Introduction

People don’t realise how much racism there is within themselves. Everyone of course thinks that: ‘I’m not’, ‘not in us’, and ‘not in our daycare’, but there are small things that one does and things one doesn’t do, small words… (Eija)

Eija, an interviewee in this study, presents a common view in Finnish early childhood education and care (ECEC): racism is located somewhere else, ‘not in us’ and ‘not in our daycare’. Even the National Core Curriculum for Early Childhood Education and Care condemns racism in all its forms (EDUFI 2022, 20) and on a global level, Finland is presented as a ‘success story’ of equality, education, and human rights (Kasa et al., 2022). However, recent reports show the opposite. At the EU level, a report by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, ‘Being Black in the EU/Second European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey’ (2018) studies the racism faced by people of African descent in 12 different EU countries. Alongside Finland, the report examines Ireland, Austria, Luxembourg, Germany, Denmark, Malta, Sweden, France, Italy, the UK, and Portugal. The report concludes that among all these studied countries, Finland has the highest amount of experienced racism. At the national level, a ‘Report of Racism and Discrimination - Everyday Experiences for People of African Descent in Finland’ was released by Finland’s Non-Discrimination Ombudsman in 2020. This report studies experiences of racism among people of African descent living in Finland. The report concludes that one-fifth of the respondents have experienced racism already in ECEC. Nevertheless, Finland is sometimes portrayed as an exceptional country fully outside racist and colonial powers (Rastas, 2016). Likewise, Finnish teacher training proves to appear ‘exceptional’, while pleading both innocence and ignorance in responding to inequalities and racism (Kasa et al., 2022). This contradiction needs more research.

As studies agree that racism is already present in ECEC, despite legal obligations to protect children from all discrimination (EDUFI, 2022; UN, 1989), an antiracist approach to actively recognize and resist racism is necessary for education. One of the main priorities of antiracism is to combat the production, organization, and regulation of race knowledge, which is repeated in education institutions from early education onwards (Alemanji, 2016). Thus, an antiracist approach demands active resistance against racism, starting in ECEC. This article contributes to the under-researched field of racism in ECEC by examining how teachers can resist racism and dismantle White normativity through an antiracist work approach. Thus, the research questions are: What kind of racism do ECEC teachers recognize in ECEC? How are teachers committed to opposing racism in their work? And, what do teachers claim are the main obstacles they face in the adoption of an antiracist approach in Finnish ECEC institutions? The focus of this study is on teachers, as the main pedagogical responsibility lies with them. Multi-professional teams in the Finnish ECEC usually include childcare nurses, but planning, evaluating, and developing pedagogical choices are a part of ECEC teachers’ work duties (OAJ, Trade Union of Education, 2019). Further, teachers’ pedagogical expertise influences the other members of the team (Halttunen, Waniganayake & Heikka, 2019). Therefore, teachers have the most opportunities and power to reflect on and evaluate pedagogical choices in ECEC teams. The data used for this article was collected in the Spring of 2021 by interviewing six ECEC teachers working in Helsinki. During the semi-structured interviews, the interviewees reflect on their experiences with and thoughts about racism, antiracism, and White normativity in their work. The collected data were analysed by drawing on discourse analysis. Footnote 1

Theoretical Frameworks: Processes of Racism, Racialization, and Whiteness in Education

The key focus of this article is on how White normativity, racialization, and racial hierarchies are reproduced and resisted in education. The main theorizations of racism(s) in this article are ‘colourblindness’, multiculturalism, and denial of racism, as they appear as main themes later in the analysis. The connections between antiracism and education are viewed as education’s opportunity to challenge and resist knowledge based on White supremacist and patriarchal hegemony, as in Perlow (2018). The formation of giving systemic privileges to those racializedFootnote 2 as White is called White privilege, and the normative, hierarchical system normalizing Whiteness is called White normativity. Thus, even when a ‘race’Footnote 3 is a socially and historically constructed, changing category, it has a social reality and effects on the lives of people racialised as, for example, as ‘White’ or as ‘Black’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2006, 9).

