Claims to whiteness: Young unemployed Russian-speakers’ declassificatory struggles in Finland

Abstract

This article analyses the position of young unemployed Russian-speaking migrants in Finland as being both racialised and racialising Others. Young Russian-speakers’ claims to whiteness are analysed against the backdrop of their racialised position as well as the neoliberal reshaping of class relations in Finland. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on young Russian-speakers’ employment in Helsinki, the article shows that young Russian-speakers’ racialisation of Others is a modality through which their own racialised class position is lived and narrated. Through such boundary-making processes young Russian-speakers resist being classified as ‘welfare abusers’, the unemployed and low-skilled workers. The article argues that young Russian-speakers’ efforts to be recognised as white should be understood as a struggle against classification, through which they generate alternative value as deserving citizens and respectable workers.