“We don’t throw stones, we throw flowers”: race discourse and race evasiveness in the Norwegian university classroom

ABSTRACT

How do university students and instructors engage in discussions about race and racism in a country where speaking about race is perceived as racist? In Norway, as in much of Europe, the concept of “race” is silenced, discarded as a wrong-headed remnant of Nazism, despite continued documentation of racial discrimination in labour, housing, education and interpersonal interaction. We used Membership Category Analysis to explore race-related interactions in classroom discourse in three university courses. We find that students and instructors implicitly equate Norwegianness with whiteness, peacefulness, and innocence, and characterize racism with deviance and non-Norwegianness. The national belonging of racialized “Others” in Norway is ambiguous: accepted, but not unproblematically. The category race is elided with the concepts of culture, ethnicity and biology. We propose discursive meta-awareness as an educational approach to countering race evasiveness (often described as “colourblindness”).

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• racialization
• discourse analysis
• race evasiveness
• colourblindness
• higher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Melanin-rich (melaninrik(e) in Norwegian) is a term that emerged among African-Norwegian youth activists in the late 2000s, introduced by Thomas Thawala Prestø, and further circulated into mainstream public discourse alongside the Movement for Black Lives in spring 2020 and through Guro Sibeko’s (2019) acclaimed book, Rasismens poetikk (The poetics of racism).

2 The project received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7 / 2007-2013/.

3 All names are pseudonyms.

4 All excerpts have been translated from Norwegian by the authors.

5 Note that a question mark in Jeffersonian transcription does not necessarily indicate a question, but rather a sharp rise in tone on the last word. “Are you not?” seems to function as a rhetorical question here, as the instructor provides the answer herself. On lines 21-22, “Where do you come from?” functions as a question that garners a response. However, we do not interpret “Invisibilized?” (line 17) to function as a question.

6 In addition, Annamma, Jackson, and Morrison (2017) argue that the term “colorblind” is problematic in embedding notions of disability in the refusal to acknowledge racial oppression. Their argument is nuanced and powerful; seek out their paper.

7 At the time we collected data, the ethics review board determined that (public) university lectures/classes were public space, and that we were therefore not required to acquire informed consent from participants for audio recording (unlike video). The guidelines have now changed and require active consent.

Additional information

Funding

The project received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7 / 2007-2013/.