Minnesota Public Radio provided the story:
[In 2015] Asma Jama sat chatting with her family in a booth at the Coon Rapids [Minnesota]
Applebee's, a glass of cranberry juice just set before her. A few
minutes later, she was in an ambulance and bleeding, her lower lip split
in two... As Jama waited for her pasta alfredo, a woman at a nearby booth smashed a beer mug in her face.
The reason? Jama had been speaking Swahili with her family.
Jodie Burchard-Risch, 43, and her husband had been sitting in the
booth next to Jama, who was with her cousins and nieces. The couple
became upset when they heard Jama and her family conversing in a foreign
language, according to a criminal complaint.
Jama said the couple told them to "go home." They said that "when you're in America you should speak English."
Jama, an ethnic Somali, came to Minnesota in 2000 from Kenya. She speaks three languages: English, Swahili and Somali.
"I'm home," she told Burchard-Risch at the Applebee's. "I can speak English, but we choose to speak whatever language we want."
Authorities say that's when Burchard-Risch hit Jama in the face with the glass mug.
A reader at
BoingBoing provides a Biblical counterpart:
Judges 12:5-6 King James Version (KJV)
5 And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the
Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were
escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art
thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;
6 Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth:
for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and
slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the
Ephraimites forty and two thousand.
Not that it isn't an atrocity, but this happened in 2015, before Trump was even elected.
ReplyDeleteTrump is not the cause of intolerance, just a manifestation of it.
DeleteI've amended the tense of the verb and inserted a clarifying date. Tx.
Every English and American tourist, AND ex-pat I've encountered in the Netherlands speaks English with their family and countrymen. I speak Dutch all day at work and at home, but if I'm out with native English speakers it's nice to use my native tongue.
ReplyDeleteNo-one has yet hissed at us to speak Dutch or die. Maybe it's because we're white.
What do these people speak on holiday ?
ReplyDeleteThey must be the kind of Americans who have never been outside of the USA.
DeleteDavid I think that's a major reason for much of rural America's xenophobia and hostility toward immigrants. Even apart from travel, many of them have never even met a person of another ethnic group.
DeleteNot to mention that a Swahili speaker is most likely black.
ReplyDeleteI'm curious about the reason for adding a Bible verse to this story.
ReplyDeleteTo show that fear and hatred of "the other" is not a new phenomenon.
DeleteTo be fair, Gilead and Ephraim were descendants of two brothers, and were not "foreigners". They were also at war. Nothing at all like this situation - closer to the civil war though for less of a cause.
DeleteRight, Mike. The context is a civil war, and the belligerents are badly defeated, yet when they throw down their weapons, they blend in perfectly with the locals. The shibboleth was used to expose the defeated enemy.
DeleteOf course this assumes the old testament is a true history and not an obvious fiction.
ReplyDeleteLooks like she got six months in jail for it after pleading guilty.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.fox9.com/news/woman-sentenced-for-assaulting-applebees-customer-for-speaking-swahili
Is it really though? Change the gender of the two people involved and it's hardly a noteworthy piece of news.
ReplyDeleteSo a man who hits another man in the face with a beer mug for speaking a foreign language is "hardly noteworthy?" I wouldn't want to live in your neighborhood.
DeleteI didn't mean to be snarky, it's just that it seems par for the course these days, even though it's from three years ago.
DeleteIt's just that racism doesn't make me feel particularly incensed anymore, worse things happen for much more idiotic reasons...
Anyhow, let me thank you for the excellent blog, it's a welcome and refreshing distraction.
:-)
Delete