Antiracism DK: Are popsicles complicit in colonialism?

The Washington Redskins. Aunt Jemima. Uncle Ben. Eskimo Pie. And now the Edmonton Eskimos. They’ve all gone to the graveyard of racist brand names. As in the US in the wake of the George Floyd killing and demonstrations, the racism debate can sometimes overshadow the coronavirus pandemic. It was only a matter of time before the nomenclature police would go after Denmark’s ice cream popsicles Eskimo-is (Eskimo ice cream) and Kæmpe Eskimo (Giant Eskimo). The first has capitulated, but the second is still resisting.

Photo: Andreas Hagemann Bro, Scanpix Denmark.

Last week ice cream producer Hansens announced that it was changing the name Eskimo-is (DK) to O’Payo, which is the type of chocolate used in the popsicle. It was with “a certain amount of sadness” that Hansens decided to drop the name of its classic snack, which dated from an “older and more unenlightened time,” the company wrote in a press release. In Denmark, the word is used mainly in reference to Greenlanders, and it is described in the Danish dictionary as “possibly offensive.” Greenland is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark.

Greenlanders are Inuit

Since the founding of the Inuit Circumpolar Council in 1977, Greenland’s inhabitants have preferred the term Inuit. They object to “Eskimo,” which was applied to them by colonial powers from outside the polar region, because it has negative connotations from a time when they were a subjugated and oppressed people. Greenland suffers from a number of social problems. It has the highest suicide rate in the world and a high rate of alcoholism.

No complaints from customers

Denmark’s largest ice cream maker, Premier Is, however, does not intend to change the name (DK) of its popular popsicle: “For us Kæmpe Eskimo is nostalgia and the name of an ice cream that consumers love,” said Claus Dahlmann Larsen, commercial manager of the company. “And we haven’t received any referrals at all about it.” Dahlmann Larsen adds that they follow the debate and will listen to objections if they come because they do not wish to be offensive or exclude anyone.

That was only the beginning of the controversy. Both ice cream aficionados and antiracist activists have stormed social media with their clashing opinions. The most dramatic confrontation involved Tina Jakobsen Wilstrup, the owner of Frederiksberg Chokolade, which sells its own version of Eskimo-is: “I think it’s annoying because I don’t associate Eskimo-is with anything negative, it is almost a tribute in my world.”

Free popsicles - courageous or disrespectful?

Jakobsen Wilstrup felt so strongly about the tradition that she offered a free Eskimo-is to customers on Friday. Many customers showed up, not only to get a free snack but also to show their support for the shop: “People can be offended about anything,” says Jonas Bjørneskjold, who came with his wife and two children, and it could lead to a “violation tyranny.” 

But Jakobsen Wilstrup was surprised by other reactions: “I received threats, hate-mail, and my staff were threatened. I was called Nazi pig and a bad speller. . . . I know in my heart that I don’t want to offend anyone.”

Juno Berthelsen, cofounder of the Greenlandic organization Nalik, does not support hate-mail or threats but finds the free ice cream offer disrespectful. Greenlanders are still subject to racism in Denmark, and the word “Eskimo” is used in that context: “Businesses share responsibility for breaking this racist structure. . . . Ice cream is just ice cream, but a word is not just a word.”

Coronavirus DK: Opinion surveys on risky travel and racism

A survey made by YouGov for the B.T. tabloid shows that a certain number of people are disregarding the travel restrictions (DK) set forth by the government and Health Authority. According to the advisory, before the borders to three countries opened on June 15 Danes were to avoid unnecessary travel and if they did travel, they were to undergo 14 days’ quarantine after they returned. The ban covered neighboring Sweden, where many Danes have summer houses. 

In the survey made on June 5 of 1,255 persons representative of the Danish population, some 4 percent responded that they had traveled abroad in the past month, and of those, 45 percent said that they had not quarantined themselves afterward. If the figures are extrapolated to reflect the entire country, they correspond to 8,400 adults who, after being abroad, returned to their workplace and frequented supermarkets and restaurants without first undergoing quarantine. According to Allan Randrup Thomsen, Professor of Virology at University of Copenhagen, it is very likely that there is a superspreader among that number. “It is thoughtless and inconsiderate that they do not comply with the rules that we are all subject to.”

