Racist speech does not function as an invitation to conversation. It does not offer reasons or arguments with which its audience can engage; and the visceral hostility it expresses effectively forecloses, rather than opens, the opportunity for further discussion. Caroline West, ‘Words That Silence? Freedom of expression and racist hate speech’, 2012. “We express ourselves […]
Freedom of opinion is a farce, unless factual information is guaranteed, and the facts themselves are not in dispute. Hannah Arendt, ‘Truth and politics’, 1966. On October 20 2014, an unemployed fifty-seven year old white Norwegian man entered a supermarket in an Eastern suburb of the Norwegian capital of Oslo. Walking through the supermarket, he […]
THE RELATION OF FEAR AND PHOBIA TO SOCIAL INTEGRATION Presentation for Conference on Xenophobia and Social Integration at the Institute For Advanced Studies (IAS)/Princeton Institute For International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), Princeton University, Oct 1 to 3 2015. Given by Sindre Bangstad (cand. Polit., PhD in Anthropology), Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo, Norway at Aaron Burr […]
It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing – race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy – serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extract organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. […]
Routledge has recently published the following anthology edited by Profs Ralph D. Grillo (Sussex University) and Marcel Maussen (University of Amsterdam) entitled ‘Regulation of Speech in Multicultural Societies’. Originally based on papers first presented at a conference at the University of Amsterdam in 2011, it was first published as a special issue of the Journal […]
My own and Cora A. Døving’s primer on racism – Hva er rasisme? [What is racism?] Universitetsforlaget, 2015 – has been reviewed by Mohamed Abdi for the Norwegian journal Samora. The review can be read in full in Norwegian here: http://mohamed86a.tumblr.com/post/122836319840/hva-b-r-antirasisme-i-var-tid-vaere
In a meeting on May 15 2015, the Arts Council of Norway selected my and Cora A. Døving’s short introduction to racism, entitled ‘Hva er rasisme?’ ['What is racism?], Universitetsforlaget, 2015 as one of 19 (out of a total of 71 titles nominated by Norwegian publishers in the Academic Prose category) which the Arts Council […]
In this review from the journal Forskerforum May 8 2015, Ragnhild Fjellro from Oslo and Akershus University College (HiOA) describes my and Cora A. Døving’s 2015 book ‘Hva er rasisme?’ ['What is racism?], Universitetsforlaget as a book at “a high academic level”, as having “rich sources spread over time and disciplines” with a “language [which] […]
This article, entitled ‘The racism that dares not speak its name: Rethinking neo-nationalism and neo-racism’ appeared in the inaugural special issue of Intersections: East European Journal of Society and Politics’, edited by my colleagues Margot Feinschmidt (University of Budapest, Hungary) and Peter Hervik (University of Aarhus, Denmark). This special issue, which is based on presentations at […]