Migrant Tales is always happy about the public recognition it has received in the past. The latest is from Mikko Kapanen of YLE Areena. He considers Migrant Tales to be one of the most influential blogs forums on multiculturalism in Finland.
Click here to listen to the program.
Kapanen published in May a blog entry called, Africa is a country: The geo-branding war.
Charges have been dropped against an Odense, Denmark, head teacher who had reportedly abused a group of Muslim students in class, reports The Copenhagen Post. Far-right anti-Islam Danish People’s Party former head, Pia Kjaersgaard, described the whole affair as ”ridiculous.”
“It’s crazy that the police have to get involved in such a case,” Danish People’s Party former chairwoman Pia Kjærsgaard told Fyens Stiftstidende. “I am so affronted on the head teacher’s behalf that she has to meet at the council, and whatever else might happen, because of this nonsense apologised already. Anyone can say something wrong without thinking sometimes.”
One matter that always surprises me about anti-immigration white politicians like Kjaersgaard is how they play down racism and discrimination. According to them, these types of social ills are “insignificant” never mind “ridiculous.”
Even so, their constant attacks and labeling of immigrants and Muslims in a negative light is always ”important” and ”sensible.”
So what happened at the Ejerslykkeskolen School in Odense and what did the teacher, Birgitte Sonsby, say? According to The Copenhagen Post, the head teacher of the school burst out saying to a group of students in class: ”I’m so bloody tired of you Muslims running the teaching lessons.”
The teacher later apologized for her outburst.
”A situation arose in the classroom and some children needed to be reprimanded,” said Sonsby. They started laughing at me and I lost control. I said some things that I deeply regret and I apologize.”
Shaib Mansoor, the father of one of the children racially reproached by Sonsby and who reported the head teacher to the police, dropped the charges after the media picked up the story and reported what happened at the school.
”I wanted to establish a debate and make people realize that there is a problem,” he said. ”It is the only way to get the attention of the politicians.”
Despite having dropped the charges, Mansoor expects Sonsby to get sacked from her job.
COMMENT: Some Finns have resolved the “mixed-ethnicity” question by stating that there is only one kind in Finland. Such an affirmation, that there is only one type of “real” Finn, is as ludicrous as stating that racism doesn’t exist in this country.
What does a white Finn say when he asks about your “other mixed” side? Is that person asking you why you aren’t white?
Finns with “other” backgrounds are an ever-growing group in this country. We should remember, however, that being an “other” Finn is not only inclusive to ethnicity.
_________
By Julian Abagond
Some misunderstand my position on mixed-race identities.
In the post on internalized racism I said:
God made you to look a certain way and gave you certain gifts to use in the course of your life. There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of it. Nothing. It is only narrow-minded, brainwashed people who want you to believe otherwise. … Who think there is something wrong with you for just being you.
One commenter remarked:
What kind of people think there is something wrong with you for being you?
{Ping! silent, little explosion goes off in cerebral cortex…)
Yet the writer of this post believes it is a character flaw if a multi-racial brown- or black-skinned person of multi-racial parents says what they are!
She gathered that from a post I wrote about Tiger Woods where I point out that Nas thought it was a character flaw that Tiger Woods defended and excused white racists.
What Nas said in a King magazine interview:
Tiger Woods standing up for this white lady who said something about him being lynched is a coon move to me. God bless the brother. I like to see him doing his thing, but that’s a flaw to his character.
I point out two other examples of the same behaviour by Tiger Woods in the post.
The issue is not mixed-race identity in and of itself. It is trying to kiss up to whites, especially while distancing yourself from people of colour. It is hard for me to respect that. And, in most cases, this behaviour comes from internalized racism, from self-hatred. That is not a healthy thing.
Racial identity in America is not simple, certainly not as simple as applying a set of rules. It is something everyone has to work out for themselves. But not all courses of action are equal, not all are harmless and innocent. It is a moral, political and psychological decision that carries a cost of one sort or other.
Tiger Woods is hardly the only mixed-race person I have written about. For example:
I have no issue with Danzy Senna, but the other two did the very thing I am talking about. This is not about me imposing the One Drop Rule on mixed-race people, as some think, this is about them being low lifes.
