Learning racism in the absence of ‘race’

Introduction

The focus of this article is an educational encounter where people wrestle with conceptual and political issues that are too close to ‘race’ for comfort; immigration, integration, cultural diversity and racism. Conceptual confusion about ‘race’, racism and lines of inclusion and exclusion in the Norwegian nation was rife in this educational setting, where education about ‘immigration and integration’ prompted struggles over the meaning and relevance of ‘race’ in contemporary Norwegian society. Treating ‘race’ as a ‘chameleon-like’ concept that adapts to the cultural context and political situation (Lentin, 2008: 491), I approach the dynamics of a particularly rich case of ‘race wrestling’ (Pollock, 2006) in the classroom, with analytic attention to the meanings of ‘race’ and the affective aspects of the students and teacher’s struggle with ‘race’ in relation to contemporary Norwegian society.

The analysis is based on classroom observations in a diverse urban school environment in Oslo, Norway, in the spring of 2008, where three researchers observed teaching and classroom interaction over a six-week period, including two weeks where the timetable was partly collapsed to focus on matters related to identity, such as racism and living in a multicultural society. The aim of this observation study was to shed light on how ‘Norwegianness’ was addressed in a multicultural school setting, and learn about how racializing discursive strategies that we had found to be evident in Norwegian textbooks were negotiated by teachers and students in diverse classrooms (Røthing and Svendsen, 2011). ¹ In the four student groups of approximately 25 13- to 14-year-old students, we observed interaction and teaching with attention to discursive and affective aspects of teaching and learning about ‘immigration and integration’ in a school where three-quarters of the student body had parents who had migrated to Norway. The 10 teachers that were involved in teaching the relevant subjects ² had to negotiate a paradox between textbook knowledge about ‘race’ as a fictional, historical and foreign concept, and the fact that many students experienced racism as a very present facet of contemporary Norwegian society.

In this school, a vast majority of the teachers, including the one in the example I have singled out for close analysis, were White ethnic Norwegian, while three-quarters of the students were first generation Norwegians who would regularly refer to themselves as ‘foreigners’ or as being ‘Brown’. As an empirical site this school offered insights into tensions between ‘the fact of hybridity’ (Back, 2002) in a number of multicultural Oslo neighbourhoods, and a continued cultural and educational investment in a Norwegian national imaginary which is invested in Whiteness and monoculturalism (Biseth, 2011; Eriksen, 2010; Gullestad, 2006b; Horst and Pihl, 2010; Pihl, 1998; Røthing and Svendsen, 2011).

In tune with scholarship on the continued manifestations of ‘race’ as a performative effect of racism in contemporary Europe (Goldberg, 2009; Lentin, 2004; Leonardo, 2002), I suggest that analytic attention to affective dimensions of everyday ‘race wrestling’ (Pollock, 2006) sheds significant light on how racism produces and reproduces racialized categories in contemporary Norway. In this educational context, students generally labelled any discrimination based on culture, ethnicity, skin colour or religion as racism, while teachers reserved this term for severe skin colour discrimination with links to notions of biological races. The students’ understanding fits a ‘racism without races’ in which the ‘dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences’ (Balibar, 1991: 21). In the material I discuss here, cultural diversity was also tied to ‘conflict’ in a way that indexes the struggles over multiculturalism as a political strategy in Europe (Lentin and Titley, 2011), as well as the geopolitical dividing lines in the post-9/11 world order (Abu El-Haj and Bonet, 2010). In Norway, however, issues of ‘race’ and racism are largely discussed without the benefit of both relevant historical and geopolitical perspectives. In the course of the analysis here, I show that the denial of ‘race’ as a concept, and the frames for understanding processes of racialization that accompanies that term, presents a serious problem to education that strives to combat racism in the Norwegian context.

