nancy notes: “Surely a girl in her circumstances cannot afford to buy dresses at such a place as this.”
Read the complete article at: The Guardian
The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, which debuted in 1927 and 1930 respectively, were originally packed with unflattering portraits of ethnic villains, who were “swarthy”, “hook-nosed”, or “dark, and rather stupid looking”. In The Hardy Boys’ Hidden Harbor Mystery, the criminal exploits are executed by Luke Jones, a Black man who wears stolen diamond rings, speaks in a heavy dialect and refers to himself in the second person: “Luke Jones don’t stand for no nonsense from white folks! Ah pays mah fare, an’ Ah puts mah shoes where Ah please.” Meanwhile, Nancy Drew solved The Mystery at Lilac Inn by means of racial profiling: spotting a “dark-complexioned” girl at an upscale dress shop, Nancy notes: “Surely a girl in her circumstances cannot afford to buy dresses at such a place as this.” cutting racism cutting racism
Racism literally ages Black Americans faster, according to our 25-year study
Racism literally ages Black Americans faster, according to our 25-year study
I’m part of a research team that has been following more than 800 Black American families for almost 25 years. We found that people who had reported experiencing high levels of racial discrimination when they were young teenagers had significantly higher levels of depression in their 20s than those who hadn’t. This elevated depression, in turn, showed up in their blood samples, which revealed accelerated ageing on a cellular level.
Our research is not the first to show Black Americans live sicker lives and die younger than other racial or ethnic groups. The experience of constant and accumulating stress due to racism throughout an individual’s lifetime can wear and tear down the body – literally “getting under the skin” to affect health.
These findings highlight how stress from racism, particularly experienced early in life, can affect the mental and physical health disparities seen among Black Americans.
Read more at: The Guardian
I’m part of a research team that has been following more than 800 Black American families for almost 25 years. We found that people who had reported experiencing high levels of racial discrimination when they were young teenagers had significantly higher levels of depression in their 20s than those who hadn’t. This elevated depression, in turn, showed up in their blood samples, which revealed accelerated ageing on a cellular level. Our research is not the first to show Black Americans live sicker lives and die younger than other racial or ethnic groups. The experience of constant and accumulating stress due to racism throughout an individual’s lifetime can wear and tear down the body – literally “getting under the skin” to affect health. These findings highlight how stress from racism, particularly experienced early in life, can affect the mental and physical health disparities seen among Black Americans.
Are Conservation Organisations Complicit in Ethnic Discrimination?
Answering this question with an example of blatantly racist and coercive imagery endorsed and propagated by two large players in the conservation world, both internationally and in India.
Trishant Simlai, doctoral candidate in geography at the University of Cambridge, is interested in the links between armed conflict, militarisation and conservation in India. Raza Kazmi, a Jharkhand-based conservationist, is interested in conservation militarisation, intersection of forest rights and conservation needs, and conservation in India’s conflict-ridden ‘Red Corridor’ landscape.
Global wildlife conservation efforts have advocated the exclusion of local people from ‘parks’ and areas considered to be of great value to biodiversity, often supporting coercive means to achieve this goal. Among the coercive measures often suggested, some don’t shy away from even recommending violence towards ‘offenders’.
Governments, conservation agencies and aid donors have further legitimised this exclusion by frequently invoking the narrative of an expanding human population destroying ‘pristine’ landscapes, often ignoring the role of over-consumption by urban actors or of states and corporate interests extracting resources. Such coercive conservation measures often base their actions on blatant racism, since it is almost always the poor populations of colour that are blamed for environmental degradation throughout the world.
The subject of racism or of ethnic discrimination in conservation is often avoided in most privileged conservation circles, putting most conservationists on the defensive. Many believe that conserving biodiversity concerns itself with a future that is common to all and is hence neutral to class, race and is neither left nor right. However, there are numerous examples of conservation interventions worldwide that belie these claims.
The usual approach of blaming poor populations of colour for environmental degradation can be traced to the advent of the Sierra Club, a large environmental conservation group in the US founded by John Muir, arguably one of the founding fathers of modern day environmentalism, in 1892.