Racism in education is often approached from the viewpoint of ‘multiculturalist assimilation’, where racial power and racial hierarchies remain unacknowledged and unchallenged (Lentin, 2004). Even education professionals combine people from various backgrounds under the subject position of ‘immigrant’, a category constructed as contrary to ‘Finnishness’, and replace the concept of ‘race’ with culture (Kurki et al., 2019). Thus, the effects of racism might be difficult to vocalize, as questions of racism are often directed toward matters of cultural difference (Rastas, 2009). As the cultural standard is set by a dominant group and other cultures are measured against it, a cultural hierarchy is simultaneously constructed (Kendi, 2019). Therefore, in cultural racism, the status quo of racial power is justified by referring to cultural superiority instead of biological racism.

Racial hierarchies are also maintained through a ‘colourblind’ approach (Lentin, 2015), sometimes referred to as ‘colour-evasive’ to avoid ableist expressions (Annamma, Jackson & Morrison, 2016). The idea of ‘not seeing colour’ is created to exempt those benefiting from racial structures (Bonilla-Silva, 2006). Colour-evasiveness, along with projections and denials of racism allow racism to be isolated to evil acts by ill-willed people, ‘bad apples’ (Ahmed, 2012; Seikkula, 2019). This strategy is tied to the lack of identifying racist structures and power while ignoring the different realities produced by racially organized structures (Kendi, 2019). As a result, racism is individualized and projected elsewhere, to ‘not in our daycare’, while maintaining the racial status quo.

There is a lack of studies on the connections of racism to the context of ECEC. This is despite earlier results presenting how already young children, from the age of three, start internalising the norm of Whiteness (Tatum, 2017, 112) and understand and use the power of racialization to gain power among their peers (Van Ausdale & Feagin, 2001). Due to the privileged idea that racism does not connect to the worlds of young children, adults feel urged to deny that children can understand and use racial concepts (Van Ausdale & Feagin, 1996) and ECEC staff may adopt the colour-evasive approach in their work, considering it neutral (Husband, 2011). Despite the slow increase in international research on ECEC and racism (see e.g., Essien & Wood, 2021; Sturdivant & Alanis, 2021; Yu, 2020), the amount of research in Finland remains scarce. As demonstrated in the introduction, children encounter racism already in the Finnish ECEC; for example, Rastas (2009) presented that young adults have vivid memories where children deploy ‘race’ and racial slurs in their fights, unrecognised by adults. In Finnish education, racism is only acknowledged as such when there is physical violence, but abusive words or biased attitudes are not fully recognised as racism (Souto, 2011). The active reproduction of Whiteness is visible in the homogenous narratives about Finland and Finnishness (Hummelstedt et al., 2021) and the national minorities in educational material remain nearly non-existent (Kohvakka, 2022) or are portrayed through problematic representations as have been shown, such as in cases of Sápmi (Ranta & Kanninen, 2019) or Roma and Travellers (Helakorpi, 2019). That being so, the Finnish context is full of normative Whiteness and harmful representations of those excluded from it, reinforced in institutional settings, such as early education centres (Rastas, 2004).

Methods, Data Sampling, and Analysis

The study is based on six semi-structured interviews with ECEC teachers. The interviews were semi-structured to enable the interviewees to share their reflections and experiences on the topic (Kvale, 2007). The aim was to understand the interviewees’ perceptions of racism and what kind of antiracist acts and obstacles they identify in their work. All six interviewees participated in two-hour antiracist workshops commissioned by the municipality of Helsinki and organized by the Peace Education Institute, the aim of which was to provide in-service training to all its education personnel on the topic. Interviewees were sampled from this group to ensure that the interview used commonly understood terminology. No shared terminology would have risked the scope of the topics in the interviews being either too wide or too limited for the purpose of this study. The directors from the early education centres participating in the training were contacted and asked to forward the invitation to participate to teachers in their units, who then contacted me directly to participate. It can be assumed that the participants were interested in the antiracist approach as they voluntarily devoted their time to participate. The interviews lasted from 40 min to 1 h and 15 min online in March 2021. Ethical guidelines were followed throughout the study, including obtaining approval from the city of Helsinki, and the responses were pseudonymized.

