The absence of race in Norway?

Abstract

During the last four to five decades, Norway has received immigrants from all over the world. About 16% of the Norwegian population are now immigrants or Norwegian-born children of immigrant. About half of these have African, Asian or Latin American backgrounds (SSB, 2017). Norway is becoming an increasingly multiethnic society. This causes social tensions and political controversy. Immigration policy is presently among the most heated and polarized topics in Norwegian public and political debates. The Norwegian public sphere is permeated by discussions about racism, discrimination, ethnicity, national identity, social integration, cultural pluralism, and how to deal with cultural and religious differences. However, these issues are rarely construed as “racial” issues. It is not common to use the term “race” in political or public discussions or in social scientific research about Norwegian society, and racial categories are never used in statistics. It has not always been like this. In the early decades of the 20th century, notions about a hierarchy of races was unproblematized and commonplace within public, political and academic discourses in Norway, as in the rest of the western world. In the decades after the Second World War, however, such ideas became increasingly marginalized and delegitimized in science, legislation, politics and public discourse. Scientific racism and the notion of race as a meaningful biological concept suffered a loss of legitimacy, but in contrast to for example the USA, this was not paralleled by the rise of an academic and political discourse about race as a social construction. Instead, politicians, bureaucrats and academics who have been studying, discussing, and managing the Norwegian society during the last decades seem, in general, to have ignored or dismissed any conceptualization of “race”. By looking at some historical examples, this article shows how “race” was once intertwined with notions of Norwegian nationhood and attitudes towards minorities, it discuss how the retreat of “race” has affected these notions and attitudes, and, finally presents some views on the absence or presence of “race” in contemporary Norwegian discourses on immigration and the multicultural society. Do racial perceptions and racial discrimination play an insignificant role in Norwegian society, as compared to for example the USA, or do the relative absence of research and discussions on “race” mean that Norwegian academics, and the Norwegian public, are avoiding to talk about an important societal issue, namely that “race” actually matters, even in Norway?