Minority youth reject both forced marriage and the majority’s free-will framing
Evidence
If we pay attention to young people’s narratives of cultural survival, as Bredal does, we find them understanding forced marriages as the response of parents seeking to provide them with cultural community and continuity but going about it in unrealistic ways. When parents turn to their communities of origin for marriage partners for their Norwegian-raised children, Bredal suggests, the risks are high that marriages really will involve men who are simply seeking a residence permit. As young people fear, their own happiness is imperilled under these conditions. While young people fear the outcome of marriages arranged by their parents with partners in their countries of origins, they do not automatically endorse ‘free will.’ Their position on arranged marriages, if a collective one is even possible, is summed up by Bredal as two messages: ‘[To majority culture]: What our parents are doing is not right, or even the real, version of our culture – our difference. To the parents: what you are doing is neither true to our culture nor is it sensible if you want our culture to survive.’ Young people find a number of covert ways to convey their positions, Bredal suggests. For example, they circulate stories of divorce, and of young people driven to desperate measures in order to escape unhappy marriages. These convey their sense of peril and their critique. Above all, minority youth negotiate their lives within culture and community, and do not inhabit, as majority Norwegians often imagine, an unproblematic position as victims of their families and communities, although it is certain that there are also victims. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 321
If we pay attention to young people’s narratives of cultural survival, as Bredal does, we find them understanding forced marriages as the response of parents seeking to provide them with cultural community and continuity but going about it in unrealistic ways. When parents turn to their communities of origin for marriage partners for their Norwegian-raised children, Bredal suggests, the risks are high that marriages really will involve men who are simply seeking a residence permit. As young people fear, their own happiness is imperilled under these conditions. While young people fear the outcome of marriages arranged by their parents with partners in their countries of origins, they do not automatically endorse ‘free will.’ Their position on arranged marriages, if a collective one is even possible, is summed up by Bredal as two messages: ‘[To majority culture]: What our parents are doing is not right, or even the real, version of our culture – our difference. To the parents: what you are doing is neither true to our culture nor is it sensible if you want our culture to survive.’ Young people find a number of covert ways to convey their positions, Bredal suggests. For example, they circulate stories of divorce, and of young people driven to desperate measures in order to escape unhappy marriages. These convey their sense of peril and their critique. Above all, minority youth negotiate their lives within culture and community, and do not inhabit, as majority Norwegians often imagine, an unproblematic position as victims of their families and communities, although it is certain that there are also victims. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 321
Categorization
- SEED: Essay angle: the two-front position young minority people must hold — defending their parents to outsiders while critiquing their parents from within — as a structural bind distinct from simple victimhood.
- XREF: Pays off earlier chapter 10 material (‘Minority youth reject both forced marriage and the majority’s free-will framing’); also directly serves the MOC thread thesis that lived-experience data bypasses the conceptual dispute.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 321