On defending (human) rights and other issues

• I’ve moved to US from Iran several years ago. One of the topics that always intrigued me is the history of white vs. native people. At the beginning I was interested in learning more about history. Then slowly I absorbed enough to put it in perspective and move to the current time. I tried to understand what is happening now in this interaction. In short, I can report that white people in general would believe they have done bad deeds to native people, they are sad, and they think something needs to be done to make up for all that ugly past. In practice, no one wants to do anything, after all it wasn’t them who did that bad things. Let the government, or even native people themselves, figure it out. In reality, what happens is that, for example, university of Wyoming makes it free for native high school graduates to attend the university for free. They come to school without having a reasonable high school education that has prepared them for college life. There are not much support for these kids. They fail courses, will go back to their reservations, and become a proof of failure. Aside from personal aspects, on two directions this hurts the whole culture, the public: One, the native people get discouraged from pursuing college degrees as they have many examples of failures and they don’t want to be that. Two, the funding agencies, government, and the general public will believe that even free education cannot help these kids, so there “is” something wrong with them. No body will say it, because of political correctness, duh! But most people think that in their minds.
  • For the past couple of years I’ve been a member of the “diversity and equity committee” for the dean of sciences at University of Calgary, Canada. What we do is to identify areas of concern as to where there might be some discrimination happening, then come up with strategies to change the situation by either suggesting them to the dean, or by acting through the means already available (e.g. asking for police intervention for a sexual harassment, or administration involvement in case of hate speech etc), or by holding events to promote culture of inclusiveness (like holding Ada Lovelace day events, holding workshops for identifying and eliminating gender bias in recommendation letters etc). What I see here is that people do not care about having a discrimination free society, even people of this committee, not even remotely. If someone is gay, they care about LGBTQ rights, if someone is female, they care about women rights etc. Which is great, by the way, but by no means is enough. On my first meeting with this committee, I told them about how I feel the Canadian rules discriminate about country of origin. Unanimously, they agreed that this topic is not related to this committee, and it did not move.
  • Almost a year ago, the new US president got elected despite being a symbol of all types of discrimination. To me, the presidents of a country means the voice of the majority of that country. Yes, I believe Iran’s previous president when was saying all that nonsense, he was representing the majority of the citizens who cared and voted for him; set aside the discussion on if he was actually elected or not, at least for his first term no one said he cheated. Any ways, Living several years in US, I have always felt that I am being discriminated. Very rarely it was racial. Yes, there were moments that a totally random half drunk person in a totally random bar in a home town USA gave me looks because of my hair colour, but it never got to a higher level. Now, I’m not claiming that this doesn’t exist, or even it’s rare, what I am saying is that there are things that are far more hurting and far more common. The type of discrimination that I faced everyday was based on my country of origin. Not only in US, but also in Canada. There are specific rules that says non-citizens and people who are not permanent residents are second degree people. You might argue that it is just natural to put the citizens first. But then there are explicit rules that makes it harder to live for you, if you are for example from Iran. The prison that people describe now they are trapped in after the muslim ban has always been there as I mentioned in my previous post “Academic Cry Baby and the Wall”. I didn’t exit US during my time there, in fears that I would not be able to get a visa to come back to finish my studies. Of course when I was going to US in the first place I knew all about it and I had made my decisions, informed ones indeed. But the thing which was missing then was that I didn’t know my rights. The situation in Canada is so much better in this respect, but still far from being equal.
  • This summer our department was looking to fill a tenure track lecturer position, and hearing about my teaching abilities, several people in the department encouraged me to apply. For various reasons I decided not to do so, nonetheless, the department head in a casual conversation told me that he has to go over all the applications and separate the Canadians from non-Canadians. That gave me enough reasons to finalize my decision.
  • I’ve applied to become a permanent resident of Canada more than a year ago. According to their website when I submitted my documents, it was supposed to take 41 days for me to hear about their decision, and also no more than 6 months. After numerous emails and phone calls without any response, I’m still not sure that when I will have it. The only thing that I know that for the past 6 months, they are doing a background check on me!
  • Putting things together, I don’t know what exactly natives in US and in Canada should do about their situation. What I know is that we shouldn’t follow in their footsteps, that is to wait for them to come up with a solution out of pity for us.

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PS: Taylor institute for teaching and learning here at University of Calgary last week hosted a show named “Chopped”, named after the food show. The competition was on who can come up with best teaching plans given certain ingredients. Towards the middle of the competition, one of the teams suggested they’ll invite an aboriginal leader to talk about land for the students of their class, as their social ingredient. One of the judges remarked that it was “strategic”. I can’t express my feelings about this quite well.