Neil Price, University of Toronto and Emis Akbari, University of Toronto

The recent UNICEF report card exposes Canada for failing its young children. The report, appropriately called “World’s Apart,” examines the status of children from the world’s most developed countries and looks at child happiness, well-being and skill. Among 38 developed economies, Canada falls 30th overall.

Unfortunately, the report highlights a recurring issue in Canada. It is one of many reports over the past two decades that demonstrate the inequities faced by many Canadian children.

How can Canada with its relatively positive environmental, social and economic conditions, fall so drastically behind the United Nations’ most recent targets for a sustainable world?

Risks to physical and mental well-being like poverty, systemic racism, pollution, climate change and uneven access to early education, all endanger opportunities for growth and development. According to the report, these dangers are far too widespread.

Canada’s inequity gaps are wide, child poverty is rampant and national averages gloss over worse conditions for those from racialized communities and Indigenous children. The report reveals that although the average child poverty rate in Canada is one in five, children from Black communities have rates as high as one in three. Within some Indigenous communities it’s a staggering one in two.

Something that should put all Canadians on alert is that this report provides a picture of the status of Canadian children prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. This pandemic brings with it new pressures and threats to child health and well-being.

The inequity gaps will likely grow.

Read more: Coronavirus school closures could widen inequities for our youngest students

Anti-racist uprisings add urgency

The UNICEF report arrives at a time of immense global protest spurred in part by the disproportionate impacts COVID-19 has had on racialized communities.

Entrenched racism and ongoing police brutality are issues that compound the conditions that children live within. We feel a growing impatience with reports that repeatedly illustrate the enormous challenges that children face but offer few concrete solutions.

In its report, UNICEF recommends policy-makers and communities “be accountable,” “be bold” and “listen to children and youth.” However, the report fails to take into account all the ways in which Black and Indigenous communities in Canada have been historically and systematically prevented from taking up such encouragements.

There is little acknowledgement of how racialized communities have been marginalized through the denial of resources and involvement in policy development. This is often the case with such reports.

COVID-19

Black and Indigenous children have been disproportionately harmed by the pandemic, so it should be clear that equity-focused approaches are required.

Yet most reports fail to emphasize culturally appropriate responses as an essential criteria for improving the well-being of children. We see no evidence of concerted efforts among Canadian policy-makers to use disaggregated race-based data to propose programs and funding mechanisms to help the most vulnerable.

How policy-makers and government bodies respond will determine the outcome for Canadian children, especially those within marginalized communities. Specific and customized responses to barriers in education, health and well-being are critically important as we move through and beyond COVID-19.

However, local and federal governments have been prioritizing resuscitation of the economy over addressing the social impacts of the pandemic. As a result, Black and Indigenous children are poised to slide further down health indices unless concrete and urgent steps are taken to address their unique circumstances. To begin to rectify Canada’s long-standing inaction towards the well-being of Black and Indigenous Peoples, policy-makers must act now.

Barriers to ‘bold action’

Funding discrepancies between non-Indigenous and Indigenous children must end. Governments must ensure that all children, regardless of their economic status, indigeneity, parent employment, race and ethnicity, have equal opportunities. This requires equitable policies.

We recommend a move toward action-based, participatory approaches to research and policy that offer concrete proposals for policy development that target the deeply entrenched inequities that form Canada’s social and economic foundation.

Policies need to be integrated with systems of education and health that have unique and important roles towards reconciliation.

Strong, focused and equitable policies to support children are needed now more than ever. Now that we have seen decades of consistent evidence of inequity and poverty, Canadian policy makers should not need to see another report. They need to take action. Canada’s children deserve better. They need federal efforts to rectify the obvious opportunity gaps. Canada’s track record leaves out too many: it needs to do better. Not tomorrow, today.

Neil Price, PhD student, Adult Education and Community Development, University of Toronto and Emis Akbari, Adjunct Professor, Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development at Ontario Institute for the Study of Education (OISE), University of Toronto

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Neil Price, University of Toronto

COVID-19 has brought issues of racism and inequality in our education systems into stark relief. We must now consider the role of colleges and universities in transforming Canada for the better after coronavirus.