More tabloid readers will flout advisory

In a separate survey of the newspaper’s 55,000 readers, 11 percent of them said that they intended to take a vacation in a country that the government has forbidden because of the risk of infection. Thomsen warns against the risk of the infection spreading from hotspots where many tourists gather and reminds us that in March relatively few skiing tourists from a small area in northern Italy and Austria were responsible for spreading the virus throughout Western Europe. It is possible that B.T.’s readers are less likely to comply with recommendations than those of some other newspapers, but it is also possible that they are more representative of the Danish population.

Since June 15, people in Denmark may travel to three countries – Germany, Norway and Iceland – without undergoing quarantine afterward. If you travel to other countries, it is not against the law not to quarantine yourself, but your employer may require you to do so. And if an employer forbids employees to travel to other countries beforehand, you can be fired for doing so.

News flash: Danes don’t think they’re racists

Another poll indicated that just over half of Danes do not think that racism is a problem (DK) in Denmark. Some 51 percent answered that they disagreed either completely or to a great degree with the statement that racism is a widespread problem in the country. Some 32 percent agreed completely or to a great degree. The breakdown among various demographic segments was not surprising. A larger percentage of younger respondents, aged 18-29, say it is a problem, as do people who vote for left-wing parties, with the exception of the center-left Social Democrats. A large majority of voters for the other parties do not believe it is a problem. The survey was made after the demonstration against racism and police brutality that was held in Copenhagen on June 7. 

The results do not surprise Mira Skadegaard, a postdoc researcher at the Institute for Culture and Learning at Aalborg University. Most people in Denmark do not experience racism since by definition it is a minority of the population that is subject to discrimination, says Skadegaard. But there is now a greater awareness that racism exists, she continues, and that is positive because previously we have not talked about it much and have been in denial about it.

Racial or ethnic discrimination?

One possible problem with the survey may be that it does not capture opinions about the views on ethnic and religious minorities. Racial minorities in Denmark are very small, and issues involving discrimination have concerned mainly Muslims and immigrants from the Middle East, most of whom are not black. 

#ICantBreathe DK

Yesterday in Copenhagen, like hundreds of thousands of others around the world, some 15,000 people took part in a demonstration to protest the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and generally against police brutality and racism (DK). The demonstration, which was arranged by Black Lives Matter Denmark, began across the street from the US Embassy, and the attendees marched to the city center and gathered again in front of the Parliament building. 

The marchers chanted slogans such as “No justice, no peace. Prosecute the police!” But in contrast to developments in many American cities, the protest remained peaceful. It did not appear to contain radical elements from the Autonomous movement, Denmark’s equivalent of Antifa, which have committed vandalism in past demonstrations in Copenhagen. The police tweeted their thanks to the participants for not going amuck. The protest was also aimed at racism in Denmark. Its manifestations may not be as bad as in the US, said some participants, but it also exists in here. One participant spoke of being bullied and harassed and of receiving mail every week with messages such as “N****r pig, go home!”

Systemic racism in Denmark

In the Deadline interview program (DK) yesterday evening, Moussa Mchangama, the chair of Mino Danmark, an organization that promotes opportunities for ethnic minorities, noted that Denmark doesn’t have the same problem with police violence as the US but Floyd’s death has raised awareness that the racism it exemplified is a global phenomenon. Mchangama said that the wave of protests has taken off internationally and in Denmark because such incidents have occurred so many times that people cannot ignore the structural, systematic racism that exists here as well as in the United States. 

Also on the program was Vincent Hendriks (DK), Professor of Philosophy at University of Copenhagen, whose father, a black American, immigrated to Denmark in the 1960s. Hendriks observed that the demonstrations have grown very quickly after this instance of police abuse partly because people have been subjected for months to the coronavirus pandemic, which has hurt minorities and poor people more than others and which has exposed and exacerbated the inequality of wealth and income that have been growing for years.

The virus is still out there

With such a large gathering, healthcare researchers worried that the event could lead to a rise in coronavirus infections, noting that in such situations, a single infected person can pass the virus on to many others. Political events are exempt from the limit on gatherings because freedom of assembly is considered a fundamental democratic right. Today, which begin phase 3 of the reopening of the economy, the limit on gatherings was raised from ten to 50.

