In a good cause: going on

[mrissa]

I said I was going to make a post about charities each week until the election. And look, the election is over! I took a week to think about it, but I don’t really feel like stopping right now. I don’t really feel like now is a time when I feel less like promoting good causes to which you can donate time and money. So I’m going to keep going with

Comments

[swan_tower]

Yeah, I've been reaching out to local Islamic centers and the mosque in town to see if there's any useful volunteer work I can do. As much as I'd like to think I don't live in a place where the local mosque would need clean-up . . . well, we'll see what they say.

[whswhs]

This year I've googled for a lot of establishments of different types, and found that the optimal format is "" and possibly "" if the city has a commonplace name. Entering "muslim cultural center riverside ca" didn't get the autocomplete that concerned you, and got me a few actual Muslim organizations, including the one that's just a few blocks from where I live.

Not to say those associations aren't there, but they seem to depend on the order you type the words in. In fact they seem to vary with the city; for example, the first completion of "los angeles muslim" is "prayer in street." So I think maybe this is not an American cultural universal but an accident of what stories have been in the news in a particular city.

[mrissa]

You know, having tricks for how to make autocomplete not autocomplete with common searches does not actually change the fact that they are common searches or that they autocomplete that way. And the search results give you not only what is "in the news" but also what is on opinion blogs. In this case that's very important. Because if there aren't particularly a lot of problems from our largely Somali neighbors in the Minneapolis area Muslim community but a lot of people who write opinion pieces and blog posts want you to think there are, because they want to think that the real problem is that our neighbors exist, there will still be a lot of hits.

Minneapolis is a focal point on this topic from people who do not live here because we're known to have a large, recent Muslim immigrant population. Ascribing that to news is dangerous. It gives the sense that there must be problems reported, when in fact most of the hits on that autocomplete are problems hypothesized--in plain English, made up.

[cissa]

I am happy to have grown up in the Twin Cities, and miss it even after these 35 years.

The Somali stuff reminds me a lot of the brou-ha-ha about the Hmong immigrants lo these many years ago... but in general, they were welcomed, and pretty smoothly integrated into the norm, and to that extent, I am proud of Minnesota. I'd move back in a heartbeat if it were not too damn cold!