Where intolerance comes from
When I was 16 years old, I spent a year in high school in Alamogordo, New Mexico. When I returned after 12 months abroad, the Danish school system determined that nothing I had learned or done abroad had any value to them, and I was made to pick up where I had left when I went away.
At the time, I didn’t think much about it as a value proposition. Sure, it was complicated socially. My friends were all now in the graduating class, and my new classmates thought I was stuck up by running with the upper classmen. I was shy and had a complicated eating disorder, and there was some deeply divisive stuff going on in my family. Let’s just say, as the understatement of the century, that my last two years of Danish high school were not fun.
But, generally speaking, at the time I thought the Danish school system was correct in their assessment. I would even laugh about it for years afterwards: of course the US high school system was dumb, of course nothing I did there had any real value. It was just fluff.
It’s now more than 35 years later. The bulk of my educational and professional experience has happened outside of Denmark in various countries spanning several continents. If I were to accept that nothing that happens outside of Denmark has any real value, that would be like writing myself out, I wouldn’t exist. Yet in all of my interactions with Danish institutions, this is what I am routinely asked to do. Get a Danish re-evaluation of my education, translate degree terms (that already exist in Danish) into Danish because the letterhead they come on is in French, count years of professional experience within Denmark, etc etc ad nauseum.
When I looked for a job in Denmark right after I finished my foreign MBA, it was so impossible to even get an interview that a national newspaper, Berlingske Tidende, wrote a full-page article about me, focusing on how Danes reject anything that didn’t happen in Denmark, and how self-defeating that actually is. They pointed out that this was doubly ridiculous since the Danish state and import/expert industry had partially financed my degree with grants and awards.
[And before you say that maybe it’s just me, let me say: yes, it may just be me. It’s possible. But to be honest I have heard too many similar stories from other emigrants and immigrants, and have had too successful a career outside of Denmark, to truly believe that. We can’t all be worthless just because we lived part of our lives outside Denmark.]
I no longer think this dismissal of anything that didn’t happen in Denmark is funny or cute. I certainly don’t think it is harmless or even accurate. I see it as part of an outdated outlook that is at the core of all resistance to diversity anywhere. That sense of, if I wouldn’t do it like that or don’t quite get it, then it can’t be valuable at all.
It’s the same place intolerance comes from. It is intolerance. And it’s not a good look.