Racism and Norwegian national imaginary

In the Nordic countries ‘race’ is not only an issue associated with the past mistakes of colonialism, it is also something that the region figures itself as historically innocent of (Keskinen et al., 2009; Loftsdóttir and Jensen, 2012; Palmberg, 2009). In Norwegian national imaginary the nation is ‘good’ and innocent of colonialism and racism, as described by Marianne Gullestad:

In popular consciousness people in Norway are historically innocent with regard to slavery, colonisation and racism. Norway is a victim of colonisation (by Denmark) and occupation (by Nazi Germany), and not a colonizer. ‘Norway did not have colonies’ is a common refrain. People in Norway supported the civil rights movement in the United States, as well as the African National Congress in South Africa. Norway has played an important role in peace negotiations in various regions of the world, such as the Middle East, Guatemala, Sri Lanka and Colombia, and Norway is among the world’s nations that give most per head in development aid. In sum, Norway is seen as an innocent, humane, tolerant, anti-racist and peace-loving society that is committed to helping the needy. (Gullestad, 2005: 43)

Gullestad articulated a popular self-image that emanates positive affect; it feels good about itself. This image disregards the history of Norwegians’ participation in colonial culture and commerce as missionaries, seamen, businessmen and explorers, as well as its investments in Whiteness (Eidsvik, 2012; Gullestad, 2005: 43). It also ignores the role of the state, including the education system, in the systematic oppression of the indigenous Sami and other national minorities (Jensen, 2005). These aspects of national history are either denied or considered as properly belonging elsewhere. The national self-image that Gullestad described after decades of studying Norwegian society has elements of ‘idealization’ (Rustin, 1991: 66). It portrays the nation as inherently good based on both denial of aspects of the past, and externalization of present-day challenges.

In her study of Norwegian public discourse about immigration and integration, Gullestad pointed out that the category ‘ethnic Norwegian’ formed a binary in public discourse with an ‘other’ marked by migration history and skin colour, commonly labelled ‘immigrant’ (Gullestad, 2002, 2006a). A locally situated and shifting mix of language proficiency (including accents), religion, looks and family name ‘are in many situations regarded as more important for national belonging than citizenship and membership of the political nation’, she argued (Gullestad, 2006a: 72). Studies of young Norwegians’ identity work show that this binary is still at work in racializing ways (Andersson, 2010; Mainsah, 2011). Furthermore, the continued use of this binary in a public discourse that focuses on the challenges that immigration supposedly poses to national cohesion constructs those who identify with the category ‘immigrant’ as problem citizens, in similar ways to that traced in other European countries (see Ahmed, 2004; Fortier, 2008). In a psychoanalytic perspective it is possible to see the discursive pattern that Gullestad described in Norwegian public discourse about immigration as a channelling device for negative affect, through which negative aspects of the nation can be projected onto its ‘other’.

In the Norwegian public sphere racism is limited to ‘the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to congenital inferiority and another group is destined to congenital superiority’ (Benedict, 1983: 97). The continued strength of the construction of a White national identity has surfaced in repeated controversies over the use of the term ‘neger’ to describe Black people in Norwegian usage (Gullestad, 2005). The term is etymologically similar to the English term ‘negro’, but many Norwegians still argue that it is ‘merely descriptive’, as opposed to ‘nigger’ which is invariably read as racist. Norwegians of colour who have disagreed and asked for the term to be scrapped have met strong opposition from established language authorities, who have claimed that the term ‘neger’ in Norwegian does not carry the same history of racist abuse as the English term. As Gullestad has argued, the only reason it is possible to claim that ‘neger’ is not a term based in a racist worldview is the denial of Norwegian participation in the colonial project noted above. As such, the ‘neger’ debates illustrate the extent of denial and externalization of racism as a social problem in Norwegian society. They also illustrate strong disagreements about what racism amounts to in Norwegian society, however. In the classroom interaction I discuss below, the term ‘neger’ is proclaimed to be ‘wrong’ and outdated by the teacher, and in that move, it is also tied to racism. Knowing from experience that it is still used, however, the students continue to unpack the meaning of the term among themselves.

