Astra

White Nation and Anti-racist Lessons for Feminism – av Daria Krivonos

”The fear of small numbers” and the work of imagination

In the public discussion of migration, migrants are often seen as the outsiders to be governed by integration policies and immigration controls. They bear the exclusive responsibility for integration, assimilation and becoming a part of a supposedly homogenous nation-state. Migration tends to be discussed through the adjectives such as “new” and “unprecedented”, creating the emotional regime of fear to lose the stability and fixity of the nation.  

This framing of migrant bodies as “bringing multiculturalism” leaves silent the massive effort that is continuously mobilized to produce and maintain this imagined national homogeneity. The violent histories that are at the centre of these processes become even more difficult to discuss in the context of Finland since the country is perceived as an outsider to the global histories of racism and colonialism. Injustice and discrimination do not belong to this idyllic picture of a peaceful Nordic nation.

“I suggest that taking the histories of making a white nation seriously has some major lessons not only to the understanding of migration but also anti-racist feminist struggles.”

But there is an urgent need to debunk one of the central myths that structure our understanding of migration and the Finnish nation – the latter’s imagined ethnic and cultural homogeneity. The idea of exceptional homogeneity ignores the histories of assimilatory and repressive state actions targeted against indigenous people and historical minorities. The word “imagined” is not accidental here, as it is the constant work of imagining one’s belonging to whiteness, Europe and the global West that is so central to this national project that produced, nevertheless, very material and violent effects.

The popular logic that connects migration to the Finnish nation is the following: if Finland has always been a historically homogenous white nation, then racism is only a recent phenomenon driven by the recent increase in non-white and migrant populations.

Against the grain of these popular narratives of the “newness” of ethnic and cultural diversity, an obsession with whiteness and the policing of its purity is at the core of contemporary Western societies, including Finland. The connections between the nation and race, and the myth of the national homogeneity must be critically interrogated when discussing “the fear of small numbers”, to borrow from anthropologist Arjun Appadurai. Indeed, Finland’s foreign-born people represents only 6% of the total population, which is the smallest number in the Nordic countries. Yet, this is not the number per se but any visible presence of non-white bodies that becomes a threat to the self-evidence of the white norm of the nation. I suggest that taking the histories of making a white nation seriously has some major lessons not only to the understanding of migration but also anti-racist feminist struggles.

Finland, Europeanness and Whiteness

But what are the histories behind this taken-for-granted norm of whiteness and at what cost Finland and the West more broadly have achieved this whiteness?

Although it has become somewhat natural for contemporary racialized vision to conflate “being white” with “being European” in public discourses and imagination, we should critically re-read whiteness as a socially located phenomenon (not a biological or phenotypical!), which was created through particular histories and geographies. Whiteness was historically invented through Europe’s colonial conquest by designating colonised Others as “non-white”, ”savage” and ”privimitive” to exploit their land, resources and labour. Europeans racialized whiteness and turned it into a fetish object to legitimise their colonial domination. Attaching the exclusive right to whiteness to Europeans also required excluding and marginalising non-European forms of whiteness, such as, for example, Chinese and Middle Eastern whiteness.

Even though Finland’s involvement in the colonial endeavors are not comparable to those of major colonial empires, there are multiple ties that show the desire to belong to whiteness and Western cultural tradition. Due to Finland’s own precarious position across the East/West divide and European whiteness, clear demarcations from its own non-white Others have been an important way to claim own belonging to Western Europe. Finns were assigned a lower status in the racialised hierarchies produced by scientific racism of the 18th to 20th centuries, which categorised Finns as non-white and non-European. This led to some Finnish scientists’ investment in forceful counter arguments, many involving the racialisation and subjugation of the Sámi people, to prove Finns were white and European. For instance, several studies in physical anthropology were conducted to measure the skulls of Sami people. The Sámi were particularly inferiorised and stigmatized through the references to their supposed “privitiveness” and nomadism.

“It is crucial to remember that the Finnish nation-state is built on the land of Sami, so deportations of migrants by the Finnish state should be rethought from the perspective of how the nation itself occupies the land of others.”

It is crucial to remember that the Finnish nation-state is built on the land of Sami, so deportations of migrants by the Finnish state should be rethought from the perspective of how the nation itself occupies the land of others.

Finnishness, as an opposite to Russianness and Eastern-ness, was also gradually constructed during the process of building Finland into an independent Western nation. These historical developments and boundary-making processes still affect Finland’s largest migrant group today, which are Russian-speaking people. They become racialised, that is, ascribed characteristics as immutably different from the Finnish majority population, as Finland’s Eastern Others and not-fully-white subjects. The references to their perceived “Eastness” are mobilised to portray them as more traditional, violent, addicted to authoritarianism and less modern Others.

