The affectivity of racism: Enjoyment and disgust in young people’s film

In Denmark, issues of racism are frequently debated in public and politics, but apparently with the predominant understanding that the Danish society is progressively moving beyond the old forms of biological, juridical and structural racism that dominated Western Europe during the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century (Andreassen and Folke Henningsen 2011). Collectively, Denmark suffers from what Ahmed (2012) terms ‘overing’, or the assumption that, generally, society is over racism (and other relations of structural inequality). A lack of acknowledgement of Denmark’s history of former colonialism (Olwig 2003) has created a national self-understanding as a mono-cultural, as opposed to a multicultural, predominantly white nation state dominated by cultural norms of unmarked whiteness (Andreassen 2007, Jöhnke 2007, Myong 2009). Furthermore, since the first half of the twentieth century, Denmark has, driven by social democratic welfare state ideology, built strong institutions to secure social and economic equality and universal (economic and juridical) rights to all citizens, across divisions of class, geography, gender, race, sexuality, religion, ethnicity and so forth. These universal rights - and the legitimacy of the ideology behind them - have, nevertheless, come under pressure from recent global developments, including an increase in non-white immigrants to the country (e.g. Kvist, Fritzell, Hvinden and Kangas 2012). Over the previous two decades, Denmark - along with other European countries - has witnessed strong opposition to immigration, and political parties advocating against immigration have increasingly gained a foothold (Mouritzen 2006).