Am I calling you at a bad time? (2024). Director: Martta Tuomaala, Finland
All the Light That Remains (2025). Diector: Moona Pennanen, Finland
Spirits / Vuoiŋŋat (2025). Directors: Marja Viitahuhta, Ánnámáret, Turkka Inkilä, Ilkka Heinonen, Finland

DocPoint Helsinki Documentary Film Festival turns twenty-five this year, and the anniversary edition lands in Helsinki from 3rd to 8^th of February 2026. Across more than a hundred films, the program combines Finnish premieres from the international selection with domestic films, organized across international, national, and short film competitions.

Out of this year’s submissions, I had the chance to review three significant but very different works, each circling questions of voice, history, and what the camera can and cannot responsibly claim. Taken together, they make a strong case for catching the festival beyond the headline picks. Enough of the setting, now for the calls, the ruins, and the ghosts.

Am I calling you at a bad time? (2025)

Image: Still from Am I calling you at a bad time? (2025) /DocPoint

I first saw Martta Tuomaala’s work last year in a Helsinki gallery, in a tiny dark room that smelled faintly like the offices the unnamed narrator remembers from the 90s. Later, over coffee, a friend asked what it was about. I said it was about a voice learning how to behave. That reductive description feels more accurate after re-watching the work.

Am I calling you at a bad time? [En kai huonoon aikaan soittele?] is a creative documentary that follows a brief stretch of an unnamed narrator’s early working life, an unlikely coming of age story where adulthood arrives with a headset. Our accidental protagonist begins as a telemarketer at the age of 15, then moves through phone sex work, telephone surveys, and ends up in sales.

Though the roles change, “the phone” stubbornly stays put in her story. In terms of form, the work is not a documentary in the strict sense so much as a performed non-fiction or a stylized staging of reality, but let us keep the familiar term, documentary, in this text.

The weight of the work is mainly carried by a playful voice actor, who also happens to be the director and writer, and who wrestles with the Finnish language itself, stretching its rhythms and intonations until it becomes spirited rather than flat. The frisky voice-over often comes to the work’s rescue, as the piece relies heavily on archival images and amateur footage that can at times feel irrelevant or distracting.

The consistent color grading and the decision to keep the narrator faceless sit comfortably with the narrative and with the lived experience of the narrator, let us call her X. We are deliberately kept at a certain distance from X, as the work feels autobiographical without ever becoming self-examining or confessional. Still, its most affecting moments arrive when the work turns inward, such as when X reflects on the effects of her job on her psyche and admits that working as a phone sex operator made her suspicious of her male friends, wondering whether they belonged to the same group of creeps.

Between the jesting lines of voice narration, Tuomaala delivers sharp commentary on mental health, loneliness, and the narrow range of opportunities available to women in Finland’s industry-driven economy of the 80s and 90s.

Between the jesting lines of voice narration, Tuomaala delivers sharp commentary on mental health, loneliness, and the narrow range of opportunities available to women in Finland’s industry-driven economy of the 80s and 90s.

The work is at its most pointed when it turns to everyday gender dynamics. This comes through when X recalls being asked to soften (feminize) her deep voice to increase sales, being told off in a job interview for not wearing make-up or dressing like the other women in the office, or when she deliberately mispronounces the name of a tractor brand in order to keep massaging the masculine ego of the customer on the other end of the phone. X’s experiences belong to the 90s only on paper. In practice, they extend easily into 2026. So yes, now is exactly the kind of time this call should happen.

Thinking back to that first viewing in that small gallery, it feels fitting that the work resists a clean ending. Like a phone call that ends without a clear goodbye, it cuts off mid rhythm, leaving the line oddly open. X’s phone sex chapter brings to mind Judy in Spike Lee’s Girl 6 (1996), especially when Judy is coached to sound more like a stereotypical white woman. The difference is that Tuomaala, quite understandably, never makes you feel for X in the same way.

Although the ending is slightly awkward, the original music that closes the piece helps absorb that jolt. The work, overall, invites speculation about what it chooses not to pursue. There is room to wonder how it might have evolved more creatively through bolder formal decisions, particularly in its dealing with archival material and the supplementary shots that feel more utilitarian than considered.

Yet these limitations somehow settle into the work’s internal logic and allow it to function as a cohesive whole with its own peculiar style rather than a loosely stitched pastiche of the 90s. Yes, the call may at times feel awkward, but the voice behind the call knows what it is doing after all.