The idea of race as a hierarchical grading of populations and racism as a practice of exclusion are not an exception to the supposedly non-racist nation but shaped the idea of Finland’s nationhood itself. In many ways, the master-narrative of Finland as a homogeneous nation state was based on assimilating the Roma and Sámi people, for example, with a wave of changing their names into more ‘Finnish’ ones. Finland’s supposed ethnic homogeneity is then not a natural condition but a product of continuous effort and nation-building processes. Today, law enforcement and day-to-day ethnic profiling in public spaces are the reality for many people racialised as non-white, which is often justified by the majority population as keeping the order or even taking care of the non-white people. It is in this context that “extreme whiteness” – the one associated with right-wing extremism and the fringes of the political culture, and “ordinary whiteness” – the invisible norm that saturates the ordinary and the everyday of Finland – should be seen as part of the same power-structure, as we learn from Minna Seikkula’s (2019) work.

Once this historical investment in the production of national homogeneity and attachment to whiteness are taken seriously, the so called “migration crisis” is better understood as a “crisis of white hegemony”, as sociologist Suvi Keskinen (2018) suggests.

Gender equality and its sexualised Others

In addition to the unrecognised norm of whiteness, Finland’s national project is also centred around the idea of exemplary achievements in gender equality. Despite high rates of domestic violence and persistent inequality in the labour market, the dominant narrative of Finnishness is that gender equality has been already achieved. What kind of lessons can we learn for anti-racist feminist projects once the histories and the present of racial exclusion are taken into account?

”There is extensive evidence of the ways feminist agenda has been hijacked and adopted by right-wing anti-immigrant actors and parties – a phenomenon Sara Farris described as ‘femonationalism’.”

While the project of gender equality is indeed crucial to pursue, we have to be wary of the ways the nationalist framing of this project may further solidify the borders of the white nation. There is extensive evidence of the ways feminist agenda has been hijacked and adopted by right-wing anti-immigrant actors and parties – a phenomenon Sara Farris (2017) described as “femonationalism”. Gender equality, women’s liberation, LGBT rights can be used to reinforce civilizational hierarchies, where the West leads “backward Others” into progressive futures while turning a blind eye to its own violence and inequalities. The struggles for gender equality and sexual rights become isolated from the struggles of non-white populations. In Finland, within these normative discourses of nationhood, young migrant women are often represented as symbols of the violence and oppression that supposedly characterise families from ethnic-minority backgrounds.

In my research on Russian-speaking migrants in Helsinki, a lot of Russian women shared their reflections on the ways they are sexualized and gendered as exotic, sexually accessible women “from the East”. This stigma leads to considerable efforts from their side to present themselves as respectable women who put effort in policing their looks. In fact, they learn of their Russianness in Finland through the circulation of the “prostitute” stigma, as Anastasia Diatlova (2019) also discusses in her scholarly work. But most importantly, these were often other Finnish women that would comment on their looks as being too feminine and excessive, being the result of “oppression” and “patriarchal culture” from which Russian women supposedly come from. While being perceived as coming from the “patriarchal culture”, these are exactly same women who come to Finland as au pairs and who do cleaning, care and domestic work, thus liberating white majority women from the perils of housework.

“While being perceived as coming from the ‘patriarchal culture’, these are exactly same women who come to Finland as au pairs and who do cleaning, care and domestic work, thus liberating white majority women from the perils of housework.”

The “prostitute” stigma is indeed a shared experience among many women, which is the result of patriarchal policing of female sexuality and reproduction. But it also becomes visible how national and white women themselves become the perpetrators of this sexist ideology by casting the stigma on migrant and non-white women. The narrow and exclusionary ideas of what an emancipated Finnish/Nordic femininity should look and be like may further reinforce racialization of sexualized Others who supposedly do not fit into the Nordic project of gender equality and women’s liberation.While doing feminist work and activism, we should be cautious of the ways we can become complicit with solidifying the borders of a white nation.

The writer is a sociologist working on the questions of gender, migration, coloniality, racialisation, and labour with a particular focus on post-socialist migration. She got a PhD in the University of Helsinki in 2019. 

Diatlova, A. (2019) Between Visibility and Invisibility : Russian-speaking Women engaged in Commercial Sex in Finland. PhD thesis, University of Helsinki

Farris, S. (2017) What is ‘femonationalism’? Open Democracy: Free Thinking for the World. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/what-is-femonationalism/

Keskinen, S. (2018) The ‘crisis’ of white hegemony, neonationalist femininities and antiracistFeminism. Women’s Studies International Forum, 68: 157-163

Seikkula , M (2019), ' (Un)making 'extreme' and 'ordinary' whiteness : Activists' narratives on antiracist mobilisation in Finland ' , Sociological Review , 67(5): 1002-1017 . https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026119841788

by Astra