The straight line

There is a tremendous amount of attention and pressure on refugees and humanitarian immigrants (for lack of a better term) in Europe. They must be acutely aware of their status as tokens in westerners’ ingroup-outgroup games. This is something I think far-ethnic people (meaning approximately nonwhite) in general have been dealing with in Europe for a long time.

I saw a Finnish national of Somali background, who is running in the upcoming municipal elections, post some hateful messages he’d received on Facebook. A common (and to me remarkable) sentiment in the FB comments supportive of him was along the lines of “You’re much more Finnish than those racists”. It’s as if Finnishness is such an unqualified and universal positive even to the antiracists that bad behaviour reduces one’s Finnishness more than one’s actual national background can.

Perhaps I was so surprised because it’s easy for me to accept that I have some non-Finnish cultural and ethnic background – it’s not looked down on, so it doesn’t bother me. In some sense the people telling the Finno-Somali guy that he’s “extra Finnish” are being racist (or culturalist) themselves, because they implicitly place value on Finnishness over Somaliness.

But this somewhat unrealistic guarantee of “total Finnishness” doesn’t relieve far-ethnic people from the burden of performing an exotic or “culturally enriching” role. They are in demand as bringers of “colour in the streets”, of increasing genetic diversity (I am not joking) and as teachers of tolerance. Given their origins, they may well have participated in considerably greater intolerance than westerners generally do, but it’s all about us – our tolerance, and our point-scoring over our co-ethnics.

(This appreciation of people for their inherent appearance would not be appropriate in many other contexts. A politician could hardly remark how happy he is of the arrival of summer bringing out the miniskirts and tank tops, but the positive objectification of ethnic diversity is standard.)

This phenomenon is brought especially into focus by the currently intensely followed deportations from Europe back into the immigrants’ home countries. Having faithfully stuck to providing the universal right to seek asylum, a process has had to be put in place to assess both the validity of the application and the situation in the home countries. No matter what such a process determines, a lot of people will be upset. But the focus is always completely on us westerners.

Afghanistan, for example, is right now home to over 30 million people of which over 10 million are children. Last year the return of refugees, both voluntary and involuntary, mostly from Pakistan, Iran and Europe, accelerated to over 700,000 people. It’s a dangerous place, but plenty of both westerners and settled-in-Europe-Afghans voluntarily holiday there. Despite this, the prospect of returning some tens or hundreds of people (who have been assessed not to require asylum), or any children, to join the tens of millions already there, has been met with a wave of hysterical moral outrage and accusations of lawlessness & comparisons to the holocaust at the Immigration Service and the Finnish government. This flare of attention probably came as a surprise, since it wasn’t the first deportation from Finland to Afghanistan, and other European countries have already undertaken deportations to Afghanistan in 2016, with the amount set to considerably increase in 2017.

The Afghans themselves are as nothing, our self-image and anger at our local outgroup is everything.