All The Light That Remains (2025)

Image: Still from All The Light That Remains (2025) / DocPoint

There is always something austere about films that begin from the idea of what remains. Moona Pennanen’s All The Light That Remains [Kaikki jäljelle jäävä valo] holds onto that formally restrained space early on, and asks the viewer to stay with the aftermath instead of chasing explanations. For a young filmmaker, that is an ambitious way to claim a voice. What sticks around after the 25-minute runtime is the mood the film generates, and much of that effect comes from Jesse Jalonen’s eye-catching cinematography and Pennanen’s consistent pacing. Taken as a whole, the film points to a personal style of working that does feel well thought-out, and it is a pleasant surprise to see that kind of clarity for such an early work.

All the Light That Remains is a hybrid documentary set in the abandoned mining village of Mätäsvaara, where the present collides with an uneasy past. The film opens with a group of young Ukrainians arriving by van. It never clearly spells out who they are or why they are there. At first they could pass for a group on a field trip, but through small visual cues and narrative detours, the film allows the viewer to infer that they are seasonal workers brought in for reforestation.

When the main character Oleksander enters the communal building where they are staying and finds an empty room, he meets another newcomer, Mykyta. The two form a loose duo, wandering around the village and picking up fragments of its history along the way. As they move through the village, they cross paths with a couple of Finnish geologists surveying the mine for a possible reopening, as rising molybdenum prices have brought new attention to the site.

Before going further, some context for Politiikasta readers can be useful. Mätäsvaara is located in Lieksa, North Karelia, on the eastern side of Lake Pielinen near the border with Nurmes. It was built rapidly during the wartime period as a purpose-made mining community, with housing and basic services organized around the mine itself.

The question is rather how far a work presented as “documentary” can go in bending historical specificity for emotional effect, and where that line begins to matter?

Today, the Finnish Heritage Agency lists Mätäsvaara as a nationally significant built cultural environment, mainly because its town plan was designed by Alvar Aalto. The mine operated as a molybdenum sulfide site and played a role in the German wartime industry. Molybdenum is used in alloy steels, including those required for arms production. A Lieksa city guide also marks the location of an “old prison camp” and notes that prisoners of war were brought to the mine as labor. During the Continuation War, Finland held roughly 64,000 Soviet soldiers as prisoners of war, along with about 5,700 taken during the earlier Winter War.

What matters for the film, however, is how this history is recorded. In official Finnish and international sources, these prisoners are not listed by modern national identities. They are consistently described as “Soviet prisoners of war”. In Finnish archives they appear as neuvostosotavangit or neuvostoliittolaiset sotavangit. In some cataloguing practices, the label “Russian” is used as a practical shorthand, even though broader historical accounts continue to frame them as Soviet prisoners.

Even an older MTV3 feature on a musical set in Mätäsvaara, for example, refers to “Russian prisoners of war” working at the mine in the summer of 1944. Against this background, Pennanen’s decision to foreground a specifically Ukrainian identity in the film for these prisoners appears to be deliberate. It intensifies the emotional weight of the setting and strategically taps into the current resonance of Ukrainian identity in Europe (without this adjustment the film’s structure falls apart). Is this a flaw? Not necessarily.

Cinema has always depended on dramatization, on bending and compressing reality in order to make it felt. The question is rather how far a work presented as “documentary” can go in bending historical specificity for emotional effect, and where that line begins to matter?

The film invites real questions, and only a work that aims high enough ever does that.

The film seems caught between two impulses that pull in opposite directions and they end up cancelling each other out, undermining the film’s overall coherence. As noted earlier, much of the film’s weight is carried by its beautiful cinematography, evident, for example, in the camera movement in the forest, wide shots at the beginning and the atmospheric cutaway shots toward the end. In its technical approach, these moments recall another film with “light” in its title, All We Imagine as Light, awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 2024.

The other pull comes from the script, which fails to rise to the level of the visual work and instead drags the film down. Rather than trusting the images, the script clings to them as a way to force its themes through. Its ideas about time, space, and inherited suffering are pushed so insistently through bland over-explanation that the visual language begins to suffocate under the weight. Artificial staging and poorly ordered dialogue only add to the problem. As cinematography reaches for subtext, the script uncreatively spoon feeds the audience with meaning (for example by long verbal padding about “grains”), and the two never stylistically align.

The clunky editing only amplifies the script’s weaknesses. The two geologists are poorly integrated into the narration, appearing like summoned ghosts who surface now and then to recite background information. Rather than enriching the film, they interrupt its visual logic. The opening quote from The Man Without Qualities does important work, grounding the film in an idea of time piling up beneath us while we pretend to stand on something stable. Yet it is hard to ignore that the real men without qualities here are the people on screen themselves, reduced to particles by a romanticized gaze. The world around them remains intact with its traumas, continuing to reproduce hierarchical ways of seeing, while even nature is stripped of specificity and turned into a symbolic pressure placed on the characters.

