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DISCRIMINATION

The conversations with Swedes about race that broke my brain

Since arriving in what she thought was liberal Sweden, Shandana Mufti has been surprised to find conversations she has had with Swedes about race often reveal a surprising ignorance.

The conversations with Swedes about race that broke my brain
A window was smashed at Lund University student organisation Hallands Nation after they held a "slave auction" at a student party. Photo: Johan Nilsson/SCANPIX

Sweden is strange.

On the one hand, it has been a fairly easy country to move to, especially for higher education. It took in thousands of Syrian refugees during the height of the refugee crisis – several times more than fellow Scandinavian countries Norway and Denmark. (Of course, Sweden’s immigration policies are expected to change significantly under the new government.)

But on the other hand, conversations in Sweden about race – race as an undeniable reality that shapes peoples’ experiences in a fairly homogenous society – are at worst ignorant.

Take, for example, a slave auction held by Hallands Nation, a student society, at Lund University in 2011. Three people in black face, ropes tied around their necks, were led into a party by a white “slave trader”. Over the course of the evening’s event, the “slaves” were auctioned off. 

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I learned about this slave auction at an exhibition about hate crimes at Malmö Museer, which I attended as part of my coursework for a class on Media and Diversity at Lund University. As I was staring aghast at a board about this slave auction, which took place a mere decade ago, a classmate nudged me. He gestured toward a police officer’s cap in a glass case. This cap was positioned not far from portraits of men and women who had been victims of hate crimes, based on their racial, religious, or gender identities. In this exhibition, organised in partnership with the police, the police positioned themselves as victims of hate crimes as well. 

I completed my undergraduate studies as an international student in the United States, which perhaps means I’m more aware of the horrors of chattel slavery. But this slave auction happened in 2011, at a point in the internet era when it would have been easy enough to Google “slave auction good idea?”

This museum trip came on the heels of my first brush with discourse on race in Sweden. Picture this: my first date since moving to Sweden a month earlier, with a Swedish guy who seemed nice enough, and who was aware that I am not a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Swede. We met for fika at a cosy café in Lund. After the usual hellos and how-are-yous, he pulled out the topic that had clearly been on his mind for a while: “When is it okay for non-black people to say the n-word?” He would hate this article for the way I’ve written out the n-word here, because he insisted that it’s important it be spelled out in full, so he can know whether the author’s intent was for it to end in -er or -ah. Why? I’m not sure, his explanation went over my head.

He argued passionately for the rights of the elderly to use the n-word, including in reference to their caretakers. What about the rights of those caretakers to a safe, non-hostile workplace? Again, his explanation for why racist slurs uttered by old people should never be corrected went over my head – something about them being old and set in their ways, and their racism being essentially harmless.

He laughed at Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, and argued that black Americans should just arm themselves if they don’t feel safe in their streets. Then he moved on from contemporary events and to historical ones. While born and raised in Sweden, he has one Belgian parent. And so, this guy cracked jokes about King Leopold “mowing his lawn” as he enacted the unimaginable atrocities that resulted in millions of deaths in the Congo when it was a Belgian colony. I could not get away from this date fast enough.

Anyway, I didn’t get any better at filtering out people after this experience. Another guy I went out with several times let his nationalism fly on our last date, when he told me confidently, “Sweden is the best country in the world.” This was the theme of a two-hour lecture he delivered as I sipped my beer and tried to think of the best way to end the ordeal. Don’t get me wrong – I do love living in Sweden. But this grew old fast. He explained that although Sweden’s zero tolerance drug policy is not a successful model, Sweden is still trying – which makes it the best country in the world. He told me that although the Systembolaget system is irritating and inconvenient, it shows how Sweden tried to curb rampant alcoholism – which makes it the best country in the world. Fair enough.

And then it got really interesting, when he decided to argue that racism in Sweden is real – but that because it is subtle, it is also the best racism in the world. This is the moment that my brain truly broke, because how do you argue with that?

It’s not all bad though. As I mentioned earlier, I did my bachelors in the United States, where the topic of Palestine and Israel is an extremely fraught one, including on university campuses. I plan to write my master’s thesis on a topic that incorporates the subject of Palestine, something that I would never have dreamed of broaching if I were still in the United States. And so, in many ways, while conversations around race and identity seem to be lagging behind in Sweden, in others, I am surprised by the opportunities to explore topics that are taboo elsewhere.

That said, come on. Racism, no matter how “subtle,” is never benign.

Last month, David Crouch wrote for The Local about the failures of Sweden’s race-blind approach to collecting data about its population. Under a system of race blindness, racism as a form of systemic and structural oppression can never be dismantled because it is never acknowledged. And consequently, you, too, might find yourself at a party that turns into a slave auction.

I hope you won’t.   

Member comments

  1. Thank you Shandana for a thoughtful article. I often struggle to communicate the importance of some of these issues to my non-American friends. Some understand, others often tell me that “Americans are always so unecessarily focused on race, we don’t have your problems here”. I think the subtlety of Swedish racisim and the lack of complex language for it really does damage in the same way that unintentional racism among white progressives in the United States does. People can say, “I’m not racist, I voted for Obama!”/”We’re not racist we brought in people from Syria!” ~ Wonderful, great job~ but you can’t use this as a free ticket to ignore history, everyone’s role in instiutionalized racism, or to feign being an activist. I am proud of Sweden for so many things and I have faith this nation may yet come together to address these issues in a good way.

