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 Routledge Research in Race and Ethnicity

RACISM IN DANISH WELFARE

WORK WITH REFUGEES
TROUBLED BY DIFFERENCE, DOCILITY AND DIGNITY

Marta Padovan-Özdemir and Trine Øland

Racism in Danish Welfare Work
with Refugees

This book explores contemporary Danish relations of colonial complicity

in welfare work with newly arrived refugees (1978–2016) as recursive
histories that reveal new shapes and shades of racism.
Focussing on super- and subordination in helping relations of post­
coloniality, the book displays the durability of coloniality and the workings
of raceless racism in welfare work with refugees. Its main contribution is the
excavation of stock stories of colour-blindness, potentialising and compassion,
which help welfare workers invest in burying that which keeps haunting wel-
fare work with refugees, i.e., modern ghosts of difference, docility and dignity.
The book dismantles the global myth of the Danish benevolent, universalistic
welfare state and it is of interest to every scholar and student, who wants to make
inquiries about Danish exceptionalism and the hidden interaction between past
and present, the visible and invisible in Danish welfare work with refugees.
Marta Padovan-Özdemir, PhD, is Associate Professor in social change at the
Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University and former Sen-
ior Associate Professor at the Research centre for management, organisation
and society and former head of the Research program for society and diversity,
VIA University College. Her research revolves around diversity management in
welfare work and how structures of inequality play out in well-meaning inter-
ventions. Recent publications include the journal article “Denied, but Effective:
Stock stories in Danish welfare work with refugees” (2020, with Trine Øland) and
the volume, State Crafting on the Fringes. Studies of Welfare Work Addressing
the Other (2019 with Trine Øland, Christian Ydesen & Bolette Moldenhawer).
Trine Øland, PhD, is Associate Professor in Educational Research, head of the
research group The history and sociology of welfare work and head of Section
for Education at University of Copenhagen. Her research interests concern the
history and sociology of welfare state progressivism and integrationism, and the
way power and inequality effects society and what it means to be human. Recent
publications are the journal article “Montage and the illumination of develop-
mental thinking in welfare work” (2021, with Stine Thygesen), and the book Wel-
fare work with immigrants and refugees in a social democratic welfare state (2019).
Routledge Research in Race and Ethnicity

37 Black Families and Recession in the United States

The Enduring Impact of the Great Recession of 2007–2009
Dorothy Smith-Ruiz and Albert M. Kopak

38 Practicing Yoga as Resistance

Voices of Color in Search of Freedom
Edited by Cara Hagan

39 Racism and Racial Surveillance

Modernity Matters
Edited by Sheila Khan, Nazir Ahmed Can and Helena Machado

40 Race and Masculinity in Gay Men’s Pornography

Deconstructing the Big Black Beast
Desmond Francis Goss

41 Making Mixed Race

A Study of Time, Place and Identity
Karis Campion

42 School Choice, Race and Social Anxiety

Exploring French Middle-Class Parental Risks
Anthony E. Healy

43 Racism in Danish Welfare Work with Refugees

Troubled by Difference, Docility and Dignity
Marta Padovan-Özdemir and Trine Øland

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/

sociology/series/RRRE
Racism in Danish Welfare
Work with Refugees

Troubled by Difference, Docility and Dignity

Marta Padovan-Özdemir
and Trine Øland
First published 2022
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Marta Padovan-Özdemir and Trine Øland
The right of Marta Padovan-Özdemir and Trine Øland to be identified as
authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Padovan-Özdemir, Marta, author. | Øland, Trine, author.
Title: Racism in Danish welfare work with refugees : troubled by
difference, docility and dignity / Marta Padovan-Özdemir and Trine Øland.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Series:
Routledge research in race and ethnicity | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021056472 (print) | LCCN 2021056473 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367563332 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367563356 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003097327 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Social work with immigrants–Denmark. | Racism in social
service–Denmark. | Racism in public welfare–Denmark.
Classification: LCC HV4013.D4 P34 2022 (print) | LCC HV4013.D4
(ebook) | DDC 362.89/91209489–dc23/eng/20211208
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056472
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056473

ISBN: 978-0-367-56333-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-56335-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-09732-7 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003097327

Typeset in Times New Roman

by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Contents

List of Tables vi
Acknowledgementsvii

Introduction1

1 Race and welfare 10

2 A post-colonial welfare analytics 30

3 A brief history of Danish refugee reception –

contextualising the source material 51

4 Sociological history of racism and the methodological

intervention of stock stories 67

5 The stock story of colour-blindness 74

6 The stock story of potentialising 100

7 The stock story of compassion 128

8 From modern ghosts to a racial structure

of welfare work 152

Index 168
List of Tables

3.1 Numerical overview of refugees granted asylum in Denmark

between 1956 and 201853
3.2 Overview of the distribution of texts across periodicals,
time period of publication and genres63
Acknowledgements

This book is the daring result of a laborious joint effort to challenge main-
stream welfare and integration research on refugees in Denmark. Moreover,
it expresses a persistent effort of vigilance and staying with the slippery trou-
ble of race, racialisation and racism in services of doing good. Our collab-
oration and inspiration for the book are offshoots of the collective research
project, Professional Interventions as a Statecrafting Grammar Addressing
“the Immigrant” (2013–2016).
In the initial phases of this book project, two student assistants helped
with the identification of a vast documentary material from October to
December 2016. This material has constituted the basis of our analyses. We
thank the student research assistants Martine Lind, then student at Roskilde
University and Katrine Severinsen, then student at Aalborg University in
Copenhagen, for their most vigilant and inventive ways of managing this
task. We also extend our gratitude to Pernille Lykke Buch-Jensen, then
intern at the Social Education Program in Horsens, VIA University College,
for assisting our supplementary collection of documentary material in the
period November through December 2019.
We appreciate our colleagues at University of Copenhagen and VIA
University College for patiently listening and willingly posing critical ques-
tions to our research endeavours along the way. In particular, we appre-
ciate the support from colleagues affiliated with the research group, The
history and sociology of welfare work (UCPH) Stine Saaby Bach, Marianne
Brodersen, Tine Brøndum, Lone Bæk Brønsted, Bjørn Hamre, Nanna
Koch Hansen, Stine Grønbæk Jensen, Malene Kubstup Nelausen, Vanessa
Paladino, Sofie Rosengaard, Stine Thygesen and Lærke Vildlyng as well
as colleagues affiliated with the Research program for society and diversity
(VIA UC), Barbara Day, Bodil Klausen, Gina Lydersen, Pia Rauff Krøyer,
Simon Nørgaard Iversen, Stine Del Pin Hamilton, Stinne Østergaard
Poulsen and Umair Ahmed.
For their discussion of our methodology and preliminary analyses,
we also want to thank the organizers and participants of the workshop
Racial Blind Spots in Danish Policy Domains at the conference on Race in
viii Acknowledgements

Contemporary Denmark, Aalborg University, Copenhagen, January 18–19,

2018, the reviewers of our paper for the Critical Race Studies in Education
Association annual conference in Los Angeles, May 29–31, 2019, as well as
the participants in our workshop, Race and Racialisations Buried Alive
in Welfare State Practices at the Nordic Migration Research Conference in
Helsinki (online), January 11–14, 2021.
We thank each other for good companionship. We have contrib-
uted equally to the book and the joint research efforts underpinning it.
Accordingly, our names are listed in alphabetical order.
Introduction

The idea behind this book was formed in the close aftermath of the so-called
European refugee crisis in the late Summer of 2015, when large numbers of
Syrian and Afghan refugees were arriving not only on the external borders
of the EU, but also appearing at the Danish border with Germany. Strong
images of refugees walking alongside Danish motorways aiming towards
Sweden reached the news headlines. Hitherto, the Danish government had
done its outmost to prevent this situation by, e.g., advertising in Lebanese
newspapers about the restrictive Danish immigration and asylum policies,
but also by supporting the Frontex policing of the EU external borders cou-
pled with humanitarian aid to refugee camps in neighbouring areas of the
conflict zones. Thus, the Danish government’s immediate response to an
imagined worst-case-scenario was to enforce stricter border controls and
contain refugees in temporary camps that would appear as hostile and
uncomfortable as possible in order to make the refugees want not to seek
asylum in Denmark (Whyte, Campbell and Overgaard 2020; Suárez-Krabbe
and Lindberg 2019). The government even introduced legislation that ena-
bled authorities to seize refugees’ possessions of jewellery and other objects
of greater value so that the authorities in advance could cover its expenses
if refugees were believed to constitute a greater expenditure for the Danish
state during their stay in Denmark. Echoing practices in Nazi-German con-
centration camps during WWII, this legislation reached the headlines in
international media, while the then minister of integration celebrated every
tightening of the immigration act with a cake in her office.
Meanwhile, local administrators and professionals of welfare provi-
sions expressed severe concerns about the lack of resources and profes-
sional knowledge for managing and integrating the new refugees expected
to arrive in mass numbers. In a short notice in the teachers’ professional
periodical, Folkeskolen [The Public Community School], it was for example
stated that:

[e]ven if the total amount of refugees seeking asylum in Denmark this

year follows the expectations – and is similar to last year – more families

DOI: 10.4324/9781003097327-1
2 Introduction

and children arrive this year. This will put pressure on the schools, if
the local administrations are not financially supported for the task …
“We have received quite many inquiries and, thus, we have sent out a
communication brief to the local district in order for them read how to
respond to the refugee children,” Bjørn Hansen tells
(n.n. 2015)

Denmark having ratified the international Refugee Convention in 1954

and subsequently establishing a system of refugee reception since, thus,
displaying fifty years of experience with the accommodation of refugees in
Danish institutions of welfare, the professional panic, forgetting and igno-
rance among Danish welfare workers sparked our curiosity. How come that
welfare work with refugees would still be considered a novel and danger-
ous activity for the welfare state to engage in? What are the troubled social
relations at play in welfare work with refugees?
Since then, Danish governments have increased their focus on repatria-
tion, which social case workers must inform refugees about when simulta-
neously trying to enforce an ever more demanding integration regime on
the very same refugees. Repatriation measures have been accompanied
by political desires for externalising the asylum-seeking process, includ-
ing establishing refugee camps in Northern Africa and contracting pri-
vate security companies to run them (Whyte and Hirslund 2013). In this
way, the present European immigration control regime parallels colonial
practices during the transatlantic slave trade. It also translates into per-
verted humanitarianism by which the externalisation of helping refugees
exempts the West from being implicated in the social, political and eco-
nomic contexts of conflicts it originates from and reinforces (Lemberg-
Pedersen 2019).
Relating such critical postcolonial perspectives on externalised
Danish/European immigration control to our initial curiosity about
the welfare workers’ apparent panic, forgetting and ignorance in their
imagined relations to the newly arrived refugees, we could say that part
of our research object is kind of disappearing since not many refugees
make it to Denmark.
Why is this book important then? The evading of refugees from Danish
national territory, and the silencing of inconvenient experiences in dealing
with refugees in welfare work, can be seen as a rather material manifestation
of the continued investment in a postcolonial hierarchical world order. This
order seems to be sustained and exempted by the global myth of a Danish
egalitarian, all-inclusive and benevolent universalistic welfare state (Øland
2019, 31–43; Esping-Andersen 1990; Lakey 2017), on behalf of which welfare
workers raise concerns about the management of newly arrived refugees on
Danish territory.
 Introduction 3

Purpose
Placing the book in this context, our objective is to explore contemporary
relations of Danish post-colonialism in welfare work addressing newly arrived
refugees. Accordingly, our ambition is to dismantle the global myth of the
Danish egalitarian, all-inclusive and benevolent universalistic welfare state.
We do so with inspiration from Stephen Ball and Jordi Collet-Sabé’s (2021)
way of redressing the modernistic questions posed within educational research,
thus, asking what is wrong with welfare work vis-á-vis refugees in relations of
post-coloniality. This question begs to remain sceptical towards reform and
improvement inherent in modern welfare work’s “constant cycle of hope and
despair, of progress and defeat” (Ibid., 3). It also entails staying with the trou-
ble that welfare workers seem to worry about in their encounter with the refu-
gee (Lea 2020) and which compels them to invest in a remedial circularity with
those deemed in need of help, improvement and development (Lea 2008; 2020).
In other words, we aspire to place and understand Danish welfare work in
relations of post-coloniality by unravelling welfare workers’ exegeses of the
troubles with newly arrived refugees in a post-1954 Danish regime of refugee
reception and development aid. Accordingly, we are interested in an empiri-
cal detailing of Danish welfare workers’ minutiae investments in the Danish
majority’s boundary-drawing relation to its imagined Other. This will allow
us to establish how race and racialisation are constitutional features of the
welfare state and, thus, operational of welfare work.
Hence, we aim to develop and contribute a historical-sociological lan-
guage for speaking about race, racism and racialisation in a Danish welfare
work that transcends the epistemology of ignorance that has followed from
the supposed burial of race with the end of WWII. In other words, we hope
to bring Danish welfare work’s perceived innocent benevolence into dialogue
with post-coloniality (Wekker 2016, 25) in order to challenge welfare work-
ers’ sometimes aggressively “rejection of the possibility to know” (Ibid., 18).
Keeping this purpose in mind, this book taps into a burgeoning research
endeavour to unravel colonial complicity in today’s welfare practices of
handling non-Western refugees and immigrants in the Nordics (Vuorela
2009). Accordingly, we aim to compensate for an almost non-existing
Nordic mainstream academic recognition of racialisation taking place in
welfare work practices addressing non-Western refugees and immigrants
(Andreassen and Myong 2017).

