Finnish Roma activist Miranda Volasrata and Romanian writer Luminita Cioaba, who fought her Roma family to attend school, at the inauguration of the Roma Cultural Route at the Roma Kamenci settlement near Lendava, Slovenia, in November 2009. (Brigid Grauman/GlobalPost)

From Brigid Grauman in the Global Post.

LENDAVA, Slovenia — The word “gypsy” is often used pejoratively. But the Council of Europe is trying to change that with a new tourism route focusing on Roma culture and history.

“People see gypsies by a squalid dump at the side of the road,” said Jake Bowers, a militant British gypsy and journalist, “but they don’t really know us. I’d like a situation where we are recognized as a transnational European nation with representation at the United Nations.”

Bowers was speaking at the inauguration of the Roma Cultural Route last month, sponsored by the Strasbourg-based Council, which is not related to the European Union and works on European integration through culture and human rights. The route will link dispersed gypsy, or Roma, communities across Europe to strengthen existing networks and encourage Roma and non-Roma people to meet. Nine countries are already taking part with museums, shows and documentation centers. The inauguration took place in Slovenia at the Roma Kamenci settlement near the spa town Lendeva.

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New Life, New Home: A Story of Retaining the Cultural Boundaries

The main thrust of this book is to focus on the consequences of involuntary migration of East Bengal (EB) Hindus in West Bengal (WB), Kolkata (Calcutta) city in particular. It attempts to analyse the resettlement struggles of the EB Hindu refugee-migrants , their family relations, marriage practices and problems of social interaction with the WB local Hindus over the years. In the course of their resettlement efforts, the EB Hindus urged to retain regional culture particularly in the context of matrimonial practices and family patterns, religious festivals and rituals and social norms and values. The analysis will be based on historical background of partition-migration as well as intensive fieldwork with the EB Hindu migrants and selected WB local Hindus for a long period of time.

Minarets are threatening because they rub salt in the wounds of those who feel the loss of their own faith.

Switzerland has four mosques with minarets and a population of 350,000 nominal Muslims, mostly Europeans from Bosnia and Kosovo, of whom about 13% regularly go to prayer. Not a huge problem, one might have thought. Yet 57.5% of Swiss voters opted in a referendum for a constitutional ban on minarets, allegedly because of worries about “fundamentalism” and the “creeping Islamisation” of Switzerland.

Are the Swiss more bigoted than other Europeans? Probably not. Referendums are a measure of popular gut feelings, rather than considered opinion, and popular gut feelings are rarely liberal. Referendums on this issue in other European countries might well produce startlingly similar results.

To attribute the Swiss vote to ban minarets – an idea that was promoted by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, but by none of the other political parties – to “Islamophobia” is perhaps to miss the point. To be sure, a long history of mutual Christian-Muslim hostility, and recent cases of radical Islamist violence, have made many people fearful of Islam in a way that they are not of Hinduism, say, or Buddhism. And the minaret, piercing the sky like a missile, is easily caricatured as a fearsome image.

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A hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Dickens opened “A Tale of Two Cities” with the now-famous phrase: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. …”

Those words resonated with me recently while contemplating the impact of the Obama presidency on blacks in America. So far, it’s been mixed. Blacks are living a tale of two Americas — one of the ascension of the first black president with the cultural capital that accrues; the other of a collapsing quality of life and amplified racial tensions, while supporting a president who is loath to even acknowledge their pain, let alone commiserate in it.

Last year, blacks dared to dream anew, envisioning a future in which Obama’s election would be the catalyst for an era of prosperity and more racial harmony. Now that the election’s afterglow has nearly faded, the hysteria of hope is being ground against the hard stone of reality. Things have not gotten better. In many ways, they’ve gotten worse.

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Last year, an Arizona housing developer known for building affordable homes for Hispanics filed a complaint against the City of Yuma, which denied his application to build homes for low to moderate income families in a predominately white high-income neighborhood. The developer sued for discrimination under the Fair Housing Act, charging that the decision was racially motivated. But the federal court dismissed the case before the developer could even gather evidence, ruling that the discrimination the developer alleged was not “plausible.”

In the past, merely stating the allegations would have been enough to allow the developer to at least begin gathering information to try to prove his case. But two recent Supreme Court decisions have made bringing discrimination cases far more difficult by demanding not only that the claim clearly meet the requirements of the law, but also that a judge find it “plausible” before allowing the plaintiff to begin collecting evidence. The consequence is that many people who in the past might have won their cases on the merits now won’t even get past the entrance gate.

That’s either a sea change in the way the courts handle lawsuits and particularly civil rights claims, as several witnesses and senators argued on Wednesday at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the subject, or it’s merely a clarification of the longstanding procedural requirements, as some Republicans at the hearing argued.

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My temporary home of the last five years, Switzerland, has just voted for one of the most bigoted and undemocratic constitutional reforms in recent memory: the banning of Islamic minarets on Mosques. The vote appears to be quite stunning, with 58% of voters backing the ban. This was after the most recent polls showed the measure being rejected by 53%, a story in itself.

This represents the most direct attack on the European Muslim minority yet. The French “headscarf ban” was at least religion neutral — something I would still argue against (as an Atheist), but I appreciate the attempt at even-handedness. On the other hand, this constitutional amendment targets a small, largely immigrant population (many of whom have no vote), single-handedly banning them from behavior that would be perfectly acceptable were they of any other faith. Outrageous.

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At a literary festival in New York City some years ago, I was introduced to a French writer who, almost immediately after we shook hands, asked me where I was from. When the answer was “Morocco,” he put down his drink and stared at me with anthropological curiosity. We spoke about literature, of course, and discovered a common love for the work of the South African writer J.M. Coetzee, but before long the conversation had turned to Moroccan writers, then to Moroccan writers in France, and then, as I expected it eventually would, to Moroccan immigrants in France–at which point the French writer declared, “If they were all like you, there wouldn’t be a problem.”