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POLITICS IN SWEDEN

Politics in Sweden: What’s in the Social Democrats’ plan to eradicate Sweden’s ‘vulnerable areas’?

The Social Democrats have given a sneak preview of their plan to eradicate Sweden's so-called 'vulnerable areas', where extreme segregation is combined with severe crime problems. Would it make a difference?

Politics in Sweden: What's in the Social Democrats' plan to eradicate Sweden's 'vulnerable areas'?

With “strategic demolitions” in the most segregated and crime-ridden housing areas, a ban on people on benefits moving into them, and a limit on the share of rental housing in such areas, the plan sketched out in an opinion piece in the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper on Sunday is the boldest new policy proposal the Social Democrats have made in years. 

It’s basically a sanitised version of the “ghetto plan” launched in Denmark back in 2018. 

And judging by the reaction – with right-wing commentators decrying what they call tvångsblandning (forced mixing) and bussning (using buses to swap pupils between areas) and left-wing ones decrying the demolition plans and proposals to let educated people jump rental queues, it promises to be almost as controversial. 

But what’s the alternative, Lawen Redar, the Social Democrat MP who led the working group on segregation, asked Swedish public broadcaster SVT on Sunday. 

“Should we just leave the situation like it is today?” she said of Sweden’s 59 problem housing areas, in some of which 80 percent or more have an immigrant background. “I am extremely frustrated over this. Something must be done.” 

What are the Social Democrats proposing? 

Redar and her three colleagues made 11 proposals in their article: 

1. A national list of “vulnerable areas” with a set of targets to promote: the physical reconstruction of the areas to combat segregation and promote integration; a better mix in the population; an increase in the use of Swedish language in welfare services; bold moves to increase the amount of people in work; and an increased police presence to fight criminality.

2. Central government to hold so-called “Sweden negotiations” with municipalities to jointly fund physical improvement of the areas, by new building, densification, strategic demolitions, and new traffic and public transport solutions. 

3. A limit to the proportion of rental apartments in vulnerable areas. Areas with high levels of rental apartments would be required to take action to increase the share of private and cooperative housing. 

4. Government to give credit guarantees to companies building detached, semi-detached, and terraced houses in vulnerable areas.

5. Government funds for renovation and upgrading of “Million Programme” areas. 

6. Minimum income for those moving to vulnerable areas. Landlords would be banned from renting out property in vulnerable areas to anyone who has lived off benefits in the last six months. 

7. People with university degrees would be given priority in the queue for rental apartments in vulnerable areas.

8. New regulations to prevent landlords setting high income requirements for rental properties outside vulnerable areas. 

9. Government to give credit guarantees and other forms of investment support to companies building affordable rental apartments outside vulnerable areas. 

10. An inquiry into how to increase the share of rental properties owned by non-profit and public housing companies outside vulnerable areas 

11. An inquiry into how to give municipalities first right to bidding on socially important and strategic land. 

What’s the problem? 

Although Sweden’s recent epidemic of gang shootings has been blamed by many on the country’s extreme housing segregation, Redar and her colleagues said that this was far from the only problem. 

Fully 40 percent of adults between the ages of 20-64 in Sweden’s 59 “vulnerable areas” cannot support themselves through their work, three out of 10 children in such areas leave secondary school without the grades needed to go to upper secondary school or gymnasium.

Part of Sweden’s segregation problem, as Lawar recognised, is built into the architecture. The Social Democrats’ “Million Homes programme”, enacted between the mid 1960s and the mid-1970s, may have rescued people from slum conditions, but it also created a series of isolated urban communities on the outskirts of Sweden’s cities, often cut off from the rest of towns and cities by motorway ring-roads. 

Although they were initially built for working-class ethnic Swedes, as the rate of immigration to Sweden picked up in the 1980s,1990s and early 2000s, Swedes became outnumbered as part of so-called “white flight”.  

Fully 80 percent of those living in the so called “especially vulnerable areas” now have a foreign background, a share that rises to above 90 percent in five of the most segregated districts. 

“We believe that there is no more important task for Sweden than breaking segregation and fighting the class society. No task is more urgent,” Redar and her colleagues wrote in their article.

“The fact that children and young people are growing up in this cemented inequality is nothing less than a social failure which brings shame to our country. It must come to an end.”  

What are opponents saying about it? 

Fredrik Kopsch from the right-wing Timbro thinktank complained that efforts to increase the number of people with immigrant backgrounds in middle class and rich areas of Swedish cities would not work. 

“The income requirement [for rental apartments] will be reduced through the law, and state subsidies will create cheap rental apartmments in socio-economically strong areas. It is detached from reality to think that this will help deprived people,” he wrote in an article in Svenska Dagbladet.  

Will it help the Social Democrats? 

The Social Democrats were criticised for lacking concrete policy proposals, both in the run-up to the 2022 general election and in their first year and a half in opposition. 

With this proposal, together with a proposal to make kindergarten compulsory for children over three years old, that has changed. 

If the rest of the 11 policy working groups set to present their conclusions at the party’s congress in August come up with similarly detailed proposals, the party will be overflowing with new ideas. 

While this will finally give its politicians something to say for themselves, it will also make them easier to attack. 

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