Selling out to whiteness, of course, is hardly limited to mixed-race people. Nearly all White Americans do it. And even some people of colour who are not mixed-race – like Michelle Malkin. Or Rented Negroes. It is what “The Boondocks” makes fun of in Uncle Ruckus.
I write about racism and social exclusion in Finland because it affects me and those I care about. I should know because I used to live marginalized from this society for decades.
I didn’t live marginalized because I was maladapted. I was marginalized because I was well-adapted.
Too many didn’t consider me a “real” Finn for a number of reasons. Was it because I wasn’t white enough or was it because the name I carried made me stick out ethnically like a sore thumb?
But what could I have done in 1978, when I moved back permanently to this country? There were so few immigrants never mind people of my ethnic background that you were culturally and ethnically unimportant and out of the loop.
It is a paradox, but the very matters that I loved and admired the most about this country back then were the very things that marginalized and excluded me from this society.
The prototype Finn is a case in point. This social construct of the so-called model Finn that was taught and reinforced in the last century is being challenged as our society becomes more culturally diverse.
Finnish society’s lack of inclusiveness was and still is the main obstacle to equal integration and acceptance.
If you want to find where racism grows its roots in this society, you will find it in the arguments that some white Finns use to exclude you from society. If you want to challenge Finnish racism, the best place to begin is to contest the arguments and actions that reinforce white Finnish exclusiveness.
I write a lot about racism and social exclusion on Migrant Tales. I write about this topic because Finland is my home and because I want a better future for visible and invisible minorities. In cultural diversity we will find strength.
I am grateful that I have found such a platform and opportunity to be a part of an ever-growing national debate and social movement that aims to make our society inclusive to all groups.
By Sandhu Bhamra*
Are you Canadian?
I am not talking legality on right to vote and accessing free healthcare, but the sense of being, being Canadian.
Let me walk you through a mini questionnaire to help you understand where I am going with this:
When you think of Canadian identity, what do you think of?
White? Hyphenated? Multi-racial?
(Did you think Aboriginal?)
What about culture?
South Asian? Asian? Polish? English? Latino?
(Again, did you think Aboriginal?)
Or Canadian?
So, what is Canadian culture?
Canada officially has a multicultural policy, which treats all Canadian citizens with dignity “regardless of their racial or ethnic origins, their language, or their religious affiliation”.
Or simply, in the words of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau who introduced the policy in 1971, “two official languages and no official culture”.
When there is no official culture, what is that we call Canadian culture?
Born and raised in India, identity wasn’t the first thing on my mind when I landed as a permanent resident nine years ago. I grew up in an urban enclave in India, where the first language of communication was English. I spoke Punjabi, my mother tongue, at home and am well versed in India’s national language Hindi.
On landing in Vancouver, the street signs in Punjabi language, and whole lot of services, both private and government, available in my mother tongue, pleasantly surprised me.
I realized there were services available in a host of other languages. I loved the respect given to plurality of cultures in Canada – the richness of different sounds, textures, and colours was fascinating.
I thought this is the place to be. After the few initial hiccups, my husband and I decided to stay for good. We eventually became citizens, had a family, and now cannot imagine living anywhere else.
But my faith in plurality of cultures was in for a rude shock when I went to register my daughter for kindergarten early this year. The morning of the day the registrations opened, I was first in line, excitedly waiting to fill the form.
As I filled in the details, I came across a harmless–looking column: ‘other languages spoken at home’. I have been home-schooling my daughter (basic pre-school material), so it has been in English. But my husband and I take great pride in our heritage, and speak both Punjabi and Hindi at home. We listen to English, Punjabi and Hindi music, and watch TV shows and movies in all three languages, so I wrote Punjabi and Hindi as the additional languages.
Little did I know that would change the way I viewed Canadian identity.
Apparently, if you speak a language other than English at home (I guess French doesn’t count here) your kid gets automatically assigned to the ESL program.
ESL? English as a second language program. The school secretary explained that at an orientation at a later date, my kid would be tested for ESL. I thought fair enough. For all kids to perform equally well, it only makes sense if all had the same level of English proficiency. I said to her, don’t worry my daughter will pass the test. And that’s when the full force of what lied ahead hit me.