Building on analyses of the externalization of colonialism and racism across the Nordic region, Suvi Keskinen and colleagues have suggested that the Nordic countries should be seen as ideologically and economically complicit with colonialism (Keskinen et al., 2009). This perspective helpfully situates the region in the epistemological context of the European continent. In this light, the Nordic externalization of the history of colonialism and racist ideologies can be understood as a regional variety of the European version of colour-blindness. Fatima El-Tayeb has described the ideology of racelessness in Europe as ‘characterized by the convergence of race and religion as well as the externalization of racialized populations (rather than their relegation to second-class citizen status)’ (El-Tayeb, 2012: 114–116). This ideology is furthermore evident in different national varieties of the ‘prohibition of discourses around racial oppression’ (El-Tayeb, 2012: 114–116).

Psychosocial perspectives on racism

In her compelling account of her orientation towards psychoanalytic thought, Gail Lewis has noted that it is her ‘deep concern with the experiential, social and political effects’ of the everyday injuries of racism that makes it necessary for her to find ways to account for the psychic life of racism (Lewis, 2012: 35). This emphasis on the felt reality of racism has also been a key facet in the tradition in Black feminist thought, most clearly expressed in the work of Audre Lorde (Lorde, 1984; see also Gunaratnam and Lewis, 2001; Thandeka, 1999). Psychoanalytic perspectives present tools which help theorize how racism is formed and transformed in individual subjectivities as well as worlds of meaning, as illustrated in Frantz Fanon’s critical discussions of the ‘psychopolitics of racism’ (Fanon, 1967; see also Hook, 2011; Khanna, 2003; Kovel, 1995; Rustin, 1991).

Specifically, post-Kleinian approaches to racism provide meaningful explanations for the strength and durability of racist viewpoints, despite their irrational character and fictional basis (Rustin, 1991). Michael Rustin argued that ‘virtually no difference is caught in “black” or “white”, except those which are effects of something else – culture, nationality, the experience of discrimination or of oppression; the result of hostility to the racial category as such’ (Rustin, 1991: 63). This emptiness makes them efficient at transferring ‘unwanted states of feeling’ (Rustin, 1991: 63). Racist dynamics can be helpfully fleshed out through the interrelated Kleinian concepts of idealization, denigration and splitting. I suggested above that Nordic exceptionalism is partly an effect of an ‘idealization’ in the sense that it denies negative aspects of its history and culture through assigning them to other regions and people. ‘Denigration’ of the other, which etymological origin is Latin denigrare, to blacken, accompanies idealization, implicitly and explicitly. ³ When bad feelings are disposed of onto the other, the self can be seen as only good, Rustin notes (1991: 66).

Splitting is crucial to these processes. In her introduction to Melanie Klein’s work, Hanna Segal wrote that ‘Melanie Klein saw that little children, under the spur of anxiety, were constantly trying to split their objects and their feelings and trying to retain good feelings and introject good objects, whilst expelling bad objects and projecting bad feelings’ (Segal, 1988: 122–124). By introjecting the good, and projecting the bad objects, the subject can create boundaries around the self. Consequently, the other whom the bad objects are projected upon appears to be dangerous, threatening and destructive. Projective identification can result from projection through an interactive process where one succeeds in projecting the unwanted parts of the self in a way that makes the other person experience those feelings as belonging to themselves (Clarke, 1999: 21).

Splitting, idealization and denigration characterizes the ‘paranoid position’ in Klein’s development theory, but is seen as a position young people and adults also move in and out of in different situations. The mechanism can be seen at work in educational encounters where the burden of racial stereotyping is threatening the individual. It can also be seen in national narratives such as the Norwegian case I have described here, where issues of race and racism are externalized along with the migrant populations it attacks (Kovel, 1995).