The interviewees were all assumedly women and are named Leena, Kerttu, Elli, Katariina, Eija, and Hannele in this article. Their work experience varied from 7 to 30 years: two were ECEC special education teachers, one was an ECEC director and three were regular ECEC teachers. Three of the participants explicitly vocalized their Whiteness during the interviews, and the other two were racialised as White or White-passing and did not otherwise articulate their identity. One participant shared during the interview that she belonged to a Finnish ethnic minority group, but to protect her anonymity, no further details will be described. It is also relevant to mention that as the researcher leading the interviews, I benefit from White privilege, which probably impacted the data collection and interpretation, as my point of view is partial [see Haraway (1988) and Harding (2004)] and coloured by the White normativity in society.

The interviews were in Finnish. After transcribing them, the most relevant parts were translated into English. The data were analysed in accordance with the Foucauldian idea, explained by Weedon (1999) as discourses of power being material and embodied in both institutions and individuals. Thus, racism through discourses constructed in everyday social interaction and practices, forming a social order together with structural-level practices (Van Dijk, 2015). In the analysis, the transcriptions were read several times and reflected on with the research questions in mind. The categories formed were, for example, racism, antiracism, and White normativity. After the formulation of these categories, they were analysed by forming three larger themes. The three final themes, presented in this order in the following chapter, were: perceptions of racism in ECEC, teachers’ commitments to antiracism and possible obstacles to applying an antiracist approach.

Perceptions of Racism and White Normativity in ECEC

All the interviewees observed unequal or racist treatment of parents by ECEC staff. They described prejudices, insulting comments and judgements, and deliberate avoidance of contact with some parents, especially those without a shared language. In the following example, Eija demonstrates how staff members use the lack of shared language as an excuse for avoidance when parents arrive to pick up their children:

(Staff) don’t encounter them or say anything, or don’t go to talk to parents. When they (parents) come, they (staff) don’t talk about their child’s day, perhaps thinking ‘oh they won’t understand anyway’, or feeling it’s difficult to go and talk to them. (Eija)

As mechanisms of racism require treating some individuals as merely representatives of a particular group, the avoidance of certain parents can originate from generalized and racialized stereotypes. This can lead to avoiding considered people for fear of language struggles or cultural differences, resulting in different treatment, and thus reproducing inequality and racism. Furthermore, if some parents unwillingly lack information about their child’s day in ECEC, this contradicts the ECEC curriculum’s principles stating that interaction and cooperation with parents require staff to take the initiative and play an active role, and parents have a right to hear about their child’s day (EDUFI 2022, 16; 35–36).

Some of the interviewees’ answers contained the idea of multiculturalism and immigrants as recent phenomena. This rhetoric links Finnishness to Whiteness, and immigrant-ism remains undefined but connects strongly to multiculturalism and non-Whiteness. As presented earlier, the notions of ‘immigrants’ or ‘people from other cultures’ are often used to avoid discussing ethnicity or race. Therefore, Finnishness in ECEC appears homogeneous, and it serves as a supreme norm to which all other cultures are compared:

If a co-worker is often on sick leave and has an immigrant background, then it’s framed as: ‘Okay, it’s so freezing cold today that perhaps she won’t come to work.’ Whereas, if it was a Finnish co-worker, people would pay no attention. (…) We have a few workers with immigrant backgrounds, and I think it’s visible in the work community, that people do not interact with them in the same way as they do with their other co-workers. (Katariina)

Repetition and reinforcement of the stereotypical assumptions about ‘Finnishness’ and ‘immigrants’ as contradictions confirm the connections between Finnishness and whiteness and can prevent the recognition of racism. For example, children differing from the White norm, such as students with an immigrant background, are viewed as a single group sharing negative features (Juva & Holm, 2017). As a result, Finnishness becomes an excluding and unquestioned norm, but not limited to only assumptions of whiteness; it also includes the norms of Finnish as a first language and Lutheranism (Tuori, 2009). For example, one of the interviewees described how in the ECEC recruiting process the background information she provided for her interview, including her name and religion, resulted in inappropriate treatment and racist assumptions:

