Negotiating the obvious: youth interpretations of racism in Norwegian schools

Abstract

While substantial research has examined how individuals respond to racism, less attention has been paid to how they define and make sense of it in the first place. This gap is particularly pronounced in school settings, despite schools being key arenas for identity formation. Drawing on 15 group interviews and 4 individual interviews with 53 youths (aged 15–16) in their final year of lower secondary school across three schools in Oslo, this study asks: What determines whether an incident is defined as racist in youths’ everyday school lives? The analysis reveals a paradox: even when interviewees identify explicit racist language as present and common in their everyday lives, they maintain that there is little actual racism at their school. Using an interpretive framework informed by Essed (1991), the findings show how the youths use three recurring cues – the speaker’s intention, the relationship between the parties, and the recipient’s response – to decide the social significance of the utterance. However, each cue is itself negotiated within local peer hierarchies and popularity dynamics. These findings add to theoretical understandings of racism by demonstrating how local social dynamics can override both group-based interpretations and individual emotional responses, making conceptually recognised racism socially insignificant.