I got hit by a car last Wednesday night in a Cerritos College parking lot, and I've been pretty well out of it since then. If I made promises about things I was going to post at the website, or if I haven't responded to an email you may have sent, I apologize. My head is just beginning to clear and I'm only now able to move around. I'll see everyone in class tomorrow, and we can catch up then.
I’ve Become a Racist’: Migrant Wave Unleashes Danish Tensions Over Identity
The thousands of Muslim asylum seekers pouring into Denmark have spawned a backlash, and questions over whether the country has a latent racial hostility at its core.
TAARNBY, Denmark — Johnny Christensen, a stout and silver-whiskered retired bank employee, always thought of himself as sympathetic to people fleeing war and welcoming to immigrants. But after more than 36,000 mostly Muslim asylum seekers poured into Denmark over the past two years, Mr. Christensen, 65, said, “I’ve become a racist.”
He believes these new migrants are draining Denmark’s cherished social-welfare system but failing to adapt to its customs. “Just kick them out,” he said, unleashing a mighty kick at an imaginary target on a suburban sidewalk. “These Muslims want to keep their own culture, but we have our own rules here and everyone must follow them.”
Denmark, a small and orderly nation with a progressive self-image, is built on a social covenant: In return for some of the world’s highest wages and benefits, people are expected to work hard and pay into the system. Newcomers must quickly learn Danish — and adapt to norms like keeping tidy gardens and riding bicycles.
The country had little experience with immigrants until 1967, when the first “guest workers” were invited from Turkey, Pakistan and what was then Yugoslavia. Its 5.7 million people remain overwhelmingly native born, though the percentage has dropped to 88 today from 97 in 1980.
Bo Lidegaard, a prominent historian, said many Danes feel strongly that “we are a multiethnic society today, and we have to realize it — but we are not and should never become a multicultural society.”
The recent influx pales next to the one million migrants absorbed into Germany or the 163,000 into Sweden last year, but the pace shocked this stable, homogeneous country. The center-right government has backed harsh measures targeting migrants, hate speech has spiked, and the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party is now the second largest in Parliament.
Some of the same hostilities were reflected this weekend in Germany, where voters in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s home state embraced anti-immigrant candidates — an emphatic rejection of her refugee policy.
There is new tension between Danes still opening their arms and a resurgent right wing that seeks to ban all Muslims and shut Denmark off from Europe. Mr. Christensen, the retired banker, supports emerging proposals for his country to follow Britain in exiting the European Union.
There is tension, too, over whether the backlash is really about a strain on Denmark’s generous public benefits or a rising terrorist threat — or whether a longstanding but latent racial hostility is being unearthed.
Analysts say that the public voiced little opposition after 5,000 Poles and 3,300 Americans, among other Westerners, emigrated to Denmark in 2014, but that there has been significant criticism of the nearly 16,000 Syrian asylum seekers who arrived that year and the next. They and other migrants were not invited, and many ended up here by accident, intercepted on their route to Sweden.
Critics complain that these newcomers have been slow to learn Danish — though the Immigration Ministry recently reported that 72 percent passed a required language exam. Some Danes bristle at what they see as ethnic enclaves: About 30 percent of new immigrants lived in the nation’s two largest cities, Aarhus and Copenhagen, where Muslim women in abayas and men in prayer caps stand out among the blond and blue-eyed crowds on narrow streets.
Perhaps the leading — and most substantive — concern is that the migrants are an economic drain. In 2014, 48 percent of immigrants from non-Western countries ages 16 to 64 were employed, compared with 74 percent of native Danes.
The Immigration Ministry has sought to avoid what it calls “parallel societies” of migrants living in “vicious circles of bad image, social problems and a high rate of unemployment.” Tightened immigration requirements, the ministry said in its latest annual report, weed out those “who have weaker capabilities for being able to integrate into Danish society.”
Omar Mahmoud, 34, an Iraqi engineer who entered Denmark a year ago and lives in a refugee center in Randers, a city of 60,000, is trying his best to fit in. He and his wife are taking Danish classes, and their three children are learning the language and making Danish friends in school. They are Muslim, but attend church to learn about Christianity, and he said he was not opposed to his son’s eating pork, a staple of the Danish diet, though it is forbidden in Islam.