Keyword: ‘Race’

Conceptualizations of Norwegian nationhood can be traced in both public discourse and textbooks. My initial focus arriving at the Oslo school where we did our observations was how these conceptualizations worked in the educational encounters, and which lines of inclusion and exclusion were performed in the process. We were three researchers present at the school for six weeks, observing four different student groups in which 10 different teachers were involved at various times. We split up for observations, shared notes and comments during our time there, yet our analyses have remained separate. During the six weeks of observation all four classes covered aspects of the curriculum concerning ‘identity’ including family, peer pressure, gender equality, a multicultural society, immigration, racism and prejudice.

It quickly became evident to me that everyday negotiations of racism were a catalyst for other ethical and political issues. Specifically, students discussed regularly whether incidents and statements amounted to ‘racism’, and whether specific teachers were ‘racist’. For me, these negotiations over ‘racism’ suggested that trying to analytically unpack the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘racism’ at work in the school could yield important insights about processes of racialization in contemporary Norwegian society. ‘Race’ emerged as a keyword in Raymond Williams’s sense; mapping its different meanings could shed light on the troublesome negotiations of ‘racism’ (Williams, 1976).

In the analyses here I approach the meanings and effects of ‘race’ through a close engagement with an educational encounter. Mica Pollock suggested that we ‘investigate and theorize actors’ everyday disputes in their full ethnographic complexity – to analyse moments when youths and adults (of all “races”) themselves are arguing over how best to understand or navigate their own race issues’ (Pollock, 2006: 85). These moments of ‘race wrestling’ cannot be studied through abstracted discourse alone. If it is indeed the case that ‘race’ is silenced in the cultural context at hand, race wrestling is bound to be expressed in a roundabout language and through affective and emotional interaction.

Affective enquiry

For the analysis below I have singled out a situation that presented a particularly rich case of ‘race wrestling’ (Pollock, 2006). In this session a White male ethnic Norwegian teacher and a mixed student group were struggling to make sense of questions of cultural diversity and racism in contemporary Norwegian society, as well as in their own lives. In terms of diversity the class was typical for the school with mostly Norwegian born students, whose parents were commonly born in Pakistan, Turkey, Norway, Palestine, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Egypt, Morocco, Iraq, Iran and Somalia. There were also students that had been adopted by Norwegian born parents and students with one Norwegian born and one migrant parent.

Affective enquiry is inevitably a subjective method. At the end of each day I wrote narratives of my own experiences in class which conveyed affect, mediated through my feelings about what had happened, and what I could sense from the others in the room. Teresa Brennan has noted that ‘feelings are sensations that have found their right match in words’ (Brennan, 2004: 5). The process of analysis involves finding such matches for affective impressions, which implies that the analysis is underway already during the immediate processing and creation of narratives based on the events that unfolded. Affects are commonly not unique to the individual, even if they are often approached through personal feelings. Brennan has addressed this issue suggesting that the ‘atmosphere’ or the environment literally gets into the individual, even if they have vastly different experiences and psyches (Brennan, 2004: 1). From a different vantage point, Thomson and colleagues have compared interpretation of texts from research encounters, finding that most would single out the same excerpts as conveying strong affect (Thomson et al., 2012).

Yet, the ‘angle’ we approach situations from are also constituted by the experiences and emotional state with which we enter the room (Ahmed, 2008: 125). Furthermore, institutional, material and geopolitical positioning also influences our work (kennedy-macfoy and Nielsen, 2012). My colleagues and I were White ethnic Norwegian educators. This ethnic and institutional position made the teachers see us as ‘colleagues’ and the students see us as teachers of sorts, even if we were outsiders to the school and did not participate in lessons. The fact that we gained access to the school through the teachers also strengthened our association with them. In this analysis I have taken care not to let the good intentions and hard work of the teachers I observed prevent me from also taking into account the deeply troubling aspects of the social interaction I analyse in depth here.

