(Un)making ‘extreme’ and ‘ordinary’ whiteness: Activists’ narratives on antiracist mobilisation in Finland

Abstract

This article analyses narratives of antiracist mobilisation against anti-immigration racism and the far and extreme right in Finland. The antiracist mobilisation narrative is, first, analysed against the backdrop of critical theorisation of racism and antiracism, which has critiqued conceptions of racism that link the term exclusively to the far and extreme right as too narrow. Second, the analysis builds upon the heuristic distinction between ‘extreme whiteness’ and ‘whiteness as ordinariness’ (or ‘ordinary whiteness’) made in the field of critical whiteness studies. Drawing on empirical data on activists’ narratives on grassroots antiracist engagement in Finland, the article explores the distinct positionalities and perspectives in the antiracist mobilisation narrative. In other words, the article discusses the consequences of grasping racism primarily as anti-immigration propagation and right-wing populism – or, as extreme whiteness – in antiracist activists’ narratives on mobilisation. By locating the aspects of extreme and ordinary whiteness in the mobilisation narrative, the article shows how the antiracist narrative risks reproducing white-normativity. The article argues that to overcome white-normativity, antiracist narratives are required to grasp extreme and ordinary whiteness as interrelated parts of the same power structure.