Officials hoped that participants would follow the healthcare guidelines and keep a distance from one another. A few of the marchers wore face masks, which have never been mandatory in Denmark. Some appeared to try to maintain one or two meters’ distance from the others, but most of them walked and stood very close to others and did not seem to worry that their chanting also increased the chances that the virus could spread. The only mitigating factor was  that the great majority of the participants were young people, who are relatively resistant to the coronavirus. 

#ICantBreathe demonstrators in central Copenhagen

PC in DK, 2019

Perhaps I was too quick to say that Denmark is trailing the Anglo-American world in social justice activism and scandals.  Peter Rasmussen has posted a useful list of the “most absurd PC moments in Denmark in 2019” (DK) on Quora. He links to his individual commentaries on five incidents - good examples of how the country is striving to catch up to the achievements in outrage and grievance in more advanced precincts.

 Hating hate
The first concerns Facebook comments  by Black Lives Matter spokesperson Bwalya Sørensen about Pernille Vermund, the leader of the New Right party (and subject of a recent post). Vermund had expressed her happiness that a 14-year-old Thai girl who had been forced to leave Denmark because of strict family reunification rules was allowed to return. Sørensen wrote to Vermund: “You disgusting Nazi shit… How dare you use a little girl to spread your racist, hateful, verbal diarrhea… You stinking pile of garbage …” (my translation, may differ from the original English). Sørensen seemed to imply that Vermund  favored deporting all Muslims (“her evil wish to shamelessly follow in her Fuhrers [sic] footsteps and cleanse Denmark of a whole religious group, 30s style”) and was therefore being hypocritical. As far as I know, the girl, known by her nickname, Mint, is not a Muslim. 

Job theft 
The second instance involves criticism in an op-ed piece of a thin actress for playing a fat character in the film Harpiks (Resin). This was considered discriminatory and fat-phobic because fat characters should be played only by fat actors – the same type of objection that led Scarlett Johansson to drop out of a transgender role. The writer is shown wearing a shoulder bag with the slogan “Fatties against fascism.” 

Depicting another ethnic group
In a similar vein, a documentary film, Dreams from the Outback, was excluded from film festivals (DK) because the  director was white and whites should not be allowed to make films about Australian aborigines and other minority cultures. The director noted that aborigines don’t often have the resources to make a film themselves, and they might well benefit from an increase in awareness in the outside world.

Everyday abuse is worse on holidays 
Fourth, Micah Oh, who teaches structural racism and cultural appropriation at the University of Copenhagen, warned against girls’ dressing up for Halloween as the Arab Princess Jasmine from Disney’s Aladdin because it could be perceived as “everyday racism" and offend people. Parents should tell them that they should be Sleeping Beauty instead. But with “Little girls first of all need to pretend to be princesses,” wasn’t Oh being somewhat discriminatory herself by stereotyping girls like that, besides ignoring the same pitfalls for all the little boys who might also wish to play princess?

Fighting racism with its own weapons
Finally, the Nørrebro Pride parade is an alternative to and protest against the annual Copenhagen Pride parade because of the latter’s commercialization, its acceptance of sponsorship from capitalist conglomerates and financial firms, and the participation of “racist politicians.” In the Nørrebro Pride parade, the LGBT+ people of color - “double minorities” - marched at the head of the procession, while white LGBT+ persons came afterward and cleaned up after the party. The parade thus not only offered an alternative for those who didn’t wish to be associated with mainstream racism; by reintroducing racial segregation, it also provided an opportunity for the descendants of racist oppressors to experience racism themselves.

While these events represent  noteworthy strides in identitarian political action, they fall short of the dramatic harassment, physical attacks, vandalism and riots that greeted, say, Milo at Berkeley or Charles Murray at Middlebury. No one was fired or even hounded off social media for following a custom or holding an opinion that was unremarkable ten years ago. Some targets may have suffered slight reputational damage, and others might have been slightly guilted – those racist princess costumes! These results may be disappointing to subjugated and aggrieved groups whose existence is being denied or erased, but the local warriors are mashaling their forces and learning the necessary epithets, tropes and tactics, and perhaps this is only the warm-up stage in the long struggle for intersectional justice and equity in Denmark. 

Tak, Peter.