They had my CV there, stating that my mother tongue was Finnish and that I had completed all my education in Finland. But… ‘you speak Finnish so well, what’s your mother tongue?’ … Yeah. And then later when I was recruited, ‘Do you visit your homeland often?’ Well, my family lineage in Finland goes back to the 16th century… (Leena)

The assumptions of homogenous Finnishness in structures result in failing children in need of help. In the interviews of the director and special education teachers, who work most closely with other services such as childcare centres, it seems that access to additional support depends on a single adult. Families fall between the services structured around the invisible norms of Finnishness that require, for example, language skills and knowledge of how to operate in institutional systems. This prevents children from receiving help equally to other children due to their different family backgrounds. As a result, the possibility of accessing support varies even among children attending the same early education centre, placing children in unequal positions. Thus, systematic racially discriminating practices in institutions can be understood as structural racism. The following extract demonstrates how access depends on adults’ ability to ‘push’ the system, including skills and knowledge of how it works:

I’m not sure if all our customers receive similar services from the child health centre or child welfare. Is everyone taken care of as well? (…) if there is a parent with the skills and knowledge to take care of things, their children’s issues are taken care of. Better than those children, whose parents themselves don’t know how to operate the system and how much you need to push it with your effort. (Hannele)

The examples presented above demonstrate avoidance, cultural racism, and racist structures. The interviewees also described overt incidences of racism among the staff. These manifest as directly racist vocabulary. Some examples mentioned by the interviewees were co-workers referring to some people with, for example, the derogatory label of ‘hairy hands’ (in Finnish ‘karvakäsi’), or placing a ‘funny’ cartoon, including the n-word, in a space meant for all staff for the time of break during their workday:

For example, using a racist term, and then masking it by claiming it was a joke, like: ‘Not really, I don’t really think like that, just joking.’ These have been not visible to kids but in a work community. And then we had to discuss how this joke would feel if we had a substitute teacher, who was dark-skinned, and she saw a ‘funny’ (E does quotation marks with fingers) thing, a cartoon that has the n-word in it, on the table of the coffee room. (Elli)

Despite the many examples of racism in ECEC provided by the interviewees, they also describe different strategies for denying racism in their work communities. The projection and denial of racism prevent the opportunity to recognize or act against racism and racist structures. Thus, the status quo is maintained when there is no space for or recognition of the need for antiracist work. Strategies used are a full denial of racism or an externalisation of it, locating racism elsewhere. Racist views are also simultaneously denied and expressed by sentences such as, ‘I’m not racist, but…’, defined as a semantic strategy by Bonilla-Silva (2006).  This can be observed in the following quote:

At the very start of the (antiracist) training, in the common space where we studied, ‘well, not in our daycare’ and ‘but we are not racists’ was very strong (…) Yeah, and then we always move on to discuss: ‘But we always look… I don’t see colour, I have this, I see a person as a person, BUT…’ (Leena).

Another strategy demonstrated in the extract denying racism can be found in claims of ‘I don’t see colour’ or ‘I see a person as a person’. As described earlier, a colour-evasive strategy might be seen as a neutral one, which might explain why the colour-evasiveness approach also seems popular in the Finnish ECEC. However, Rastas (2009) and Alemanji (2016) both describe how, as parents of children racialised as non-White in the Finnish context, they had to discuss race and its effects with their children already at a young age. Therefore, the possibility to forward the colour-evasive approach to children as ‘neutral’ might be a sign of White privilege and the upkeep of White normativity.

