'Gingerbread' and Ethnic Identification
Teenage Schoolboys Experiencing and Defining Racism
Keywords:
ethnic identification, teenage schoolbooy, racism, inclusion, exclusionAbstract
A class of eighth graders are having their maths lesson. The pupils are sitting in groups around desks that have been put together to form bigger units. This allows free socialising between them while they are doing the assignments the teacher has given them. There is an active working process going on around the table where some of the girls are sitting. At one of the other tables a boy is listening to Russian music through his friend's headphones, trying to repeat the unfamiliar language he hears. Around the third table the conversation has shifted to Finnish Independce Day, which was going to be celebrated in the school in the afrernoon, and to the way the pupils defined their nationalities. Words such as mulattos and mixed breed stand out in the conversation. The atmosphere is a little restless, but everyone seems fine and no one appears to he offended. (Field notes 3.12.2010.)
The conversation l witnessed made me wonder about the boundaries of racism. The utterances that sounded offensive to me seemed to be acceptable in the group I was observing. How do you define a situation in which someone is called slant-eyed? lf this is not racism, what is it? ln this article l analyse an interview I had with three pupils from the class I was observing. All of them were boys with a multicultural background or transnational roots (see Rastas 2007, 11): two of them came from families with both an Asian and a Finnish background, and the other was from an Eastern European family living in Helsinki. The interview took place the day after Finnish Independence Day and the theme - racism - was topical because of the conversation I had followed the previous Friday.