His tone suggested he was paying me some sort of compliment, though I found it odd that he would want the 1 million Moroccans in his country to be carbon copies of someone he had barely met and whose views on immigration–had he asked about them–he might not have found quite to his liking. It was only later, when I had returned to my hotel room, that it dawned on me that the profile of the unproblematic Moroccan immigrant he might have had in mind was based solely on conspicuous things. Some of these, like skin color, were purely accidental; others, like sartorial choices or dietary practices, were in my opinion inessential, but from his vantage point perhaps they suggested a smaller degree of “Muslimness.”

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INTERVIEW. Janet Muller speaks to Nationalia. She is the Chief Executive of Pobal, a partnership that coordinates and supports the groups in favour of Irish language in Ireland. Muller explains the current state of the Celtic language, especially in the media. Two important Irish language papers closed down during 2008. Mairtin O’Muilleoir, former publisher of one of them, then said: ‘To lose one newspaper in Lá Nua is a tragedy but to lose two with Foinse closing is just plain carelessness.’

Nationalia: Two Irish language newspapers -Lá Nua and Foinse- closed down during the last year. Is it a sign of declining public usage of Irish or just another consequence of the current economic downturn which is especially affecting the print media?

Janet Muller: It is a sign that it is difficult to maintain such an intensive project as a newspaper, particularly in the case of Lá Nua, which was a daily paper and had never been properly supported by the state throughout its entire existence. It is extremely ironic that the paper, which had nonetheless survived for twenty years was closed down after the Good Friday Agreement and the St Andrews Agreement and through the decision of the all-Ireland body for the Irish language to end its funding. The other paper, which was a weekly has now started again in a different form and is being distributed as a weekly supplement with an English language paper. It has been very shocking to the community to lose two newspapers in six months and while some positive developments are happening in the media, these are being mainly community-driven rather than brought about through careful collaboration and co-ordination between the community, the funders and the states.

Nationalia: How was this loss perceived by the Irish society? Do you think there is support for further public spending on the language? Are there significant differences between both sides of the border regarding this issue?

Janet Muller: This is a mixed picture. There is wide support for Irish throughout Ireland, even amongst those who do not necessarily want to use the language themselves or have their children educated through it. However, there is an ethnic and colonial history in Ireland and in the North, the British government has neglected and politicised the Irish language (most recently in 2007 when it failed to fulfil its commitment on the Irish Language Act and used this as a bargaining ploy with the unionist parties) and some political parties who have stoked hostility towards the Irish language to make themselves appear ‘stronger’ to their electorate. The circumstances of the language North and South are very different. In the South the language has constitutional protection as well as the Official Languages Act 2003. The community sector is longer established and has a different relationship with the state than the sector in the North has. Although Irish is one language it exists in vastly different situations north and south and this must be recognised.

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CREDIT: JUPITERIMAGES

Raegen T. Miller reviews the book The Mathematics of Sex: How Biology and Society Conspire to Limit Talented Women and Girls by Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams in Science for 20 November 2009:

Two groups of people should care about the underrepresentation of women in math-intensive fields: academics and everyone else. In The Mathematics of Sex: How Biology and Society Conspire to Limit Talented Women and Girls, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams provide a valuable resource for both audiences. For academics, their book may help diffuse political tension inimical to the goals of the academy. Currently, the issue of underrepresentation is a political lightning rod, and scholars are virtually guaranteed to attract abundant criticism for posing and testing any hypothesis explaining gender disparities among scientists in different fields. Such criticism is not always confined to the scientific merits of its recipient’s work, and junior scholars, in particular, may jeopardize their careers by pursuing research agendas speaking to the relative scarcity of women in mathematically oriented fields. An intellectualclimate more conducive to self-censorship than the pursuit of knowledge seems unlikely to help explain the issue of underrepresentation, much less address it. In other words, the academy has painted itself into a corner, and it needs help getting out. In this sense, The Mathematics of Sex is a lifeline.

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Picture a typical MBA lecture theatre twenty years ago. In it the majority of students scribbling away furiously will have conformed to the standard template of the time: male, middle class and Western. Walk into a class today, however, and you’ll get a completely different impression. For a start you will now see plenty more women—the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, for example, boasts that 40% of its new intake is female. You will also see a wide range of ethnic groups and nationals of practically every country.

It might be tempting, therefore, to think that the old barriers have been broken down and equal opportunity achieved. But, increasingly, this apparent diversity is becoming a mask for an insidious new type of conformity. Behind the differences in sex and sexuality, the varying skin tones and mother tongues, there are common attitudes, expectations and ambitions which risk creating a set of clones among the business leaders of the future. A future in which the methods and motivations of hotshots in Bangalore, Beijing and Boston are impossible to tell apart.

Many of the corporations which led us into the current economic mess were also the most enthusiastic hirers of MBAs. Diversity, it seems, has not helped to address fundamental weaknesses in business leadership. So what can be done to create more effective stewards of the commercial world? According to Valerie Gauthier, associate dean at HEC Paris, the key lies in the process by which MBA programmes recruit their students. At the moment candidates are selected on a fairly narrow set of criteria such as prior academic and career performance, analytical and problem solving abilities and numeracy. This is then coupled to a school’s picture of what a diverse class should look like, with the result that passport, ethnic origin and sex can all become influencing factors. But schools rarely dig down to find out what really makes an applicant tick, to create a class which also contains diversity of attitude and approach—arguably the only diversity that, in a business context, really matters.

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