Some have argued that the humanities and social sciences have a particularly important role in shaping our responses to the pandemic. Others suggest that now is the time to rethink higher education and pivot to a more decentralized model that reduces demands on the environment and opens up horizons for innovation and flexible learning.

Canadian colleges and universities are an important site for imagining and enacting a better Canada post-pandemic. Addressing the experiences of Black students, staff and faculty in these institutions is essential to move through and beyond crisis towards societal transformation.

COVID-19 contexts

One way to approach such fundamental issues is to examine the experiences of Black people within the academy. Black people in Canada have always had challenging relationships with educational institutions. Their experiences can be characterized as an enduring crisis, one that will most likely outlive our current pandemic.

As important sites where future workers are educated and developed, and where global events like COVID-19 are studied and theorized, universities and colleges offer unique spaces to think deeply about these critical interconnections as we engage in protest against anti-Black racism and move toward possible transformations beyond the pandemic.

So what might we glean from all of the ways in which Black people in higher education have managed to survive and persist during the coronavirus? And how might understanding their experiences be useful in thinking about how colleges and universities can contribute to a post-coronavirus future?

As a Black college administrator and someone whose doctoral research looks at the experiences of Black people in higher education, I have witnessed how the pandemic has wreaked havoc in the lives of Black students and colleagues first hand.

I’ve observed how Black students, faculty and staff have had to attend to home lives shot through with constant worry for loved ones who are employed on the front lines; the constant threat of layoffs that has disproportionately impacted Black and racialized staff; and how the need to maintain employment has made the continuation of studies near-impossible for far too many Black students.

Indeed, the coronavirus continues to have a disproportionate impact on all aspects of Black life.

All of this comes on top of an already tenuous and vexing relationship with post-secondary institutions, where historically high push-out/dropout rates, social isolation and anti-Black racism is pervasive.

Read more: Living and breathing while Black: Racial profiling and other acts of violence

Black ‘care’

Black people have known crisis ever since the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and we have known it in the academy well before COVID-19. To be Black and active in the academy is to know what it means to survive, largely by practising what York University humanities scholar Christina Sharpe has termed “care”.

Care can be discerned in the countless check-ins on the states of well-being of Black students and colleagues; in the meetings after the meeting where what was both said and left unsaid by non-Black colleagues is unpacked; and in the spontaneous email threads where supports and mental health resources for Black people are shared.

For those of us concerned with higher education and its role in contributing to the public good in a post-pandemic future, we might imagine ways of embedding a similar ethics of care in all that we do. We might consider and examine how our everyday work of teaching and learning may be complicated by such a commitment.

Unmaking the academy

What does it mean to be in the university but not of the university? And what might this asymmetrical relationship mean for those of us who learn and work in higher education beyond COVID-19?

I think of the ongoing protests against anti-Black racism both within and outside the academy as opportunities to conceptualize ways in which Black people attempt to resist anti-Black prescriptions and forces, whether they’re procedural (harmful policy), mental (internalized racism) or physical (damaging environments/bodily stress).

Protest is a necessary, important and potentially transformative act of refusal. Whether it is resigning from a prestigious university committee or bringing attention to racism on campus, protest is a means for both surviving the academy and making way for change.

Black solidarity

Black people have survived the academy partly because of their creative ways of tending to and accessing resources that sustain their presence. In my many years teaching and working in higher education, I’ve observed how Black students and staff (myself included) have relied on each other to persist in their various endeavours.

This includes the pooling of intellectual resources, quietly pointing Black students to financial supports (both formal and informal), sharing of cultural knowledge and guidance, making connections and introductions for employment, offering timely encouragement, and trading and purchasing of goods (time, peer tutoring, food, short-term loans, transit fare, child-minding, etc.)

All of these affirming and supportive activities amount to what York University professor Caroline Shenaz Hossein refers to as the “Black social economy.”

As we witness the confluence of global activism in response to police brutality and demands for social and economic democracy during the coronavirus pandemic, we should rethink our public institutions through a deeper understanding of Black care, protest and solidarity.

Neil Price, PhD student, Adult Education and Community Development, University of Toronto

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Luisa Farah Schwartzman, University of Toronto

In the final presidential debate before the United States election, Democrat Joe Biden acknowledged the harmful effects of the war on drugs on racial minorities in the U.S. due to incarceration and police violence, and even suggested decriminalizing cocaine consumption.

