Singapore is one of the busiest cities in the world.

But biologist Philip Johns is fascinated by a different inhabitant on the island.

Otters.

At rush hour, downtown, the otters would swim toward each other,

and they're literally tens of thousands of people who are on their way to work.

How ideas, emotions, and creatures coexist.

That's next time on the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

Hey, everyone, you're listening to Code Switch,

the show about race and identity from NPR.

I'm B.A. Parker.

So, I want to tell you about someone.

Her name is Edna Bonhomme.

Now, Edna is Haitian American, and when she was a little girl in 1980s, Miami, she started running a very high fever, so high that her frightened appearance had to take her to the hospital.

I had typhoid fever that experience of feeling confined, not knowing what was going

on, being separated from my parents temporarily, and how that elicited, at least at the time, and even

subconsciously now, a sense of loss, of sense of loss of control more specifically.

That moment of isolation was compounded by the fact that she was Haitian

at a time when her community had been singled out by the CDC.

The CDC had deemed these groups the 4-Hs, homosexuals, heroin users, hemophiliacs, and Haitians,

as high risk of spreading HIV and AIDS. That was all a myth.

The Haitians in particular were vilified for no other reason than what I would consider to be

anti-blackness. I would say that even with the anti-Hatian, anti-queer rhetoric that was being purported in the U.S.

...