Mr. Mahmoud said his family had not encountered direct insults or threats, but was frightened by the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim tenor in the public discourse.
“It’s like foreigners are put in a special clan, separate from the Danish people,” he lamented. Still, Mr. Mahmoud said that “some of the Danish people are angels” and that he was relieved to be far from the violence of Iraq. “I’m in my heaven now.”
Anders Buhl-Christensen, a center-right city councilman in Randers, said the influx had forced a more honest conversation about national identity. “Our problem in Denmark is that we’ve been too polite,” he said. “No one dared talk about” immigration, he added, “because they were afraid they’d be called racist.”
A Friday prayer last month in the Grand Mosque of Copenhagen, also known as Hamad Bin Khalifa Civilization Center.CreditIlvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times
‘It’s not racism to be aware of the difference’
Denmark is just one of many European nations grappling with the wave of migrants amid a spate of terrorist attacks across the Continent by Islamic extremists: A recent Pew Research Center survey found that at least half the citizens in eight of 10 countries polled said incoming refugees increased the likelihood of terrorist attacks.
Many analysts saw Britain’s surprise vote to leave the European Union as an angry expression of concern that British — or, especially, English — identity was being diluted by the nation’s growing diversity. Debate is raging anew over whether certain Islamic modes of dress — full-body swimsuits, known as burkinis, in France and face veils in Germany — inherently contravene countries’ values.
Similar themes are seen as underpinning a wave of new measures here in Denmark.
Last year, Denmark placed ads in Arabic-language newspapers stressing its tough new policies, essentially suggesting: Don’t come here.
Muslims do not assimilate as easily as Europeans or some Asians, said Denmark’s culture minister, Bertel Haarder, partly because, as he put it, their patriarchal culture frowns on women working outside the home and often constrains freedom of speech.
“It’s not racism to be aware of the difference — it’s stupid not to be aware,” Mr. Haarder said. “We do them a blessing by being very clear and outspoken as to what kind of country they have come to, what are our basic values.”
But much of the difference remains unspoken. This is a country where pedestrians wait for a green light to cross even when no cars are in sight, a contrast to the bustling streets of Middle Eastern capitals.
Birgitte Romme Larsen, a Danish anthropologist who has studied refugees and asylum seekers in rural areas, mentioned an African refugee who did not realize that closing his curtains during the day was interpreted as being unduly secretive. Other newcomers were not aware that congregating and talking loudly at a grocery might offend Danish sensibilities.
“These implicit expectations cannot be written into an integration folder” migrants receive, Ms. Larsen said.
Signe Gadeberg, right, and her friend Fatima Al-Gharawi, a native of Iraq, in Copenhagen last month.CreditIlvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times
‘A Dane of a different color’
Sherif Sulaiman, an organic food scientist who moved to Denmark eight years ago from Egypt, said Muslims must not close themselves off in enclaves but open themselves up for interaction.
He is the manager of an Islamic center that opened in 2014 and invites Danes in for meals and for an annual “harmony week.” Mr. Sulaiman pushed to have the mosque complex use Scandinavian architectural style and furniture, and lends its conference room to a church for meetings.
“We should be like this glass — transparent,” he said, pointing to a window. “As long as we follow the rules of the country, we are part of Danish society.”
But some dark-skinned immigrants who have lived in Denmark for decades say assimilation seems an elusive and ever-shifting target.
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Sylvester Bbaale, who operates a food truck, came to Denmark from Uganda as a baby in 1989. He said he was beaten on the street last year by three men who told him to go back to Africa.CreditIlvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times
Patricia Bandak and her brother Sylvester Bbaale came to Denmark from Uganda as babies in 1989. Like their native neighbors, they are polite and punctual and ride their bicycles everywhere.
The siblings are not Muslim but said they frequently encountered racism: In school, they were called the N word, and told that they should stop eating Ugandan food like matoke, a starchy fruit. Mr. Bbaale, 27, who operates a food truck, said he was beaten on the street last year by three men who cursed at him and told him to go back to Africa.
“For a lot of people, being Danish is in your blood, so I will never be Danish,” said Ms. Bandak, 28, who became a Danish citizen in 2010 and is studying documentary film. “I call myself a Dane of a different color.”