But the immigration debate centred on familiar issues. Biden focused on the innocent children who got separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump focused on the “coyotes” — someone paid by migrants to illegally guide or assist them across the border — and drug cartels.

But neither made the link between immigration and the drug war, despite the substantial impact the U.S.-led war on drugs has had on the lives of people in Latin America.

Increasingly, people are crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to escape a cycle of violence to which the United States continues to contribute. Immigration is just the tip of the iceberg.

Murder rates in Latin America have skyrocketed since the 1980s and are still among the highest in the world. This is because Latin America became the battleground for the war on drugs.

American crackdown

Over the last 50 years, the U.S. government has pushed for increasingly restrictive international treaties on drugs, which paradoxically increased the profitability of cocaine.

In the 1980s, while Americans were locking up their fellow citizens for drug offences, the U.S. government decided to eradicate the production of coca plants and the sale of cocaine abroad. The U.S. provided political, military and financial support for Latin American governments to eradicate coca production, spraying the lands of peasant coca farmers, supporting police and militia violence against guerrilla movements and cracking down on drug businesses in urban centres.

The U.S. made foreign loans to Latin American countries conditional upon enforcing tough anti-drug policies. These tough-on-crime measures disproportionately affected marginalized populations: Peruvian peasant farmers, Black Brazilian favela dwellers, Salvadorean youth sporting tattoos.

American support for violence in Latin America is not new. During the Cold War, the U.S. supported military coups and civil wars in the region. But with the end of the Cold War and the democratization of Latin American countries, the war on drugs became a legitimate excuse for continued state violence as the illicit drug economy fuelled criminality.

Unsuccessful policies

These policies did not work. Drug prohibition, combined with continued consumption, has shifted but not dismantled the drug business. The largest consumer market is still the United States.

When Peruvian coca production was reduced, production shifted to Colombia. When Colombian drug cartels were dismantled, Mexican cartels became stronger. Weakened large cartels allowed smaller organizations to fill the void. Brazil’s overcrowded, underfunded, violent and corrupt prisons became headquarters and training grounds for drug traffickers.

The war on drugs generates criminal and police violence in Latin America, and blurs the boundary between the two. Drug businesses create their own justice systems.

There’s no point calling the police to help you resolve an illegal business transaction. Drug dealers would rather act as the police than have someone else call the police into their neighbourhoods.

Drug profits create opportunities for corruption, involving police officers, government bureaucrats and high-level politicians, and all sides create violence when these private-public partnerships go wrong.

Politicians often enlist drug dealers, militia and police officers to eliminate their opponents or to generate societal drama for political gain.

A vicious cycle

Combined with the war on drugs, domestic tough-on-crime and restrictive immigration policies in the U.S. generate a vicious cycle of displacement and violence on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Greater border enforcement means that more immigrants have to depend on human smuggling organizations, and pass through territories controlled by drug traffickers, to make the crossing. But these relationships go deeper.

As the book Space of Detention by American cultural anthropologist Elana Zilberg explains, the first wave of Salvadorean refugees to the U.S. were escaping the American-backed civil war and political repression of the 1980s.

Some of these refugees’ adult children joined youth gangs, and were imprisoned and deported from the U.S. due to toughening anti-drug and immigration policies. As they arrived in their parents’ country, one they barely knew, they influenced local youth culture, symbols and gang affiliations, creating transnational youth gangs known as maras.

Read more: Central American gangs like MS-13 were born out of failed anti-crime policies

Maras were then violently repressed by Salvadorean policies that were modelled on U.S. drug/gang measures, including persecuting young adults if they had tattoos.

Police and criminal violence has generated more insecurity, leading some Salvadorean youth to seek refuge in Mexico and the United States.

U.S. conservatives cite criminal violence in Latin America to deny migrants fleeing that violence the right to asylum, and as an excuse to enforce draconian immigration, policing and deportation policies, which in turn exacerbate the same problems that they’re ostensibly aimed at solving.

