The research, published in the European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy by Lilja Lehmuskallio of the Sibelius Academy at the University of the Arts Helsinki, examines the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture’s 2023 action plan ‘Art, Culture and Diverse Finland’. The plan sets out measures for the country’s three national arts institutions: the Finnish National Gallery, the Finnish National Theatre and the Finnish National Opera and Ballet. These organisations matter far beyond their box offices. Founded at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth century to forge a Finnish national identity, they remain the official curators of what the nation sees, hears and calls its own.

Lehmuskallio’s central claim is technically ambitious: structural discrimination in the arts cannot be dismantled without examining the epistemology on which policies, institutions and practices are built. She argues that European art institutions rest on what she calls a europatriarchal understanding of difference as hierarchical, a worldview produced by centuries of colonialism that positions white, European, able-bodied, cisgender, heteronormative perspectives as the neutral default and everyone else as the Other. Drawing on decolonial theory, including the well-known warning by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang that ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, she insists that diversifying an existing field is not the same as decolonising it, which requires materially disrupting the epistemic and institutional infrastructures that maintain hegemonic power.

To test how these abstractions play out in policy text, Lehmuskallio adapted a four-phase critical discourse analysis tool. First she identified a social question that can be meaningfully approached through language; then she analysed the action plan text and prior policy research; next she examined who wrote the policy and how their power positioning connected to the discourses under study; and finally she searched for discourses that could counteract the dominant ones. The method draws on Michel Foucault’s conception of discourse as a system of knowledge that both reflects and reproduces power. Discourses, in this view, are never neutral: they define what can be said and thought, and thereby shape how material resources flow through the cultural sector. Institutions, in Foucauldian terms, operate as dispositifs, interconnected assemblages of discourse, regulation and practice, that internalise policy language in recruitment, programming and governance.

A telling detail emerged early in the analysis. While the original working group behind the ministry’s 2021 final report included individuals from diverse backgrounds, the action plan itself was written and edited by a senior ministerial adviser, and the measures for each national institution were drafted by the institutions themselves. The result was three starkly different sets of measures: six for the Opera and Ballet, nine for the National Gallery and seventeen for the National Theatre, differing in number, tone and critical depth. As the study notes, following scholarship on policy writing, who is allowed to write what testifies to the real power of the document itself, and policies drafted without diverse epistemologies risk failing the people they are meant to serve.

The analysis identified four discourses threading through the measures. Two of them, the discourse of tolerance and difference-blind universalism and the discourse of tokenism, reproduce hierarchical difference. Tolerance, the study argues, is a nationalist practice of inclusion that reserves the power to permit or deny the Other access to spaces the majority continues to control; phrases like ‘opening doors’ and ‘giving voice’ betray structures still owned by the dominant group. Difference-blind universalism compounds this by treating all diversities as interchangeable, so that stating that cultural diversity ‘is taken into consideration in recruitment’ can mean nothing changes at all. Tokenism, meanwhile, treats marginalised individuals as symbols rather than people, singling out and elevating them above their own groups while leaving structural hierarchies untouched.

The Finnish National Opera and Ballet illustrates the tolerance problem most clearly. Its six measures are brief, impassive and vague, relying only on the terms ‘cultural diversity’ and ‘diversity’, with phrases such as ‘regularly implement diversity training’ and ‘maintain an open diversity discussion’. Because opera and classical ballet still carry the weight of perceived elitism and ongoing struggles with gender equality and misuse of power in leadership, the study argues, stronger measures are needed. Notably, anti-racism is entirely absent from the institution’s measures, a significant omission in the context of recruitment. Encouragingly, the FNOB has developed a four-page representation policy acknowledging problems such as exoticisation and racialisation, and recognising that the institution does not merely reflect society but actively constructs it, but keeping that policy as a separate document outside the public action plan limits its visibility and makes monitoring difficult.

The National Theatre, by contrast, shows how tokenism can hide inside genuine progress. The institution hired Finns born abroad into its ‘Communities and Inclusion’ unit and publicly named a writer-in-residence with a foreign background whose successful production reached the main stage, marking several firsts for Finnish theatre. Yet individuals already othered in Finnish society were thereby placed in the position of transforming institutional structures, often relying on personal experience of the very discrimination they were hired to tackle. Meanwhile, the monitoring report revealed that 0 percent of the theatre’s permanent ensemble of actors came from diverse backgrounds, even after a 2023 recruitment round, because the diversity measure specified no concrete implementation strategy. The National Gallery’s nine measures leaned heavily on accessibility, including safer-space principles, economic access and anti-racism training for all staff, but conspicuously avoided diversity in artistic programming, a gap the study links to collections historically shaped by the assumption that artists are white men.

