Cartoons, Part II

Two of my former Danish flatmates in Aarhus wrote to me last night about the resurgent cartoon controversy. One wrote: “I don’t really think that’s the correct solution in this situation, and we can’t continue to enrage them like this.” The other updated me on how the domestic media were handling the affair, along with his interpretations of the political landscape:

Yes I just read it on the news paper Politiken’s homepage. Though making a fuss about it being printed in a newspaper seems strange since they are shown on TV each time they mention the cartoonist.

The three news papers are Berlingske Tidende, Politiken and Jyllandsposten (JP).

It is quite remarkable that Politiken prints them since its chief editor, Thøger Seidenfaden, led the criticism against JP back then. Also Berlingske Tidende have not printed them before.

It could seem Seidenfaden is afraid to end up looking like a bad guy defending the religious fanatics (in the Danish media at least) as he did the last time.

http://jp.dk/indland/article1263415.ece

http://politiken.dk/indland/article470475.ece

http://www.berlingske.dk/article/20080212/ledere/80212059/

And yeah the place the police raided was just where the 15 goes by.

***

The “15” to which he refers is the bus route we all took to and from central Aarhus from the lovely Skjoldhøj. It passes through what is often called the largest ghetto in Denmark, Gellerupparken, for its sizable immigrant population. After visiting the local DR TV and radio stations in Aarhus, I thought the opinions expressed by media personnel about Gellerupparken bordered on the paranoid.

The personal stories I had heard from ethnic Danes about interaction with minorities in Aarhus did not sound good, either. One flatmate, who looks as Viking and Nordic as possible with his pale blond hair, blue eyes, and almost bloodless skin, described a walk he took through a grassy area in Gellerupparken. He had just gone grocery shopping and decided to take a shortcut home. It was the middle of the afternoon, bright and sunny. As he walked through the park, some elementary school kids of minority descent started shouting at him “f*ckin’ Dansker”—”f*ckin’ Dane.” In another incident, he was sitting at the back of the bus when a group of boisterous, minority teens boarded the bus (you board from the back in Denmark). They exhibited loud, intimidating male behavior and moved to the front of the bus, where a fellow classmate of his sat. He described this classmate as “about as harmless and dorky as you can get.” Right before the teens exited the bus, one turned to the unassuming kid and spat in his face. They laughed and ran out. My flatmate, outraged, sat there stunned. Then, he looked behind him and noticed a big wad of spit oozing down the window behind his head. They had missed.

I noticed a bit of the tension in Denmark myself, as a minority “not of contentious origin”—there aren’t many East Asians, and the ones there keep to their own communities. It is also disarming, I imagine, for a foreigner to hear me speak perfectly fluent English. So I found my situation different from those of my other international classmates. Almost all Danes I encountered were super friendly and helpful. I remember my first extensive contact with a Dane was with the bus driver who drove me from the airport to the city. He went out of his way to figure out my rendezvous site with my mentor, and took pains to drop me off at another location not really on the bus route.

The “contentious minorities” in Denmark mostly left me alone. One time I was walking to the #15 bus when a car slowed down and stopped. A dark-skinned man asked me which direction I was heading. Puzzled, I told him I was going to football practice. “Oh,” he said, “I am going to the opposite side of town, otherwise I would drop you off.” It was random and nice, and I don’t think he had any ulterior motives except to help out.

Most forced social interaction happens on the bus. Public transport is sometimes the only way in which people experience the “other,” which is why I like New York City so much, as opposed to Los Angeles. You’re forced to encounter all kinds of people and behavior in daily life. And since you’re practically living on top of your neighbor, squeezed up against some guy’s bum on the subway, or dining with someone’s elbow in your soup, most people eventually form many relationships they would not normally have elsewhere. Los Angeles, its polar opposite, facilitates strong cliques based on location and familiarity. People stay in their cars and communities and ethnic leanings, creating a relative—but separate—peace in the California sunshine.

Aarhus sits in a precarious spot between the extremes of New York and Los Angeles. There’s enough interaction to increase prejudice, but not enough to forge relationships and understanding. Another time I sat on the bus with a classmate when a loud minority male got on the bus sporting a backwards baseball cap (a universal sign of “dunce”). He sat behind my classmate and proceeded to hit the back of her seat obnoxiously, completely aware of his actions. My soft-spoken African classmate endured the thumps. After several minutes of repetitive whacks, I turned deliberately and made eye contact. He carried on, in what I am sure he considered to be a defiant and cool attitude. Right at the moment I was about to say something loud and attention-gaining, he stopped. A group of school kids boarded the bus; they formed an animated mass of blond heads and cherubic cheeks rouged by the winter winds—except for one. A cute dark-haired, dark-skinned boy romped around with the other kids, laughing and talking in a scene typical of my multi-ethnic hometown, Cerritos, California. Mr. Knucklehead noticed this kid, too. And as he stood up to exit the bus—in sharp contrast to the disenfranchised, boorish demeanor with which he greeted the rest of the world—he tenderly tousled the boy’s hair and went through a “got-your-nose” routine with him. The boy, puzzled and a bit disturbed, immediately went back to his friends.

