Tag: Racism

Whiteness and white privilege speak European languages

Posted on by Migrant Tales

As we hold our collective breaths and await to know the identity of the bombings in Boston Monday, too many don’t see a suspect but a whole ethnicity or religious group. Tim Wise put it very well in an opinion piece where he makes some distributing revelations about the power of whiteness.

If we understand in Finland, the Nordic Region and Europe that white privilege in the United States means the same thing here, we can begin to understand the social ills that have inflicted us as well.

Being “white” in Europe means that you are a member and identify with the dominant ethnic group of a country. You can speak Italian, be a white Romanian, Estonian-speaking Estonian, or an Englishman or a white Englishwoman to enjoy white privilege over other groups that are visible minorities.

Wise affirms that the Boston bombings are another lesson about ethnicity, whiteness, and specifically of white privilege.

He writes: “White privilege is knowing that even if the Boston Marathon bomber  turns out to be white, his or her identity will not result in white folks generally being singled out for suspicion by law enforcement, or the TSA, or the FBI…And if he turns out [the killer] to be a member of the Irish Republican Army we won’t bomb Belfast. And if he’s an Italian American Catholic we won’t bomb the Vatican.”

Anders Breivik, who killed in cold blood 77 victims on July 22, 2011, is a good example of white privilege in the Nordic and Europe. Despite his horrific act, nobody in this part of the world thinks that all white people are mass murderers.

On the contrary. Whites privilege and time make us forget such horrors. Wasn’t Breivik a deranged lone wolf?

We should start to speak more about white privilege.

Not talking about it  shows another feat by white privilege: Playing down the issue.

European Network Against Racism statement: Europe is losing out by failing to recognise the talents of migrants and ethnic minorities

Posted on by Migrant Tales

March 9, 2013: Migrants and ethnic minorities contribute hugely to Europe’s economic, social, political and cultural life. But failing to recognise and value this contribution –or worse, setting barriers to migrants’ participation in society– results in a waste of these many talents. This has a damaging impact on Europe’s resilience to the economic crisis, its creativity, and on the well being of European residents. 

ENAR’s publication: Hidden Talents, Wasted Talents? The real cost of neglecting the positive contribution of migrants and ethnic minorities’, launched today, provides evidence that migrants and minorities do contribute to Europe and that many talents go unrecognised. For instance, despite misconstrued myths of migrants as ‘welfare scroungers’, migrants are in fact contributing more to welfare states overall than the rest of the population. In France, a study found that migrants contribute 12 billion Euro annually to the state. Migrants are also playing a particular role in care work –a sector which is critically important to ensure high levels of labour market participation– and in sustaining healthcare systems across the EU. In the UK, migrant workers account for 19% of care workers and 35% of nurses employed in longterm care. In Ireland, 17.4% of health professionals identify themselves as migrants.

Yet Europe is not taking full advantage of its rich variety of cultures, traditions and languages. Rather, the fight for equality meets strong opposition, with widespread racism, xenophobia and discrimination. High unemployment across much of the continent has also led to an exacerbation of fears, with many blaming migrants. The notion that migrants are ‘stealing’ jobs from natives is unfounded, however. The reality is that migrants are needed to secure the future well being of Europe, particularly as populations grow older and birth rates decline. Moreover, in the midst of the economic crisis, one in four employers in Europe have difficulty filling positions due to lack of qualified individuals. Creating more opportunities for migrants would thus be to the advantage of everyone and would contribute to putting European economies back on track. European leaders must take mbitious measures to break down structural barriers and policies that do not make economic sense or ensure human rights protections, and that further limit migrants’ opportunities to participate fully in society.

ENAR Chair Chibo Onyeji said: “Imagine , how many more migrant ‘success stories’ would come to light if we ceased wasting talents because of discriminatory and exclusionary practices? How much better off would we all be? Diversity is part of the very foundation of Europe, and we can only build a strong and successful Europe by recognising on the value of our differences and revealing the hidden talents among us.”