If this review runs longer than the others, it is because the film invites real questions, and only a work that aims high enough ever does that. For all its tensions, the film leaves a clear impression and makes Pennanen a filmmaker worth paying attention to right now.

Vuoiŋŋat (2025)

Image: Vuoiŋŋat (2025) / Docpoint

Marja Viitahuhta’s Vuoiŋŋat reminds us of a dark chapter in European history, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a documented movement now known as “scientific racism” used pseudo-scientific authority to justify imperialism, colonial domination, and ideas of white superiority, while legitimizing discrimination, the collection of human bodies, and state policy.

Germany became an early center for this thinking, with the founding of the German Society for Racial Hygiene in 1905 by Alfred Ploetz, promoting concepts of “racial health” and “purity” that later intensified across Europe in the 1930s. In the Nordics, a key milestone was the establishment of the State Institute for Racial Biology in Sweden’s Uppsala in 1922, led by Herman Lundborg, one of the most influential race scientists of the period. In this period, the Sámi population was systematically targeted by racial biology research through physical measurements and the removal of human remains.

In Finland, a major racial research program operated during the 1920s and 1930s under Professor Yrjö Kajava, during which approximately 37 percent of the Finnish Sámi population, totaling 795 individuals, were subjected to anthropometric measurement between 1926 and 1934. Within this context, grave disturbances are documented, including a 1934 anthropological expedition that exhumed seventy skeletons from the old cemetery island in Inari for study at the University of Helsinki. These remains later became the subject of long repatriation efforts, with ninety-five Sámi remains returned in 1995 and a further 172 repatriated in 2001 to the Sámi Museum Siida.

Although Vuoiŋŋat will not speak to everyone, what the work achieves through form deserves recognition.

In August 2022, Sámi human remains removed from burial grounds during the era of European racial science were reburied in Inari, Utsjoki, and Nellim in ceremonies led by Sámi communities in collaboration with church and state representatives. Viitahuhta dedicates her work to the Sámi ancestors whose remains were taken from their graves in the name of racial research.

Viitahuhta’s piece is a five-minute cameraless video built from animated digital auroras and a luohti performed by Sámi musician Ánnámáret, where the yoik gives voice to spirits that have been left without a place to rest. The title Vuoiŋŋat comes from the Northern Sámi word for spirits or life force, a term connected to the verb meaning “to breathe” and is used in Sámi cultural contexts to refer to ancestral or collective spirit. The Sámi political slogan ČSV includes the phrase Čájet Sámi Vuoiŋŋa! which is translated as “Show Sámi Spirit” where vuoiŋŋa is interpreted as “Sámi spirit” showing the word’s use to express presence or collective soul.

If you allow yourself to get lost into Viitahuhta’s experiment with form, the digitized images start to pull you in. Hold your gaze long enough and pareidolia kicks in. Shapes appear, and suddenly you wonder if the spirits are there on the screen, if they are watching you back, if one of them just waved at you.

Ánnámáret’s wordless vocalization carries the experience forward and holds it together. When her vocal register drops near the end into a deeper, grounded sound, it feels like another presence stepping in, as if a spirit is finally speaking plainly and letting its grief surface. Although Vuoiŋŋat will not speak to everyone, what the work achieves through form deserves recognition.

Rather than following a normative Western approach to her material, Viitahuhta’s work opens toward another way of thinking, one that the Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida helps put into words. As Nishida explained it, Western thought tends to treat form as being itself and formal completion as a measure of value, while East Asian thought allows for seeing the form of the formless and hearing the sound of the soundless. Without this kind of experimentation and had Viitahuhta adhered to a fixed Western ideal of form, the work would not reach the emotional force it carries.

Erfan Fatehi is a doctoral researcher in sociology at the university of Helsinki.

National Short Film Competition 1: The Verge of New, 2: Side by Side, and 3: Flashbacks are screened at DocPoint-festival between 3.–8.2.2026. Check the screening programme for showtimes.

Article images: DocPoint Helsinki

Read all Politiikasta DocPoint 2026 reviews in english here.
All Politiikasta DocPoint 2026 reviews in Finnish here.

Update 27.2.2026: Film names and link to screening schedule added

Julkaisu DocPoint 2026: From Calls to Spirits: Three New Finnish Films ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.

What happened to the politics in identity politics? Let me begin with a small social experiment I stumbled into, though it was billed as an art event.

