On the Cultivation of Black Feminist Pattern Recognition – av Mwenza Blell
”You can hear Finnish people arguing with you in your head, arguing with your every thought about Finland, what does that mean?”
Sometimes when your skin is pressed against something for a while, it leaves a set of marks, a pattern. Sometimes the pattern is recognisable, especially if your skin has borne them before. You might recognise, for example, the shape of leaves of grass on your legs after you’ve been sitting on them.
In Finland, as a Black American woman ethnographer, I wasn’t always pressed up against something new, but I was so firmly pressed against things that patterns were etched into my skin and I could explore them via my own body. Often a pattern was recognisable because it was generated by a familiar oppression, whether white supremacy, gender- or class-based oppressions, or all three at once. It was striking to me that one part of a pattern could be immediately familiar and yet diverge elsewhere.
For example, the way thin, white, abled Finnish ciswomen’s bodies were represented in art and advertising as stand-ins for the nation, representing purity and whiteness, enticing would-be tourists through their beauty and nudity, was familiar. This fierce capitalising on some Finnish women’s resemblance to contemporary white feminine beauty ideals was unsurprising, but the way this combined with state feminism to lend a complex and exceptional power to highly visible normative white women’s bodies went beyond what I had experienced elsewhere. I was struck by the centrality of this exalted form of white womanhood for Finland’s nationalism and global image, and by how it visually represented the idea of Finnish superiority in so many ways, from superior democracy to a superior relationship to nature. It evoked a fragile form of perfection in need of protection and preservation (a repeated implication was that the protection needed was from men ’of migrant background’).
”Meaningful mimicry of Finnishness is not possible for a Black woman: this form of whiteness is out of reach. You don’t fit, you can’t fit, you stand out (like the nail that needs to be hammered down): your colour, your shape, your knowledge.”
It was as if I was seeing the immense power of normative white womanhood for the first time. But where I was used to the (admittedly distant) possibility that I could join the ranks of the human, I found in Finland there was no real invitation. Finnishness managed to mix up and mix together nationality, language, genetics, a political economic logic, a relation to nature, and a specific form of whiteness in such a way that it can’t properly be joined in with. Indeed, the suggestion was that I might damage Finland somehow, including by thinking the wrong thoughts. Meaningful mimicry of Finnishness is not possible for a Black woman: this form of whiteness is out of reach. You don’t fit, you can’t fit, you stand out (like the nail that needs to be hammered down): your colour, your shape, your knowledge. It makes it difficult to find the confidence to speak, even for someone who people hear as loud, angry, and overconfident.
The daily experience of unfamiliarity and all the ways I didn’t fit and couldn’t do the right things was itself familiar from other experiences as an ethnographer, where surely things being new and different and requiring one to learn to fit is the point. Yet, it was new to find an overwhelmingly cold, deeply disapproving, and humourless approach to my lack of fit and need to learn. It seemed there truly was only one correct way and it was out of reach. I could not learn fast enough the correct way to dress, comport, or even feed myself and my child, and I could not afford the immense monetary expense of this kind of fitting in, even if I had wanted to lose my clearly culturally inferior and déclassé ways (which I did not).
”It was as if I was seeing the immense power of normative white womanhood for the first time. But where I was used to the (admittedly distant) possibility that I could join the ranks of the human, I found in Finland there was no real invitation.”
And yet the disapproval stayed with me uncomfortably, the marks on my skin more like welts than mere indentations. And this disapproval was communicated to me by white women, sometimes strangers, sometimes not, but never by Finnish men, whose habits of silence felt increasingly strange to me. White Finnish men’s silent detachment (even in conjunction with power) indicated to me a very noticeably different conception of manhood that was complemented by the confident centrality of white Finnish women to all spaces I encountered. This left me dwelling on what it means when powerful people can so comfortably avoid engagement entirely and leave one to spin one’s wheels alone. I was used to a form of domination where men discredit women, including Black women, quite overtly but here was something new.
Of course, I was also familiar with being pushed down by white women; I am after all in academia, where this is ubiquitous for women of colour. In Finland I was in contact with this pattern of behaviour so constantly that I cannot but have a more heightened awareness, a deeper knowledge of it. In particular, I have a keener sense of the way that class is entangled in all of this, playing an essential role in the policing of all aspects of life which middle class white women carry out on behalf of the nation, against working class white people and racialised people alike. It works so well you find yourself vainly searching within for the strength to push back or to thicken your skin so they can’t press into you quite so far.
But who are you to resist a loudening consensus on your inferiority? It’s not like you’ve not been told before.