Then there is Ozlem Cekic, a Turkish-born Muslim who served as a leftist member of Parliament from 2007 to 2015. Her three children were born in Denmark, she wrote a 2009 memoir in Danish, and, she said, “I even dream in Danish.”
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Ozlem Cekic, a Turkish-born Muslim, served in Parliament from 2007 to 2015. She is inundated with accusations that Muslims are milking the welfare system and plotting against Danes, she said.CreditIlvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times
Yet Mrs. Cekic, 40, said she often received death threats and heard shouts of “Go home!” on the street. Every time terrorists strike Europe, she is bombarded by hundreds of hate messages. Lately, people have inundated her with accusations that Muslims are milking the welfare system and plotting against Danes.
While in Parliament, Mrs. Cekic held “dialogue coffees,” at which she would explain — in fluent Danish — why she is as Danish as anyone.
“They meet me for coffee and suddenly they say their problem isn’t with me but with those other people,” she recalled. “I tell them, ‘I am the other.
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Housam Mohammed Shamden, a Syrian refugee, and his family having dinner last month at the Randers, Denmark, home of Kind Citizens group members, who try to help immigrants settle in.CreditIlvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times
‘Denmark is closing in on itself’
Karin Andersen is one of thousands of Danes trying to help the immigrants settle through groups formed on Facebook called Venligboerne, or Kind Citizens. She spends several days each month with Housam Mohammed Shamden, 38, his wife and two daughters, who fled Syria in 2014 and now live in Randers, with small Danish flags taped to the front door of their apartment and tucked into flower vases.
“Danes are so concerned about losing their culture,” said Ms. Andersen, 62, a retired teacher. “But how many help the ones who want to be part of it?”
However many, they are often drowned out by reports of Muslims being spat at and showered with racist slurs. In May, two Danes ripped the head scarves off two girls. The month before, a national controversy erupted after a public swimming pool in Copenhagen created girls-only lessons in response to Muslim requests.
“Freedom of speech is now interpreted as freedom to say anything hateful,” said Julie Jeeg, a law student who volunteers with an antiracism group. “Denmark is closing in on itself. People are retreating inward.”
In January, after revelations that a Randers day care center had stopped serving pork meatballs since its Muslim students would not eat them, the Town Council narrowly passed a measure requiring that pork be served “on equal terms with other kinds of food.”
The councilman who pushed the measure, Frank Noergaard of the Danish People’s Party, said he was incensed that “pork could be abandoned in Denmark,” adding, “If you give in on pork, what’s next?”
Water levels have dropped at Lake Tanganyika in Bujumbura, Burundi.CreditWill Okun
BUJUMBURA, Burundi
If we need any more proof that life is unfair, it is that subsistence villagers here in Africa will pay with their lives for our refusal to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
When we think of climate change, we tend to focus on Alaskan villages or New Orleans hurricanes. But the people who will suffer the worst will be those living in countries like this, even though they don’t contribute at all to global warming.
My win-a-trip journey with a student and a teacher has taken us to Burundi, which the World Bank’s latest report shows to be the poorest country in the world. People in Burundi have an annual average income of $100, nearly one child in five dies before the age of five, and life expectancy is 45.
Against that grim backdrop, changing weather patterns in recent years have already caused crop failures — and when the crops fail here, people starve. In short, our greenhouse gases are killing people here.
“If the harvest fails in the West, then you have stocks and can get by,” said Gerard Rusuku, an agriculture scientist here who has been studying the impact of global warming in Africa. “Here, we’re much more vulnerable. If climate change causes a crop failure here, there’s famine.”
Guillaume Foliot of the World Food Program notes that farmers here overwhelmingly agree that the weather has already become more erratic, leading to lost crops. And any visitor can see that something is amiss: Africa’s “great lakes” are shrinking.
Burundi is on Lake Tanganyika, which is still a vast expanse of water. But the shoreline has retreated 50 feet in the last four years, and ships can no longer reach the port.
“Even the hippos are unhappy,” said Alexander Mbarubukeye, a fisherman on the lake, referring to the hippos that occasionally waddled into town before the lake retreated.
The biggest of Africa’s great lakes, Lake Victoria, was dropping by a vertical half-inch a day for much of last year. And far to the north, once enormous Lake Chad has nearly vanished. The reasons for the dipping lake levels seem to include climate change.