A friend of mine, a visual artist, invited me to the debut of her latest piece. The venue was a familiar Helsinki art space that often hosts activist-leaning exhibitions. The theme this time was “resistance and emancipation” and the walls were hung with works that made their stance clear: slogans, symbolism, visual homages to liberation struggles from Palestine to Central Africa.

Alongside the art, there were “safer space” posters posted everywhere, including, inexplicably, the inside of the toilet doors. The assumption seemed to be that “political danger” could lurk anywhere, even at the urinal!

The crowd, no more than twenty people, consisted mostly of local artists and activists. You could tell from the tote bags and the bios on their social media, which often carry the word “activist” in three languages. Everyone knew everyone, or thought they did. The mood was gentle, respectful, almost reverent. That is, until someone said “third world”.

One of the invited artists (non-white, immigrant), was explaining the layers of meaning in her work. She mentioned being inspired by travels across “the third world,” and gave an example: the many names for camels in Arabic, depending on their color, gait, pregnancy, or the way they drank water. It was a poetic moment, light and thoughtful. Then came the interruption.

“I’m sorry, but I have to stop you,” said one of the event organizers (white, Finnish). “This is a safe space. Some people might feel offended with the term ‘third world.’ Please use ‘Global South’ or ‘developing countries’ instead.”

That did it. The group responded like clockwork: muttering from one corner, visible agreement from another, and a couple of eyerolls that no one was supposed to notice. Another participant stepped in, accusing the interrupter of hypocrisy: “You used the E-word in an Instagram story once,” they said, meaning Eskimo. “I’ve been to Canada, I know the context. You need to reflect on that.”

Someone else began to cry. Another person said the situation had become too violent for them to stay. On their way out, a small group of four said the space was no longer safe for BIPOC attendees. The speaker never got to finish her point about camels.

It became clear that it was not what was said, but who was saying it, that mattered. By the end, the topic of resistance was nowhere in sight. Instead, the group had managed to stage a sort of zero-budget morality play in which the script kept changing. Everyone was both accused and accuser, and the resolution was collective exhaustion.

As I watched the whole thing unfold, two thoughts came to mind. The first was: these people could not even manage a peaceful conversation among friends, yet they had gathered to talk about how to organize resistance.

The second was a flicker of those who came before: Steve Biko beaten to death in custody, Ruth First opening a letter bomb in her university office, Bobby Sands in his cell, Ai Weiwei under surveillance, Mahmoud Mohammed Taha walking calmly to the gallows.

Not one of them stormed out of a room because someone misused a label or because two people got passionate arguing. Needless to say that I did not expect anyone in that room to face the kind of risks these activists had endured. But the gap between the stakes (ongoing famine, burning children, ethnic cleansing) and the emotional sensitivities felt dizzying.

Something has happened to identity politics. The phrase “identity politics” was coined by the Combahee River Collective, a group of radical Black feminists and socialist organizers active in the 1970s. What they meant by it was almost the opposite of what it has come to mean. For them, identity was not a personal brand, an exclusive boundary or zero-sum game, but was a political position formed by overlapping systems of oppression.

As Black women, they had learned that white feminists often ignored racism, while Black liberation spaces sidelined sexism and homophobia. They fought both at once, refusing to rank or isolate these struggles. “We do not separate race from class,” they wrote, “because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.”

Identity was the starting point, not the destination. They refused to reduce politics to separate camps. Their vision was unapologetically anti-capitalist and universalist in every sense.

Do you want to know what the founders of identity politics might think of what it has become? Barbara Smith, one of the Combahee River Collective’s original members, has already weighed in:

“People are introduced to the concept in academic settings, and the people who are introducing them to it don’t have any political practice. They don’t have familiarity with how people mobilize and come together in order to make actual material change, not ideas, but material change in the real world; change that affects real people. It’s like they embrace identity, but they leave the politics on the floor.”

What I saw in that art space was just a slice-of-life version of a bigger complaint heard even in the left’s own power circles, from people who have been around leftist politics long enough to remember when the fight was about changing how power and resources were organized, not just how they were described.

For example, In Germany, Sahra Wagenknecht broke from Die Linke (the Left Party) accusing her former comrades of turning into a “lifestyle left” and forgetting the bread-and-butter fights. Across the water, sharing the same frustration, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana (who was suspended from Labour for voting against the Labour government to end the two-child benefit cap in July 2024) launched a new party promising to put “mass redistribution of wealth and power” back at the center. In what follows, I look at how losing sight of material change has helped the right weaponize identity while leaving the left atomized.