Margaret Thatcher’s New Right and Finland’s Perussuomalaiset party

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As Perussuomalaiset (PS) leader Timo Soini promises that his party will become the biggest party in next year’s European parliamentary elections, which would give him a spring-board to score a similar election victory as in 2011, it’s still too early for the party to reveal how it would deal with its usual enemies like the Greens, homosexuals, immigrants, visible minorities, left-wingers and anyone it arbitrarily labels as “unpatriotic” or anti-PS. 

What is scarier about the PS? Is it its bravado and political saber-rattling taking place now or what it’s keeping under wraps in the stuffy closet: Do not let out until after the 2015 parliamentary election?

What isn’t surprising, and what few political journalists have failed to analyze, is how similar Soini’s political world view is to Margaret Thatcher’s New Right ideology, when she ruled Britain with an iron fist between 1979 and 1990.

Writes Owen Jones: “Thatcherism was a national catastrophe, and we remain trapped by its consequences. As her former Chancellor Geoffrey Howe put it: ‘Her real triumph was to have transformed not just one party but two, so that when Labour did eventually return, the great bulk of Thatcherism was accepted as irreversible.’”

Can the same happen in Finland if the PS are victorious in 2014 and 2015?

One post, published on Migrant Tales by Jenny Bourne of the Institute of Race Relations, highlights many similarities.

Like Thatcher, who ”was, without doubt, a xenophobe, an unapologetic imperialist with a natural penchant towards the far Right,” according to Bourne, Soini and the PS are without doubt “xenophobic, unapologetic racists with a weakness for the far Right.”

There are differences, however. While Thatcher was bent on destroying the power of the unions, the PS aims to build a “workers’ party without socialism.”

A workers’ party without socialism sounds more like what fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini founded in Italy. During his reign (1922-43), Mussolini wielded power with the help of powerful unions. The same model was copied during 1946-55 by Argentinean former strongman Juan Perón with disastrous consequences.

Another clear example of the New Right spirit of the PS is their economic policies. Part of these were revealed in January  by EuroMP Sampo Terho and PS strongman Matti Putkonen, who suggested how Finland could save 3.15 billion euros. While the usual culprit of development aide was mentioned, it was surprising that Terho and Putkonen suggested raising VAT, a PS policy no-no.

Thatcher’s suspicion of the outside world, nationalism and xenophobia are generously shared by the PS.

One recent example is the embarrassing revelation where the National Bureau of Investigation as well as Interior Minister Päivi Räsänen have had to apologize for the mistake in adding Russian President Vladimir Putin to a list of criminal suspects. It didn’t take long for PS MP Tom Packalen, a former police commissioner, from stating in a blog that there was no wrongdoing in placing Putin on such a list.

While the former prime minister admitted that if four million people from the new Commonwealth or Pakistan moved to England in the 1980s, she admitted that people were going to react in a hostile manner to those moving there.

Many PS and anti-immigration groups in Europe and elsewhere speak of “uncontrolled” immigration, which is only a synonym for permitting people to react in a hostile manner towards others.

 

It’s the cultural diversity, stupid!

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Would it be fair to say that the biggest challenge facing Finland during this century is accepting its cultural diversity and deconstructing our white national identity in order to make our society more inclusive? Will this happen easily? 

The central issue being debated in Finland today about immigrants boils down to one question: How much cultural diversity are we willing to accept?

There aren’t any political parties in this country, except for the Perussuomalaiset (PS) and its extremist Suomen Sisu faction, which are openly against white  Finns marrying people of different ethnicities.  Even so, it’s clear that this attitude is quite widespread in our society.

If we’d like to see an even bigger picture of how this works in practice, we could take Cuba’s Fidel Castro example of how he got rid of  his political dissidents by allowing them to flee en masse to neighboring Miami.

Less dissidents, more perceived unity.

Finland has seen over 1.2 million emigrants move mainly to the Americas and Sweden between 1860 and 1999.  Just like Castro, Finland benefited in the same way. Apart from the socialists and communists that fled Finland after the Civil War of 1918, Finland was able to forge unchallenged a social construct like the “noble” white Finn.

