ABSTRACT

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”).

摘要

在讲种族的国家被视为种族主义者的国家，大学生和讲师如何参与有关种族和种族主义的讨论？在挪威，就像在欧洲大部分地区一样，尽管种族歧视在劳动力，住房，教育和人际交往方面的文献不断记载，但“种族”的概念却被沉默了下来，被当作是纳粹主义的错误残余。我们使用会员类别分析来探讨三门大学课程中课堂讨论中与种族相关的互动。我们发现，学生和讲师隐含地将挪威语等同于洁白，和平与纯真，并将种族主义刻画为偏离和非挪威。种族化的“其他”在挪威的国民归属是模棱两可的：可以接受，但不能毫无问题。类别竞赛不再包含文化概念，种族和生物学。我们建议使用元数据意识作为一种对抗种族逃避行为（通常被称为“色盲”）的教育方法。