Victimhood as Political Capital: Progressive in Form, Conservative in Logic

Identity politics runs on a set of scripts. These days, it is common to hear people begin their opinions with lines like “As a [member of X group]…” or “Coming from a background of…” These are not just introductions. They function as credentials, as shortcuts to authority. The speaker’s identity is supposed to shield their words from challenge. “Lived experience” has become untouchable, placed on a pedestal where disagreement is treated as offense.

But there is nothing “progressive” about the idea that “I’ve suffered, therefore I cannot be questioned.” It historically mirrors authoritarian populism, where claiming victimhood means you are always right. Not to mention it is deeply hypocritical.

It is hypocritical because not all lived experience is treated equally. Who gets heard, whose story is sanctified, and whose is ignored depends on whether the narrative fits our ideological filters. A blissfully apolitical Moomin character can be immediately erased from a Brooklyn library wall because one individual decides it carries racist undertones, and little Gaza children’s drawings can be stripped from a London hospital because some Jewish visitors say they feel “vulnerable, harassed and victimised” being around these childish crayon-bright scenes of home and sky.

In both cases, the feeling of offence (when backed by the right badge of identity) is taken as unchallengeable truth, the complainant’s emotions accepted as fact, yet this courtesy is never universal. If we really believe lived experience is untouchable, then why do we not accept the accounts of police officers who shoot unarmed civilians (most frequently Black men) and claim “I feared for my life”? These officers may not necessarily be lying, but where does our political reasoning and judgment start?

The politics of recognition also demands that lived experience align with Western moral expectations: trauma, powerlessness, and gratitude for rescue. When it does not, it is likely to be suppressed, as in the United Nation’s attempts to silence the Rohingya who disrupted the official script.

Lived experience can also be used for reactionary ends. During the Vietnam War, officials used the lived suffering of a certain group of veterans to justify their actions, while anti-war voices like Ron Kovic (himself a wounded veteran) were vilified. This is why politics must not end with pain. Placing lived experience above argument shuts down debate. It turns every disagreement into a threat and every challenge into a violation of a “safe space”. 

Who gets heard, whose story is sanctified, and whose is ignored depends on whether the narrative fits our ideological filters.

In early 2025, the American-Soviet historian Izabella Tabarovsky had her planned talks at Turku’s Åbo Akademi and the University of Helsinki cancelled. In response, she published a self-important and visibly aggrieved article in Tablet Magazine.

Much of it is spent straining, in a roundabout way, to frame the cancellations as a case of antisemitism, relying on a handful of obscure historical references and incidents that barely register in Finnish public memory. Then, sensing the argument’s thinness, she abruptly shifts her identity politics front near the end: this, she declares, was really about institutional patriarchy, that is, powerful male administrators silencing their female subordinates.

It is a clumsy switch, but also a revealing one. Tabarovsky knows perfectly well why and in what political context her talks were cancelled; her own deleted posts make that clear. But like many others across the political spectrum, she understands the rules of the current game. Victimhood has become a form of political capital. In today’s attention economy, it does not matter where you stand (left, right, elite, marginal) or what privileges you enjoy. What matters is whether you can position yourself as the one being wronged, if only for some airtime.

Another problem with identity politics that makes it inherently conservative is its accidental loyalty to essentialism. As American anarchist essayist and activist Lawrence Jarach discusses, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression are maintained through essentialist ideologies, that is, by assigning fixed, unchanging characteristics to groups based on attributes like race or gender, which leads to hierarchy and discrimination.

In trying to reverse these hierarchies, identity politics often adopts the same logic. It inverts the categories but keeps them intact, reinforcing the very framework it claims to challenge.

Sociologists like Norbert Elias instead emphasize the fluid, relational, and historical nature of identity, and that the relationship between a group and its members could change. For example, sociologist Samaneh Naseri’s study of LGBT refugees in Germany shows how people rework their sexual and gender identities in relation to cultural expectations, asylum systems, and politics of visibility. Defining politics through essential traits reproduces the very hierarchies it claims to oppose. Every time politics has relied on essentialist identity, it has ended up reinforcing exclusion, not undoing it.

One Identity per Struggle, Please…

Identity politics in its current form (particularly in New Left spaces, meaning contemporary progressive activism) makes solidarity difficult. Rather than bringing people together to fight shared conditions of oppression or push for material change, it tends to atomize them. Groups are treated as separate and competing, rather than interlinked and co-struggling.

Recently, this became clear at my own workplace. A colleague sent out an internal message about organizing aid for Palestine. Shortly after, an Ukrainian colleague responded by questioning why no such emails had been sent about Ukraine, and asking whether people were ignoring the suffering there.

It sounded like a clarification, but it worked like a boundary being drawn. It exposed the zero-sum logic identity politics breeds: when attention is a scarce resource, even the oppressed feel they must compete for it. This logic frames groups as if their experiences are so irreducibly different that they cannot share the same space, let alone a common cause. Each group is nudged toward fighting its own isolated battle.