I noticed The New York Times removed its characterization of Aarhus as a “quiet university town” today in the cartoon arrests story from last night. An experienced editor, no doubt, knew that such a simplistic characterization is almost never on the mark.

Robin

Cartoon Showtime?

The Dutch wires are reporting at this hour that in the wake of today’s arrests in Aarhus, Denmark for a plot to assassinate one of the cartoonists involved in the 2005 Prophet Mohammed caricature controversy, three of the largest Danish newspapers have decided to republish the cartoons.

Jyllands-Posten, the original perpetrator, already has a cartoon displayed prominently on their English Web site.

After examining media in Denmark last fall, many of our classmates have grown weary of the whole Danish cartoons affair. In fact, two of the required readings from last week focused exclusively on the media’s role in the brouhaha and how minorities are portrayed in Denmark. One text published in 2000 by Mustafa Hussain analyzed Islam and minorities in Denmark, asserting that an “interdiscursivity of powerful societal institutions” promotes a negative public opinion, creating political intolerance (97-98).

On a comparative scale with other European nations, Denmark stands out. Hussain offers supporting evidence:

• Only 17 percent of Danes reported they were absolutely non-racist, according to a 1997 European Commission survey on racism, qualifying as the lowest percentage of self-defined non-racists in the EU. For comparison, the average EU self-defined non-racist was 34 percent; fellow Scandinavian country (and place where all is sweetness and light) Sweden was even higher at 42 percent.

• 83 percent of replies in Denmark scored as having low to very high racist attitudes in the same study. Again, for comparison: Austria and Germany, both associated with neo-Nazi movements, both hovered around 70 percent.
• Despite this, Denmark has one of the smallest percentages of immigration in the EU from countries outside the EU, Eastern Europe, and North America.
• 37 percent of Danes would not want to have a Muslim for a neighbor and 64 percent would not want a close family member to marry a Muslim. These figures drop considerably to 18 percent and 36 percent, respectively, when “Muslim” is replaced by “a person of another race,” according to a 1995 national survey by two political scientists from Aarhus University.
• 85 percent of ethnic Danes had no social interaction with minority individuals or groups, as cited in the previous study.

These statistics seem damning, but it’s much more complicated than simply concluding that Danes are simply more racist. Hussain analyzes how the media influence public opinion through the use of repetitive headlines, negative minority topics (like crime, immigration, and other problems), and creating an us-versus-them framework for stories. Public service media were worse offenders than commercial media in this regard.

Hussain uses John Zaller’s theory on the origin of and formation of mass opinion to support his idea on media influence. In a nutshell, Zaller’s theory says that people’s opinions depend on the “ideas and thoughts activated immediate” rather than a thorough evaluation on the subject in question (Ibid. 101). So whatever the dominant information flow is at the time—as perpetuated by the media—will also dominate public opinion. Given that most Danes have little to no experiential knowledge of minorities, this phenomenon is perhaps even stronger.

Another text, a book written after the cartoon controversy in 2007, analyzed the media’s handling of the controversy in 14 different countries. The authors claim that an editorial in The Economist sparked the initial idea for the project: to understand how “freedom of speech was defined, defended, and criticized,” under international scrutiny, both in and by the press (Kunelius and Eide 9). One of the researchers, in an essay called “The Right to Communicate,” took the moderate stance, weighing individual expression against duties towards society. “[T]he right to be understood,” he writes, should imply that others have a duty to try and understand the “other.” This requires society to “distance itself from egocentric acts of communication” (Ibid. 19).

Now that the controversy looms large once again, our project to interview minority media outlets here in the Netherlands might take a more interesting twist.

Stay tuned…

Robin

References
Hussain, Mustafa (2000). Islam, Media and Minorities in Denmark.
Current Sociology,48(4), 95-116.
Kunelius, Risto, & Eide, Elisabeth (2007). The Mohammed cartoons, journalism, free speech and globalization. In Risto Kunelius, Elisabeth Eide, Oliver Hahn & Roland Schroeder (Eds.), Reading the Mohammed cartoons controversy: an international analysis of press discourses on free speech and political spin (pp. 9-23). Bochum/Freiburg: ProjektVerlag. Available online at
http://ncom.nordicom.gu.se/ncom/research/the_mohammed_cartoons_journalism_free_speech_and_globalization(19166)/