Whether these immigrants are members of gangs, are carrying drugs, have learned how to be violent or are innocent victims is beside the point. The point is that the American public should no longer pretend that the United States hasn’t played a critical role in creating and fuelling this violence. The violence doesn’t only go in a south-north direction.

Luisa Farah Schwartzman, Associate Professor in Sociology, University of Toronto

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Neil Price, University of Toronto and Emis Akbari, University of Toronto

The recent UNICEF report card exposes Canada for failing its young children. The report, appropriately called “World’s Apart,” examines the status of children from the world’s most developed countries and looks at child happiness, well-being and skill. Among 38 developed economies, Canada falls 30th overall.

Unfortunately, the report highlights a recurring issue in Canada. It is one of many reports over the past two decades that demonstrate the inequities faced by many Canadian children.

How can Canada with its relatively positive environmental, social and economic conditions, fall so drastically behind the United Nations’ most recent targets for a sustainable world?

Risks to physical and mental well-being like poverty, systemic racism, pollution, climate change and uneven access to early education, all endanger opportunities for growth and development. According to the report, these dangers are far too widespread.

Canada’s inequity gaps are wide, child poverty is rampant and national averages gloss over worse conditions for those from racialized communities and Indigenous children. The report reveals that although the average child poverty rate in Canada is one in five, children from Black communities have rates as high as one in three. Within some Indigenous communities it’s a staggering one in two.

Something that should put all Canadians on alert is that this report provides a picture of the status of Canadian children prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. This pandemic brings with it new pressures and threats to child health and well-being.

The inequity gaps will likely grow.

Read more: Coronavirus school closures could widen inequities for our youngest students

Anti-racist uprisings add urgency

The UNICEF report arrives at a time of immense global protest spurred in part by the disproportionate impacts COVID-19 has had on racialized communities.

Entrenched racism and ongoing police brutality are issues that compound the conditions that children live within. We feel a growing impatience with reports that repeatedly illustrate the enormous challenges that children face but offer few concrete solutions.

In its report, UNICEF recommends policy-makers and communities “be accountable,” “be bold” and “listen to children and youth.” However, the report fails to take into account all the ways in which Black and Indigenous communities in Canada have been historically and systematically prevented from taking up such encouragements.

There is little acknowledgement of how racialized communities have been marginalized through the denial of resources and involvement in policy development. This is often the case with such reports.

COVID-19

Black and Indigenous children have been disproportionately harmed by the pandemic, so it should be clear that equity-focused approaches are required.

Yet most reports fail to emphasize culturally appropriate responses as an essential criteria for improving the well-being of children. We see no evidence of concerted efforts among Canadian policy-makers to use disaggregated race-based data to propose programs and funding mechanisms to help the most vulnerable.

How policy-makers and government bodies respond will determine the outcome for Canadian children, especially those within marginalized communities. Specific and customized responses to barriers in education, health and well-being are critically important as we move through and beyond COVID-19.

However, local and federal governments have been prioritizing resuscitation of the economy over addressing the social impacts of the pandemic. As a result, Black and Indigenous children are poised to slide further down health indices unless concrete and urgent steps are taken to address their unique circumstances. To begin to rectify Canada’s long-standing inaction towards the well-being of Black and Indigenous Peoples, policy-makers must act now.

Barriers to ‘bold action’

Funding discrepancies between non-Indigenous and Indigenous children must end. Governments must ensure that all children, regardless of their economic status, indigeneity, parent employment, race and ethnicity, have equal opportunities. This requires equitable policies.

We recommend a move toward action-based, participatory approaches to research and policy that offer concrete proposals for policy development that target the deeply entrenched inequities that form Canada’s social and economic foundation.

Policies need to be integrated with systems of education and health that have unique and important roles towards reconciliation.

Strong, focused and equitable policies to support children are needed now more than ever. Now that we have seen decades of consistent evidence of inequity and poverty, Canadian policy makers should not need to see another report. They need to take action. Canada’s children deserve better. They need federal efforts to rectify the obvious opportunity gaps. Canada’s track record leaves out too many: it needs to do better. Not tomorrow, today.

Neil Price, PhD student, Adult Education and Community Development, University of Toronto and Emis Akbari, Adjunct Professor, Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development at Ontario Institute for the Study of Education (OISE), University of Toronto

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.