It didn’t matter that hundreds of thousands of Finns had moved to other parts of the world and intermarried with other ethnicities. The way Finnish language evolved in Finnish immigrant communities, and how our view of our changing identity changed as a result, interested only a few.

Paradoxically, we wanted our Finnish expats to retain their Finnish culture and identity at all costs. Today, however, we want our immigrants and newcomers to do totally the opposite: Be like us (white Finnish) we tell them. Learn our culture, speak our language adopt our way of life.

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The Finnish Lutheran Church has started to take a strong stand against racism like this story about multicultural families reveals about the discrimination their children face in our society. If there are people who are on the frontline of our ever-growing cultural diversity, they are these exemplary mothers.

Any person who thinks that immigrants don’t want to adapt and succeed in their new homeland know very little about immigration. An unsettling question arises: How can you integrate into a society that doesn’t accept you?

It’s clear that white Finland will not cede much of the high ground to cultural diversity. Expect then the following: lip service about two-way integration but what is really happening is one-way integration (assimilation) in most cases. Wherever two-way integration occurs, it usually happens on a short leash.

A good example of the latter is the following statement I heard from a politician in private. “There is room for immigrants in this country” but “building mosques is out of the question.”

Since it was easy to assimilate “foreigners” in the last century into Finns, it’s a bit more complicated in this century. It was easier in the previous century. All you needed was language, be white, adopt a Finnish surname and substitute your “foreign” background for ardent nationalism.

You’ll need much more than a surname change and a few nationalistic sound bites to be accepted as a Finn with equal rights in this century.

 

 

Pastor Ansku Jaakkola says that racism in Jyväskylä is far worse than many think

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Difficult times bring forth exceptional people. One of these is Pastor Ansku Jaakkola of the Adventist Church in Jyväskylä, who believes that racism in her Central Finnish city is far worse than many think.
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”Our new [foreign] friends have told us that yelling and harassment happens on a daily basis,” she was quoted as saying on Keskisuomalainen. ”It happens at stores, in the streets and at school.”Jaakkola admitted that it’s difficult for white Finns to understand what racism is if they have never experienced it.While she admits to having been treated well when she lived abroad in England, Marshall Islands and other countries, she states that our society should speak out more against intolerance.

?”It shames me when I hear about people treating others unfairly because of their ethnic background,” she told Migrant Tales. ”It surprised me how general and how much it occurs [in Jyväskylä].”

Jaakkola says that fear and ignorance are the causes for racism in our society.

Jyväskylä has been in the national spotlight recently because of an attack by neo-Nazis against a book presentation in January. In the same month there was a story in the local newspaper about a young dark-skinned woman who was in a toilet.One of the white Finnish women standing in line exclaimed upon seeing the black woman: ”I’m not going to [sit on the same toilet bowl] as that n-word,” she told a woman behind her. ”You go ahead if you dare.”

How can Finland tackle intolerance today if it cannot come to terms with its past?

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Finland’s present political and social dilemma could be best described in the following manner: On the one side it has a difficult time acknowledging ever-growing intolerance in its society, but on the other slowly understands that one major source of that intolerance are groups like the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party.

The PS has grown into a major political force in Finland not by its own merits per se, but because other political parties and the media have been near-silent to its right-wing populist anti-EU, anti-immigration and especially anti-Islam political message.

If the PS ever got to government, and if its chairman Timo Soini ever became prime minister, it would make conservative Christian Democrat interior minister, Päivi Räsänen, look like a liberal.

If this ever happened, the situation of immigrants and visible minorities in Finland would deteriorate further. They would feel the full brunt of populism and intolerance that is openly promoted by the PS.

While we can debate the extent of intolerance in Finland, probably one matter that we can state safely is that our tolerance for cultural diversity needs to improve. We cannot improve on this front as long as we close our eyes and plug our ears to the social ills that racism, prejudice and discrimination are fueling in our society.

It’s futile for a white Finn to state if there is racism or not in our society because he or she has never experienced it. How could he?