Politics
However, it is no wonder that mainstream academia has been reluctant to
engage with issues of structural racism in the welfare state; exactly because
critical race studies tend to trouble and shake humanistic and modern per-
ceptions of progressive development and social science’s self-evident role
4 Introduction

therein. Critical race scholars talk about how the collegiality of their work
places is shaken and they themselves are rendered suspect to bad science,
when they, for instance, explore how the history of racism is intertwined
with social science and the logic of statistical analysis (Bonilla-Silva and
Zuberi 2008).
During our writing of this book, we have witnessed how activist move-
ments such as Black Lives Matter Denmark and Refugees Welcome have
called out racism in Denmark and criticised the hostile environment of
policies targeting the refugees, thus, alluding to a new form of apartheid
in Denmark. Meanwhile, leading Danish politicians and the media indus-
try have increasingly engaged in delegitimising such critiques – including
critical research on race and racism – saying that the critique is unfounded,
unscientific and rooted in hysterical identity politics. Two Danish MPs’
question for the minister of science and education regarding their suspi-
cion of excessive activism in certain research environments (in particular
gender and migration studies) led the Danish parliament to decide on a
resolution stating that the Danish parliament “expects university manage-
ments to continuously secure that the self-regulation of scientific practice
functions. This means that no enforced orthodoxy occurs, that politics is
not disguised as science, and that it is not possible systematically to avoid
justified academic critique” (Folketinget [The Danish Parliament] 2021,
our translation).
Such political attacks on critical gender and migration research includ-
ing the delegitimisation of identity politics can be understood to represent
a new flank in Danish value politics in a political situation where cross-
party political consensus has been reached in regard to being tough on
immigration and integration. These public attacks can also be regarded
as continued investments in white dominance by silencing counter-stories.
Accordingly, the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has recently
stated that she sees no reason to take special measures against racism in
Denmark (Danbolt and Schmidt 2021, 61). This statement is highly inter-
esting in light of an earlier incident in 2016, when artist Emil Elg held a
speech at an exhibition opening at The Workers Museum, which the Social-
Democratic chairperson, Mette Frederiksen, attended. Elg presented a
critical reading of the Social-Democratic battle song suggesting that the
Danish Social-Democrats’ immigration politics is racist. Elg was expelled
and his art work (a recording of his speech) was removed from the exhibi-
tion (Elg 2016).
To sum up, it seems fair to say that our research object is part of a highly
politicised controversy. Therefore, the research presented in this book may
feed into these discussions, and anyone is welcome to relate to and discuss
our research. Whether our results and interpretations are reliable is, how-
ever, not a question of taste or political opinion, but scientific systematics
and documentation, which we will communicate as clear as we can, and
 Introduction 5

which continue to be subject to ongoing discussions in our community

of peers.
Nevertheless, the politics traversing our research object of welfare work
addressing newly arrived refugees accentuates that there exists no external
point of view on welfare work, immigration or in research addressing the
welfare-migration nexus. This implies that one is always already involved
in the subject matter, which we acknowledge as the condition of conducting
credible research.

Researcher integrity through reflexivity

In the research fields of this book, it is not uncommon to ask for scholarly
reflexivity as to how we as Western/Nordic postcolonial scholars read, think
and write in “the double position of being located at the centre and speaking
for the margins” (Vuorela 2009, 19).
Bringing our research behind this book into dialogue with critical race
studies, we have observed two possible responses to Vuorela’s request: (1)
Researching racism in a credible way demands a researcher who has expe-
rienced racism, is coloured or in other way hierarchically subordinated
and, in that sense racialised and, (2) research on racism demands like
any other kind of research skillful and vigilant researchers who master
their disciplinary craftmanship and know how to construct their research
object based on theory and methodology and, thus, display their work of
truth telling.
We subscribe to the second approach. Yet, we admit that our everyday
experiences of being racialised or witnessing racialisation of others close to
us inform our research on racialisation inasmuch as we know that racism is
real and has real effects. Moreover, we are acutely aware of our socially struc-
tured presuppositions as children of the Danish welfare state and privileged
by the welfare state in terms of free education and positions in academia.
This implies that we are enmeshed with our research object from the inside,
which is why we challenge ourselves by asking what is wrong with welfare
work. In other words, we objectify our research object with postcolonial
and critical race theory that will allow us to identify and describe non-ac-
knowledged dynamics of welfare work. Social dynamics cannot be treated
as either inside or outside people or social fields. Thus, it is no easy task
to study such matter with clarity. What is needed is a balancing act where
affectivity and preferences are controlled with theoretical objectivation and
methodological stringency.
Hence, we are not apologetic, but we do recognise that there are people
who are exposed to racial injustice, which we as whites benefit from due
to our position in the social structure. As citizens and researchers, thus,
not exclusively as whites, we take upon ourselves an ethical and political
responsibility to promote justice and counter injustice. Not exactly by
6 Introduction

engaging politically, but by developing and contributing research that rec-

ognises racism and racial injustice in welfare work.

Structure of the book

The book’s eight chapters fall in two main sections. First, in Chapters 1–4
we outline the theoretical and methodological basis of the book in terms
of basic sociological relations of super and subordination, post-coloniality
and the intervention of stock stories. Second, in Chapters 5–8 we present
our analytical findings in terms of three stock stories operating Danish wel-
fare work with refugees that is haunted by modern ghosts with the effect of
a racially coded social structure.
In Chapter 1, we situate the book in dialogue with two Danish/Nordic
research fields on welfare and integration related to immigrants and refu-
gees and on race, racism and racialisation. The chapter closes by summaris-
ing how this book conceptualises racialisation as producer of race in welfare
provision for refugees. This conceptualisation is further substantiated in
Chapter 2, where the book’s post-colonial welfare analytics is outlined.
The analytics is founded on Georg Simmel’s concept of sociation processes
conditioned by super- and subordination processes between the welfare
worker and the poor/stranger. This theoretical foundation is augmented
with understandings of the welfare worker as an investing agent in circuits
of remediation and compulsory intervention that are situated in relations of
postcoloniality with its companions of nationalism, modernity, capitalism
and liberalism. Finally, we conceptualise Danish welfare work’s complicity
in reproducing racial structures. This is followed by a brief historical out-
line of post-1954 Danish refugee reception in Chapter 3. Here, we also argue
for choosing three moments in Danish welfare state history with a focus on
three specific refugee arrivals to Denmark, i.e., Vietnamese refugees 1978–
1982, Bosnian refugees 1992–1996 and Syrian refugees 2014–2016. Finally,
the chapter delineates the book’s source material comprising 752 texts con-
cerning welfare workers’ mobilisation vis-á-vis refugees and derived from
four professional periodicals. In Chapter 4, we outline how the source mate-
rial has been read in a sociological-historical manner that replaces modern
progressive linear history-writing with recursive histories supplemented
with concepts of ghosts and hauntings. Accordingly, we argue how such a
sociological-historical approach enables an understanding of the durability
of coloniality and racism. Furthermore, we explain how the source material
has been reworked by a methodological intervention of stock stories as a
way to exhibit how welfare work with refugees has been described by major-
itarian subjectivations, problem descriptions, welfare interventions and
legitimating meaning-making. In this way, the reconstructed stock stories
speak of the unspoken and name the unnamed super- and subordinations
of racial structuring.
 Introduction 7

Chapters 5–7 present three stock stories of colour-blindness, potentialising

and compassion, all of which exhibit Danish welfare workers’ majoritarian
reality production about their troubled encounters with the refugee. The
first stock story of colour-blindness (Chapter 5) is presented across three
variations: Perplexing culturalisation, Controlling racism and Managing.
The chapter recollects how differences ascribed to refugees inconveniently
interfere with welfare workers’ colour-blind self-image, which is condi-
tioned upon organising principles of sameness, neutrality and universality.
By default, Danish welfare workers cannot be imagined to be racist as they
operate a reality production that saves their white innocence and ignores
racial injustice. The second stock story of potentialising (Chapter 6) is ani-
mated by three variations: Stimulating, Pioneering and Identifying. The
chapter shows how this stock story is governed by social-liberal fantasies
about self-sufficiency, productivity and infused with protestant work eth-
ics. Ultimately, the chapter coins the work of potentialising as a matter of
keeping things open, which retains refugees in docile proximity to a mov-
ing target and promise of prosperity in the capitalistic welfare society. This
involves welfare workers’ continuous investments in a racial ontology of
humanity that never acknowledges the refugee as fully human. The third,
and last, stock story of compassion (Chapter 7) is animated in three ways:
Confirming suffering, Rescuing and Reconstructing. This stock story is told
from welfare workers’ self-proclaimed moral high ground compelling them
professionally, emotionally and morally to help the refugee. Accordingly,
the chapter recollects the stock story as a matter of uneven reciprocity,
which is based on a racialised exchange rate that clearly grants the welfare
workers’ moral and professional superiority. This leaves the refugees as less
dignified subordinated people who cannot help, only receive help on the
condition that they express gratitude.
Based on the post-colonial recollections of the three stock stories, it is
clear that race is efficiently and productively alive in Danish welfare work
with refugees. In the book’s Chapter 8, we argue that race is kept alive as
effects of welfare workers’ burying of modern ghosts that are haunting in
the stock stories. Accordingly, we elaborate how ghosts and hauntings are
productive concepts to study the workings of raceless racism, based on
which we identify the modern ghosts of difference, docility and dignity that
trouble the welfare workers. Describing how the welfare workers invest in
the burying of the ghosts, we are able to tease out the four basic categories
of development, humans, society and professionalism that are socially and
historically produced in relations of post-coloniality and drawing on its cul-
tural archive. Hence, it is concluded that the onto-colonial constitution of
the social structure is made up of racially coded categories and that they set
the limits of inclusion and exclusion. Consequently, it is argued that Danish
exceptionalism must be refused, as the global myth of the benevolent uni-
versalistic welfare state is dismantled.
8 Introduction

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 Introduction 9

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Chapter 1

Race and welfare

In this chapter, we address how the book relates to and is in dialogue with
two research fields, primarily in Denmark, but with an outlook to the
Nordics. First, we describe a research field of welfare and integration stud-
ies related to immigrants and refugees. This research field has been a dom-
inating research strand with its focus on the problem of migration and its
solution of integration to the nation-state, although there are also studies
scrutinising the whole endeavour of integration. Second, we describe the
emerging field of race, racism and racialisation studies that has surfaced in
the last 10–15 years, despite the silencing of race that continues to prevail,
also in research communities. Finally, on the backcloth of these strands of
research, the chapter conceptualises the book’s understanding of raciali-
sation at the intersection of race and welfare, i.e., the processes of giving
welfare to racialised groups.

Welfare and integration studies related to immigrants

and refugees in Denmark and the Nordics
In Denmark as well as in the Nordics and Europe for that matter (Lentin
2014), research concerning migrants, ethnicity and minorities has first and
foremost been embedded in the nation-state’s dynamic of solving migra-
tion in terms of quests for integration. Welfare and integration studies have
investigated and evaluated welfare provisions and welfare work in diverse
welfare policy areas such as social policy, cultural policy, educational policy
and employment policy. Ethnographic studies have also investigated how
migration and migrants are being described and understood as anomalies,
thus often nourishing the idea of migrants as strangers to the nation. Finally,
epistemologically oriented studies have examined integration endeavours as
containing problematising and circular dynamics that continuously remake
the problems they seek to solve.
In the volume The Question of Integration: Immigration, Exclusion and the
Danish Welfare State edited by Karen Fog Olwig and Karsten Paerregaard
(2011), Danish anthropologists locate the response to immigration and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003097327-2
 Race and welfare 11

refugee arrivals in the sociocultural history of Denmark referencing a con-

stellation of values informing Danish living. Ralph Grillo (2011, 268–269)
summarises these values and emphasises “the idea that Danes are a fam-
ily or ‘tribe’”, “individual freedom”, that there is a link between equality
and sameness as Norwegian Marianne Gullestad has phrased it regarding
the Norwegian case, and finally, that a “historical amnesia” concerning
Denmark’s past is prevalent, which among other things hides heterogene-
ity and favours homogeneity. Spiced up with the Protestant faith which is
predominant in Denmark, these values have coined Denmark as a social
democratic welfare society weaved together by a strong state and universal-
istic social policies. The welfare state in this volume has been analysed as a
national and nationalistic accomplishment (Jöhncke 2011), which shows in
analyses of how this ideological and institutional framework functions as
the background on which integration processes are formed. In the volume,
Grillo points to how relationships with an international context tends to
be ignored by these Danish anthropologists, thus omitting a transnational
intertextuality (2011, 271). Educational researchers add to the picture that
in this sociocultural context, Muslim pupils are thought of as particularly
problematic and not natural bearers of the liberal and democratic welfare
state culture with an emphasis on individual freedom (Buchardt 2012).
Also, that transnational universal modern Muslim identity strategies in
relation to schooling are activated within this context and enabled through
independent free schools (Padovan-Özdemir 2012). Although the integra-
tion regime is national and nationalistic, transnational and more complex
strategies come to the fore.

