Saving racialized children through good schooling: media discourses on racialized children’s schooling as a site for upholding danish whiteness

Abstract

This article uses Danish media discourses on racialized children's schooling as a lens through which to analyse how issues of kinship and family play into nation-building processes through representations of 'the child'. The article addresses the question of the distribution of racialized children, mostly termed 'bilingual pupils', at Danish schools, which is a recurrent theme in the public debate. The media representation of this issue is mostly framed around an ideal of spreading the 'bilingual pupils' among different schools to ensure proper mixing with white Danish pupils, which is framed as securing both the educational development of the children and the prosperity of the Danish nation. Through the ideal of mixing, the nation is constituted as able to include the racialized child as an act of saving it from its heritage of racialized and classed disadvantage. A comparison with other kinds of media reporting on racialized children in Danish schooling reveals the constellation of a racialized hierarchy that works to uphold Danish whiteness and non-racism through the ideal of proper mixing. Migrant subjects who have mixed through kinship with Danish whiteness and have actively abandoned their racialized familial background seem more easily constituted as belonging in Denmark.

Racism suitable for children? Intersections between child innocence and white innocence

“…However, as Faulkner (2010) notes: 'Despite our love for children, then, the importance of innocence has little to do with their welfare, and a great deal to do with adults' discomfort in the world' (p. 18). For instance, the discomfort when being confronted with one's own privileges and responsibilities relating to the still-existing racialized social structures and hierarchies (see Wekker, 2016;Ahmed, 2013), ultimately challenging a self-image of being 'good' (Smedegaard Nielsen, 2021;Sue, 2010).…”

“…While this is a symptomatic example of Scandinavian silencing of racial injustice, it also shows how some children are perceived as more ‘desirable’, ‘welcomed’ and more in need of protection than their racially minoritized peers. Similarly, studies have suggested how ideas of belonging to the child or student category operate through intersecting processes of gender (Gilliam, 2018; Kofoed, 2008; Lagermann, 2014; Staunæs, 2004), religion (Khawaja, 2010; Buchardt, 2014) and race (Smedegaard Nielsen, 2021; Smedegaard Nielsen & Myong, 2019; Vertelytė, 2019) that work against minoritized children.…”