Based on a 2020 survey answered by 10% of Sweden's licensed primary school teachers, this paper will provide a unique insight into the Swedish teacher corps’ attitudes and experiences of racialization in primary school. Analyses reveal paradoxes between ideals and reality, coexisting logics of equality and practices of difference. For instance, 99.5% believed everyone in schools should counteract racist behavior, yet 43% thought students with a migrant background performed worse due to difficulties complying with Swedish norms and values. Furthermore, students who were presumably excluded from normative Swedishness were more likely to be subjected to racism by school staff. Teachers' own likely exclusion or inclusion in normative Swedishness influenced perceptions of racist treatment.Survey responses link to the school's wide range of othering practices, indicating among others racialized attributions of students' performance and compliance. Maladjustment was racialized as something non-Swedish, as a lack of Swedish norms and values. A textbook example of how notions of Swedishness are loaded with positive content while notions of non-Swedishness are loaded with negative content. Drawing on psychoanalytic and postcolonial perspectives, the paper examines how othering split and categorize human traits and attributes when, for example, motivation and commitment to school are racialized. Internalized splits and categorizations create conflicts between normativeprocesses, which try to maintain splits and categorizations, and counter-normative processes, which resist and refuse to accept them. Conflicts visible in the paradox between racializing understandings/practices and anti-racist ambitions. Perspectives on internalizations of racist power hierarchies explore how individuals' understandings of themselves and their environment interact with surrounding power structures, challenging binary notions of being racist and not being racist. In the fight against racism, it's crucial to raise awareness of normative processes and strengthen counter-normative processes.

Research topic

With the aim of developing deracialization as a concept and practice, this paper will focus on what appears to be teachers’ conflictual desire to dismantle racism and at the same time concealing it. The gaps between teachers' aspirations to combat racism and the actions that inadvertently uphold racist power structures has been explored through action research. In recorded conversations some of the teachers seems to be in between knowing and not knowing about the presence of racism in their school and among the students. This examination of conflicting desires creates opportunities to raise awareness of and, strengthen resistance to, racist actions and structures.

Theoretical framework

Deracialization is an active disruption of racializing processes, ultimately aiming to eliminate the regulation of unequal social relations by notions of race (Stevens, 2014). The use of the concept deracialization in this paper should not be mistaken for the deemphasizing of Black racial identity (Johnson, 2017). Within relational psychoanalysis theory attention is paid to the tension between normative unconscious processes, when people reproduce different power hierarchies of race, class and sexuality, and conscious and unconscious ways of resisting these reproductions (Layton, 2020). The teachers' conflicting desire to dismantle and conceal racism can be viewed as part of a repetition compulsion, manifesting as struggles between normative unconscious processes and counter-normative processes (Layton, 2020).

Methodology

Employing an action research approach, I’m engaged in collaborations with two groups of secondary school teachers committed to improving their ability to combat racism in school. Working with the teachers' self-reports in dialogue, space is provided for teachers to reflect on their actions and understandings. This reflective process allows them to examine their categorizations and splits (Layton, 2020) (which may have been unconscious) and consider how they would like to change their actions as teachers. Transcriptions of the dialogues and teachers’ reflections will be thematically analyzed, focusing on the spaces between knowing and not knowing.

Expected results

This research aims to contribute to a more dynamic understanding of teachers' and schools' often conflicting desires in addressing racism. Developing the concept and practice of deracialization may lead to heightened awareness of the limitations of racializing power structures on human experiences and encourage explorations of interdependence among individuals while acknowledging our unique experiences.

Relevance to Nordic educational research

The theoretical framework of "deracialization" and relational psychoanalysis theory can provide a unique perspective on understanding and addressing racism in education. This contributes to ongoing efforts to create inclusive and diverse educational environments.

References

Johnson, R. (2017). HAMILTON’S DERACIALIZATION: Barack Obama’s Racial Politics in Context.  Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 14(2), 621-638. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X17000182

Layton, L. (2020). Intersectionality, normative unconscious processes, and racialized enactments of distinction. In M. Belkin & C. White (Eds.), Intersectionality and relational psychoanalysis: New perspectives on race, gender, and sexuality. Routledge.

Stevens, G. (2014). Racialization and Deracialization. In T. Teo (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology (pp. 1637-1640). Springer New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_258 

The paradoxes that arise between teachers' good intentions to counter racism and the ways in which they contribute to and reproduce racist power structures, could be described as negotiationsbetween people's emancipatory potential and conformity to society's oppressive norms. I’m currently exploring this problematic through an action research approach in collaboration with secondary school teachers seeking to enhance their efforts against racism. Building on these exchanges, and on critical psychoanalytic traditions that can be traced back to Frantz Fanon and especially the relational intersectional psychoanalysis currently being advanced by Lynne Layton and others, this paper will develop a theoretical understanding of the contradictions at hand. Relational psychoanalysis views human subjectivity as a dynamic process in interaction with history and society. Through internalizing and acting according to norms of recognition structured by the cultural hierarchies of society (classism, racism, sexism, and heterosexism), individuals and societal structures are intertwined. In addition to idealizing certain subject positions and devaluing others, these hierarchies split and categorize human traits and attributes. Subjectivity thus becomes contradictory and marked by ceaseless conflicts between normative unconscious processes, which try to maintain the splits and categorizations, and unconscious counter-normative processes that resist and refuse to accept them. People's investments in identities, structured by norms of recognition, can be described aspsychosocial illusions. These illusions are maintained by disavowals, both of parts of oneself and of the social violence sustaining power hierarchies. This paper proposes the theoretical concept of deracialization to destabilize racialized psychosocial illusions and internalizations. Deracialization, as a practice of psychoanalysis’ ethics of disillusionment, can open experiences and solidarities beyond the dichotomies and categories created by and reproducing racist power structures.

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