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Greenhouse gases actually have the greatest impact at high latitudes — the Arctic and Antarctica. But the impact there isn’t all bad (Canada will gain a northwest passage), and the countries there are rich enough to absorb the shocks.
In contrast, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned this year that the consequences for Africa will be particularly harsh because of the region’s poverty and vulnerability. It foresees water shortages and crop failures in much of Africa.
“Projected reductions in yield in some countries could be as much as 50 percent by 2020, and crop net revenues could fall as much as 90 percent,” the panel warned. It also cautioned that warming temperatures could lead malaria to spread to highland areas. Another concern is that scarcities of food and water will trigger wars. More than five million lives have already been lost since 1994 in wars in Rwanda, Burundi and Congo, and one factor was competition for scarce resources.
“It seems to me rather like pouring petrol onto a burning fire,” Jock Stirrup, the chief of the British defense staff, told a meeting in London this month. He noted that climate change could cause weak states to collapse.
Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president, describes climate change as “the latest form of aggression” by rich countries against Africa. He has a point. Charles Ehrhart, a Care staff member in Kenya who works full time on climate-change issues, says that the negative impact of the West’s carbon emissions will overwhelm the positive effects of aid.
“It’s at the least disastrous and quite possibly catastrophic,” Mr. Ehrhart said of the climate effects on Africa. “Life was difficult, but with climate change it turns deadly.”
“That’s what hits the alarm bells for an organization like Care,” he added. “How can we ever achieve our mission in this situation?”
All this makes it utterly reckless that we fail to institute a carbon tax or at least a cap-and-trade system for emissions. The cost of our environmental irresponsibility will be measured in thousands of children dying of hunger, malaria and war.
Proofreading is primarily about searching your writing for errors, both grammatical and typographical, before submitting your paper for an audience (a teacher, a publisher, etc.). Use this resource to help you find and fix common errors.
Contributors: Jaclyn M. Wells, Morgan Sousa, Mia Martini, Allen Brizee, Ashley Velázquez, and Maryam Ghafoor Last Edited: 2013-03-01 10:29:49
When you have plenty of time to revise, use the time to work on your paper and to take breaks from writing. If you can forget about your draft for a day or two, you may return to it with a fresh outlook. During the revising process, put your writing aside at least twice—once during the first part of the process, when you are reorganizing your work, and once during the second part, when you are polishing and paying attention to details.
Use the following questions to evaluate your drafts. You can use your responses to revise your papers by reorganizing them to make your best points stand out, by adding needed information, by eliminating irrelevant information, and by clarifying sections or sentences.
Find your main point.
What are you trying to say in the paper? In other words, try to summarize your thesis, or main point, and the evidence you are using to support that point. Try to imagine that this paper belongs to someone else. Does the paper have a clear thesis? Do you know what the paper is going to be about?
Identify your readers and your purpose.
What are you trying to do in the paper? In other words, are you trying to argue with the reading, to analyze the reading, to evaluate the reading, to apply the reading to another situation, or to accomplish another goal?
Evaluate your evidence.
Does the body of your paper support your thesis? Do you offer enough evidence to support your claim? If you are using quotations from the text as evidence, did you cite them properly?
Save only the good pieces.
Do all of the ideas relate back to the thesis? Is there anything that doesn't seem to fit? If so, you either need to change your thesis to reflect the idea or cut the idea.
Tighten and clean up your language.
Do all of the ideas in the paper make sense? Are there unclear or confusing ideas or sentences? Read your paper out loud and listen for awkward pauses and unclear ideas. Cut out extra words, vagueness, and misused words.
Eliminate mistakes in grammar and usage.
Do you see any problems with grammar, punctuation, or spelling? If you think something is wrong, you should make a note of it, even if you don't know how to fix it. You can always talk to a Writing Lab tutor about how to correct errors.
Switch from writer-centered to reader-centered.
Try to detach yourself from what you've written; pretend that you are reviewing someone else's work. What would you say is the most successful part of your paper? Why? How could this part be made even better? What would you say is the least successful part of your paper? Why? How could this part be improved?
A well-intentioned producer once said to me, “John, you’re so talented, but too bad you’re Latin — otherwise you’d be so much further along.” When I pitched a movie about Latinos, another producer said: “Latin? People don’t want to see Latin people.” This is not just my experience but a typical Latino person’s experience in America.