It didn’t matter if my daughter passed, the secretary explained – there is no pass or fail in ESL, just levels. Every kid who listens to sounds made in a language other than English at home gets into the program.
It didn’t make sense to me. Next moment, I was sitting in the principal’s office, a Canadian educator with Asian roots (her ethnicity is relevant in context to this post). For the next half-an-hour or so, she tried to reason in her Asian accent the importance of the program. I told her I recognized the value of ESL; all I didn’t understand was – how was this language program relevant to a child who spoke fluent Canadian English?
Because ESL just didn’t cover a language issue, she explained. It was an introduction to Canadian culture. And what exactly do you mean by that, I asked her. She wavered in her replies, giving me examples of teaching kids about “ham” and “Canadian sports” and “traditions” or other things “Canadian”. She got personal to convince me – if it weren’t for ESL, her son wouldn’t be working in IT at The University of British Columbia!
I asked her if they put a White kid in ESL or do they assume that all White children have a good command of English language and know everything “Canadian”? She confirmed my worst fear: even if my daughter were a fourth-generation Canadian, as long as she listened to Punjabi and Hindi music, she would be in ESL.
The message I got was: if you are not White, you are not-Canadian-enough.
I thanked her, and walked out asking to sit on the Parents’ Advisory Committee.
The new definition of ESL sadly reminded me of the residential schools: the ill-fated program that destroyed the culture, identity and sense of being of Canadian Aboriginal peoples in the name of assimilation.
It is not fair on my part to compare a harmless-sounding program like ESL to a national tragedy of residential schools that destroyed generations and continue to evoke bitter memories for Canadians. But with my new understanding of ESL, veiled as a language program, and intended to teach non-White kids about “Canadian culture”, I can’t help but draw the comparison of a similar “assimilation” that the Aboriginal kids went through.
I calmed myself and reasoned, if a child who lived in a war zone in Afghanistan were to come and start school here, he or she would have to know more than just English to fit in. In this context, the program seemed fair.
But three things are out of place here: first, the wrong impression that ESL is only about language. It is actually about conversion to “Canadian culture”. (The fact is I didn’t get a clear definition of “Canadian culture” from the school principal I spoke to.)
Secondly, you cannot use a blanket column to put kids from varied backgrounds in ESL just because a language other than English is spoken at home.
Is it justified to club a child whose initial formative years were in an urban school in China with a child who spent first five years of his or her life in a refugee camp in Afghanistan with a Canadian-born, raised child who knows ice hockey from field hockey, took the first steps with Caillou, can tell a dime from a nickel, sings Canadian rhymes and a flag means the Maple Leaf, just because he or she speaks another language at home?
Still, I would give the benefit of doubt to the ESL program for better “assimilation” of my children but it’s my third point we need to consider seriously: the unfair treatment to the White child whose grandparents or great-grandparents or great great-grandparents came to Canada before the “Others” came in.
A nation with physical borders has to have a commonality (other than hockey) to exist peacefully. If we have the benefit of equality of all cultures, why this is not getting culturally crossed over?
If my kid is going to learn about “Canadian” things, doesn’t the White kid have a right to know about Vaisakhi, Diwali, or Eid? Not on a special multicultural day where kids dress up in “their traditional” wear and talk about “their culture”.
Instead of telling our kids (White and non-White alike) to respect the Aboriginal land we live on and be thankful for the rich heritage they have given us, we “study” them like a species. To me, that is breeding White vs. Other identity.
This “Other”, who lived in huts and wore feathers or came from foreign mystical lands of flying carpets and snake charmers (doesn’t matter if two generations before him or her have lived in Canada) has to assimilate in the “White” culture. Where is Trudeau’s no official culture?
This reminds me of a video project I did sometime ago. The main character was a second-generation South Asian and was filmed in both Canada and at location in South Asia. The second person of South Asian heritage in the piece was I, since I narrated the story.