We do ourselves great harm by denying or playing down those voices that claim they are victims of racism, prejudice and outright discrimination.  This type of silence only encourages and fuels more intolerance.

But back to our dilemma: If we are to challenge the sources of our intolerance, our society needs to do a lot more soul-searching that will carry us back to the depths of the last century. Certainly there we’ll find the sources of our intolerance and the causes for the rise of an anti-immigration party like the PS.

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Here’s an interesting article on Yliopppilaslehti about one of those historical skeletons in our collective closet.

It’s futile to understand who we are today if we don’t come to terms with our past. Some sticky unanswered questions include our relationship with Germany and the Nazi regime, the Continuation War, our hatred for the Russians, the Civil War of 1918, cold war-era censorship, and the social construct of Finnish national identity in the last century as well as other ones.

This is the dilemma facing Finland today: If we don’t come to grips with our past, we will be in danger of repeating the same mistakes.

 

Migrant Tales takes part in German Broadcasting Company program on hate speech

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Those that promote anti-cultural diversity sentiment are not only out to destroy your arguments but your self-esteem. Migrant Tales has proven over again that what we say on this blog has importance and does get noticed in Finland and abroad.  The German Broadcasting Company aired on Friday a program on hate speech in which we took part.  

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We have gotten noticed on publications like Time, Sveriges Radio, YLE’s Suora linja,UNHCR in Greece and others. The BBC and TV4 of Russia have gotten in touch with Migrant Tales as well.

The point is simple: If we have an important message to get out because it is heard faintly by the local media, politicians and public, that message gets eventually noticed. People think we get funding and that enables us to publish Migrant Tales. Wrong.  We are for now a hand-on-heart operation with a clear mandate.

Considering that we’ve been around for almost six years and grown to be an active anti-racist blog that promotes cultural diversity, isn’t it surprising how our most infamous counterjihadists and racists don’t dare come close to our blog.

Doesn’t that tell you something?

It tells me that most of these anti-immigration pundits and groups would rather avoid us because we can expose their false arguments but putting in jeopardy their political careers and credibility.

Another important matter to keep in mind is that nobody in the immigrant community controls which topics should be brought up. Our community is a democracy and defends the rights of others to express themselves as long as they don’t insult others. The more opinions we hear, the better.

Thank you for making Migrant Tales into what we are today.

 

Migrant Tales Literary: The racist and his rabid dog

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By Leo Honka 

The racist shows off

his rabid dog

on a short leash

footsteps and gleaming eyes

speak of  satisfaction

on the pavement and media attention

thanks to his rabid dog.

Like flies on flypaper

struggling to survive

the racist too owns a rabid dog.

On a short leash he walks, walks

but doesn’t know

the true nature of the beast

that knows no master

and can bite back, hard

like Anders Breivik.

What should we do!?

A racist and his rabid dog

in our midst and on our streets!

Send them both to the municipal racist pound!

Give them a shot of tolerance,  a possible cure!

So the racist

will no longer show off his rabid dog

on a short leash.

 

Finland’s tolerance for cultural diversity is being tested to the limit these days

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Finland’s tolerance to Otherness is being tested to the limit these days. If we look at it from a political perspective, the knee-jerk reaction is clear. Denying that there isn’t a connection between the stellar rise of an anti-EU, anti-immigration and anti-Islam party and our ever-growing cultural diversity is understanding a little or erroneously the issue at hand. 

It would be wishful thinking to believe that the Perussuomalaiset (PS), which won 39 seats in the 2011 election versus 5 in 2007, that there is a return to the past when the political landscape was dominated by three major parties: National Coalition Party, Social Democrats and Center Party.

Returning back to the political good old days without Timo Soini’s PS is just as unrealistic as stopping Finland’s ever-growing cultural diversity. Intolerance and cultural diversity are here to stay and will set the pace of things to come in Finland in the future.

As far as intolerance is concerned and the rise of parties like the PS appear to throw sand in the gears of cultural diversity, the good news is that history and our sheer numbers will have the final say. We will one day have the power to tell our own narrative as Finns.