In my observation notes from the session I discuss here, there is hasty, almost panicked, scribbling from the different conversations that went on, and a messy map of how themes converged and split up again (Clarke, 2005). My attention was geared towards the atmosphere of the room and the affects expressed by actors in the situation, where boys completely dominated the interaction with the teacher as well as cross-communication between students. The prolonged drama of the two 45-minute sessions with no break in between was one in which I did not understand the depth and complexity of what was going on until later, and that made a lasting impression on me.

‘Because we’re foreigners’: Immigration politics in the classroom

Entering this educational encounter, I got the impression that the teacher had prepared for a class about a conflicted topic. I was well aware that he was obliged to teach the students about the ‘challenges and opportunities with a multicultural society’ according to the Norwegian curriculum, and that cultural conflict was a theme that was listed on the teachers’ plan at this time. The teacher entered the classroom resolutely and quickly got ready to teach:

Today’s themes are culture clashes and immigration. He wrote the heading ‘Culture conflict’ ⁴ on the blackboard.

I read his example as an attempt to ‘neutralize’ a controversial topic. It did not work. Before five minutes had passed, a politically alert student had called him out. His response, ‘because we’re foreigners’, raised political questions regarding inclusion and exclusion in the nation, as well as racism. The example suggested that conflict could be seen as an inevitable and unintentional effect of cultural difference. Yet, there was nothing unintentional about the conflict in the library. The boys in question knew perfectly well which teachers they could irk by keeping their caps on inside, and who they couldn’t. Defining this as a cultural conflict, the teacher illustrated that ‘cultural conflicts’ are determined by unequal power relations.

This is one example of several during these observations in which being ‘thrown out of the classroom’ figured as an image for being ‘thrown out of the country’ and vice versa. The scenario related everyday discipline issues in the school to political discourses about immigration control and citizenship. The widespread racist claim that ‘immigrants’ should be ‘thrown out of the country’ if they cause trouble seemed to inform some students’ interpretations of being ‘thrown out of the library’, or the classroom. The imagery figured the teachers as representatives of the state who were vested with the power to decide who was safe and welcome, and who was not. These parallels suggested that the risk of ‘eviction’ in public discourse and racist rebuffs registered affectively as a threat to students who identified as ‘foreigners’, regardless of their Norwegian citizenship. Knowledge of friends and family in trouble with immigration authorities, as well as media coverage of children of asylum seekers being forcefully sent ‘back’ to a place they have no knowledge of, accentuated these fears. The bewildered and concerned teachers could only try to reassure the children that they would not be ‘sent back’ to somewhere they had never been.

Wrestling with ‘race’

After the interaction above, the teacher approached the topic of ‘racism’, somewhat less surefooted than at the outset. He had chosen an excerpt from the textbook, which he asked a student to read out loud. The text was about race theory, and explained the ideas behind human races and the scientific rejection of these ideas after the Second World War. There seemed to be puzzled concern and confusion among the students during this reading. The text about race theory seemed to make the class both perplexed and uneasy. Afterwards, the teacher asked the students what racism was. ‘Differential treatment’, one student answered. ‘Yes, taken far’, the teacher half confirmed. He asked further: ‘What is it based on?’ ‘Neger’, a student replied promptly, but as soon as he said it he was reprimanded by the teacher: ‘That’s wrong, we don’t use that word’. Another student suggested ‘skin colour’. The teacher affirmed that, and explained further about the views on race found in encyclopaedias from the 1920s. The intent was clearly to convey that racism was based on the misunderstanding that there are human races, as they had just read in the textbook. In his explanation he used the term ‘Black’, and was instantly corrected aggressively and fearfully by a student who said ‘you can’t say that!’