There were two minor characters, one Middle Eastern in descent and one White. For time constraints, we had to pick one of the two. For me, the Middle Eastern was a stronger character in terms of background story that gave depth to the narrative. For my partner on the project (a White guy), it made more sense to keep the White person – not on strength of background story but to make the overall piece more “Canadian”. I still remember his awkward laugh and hesitation as he said to me, if we keep the Middle Eastern character, the video piece wouldn’t look and sound “Canadian”.
My partner is a nice person and a friend, but I was disappointed to see how he viewed Canadian identity. A senior (another White person) called the final shot and dropped the Middle Eastern character. He didn’t say if it were for “Canadian identity” purposes, but just the White person suited the story more. It has weighed on my chest since.
I still cannot imagine living anywhere else, but I want the Canadian identity to truly reflect the plurality of cultures.
*Thanks for reading. I am a Canadian journalist with transnational experience. An award-winning broadcaster, print and web reporter, I have reported across major media platforms – print, television and web for over a decade. I just started this blog in an effort to deconstruct identity in inter-racial, inter-cultural, patriarchal modern world. For detailed biography and portfolio, visit my website.
Read original blog entry here.
This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.
Sandhu Bhamra*
That was the title under which three young Canadian authors discussed issues of identity, location and language at the recently concluded Indian Summer Festival in Vancouver.
The three, Anosh Irani, David Chariandy and Gurjinder Basran – from different backgrounds discussed how heritage, culture, memories and language shaped their work.
At the end of the talk, I asked if there was a Canadian identity and if yes, how each defined it? I quite liked what each said, but I didn’t really get a definition.
Not to say they didn’t have anything credible to say, but each defined what being Canadian meant to them. They offered a discourse, a rather brilliant one. The audience engaged and every person who spoke added dimensions to my still unanswered question: “What is Canadian identity?”
“Identity is on a spectrum,” offered a good friend. He said his “visible identity” of South Asian heritage was one end of the spectrum and the “Canadian identity” was the other end. He said growing up in Canada and living the western lifestyle, he considered himself at the other end.
But what is this other end? The opposite end of one’s “visible identity”?
He offered a description of this opposite end: the Anglo identity, which he argued was the “Canadian identity”. But when half of Vancouver and Toronto’s population is headed to be “Visible Minorities”, how is the opposite end Anglo?
Or is there an opposite end?
Or to begin with, can identity be really gauged on a spectrum?
And that too national identity?
In a nation where multiculturalism is a policy?
A nation I willingly chose to make home, where I feel loved and protected, where I can raise this question for a dialogue without the fear of being persecuted or worse, beheaded?
I have no qualms about accepting the Anglo-French heritage of Canada, but I also cannot forget that this heritage was built on Aboriginal land and identity. I cannot argue with, or change history. It is what it is. I use the lens of the past to understand the context of my present.
But to understand the present in the context of future, I have no lens.
So the need for this dialogue.
With you.
About our present.
Our present where “Visible Minorities” are projected to be “Visible Majorities” in a few years.
Our present where Aboriginal youth continue to face challenges.
Our present where the law says there is no official culture but the norm says the Anglo culture is the Canadian culture. Again, I am not rejecting the Anglo (or in common parlance, the White identity) culture, but I am saying it cannot define the core identity of a nation where the “Other” has to wrap him or her around it. For a nation to exist peacefully, the “Anglo”, the “French”, the “Aboriginal and the “Visible Minorities” on the so-called spectrum have to have a common footing – one cannot define the other.
How do we do this? That is my question – to self, to academicians, to politicians, to social scientists, and most importantly, to the society, to you.
The friend I mention above did admit that despite his identification with the Anglo identity, he does get asked, “Where is he really from”? Despite self-identification with the Anglo culture as being Canadian, his visible identity takes precedence. Meaning, he rejects his own identity and doesn’t get accepted for his adopted identity.
And that brings me to the oft-repeated question in parties, in playgrounds and at workplaces, “Where are you really from?” Even if you are a second or third-generation non-Anglo “Canadian”, have never visited the birthplace of your parents, or grandparents, you are always recognized as the “Other” and asked this question.
I myself have given answers like “I am really from Vancouver”, then tried getting specific on the area I live in, but till I answer, “I am from India”, the person at the other end doesn’t budge.
