Inequality Before the Law - A Study of the Legitimisation of the ‘Ghetto’ Law on Compulsory Daycare

Abstract: The legitimisation of discriminatory policies is the phenomenon under scrutiny in the present study. The thesis is an extreme case study, that inductively analyses The Law on Compulsory Daycare through the ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be’ approach. Deductively, the policy is examined for the presence of othering, orientalism, and cultural racism. The problem representation assumes a binary hierarchy which results in a simplified understanding of ‘non-western’ culture attributed a few negative characteristics. The discriminatory policy is legitimised through the assumption that a lack of ‘Danish culture’ causes social problems of crime, non-participation, isolation, and under-performance in school in so called ‘ghettos’ and ‘deprived neighbourhoods’, which characterises as cultural racism, because it assumes the inferiority of ‘non-western’ culture. The thesis concludes that the ‘non-western’ is created as the ‘other’ in a way that is related to the merits of orientalism, but there is not found clear evidence of orientalism.