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Anti-Black Racism in Canada

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Anti-Black Racism in Canada

Black people have been in Canada since the early 17th century (see Black Canadians). Throughout their 400-year history in Canada, Black people have faced racism, discrimination and hostility based on the colour of their skin. Anti-Black racism refers to attitudes, beliefs, stereotyping, discrimination and prejudice targeted at people of African descent. The roots of anti-Black racism are found in enslavement and its legacies. Deeply entrenched in Canadian institutions, policies and practices, anti-Black racism is either normalized or rendered invisible to the larger white society. Anti-Black racism manifests itself in how Black Canadians are disadvantaged, or marginalized, in society, the economy and politics. As a result, Black Canadians often have unequal opportunities, higher unemployment and significant poverty rates. They are also overrepresented in the criminal justice system (see also Criminal Code of Canada).

Anti-Black racism has manifested itself through various historical examples, including enslavement (the transatlantic slave trade) and segregation. Ongoing issues of anti-Black racism, such as police brutality and racial microaggressions, continue to persist in Canada.

Black Enslavement in Canada

The historical roots of anti-Black racism started with the transatlantic slave trade. The slave trade depended on the buying and selling of Africans for use as enslaved labourers. Traders of enslaved people exploited and profited from Africans’ labour. From the 16th to 19th centuries, the slave trade transported between 10 and 12 million people between Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas and Europe.

In colonial Canada, the enslavement of African people was a legal tool for economic interests. In New France, French colonizers started the practice of chattel slavery, in which enslaved African and Indigenous people were treated as personal property that could be bought, sold, inherited and traded. The practice of slavery continued after the Conquest of New France. The number of enslaved African people increased significantly in British North America after the American Revolutionary War (1775–83). (See American Revolution – Invasion of Canada.) White American Loyalists were encouraged to move north to Canada after the American Revolution. Many United Empire Loyalists brought along their “property” with them, including enslaved Black people. French and British colonists relied on Black people’s slave labour to build their personal wealth as well as the colonial economies. Thus, the intention of enslaving Black and Indigenous people was to exploit them for their labour. (See Black Enslavement in CanadaEnslavement of Indigenous People in Canada.)

Segregation

The racial segregation of Black people is evident throughout Canadian history. Racial segregation seeks to separate people and communities based on their race. Many Black people in Canada were segregated, excluded from or denied equal access to various opportunities and services. This was the case in education (see Racial Segregation of Black Students in Canadian Schools), employment, housingimmigrationtransportation, military service (see Canadian Armed Forces) and healthcare. Historically, various laws, court decisions and societal norms upheld the racial segregation of Black people. To many, widely held beliefs about Black people’s racial inferiority (see Racism) during the period of enslavement justified racial segregation. Racial segregation against Black people in Canada was different in each province and territory, as well as in various communities.

Did you know?
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Canadian government implemented several immigration policies to exclude Black people. Order-in-Council P.C. 1911-1324 was one such policy. It proposed to restrict and ban Black immigration to Canada. Policymakers believed that Black people were unsuited to Canada’s cold climate. Although the Order-in-Council never went into effect and was repealed, it demonstrated that Black immigrants were not wanted nor welcomed in Canada.

 

How does Anti-Black Racism impact health?

  • Racism can cause frequent stress on the body and trigger stress-coping behaviours (e.g. smoking) that often lead to disease
  • A study investigating the possibility of links between Canadians’ race, experiences of discrimination and risk for diseases such as high blood pressure found Black Canadians were almost two times more likely than White Canadians to be treated badly or with less respect. Frequent experiences of discrimination were linked with a greater chance of obesity and lower self-rated health.
  • In Toronto, Black Canadians often face ‘service deserts’—a lack of safe, inexpensive and effective healthcare and community services in their communities.
  • A report about the sexual health education and services needed for Toronto youth found Black youth were the only group of youth that pointed to racism as a key factor preventing them from using sexual health clinics.

How can we fight Anti-Black Racism?

  • Acknowledge Anti-Black Racism exists and that it has an impact on the health and well-being of Black-Canadians.
  • Eliminating Anti-Black Racism requires support from all levels of government, institutions, businesses, schools, healthcare, social service and community agencies and individuals.
  • Take a look at how or if you, your organization, the agency are being inclusive and easily accessible to Black Canadians.
  • Join the Black Health Alliance in working towards finding ways to address Anti-Black Racism in order to improve the health and well-being of Black Canadians.

When governments, healthcare and social service organizations, employees and community members work together to eliminate Anti-Black Racism in healthcare and beyond, all Canadians benefit. Join us and many more as we work together to accomplish this goal.

Contemporary Examples of Anti-Black Racism

Anti-Black racism continues against Black people in Canada today through a variety of overt and subtle dynamics. Some of these factors include education, poverty, the labour market, the justice system, immigration and housing. Unequal opportunities in education seriously impact Black Canadians in negative and discriminatory ways. In comparison to other youth, Black young people are less likely to attend post-secondary institutions and earn post-secondary qualifications. (See also Universities in Canada.) Although the socio-economic conditions of Black Canadians may vary according to their gender, region of origin or ancestry and generation status, discrimination and racism still exist and negatively impact Black people in Canada.

One subtle way that racism and discrimination are perpetrated is through racial microaggressions. Microaggressions are everyday insults, indignities and demeaning messages directed toward Black, Indigenous or racialized people by white people. The latter may be unaware or ignorant of the harmful and negative effects of these verbal aggressions. Examples of racial microaggressions would be someone saying “You don’t act like a normal Black person” and “You’re really pretty for someone so dark.” Racial microaggressions may stem from unconscious biases. They also demonstrate how racialized people are viewed by others. Racial microaggressions can be harmful to Black, Indigenous and racialized people. Racial microaggressions can leave targeted people feeling sad, excluded and viewed as second-class citizens.

Another way in which anti-Black racism manifests itself against Black people in Canada is through instances of police brutality. In Canada, Black and Indigenous people are overrepresented in police-involved deaths. In 2018, the Ontario Human Rights Commission found that, between 2013 and 2017, a Black person was nearly 20 times more likely to be shot and killed by the police in Toronto compared to a white person. Advocates argue that police brutality is just one of many symptoms of systemic racism found in Canada. Dismantling police brutality and injustice toward Black, Indigenous and racialized people in Canada need to be dealt with at the foundational level. For activists, this means addressing racism on a structural level and throughout society.

Oyeniran, C. (2022). Anti-Black Racism in Canada. In The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/anti-black-racism-in-canada

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STD epidemic slows as new syphilis and gonorrhea cases fall in US

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NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.

The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.

“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”

More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.

Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.

The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.

However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.

Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.

“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.

What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.

In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.

Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.

Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.

Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.

However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.

Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.

Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)

There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.

“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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World’s largest active volcano Mauna Loa showed telltale warning signs before erupting in 2022

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.

That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.

Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.

“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.

Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.

When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.

The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.

The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.

Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.

Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.

Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.

(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles

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Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.

The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.

After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.

Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.

Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.

“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.

Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.

But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.

Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.

Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.

That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.

Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.

Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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