Donald J. Trump has done one good thing. He has galvanized a conflicted and diverse community. For years, activists and politicians have struggled to get Latinos to vote and show their power. But not until Mr. Trump’s racist rhetoric shone a light on anti-Latino sentiment did we feel the need to make our voices heard on the issues that matter to us: from proper funding for our schools, better infrastructure in our communities and financial aid, to health care that doesn’t consider poverty a pre-existing condition.
There are around 56 million of us. We are the largest ethnic minority in the United States, at almost 18 percent of the country’s population. And yet Latino students drop out of high school at a higher rate than members of any other minority. We are victims of neglect, discrimination and ignorance. We have grown up amid an entrenched disrespect for Latin culture, and we have often internalized that disrespect.
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Bernardo de Gálvez led a group of fighters against Britain in support of the American colonists during the Revolutionary War. Galveston, Texas is named after him.CreditWilfred Santiago
The dominant narrative is that we have just “illegally” crossed the border or are “fresh off the boat.” In fact the Spanish are evidence of America’s first original sin: We were mistreating indigenous people here long before the British brought slaves to the colonies. People forget that Latinos founded some of America’s first cities.
Latinos have been dying for America since before we were a nation. Why have our children not heard that thousands of Latino patriots fought for America in the Revolutionary War? Bernardo de Gálvez, a Spanish general, recruited Mexicans, Cubans, Native Americans and free African-Americans to fight against the British in the South, while Cuban women donated their jewelry and money to help the patriots. Where is the Ken Burns documentary about that?
Why don’t they know about the many Latinos in the War of 1812? Or anything of the 20,000 Latinos who fought valiantly in the Civil War? Or of those who earned Purple Hearts or the Croix de Guerre in World War I? Or of the up to 500,000 who served in the military in World War II?
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Ellen Ochoa is the first female astronaut of Hispanic descent — part of the 1993 space shuttle Discovery team. She is currently the Director of the Johnson Space Center.CreditWilfred Santiago
It’s as if our heroism and sacrifice somehow counted less, as if we didn’t exist in history at all. Without a past to glorify and uplift you, how do you propel yourself into an unknown, tenuous future?
I’m only an amateur historian. But I am an expert on my own life and career. So to bring it around to more contemporary slights: Hispanics are the most underrepresented ethnic group in film and television. “Saturday Night Live” has only just hired its first Latina comic. Are we really to believe there are so few funny Latinos? We are similarly marginalized in business and corporate life.
This exclusion sends a painful message to every Latino child about how he is seen and judged. Latino people face a double challenge: to create our own positive self-image while battling against the way the broader society portrays us. Without textbooks in schools that do justice to our contributions to the making of America, and without media representation expanding to include more Latin faces and voices, we are vulnerable to a demagogue like Mr. Trump claiming that we are all “drug dealers,” “rapists” and “criminals.”
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But a range of studies find no link between violent crime and immigration. The fact is that immigrants as a group commit far fewer crimes than the rest of the American population. Almost every immigrant is just here to make a better life for himself.
That can be hard to do when the states where many immigrants live — Texas and Arizona in particular — gerrymander Latino communities out of political power and limit funding to their neighborhoods. Latinos aren’t uniformly liberal; some are conservative because of their religious beliefs or fiscal views. And yet if all of the eligible Latinos voted, a number of states would turn from red to blue.
We need a Latino Spring in this country. We need to demand power and equal opportunity. A friend of mine recently did a small experiment to tease out anti-Latin sentiment. She sent out two résumés for an acting job with her picture attached. She happens to be very dark skinned (“morena,” as we say in Spanish). On one résumé she used her own traditionally Latina-sounding name, while on the other she used a traditionally white-sounding name. The Latina name received zero callbacks while the white name received a few responses.
Where else is this racial profiling going on while we are “living while Latin”? It is going on while we are working for the promotion that doesn’t come, while we are trying to rent an Airbnb for vacation but no one will respond, while we are hoping to make our children’s lives better than our own.
Latinos need to demand our place in American history, and in corporate, political and social fields. We must demand an equal share of the American dream, and not accept a downgraded version of it. We need to stop accepting exclusion over persecution. In this critical election, and in the future, I urge you all to register and vote, to be counted and heard.