The teacher’s message in the early interaction in this session seemed anti-racialist, in the sense that he opposed racial thinking (Goldberg, 2009). He wanted both to reject the concept of ‘race’ on scientific and moral grounds, and to teach the students that this concept was dated and wrong. As a consequence, they should not use the word ‘neger’, which has its origin in biological racial categories. There was some troubling lack of clarity in the teacher’s message, however. ‘Neger’ was a historical term, not to be used in the present. Yet, both the students and the teacher knew that it is indeed used in the present in racist discourse; sometimes without even being understood as racist, other times as part of a claim of innocence with regard to colonial complicity (Gullestad, 2005; Hübinette, 2012). Through denying the relevance of the term in the present, the teacher effectively foreclosed the opportunity to highlight the fantastic nature of both historical and present-day racist beliefs. While historical racism could be cast as ridiculous, its present-day forms remained unacknowledged, contrary to students’ experiences. The teacher’s inability to continue his critique of racism into the present day was likely to be underscored by anxiety of being cast as a racist himself. Rather than allow the students’ ideas to come forward, he policed them, and made sure they were not empowered through an ability to critically analyze racist dynamics in the present. Nor was he able to fully reassure their concerns about his own standpoint on the issue.

Nevertheless, the concept that had been confined to history resonated in a troubling way with the felt experience of some students in the class. It would not stay in the history book. After the discussion about ‘racism’ above’, a student in the back intervened: ‘Hey, I’m a “neger” ’. He was the only student in class who had migrated to Norway as a child, and was from Somalia. The teacher didn’t register his intervention, but the student, Hanad, continued to talk about whether he and some others in class were ‘neger’. While several students were expressing feelings about racism that were ‘out of place’ in contemporary raceless Norwegian discourse, the Somali boy Hanad took it upon himself to be the body out of place, in Sara Ahmed’s terms (Ahmed, 2000). At that point the teacher clearly wanted to sum up and close the topic of ‘race’. He asked everyone to write in their notebook that all human beings are of the same race.

David Goldberg argues that the concept of ‘race’ as such was willed away in Europe after the Holocaust, and ‘buried alive’ with the memory of its atrocities. Nevertheless, he points out:

As diffuse as they are, racist implications linger, silenced but assumed, always already returned and haunting. Buried, but alive. Odorless traces but suffocating in the wake of their nevertheless denied diffusion. (Goldberg, 2009: 2128ff.)

Characterizing the after-effects of chattel slavery in the US, Avery Gordon defined haunting as the ‘way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with’ (Gordon, 2008: xvi). The ‘race wrestling’ that the teacher and the students in this class were engaged in illustrate how certain forms of education about racism can amount to an enactment of the burial of ‘race’. It is a partial and halting affair, through which the concept is animated in the process of its continuous burial. In the process of its pedagogical denial, ‘race’ became a haunting presence in this classroom, in the form of anxiety. It had to be dealt with, somehow. As far as the racial drama of this class had already progressed, it had only just begun. As Gordon noted, ‘haunting’ points to the sense of trouble that arises when the social order cracks and exposes feelings and bodies that are out of place, ‘and show no sign of leaving’ (Gordon, 2008: xvi).

The affective burden of ‘race’

During the instruction that followed what I have discussed so far, several students were keenly watchful of the teacher’s language, and would interrupt and protest if there were a slightest chance that his positioning could be interpreted as racist. He was visibly struggling with the intensity in the room. When the teacher wrote ‘immigration’ on the blackboard, and ‘for’ and ‘against’ columns under it, the political conflict line between ‘immigrants’ and ‘Norwegians’ was activated once again:

Towards the end of this exchange, there were lengthy silences, in which the students resisted the teacher’s attempts to discuss negative effects of immigration. While some students seemed genuinely perplexed and simply appeared to remain silent because they did not have an answer to offer, others expressed defiance and contained hostility towards the teacher. In a class where the boys completely dominated verbal interaction that involved the teacher, boys as well as girls participated in this silent, yet palpable, protest. There seemed to be resistance, with momentum. It was evident in students who tipped back their chairs with arms crossed over their chests and raised eyebrows combined with challenging looks at the teacher. By the time he started supplying answers himself, he had lost the attention of several students, who were engaged in their own conversations about the issues at hand. I was hopeful that there was a ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, 1977) at work here, which could amount to an emergent collective of ‘immigrants’ who could press back against the teacher verbally (Andersson, 2010). They seemed too young, and too anxious for this kind of resistance, however. Instead, the anxiety was dealt with by enacting the racist dynamics the lesson had presented them with.