Teachers’ Commitments to Antiracism

As the most important part of their antiracist work, the interviewees named the treatment of all children’s families as individual family units. They aimed to encounter each family as unique in its needs instead of seeing families through generalized and racialised assumptions. The importance of cooperation with guardians is emphasized several times in the national curriculum for ECEC (EDUFI, 2022), and thus guardians must be met without racialised expectations. The interviewees describe aiming for this by assuring that all families receive an equal amount of attention from the staff, even if this requires extra time and effort, for example, using pictures or requesting an interpreter. In the following extract, Elli describes how she actively tries to dismantle her racializing assumptions and treat children and their families as unique:

I don’t know, it always makes you stop and think when you notice that from the name of a child, you assumed they would be dark-skinned, and then you see that he is not. (…) I’m prone to these (assumptions) occasionally too, I can admit that. Certain kinds of assumptions about how people act in some cultures. Like, thinking very strongly somehow ‘well but they don’t ever…’ or ‘children can’t participate in church services’ kind of, so. But we’ve discussed this a lot. These are the kinds of things we go through in the conversations with each family when we make a child’s development plan. So precisely not this, ‘what it is like in your culture’ but ‘what it is like in your family’ with all things. (Elli)

All six interviewees recognized White normativity in ECEC, and four of them reflected on the opportunities to dismantle White normativity and White privilege more deeply. As in the following quote, White privilege is not only related to skin colour; it’s also related to normative and excluding assumptions of what ‘Finnishness’ means and what kinds of bodies are assumed to be Finnish:

How easy it is for me to speak… Since I don’t think I’ve ever faced racism in my life due to my skin colour. Since I’m a White, Finnish teacher, how could I step into someone else’s shoes and position? And also, to see those things as self-evident to me but not to someone else, how in the same situation totally different things are expected and active consideration of that. … Since I present the majority in Finland, where I live now, and then ‘oh yeah right’ how in every single thing and in every single place some people are judged for being a different colour, or speaking a different language, or then speaking perfect Finnish even if their skin tone could lead you to assume something else. (Kerttu)

As the most crucial feature for adopting an antiracist approach, the interviewees’ named willingness for both personal and pedagogical self-reflection, even when it feels ‘painful and tiring’, as one interviewee described. Self-reflection and recognition of one’s privilege and lack of knowledge are required to develop an antiracist approach (Alemanji, 2016). This recognition and reflection on one’s racial stereotypes, especially assumptions of Whiteness, were apparent in some of the responses, as in, for example, above in Kerttu’s described assumptions of Finnish skills based on one’s skin colour, and in Elli’s assumptions made on the basis of a child’s name.

All the interviewees considered the antiracist approach important and necessary for balancing the differences and inequities in society via education. They emphasized the effort and role of adults in treating all children in their group as individuals. The interviewees saw it as crucial to teach children the social skills needed to play and cooperate with all their peers, especially ensuring the participation of children with linguistic challenges. This requires pedagogical considerations, particularly from the teachers as their teams’ pedagogical leaders. The importance of having space and resources to develop an antiracist approach in conversations within the teams and their own pedagogical choices as teachers were emphasized by the interviewees. Leena described antiracism as a fixed part of pedagogical thinking and planning: “You can’t be pedagogic if you are not antiracist. (…) And if anything, antiracism is a pedagogical matter.” (Leena).

Pedagogical solutions are not neutral and may reflect societally hegemonic values, such as White normativity. One interviewee described how in ECEC ‘a mist of White normativity’ pierces everything from communication to learning material. Tatum (2017, 86) gives a very similar description of the reinforcement of the cultural superiority of Whiteness, phrasing it as ‘the smog in the air’. As mentioned earlier, all the interviewees recognized White normativity in ECEC. All of them described how most of the play material for children, such as toys, games, and dolls, only have White-skinned characters. As in the following example, material representations did not represent all the children currently in a certain early education centre, as demonstrated in the extract where Hannele is connecting White normativity to ‘old Finnish monoculturalism’:

Well, that kind of old, Finnish monoculturalism is apparent. Of course, it’s apparent. When you look around here, what kind of toys the children have, and games, what kind of characters, very… mmh! [H sneers] In that kind of thing, it (White normativity) is visible. And when you look at the children in our daycare, they present every colour of the world. So, that should be more visible, starting from the toys. (Hannele)

