Keeping distance - Fragility of ties between ethnic minority and majority youth in Finland

This paper explores ties crossing ethnic boundaries in micro-level interaction of youth in Finland. The aim is to disentangle what types of ties are formed between ethnic minority and majority youth and how these ties build up intergroup bridging social capital. The study is based on translocal ethnography conducted in leisure fields of youth and on an interview data (n=38) of ethnic minority youth.

The assumption inherent in the notion of social capital is that interethnic weak ties benefit ethnic minority youth and enable them to ‘get ahead’ – to form bridges across ethnic niches. Strong ties, on other hand, would help ethnic minority youth only to ‘get by’ in a fixed peer circle. However, it has been claimed that theorizations of social capital have not sufficiently recognized group-based demarcations and material inequalities in stratified surroundings. Thus, bridging interethnic ties do not formulate automatically because of spatial and institutional segregation, cultural hierarchies, racist group relations and more micro-level mechanisms. The empirical focus of this paper is on latter types of mechanisms.

Strong ties in the form of close interethnic friendships are rare in the data. Instead, a lot of weak ties in the form of distant acquaintances are formulated. However, these weak ties seem to be too fragile in creating bridging social capital because of manifold hindrances in micro-level interaction: differing (youth) cultural competences, harness of racializing narratives, intergroup conflicts, ‘considerate aloofness’ and differing leisure habits. It seems that the strong interethnic ties have more bridging qualities. Moreover, many ethnic minority youth are not able to take part in costly middle-class sociability or are otherwise excluded from mainstream leisure surroundings.