In Hanad’s corner the conversation revolved around ‘race’ and who counted as a ‘neger’. More students joined him, also discussing among themselves who were ‘immigrants’. In a belated response to the teacher’s attempt to teach about the problems with segregation, one boy who was also discussing whether he was an ‘immigrant’ simply stated: ‘Somali’. ‘Burka’, a loudmouth White boy said, instantly, as if it followed naturally from ‘Somali’. ‘Circumcision!’ another White boy added, clearly inspired by the new turn of the conversation. Several boys, both White and identifying as Brown, started discussing Somali immigrants loudly among themselves. It went on in discussions between two or three students, and sometimes erupted in comments the entire group would hear. The room was buzzing intensely, in spite of the teacher’s repeated attempts to stop it. It seemed like the Norwegian born students with migrant parents from other countries tried to rid themselves of the bad feeling the topic had landed on them. The discussions piled up to a co-construction of Somalia as the origin for all social evils associated with ‘immigrants’. ⁵ It took time. After a while, Hanad, the only Somali student in class, said, ‘That’s racist’ to the students talking about Somalis. Towards the end of the class he angrily stated, ‘you are all racists!’ to everyone around him, and left the room.

‘Racism and sexism are grown-up words’, Audre Lorde has noted, and ‘children perceive them, correctly, as hatred’ (1984: 152). Hanad had the word he needed to shout back, and a concept to understand with, and through his anger leave at least some of the hate for the others to deal with. This is a meagre consolation, however, when a lesson intended to raise awareness about racism resulted in racist bullying.

Rustin notes simply that ‘the more negative feeling and anxiety that is having to be processed by children in their social milieu (such as school), the more likely this is to be projected in persecutory ways into negatively defined out-groups’ (Rustin, 1991: 59). Here, the anxiety that was palpable in the room was further intensified by the teacher’s insistence on engaging his students in recounting the ‘negative effects of immigration’. In the process, the majority of the students were yet again subjected to the homogenizing effect of racialization (Goldberg, 2009), and denigrated as the source of ‘trouble’ in the supposedly peaceful and benign Norwegian nation. Under the weight of this social projection, unwittingly enacted by the teacher as a representative of the White majority, differently positioned students were inspired to push the negative affect onto others.

The White boys who shouted ‘burka’ and ‘circumcision’ to label the Somali seemed to be enjoying the spectacle. The figure of the Somali woman worked particularly well as a ‘container category’ in this instance (Lewis, 2006). Misogyny as well as racism could be freely expressed, as long as it took this direction, it seemed. It also ‘stuck’ to the Muslim girls with and without a hijab (Ahmed, 2004), but they were defended by other Muslim boys who shouted in response that ‘burka’ and circumcision of girls was ‘something the Somalis invented’. They were not only defending the girls, however. In Norwegian, the term ‘circumcision’ currently references female genital mutilation, and has male circumcision as a secondary meaning. The fact that the Muslim boys in class were circumcised was not new to the two boys who seemed to raise this topic as often as they could. The affective intensity the accusation brought about could be understood as a defence against a veiled attempt at emasculating the Muslim boys.

