Our group: Tomas Blomqvist (writer), Heidi Urpilainen, Tero Väisänen, Sara Haura and Lucy Kaplan
Hello everyone!
Some nice blog posts already here about the readings and lecture(s) last time (26.9), so I try to avoid making identical comments. The following are my (Tomas) personal thoughts only so I take full responsibility of them. These ideas are mainly based on the readings for last time and especially on some of them, because there were so many and large articles. I suppose you have read them nevertheless.
First shortly about Jenni’s lectures on Romas last time. To my mind that was very eye-opening information and an important lecture to give. Unfortunately I/we don’t have the slides of the presentation, but as far as I can remember, it was interesting and useful to hear about 1) the concepts and names associated with the Roma people and which words not to use of them, 2) the internal diversity of the group and 3) the language(s) they have or have had. For one thing I didn’t know that they are called Roma – I only knew about the ”g-word” (gypsy).
Then some general comments about the articles and Gunilla’s lecture. Last time we were assigned the task of talking about our own ”cultural backgrounds”. It seemed for many people a hard task. Why? Because we seem to belong to the majority groups, when considering different cultural categories relevant to the task – especially ”race”, since the lecture was about that. I think that was a very good task to orient pupils to the themes of the lecture and readings.
I am myself interested about race and racism (as a side note, I’m ”white” as is everyone in the class). I have followed the racial debates in USA, where the issue is more relevant, because of the ethnic diversity. Here in Finland it is still kind of homogenous in racial terms. (By the way to the non-Finnish readers: the Finnish word for ”race” – ”rotu” – is, I would say, even more a taboo than it is in English.)
As a follow-up to the ”reversed racism” -comments in the lecture and in one of your posts, I, in one sense, tend to agree with both. Gunilla said that there’s no reversed racism supposedly meaning black-to-white racism (or non-white -to-white). For example I don’t think that I have ever countered (that kind of) racism myself – maybe except for the fact that one Kenyan friend once said that ”Whites can’t dance”, which was meant humouristically (and maybe true ;)). On the other hand the term ”racism” lingvistically seems to include every kind of racial discrimination regardless of who is doing it and to whom it is done to. Therefore ”racism” in the first sense is really Whites being racist to Non-whites and ”reversed racism” being anti-white racism. In the second sense ”racism” is all kind of racial discrimation and thus reversing that doesn’t make sense. Furthermore, it may depend on the country and society one is talking about: for a white person to be a victim of racism, it can happen more probably in places, where ”Whites” aren’t the (leading) majority.
In the articles read there wasn’t much differentiation between ”race” and ”ethnicity”. Are they the same or not? The latter has the benefit of not having that many negative connotations associated to the word (e.g. pseudoscientific racial theories); the former is conceptually larger and more diffuse to describe group differences. Van Ausdale and Feagin (1996) – in their partly funny, partly cruel article – to make the point that, contrary to the general opinion, children can understand and use racial concepts, use the words ”race” and ”ethnicity” (quite) interchangeably and quite broadly. They for example include language as a ”racial and ethnic concept”, the use of which they analyze among children. Not to say it is a bad thing to include it, as scientists we have to define our concepts very carefully and precisely, even though they are emotionally charged.
To end on a positive note, I think we can agree that we are doing progress. There is no black slavery or legal (law-based) racism racism anymore in the U.S. or elsewhere. People and societies have become more tolerant of group differences, even though that in this day and age, racial tensions get lots of media coverage. Nowadays the world is more multicultural and -racial than ever before. Before people didn’t interact that much with people looking different than them. That’s why it is more important than ever that we raise our children to the ever-increasing multiethnic world-society. I really trust the future-adults.
Referred literature:
Van Ausdale, D. & Feagin, J. Using racial and ethnic concepts: The critical case of very young children. American Sociological Review. 1996, 61(5) p. 779- (15 pp.)