A young Black woman who was subjected to racist abuse after being selected to lead celebrations of a Swedish festival of light in Helsinki has received an apology from the Finnish prime minister.
According to the Swedish tradition, each year a young woman or girl is chosen to represent Saint Lucia by dressing in a costume of a white gown, red waistband and crown of candles as part of the official annual festivities in Finland at the Lutheran Cathedral on 13 December to mark the shortest day according to the Julian calendar.
About 5% of people in Finland, which until 1809 was part of Sweden, speak Swedish as their native language, which is one of two national languages in the Nordic country.
Daniela Owusu, 20, who is Finnish Ghanaian, received thousands of hate messages after on Friday becoming Finland’s first Black Lucia. The organisers have reported the abuse to police and the discrimination ombudsman and are considering taking legal action.
I had no idea that Finland was a racist place. But I suppose there are racists everywhere…
Finnish guy here. The whole nation has been thrown in the middle of racist debate in the past year. One of the ruling political parties is a far right populist party who have strifed to normalize racism while they’re in power. There are actual nazi affiliated people there. It’s a fucking shitshow where they lie to coax normal people into rage against immigrants and it seems to be working with those poor suckers. It hasn’t been a good year, far from it, but at least common everyday racism has been outed and is condemned by the majority.
Honestly, Finland has had a weird relationship with immigration for at least a decade. I think all the countries with large sovereign wealth funds are in a pretty weird place when it comes to immigration… and if immigration gets demonized racism flourishes.
How racist a place is perceived as is directly proportional to how many minorities actually live there. It’s easy for racists to be in denial about their bigotry when there are so few minorities that they’re treated as a curiosity rather than a demographic.
For example, you probably think Oregon is less racist than Georgia, right? Well, guess which one was founded as a whites-only ethnostate.
Similarly, Finns considering black people in the abstract probably think they aren’t racist, but when confronted with being concretely affecting by one, well, you see the result.
Georgia was also founded as a white supremacist ethnostate. All of them in the contiguous 48 states were.
The entire USA was founded as a white supremacist state. Whites were supreme by at least 2/5ths…
Oregon took it to a whole new level though, to the point of banning PoC entirely.
Finnish guy here, as well. I went to school in the 90s and the subtext was always that the local Lucia would be a blonde girl. We’d have one for our school, the town, and the country.
The mythical Lucia was burned at a stake, and I guess those flames both translated to the crown of candles that she wears as well as blonde hair. The mythical Lucia most likely looked pretty Hispanic.
I think the current Lucia wears the crown well, and the response has been that the charity organising it has received several times the donations it usually gets. I think we’ll need to wait another generation to get rid of the racist pushback.
I’ve got bad news about every country on Earth.
Northern Europe is super racist again black people and Asians….