From this evidence, Lehmuskallio builds a conceptual map connecting systems of inequality to strategies for transformative change. Colonialism, in this account, laid the foundation for europatriarchal norms in which difference is understood hierarchically, producing systemic discrimination in the forms of racism, classism, ableism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. These structures create barriers to participation that are maintained in institutions through tokenism and difference-blind universalism, rendering marginalised groups absent from recruitment, decision-making and programming, what she terms absent Others. The pathway out begins with the radical deconstruction of colonial knowledge production, proceeds through analysis of discourses to identify embedded privileges and stereotypes, then shifts to decolonial, antiracist, intersectional and accessibility-oriented strategies, ultimately enabling new knowledge systems, policy instruments and institutional reform.

The study’s conclusion is blunt: Finnish cultural policy currently adds diversity into existing systems rather than dismantling the structures that perpetuate hierarchical difference, and policy documents can present an inspirational vision while ultimately preserving the status quo. The emerging discourses of intersectionality and accessibility, rooted in the BIPOC feminist tradition from the Combahee River Collective to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s coining of the term in 1989, offer transformative potential, but remain underdeveloped. What is required is radical inclusion, an approach that does not merely admit marginalised groups into unaltered structures but reimagines and restructures those structures to dismantle discriminatory barriers. As the article closes, quoting Audre Lorde’s famous line, ‘Master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’ For national arts institutions charged with projecting a nation’s identity, that may be the most demanding policy prescription of all.

Subject of Research: Decolonial and intersectional analysis of diversity discourse in Finnish cultural policy and national arts institutions

Article Title: From tolerance and tokenism to radical inclusion: decolonial and intersectional approach to diversity in arts organisations and cultural policy

Article References: Lehmuskallio, L. (2026). From tolerance and tokenism to radical inclusion: decolonial and intersectional approach to diversity in arts organisations and cultural policy. European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, 16, Article 16054. https://doi.org/10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16054

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16054

Keywords: cultural policy, decoloniality, intersectionality, diversity, arts institutions, tokenism, radical inclusion, critical discourse analysis, Finland, racism, museums, accessibility

The research distinguishes carefully between individual prejudice and structural racism, drawing on work by psychologists and sociologists who have mapped how discrimination becomes embedded in institutions. Individual prejudice typically occurs face to face, through microaggressions, hate speech or overt hostility. Structural racism, by contrast, is a web of interconnected elements embedded in legislation, policies and institutional practices that perpetually disadvantage racial minorities, even when individuals working within those systems hold no personal racist beliefs. The study cites evidence that structural racism manifests notoriously in housing, employment and the justice system, and it argues that supremacist attitudes also hide behind distancing strategies such as claims of color-blindness, whereby many white people detach themselves from responsibility and avoid discussing racism altogether. Philosopher Charles Mills describes this as a self-shielding tactic, in which pretending not to know functions as a channel that dismisses the oppressive realities of white supremacism.

Recent survey data underscore the scale of the gap between perception and reality. A 2025 Pew Research Centre survey of more than 5,000 respondents in the United States found that optimism about racial reform, which stood at 52 percent of US adults after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, had dwindled to 27 percent by 2025. Among Black respondents, 67 percent believed that meaningful reform remained a pipe dream. Ironically, 58 percent of white Americans believed racial equality had been restored. The study also points to a Gallup finding that 64 percent of US citizens consider racism against Black people to be widespread, and to research by the German Centre for Integration and Migration, which found in 2022 that 90 percent of respondents in Germany believed racism existed there. United Nations expert reports on the United Kingdom have concluded that discrimination against people of African descent is structural, institutional and systemic, while the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights has reported that four out of ten Black people in Europe are stopped by police allegedly because of their skin color.

Central to the study is a genealogy of how racial ideology has adapted across economic eras, from mercantilism to industrial capitalism, imperialism and contemporary neoliberal globalization. Race, the author emphasizes, has no biological cogency: humans share roughly 99 percent of their DNA, and modern scholarship treats racial categories as political inventions created to grant power to white people and legitimize the subjugation of people of color. Racial hierarchies emerged historically around the fifteenth century and gained momentum alongside the transatlantic slave trade, colonial expansion and capitalist accumulation. The study documents how religion, culture, pseudo-science and economics were each mobilized to justify racial classification, from cherry-picked Christian doctrines that framed Black people as a cursed race, to Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden,’ to distortions of Darwinian evolution that recast imperial domination as ‘survival of the fittest.’ Legal instruments such as the Jim Crow laws and South Africa’s apartheid pass laws then entrenched segregation long after slavery’s formal abolition.