In the early days of my arrival in Canada, I used to be annoyed when asked where I am really from. Three years later, I became a Canadian citizen and gave up my Indian citizenship. When I was still asked the same, I was perplexed. Nine years later, I still am asked the same question.
How do I feel today?
For that, I will ask you to read, “Just another Chinese Christian?” by Mr. Justin Tse.
Mr. Tse, a Ph.D. candidate at UBC, frustrated with people’s expectations from him as a Chinese Christian with roots in Hong Kong brilliantly sums up the sentiments of people like me. The best part? Humour is not lost on him.
It’s even more complicated for people who inherit multiple racial and national identities before moving to Canada. Mr. Jayson Go grew up in the Philippines, is ethnically Chinese, but now a Canadian. I went to UBC with Jayson and have been friends with him since. This is one of his recent Facebook status updates:
“Filipinos always say to me, ‘You’re from the Philippines? But you look Chinese!’ Chinese always say to me, ‘You’re not Chinese. What are you? What kind of name is Go?”
Now envision this scenario: more than fifty per cent of the population torn between these identities.
I foresee chaos.
And that is why we need a dialogue. We cannot sit comfortably in the coziness of our self-created identities and pretend the Canadian landscape is the same as it was 100 or even 35 years ago and expect every newcomer to the country and the successive generations to just adapt to the existing societal norms.
We as a society need to be sensitive to the richness of experience, language, and culture that the newcomers bring with them, keeping the context of past in mind. We need to remember that these newcomers call Canada home, raise families and the children from these homes are/will be torn between identities.
And we cannot ignore the Aboriginal youth who are growing up with their unique sense of identity in the shadow of the residential school past. As one Aboriginal friend remarked to me that his tribal identity is his first sense of identity. So how was he left out from the “Canadian identity”?
It just means one thing: the present norm of Canadian identity, loosely translated: the Anglo identity, doesn’t hold water. Anymore.
If identity is indeed a spectrum; the Canadian identity needs to be the spectrum itself, not one end. Every community, Anglo, French, Aboriginal, “Visible Minorities”, regardless of racial and ethnic origins, language, or religious affiliation needs to be a band of colour that completes the rainbow, not gravitate towards one end, the Anglo end.
*Thanks for reading. I am a Canadian journalist with transnational experience. An award-winning broadcaster, print and web reporter, I have reported across major media platforms – print, television and web for over a decade. I just started this blog in an effort to deconstruct identity in inter-racial, inter-cultural, patriarchal modern world. For detailed biography and portfolio, visit my website.
Read original blog entry here.
This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.
If we look at the ongoing one-sided debate on immigration, immigrants and Finland’s ever-growing cultural diversity, one matter is for certain: It does not help dispel prejudices that encourage racism and social exclusion.
While I am certain that most Finns are willing to make immigration and cultural diversity work, it is a totally different question how they think this should happen.
Finland has few immigrants compared with other European countries. In 2010-11, our foreign population stood at 167,954 (3.1% of the total population), up from 155,705 (2.9%) in 2009-10, according to the Population Register Center.
Our small immigrant population explains in part why a social ill like racism is still not seen by our society as a serious problem. Other factors discouraging action and debate on this front are ignorance and apathy.
When some Finns speak of language as the key to integration, only half of the issue is being debated. Stating to a newcomer that all he or she needs to do is learn the Finnish or Swedish language to be integrated is leaving out a crucial issue: acceptance.
I am always sadly surprised when I know an adolescent who speaks and writes Finnish proficiently but still feels like an outsider. The person in question has done part of his elementary and all of middle school in Finland.
A Somali who has lived two thirds of his life in Finland told Migrant Tales recently in perfect Finnish: “The worst thing in Finland is that if you have a different religion, culture and language, you are left on the fringes of society. No matter how much you try to integrate you are always left outside.”
Certainly the exclusion that some second-generation Finns feel is partly due to the person but it does reveals where our integration program fails miserably as well as our propensity to colorblind racism.
Instead of accusing some immigrants of not wanting to adapt, being welfare shoppers or other insulting terms, shouldn’t we shift debate in a totally new direction that would promote real integration?