Remaking the welfare nation-state through integration

The integration regime has predominately been investigated within a
policy-­oriented approach constituting migration and migrants as issues for
the national societies to solve or handle using integration. In Denmark, his-
torians with an interest in immigrants and refugees have had a focus on pol-
icy and the changing of policies (Jønsson 2013; 2014; Jønsson and Petersen
2013). These historians have illuminated how the presence of immigrants
since the 1970s have mobilised a battle field where an “immigrant prob-
lem” was defined and this problem has been a turning point in statements of
the crisis of the welfare state faced with and affronted by globalisation and
immigration. The fact that people move across national borders becomes a
problem for national governments and a dominating research object. From
the 1970s to the 1990s, research centred on describing immigrants’ social
problems, and immigrants and the immigrant family as a social problem
(Jønsson and Petersen 2013). From the 1980s, with the increasing intake of
refugees, cultural issues became the turning point for education policies and
welfare. Political discussion about assimilation, labour market integration
12 Race and welfare

and language training, or accommodation to immigrants’ and refugees’

cultural difference took place, and in the 1990s, labour market integration
turned out to be the conquering “solution” to the influx of immigrants
and refugees. In the following years, research continued to investigate on
these matters.
Norwegian sociologists, Grete Brochmann and Annika Hagelund (2011),
illuminated that while some immigrants and refugees proved difficult to inte-
grate, they became an even more explicit social policy problem, and social
inequality was accompanied by an ethnic aspect. It was analyzed how immi-
grants had poor living conditions, were culturally different and had poor
labour market participation and, thus, poor ability to be self-­supporting.
This research paints a rather pessimistic version of the Scandinavian uni-
versal welfare state’s ability to integrate, and it is described how the situation
seems to fuel nation-building projects immanent in the welfare state (Ibid.,
16–17). The state initiated a whole lot of integration and labour market pro-
jects and they were studied meticulously. Cultural policy was one site for
the launch of discussions about values and morality, liberty, equality and
child-rearing. “Our values” such as democracy and freedom of speech were
voiced as being threatened by the changing composition of the population,
and in Denmark, the state published canons on history, culture and democ-
racy to be implemented in schools and society at large, particularly aimed
at (the threatening) immigrants. These canons were analysed to transport
images of cultural “roots”, and images of native Danes versus non-native
Danes, focusing on descent and kinship in the management of the popula-
tion as a resource. On this basis, Sofie Rosengaard and Trine Øland illumi-
nate how human differences are racialised through canons (2018, 66–69).
Education policy has been another site of research attention, and disper-
sal policies have been researched in particular. Gro Hellesdatter Jacobsen
(2012) detects how immigrant children are treated differently through either
bussing or day schools, and how such arrangements are legitimised with ref-
erence to Denmark as a competition state. Jacobsen analyses these explicit
forms of differential treatment as a way of subsuming individual rights to
the benefit and survival of the collective – or at least the competition state.
Christian Horst (2017) has also described how equal rights and equality of
treatment are subjected to national interests, which then legitimates differ-
ential treatment in education and society in general. The spatial dispersion
policies pertaining to newly arrived refugees have also been investigated
from a local and rural angle. Birgitte Romme Larsen (2011) has showed that
the lack of relatives and so-called co-ethnics already settled in the area in
which one lives, turns out to result in lacking mechanisms for integration
which can affect refugees’ ability to form a new life in Denmark. However,
it is also reported that local communities develop collective, pragmatic and
inclusive approaches to refugees beyond the ideological debate in national
media and politics (Whyte, Romme Larsen and Fog Olwig 2019).
 Race and welfare 13

It is fair to say that integrationist endeavours surface in research as

nation building ingrained in the functioning of the welfare state. At a cer-
tain point in time, this is conceptualised as welfare nationalism which is
discerned as a method to maintain the citizen’s good will and willingness
to accept the burdens, economically and socially, to sustain the welfare
system (Suszycki 2011). Moreover, three different concepts have been sep-
arated (in the Finnish context but this resonates with the Danish context
as well) to explain the political arguments for welfare nationalism in depth
(Keskinen 2016). Welfare nationalism points to the entanglement of welfare
and national identity and membership; welfare chauvinism signals that wel-
fare is reserved for our own sorts of people based on ethno-national ideas;
and welfare exclusionism refers to welfare only reserved for those who work,
not for those with only a residence permit, thus excluding migrants and
descendants who live in the country but do not have a job.
These concepts relate to how the ideologies of equal treatment are in ten-
sion with exclusionary quest for differential treatment of those not thought
of as belonging to the nation or the work force. During the 2000s, increas-
ing pressure was put on the immigrant and refugee not to continue to be a
receiver of social security benefits; to be active and integrated into a nor-
mal life, including a work life (Moldenhawer and Øland 2013). At the same
time, from 1970 to 2000, the immigrant and refugee moved from being only
a labour market issue to being a social problem to being also a cultural
problem and a security problem, thus continuously disturbing the national
imaginary although in different ways. In a research project on school pro-
fessionals’ making of educationally manageable immigrant schoolchildren,
it is, for instance, shown how pedagogical repertoires, their objectives, tech-
niques and truths and the social utopias they relate to feed into the fabri-
cation of the Danish welfare nation-state (Padovan-Özdemir 2016). In all
policy areas, the welfare nation-state seems to struggle to stand firm, often
in a high-pitched fashion.

Reifying migration and migrants as eternal strangers

The integration regime and its in- and especially excluding effects have also
been investigated from the point of view of migrants. Anthropologists have
conducted extensive fieldwork in, e.g., a so-called ghetto, where Palestinian
refugee parents struggle with the Danish welfare state professionals who urge
the refugees to trust the system while they are being constructed as a threat
and a disturbance to the system (Johansen 2013; 2017). Also, anthropolo-
gists presenting ethnographies from the school and day care context show
how the civilising and socialising practices of these educational institutions
are ambiguous (Gilliam and Gulløv 2012). On the one hand, welfare profes-
sionals are analysed as mediators and, thus, drivers of the collective and its
exclusionary practices (cf. also [Gitz-Johansen 2006]). On the other hand,
14 Race and welfare

education’s progressive civilising mission is analysed as an option children

take up, struggle with and in some instances resist or transgress in order
to form an oppositional or transnational identity (Moldenhawer 2001;
Gilliam 2009). This research attends to the way immigrants and refugees
are problematised within welfare state institutions and it seeks in different
ways to present other aspects of immigrants’ and refugees’ lives than what
is described as lacks by welfare professionals.
In the volume Migration och tillhörighet: Inklusions- och exklusions­
processer i Skandinavien edited by Gunnar Alsmark, Tina Kallehave
and Bolette Moldenhawer (2007), a whole range of researchers across the
social sciences and the humanities seeks exactly to write up an alternative
research agenda that does not have as an effect to point to immigrants’
lacks. Instead, this collection seeks to attend to: “complex relations between
migration and belonging, and how research is able to conceptualise these
relations” (Ibid., 11). This intention is based on the idea that “immigration
always begins with emigration” (Ibid.), and this is thought of as a way to
transgress the focus on integration processes in the country of arrival, and
instead include a focus on migration’s human dimension as migrants them-
selves report on their complex lives in, e.g., a transnational or global space.
However, although this research may slide away from an unequivocal focus
on integrationist and national policies, it seems to reify migration between
national countries as a problem or anomaly to be studied, and migrants as
potentially and forever homeless and lost between cultures.
Similar observations have led researchers to propose a move away from a
“migrantology” to a postmigrant social and cultural research agenda tak-
ing migration as a perspective rather than a subject (e.g., Römhild 2017, 73).
Such a research agenda brings migration in relation with broader cultural
and social conditions and relations that are contested and must be kept
open for negotiated interpretation and understanding. It does not just place
migrants at society’s margin and as objects to be studied and conceptual-
ised in binaries of being for example either (mostly) native or foreign.

The epistemic conundrum of integration

This brings us to the last strand of research concerning welfare and inte-
gration, i.e., research that takes as its object the paradoxical epistemology
of integrationist thinking. The Swedish researchers Mekonen Tesfahuney
and Lena Grip (2007) have scrutinised the (Swedish) politics of integration
from an epistemological point of view. They describe how the idea of inte-
grationism is a “culture of wholeness” and a belief in majority culture and
the nation-state’s integrating powers. In other words, it is about creating
sameness that smooths out differences, which they phrase as “the will to
the same”. Nevertheless, the other is never allowed to be the same, and the
boundary towards the other is perpetually redrawn so that the politics of
 Race and welfare 15

integration is kept legitimate and reasonable due to a need to integrate pas-

sive subjects not yet the same. Tesfahuney and Grip states: “In this way,
segregation is the condition for and the reason why integration research and
politics of integration emerges” (Ibid., 67). The logic is that inclusion pro-
ceeds while segregating, and segregation proceeds through inclusion (Ibid.,
90). In other words, an inertia reproducing segregation as a precondition for
integration is in motion. It is a process without an end serving the nation-
state as an entity.
Integrationism within state philosophy is further inspected for its
epistemological tracks in educational sociological research and welfare
professional thinking (Larsen and Øland 2011). Larsen and Øland exam-
ine the father of educational sociology, Emile Durkheim’s integrationist
visions of organic solidarity around 1900 (Ibid., 10), and the parents of
Nordic welfare state thinking, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal’s integrationism
in their universal, rational and progressive assumptions about the human
being as conditioning their welfare state ideology. In this analysis, it is
illuminated how the conundrum of integration lives on: In order for some-
thing or someone to be integrated and the difference estranged, the dif-
ferences must be identified, made and preserved as differences (Ibid., 8).
Again: Segregation conditions integration, which produces segregation
and thus a paradoxical treadmill or circularity is reinvented continuously
in welfare state practices. The one singled out to be integrated is episte-
mologically made in the targeting. In a more recent piece, integration as
a concept is also problematised for its promotion of an understanding of
immigrants having troubles in relation to indigenous Danes (Rytter 2019).
Rytter (Ibid., 678) disentangles this dominant social imaginary by show-
ing how its different scenarios “consolidate an asymmetrical relationship
between majorities and minorities because they simultaneously cast inte-
gration as desirable and impossible”. In all three works on the epistemic
conundrum of integration, it is concluded that integration and its epis-
temic integrationist circularity serve the purpose of dominating social and
cultural relations within the nation-state.

