Color that Matters: A Comparative Approach to Mixed Race Identity and Nordic Exceptionalism

207 Pages·2018·3.029 MB·English

by  Tony Sandset

Color that Matters
This book examines the ways in which mixed ethnic identities in Scandinavia
are formed along both cultural and embodied lines, arguing that while the
official discourses in the region refer to a “post-racial” or “color blind” era,
color still matters in the lives of people of mixed ethnic descent. Drawing
on research from people of mixed ethnic backgrounds, the author offers
insights into how color matters and is made to matter and into the ways in
which terms such as “ethnic” and “ethnicity” remain very much indebted to
their older, racialized grammar.
Color that Matters moves beyond the conventional Anglo-American fo-
cus of scholarship in this field, showing that while similarities exist between
the racial and ethnic discourses of the US and UK and those found in the
Nordic region, Scandinavia, and Norway in particular, manifests important
differences, in part owing to a tendency to view itself as exceptional or out-
side the colonial heritage of race and imperialism. Presenting both a contex-
tualization of racial discourses since World War II based on documentary
analysis and new interview material with people of mixed ethnic back-
grounds, the book acts as a corrective to the blind spot within Scandinavian
research on ethnic minorities, offering a new reading of race for the Nordic
region that engages with the idea that color has been emptied of legitimate
cultural content.
Tony Sandset is Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oslo, Norway.
Studies in Migration and Diaspora
Series Editor: Anne J. Kershen, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Studies in Migration and Diaspora is a series designed to showcase the
interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary nature of research in this important
field. Volumes in the series cover local, national and global issues and en-
gage with both historical and contemporary events. The books will appeal
to scholars, students and all those engaged in the study of migration and
diaspora. Amongst the topics covered are minority ethnic relations, trans-
national movements and the cultural, social and political implications of
moving from ‘over there’, to ‘over here’.
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Gender, Work and Migration
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Megha Amrith and Nina Sahraoui
Growing Up Muslim in Europe and the United States
Edited by Mehdi Bozorgmehr and Philip Kasinitz
Trajectories and Imaginaries in Migration
The Migrant Actor in Transnational Space
Edited by Felicitas Hillmann, Ton Van Naerssen and Ernst Spaan
Color that Matters
A Comparative Approach to Mixed Race Identity and Nordic
Exceptionalism
Tony Sandset
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.
com/sociology/series/ASHSER1049
Color that Matters
A Comparative Approach to Mixed Race
Identity and Nordic Exceptionalism
Tony Sandset
First published 2019
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2019 Tony Sandset
The right of Tony Sandset to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
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or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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ISBN: 978-1-138-05014-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-16904-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Series editor’s preface ix
1 Introduction 1
PART I
Methodology and theory: towards grounding the book 11
2 Research horizons: inspirations and tensions 13
3 Theoretical inspirations and methodological tools 29
PART II
Epistemic documents, racialized knowledge and mundane language 57
4 From race to ethnicity: the purification of a discourse;
UNESCO and Norway’s Western others 61
PART III
In living color: the lived life of mixed colors 123
5 Discourses of race and ethnicity: a difficult deployment
of color 125
6 Performing mixed ethnic identities: colors that matter 146
vi Contents
Part IV 173
7 No guarantees, just paradoxes to offer: in lieu of the
typical conclusion 175
Appendix: List of peopled interviewed 179
Bibliography 181
Index 193
Acknowledgements
This book has been long in the making and took several years to complete.
Its inception took place back in 2012, and as such there are several people
who have been part of its making and who deserve recognition for their
support and relentless work. I want to first start by thanking Professor Knut
Aukrust at the University of Oslo for his wonderful and supportive supervi-
sion during my fieldwork that lead to the making of this book. Without his
support and academic input this book would not have been possible. I would
also like to thank Associate Professor John Ødemark at the University of
Oslo for all his considerate help and input in the formation of this project,
as well as all the other collaborations that he has included me in; it has been
inspirational as well as a huge benefit in terms of all the thoughtful com-
ments this has generated in completing this work. I want to thank Professor
Eivind Engebretsen and Professor Kristin Heggen at the University of Oslo
for giving me the time to work on this book while also fulfilling my other
obligations at the Faculty of Medicine. Without their care and immense sup-
port, the work on this book would have been a much slower process.
I want to thank the staff at Routledge for their incredible and diligent
work in facilitating the completion of this book from manuscript to finished