If racism and other social ills faced by immigrants are not debated seriously by our society, the biggest losers are the children of these newcomers.
For them we have nothing to offer except our ignorance and arrogance.
Even if I had visited the Finnish Seamen’s Church on many occasions, the days I spent there as a tenant brought me back to the beginning of a long journey I began around two decades ago when I moved back to Finland.
William Blake (1757-1827) once said that improvements make straight roads but that it was the crooked ones without improvement that are roads of genius. Is yearning and following your heart’s desire a crooked road that can lead you to wonderful places never imagined?
The former Finnish Seamen’s Church is today a cultural center in dire need of money and repair.
Even if my great grandparents, Dante and Jacob only appear occasionally in talk, I can say with total confidence that the yearning and restlessness I feel today is because of them…
…or possibly it’s because I was born in an enormous migrant transit lounge called The Americas.
Like many others, my family has been on the move for generations: from my father’s side, my great grandfather Dante was from Italy, my grandfather Nemo was born in Brazil, my father and I were born in Argentina, and my three children were born in Finland.
Yearning is a powerful force. It is the fuel that turns on our hope; it is so powerful that it rarely dies in a lifetime but lives on for generations.
The world is becoming a very small place as time takes us by the hand to the future. It’s pretty certain that my children and grandchildren will be much luckier than I. They will have the ability to visit and leave cultures and lifestyles at will and be – if they wish – from many places simultaneously. They will travel without the baggage of hatred and prejudice constantly overlooking them.
As long as smaller cultures and not devoured by larger ones, life in the new millennium will resemble vast cities like New York or London, where everyone is from somewhere but few from there.
If we all learned to let go and allow yearning to take us by the hand, maybe the first lesson we’d learn is that we are nothing than temporary migrants on Earth searching for that hill where the grass is greener on the other side.
(1999)
I’m fed up. I’m fed up of certain commentators visiting us here on Migrant Tales to spread lies and personal insults and to disrespect other cultures. Those that ONLY have terrible things to say about specific peoples (as opposed to cultural criticism) really are practicing extremism. How could it be otherwise?
When we condemn totalitarianism, do we always imagine that the people subjected to it are happy with that? There will always be supporters of extremism, some that will win or benefit from the privileges that come from those political or social systems. But we should NEVER blame the people as a whole, the nation or the nationality. Otherwise, no country in the world would allow Brits, the French, the Germans, the Italians and the Spanish into their countries because of the atrocities these ‘nations’ have carried out in the past.
There are two commentators on here in the last week that have finally snapped my patience. It seems very clear to me that Allan and Göran [they only ever use their first names, so I am not identifying them] have allowed themselves to become radicalised. I do not say this lightly. I have studied radicalisation for over 20 years, both from psychological, political and religious perspectives. They have nothing good to say about Somalis, in particular, with Afghans and Iraqis also mentioned in the same vein from time to time.
The fact that Allan and others HAVE to say that we are Finland-haters in order to maintain their world-view and to resist having to take seriously our arguments tells a lot about the psychology of radicalisation. To maintain a war, there must be an enemy.
I’m sure Allan believes I hate Finland. What can I say to that? My kids are Finnish. It doesn’t get any more personal or hurtful to hear that kind of crap from Allan. But it isn’t just about my kids. I was only yesterday walking around the streets of my home town here in Finland thinking about how much I appreciate many of the things in Finland.
It’s not perfect and it has, to different degrees, much the same social problems and inequalities of British society, but there is still a sense of safety about Finland that perhaps we have lost in the UK. There is not, or has not been to a great extent, the kind of cynicism and social division in Finnish society that we have seen, either historically or in recent times, in parts of Britain. Yes, in Finland there are inequalities of income to an extent and even of cultural perspectives and education, but not anything that has led to ‘war on the streets’ in the way that it has in the UK at times in the last 50 years. I really hope that doesn’t happen here in Finland.
What I do know is that some of the problems in the UK in regards to race relations were made much worse by Far Right groups stirring up hatreds in much the same way that Allan and Göran and others attempt to do when attacking this blog in the comments. Sometimes the response to this ethnic agitation in the UK at least has been reasoned, other times, it is expressed as an equally blind anger and bitterness, probably not so different in kind to the hatred that Allan and Göran so obviously display towards certain immigrants. Who’s to blame then? When does the hating stop? That is always the problem when you start down that kind of road to war. And it is a road to war, make no bones about it.