Race, racism and racialisation studies in Denmark

and the Nordics
The widespread and deeply rooted neglecting, silencing and evading of race,
racism and racialisation in the Danish and, more broadly, Nordic welfare
states appear as the defining launch pad for the embryonic and still emerg-
ing research field on race, racism and racialisation in the Nordic countries
(Keskinen and Andreassen 2017; McEachrane 2014; Vitus and Andreassen
2015a). Thus, it is only within the last 10–15 years that we see this research
field accumulating in volume and advancing theorisations and conceptual-
isations of race, racism and racialisation.
16 Race and welfare

Racialised business of integration

Yet, already in the 1990s, Swedish scholars paved the way and called atten-
tion to racial structures and racism within the Nordic welfare regime (see
e.g., Deland 1997; Molina 1997; Tesfahuney 1998). In the Danish case, it is val-
uable to this book to highlight two seminal works of the late 1980s and early
1990s that voiced critique of the expanding integration industry and integra-
tion research while drawing attention to the racialising logics and effects of
the entanglements between integration research and welfare interventions.
In 1987, Ole Stig Andersen and René Mark Nielsen published a fierce and
polemical critique of the Danish Refugee Council and its work with newly
arrived refugees. As former employees, they spoke from the inside of the
organization and named it “the racism business” (in Danish: racismegesjæf-
ten) suggesting that the organisation was riding the crisis of refugees, while
promoting itself as a crusader of anti-racist enlightenment. They alluded
to the systemic racism of the organisation by highlighting all white Danish
recruitment of teachers and social workers on the backdrop of a patholog-
ical imagery of the refugee as incomplete (i.e., represented as non-Danish
speaking, with an anti-democratic attitude, being poor, oppressed, sick,
distant rural). All of which could be redeemed by the white professional
and conditioned by the refugee’s gratitude and solidarity with the white
professional (Andersen and Nielsen 1987, 57–100).
Like Andersen and Nielsen (1987), Carl-Ulrik Schierup (1993) raised cri-
tique of the widespread idea of racism either being something of the past
or the expression of a pathological individual deviant. Inspired by British
developments in race and cultural studies, and race scholars such as Franz
Fanon and Etienne Balibar, Schierup argued that to understand “new rac-
ism” in its Danish context, one had to unravel the racial tenets of the “lib-
eral professional establishment” and emerging Danish immigrant research.
Schierup critiqued the culturalist turn that produced knowledge about the
Others in order to integrate them. According to Schierup, this produced
a reductionist and antagonistic imagery of traditional-collectivistic versus
modern-individualistic cultures feeding into the cultural legacy of colonial-
ism in welfare institutions: “In this way, the history of research on the guest
worker/immigrant problem reflects, or even better, refracts, the institutions
and power structures in the Danish society” (Ibid., 178, our translation).
Also, Schierup observed, it was mainly researchers with a migrant back-
ground who had made similar critiques of the exoticisation of the Other
(Suni Loona), of the conflation of layman’s world views and integration
researchers’ conceptualisations (Hedi bel Habib) and calling attention to
the need for making the culture of racism the object of research (Jonathan
M. Schwartz).
This proved to be essential keystrokes for the developing of a Danish and
Nordic research field on race, racism and racialisation in the 21st century.
 Race and welfare 17

Conceptual adjustments
However, in the 2000s we still see a primarily conceptual interest in race, racism
and racialisation (Gullestad 2004; Pihl 2000; Røgilds 2002) followed by sim-
ilar theoretical discussions in the 2010s (Bangstad 2017; Hervik 2015; Jensen
et al. 2010). These conceptual dealings with race, racism and racialisation all
respond to the widespread denial of racism and racialisation in Denmark and
other Nordic countries by offering a more precise and historically nuanced lan-
guage for articulating racism and racialisation. Important to mention is Poul
Duedahl’s (2015) historical investigation of how ethnicity became a proxy for
race in the post-WWII mental engineering of public Danish self-perception as
a soft and benevolent colonial power in the past (but still active in Greenland
and Faroe Islands) and now a tolerant nation – strongly aided by UNESCO’s
culture and peace programme (Duedahl 2017). The theorisation of race, racism
and racialisation was not finalised in the 2000s. Rather, it seems to be a defin-
ing trait of the developing research field of race, racism and racialisation in the
Nordic countries; perhaps provoked and nurtured by the import of primarily
Anglo-Saxon defined critical theory on race. Accordingly, in a special issue of
the Nordic Journal of Migration Research in 2017, the editors wrote that:

theoretical approaches on migration and racialisation need to be

adjusted to and elaborated in a context characterized by welfare state
ideologies and institutions, notions of allegedly homogenous nations
and claims of exemplary achievements in gender and socio-economic
equality, as well as neoliberal policies
(Keskinen and Andreassen 2017, 64).

Two doctoral theses in the 2000s are claimed to be pioneering work on rac-
ism and racialisation in Denmark inasmuch as they empirically displayed
the existence of racism and racialisation in Danish society in substantial
ways. From an intersectional perspective, Rikke Andreassen (2005) showed
how themes of nationality, gender, sexuality and race were weaved together
in Danish media coverage of visible minorities between 1971 and 2004. Lene
Myong (2009) studied transnational Korean adoptees and their experiences
of racialised subjectivation growing up in Denmark. Not only did Myong’s
study punctuate the myth of the transnational adoptee as the ideal minor-
ity, it also dismantled the myth of Danish colour-blindness. In this way,
Myong’s study of racialised becoming showed that Danishness is not some-
thing you can decline as non-Danish minority.

Racialising representations
Since then, we have seen a growing proliferation of media, literature
and cultural studies uncovering the culture of racism and racialising
18 Race and welfare

representations. Rikke Andreassen and Anne Folke Henningsen’s book

(2011) on human exhibitions in the Danish amusement park Tivoli and the
Zoological Garden in Copenhagen around 1900 analysed and scarred the
Danish self-perception as a humanistic and enlightened nation. In a similar,
yet contemporary context, Mathias Danbolt and Lene Myong (2018) have
dissected a self-proclaimed anti-racist performance theatre and identified
how racialisation is deployed as a method of generating empathy – a com-
mon trait in the culture and diversity industry. Accordingly, race and racism
become depoliticised feeding into liberal progressives’ self-understanding
as tolerant, empathetic and capable of change-making.
Studies of racial and racialising representations constitute by far the
greatest part of this emerging research field. Two edited volumes bear wit-
ness to this tendency in the field. Afro-Nordic Landscapes. Equality and
Race in Northern Europe edited by Michael McEachrane (2014) thematises
entanglements of nation, racism and black diaspora in the Nordic coun-
tries by illuminating negotiations of racial representation in the arts and
at cultural events. In 2019, Peter Hervik edited the volume Racialization,
Racism and Anti-Racism in the Nordic Countries focusing on critical media
events as prisms through which to study racialised representations. Hervik
argues that such studies are pertinent as racism has become subtler and
more difficult to disentangle in the last 20 years (2019, 4).
In tandem with this media and arts strand of research on race, racism
and racialisation, we also see more wide-ranging social and political science
research with the objective of countering the denial of racism and raciali-
sation in Denmark and the Nordic countries. The edited volume, Undoing
Homogeneity in the Nordic Region. Migration, Difference, and the Politics of
Solidarity (Keskinen, Skaptadóttir and Toivanen 2019) stands as a seminal
work in the current research field. The volume dismantles the Nordic idea
of homogenous Nordic nation-states by exposing how ethnic minorities and
indigenous people have been ignored and silenced in dominant national nar-
ratives. In this way, the volume unravels how racial ideas run through Nordic
nation building. The editors also highlight the need for a new politics of sol-
idarity that undoes the idea that social cohesion and solidarity is dependent
on cultural – and racial – homogeneity. Taking the political management of
deportation centres and relating them to other policy initiatives targeting
racialised groups in Denmark, Julia Suárez-Krabbe and Annika Lindberg
have shown how the homogenising efforts of Danish nation building continue
as internal as well external bordering practices as a form of racially “struc-
tured differentiation of rights, entitlements, and exposure to harm” (2019, 95).

Everyday racism
In line with the policy and media analyses of racism and racialisation in Nordic
welfare states is a research strand focusing on racialisation as it is experienced
 Race and welfare 19

in everyday encounters. Leandro S. Mulinari and Suvi Keskinen (2020) have

recently published a study on racial profiling in different contexts of polic-
ing practices in order to showcase how the “racial welfare state” enforces an
imagined community based on Nordic whiteness against which the Others are
measured. Other micro-oriented studies have focused on educational institu-
tions, in particular. Based on classroom observations, Laila Lagermann (2013)
discusses how racialisation happens both in the case of white teachers down-
playing race with reference to colour-blindness and in the case of coloured
teachers celebrating differences. Similar in cases is the essentialisation of racial
particularity, which may lead to marginalisation of racialised students. Based
on a historical analysis of professional educator journals specialised in the field
of educating immigrant schoolchildren between 1970 and 2013, Marta Padovan-
Özdemir (2016) shows how educational problematisation of immigrant school-
children gets entangled with a racialising subjectivation of teachers imagined
to solve the problem of immigrant schoolchildren. A similar problem-analysis
was deployed in Iram Khawaja’s (2015) case study of secondary school teach-
ers’ problematisation of visibly Muslim students grouping together. Khawaja
pointed out the workings of racialised othering by imagining what the problem
would look like if the religious categorisation of the students was taken out of
the equation. Reva Jaffe-Walter (2016) and Mira C. Skadegård’s (2017) stud-
ies also pay attention to the racialised everyday encounters in Danish schools.
They reach similar conclusions as to how “coercive assimilation” or “micro-­
discrimination” become cloaked in “progressive” teachers’ liberal values and
benevolent concern and care for students with non-Western/non-White – and/
or Muslim – backgrounds. To a lesser extent, racialised forms of othering have
also been studied outside of formal (educational) settings. Kirsten Simonsen
(2015) investigates racialisation from the perspective of the white majority gaz-
ing at the coloured minority experiencing being gazed at in the streets of the city
of Copenhagen. Such encounters seem to invoke emotions of hostility, distanc-
ing or fascination on the part of the one who gazes. On the part of the one who
experiences being gazed at, the emotions of fear, uncertainty or feeling out of
place surface. According to Simonsen, such encounters can be understood as
processes of making the Other strange.
The focus on emotions in studies of racism and racialisation was coined
as a particular research strand in the edited volume, Affectivity and Race:
Studies from the Nordic Contexts (Andreassen and Vitus 2015) exploring “how
race and racial formations are produced and reproduced through affect and
emotion, and how race and racialised bodies provoke, produce and influence
certain affects in the surrounding world” (Vitus and Andreassen 2015b, 1).

Turning the racial perspective on whiteness

Affectivity in Nordic race, racism and racialisation studies is often seen
connected to Nordic whiteness studies. For example, in Lene Myong and
20 Race and welfare

Mons Bissenbakker’s analysis of family reunification activism in the context

of a strict immigration control regime. Here they show how love is affec-
tively tied to the promise of the receiving nation state and bound to a white
partner; together sustaining white hegemony by silencing “unrepresenta-
ble love … that does not include a white component. For example: love in
migrant families…” (2016, 141).
The edited volume, Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region
(Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012b) has been a major contribution to forefront-
ing whiteness as a pivotal dimension of studying race, racism and racialisa-
tion in the Nordic countries. The editors argue that the focus on whiteness
not only affords de-normalisation of white bodies in race studies, it also
involves “a dynamic view of racism as not only being concerned with skin
colour, but as entangled with other markers of inferiority” (Loftsdóttir
and Jensen 2012a, 7). However, like with the affective turn in Nordic race,
racism and racialisation studies, the whiteness “turn” still constitutes a
rather embryonic research field as stated by the editors of a special issue
on Nordic whiteness in Scandinavian Studies (Lundström and Teitelbaum
2017). What Catrin Lundström and Benjamin R. Teitelbaum also high-
light is that this may appear rather thought provoking since Nordicness
has played an essential role in “shaping white identity and vice versa”
(Ibid., 155).
Feminist and gender studies might, however, be one place where white-
ness studies have been advanced more thoroughly. Already in 2008,
Rikke Andreassen, Anne Folke Henningsen and Lene Myong Pedersen
edited a themed issue on whiteness in the Nordic journal Kvinder, Køn
& Forskning (Women, Gender and Research). Introducing the perspec-
tive of whiteness in gender studies, they alluded, had the potential of
advancing the intersectional approach, refocusing the gaze on minority
to majority, and, not least, nuancing racial hierarchisations happening as
the effect of contemporary internal European (white) migrations (2008,
5–6; see also Lapiņa 2018).
What is particularly striking in the advancement of the race (including
whiteness) perspective in Nordic feminist scholarship is the self-reflexive
endeavour to decolonise white feminist epistemologies and deconstruct
white feminist activism (Andersen, Hvenegård-Lassen and Knobblock
2015; Keskinen, Stoltz and Mulinari 2021). In 2017, Andreassen and Myong
undertook such a self-reflexive experiment in which they scrutinised their
own academic experiences of being gendered and racialised. Hereby, they
illustrated how the lack and evasion of any reflection and discussion of
racial and gendered privilege “contribute to maintaining whiteness as a
privileged site for scientific knowledge production and dissemination”
(2017, 102).
 Race and welfare 21

Conceptualising racialisation at the intersection

of race and welfare
By reading across these two research fields, we are able to conceptualise
how this book understands racialisation at the intersections of race and wel-
fare pointing to how race and racism are reinvented in processes of giving
welfare to racialised groups.
Hence, it goes without saying that this book’s concept of race is that race
is a social construct. However, it needs to be clarified that race as a social
construct is not sufficient to pinpoint the effects of race. In her quest to
provide literacy in race, Alana Lentin (2020) cites Patrick Wolfe’s (2011, 274)
most powerful work on explaining the comprehensiveness of racialisation:

Useful though it may once have been for denaturalizing race, the well-
worn piety that race is a social construct (with exculpatory quotation
marks to prove it) does not get us very far. It simply begs further ques-
tions: ‘Under what circumstances was (or is) race constructed?’; ‘Has
race been differently constructed under different circumstances?’