The anxiety that these topics generated informs the power of the bad feeling that was dumped on the Somali boy, Hanad, in this situation. Rustin writes that:

… what is expelled by the group expressing prejudice or hatred, and what has to be borne (or resisted, or got rid of, if that is possible) by their recipients, are powerful doses of bad psychic stuff. Such transactions are more potent, psychologically primitive, and damaging than the mere mental definitions or images that are usually written about in this context. (Rustin, 1991: 68)

In this educational encounter, a public discourse that projected troublesome facets of the nation onto the container category ‘immigrants’ caused children who were interpellated by this term to split off and project the hatred towards the most vulnerable group available, in this case the Somalis. For Hanad as well as the other students interpellated by the term ‘immigrant’, the situation could be seen to amount to a struggle against projective identification; against seeing himself as the abject other his classmates were trying to cast him as. The only protection the students in question had against this assault was their recognition of racism, and the anger they could push back with.

Conclusion

Thinking with Audre Lorde, one could wish such recognition of racism could have spurred anger against the school and the teacher in the first place, and thus prevent the racist bullying of Hanad (Lorde, 1984). The content of the lesson worked against that, however. Frantz Fanon argued in Black Skin, White Masks (1967) that the colonial influence on education in the Antilles, presenting the foundations of identification with Whiteness, played a significant role in providing the social conditions for the introjection of racist contempt (Fanon, 1967: 147–148).

In the case I have discussed here, the White ethnic Norwegian teacher was not acknowledging the anxiety that the ethnic Norwegian/immigrant binary was causing in the student group. The students knew they were not ‘ethnic Norwegian’ despite their citizenship because they were not White. The significance of Whiteness to national identification has largely been silenced in Norway, but there are signs that first generation Norwegians are increasingly articulating the racial aspects of this line of exclusion. One of Dorthe Trøften’s informants from an Oslo school stated: ‘I don’t feel particularly Norwegian. … Because I don’t have that skin colour, and then I can never become Norwegian for the Norwegians, quite simply’ (Trøften, 2010: 17). Henry Mainsah introduced his work on ethnic minority youth’s self-representation on social network sites with the statement ‘I could well have said I was Norwegian but nobody would believe me’ (Mainsah, 2011). Recently, an eight-year-old Norwegian born boy who analysed his own situation in Kari Gellein and Tine Poppe’s book on children who live in asylum centres, stated: ‘I am Brown. That’s why I’m poor. The others in my class are White, and they are rich. Brown is a problem, White is not a problem’ (2012: 29). His analysis was also picked up by Norwegian newspapers, and exemplifies a growing representation of critiques of racism from young non-White first generation Norwegians (Alghasi et al., 2012; Andersson, 2010; Andersson et al., 2012; Hansen and Poppe, 2012; Prieur, 2010).

These formulations of racialization – an effect of naturalized lines of exclusion that externalize people of colour while perpetuating an ideology of racelessness (El-Tayeb, 2012) – expose ‘race’ as an unacknowledged, albeit haunting, presence in contemporary Norway. The Kleinian psychoanalytic perspective I have applied here allows us to see how children and young people’s everyday racisms link with such larger racial divisions. This perspective also enables us to see what happens when these everyday racisms are allowed to flourish in destructive ways in schools when teachers are in denial of their significance.

For contemporary Norway this example from civic education indicates that perpetuating the notion of a nation that is ‘innocent’ of racism is continuously making it guilty of racism as an effect. Anti-racism would involve acknowledging ‘race’ as an effect of current racisms (Goldberg, 2009), and coming to terms with the part it plays in Norwegian ethnonationalism. The critiques against racism that are currently formulated by first generation Norwegians could potentially expose how racialization is allowed to flourish through the denial of ‘race’, also in state institutions.

Changing the dynamics of educational encounters, like the one I have discussed here, would involve that the White majority accept responsibility for the facets of society and oneself that have been projected onto other groups and people. Tobias Hübinette and Catrin Lundström have noted with regard to the Swedish situation that this process includes mourning the loss of the nation as it used to be known, and that the difficulty this involves should not be underestimated (Hübinette and Lundström, 2011). The violence that colour-blind anti-racialism unwittingly purports in the absence of ‘race’ underlines the necessity of this process, however difficult it may be.