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Professor Jeremy Gould spoke to Otava Opisto Folk High School students and staff on Friday. 

Professor Jeremy Gould of Jyväskylä University gave us the big picture in a recent talk he held near Mikkeli. According to him, there is very little narrative coming from immigrants and visible minorities concerning our ever-growing cultural diversity.

“Nearly everything written about ethnic relations in Finland is by researchers with no personal experience of racism,” said Gould. “Obviously, this limits the depth and relevance of their insights.”

It would be too simplistic to blame only the PS for Finland’s ever-growing intolerance. Such a social ill has been fueled as well by the silence of other political parties, the media and general public.

Not only is silence and lack of leadership a problem, associations that claim to further the rights of immigrants and visible minorities are just as guilty as those who decide to remain silent to the threat of intolerance.

If we accept white Finns, or visible minorities who speak like Uncle Toms, to champion for our rights and to our narrative, we have nobody else to blame but ourselves for our failures.

The big challenge in this century for Finland is deconstructing its twentieth century national identity. In its place there will be a more inclusive Finland where there is a lot of room for everyone to embrace this country as their home.

 

 

 

 

 

Three news stories that expose the challenges facing Europe: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-Roma and official approval of the latter

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Three stories this week spoke volumes about the challenges facing Europe during these times: discrimination against Muslims is widespread in many European countries; a string of anti-Semitic attacks have been reported in Eastern Europe; and Hungary’s top journalism prize is awarded to an anti-Semitic and Roma basher. 

Despite their geographic differences, all three stories are related shedding light on the cancer that is spreading in our region. Intolerance is exceptionally resilient, surviving in the postcolonial era even after two devastating world wars that cost the lives of an estimated 100 million people.

If we had to picture how xenophobic groups are using hate speech to further their agendas, we could use a rabid vicious-looking dog being walked on a short leash by a zealous owner. The dog attracts lots of attention and the owner is happy about this.

What the owner doesn’t know is that the dog knows no master and can bite back hard like he did with Anders Breivik, who murdered on his counterjihadist crusade 77 victims in Norway in July 2011.

Another matter that the rabid dog owner doesn’t want to know, or is ignorant of, is that numerous rabid dogs on short leashes with owners can spark conflicts and wars between nations.

A shadow report on racism by ENAR, the European Network Against Racism, expresses concern about widespread Islamophobia in many European countries.

It claims:  ”…damage to Islamic buildings, and protests against the building of mosques even in countries, such as Poland, where some Muslim communities have been established and integrated for centuries. Muslim women and girls are particularly affected, facing an extreme form of double discrimination on the basis of both their religion and their gender. In France for instance, 85% of all Islamophobic acts target women.”

In Eastern Europe, where the economic recession has hit some countries very hard, nationalism and neo-Nazi anti-immigration groups have been on the rise. A spate of anti-Semitic attacks were recorded in the Ukraine, Poland and Hungary in recent days.

Anti-Semitism, which is one of the poisonous fruits of intolerance inflicting Europe these days, is not only on the rise in Eastern Europe but throughout the continent.

The media plays a crucial role in forging attitudes. Even so, the media mirrors what their readers think.

Rerenc Szaniszlo, an anti-Semitic radio broadcaster in Hungary who got fined for calling the Roma ”apes,” was awarded Hungary’s top journalism prize. He has a dubious reputation for spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on his shows.

It’s a good matter that there are some self-respecting Hungarian journalists still around who saw this as a sham. Ten Transcics Prize for journalism winners from other categories handed their prizes in protest, according to The Independent.

All three cases above reveal something disturbing but known to us for a long time in Europe. Attacks on minorities have become so common in some parts of Europe that even journalists, who fuel such intolerance, are awarded coveted journalism awards.

The day will come when the crimes against minorities will be exposed. Their horrors, which reveal social exclusion, wrecked lives, abuse and exploitation, will one day awaken a wider audience to act and defend those democratic values we hold so dear and which are under threat these days.