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

Asta Smedegaard Nielsen*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)
22 Downloads (Pure)

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.

Original languageEnglish
JournalNordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy
Volume7
Issue number3
Pages (from-to)200-208
Number of pages9
ISSN2002-0317
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Keywords

  • children
  • media
  • Racialization
  • schooling
  • whiteness

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