Reproducing Color-Evasiveness in Finnish Adult Basic Education

This article focuses on how color-evasiveness, i.e., the bypassing of racial issues, manifests in classroom interaction in the context of a Finnish adult basic education center. Drawing on critical discourse studies, we analyze moments in which race-talk is or could have been present, using culturally sustaining pedagogy to identify alternatives for the absence of race-talk. The main data includes classroom recordings that were collected as part of a 5-year ethnographic project. Our findings show that when race-talk occurred, academic language, racial proxies, and tokenistic representations, and disconnects between personal- and structural-level talk, erased students’ lived experiences of racialization and racism. This study calls for slow educational spaces in which teachers have time and support to engage in self-critical and data-based learning, have structures that allow for student-centered antiracist pedagogies, and where Black and Brown people are well represented in key roles of teaching and educational policy making.