‘There is Nothing Wrong with Being a Mulatto’: Structural Discrimination and Racialised Belonging in Denmark

ABSTRACT

This article addresses structural discrimination in everyday lives of Danes with mixed racial heritage. We explore how discrimination (implicit, underlying, and discursive) is expressed and resisted in seemingly neutral interactions. Using structural discrimination as our framework, we look at how this type of discrimination contributes to the racialisation of national belonging in Danish contexts. In particular, we examine how notions of ‘Danishness’ are discursively linked to racialisation. Furthermore, we discuss some dilemmas that arise for racially ‘mixed’ and other racialised Danes. These include denial and deflection of discrimination, as well as problematics of belonging. Constructions of Danishness, we argue, rely on (and express) racialised understandings and discriminatory assumptions which explicitly and implicitly influence the experience of (and potential for), belonging within constructions of Danishness. Our findings suggest that certain paradoxes arise in the lives of Danes with mixed racial heritage and other racialised Danes.

KEYWORDS:

• Structural discrimination
• racism
• racialised belonging
• racialisation
• Danishness
• denial
• double bind
• mixed race

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Mira C. Skadegård is Postdoc at the Department of Learning and Philosophy at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her current research is primarily on structural discrimination, and her main focus is on gender, race, ethnicity and religion. Ms Skadegård studies micro-interactions and different forms of communication to see how structural (and other) forms of discrimination are expressed and how normalisation of discrimination contributes to the perpetuation as well as the denial of discrimination.

Iben Jensen is professor in intercultural learning at Department of Learning and Philosophy, Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark. She explores intercultural relations related to social exclusion. Her interests are related to how concepts such as culture and intercultural communication construct and sustain fixed categories and how it is possible to problematise these. She has conducted empirical studies in job interviews related to ethnicity and gender, social exclusion in school-home-contact, development of intercultural competence internally and externally in Danish public organisation. Currently, she works with the concept of mutual intercultural learning in order to develop sustainable intercultural capabilities for global futures.

ORCID

Mira C. Skadegård http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7663-9279

Notes

1 We must emphasise that our critique of the handling of this situation is related to how structural discrimination infuses the interaction, it is not intended as a critique of the involved persons.

2 In addition to a conflation of institutional, systemic and structural discrimination in definitions of structural discrimination in various reports and contexts, structural racism is another term that is used similarly. For example, in Structural racism and youth development: issues, challenges, and implications, 2005.