Similar notes on ‘old, Finnish monoculturalism’ were presented earlier in this article in reference to the exclusion and racist representations of Finnish minorities in learning material and in a wider perspective, excluding minorities from the national narrative (Ranta & Kanninen, 2019, 25.) Wiseman et al. (2019) argue, children’s literature could be a starting point for an antiracist stance in ECEC. Racist or antiracist presentations in children’s books were mentioned in most of the responses. Two interviewees described how, due to a lack of resources, some early education centre libraries have old books with racist, stereotyping descriptions. One interviewee explained that she throws these books away—this can be interpreted as a very concrete antiracist act. The interviewees told how they had started to actively dismantle White normativity by collecting visual material with more diverse representations. The interviewees considered recently published material offering more diverse representations, but access to this material demands teachers’ activeness and effort. The interviewees described easy access to the material (e.g., online videos, audiobooks, ready-made printing material) as an effective way of introducing diverse, antiracist representations in ECEC.

The Main Obstacles to Adopting an Antiracist Approach

Typically, ECEC teams in Finland include professionals from different educational backgrounds and generations. Their diverse educational backgrounds might result in different readiness to adopt new approaches at work. The interviewees described one of the clearest obstacles to adopting an antiracist approach as the lack of support and self-reflection in teams. Kerttu described the lack of self-reflection as follows:

If most educators lack the ability to reflect on their actions or speech, then (there are challenges in adopting an antiracist approach). Or then like ‘it’s always been done like this’ and not willing to receive feedback and evaluate your actions critically. (…) So, then no change happens. Things will not improve if you’re not ready to think about your actions critically. (Kerttu)

Two interviewees emphasized the challenges in adopting any new pedagogical concepts in professionally diverse teams, in which skills, training or willingness to self-reflect vary. As one respondent concluded, a lack of self-reflection can prevent the adoption of new pedagogical skills in general unless ready thought-out and easily implementable, practical material is provided. Due to the ECEC’s work structure of working in teams, individual teachers’ commitment might not be enough to change the collective operational culture or pedagogical understanding. All the interviewees stress the importance of the whole work community having a similar understanding and commitment to developing and adopting an antiracist approach. Thus, the commitment of the whole team is crucial. Two interviewees described their teams as communicative and open, whereas one described her team as a battlefield on which she was often steamrolled. One interviewee had the experience of setting agreements collectively with the team, but in praxis, the other team members withdrew from those agreements. Also, the hectic reality and limited resources were additional obstacles to continuing or even starting antiracist work in teams. There was a great deal of short training courses on different topics, deadlines, and daily urgent work described by two interviewees as ‘hustle and bustle’. Half of the interviewees recounted how even if there was motivation to continue antiracist work, it might be trampled over by urgent everyday matters. The importance of the role of the director was emphasized in the interviews: the director should address the topic in the internal conversations and ensure development within teams. The director’s attitude was also described as a possible obstacle to applying or prioritizing an antiracist approach.

Two of the interviewees considered intervening in co-workers’ racist behaviour difficult, and they longed for more courage and strength to intervene in racist situations. Katariina describes how she was not certain whether her co-workers shared the same values and knowledge of equality and equity. It is noteworthy that these doubts exist despite the legal obligations of all ECEC staff, and even after antiracist training targeting whole work communities: “Not all have the same knowledge, and won’t necessarily share the same kind of ideology… Similar to many other things, it feels like getting mixed up in someone else’s business.“ (Katariina) In some early education centres the arrangements for attending the antiracist training were left to the staff. The difficulty of attending any training in general due to practical arrangements was mentioned in several interviews. Some staff members chose not to take part in the training. It seems that the antiracist training only attracted ‘like-minded’ staff members, as Katariina describes:

In the training like that, the whole work community should be involved, and not be asked who would like to join. Because then I noticed immediately who participated in the training. They were, how to say, like-minded with me, those who did participate in the training. So, then it should be a duty for everyone to participate and not a matter of choice. (Katariina)

