In my PhD I'm researching the accepted, everyday racism in Finland. One of my articles examined the way the Finnish press wrote about Jews before the Second World War, during the years 1821–1936. Another article looked at the way the press wrote about migrants during the years 2019–2021.
These studies show that the normalised racism has not changed markedly between the study periods; even though they were separated by the Holocaust and the Western world's coming to realisation of racism and its horrid effects.
In the summary section of my PhD I seek to provide an answer to the inevitable question: Why aren't we able to get rid of racism?
My PhD examines the transformations of racism in Finnish societal discourses in the past two centuries. My PhD consists of four articles:
The first article was named Puhummeko nyt rasismista? (Are we talking about racism now?) and it appeared in Media & Viestintä journal in December 2020. The article discusses racism-related terms whose meanings are sometimes blurred even for (and because of) the academics and other experts of the field.
The second article examined the way Jews were written about in the Finnish general press before the Second World War. Prior research has usually combined different data sources, in addition to general papers the studies have looked at, for example, Senate discussions, political statements, far-right and religious papers, narrative literature and school books. However, there is very little systematic research on how the Finnish general press represented Jews. Consequently, the prevalent view has been that media's antisemitism was limited to far-right or ultranationalist papers. My article points to the contrary: antisemitism in the general press was commonplace, and the attitudes towards Jews were notably negative.
The third article studies press texts about migration and/or migrants. When the media talks about "migrants", they rarely mean white migrants from Sweden or the United States. Also, outside of press texts, the discussions on migration are almost invariably about certain groups of migrants. With them, the discourse is seldom about how to attract them to Finland; it is about the possible threats, about "limiting factors of attraction" and about whether or not they have "grounds" for entering the country. In the article, I examine the discursive choices that have been made in media in relation to different migrant groups. Where does the shift from life stories to costs and threats happen?
In the fourth article I compare the findings of the two prior articles. The general press is a valuable mirror when one wants to find out what is considered to be "appropriate" or "proper" discussion at a given time. The media content of two distinct eras show how the "socially acceptable" racism has changed in the past two hundred years.