The Material Consequences of Concern: Liberal Epistemologies of Racial Exclusion in Immigrant Education

• In Event: 49.028 - The Meaning and Matter of Materialist (Anti)racisms in Educational Research

Abstract

The events surrounding 9/11 created what a number of scholars refer to as a “moral panic” (Maira 2007; Razack 2008; Rana 2011), which in turn has led to the sudden growth of anti-Muslim racism and an intensification of the surveillance and disciplining of Muslim communities. Although “new” forms of racialization are characterized by official discourses of antiracism that take up the liberal tropes of equality, individualism, and inclusive civic nationalism (Augoustinos and Every 2007; Melamed 2011), a tacit racism continues to operate in the differential allocation of resources in societies and in the dynamics of social control and power.
This paper explores the ways that new forms of liberal racism and nationalism are imbricated, serving to protect the need to believe in the goodness of nations as well to ensure the future of racialized national imaginaries. Drawing on an analysis of Danish integration policies and the everyday experiences of Muslim youth in a Danish high school, this paper explores the material consequences of liberal concern for the welfare of Muslim immigrants, how it produces notions of enlightened selves and immigrant others and even more importantly, how it distances youth from educational resources.
This paper draws on data from a two-year study of Danish Integration Policies and the experiences of Muslim immigrant youth in a Danish Folkeskole near Copenhagen, Denmark. It engages critical policy analysis, ethnographic observations as well as focus groups and interviews to document the ways in which immigrant youth are represented and positioned within schools and society.
The findings of this research reveal that while there is a discourse of openness, anti-racism 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. This work challenges European notions of “anti-racism” that claim that equality is achieved through colorblind approaches in which all students are treated the same as it reveal how the differential provisioning of educational resources is tied to constellations of racial difference. My work challenges the belief that talking about processes of racialization will produce polarization in schools as it reveals the ways that notions of racial difference echo through schools and communities.
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 calls for a materialist anti-racism that turns the lens from an emphasis transforming immigrants into ideal liberal subjects to a critical examination of the ways in which national constructions of racial difference are tied to more global constellations of race, labor, and capital.

Author

• Reva Jaffe-Walter, Montclair State University