The Blurring of Discourses of Liberalism and Nationalism and the Racialization of Muslim Youth

• In Event: Encountering Race: Discourses of Race and Racialization and the Education of Immigrant Youth in the United States and Europe

Abstract

Objectives:
Denmark is a nation that prides itself on its historical commitments to social equality and “openness” to immigrants and refugees. While liberal discourses of social equality and “colorblindness” are pervasive in the Danish media and the institutional discourses of schools, human rights organizations document stark disparities between the educational outcomes of ethnic Danish youth and immigrant youth. This paper analyzes how discourses of racial difference function within a Danish lower secondary school. It explores how everyday discourses and practices of racialization are cloaked in the language of liberalism and “non-racism” and how they maintain a focus on the problems with Muslim families rather than addressing existing educational inequities.

Perspectives or Theoretical Framework:
Despite repeated critiques of race as a category, Silverstein (2005) argues that “race remains a salient in the everyday lives of immigrants in Europe, as an inescapable social fact whose vitality and volatility only appear to be increasing”(p.365). Following Omi & Winant (2004), this paper defines racialization as a process through which ethnic and religious differences come to be essentialized and naturalized. It analyzes educators’ discourses of racial difference to examine how race talk is accompanied by claims of non-racism and how it functions to legitimate existing inequities between groups.

IV. Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
This presentation draws on data from a two year study of Muslim immigrant youth in a Danish Folkeskole near Copenhagen, Denmark. This study uses ethnographic observations as well as focus groups and interviews with teachers and administrators, first and second generation Muslim immigrant youth and ethnic Danish youth to document the ways in which immigrant youth are represented and positioned within the school.
V. Results and/or substantiated conclusions
The findings of this study reveal that while there is a discourse of openness, and the ‘equal treatment’ of differences within the school, Muslim youth are treated as outsiders who are in need of intervention and are not eligible for the same supports as ethnic Danish students. Such racialized narratives complicate the development of critical relationships between immigrant students and their ethnic Danish peers as well as with teachers. Further, this study reveals that rather than focusing on how to address educational inequalities, some teachers recruit racialized representations of immigrant families to justify the marginalization and exclusion of immigrant youth within the school.
VI. Scientific or scholarly significance of the study
While there has been much attention to how Muslim immigrants need to adapt their culture and behaviors to fit in within schools in European countries, there has been much less consideration of the ways that schools either encourage or discourage the civic engagement of these youth. This paper seeks to contribute to a developing body of literature focused on the racialization of immigrant youth within schools in Denmark and other European countries.

Author

• Reva Jaffe-Walter, University of Wisconsin