This fracturing has not only weakened the left but has also been absorbed by the right. Reactionary politics today operates on the same identity logic it claims to oppose. The white working class is now packaged as a victimized group pitted against everyone else, especially immigrants. But instead of addressing the material causes that shape working-class life (precarity, housing, wages) right-wing discourse frames it as an identity category in need of protection.

Worse still, this logic echoes in even more toxic forms like the manosphere and so-called anti-woke school boards. It is all the same script: take “what feels like” social pain, strip it of class content, repackage it as identity-based entitlement and call it politics. Let us see how right-wing politics now stands tall on the very rug it spent decades pulling out from under the white working class.

The hypocrisy behind this shift is blatant. To understand where the white working class became an identity category rather than a class position, we need to start where the script was written: Britain. One of the earliest right-wing attempts to politicize white working-class identity came in Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, where he claimed a white working man warned that “in 15 or 20 years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”. But despite this start, the working class was long handed over to the left like an unwanted inheritance.

Rather than bringing people together to fight shared conditions of oppression or push for material change, it tends to atomize them. Groups are treated as separate and competing, rather than interlinked and co-struggling.

At least since the late 1990s, the white working class in Britain was routinely mocked and demonized under the term Chavs (a slur used to reduce them to vulgar, ignorant, and criminal). Comedy shows (like Little Britain), media pundits, and politicians leaned into it, selling the working poor as “scroungers” undeserving of support. This image was useful (and remains so in rightwing vocabularies world-wide with labels like suckers, dole bludgers, welfare queens and losers) for conservatives looking to justify cuts to public services and welfare.

The great rebranding happened. Chav disappeared from the respectable right’s vocabulary and was replaced with “white working class” as a fragile identity in need of rescue. The same group once ridiculed for being poor and uneducated was suddenly framed as under threat by multiculturalism, immigration, and liberal elites. In 2011, following the police shooting of Mark Duggan, a Black man, and the riots that broke out across England, the conservative British historian David Starkey made a racist statement on national television. He claimed that “a substantial section of the chavs… have become Black…the Whites have become Black” blaming what he described as a “violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture.”

By “turning Black,” Starkey was not referring to economic shifts or political alignment, but to an alleged cultural and identity transformation. For him, it was a double insult: first, for being white and working class (chavs) and second, for supposedly adopting what his racist worldview cast as an inferior Black culture. This is how people like him saw (still secretly do) the working class: as degenerate when poor, and contaminated when not properly white. Today, no right-wing politician uses the term chav. It has been replaced by a sanitized, weaponized identity politics engineered for nationalist ends.

Identity Politics™: Now with Corporate Sponsorship

Identity politics, as practiced in much of the contemporary left, has flung open the gates of something close to hell. Politics has been flattened into language policing and performance, where moral authority is earned through personal suffering and the public display of it. It has been hollowed out into a cult of “I” and a war of individual righteousness where nobody, absolutely nobody, gets to win.

Structural issues tend to become depoliticized, with energy redirected toward surface-level fixes like diversity optics rather than systemic change. Activists or influencers build followings by curating their trauma, identities, and politics into online personas. The left, atomized and weakened, seems better at issuing (ever-changing) moral verdicts and callouts than effective mobilization for material change. Meanwhile, the right has taken detailed notes. Reactionary politics has been rebranded by surfing the same identity currents the left amplified.

The absurd irony speaks for itself. A political camp that spent decades gutting public services and mocking the poor is now posing as the voice of the betrayed working class, thanks in part to the identity-driven scripts it borrowed from the left. Meanwhile, identity politics has become the fluent language of neoliberal policies. Identity has turned into currency, branding, and tokenism.

Structural issues tend to become depoliticized, with energy redirected toward surface-level fixes like diversity optics rather than systemic change.

Some of the most exploitative corporations on the planet like Coca-cola with long records of racial discrimination, pollution, and community harm have proudly become champions of identity politics. While draining and poisoning the water of poor communities in countries like India and Mexico, giant corporations fly in Robin DiAngelo to talk about whiteness. She accepts these gigs and charges up to $20,000 to hold “anti-racism” workshops. She apparently still has not noticed the irony, nor have the people who think White Fragility is a radical, emancipatory text.

Now, if you are reading this with your cynical monocle polished and your finger counting every time I have said the word “material,” you might be ready to accuse me of launching into some tired class-first tract. But NO! This is not a call to class reductionism. This is not an orthodox communist pamphlet, and this article is not here to erase race, gender, or sexuality. These forms of oppression do not neatly collapse into class. They cut across and reshape it. Class itself is not neutral. It is lived differently depending on your race, gender, and cultural identity.