Racial difference is constructed in a particular way depending on the soci-

etal goal of the racialisation. Thus, race is made in the targeting, e.g., in the
US context:

Black people were racialized as slaves; slavery constituted their black-

ness. Correspondingly, Indigenous North Americans were not killed,
driven away, romanticized, assimilated, fenced in, bred White, and oth-
erwise eliminated as the original owners of the land but as Indians
(Wolfe 2006, 388).

The “one-drop-rule”, which makes a person black according to any amount

of African ancestry, even rather remotely and regardless of phenotypical
appearance, made it impossible for blacks to accede to whiteness, whereas
that was possible and desirable for the Indigenous population. Likewise,
Statistics Denmark, for example, uses the category descendants of non-­
Western immigrants, thus reproducing a racial difference for generations.
The perpetual remaking and intrinsic precariousness of race and racism
due to complex and shifting racialisation processes are thus obvious. What
we are getting at is the fact that racialisation processes produce race, which
then obviously is socially constructed, in our case by welfare dynamics. This
book does not only give lip service to social constructionism in the words of
Bonilla-Silva (2018, 8), but also illuminates the way in which welfare dynamics
produce and reproduce racial difference and racism. Moreover, and here we
22 Race and welfare

also draw on Bonilla-Silva and on Lentin, we stress that racialisation has

effects, is inscribed in history, the polity and not least that is it institutional-
ised in multiple ways, including welfare state practices in welfare work. We
do not reduce race to the bodily or the biological, not even in the sense that
race is a social or cultural construction of the idea of biological race (Lentin
2020, 33), which has been a recurring expression since WWII, including
one that we ourselves have used. We acknowledge that this stance has not
brought us far in explaining how race is socially produced and reproduced
in ways that also enables us to imagine it undone.
Of importance is how race as a social construct has a social reality and
produces real effects on racialised human beings, which means that (Bonilla-
Silva 2018, 8) “[a]lthough race, as other social constructions, is unstable, it
has a ‘changing same’ quality at its core”. This core equals a racial structure
that reproduces itself and is reproduced, i.e., the continuous formation of a
racialised social system that grant privileges (Ibid, 8): “to Europeans (the
peoples who became ‘white’) over non-Europeans (the people who became
‘non-white’)”, and finds new ways of reproducing this super- and subordina-
tion through time. To be able to acknowledge that race (Lentin 2020, 48): “is
in constant need of replication owing to its inherent instability”, we need a
deep historically situated account of how race is produced and reproduced
and to this end we develop a postcolonial welfare analytics in Chapter 2.
For now, it suffices to stress that race is intertwined with welfare dynam-
ics through comprehensive racialisation processes. In a recent analysis of
welfare work’s structure as a racialised structure operating in welfare work
with immigrants and refugees (Øland 2019, 127–148), it is concluded that
(Ibid., 146):

Welfare work depends on the illusion of the Other and the stereotypes
the processes of othering installs. The analyses of welfare work’s racial-
ising outlook are thus not reifying and naturalising the idea of race, but
showing how it is activated and assembled as social fictions through
symbolic resources and the images and meanings they mobilise. The
effects are nevertheless well-founded illusions that have an effect and
create reality.

Racialisation is thus interweaved by threads joining up in the mobilisation

of race in welfare work. Accordingly, racialisation appears when race and
social control in welfare policies and practices intertwine, and welfare rac-
ism appears as a shapeshifter of controlling dehumanising images within
welfare (Neubeck and Cazenave 2001; Williams 1996). In other words, rac-
ism takes shape as racialised logics and practices within benevolent welfare
work, and it is through institutionalised welfare work that societal racial
logics are (re)produced (Lea 2008). As Sara Ahmed (2014) has carefully con-
sidered, social norms gather affective value over time, which also concerns
 Race and welfare 23

benevolent welfare and makes race in welfare work a challenging subject to

research. In her foreword to an edition of her selected writings translated
into Danish, Ahmed (2020, 9) explains how she always has been interested
in exploring how worlds work: “how emotions work to orchestrate a ‘we’
and how institutions work to create an idea about who and what is ‘in its
right place’”. In continuation of Frantz Fanon, Ahmed (Ibid., 10, our trans-
lation) tells that she in particular has been interested in racialisation of the
stranger as a figure:

Frantz Fanon taught us to keep an eye on that which is lurking, just

like he saw himself as someone being in the shadow and as a shadow;
the dark body that always passes by, at the edge of the social. To give
this figure back its history is to begin understanding how the stranger
is being singled out.

And she exemplifies this singling out (2020, 12, our translation):

To be asked whether you are the professor is another way of being

made the stranger: To be asked where you are from is another way of
saying that you are not from here. Brown, black. Not from here, not
here, not.

The book thus taps into analyses of welfare state practices because they
play a racialising role in the oppression and exploitation of racialised peo-
ple in all the ways welfare implicates: Economically, socially, culturally and
psychologically. The way this may play out is conceptualised in Chapter 2
where we develop our post-colonial welfare analytics.
On this note, we designate this book’s contribution to the emerg-
ing research field on race, racism and racialisation in Denmark, and the
Nordic region more broadly, in terms of revisiting the initial and pro-
foundly sociological critique of social dynamics of super- and subordina-
tion in professional welfare work addressing newly arrived refugees in an
era of profound welfare state changes. As such, the book contributes fur-
ther nuances to how racial logics and privileges have been and are at play
in the work of the so-called progressive establishment of liberal-minded
welfare professionals, who practice care, education and development on
a state-privileged mandate. Adding a historical dimension to this socio-
logical reading of racial dynamics in Danish welfare work with refugees,
this book also contributes a post-colonial reading of welfare dynam-
ics with inherently racialising effects. In this way, the book taps into the
research field of post-colonial studies on race, racism and racialisation in
Denmark and the Nordic region, which has been implied in the preceding
outline of the book’s research context and will be further discussed in the
proceeding chapters.
24 Race and welfare

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69. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2018.1482741.
Williams, Fiona. 1996. ‘Racism and the Discipline of Social Policy: A Critique of
Welfare Theory’. In Critical Social Policy. A Reader, edited by David Taylor, 48–76.
London; Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage.
Wolfe, P. 2006. ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’. Journal of
Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409.
———. 2011. ‘Race the Trace of History: For Henry Reynolds’. In Studies in Settler
Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture, edited by Fiona Bateman and Lionel
Pilkington. Houndmills, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chapter 2

A post-colonial welfare analytics

With this book’s ambition to uncover forms of racism and racialisation in

Danish welfare work with refugees, we develop and unfold a post-colonial
welfare analytics. We do so by proposing a basic sociological reading of
sociation processes as conditioned on relations of superordination and sub-
ordination. We augment it with concepts such as remedial circularity and
compulsory interventions understood as welfare workers’ investments in
social relations. To this basic sociological reading, we add post-coloniality,
which exposes how post-colonial sociation is racially conditioned and
accompanied by nationalism, modernity, capitalism and liberalism.
Furthermore, we situate the Danish welfare nation-state in its global rela-
tions of (post)coloniality. Hence, we imply Danish welfare workers’ com-
plicity in the reproduction of post-colonial social structures and, thus, in
racial injustice.
Accordingly, with this chapter we display how our post-colonial welfare
analytics is developed through conceptual development in relation to the
specific object of study and, thus, works as an opening for the writing of and
analysis of stock stories in Danish welfare work with refugees.

Sociation: Superordination, subordination

and society’s corpus vile
Drawing on Georg Simmel’s focus on how interactions and relations create
and recreate myths about and structure society can help us conceptualise
how welfare work create and recreate societal forms. To Simmel, society is
made possible and is shaped through interactions and relations that human
beings are part of and from which sociation processes occur.
According to Simmel’s essays on respectively The Poor and The Stranger
(1965, 1971) as social types, the social type in a marginal position appears
to be an intrinsic dimension of such sociation processes as these processes
imply positioning groups of people in specific roles and ascribing them
certain qualities based on certain generalised expectations.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003097327-3
 A post-colonial welfare analytics 31

In The Poor, Simmel explicitly addresses the relation between welfare

agencies and practitioners of welfare on the one hand, and the recipients
of welfare on the other. In a previous piece of work, we have described
this relation as a relation between the welfare system and the ones help-
ing on the one hand, and the one deemed in need of help on the other
(Padovan-Özdemir and Øland 2017). Simmel explicitly conceptualises the
assistance to the poor as “a public institution” and as a relation with a
“unique sociological character” (1965, 121). It is an objectifying relation
where the poor is the object of the actions of the collectivity. Simmel states
that the assistance is:

… focused in its concrete activity on the individual and his situation.

And indeed this individual, in the abstract modern type of welfare, is
the final action, but in no way the final purpose, which consists solely
in the protection and furtherance of the community. The poor cannot
even be considered as a means to this end – which would improve their
position – for social action does not make use of them, but only of cer-
tain objective material and administrative means aimed at suppressing
the dangers and losses of which the poor imply for the common good
(1965, 121–122).

Accordingly, assisting the poor does not imply an objective of improving

the life conditions of the poor, as one might imagine. Rather, assistance to
the poor seeks to cushion the most extreme social differentiations so that
the established social structure based on this differentiation may remain
(Simmel 1965, 122).
In other words, the individual at the margin is an object made visible and
apparent; an object that has a certain social function and to which certain
social dynamics and structures are attached.
Hence, the individual at the margin can also be understood in terms of
his/her/their visibility in the eyes of welfare workers and society: “[I]t makes
the person into an object, it ‘handles’ him differently, it subjects him or
recognises him as a power standing against power. On the other hand, the
group incorporates him as an element of its life” (Ibid., 135). However, the
assistance is premised on the interests of the collectivity, and the individual
at the margin (the poor) is in no position to claim any right to this whole.
According to Simmel, this pacifying objectivation places the poor: “at a
distance from the whole, which at times makes him live as a corpus vile by
the mercy of the whole and at times because of this, makes him into its bitter
enemy” (Ibid., 136, italics in original). The poor or the receiver of welfare
as a social type is thus positioned as an expendable subject around which
society can operate and remake itself.
In The Stranger, Simmel conceptualises the stranger as a social type
characterised by: “the union of closeness and remoteness”; an individual
32 A post-colonial welfare analytics

fixed within the group, and the state of being a stranger is conceptualised
as a “specific form of interaction” (1971, 143). The stranger is thus an out-
sider within the group. Simmel specifies the tension attached to the way the
stranger relates to the whole:

the consciousness of having only the absolutely general in common has

exactly the effect of putting a special emphasis on that which is not
common […] For this reason, strangers are not really perceived as indi-
viduals, but as strangers of a certain type. Their remoteness is no less
general than their nearness
(Ibid., 148).

From this, we understand that a “generalized objectivation” can appear as

an empirical referent for internal objectification of the marginal individual
or group which we connect to racialisation by its effective anonymisation of
the refugee individual. This understanding is supported by Simmel’s writ-
ings on superordination and subordination in which he remarks that “the
essential vehicle of compassion and tenderness – fails easily if the sufferer
is not a nameable or visible individual but only a totality, which has no
subjective states of mind, so to speak” (1950, 226). Furthermore, Simmel
notes that the deployment of “forms and norms of personality” authorises
action by the superordinate and determines the suffering of the subordi-
nated (Ibid., 227).
The stranger’s synthesis of closeness and remoteness, i.e., the outsider
within, crystallising the stranger as object within society is like the thought
figure of the corpus vile attached to the poor. The outsider within society
and the corpus vile have the same societal function. This becomes evident
when Simmel writes that “[t]he poor are approximately in the situation of
the stranger to the group who finds himself, so to speak, materially outside
the group in which he resides” (1965, 125). The stranger and the poor have
in common the fact that they are: “confronted by the group. But this ‘being
confronted’ implies a specific relationship which draws the stranger into the
group life as an element of it” (Ibid., 135).
This relationship is one in which society revitalises itself and recon-
structs the roles and positions in society. This implies that the individual
at the margin is reified as an individual at the periphery and needed as
such – for societal reasons. Society thus relates to the individual at the
margin in relation to the rights of society, not the rights of the poor or
the stranger. Welfare is provided to secure and maintain society, and the
individual at the margin disappears as a legitimate autonomous subject in
such a sociation process.
It is obvious that this relationship is one of superordination and subordi-
nation described in detail by Simmel (1950), who understands the relation
of domination intrinsic to sociation processes. Accordingly, domination is
 A post-colonial welfare analytics 33