People in Europe are banging the war drums, telling us that Christianity and Islam are fundamentally opposed in their values, regardless of the fact that Muslims have been living peacefully in Europe for hundreds of years. They are banging the war drums because people seek a better life here in Europe, and rather than give those that manage to get here, for whatever reason, the opportunity to succeed and contribute, the talk is only of the costs of adaptation –
seeing the price of everything and the value of nothing.
I’ve had enough of Allan. The danger whenever you are ‘forced’ to engage with extremists is that you give them a platform. The words of hate have a way of getting inside, of manipulating our fears and our sense of what’s right. Who thinks crime is right? Who thinks rape is right? Who thinks oppressing women is right? Of course, if all it takes is to discover these things in our culture, then we are truly all guilty.
But ultimately, crime is a deed of the individual, and we have no business making it into an ethnic or cultural matter. Researchers are very clear in what factors are known to affect crime, in quite complex ways, and they are poverty, disempowerment, social anger, marginalisation, inequality, etc. It must always be recognised that people are free to be different, to choose a law-abiding life, regardless of their culture. The vast majority of people on this planet want peace and prosperity and the freedom to express themselves.
There is every reason to stand up for the rights and values of the West, but we would be making a huge mistake if we think that we have a monopoly on those rights, or that those in developing or conflict ridden countries have a monopoly on intolerance, inhumanity etc.
A multiethnic society requires a common bed of values which are understood and shared. If we take the guests in Finland and attempt to portray their values as always being negative, always being inferior, always being somehow in conflict with our own values, then there will be no peace. This is war-mongering. It is dangerous and it is absolutely unnecessary.
If you are concerned about these rights and values, then there is every possibility to study them, to understand them, and to be active in trying to protect and promote them.
One of the big issues concerning the ongoing debate on Finland’s ever-growing cultural diversity is that rarely are we asked our opinion. A good example was Friday’s Helsingin Sanomat, which asked only white Finns whether our country understand the threat that racism poses and if such a threat is taken seriously.
The question that we should possibly ask is why does Helsingin Sanomat and the media in general rarely take into account what the victims of racism and social exclusion think about this social ill? Is it a cultural thing (this is our country and our discussion – stay out)? Or is it patronizing behavior by the majority to a largely silent “Other” Finland?
One of the positive matters about the Helsigin Sanomat survey, however, is that 74% felt that racism isn’t taken seriously enough in Finland. Thirteen percent felt that it was while 13% had no opinion.
One of our most persistent stands on Migrant Tales has been that racism is not taken seriously enough in Finland. Politicians, the media and the general public have preferred instead to watch from the sidelines while this shameful behavior takes place in the form of institutional and colorblind racism.
Writer Kaari Utrio said on the survey: “The only way to deal with the matter is to have zero tolerance for racism. Our past reminds us the terrible consequences happen when we accept racism. If we tolerate racism, it will soon be accepted and become the way of [our everyday] thinking. Thereafter we’ll start building concentration camps and gas chambers.”
Who is to say that racism isn’t already a part of our everyday thinking? Why is it when some of us speak about this social ill, we usually end up using the conditional or future tenses? Racism is something that could impact us in the future but is not a problem today.
Excluding Finnish- and Swedish-speakers, a total of 226,220 people speak another language as their mother tongue in Finland, according to the Population Register Center. For the sake of comparison, there were 291,153 Swedish speakers in Finland (5.42%) in 2010-11.
If we added to the former figure the children of immigrants who are bilingual but speak Finnish as their mother tongue, the number of “Other” Finns is quite significant.
Could we speak of disenfranchised groups? Certainly.
The attitude of leading dailies like Helsingin Sanomat, which did not even bother to ask immigrants never mind a Finn with international backgrounds their opinion about such an important matter, is a classic case of how Finland deals and challenges such a social ill.
If we sit around waiting for our point of view to be heard, we might as well wait forever. The solution? Get active and say it loudly!