In many contexts, the “working class” is still imagined as white and male, erasing the labor of women, migrants, and racialized workers. In others, entire groups are excluded from even entering formal labor markets. Even in so-called universal welfare states symbolic and institutional hierarchies remain intact. (See, for example, the overpolicing and systemic discrimination faced by Somali communities in Finland.)

The way forward, in this case, is looking back. It starts with re-reading the statement of those who coined the term identity politics and understanding their refusal of campist thinking, which still haunts the left. That means rejecting what historian Victoria Wolcott calls the “false choice” between class and race, or other forms of identity. We can learn a great deal from civil rights unionism in the 1930s, especially its Southern version, which brought together Black and white workers, feminists, socialists, and New Deal reformers in a shared fight.

There was a time when solidarity meant more than a theater for personal therapy and branding. Recovering that tradition is not nostalgia, it is survival for those whose lives are ground down by inequality and for any politics that aims to change the material conditions of life.

Erfan Fatehi is a doctoral researcher in sociology at the University of Helsinki.

Article image: Luke Heibert / Unsplash

Julkaisu Identity politics lost the plot and now comes in conservative packaging ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.

In August 2023, Helsinki Regional Transport (HSL) launched an anti-fraud campaign featuring social media personalities Iba and Keinaan, who were chosen to promote the risks of using fake transit tickets. However, the campaign sparked significant controversy and public debate, as critics argued, that using two Black men in this context risked reinforcing negative stereotypes around race and criminality.

While some defended the campaign as a step toward greater visibility for underrepresented groups and dismissed the criticisms as overblown “woke” reactions that had turned an innocuous issue into another topic for the culture wars, others saw it as racially insensitive. In response, HSL initially pulled the campaign but later reinstated it. The transport authority believed that clarifying Iba and Keinaan’s roles as influencers would address the backlash and emphasize the campaign’s intent.

The controversy, though, revealed deeper issues with representation of minorities in Finnish society, institutional responsibility, and the social consequences of public messaging choices. Social media platforms became a major space for discussion, with people from various backgrounds sharing their concerns about the campaign. Many argued that HSL should have anticipated backlash, as a quick scan of HSL’s Facebook and Instagram pages shows few — if any — Black individuals in past positive messaging campaigns.

Finnish audiences are generally not accustomed to seeing Black individuals represented in HSL’s campaigns, which makes this casting choice a noticeable departure from its not-so-strong track record of diversity. The choice of lesser-known personalities over more recognizable Black influencers active in Finland, likely to save costs for HSL, added to the controversy, as most people saw Iba and Keinaan as mere campaign models.

Iba and Keinaan themselves expressed disappointment after the initial removal of the campaign from digital screens. In an interview with Iltalehti, they explained that they found it unfair for those outside the minority community to speak on their behalf, adding that, regardless of their involvement, they felt open to public scrutiny either way.

The Specter and Spectacle of Race

The real question is not about branding the campaign as racist or not; it is more about unpacking the sociopolitical implications and understanding the context from which it emerged. It is no coincidence that two Black individuals were chosen for an anti-fraud campaign in the Finnish context.

Unlike Sweden’s social-democratic roots, Finnish welfare policy has historically leaned toward protectionist and nationalistic orientations. In his doctoral dissertation, university researcher Niko Pyrhönen explains how a widely shared concern across the Finnish political spectrum about the welfare state’s future in a globalized era enabled neo-populists, such as the Perussuomalaiset (Finns Party), to frame immigration as a threat to welfare structures. Far-right political ideologies constructed a collective identity centered around “welfare nationalism”.

This so-called “blue-and-white solidarity” has crafted an exclusionary narrative that positions native Finns as the “real” beneficiaries of the welfare state, while casting “racial aliens” (a term used by the far-right in Finland for African and MENA immigrants) as outsiders from whom the welfare state must be “saved”. In other words, “the other” is located as both “traumatic” and “excessive”.

The real question is not about branding the campaign as racist or not; it is more about unpacking the sociopolitical implications and understanding the context from which it emerged.

This image of immigrants and their relationship with welfare structures has permeated mainstream Finnish discourse, surfacing almost daily in the public sphere. Immigrants are often accused of clogging public health service lines or are labeled “sossupummi” (a derogatory term for a perceived welfare client) on social media. To better understand this, we can turn to university Professor Li-Chun Hsiao’s distinction between the “specter” and “spectacle” of race. The “specter” of race refers to pervasive, often unspoken racial anxieties or biases that linger beneath society’s surface.