not about pure and brutal exploitation, but certainly a possibility, which
finds its subtle form in the desire “to break the internal resistance of the
subjugated” (Ibid., 181). Simmel writes that nobody “wishes that his influ-
ence completely determines the other individual. He rather wants this influ-
ence, this determination of the other, to act upon him. Even the abstract
will-to-dominate therefore, is a case of interaction” (Ibid.).
Important to note, Simmel reads and conceptualises power and domina-
tion by and through the effects and consequences it has on the subordinated.
In this way, we may say that sociation is most vividly captured in its processes
of domination; (re)creating and differentiating the subordinated – the Other.
Simmel examines three forms of subordination, i.e., subordination to an
individual, to a plurality and to an impersonal, objective principle (Ibid.,
181–303). The form of subordination taking place within the social relations
of welfare work can be encircled as a form of subordination to a plurality
inasmuch as subordination to a plurality refers to relations of domination
in the shape of an embodied abstraction (e.g., a state or an organisation).
In other words, we understand the concept of subordination to a plurality
as a social structure based on a hierarchy according to principles of dif-
ferentiation, which cannot be escaped due to its democratic inclusiveness.
For example, Simmel finds a homogenising will (Ibid., 243) in democratic
inclusiveness insofar as the “outvoting” favours and legitimises the will of
the majority, which then “appears as the natural representative of the total-
ity” (Ibid., 242). Thus, the will of the majority (i.e., the state) can exist and
be exercised in spite of existing antagonisms considering that “the minority
is, in principle, not excluded but included; and the majority acts, not in the
name of its own greater power, but in the name of the ideal unity and total-
ity” (Ibid., 243). In this way, democratic inclusiveness by means of outvoting
becomes brutal in the sense that the minority, due to his/her collective mem-
bership, is expected to participate in actions, which were “decided upon
against his will and conviction” (Ibid., 249).
Effectively, a differentiated membership of society occurs, which Simmel
elaborates in his essay on the social boundary. Here he writes, “[t]hat there
is a difference within a collective between a full member and a half- or
quarter-­member signifies a boundary between the latter and the whole to
which he nevertheless belongs” (Simmel 2007, 55). Accordingly, the differ-
entiated membership of society indicates a norm-setting radiating from the
centre “that indicate for some a barrier to their participation which does not
exist for others” (Ibid).
This dynamic of differentiation is governed, according to Simmel, by
“objectivity”, disregarding subjective impulses of the superordinate, who
instead governs by the “objective axiom of greatest advantages and least
sacrifices possible” (1950, 226). Although this may sound fair, subordination
to a plurality presents its brutality in its widely differentiated effects and its
anonymisation of the subordinated.
34 A post-colonial welfare analytics

At the same time, working with reference to objectivity assists hiding or

masking the subjective impulses and reckless desires of the single individual
executing subordination (Ibid., 226). In other words, we can say that the
welfare worker justifies his/her actions with the welfare states’ universalistic
principles of objectivity, equality and solidarity while inferring forms and
norms of personality, which determine not only the welfare workers actions,
but also the suffering of the subordinated (Ibid., 227).
In addition, we can understand the superordinated position of the wel-
fare worker as an “intermediate layer” in a stratification of superordinates.
Accordingly, the welfare worker is superordinate to the refugee but subor-
dinate to the higher echelons of the state. This socio-bureaucratic stratifica-
tion allows a direct transmission of domination to flow through the welfare
worker unto the refugee, while the intermediate layer of welfare workers
secures a clear separation between the highest and the lowest strata of the
social structure.

The investing welfare worker

The Simmelian sociology enables us to identify the social relations of subor-
dination and superordination within welfare work, which is in accordance
with other investigations of welfare provision, not least Nancy Fraser’s and
Linda Gordon’s genealogical study of “welfare related meaning of the word
dependency” (1994, 310) in which they carve out that “talk of dependency as
a social relation of subordination has become increasingly rare. Power and
domination tend to disappear” (1994, 330–331). Instead talk about moral
and psychological welfare dependency pertaining to the individual at the
margin has prevailed. We identify the social relations of subordination –
superordination as they unfold in welfare workers’ descriptions, imagina-
tions, evaluations and documentations, and who in turn are understood as
agents investing in the (re)production of society and its stratifying and dif-
ferentiating structure of superordinates and subordinates.
This conceptualisation also allows us to reinstate welfare workers as
agents practicing and investing in racialised welfare dynamics. The Critical
Race Theory scholar Zeus Leonardo has argued against the tendency
within what he terms white imagination to “accept the problem of racism
without an agent” (2004, 138). Leonardo wants to reinsert the subject of
domination, i.e., in his work the white subject, as someone that invests in
acts of domination and thus racialisation. Unlike coloured communities
who according to Leonardo know they depend on alternative knowledge
about racial relations:

white subjects do not forge these same counter-hegemonic racial under-

standings because their lives also depend on a certain development;
that is, colorblind strategies that maintain their supremacy as a group.
 A post-colonial welfare analytics 35

Like their non-white counterparts, white students are not taught anti-­
racist understandings in schools; but, unlike non-whites, whites invest
in practices that obscure racial processes
(2004, 144).

In other words, in this book we study welfare workers as social agents

producing and reproducing society, including its relations of domination,
superordination and subordination and racialisation, while simultaneously
furthering the disappearance and absence of race.
To our study, it is thus important not to side with welfare workers, but it is
equally important that we do not want to not side with them. We engage in
a study of welfare work as a sociological matter not unlike the way anthro-
pologist Tess Lea engage in a study of what she terms bureau-professionals
and bureaucratised race relations in Northern Australia as an anthropolog-
ical matter. The state and welfare state professionals are approached as a
cultural matter, as cultural processes and as human creations, and the focus
of attention is to understand “the overall effects of [the] developmental
logic” (Lea 2008, 10), and furthermore to enter the “complex socio-cultural
domain with its own passions an inanities, pains and pleasures, complici-
ties and truths, mysticism and magic” (Ibid.). This entails focusing on an
ongoing recreation of urgency, unmet needs and appropriate intervention
upon the subordinated (aboriginal or refugee) – what Lea formulates as a
“remedial circularity” (Ibid., 13). This remedial circularity is nurtured by
an endless perfectionism inherent in welfare bureaucracy whose remedial
logic lies in the belief in a future perfect, which in the end appears to be
nothing else but a cultural (majoritarian) abstraction of the good life (Ibid.,
x-xi). This perfectionism feeds into a circularity of adhering failure, which
then again needs to be remedied. According to Lea, welfare workers always
imagine their own involvement in the interventions of betterment (Ibid., 12).
The concept of remedial circularity is, thus, closely connected to the con-
cept of compulsory intervention that can be understood as the passionate
motor of welfare work’s doing good; an irresistible and uncontrollable urge
to intervene which makes the welfare worker dependent on those they want
to help. Welfare workers’ compulsion to intervene and do better is there-
fore always also an investment in their own superordination and their target
group’s subordination with the effect of sustaining the social structure of
stratification and differentiation.
From this conceptualisation follows an exploration of how the universal
welfare state project, on the one hand, becomes engaging for its practition-
ers, and how the interventionist thinking becomes interiorised on the other
hand. In other words, how interventionist thinking becomes an emotional
and stimulating compulsion, where imagining ways to interfere in the lives
of others is the welfare workers’ impulse since the welfare worker is in sync
with the normative state of “being the state” (Lea 2012, 116). The welfare
36 A post-colonial welfare analytics

worker thrives on “the emotional thrill of surfing crises and will convert
even banal issues into heightened occasions of disorder” (Ibid., 111), which
means that the welfare worker even may “join the manufacture of anarchic
social relations that must be amended as a reflex procedural action” (Ibid.).
Accordingly, we focus on the relations and interactions between wel-
fare workers and the refugee exactly because we see the refugee epitomise
a Simmelian corpus vile or outsider within as a necessary constitutive part
of the societal whole. This entails that the refugee also appears as an object
of intervention and experimentation through which welfare workers unfold
their relation to and creation of society. Consequently, focusing on welfare
workers’ relation to the refugee is a way of studying not only sociation pro-
cesses, but also its intrinsic super- and subordinating, racialised and racial-
ising welfare dynamics energised by objectivity, passion, compulsion and
emotion.

Post-coloniality, race and its companions – Completing

our post-colonial welfare analytics
In a theoretical sense, and to complete our post-colonial welfare analyt-
ics, we will elaborate on how the racial logic of super- and subordination
at work in welfare work is marked by post-coloniality in Denmark. By
post-coloniality we are referring to a condition shaped by the legacy of a
colonial experience, including how this experience – when it is acknowl-
edged – can alter the perception of, e.g., Danish welfare work with refugees
(Jensen 2015, 444–445). We deploy post-coloniality primarily as a devel-
oper of insight into how race and racialisation is part of Denmark’s living
legacy. By post-coloniality we also aim at describing how colonial subju-
gation shaped and shapes global relations and thus also Danish relations
to its imagined Other. This makes it possible to focus on how race and
racialisation are constitutional relational aspects of welfare society and
welfare work linked to the colonial condition that was set in place a good
while ago but lives on (Goldberg 2015). Additionally, post-coloniality and
its adhering racialisation processes have companions such as capitalism,
but also nationalism, modernity and liberalism, and these post-colonial
companionships are explored in the following sections.

Postcoloniality and nationalism

Alana Lentin identifies how race in European research into migration, eth-
nicity and minorities (MEM) is under-theorised and not used to “histor-
icise and decode the effects of migration in Western European societies”
(2014, 70). MEM research is embedded in the nation-state’s dynamic of solv-
ing migration in terms of quests for integration, and furthermore it does
not include colonial history and how it is connected to present-day power
Another random document with
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opened the door. Vroom stood there facing me, a revolver in his
hand.
“You did not consider,” he said calmly, “that my left eye also is
sympathetic; that I have followed every movement of yours; that I am
acquainted with your errand through the entries in your diary, which I
read line by line as you wrote. You shall not see her. I have sent her
far away.”
I rushed upon him in a frenzy. His revolver clicked but missed fire.
I bore him backward over a divan, my hands at his throat. His eyes
grew big as I strangled him. And into my left eye came a vision of my
own face, as Vroom saw it, distorted by the lust of murder. He died
with that picture fixed in his own eye, and upon the retina of the eye
that once was his, and is now mine, that fearful picture of my face
was fixed, to remain until my death.
I wear a black patch over my left eye. I dare not look upon the
horror that it hides.
 A SHIPBOARD ROMANCE
By Lewis Allen

“Isn’t that young Griggs and Miss Deering?” asked the captain,
peering down from the bridge at a dark spot silhouetted against the
moonlit sea.
“Yes, sir,” replied the second officer.
“It’s the speediest shipboard romance I’ve ever seen in all my
thirty years aboard a liner,” remarked the captain, smiling.
“I understand they never saw or heard of each other until they met
at dinner, Tuesday. Have you talked much with them, sir? I see they
sit next you at table.”
“Oh, yes, that’s true. Why, on the second dinner out he
complained because there was no jewellery shop aboard. She
looked as happy as a kid with a lollypop, and blushed.”
“Whew! Engaged within forty-eight hours! Going some! I suppose
they’ll be married by the American consul before they’ve been
ashore an hour.”
“Not a bit of doubt of it,” grinned the captain. “True love at sight in
this case, all right. Well, they have my blessings. I fell in love with my
Missus the same way, but we waited three months. I’ll go below.
What’s she making?”
“Nineteen, sir. Good-night.”
· · · · · · ·
Two hours later there came a terrific explosion away down in the
hold amongst the cargo. The ship trembled and listed.
“Women and children first! No danger! Time enough for all!”
shouted the officers, as the frantic passengers surged about the life-
boats.
 She was going down rapidly by her stern. There came another
explosion, this from the boilers.
“All women and children off?” bellowed the captain.
“Aye, aye, sir,” answered the second officer.
“Married men next!” shouted the captain as the men began
scrambling into the boats. A score of men paused, bowed, and
stepped back. Young Griggs tore his way through and started to
clamber into the boat.
“Damn you, for a coward!” cursed the second officer, dragging him
back.
Young Griggs yanked away and again clutched at the boat. This
time the second officer struck him square in the face and he went
down.
The boatload of married men was merely cut away, so low was
the ship in the water. Then came a lurch, and the waves closed over
the great ship.
· · · · · · ·
The next evening the Associated Press sent out, from its St. Louis
office, this paragraph:
“Among those lost was H. G. Griggs, junior partner of the Wells &
Griggs Steel Co. He leaves a wife and infant son in this city. It is
feared Mrs. Griggs will not recover from the shock.”
 THE COWARD
By Philip Francis Cook

Johnson stopped at the edge of the clearing and looked carefully

at the hut. A few yards back, where the spring crossed the trail, there
were tracks of a woman’s shoe-pack. It was country where one didn’t
live long without the habit of noticing things. The tracks were light,
mostly toes, and far apart for so small a foot. Johnson knew no
woman travelled north so fast, into the wilderness, and without a
pack, at that, for diversion, so he had sidestepped from the trail,
silently slipped off his tump-line, and circled to the edge of the
clearing, about a dozen yards from where the trail struck it. There in
the shadow of the pines he searched the clearing with his eyes. No
sign of life.
The door of the hut was shut, but a couple of boards had been
knocked off one of the window openings. The tall grass was
trampled toward the spring. Over to the right was a wreck of a birch,
where some one had been cutting firewood. Nothing especially
alarming, but Johnson was not popular and a few early experiences
had made him cautious. He stood there, silent, for perhaps fifteen
minutes, before he started for the door. There was still no sound, and
he stepped inside, gun in hand.
A rusty little yacht stove, a few shelves, and a rude table were all
the cookroom contained. Beyond was the bunkroom with a large
double-decked bunk against one wall, and opposite it the window.
Johnson went on in.
In the lower bunk lay the body of a man with a hunting knife
sticking in his breast. He lay staring at the ceiling with a rather silly
smile, as though he had been grinning, and death had come too
quickly for it to fade.
“MacNamara—— My God!”
 Johnson was unnerved. It was not often that men die by the knife
in the North country. Then a great load seemed to leave his
shoulders, for this dead man had sworn, not three weeks before, to
shoot him at sight—and Johnson was known to be a coward. No
more need he sleep with an eye open, or slip into towns at night.
MacNamara, thank God, was dead.
The dead man’s pack was in the other bunk, and scattered around
the room were hairpins, a small rhinestone ring, and a few other
feminine trinkets. “Woman!” said Johnson—and then he saw the
note. It was scrawled on the cover torn from an old magazine. It
read:

“Ed, you’ll find this sure. Mac was going to lay for you and pot you
at the White Rocks. I couldn’t find you, so I promised to come here to
Carmels with him. When he climbed in the bunk I give it to him—the
damned fool!”