book. I want to thank Editorial Assistant Alice Salt for her incredible sup-
port and the way she has gone over and beyond in facilitating all the logis-
tics of this book. Special thanks are also due to Editor Neil Jordan for his
comments on the manuscript as well as his help in terms of facilitating both
logistics and making the whole book come together in a great fashion. I also
want to thank Anne Kershen for her amazing work on providing comments
and editorial work on the manuscript. Her work has been invaluable and of
the highest quality, and for that I am thankful.
I want to thank John Anthony for his immense work on proofreading and
commenting on the manuscript as it was nearing completion. Without his
great efforts this book would have been difficult to complete as well as read
for the readers. I owe him a great deal of credit for putting up with countless
questions and drafts.
Thanks, are also due to Alex Larsen for his comments in the begin-
ning of this process. They were much needed and were of immense help
viii Acknowledgements
as I moved forward with the process of transforming my field notes, my
drafts and my ideas into a finished book. I want to thank Alek Jeziorek
and Maddie Lesser at UC Berkeley for their comments, their friendship
and their own inspirational writing. Thank you for giving me inspiration in
times when inspiration was a scarce commodity. I want to thank Professor
Michael Wintroub at UC Berkeley for his supervision and theoretical input
both historical and contemporary. My years at UC Berkeley would not have
been as inspirational nor as valuable without your support. I want to thank
Ron Malkeff, Kamala Russel, Michael D’Arcy, Lisa Sang Mi Min, Ashwak
Hauter, and William Stafford at UC Berkeley Anthropology and the Exper-
imental Ethnography Working Group.
I want to thank Karmina Ceniza for taking me away from the manuscript
when I needed that, as well as giving me a unique perspective on issues that
dealt with transracial identity as well as transgressions. I owe you a great
deal, and probably more than I realize myself.
I want to thank Svein and Nadine for their friendship, their care, and
their support throughout all these years that I have been laboring with this
book. I owe both of you so much: without your support this book would be
far poorer in quality, indeed so would my own life.
I want to give a special thanks to the people who I interviewed and fol-
lowed as part of my fieldwork. Thank you for letting me into your lives, your
narratives and for allowing me to listen to you. Without your stories this
book would not have been possible nor even worth writing. It is thanks to
you that this book is now finally finished and worth reading. Thank you.
Finally, I want to give my mother, Judith Sandset, a huge thank you.
Thank you for allowing me to see the world through different lenses and
different cultures, for giving me the strength to pursue my goals and for
giving me a wisdom that went beyond books and academia. It is difficult to
express all the ways in which you have inspired me and helped me, so I hope
this humble thank you will at least be a sign of my infinite gratitude for your
love and care.
Series editor’s preface
“To see oursels as ithers see us.” When the Scottish poet Robert Burns penned
that line in 1786 he could not have foreseen that 232 years later it would so
accurately define one of the core themes of this book, as well as one of the
more disturbing experiences in the life of its mixed-race, Norwegian-born
author. As Tony Sandset describes in the opening paragraph, irrespective of
his place of birth, his phenotypical features labeled him as other. When as a
young man a neighbor called him a foreigner and demanded to know where
he came from, it brought home to him his ‘other place’ within Norwegian
society. It was this othering and distancing from the mainstream which en-
couraged him to explore the methods by which people of mixed race are
labeled and accordingly, how they respond to alterity. For those of mixed
race, as the title of this book makes so germane, it is ‘color that matters’;
color here denoting all who are not white and, in the case of Norway, those
who do not conform to the stereotypical Norwegian image of the white-
skinned, blue-eyed, and blond-haired northern Scandinavian. In this con-
text, unlike the fluidity of color evident in the labeling of the Irish, Jews and
Southern Europeans as ‘less white’ – particularly in the USA – before the
second half of the 20th century, the non-white appearance of the subjects of
this volume is non-negotiable.
In addition to examining the social acceptance and rejection of people
of mixed race, the author seeks to identify the methods used by the state
to classify them, the two main areas under the microscope being decennial
censuses and national lexicons. In order to arrive at current nomenclatures,
Sandset takes the reader on a journey which incorporates an in-depth dis-
course on the way in which the singular taxonomies of race and ethnicity
have become fused. However, here we meet a stumbling block, for the sense
of those two evocative terms have themselves been the subject of much de-
bate and discussion. What exactly does the word ‘race’ portray: a group
connected by common descent or origin, a tribe, a nation or a people? If a
nation, then do those incorporated within that category simply share the
same history, culture and/or language as opposed to the same phenotyp-
ical characteristics? If this is the correct definition then is this rather an
explanation of ethnicity as opposed to race – the latter relating to corporeal