In contrast, the “spectacle” of race is race made visible and performative, often through exaggerated or symbolic representations in media and public campaigns. According to Hsiao, every spectacle is shadowed and haunted by the specter of race. In this context, the “spectacle” of two Black individuals featured in a campaign aimed at “saving” welfare structures from fraud reflects the deeper “specter” of race in the contemporary Finnish context.

“They themselves accepted it, so it’s fine!”

A common cliché used to dismiss controversies like this is the argument, “they accepted it, so it’s fine”. This flawed—and ideologically skewed! —understanding of agency deliberately ignores the power dynamics at play, shifting focus away from broader structural issues and reducing a systemic problem to individual preference. In this case, it refers to Iba and Keinaan’s interview comments about not perceiving the campaign as racist. This reasoning is as problematic as suggesting Donald Trump is not a racist politician because some Muslim leaders and Imams in Michigan endorsed him, or insisting Non-Black people must shut up about slavery because one of the largest slave-owners in U.S. history, John Carruthers Stanly, was Black.

This argument rests on the notion that participation by individuals from marginalized backgrounds inherently validates those structures as non-discriminatory or fair. Such thinking fails to consider the complex survival strategies, constrained choices, and internalized norms marginalized groups have to deal with within systems that remain biased.

Another naive argument often thrown around in cases like this is, “What problem do you have with the representation and inclusion of Black individuals in the public sphere?” Although this rather common question builds on the dynamics discussed in the previous paragraph and reduces the complexities of inclusion to a binary of presence versus absence, it deserves attention because it reflects a prevailing issue between symbolic representation and genuine inclusion—a challenge faced by many Western societies today.

Not every representation is a sign of inclusion, and we must be cautious when inclusion is tokenized and used as a shield against criticism.

To be more clear, I will provide an example.  Indigenous culture is often celebrated through traditional clothing, dance, or festivals, which are romanticized and consumed by the majority for aesthetic value. Yet, when Indigenous groups advocate for land rights, resist environmental degradation, or oppose corporate interests, they often face hostility, which reveals the limits of the “love” that exists only for aesthetic or symbolic purposes. The same holds true for celebrating black individuals in roles such as athletes, musicians, or entertainers, and Asian Americans as hardworking and non-confrontational.

Here, we see a phenomenon where members of marginalized or racialized groups are selectively embraced or celebrated when they conform to certain roles, behaviors, or stereotypes that are beneficial or non-threatening to the dominant group. To explain this phenomenon, American authors Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan coined the term “racist love” in 1972. In essence, racist love is a conditional love that creates an illusion of acceptance or inclusion as long as marginalized groups conform to stereotypes or roles that align with the dominant group’s expectations or interests. Therefore, not every representation is a sign of inclusion, and we must be cautious when inclusion is tokenized and used as a shield against criticism.

The Path to Authentic Inclusion

Reflecting on the controversy surrounding this campaign, one thing becomes clear: representation is a complex, layered issue, especially when it intersects with race and public messaging. The lingering influence of welfare nationalism, which emerged starkly in Finland’s recent general elections, and Finland’s repeated selection as the “happiest country in the world” should not lead to a fetishization of Finnish public institutions and services, stripping them of accountability and closing off avenues for public critique.

Rather than focusing solely on whether this campaign was “right” or “wrong” this incident points to the need for deeper discussions around inclusion and the responsibilities of public institutions in shaping public perceptions.

Rather than focusing solely on whether this campaign was “right” or “wrong” this incident points to the need for deeper discussions around inclusion and the responsibilities of public institutions in shaping public perceptions.

As political polarization is ravaging liberal democracies, it is becoming increasingly challenging to speak about racism and the different brands it comes in. As British journalist and author Reni Eddo-Lodge explains in her influential piece titled Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Euro-ethnic populations historically never had to think about what it means, in power terms, to be white, so the majority believe that their life experiences, shaped by skin color, can and should be universalized.

This has turned racial discussions into a burden for people of color, as they are expected to educate others on the subject and prioritize white feelings in understanding structural racism. This is why we need a dialectical reversal in understanding racism and, for a first step, must challenge the neoliberal idea of diversity and multiculturalism, which is based on the commandment of thou shalt tolerate the other yet keep thy distance from ‘em…! The path forward is not arm’s-length tolerance and tokenism but understanding the otherness of the other.

Erfan Fatehi is a doctoral researcher in sociology at the University of Helsinki.

Article image: Jori Samonen / Pixabay

Julkaisu Racist Love? A Note on HSL’s Fake Ticket Campaign  ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.