One of the study’s most detailed case studies concerns education and academic publishing, arenas the author describes as supposed champions of open inquiry that have themselves been captured by supremacist gatekeeping. Article 26 of the Universal Declaration proclaims that education shall strengthen respect for human rights and promote tolerance and friendship among racial groups, yet the study argues that Western curricula continue to elevate whiteness at the expense of other races, teaching slavery and colonialism in sanitized versions while concealing colonial atrocities such as German genocide in Namibia and British torture of Kenyan freedom fighters. In publishing, the author describes subtle gatekeeping coded in routine rejection reasons, including demands to tone down criticism of imperialism, reduce word counts that would otherwise cut off criticism, or conform to Western-prescribed methodology. Empirical studies corroborate the pattern: research on geoscience found that only about 30 percent of papers on African topics were written by African authors, while studies during the COVID-19 pandemic and in global oncology documented persistent under-representation of sub-Saharan African authorship.

The study links these knowledge hierarchies to global capitalism, arguing that supremacism sustains a Western hegemonic system in which might is treated as right. Through trade ploys described as colonial-based commodity racism, including control of plants and seeds, and through raced markets, capitalism is said to manufacture poverty in the Global South while marginalizing it in economic relations. The author invokes Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, in which radical disparities in wealth distribution are purposely reproduced as small doses of death in the daily lives of subaltern populations. Trade frameworks such as the African Growth and Opportunity Act are criticized for tying market access to US-defined benchmarks of liberal governance, and the funding dependence of African institutions, with the African Union receiving nearly 70 percent of its operational funding from Europe, is presented as a mechanism of quiet capture that erodes institutional independence.

International human rights law offers little shelter from these dynamics, the study finds, because laws enacted in good faith are subverted by institutional practice. The United Kingdom’s Equality Act 2010 and the Treaty of Lisbon, which made the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union legally binding, are cited as milestone legislation that nonetheless coexists with pervasive, well-documented racism. The now-defunct Rwanda Asylum Plan, struck down by four separate courts as a breach of the UK’s international treaty obligations, is presented as an example of how governments persist with policies widely denounced as racist even after legal defeat. The paradox, the author argues, is devastating for the credibility of universal rights: it seems implausible that universal rights can be attained in environments that condone supremacism, prejudice and racial stereotyping, and many in the Global South consequently view the human rights agenda as an extension of disguised colonialism.

The study also engages critically with psychological theories of racism’s origins, including Frances Welsing’s Cress theory of color-confrontation, which posits that white supremacy is driven by a fear of genetic annihilation in a world where most people are non-white. The author reviews objections from scholars such as Bernard De Montellano, who found the albinism claim scientifically baseless, and from critics who argue the theory distracts from the political economy of racism, exemplified by historian Barbara Fields’s warning that slavery’s chief business was the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco rather than white supremacy. The study concludes that the real drivers of supremacism are historical capitalist economic factors, profit accumulation through cheap labor and the fear of losing unearned imperial and neocolonial privileges, rather than genetics.

Resistance, the study insists, must come from both sides of the racial divide, because complicity sustains the system. Philosopher Iris Marion Young’s social connection model holds that people are responsible for structural discrimination by virtue of participating in the institutions they condemn, through employment, volunteering or funding. The author cites Steve Biko’s call for Black people to reclaim agency and Nelson Mandela’s reminder that no one is born hating another person because of the color of their skin, since racism is a taught behavior. At the same time, the study argues that white complicity persists through color-blindness, white fragility and tokenism, the perfunctory hiring of minority members to create a false impression of inclusiveness while denying them real influence over policy. Emerging counter-currents, including South-South cooperation through BRICS and the decolonial drive toward delinking from the colonial matrix, are flagged as signs that the cycle of coloniality may be nearing its end.

The study’s conclusion is blunt: universal human rights and global justice cannot be attained when certain groups believe themselves above the structures of international governance, and the greatest threat to international peace and security may not be armed conflict but white supremacism itself, which fuels conflict through capitalism’s profit-maximizing contempt for African lives. Unless there is a proactive policy shift, the author warns, polarization between the West and Africa will deepen, making sustainable global security harder to achieve. Invoking an African proverb that when you shoot a zebra in the black stripe, the white stripe dies too, the study frames racism as a self-defeating scheme in a world where all human beings are enmeshed in the same social fabric, sharing 99 percent of their DNA and, by the terms of every major human rights covenant, the same equal and inalienable rights.

Subject of Research: How white supremacism undermines the universal human rights agenda through structural racism and global capitalism

Article Title: How white supremacy undermines the universal human rights agenda

Article References: Simuziya, N. J. (2026). How white supremacy undermines the universal human rights agenda. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 233. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00544-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00544-x

Keywords: white supremacy, human rights, UN Charter, structural racism, capitalism, Global South, colonialism, academic publishing, racial discrimination, institutional racism, necropolitics, decoloniality