Immigration and Refugee Board hearing room: Forget the stereotypes. See the person standing before you
I’d studied racism in college and written about it in my short career as a museum historian. At the root of it, as far as I can see, is the self-serving bias. (1) But, if we take the elevator one floor up, we find there the felt need to have enough. Amidst an environment conceived of as having scarce resources, we want to be among the people who have enough.
Enough to survive. Enough to take a vacation. Enough to do what we want. The scale doesn’t have to be grand.
And to effect that, we glorify our group (race, religion, politics) and cast aspersions on all others. It helps international bullies, no one else. It’s not designed to.
Meanwhile, the racial character we come up with is tainted overall with righteousness and whoever opposes it or us is … removed from the picture.
Well, the results of this situation face anyone who gets paid for reaching a decision, a judgment, a determination.
As a Member of the Immigration and Refugee Board from 1998 to 2006, I was responsible for reaching a determination of whether the individual before me was a refugee as defined by the UN Convention on refugees or not. And I came to my decision-making with all my biases, preferences, needs, etc. Which I had to put to one side and call on a deeper self.
And I always followed one maxim. I don’t know where I picked it up from: Always focus on the person right there in front of you. Never mind self-serving racial or religious stereotypes you carry around – your baggage. The person right there in front of you wants justice from you. (2)
It’s a bit of a dance because we also studied country conditions and had some background to check facts against. And test credibility. We didn’t fully ignore it. We kept an inner calculus. One error. Two errors. But until too many errors arose, we maintained an open neutrality. (You see this on TV all the time, the judge’s skepticism growing).
One case I had made a deep impression on me in this area. May I?
An elderly Punjabi woman was fleeing India because she was a target of everyone’s corruption – her son’s, the local police’s, etc.
I know about sending women or children ahead to win a refugee claim. She then anchors further extended-family or other migration. But this claimant’s testimony struck me as credible and I knew the fate of a woman of her age in India. She indeed had no “internal flight alternative.”
There was just one thing that I couldn’t reconcile. All the time she testified she did not once look at me. Not once. I finally stopped the hearing and asked counsel for a mid-hearing conference on the matter. What was she hiding?
He said that all her life in the Punjab men had ruled her and for a woman to offend a man in that region … can get you killed. And no one would do anything about it.
He said she had already been jailed once to force her to give up her house and described conditions in a Punjabi municipal jail. I knew what they were from the country-conditions literature.
Based on her treatment and what awaited her if she’d stayed in India, he said, why would she, here, now, in Canada, risk offending the person who can decide her fate by [arrogantly, she may think] looking at him?
Never mind how you might feel about the scenario; it was an occasion on which I got the full meaning of “bias” — in this case, what in our legal circles would have been called “western bias.”
That removed, I could now see the person standing before me.
The moral of the story is: Never mind the preconceptions of Islam that will inevitably mushroom on social media. We must keep perspective.
We must focus on the person in front of us and not project onto them our foundationless stereotypes and prejudices.
You might call it “an Ascension discipline.”
Footnotes
(1) See On the Self-Serving Bias at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/On-the-Self-Serving-Bias-2.pdf
(2) I once had a claimant whom I gave a negative decision to write me and thank me for having gotten a fair hearing. I was quite happy about that.