It was unsigned.
The sun was very near the western hilltop. Johnson went to the
woods and returned with his pack; he dropped it near the stove in
the cookroom. Then he burned the note. Next he took a small bag of
parched corn out of his pack and concealed in it the woman’s little
things, and put the bag in his shirt. There remained only one thing to
do. Without looking at the dead man’s face he drew the knife out of
his breast and forced his own into the wound. The woman’s knife he
took to the door and hurled far out into the woods.
There wasn’t much daylight left. He closed the door quietly and
started for the trail, north.
“I’ll have to hurry,” said Johnson.
 THE HEART OF A BURGLAR
By Jane Dahl

Noiselessly the burglar drew his great bulk through the window,
deposited his kit of tools on the floor, and lowered the sash behind
him. Then he stopped to listen. No sound broke the midnight
stillness. Stealthily he flashed his lantern around the room in search
of objects of value. His quick ear caught the sound of a door opening
and hurried footsteps in the upper hall. Instantly he adjusted a black
mask and sprang behind an open door. Pistol in hand, every faculty
alert, he waited. He heard the soft thud of bare feet on the padded
stairs, then laboured breathing nearby.
As the electric light was switched on, brilliantly illuminating the
room, he gripped his revolver and stepped from behind the door.
“Hands up!” he cried in a hoarse whisper. Then he fell back with a
short, raucous laugh. He was pointing the revolver at a frightened
little mite of a girl shivering before him in her thin, white nightgown.
The small, terrified face touched him strangely, and, placing his pistol
in his pocket, he said, not unkindly:
“There, little girl, don’t be so scared—I’m not going to hurt you.
Just you be real still so as not to disturb the others until I get through
and get away, and you shan’t be hurt.”
The child looked at him much as she would an obstacle in her
path, and attempted to rush past him. He grabbed her and held her
tight.
“You little vixen!” he exclaimed. “Didn’t I tell you to keep still?”
“But I’ve got to telephone,” gasped the child, struggling to free
herself. “Just let me telephone and then you can do what you like
with me—but I can’t wait—I’ve got to telephone right away.” And she
made another effort to reach the telephone on the wall.
 Again the burglar laughed. “It’s very likely I’ll let you telephone for
the police. No, missy, you can’t work that on me. I guess I’ll have to
tie and gag you after all.”
Fresh terror found its way into the child’s face, and, for the first
time the burglar realized that he was not the cause of it. She was not
afraid of him. She fought and scratched him like a young tigress,
striving to free herself, and when she realized how powerless she
was in his strong arms she burst into tears.
“Oh! My brother is dying,” she cried, “and I want to telephone the
doctor. He has convulsions and mamma doesn’t know what to do—
and you won’t let me telephone the doctor!”
At the word “convulsions” the burglar went white—his hands fell
nervelessly to his sides—the child was free.
“Call the doctor, quick,” he said, placing the child on the chair in
front of the telephone. “What room are they in?”
“End of the hall, upstairs,” responded the child, with the receiver
already off the hook.
In three bounds the burglar was up the steps. He made for the
light which shone through a half-open door down the hall, striving to
formulate some explanation to offer the mother for his presence in
the house. When he gently pushed open the door he saw that none
was needed—the woman before him was oblivious to all the world.
Dishevelled and distracted, she sat rocking to and fro, clutching to
her breast the twitching body of a wee boy. Piteously she begged
him not to die—not to leave his poor mummy.
Quietly the burglar came to her side and gently loosened her
clasp.
“Give me the baby,” he said in a low voice. “He will be better on
the bed.”
Dumbly, with unseeing eyes, she looked at him, and surrendered
the child.
“He is dying,” she moaned—“dying—oh, my little, little man!”
“No, he’s not,” said the burglar. But as he looked at the wide-open,
glassy eyes and blue, pinched face of the child he had little faith in
his own words.
 He placed the baby upon the bed, and turning to the mother, said
in an authoritative voice:
“You must brace up now and save your child—do you
understand? I can save him, but you must help me, and we must be
quick—quick, do you understand?”
A glimmer of comprehension seemed to penetrate her palsied
brain.
“Yes, yes!” she said. “What shall I do?”
“Heat a kettle of water, quick. Bring it in his bathtub—and bring
some mustard, too. Hurry.”
Impatiently the mother was off before the last “hurry” was hurled at
her. Now that a ray of hope was offered, and something definite to
do, she was all action.
Reverently the burglar removed the baby’s nightrobe, and,
covering the little body with a blanket, he rubbed the legs and arms
and back with his huge hands—very, very gently, for fear their
roughness would irritate the delicate skin.
In a short time the mother was back with the hot mustard bath.
Together they placed the baby in the tub. His little body relaxed—the
glassy eyes closed—he breathed regularly—he was asleep.
“Thank God,” breathed the burglar, fervently, though awkwardly,
as though such words were strange to his lips.
“He is sleeping,” cried the mother rapturously. “He will live!”
As the mother was drying the little body with soft towels the
burglar said brokenly:
“I had a little boy once—about his size—two years old. He died in
convulsions because his mother didn’t know what to do and the
doctor didn’t get there in time.”
A sob of ready sympathy came from the heart of the woman.
“And his poor mother?” she asked. “Where is she?”
“She soon followed—she seemed to think the little fellow would
need her over there,” he replied in a tear-choked voice.
Half ashamed, he ran his sleeve across his eyes to remove the
moisture there. The woman’s tears splashed on the quietly sleeping
infant in her lap.
Both were startled by the clamorous ringing of the doorbell.
 “The doctor!” cried the man, suddenly brought to a realization of
his position.
The woman looked at him, and for the first time she really saw
him; for the first time the strangeness of an unknown man in the
house in the middle of the night was apparent to her. From his face
her glance wandered to the chair where the burglar had thrown his
mask and tools.
“Yes,” he said, answering her look, “I’m a burglar. I heard your
husband was out of town, and I came to rob you. You can call the
police, now.”
“No,” the woman interrupted. “Go into the next room and wait until
the doctor leaves. I want to help you to a better way of living than
this, if I can.”
After the doctor had departed the woman went into the next room.
The burglar was not there. Going downstairs she found the drawers
ransacked and all her valuables gone. On the table was a scrap of
paper. On it was written:

“Thank you, madam, for your offer, but I’m used to this life now
and don’t want to change.”

The woman thought of the sleeping baby upstairs, and a tender

smile came to her lips. That robbery was not reported to the police.
 THE REWARD
By Herbert Heron

No one knew just how popular Cobbe was till Dick Walling shot
him. It was Cobbe’s fault, but Walling didn’t wait to explain. Like
others, he didn’t know the degree of the deceased’s popularity but
he had a fair idea, and left Monterey as fast as his horse could take
him. The animal was the speediest in the county.
He stopped at Parl’s on his way up the valley. Parl greeted him
cordially. For half an hour they talked. The ’phone rang.
“That’s for me. I told Cobbe I’d stop here,” and with that Walling
took down the receiver.
“Hello! This Mr. Parl’s. Oh, yes, you want me. What? Well, I’m
damned! Not a sign. I’ll watch. Sure. What? How much? Whew!” He
ended in a long whistle, and hung up.
“I’ll be sliding along now.” He shook hands, mounted, and rode
toward Monterey till Parl shut the door. Then he circled, and went on
up the valley. A thousand dollars reward, dead or alive! He knew
now how popular Cobbe was.
They hadn’t even waited till the sheriff had failed to get him.
There are few ranches above Parl’s, and these have no
telephones, so he rode by, unconcerned. Toward midnight he came
to a place owned by a girl and her brother. He had loved the girl, but
decided that she didn’t care for him. The brother liked him, though,
and he could get some food for his stay in the mountains till things
quieted down and he could leave the country.
The brother came to the door, pale and troubled. “He can’t have
heard——” The thought was dispelled by the sudden relief on the
boy’s face.
“Thank God, it’s you, Dick! Mary’s dying, and——” Walling
followed him into the room where the girl lay, high in fever. “I couldn’t
leave her alone, to get the doctor, but now you can go——”
Something in Walling’s manner stopped him. “I’ll go, and you can
stay with her. Are you on Firefly? I’ll take him. It’ll be quicker.” Before
Walling could think what to say, the boy was gone. He went to call
him back. The girl moaned. What could he do? He couldn’t refuse
this duty fallen on him from the sky, even if the girl were a stranger;
and this was the woman he loved, ... but she was dying.
“Dick!... Oh, Dick!... Dick!...” The voice from the bed startled him.
He went softly over to see what she wanted. In her eyes there was
no recognition: she had spoken in delirium.
She loved him! But the rush of joy was swept away by the sight of
her suffering. He bathed her face and hands. By and by the fever
seemed less. She passed into a light sleep.
He made some coffee. While he drank it he had time to think of
himself. When the doctor came from Monterey.... The doctor would
know, and....
“I must clear out when I hear them coming.” Then another thought
forced its way in: “Go now, while you’ve still a good lead. Go now!”
He went to the stable, saddled a horse, and led him out. Then the
face of the girl came over him. He left the horse tied to the gate, and
went back. She was sleeping still, but brokenly. He couldn’t go.
It was a two hours’ ride to Parl’s, where the boy could ’phone.... If
the doctor left Monterey immediately, he’d get to the house about
five. It was now nearly two.
The girl slept. Walling knew it was the critical time. If she woke
better, she would probably recover. The thought was sweet to him. If
she went again into delirium.... He sat still, thinking. The hours
passed very slowly.
Suddenly Walling heard a step outside. He had heard no horse
coming. He looked out cautiously and saw four men with rifles.
Walling cocked his revolver, took down the boy’s rifle from the wall
and loaded it. He could account for some—and those who were left
might depart. It would be a battle, anyway. There was no use being
taken alive. Better be shot than hanged.
The leader made a signal. Walling raised his gun. And then—Mary
stirred. Her battle, like his, was still undecided. If she slept on, and
woke refreshed, she would get well. If not....
Walling laid down his rifle and stepped outside. The men covered
him. As he was taken down the road to the waiting horses, the
doctor and the girl’s brother drove up.
“She’s asleep,” said Walling.
The boy showed no surprise—he had heard the story from the
doctor—but his voice was pitiful:
“Why didn’t you?... I didn’t know.... Oh, my God! ... and you stayed
... when you could have got away!” He turned to the men with a
hopeless look. “It’s my fault!” he cried. “He stayed with my sister. I
thought she was dying. He didn’t tell me he couldn’t stay! He’d be
safe in the mountains by now.... Oh, my God!”
The leader glanced at his companions. They were stern men, but
they were moving uneasily. The situation was unbearable.
“How long have you been here?”
“Since about midnight,” answered Walling, though he couldn’t see
what difference it made. The leader took out his watch.
“Twelve minutes past five now. Say, we’ve been twelve minutes
getting you, that leaves five hours. We’ll stay here and rest our
horses. At twelve minutes past ten we’ll start again. That suit you,
boys?”
“What do you mean?” asked Walling.
“I mean you still have your five hours’ start; you haven’t lost
anything by staying with the sick girl.”
Walling went back to the house. Mary was still sleeping. He
touched her hand. It seemed cooler.
“Tell her I’ll write—if I can.”
“Good-bye,” said the boy.
As he went out Walling saw the men unsaddling their horses. He
took off his hat to them as he rode away into the mountains.
 THE FIRST GIRL
By Louise Pond Jewell

