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“We don’t throw stones, we throw flowers”

Race discourse and race evasiveness in the Norwegian university classroom

Bibliographic Data

ID19002083
AuthorsYael Harlap (0000-0002-3956-3615, University of Bergen, corresponding author), Hanne Riese (University of Bergen)
Year2021
Volume45
Issue7
Pages1218-1238
Publication date2021-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthnic and Racial Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-9870 • E-ISSN: 1466-4356
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/01419870.2021.1904146
OpenAlexW3140661512
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited46

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”)

Deviance (statistics) · Documentation · Ethnic group · Innocence · Interpersonal communication · Linguistics · Norwegian · Political science · Race (biology) · Racialization · Racism · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Critical Race Theory in Education · Gender Studies · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Law · Social and Intergroup Psychology

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Unique citing works13
Citations per year3,25
Citation span2022 - 2026 (5)
Citation velocitycurrent
Highly citedNo
Citation typesNeutral: 13
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