The lack of commitment from the staff might originate from an idea that racism does not connect to the children’s world. Van Ausdale and Feagin (2001) conclude that educators ignore racial power among children and tend to emphasize how well children from different backgrounds (e.g., racial, ethnic, linguistic) get along together. However, children are skilled in avoiding and creating spaces away from the gaze of ‘sanctioning adults’ and when observed more closely, strict segregations remain among children, and ‘race’ is used as a tool in their internal power dynamics (Van Ausdale & Feagin, 2001, 169). In this study, all the interviewees emphasized the importance of teaching all children to interact and play with every child. Half of the interviewees aimed to support peer relations among children by mixing up children’s playgroups as a pedagogical tool to prevent discrimination and accept and respect differences. However, they did not report how children were observed and supported when the playgroups were mixed. Especially considering observations that not all the staff commit to antiracist principles, the appearance of racial power between children might be overlooked or ignored by the adults in ECEC.

Discussion

To conclude the results of this study, racism in ECEC appears as direct racist rhetoric, generalizing assumptions about families or co-workers ‘from other cultures’, and reproducing White normativity. It also appears in the structures. Still, racism is denied with different strategies, such as projection and colour-evasiveness. Alemanji (2016) describes how being considered a racist is one of the worst identity markers one can have. The denial of racism might originate from this notion. The uncomfortable, emotional process of recognizing one’s racial privileges and racist behaviours is often portrayed as one key element of an antiracist approach, but simultaneously it appears to be one of the obstacles to antiracist work. Therefore, it is vital to find ways to improve the ability to recognize racism in ECEC, despite affective reactions to deny it.

All the interviewees considered an antiracist approach important and necessary, and all of them had committed to some antiracist acts. Some of them described aiming to adopt a self-reflecting and active stance against racism and White normativity. This included committing to antiracist strategies in their work, such as actively dismantling their racist stereotypes of families or contesting White normativity in learning materials. However, it is noteworthy that diverse representations in learning material are indeed crucial, but they should also be connected to conversations on wider issues of social justice with children (Nguyen, 2022). Furthermore, as Yu (2020) demonstrates, racial discrimination does not occur on a binary ‘Black/White’ axis and thus, educators should also be aware of the possibilities of discrimination between children of differently racialized minority groups. Therefore, it would be essential for educators to be able to observe whether pedagogical aims are fulfilled when, for example, mixing playgroups, or if attempts to create peer relations serve as battlefields for subtle racial power. In addition to this, are (White) adults capable of and willing to recognize and intervene in the usage of racial power among children?

The participants of this study voluntarily chose to offer their time and effort to participate and were thus assumably more interested or motivated by the antiracist approach than those who chose not to participate. Furthermore, it must be considered that the interviewees had recently attended training on the topic. Since the data were gathered solely through interviews, it can be questioned whether the interviewees had learned to ‘talk the talk but not walk the walk’ in terms of their commitments towards antiracism. Yet, studying the commitments to antiracism in ECEC in praxis would require multiple methods of data collection, such as ethnographical observations, and due to the limitations of this study, this idea must be left to future research.

In multi-professional teams, a possible obstacle to the antiracist approach appears to be a lack of commitment from the whole work community. Despite the interviews containing descriptions of concrete actions and pedagogical choices of dismantling White normativity and forwarding antiracism, in the everyday ‘hustle and bustle’, this work requires time and resources allocated specifically to antiracist development to avoid urgent everyday matters trampling over it. Considering the increasing lack of professional ECEC teachers in Finland, resulting in some early education centres lacking qualified teachers, the role of antiracism might remain very partial and vary drastically among different institutions. This sets children in unequal positions. Due to the lack of teachers, it is crucial that all adults with different professional backgrounds can recognize racism in it its many forms and act against it. How are the legal principles to prevent discrimination (National Core Curriculum for Early Childhood Education and Care, 2022) fulfilled if they are not a part of the work culture but depended on individuals’ abilities and efforts? And drawing from Freire’s concept, how well do all educators recognize the hidden curriculum transferring White normativity and racial hierarchies? Thus, even though this article fills some of the gaps in the research on racism and antiracism in ECEC, it also opens new concerns about how ECEC fulfils its legal promises to ensure that all children have equal possibilities right from the start.