They had been talking of the Marsdens, who had just gone down
with the torpedoed ship; and among the kindly and affectionate
things said about them, the exceptional happiness of their married
life was mentioned. Some one spoke of this as being rather
surprising, as they had married so late in life; then, naturally enough,
another remarked what a different world it would be if every man had
been accepted by the first girl he had proposed to. And he added,
that sometimes he thought that first choice was one of truer instinct,
less tinctured with the world’s sophistication than any later one. The
bachelor contributed with a laugh that that first girl had one
advantage over the wife, no matter how perfect the latter—that she
remained the ideal. And then, little by little, they came to the point of
agreeing to tell, then and there, in the elegance and dignity of the
clubroom suited to the indulgence of their late middle years, each
one about that first girl, and what she had meant to him.
The Explorer began.
“I met her in the Adirondacks, and knew her only one summer.
After that, I couldn’t see her just as a friend—and she was unwilling
to be anything else to me. So, all my life, I’ve associated her with the
woods and lakes, with the sincerity and wholesomeness of the great
Outdoors. She had the freedom of Diana, and her lack of self-
consciousness. I never saw her except roughly clad, but she always
suggested that line of Virgil—‘She walked the goddess.’
“She was strong and lithe as a boy, could climb mountains, row,
play golf and tennis with any of us; and what a good sport. She
never fussed over getting caught in drenching rains, being bruised
and torn by rocks and thorns; and once when a small party of us lost
our way, and had to spend the night on a lonely mountainside within
sound of wolves and catamounts, her gayety made a ‘lark’ of it. She
could drive horses with a man’s steady hands; she knew the birds by
name, and all the plants and trees that grew within miles, and she
was familiar with the tracks and habits of all the small creatures of
the forest. To me she was—simply wonderful, and, I confess, always
has been.”
“What became of her?” they asked.
“Later, she married—a man who didn’t know a pine from a palm! I
always wondered....”
The Diplomat came next.
“That sort,” he said, “is a little too independent and upstanding to
belong to my type of woman. The rough, tanned skin, the strong,
capable hands—big, probably—the woolen skirt and blouse—they’ll
do very well in a girl chum, for a summer. But when it comes to a
wife, one’s demands are different. The girl I wanted first—and I’ve
never forgotten her; she was a queen—I knew during my first winter
in Washington. You talk of Diana; I prefer Venus—wholly feminine,
but never cloying. She was the kind that looks best in thin, clinging
things. I remember yet a shimmering green and silver ‘creation’ she
wore at the Inaugural Ball. She didn’t take hikes with me through
scratchy forests, but she’d dance all night long, and her little feet
would never tire. She didn’t handle guns or tillers, but you should
have seen her pretty fingers deftly managing the tea things in a
drawing-room, of a winter’s afternoon, or playing soft, enchanting
airs on the piano at twilight; or, for the matter of that, placing a
carnation in a man’s button-hole—I can feel her doing it yet! She
probably didn’t know birds, but, by George! she knew men! And
there wasn’t one of us young fellows that winter that wouldn’t gladly
have had her snare him. Only—that was the one thing she didn’t do!”
“Didn’t she ever do any snaring?”
“Oh—finally. And—the pity of it!—a man who couldn’t dance, and
had no use for Society! Sometimes....”
“How about you?” the third member of the group was asked, an
Engineer of national reputation. “Was there a first best girl for you,
too?”
 “Guilty!” he replied. “But my account will sound prosaic after these
others. You know, my early days weren’t given to expensive summer
camps, nor to Washington ballrooms. I made my own way through
college, and ‘vacations’ meant the hardest work of the year. But
when I was a Senior, all the drudgery was transformed. Paradise
wouldn’t have been in it with that little co-educational college campus
and library and chapel and classrooms; for I found her. Just a
classmate she was. You tell how your girls dressed; I never noticed
how she dressed; it might have been in shimmering green and silver,
and it might have been in linsey-woolsey, for all I knew. But—she
could think, and she could talk! We discussed everything together,
from philosophy and the evolution of history to the affairs of the day. I
spent every hour with her that I could, and in all sorts of places.
There’s a spot in the stackroom of the old library that I always visit
yet, when I go back—because of her. I’ve never known a woman
since with such a mind, such breadth and clearness; and it showed
in her face—the face of Athena, not Diana or Venus! I believed that
with such a companion at my side, to turn to in every perplexity, I
could make my life worth while. But she—saw it differently.”
“Is she a feminist now?” slyly inquired the Explorer.
“She, too, married, after a while—a fine fellow, but—anything but
a student. I can’t help....”
“Mine,” said the fourth, the Socialist, “will sound least dramatic of
all—though I assure you the time was dramatic enough for me. You
talk about your goddesses; my pedestal held just a sweet human
girl,—a nurse, serving her first year at the hospital, that time we had
the smash-up in ’80. And you talk of beauty, and style, and brain; but
with me it isn’t of a pretty face or graceful form I think when I recall
that magic time; and least of all is it of any intellectual prowess. I’m
not sure whether she knew the difference between physics and
metaphysics, or whether she’d ever heard of a cosine. But she was
endowed with the charm of charms in a woman—sympathy. She
would listen by the hour while I poured out to her my young hopes
and ambitions; I could tell her all the dreams a young fellow
cherishes most deeply—and would die of mortification if even his
best friend guessed at their existence. She always understood; and
though she talked little herself, she had the effect of making me
appear at my very best. I felt I could move the world if she would just
stand by and watch. But in spite of her kindness and gentleness she
turned me down. Many times I’ve questioned....”
“That was all right for a sick boy,” commented the Diplomat, “but
for a wife, a girl like Alison——”
“‘Alison,’” echoed the Engineer, involuntarily, “a nice name,
anyway; that was her name.”
“Why——” the Explorer mused—“that’s an odd coincidence; so
was hers—Alison Forbes.”
“Alison Forbes”—breathed the Socialist—“Alison Forbes—
Marsden!”
And suddenly there was a silence, and the four friends looked
strangely at one another. For they knew in that moment that there
had been in those lives of theirs left far behind, not four first girls, but
one—seen with different eyes.
 A SOPHISTRY OF ART
By Eugene Smith

On the station platform in Quanah, one morning, I stopped

“waiting for the train” for a moment to watch a man and woman
painting on a large signboard across the way. The inevitable
wiseacre in the little group of travelling men explained that they were
really talented artists, a man and wife.
The husband had contracted—er—a throat affection in their studio
back East, and physicians had ordered him to the open air and high,
dry altitude of west Texas. So they had come, and were earning
expenses, making a series of paintings on signboards,
advertisements of a lumber corporation, throughout the Panhandle
country.
I walked out across the tracks near where the slightly stooped
husband, in overalls, and his little wife, looking very attractive in her
neat apron and sunbonnet, were at work.
There was a pathos about the thing that went straight to my heart.
The loyal little woman and the stricken husband there in the clear,
crisp morning air and sunshine, earnestly striving, undismayed.
Something—a common sympathy—thrilled me.
And now the painting seemed artistic. The general idea was a
lovely cottage home (built, of course, with Oakley’s lumber, as was
intimated). But the cottage was not glaringly new—rather mellowed a
bit with time, it seemed, and was the more homelike for it.
In the front stood a sweet little woman, looking down a winding
road, and in the expression on her face, painted by the real little
woman, was joyous hope—almost certainty—of seeing the husband
coming down the road to her and home, after his day’s work.
The colours of sunset added to the beauty of the conception,
which altogether made desirable the having such a little wife to wait
for one each evening at such a little cottage home. And that was the
purpose of it; when you thought of home-building, you also thought
of Oakley’s lumber.
The painters were happy in their work—happy as two birds
building a nest. The wife, seated on her little stepladder, with palette
and brushes, was deftly pointing up the vines about the windows, as
all good wives should. She hummed something of a tune, now and
then looking gayly down at him, who laughed back up at her from his
work on the winding road and distant trees.
A courteous inquiry and my being an Easterner, was a passport
into their confidences. “We only paint a little while in the cool of the
morning and afternoon of each day,” he was saying to my remarks
on the weather. “It’s dangerous to lay on much paint at a time,” he
continued, “for the sand ruins it.”
“Oh, if it wasn’t for the sand storms!” she chimed in. “But we love
the country, and the folks, too; they seem so much a part of the out
of doors, you know. Though we hope—we expect—to go back home
before long.” She was looking fondly down at him.
“I had a little trouble with my throat,” he explained depreciatively.
“But this western air has just about put me in the running again. It’s
wonderful.” I could see the thankfulness in his eyes, as he smiled up
at his companion. I didn’t blame him for loving life.
In the smoking-car of the belated train we travelling men
discussed the case of the painters.
“It’s only his throat that bothers him a bit,” I denied with some
heat. “Besides, he is nearly recovered, and looks it.”
“Yes, I know; that’s characteristic. It’s what they all say when they
begin to perk up in a change of climate,” persisted the Pessimist in
the crowd. “But the average is 100 to 1 against them. I’ve seen too
many lungers out here in this country.”
Damn a Pessimist with his statistics, anyhow!
· · · · · · ·
Several months later I made another trip through the Texas
Panhandle country, and at each town going up from Quanah toward
Amarillo I saw one of the Oakley lumber advertisements prominently
displayed on large bill-boards. They were all the same, like the first
one; that is, if your glance was but a passing one. But to me, who
had grown interested in Art and things artistic, there was a difference
in the paintings. Yes, a difference! I wasn’t so sure at first. “It’s just
imagination,” I pooh-poohed the idea. But later on——
Anyhow, I soon found myself going directly from the station, on
each arrival, to look up the Oakley bill-board. It was never hard to
find. Somehow, I just got to wondering—worrying—about the welfare
of the young husband, the artist, I had met.
In the first few of the paintings I found portrayed all the life and
glad hope and expectancy that I had seen some time before in the
one at Quanah.
Then came the inevitable. Strange as it was, I knew that I had
been expecting—dreading—it; though rather in the gossip around
the hotels than in the pictures themselves, where I really found it.
That was the only surprise.
I remember, in Clarendon—the first town after you get up on the
Cap-rock of the Staked Plains—there I saw—or imagined—it first.
One is ever instinctively wary of eyesight in that land of mirages.
And in each succeeding village and town as I travelled westward
and upward, I felt it—saw it—there on the bill-boards, as if painted in
half-unconsciously by the artist: a faint trace of querulous doubt in
the face of the little, waiting wife, spirit of melancholia lying dull in the
picture.
As I was getting out of Goodnight one afternoon—a little ahead of
time—in the automobile that daily makes the round trip to Claude,
we drove past the Oakley signboard. I was in a hurry to get on to
Claude to see the trade before night, and be ready to leave for
Amarillo the next morning. But forgetting all this at the sight of the
picture on the bill-board, I asked the chauffeur to stop a minute
before it.
She was still smiling, the little wife waiting there in front of their
home for her husband’s return, but the smile was hollow and lifeless.
I knew—could see—she was full of uneasiness and dread, and was
only smiling to keep up her courage.
“That’s quite a lumber advertisement—there,” I ventured. The
chauffeur was drinking water from the canvas canteen.
 “Uh-huh!” he gulped. “I seen ’em painting it.”
“A man and woman?”
“Well, yes; but the woman did most of it. I saw her there every day
for some time. Once in a while the man—her husband, I guess—
would be tryin’ to help paint, but he was all in. You could tell it, the
way he looked.”
I winced at his words. So here it was, confirmed, what I had been
hoping was only imagination. Confound that Pessimist!
“They must have painted a good many of these signs; I see them
everywhere,” I continued, in a disinterested manner.
“There’s another’n over at Claude,” yawned the chauffeur. “I think
I remember hauling them people over in the car.”
“Over to Claude?”
“Yes—I fergit. I never pay much attention to the folks I haul,” he
remarked casually, eying me in a bored way.
Then we drove on.
A day later I arrived in Amarillo from Claude, glad, for it was my
trip’s end. I started walking uptown from the station to stretch my
legs, besides—well, there across the street, on a vacant lot, was the
Oakley bill-board, and the picture. The late afternoon sunlight fell full
across it.
I looked at the woman in the picture, whom I had come to know
for the real little wife, the artist, painting from her heart. She stood
smiling, but behind the smile I read doubt and dread realized, and
hope—almost—dying hard. For the smile was but a poor attempt,
and the joyous expectancy I saw shining in her eyes months before
at Quanah was not there now. There was a subtle air of
unmistakable despair about her. Her very frailty and dependency and
loyal effort to keep her smile wrung from me a quick sympathy.
I turned back to the drab routine of life sadly, and picking up my
grips, saw the Pessimist standing on the sidewalk with his detestable
knowing look. There behind him came the Wiseacre. It was one of
those little coincidences of a drummer’s life which so often find the
same parties together again.
“I was just looking at another one of the pictures—the last one, I
guess,” I said suddenly, feeling unashamed of my concern and