I have fallen deeply in love with Norway. I am enamoured with its mountains and fjords, its grandeur, its people; I feel alive in its air, wild in its untainted spirit, pure and clean and safe in all its spaces. My flatmates and I don’t lock our door at night. My university provides free contraception and STD testing. Healthcare is universally available and is free for everyone under sixteen. They accept refugees. This country, and Scandinavia as a whole, is everything that Bernie Sanders made me believe in.
Source: https://media.giphy.com/media/vKrjsoXHoPDWg/giphy.gif
A few weeks ago, an old high school friend wrote a Facebook post asking where in the world she, a queer African American woman, might be safe from the hate crimes and prejudice that, though they have existed in socially-embedded racist and sexist institutions since America’s founding, have burst forward with alarming frequency since Donald Trump’s election. Everyone who commented was thinking along the same lines: “Go to Denmark,” “Sweden is progressive,” “You won’t experience those problems in Norway.” And I would completely agree that Scandinavia would is safer and more tolerant, in all ways more progressive, but it is impossible to deny that minorities in these countries experience discrimination and racism. I love Norway, but it has its problems, too.
Since I arrived in January, I’ve been interested in understanding Norwegian social dynamics, and I have learned a lot from my flatmates and other students, especially when comparing racial issues here to those in America. One of the more interesting observations I made is that Norwegians tend not to focus on race as much as ethnicity; race is a topic more generally associated with Hitler and the Jews rather than with black or white. Here, the issues generally involve religion and culture, not skin color, and an important aspect in that regard is immigration. Scandinavians are intensely nationalistic. They love their flags and their languages, from what I have observed, skin color means nothing as long as one is willing to adopt the national culture.
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Herein lies the big reason why immigrants living in Norway, many of whom come from the Middle East or Northern Africa, are looked down upon: not because they are black or brown or wear headscarves but because they want to maintain their customs, languages, and religious practices. As one of my Norwegian flatmates said, “they don’t want to be Norwegian.” When I discussed this issue further, the aforementioned flatmate noted that he had no qualms with a people’s origins or appearances but took issue with those who weren’t willing to assimilate. He argued that refugees who had found sanctuary here had the responsibility of learning and adapting the customs, and he criticized them for staying in small communities that practiced the same religions or spoke the same languages instead of spreading out and becoming part of the country as a whole.
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He’s not alone in this opinion, either. Much of the racial/ethnic rhetoric that I have observed emphasizes the importance of learning Norwegian and becoming part of the country, and in some ways, it sounds eerily similar to that of white American nationalist groups like the Alt Right. I don’t in any way mean to compare Norwegians to neo-Nazis because Norwegians are generally good people who commit far fewer hate crimes, but a language comparison reveals quite a bit about how both nations view citizenship, patriotism, and pride. The distinction, of course, is that white American nationalists (re: Alt Right) perpetuate and commit acts of domestic terror (re: Dyann Roof).
My general observation is that Norwegians are more tolerant than Americans, especially in the age of Trump and his neo-Nazis (re: Steve Bannon). They are considerably more willing to welcome refugees and less likely to discriminate based on race or color. They don’t promote violence against people who are not Norwegian, and their police force does not have a reputation for murdering people who are not white. So, yes, it would be much safer for a queer black woman to live in Norway than the United States. That doesn’t mean that this northern region, my democratic socialist dream, doesn’t have its own issues.
What that reveals about our world as a whole, I have yet to put into words.
Source https://media.giphy.com/media/Ri2XGIVFzOHzq/giphy.gif
(Still love you, Norway).