Catrin Lundström

I den här artikeln ställs Bourdieus analytiska begrepp kulturellt kapital i dialog med ras- och vithetsforskningen och migrationsforskningen. I fokus står vita migranter med en erkänd uppsättning privilegier avseende nationalitet, medborgarskap, och kompetens; tillgångar som öppnar för nya sätt att producera och reproducera kulturella, sociala och ekonomiska former av kapital. Som objektiverat och institutionaliserat kulturellt kapital finns vitheten i institutioner, pass eller visumpolitik, som alla innebär att människor som klassificeras som vita kan uppleva det mest upphöjda tillståndet av att känna sig hemmastadda nästan var som helst i världen. I kölvattnet av en globaliserad historia av rastänkande och europeisk kolonialisering positioneras dock vita grupper på olika sätt i det transnationella sociala rummet. Vithet som kulturellt kapital är med andra ord å ena sidan sammanflätat med historier om koloniala rasstrukturer, och utmanas å den andra av global konkurrens, där framför allt den asiatiska synen på vithet ställer den europeiska vitheten i nytt ljus.

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This chapter chronicles how Sweden emerged as the world’s most colourblind state formation by examining the Swedish critique of the concept of race, which ultimately led to the tabooisation and public elimination of the very word itself. The chapter follows three themes – namely, the Swedish critique of race and how it is steeped in a race biological understanding of the term, the construction of Swedish values and in the end of Swedishness itself as being the same as antiracist values and Sweden’s struggle to eliminate the word race also outside of its borders in relation to, for example, the UN and the EU. The chapter concludes that the Swedish colourblind project has in the end been about breaking with the old Swedish racial thinking that prevailed in Sweden during the first half of the 1900s. The country’s colourblind antiracist ideology has both been concerned with Sweden’s place in the world and in particular in relation to the non-Western world and with cleansing Sweden and the Swedes from all vestiges of racial thinking.

Sweden has a paradoxical history when it comes to race, as a term, as a concept and as a lived reality. In this introduction, we provide a short background on the life of the concept of race in Swedish culture and language within the last century. In addition, we introduce some key concepts and outline the aim and central arguments of the book. From its role as a pioneering nation in race science in the earlier parts of the 20th century, Sweden was equally as pioneering in the latter parts in deracialising public life and discourse, embracing a hegemonic, normative colourblindness. In today’s Sweden, neither conservatives nor progressives, and neither xenophobes nor antiracists can talk about race and hope to be taken seriously. However, things may be in the process of changing, in a situation of escalating tensions between an increasingly superdiversified Swedish population and the emergence of a revitalised far right. In the introduction, we outline six empirically focused chapters which constitute analyses and case studies of both historical and contemporary materials aiming to shed light on some of the most important and pernicious articulations of Swedish colourblindness in a time when this doctrine is becoming increasingly untenable.

The chapter presents a historicised analysis and chronological outline of the modern history of hegemonic whiteness in Sweden. This analysis provides an overall framework for the present book by forming a critical account of how Swedish race relations have evolved over time within the last century. We divide the modern history of whiteness in Sweden into three periods, which can also be thought of as phases or regimes, of hegemonic whiteness, each characterised by a number of specific tendencies, developments and confluences. Firstly, we describe the white purity period of white homogeneous Sweden, 1905–1968, most notably characterised by the foundation of the State Institute for Race Biology. Secondly, we describe the white solidarity period of white progressive Sweden,1968–2001, during which period Swedish colourblindness emerged and grew into dominance, culminating in the elimination of the word race from public life. Thirdly, we outline the white melancholy period of a white nation in crisis from 2001 and onwards as a time characterised by a sense of things falling apart, including both white homogenous Sweden and white progressive Sweden.

Race in Sweden is an introduction to, and a critical investigation of, the Swedish relationship to race in the post-war and contemporary eras. This relationship is fundamentally shaped by an ideology of colourblindness, with any kind of race talk being taboo in public discourse and everyday language use, and in practice forbidden in official and institutional language. A study of a country which was until recently strikingly white but has become extremely diverse, yet where the legacy of Swedish whiteness co-exists with a radical, colourblind, antiracist ideology, Race in Sweden will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in race and ethnicity, whiteness and Nordic studies.

In these concluding remarks, we reflect upon and envision the possible future of the notion of race in Sweden. We foresee a continued emergence of the new multiracial and super-diverse Sweden. Following this, the maintenance and defence of the colourblind hegemony of contemporary public life in Sweden must inevitably become more and more challenging as inequalities continue to grow and segregation structured by race eventually becomes impossible to ignore. Thus, while the colourblind fantasy of post-1968 Sweden lives on, and provides cover for the emergence of an increasingly emboldened far right, we suggest that things must change. We, therefore, express our hope that coming generations of Swedes will break with the current white melancholy period. Instead, we hope that tomorrow’s Swedish antiracists, white and non-white alike, will be both more willing and more capable to engage with the concept of race, the language of race and the lived reality of race in a more substantial and critical way.

This chapter analyses how expatriate women navigate national political ideals formulated around gender equality and the dual-earner model upon their return to Sweden. The study is based on 46 in-depth interviews and participant observation conducted in a network for returning migrant women in Sweden. The vast majority were married to Swedish men working in transnational companies and had returned to Sweden due to their husbands’ completed expatriate contracts. As the women had been situated outside the formal labour market during their time abroad, they had no work experience or pensionable income in the Swedish welfare system, which is based on the idea that women and men share labour- and family-related work. Hence, their positions as ‘trailing spouses’ had a severe impact on their opportunities for reintegration into Swedish society. On the one hand, the women’s work enabled their husband’s mobility and working life in transnational companies. On the other, national social benefits did not take this (gendered) work into account. Thus, the women continued to depend on their husband’s income and private insurances back in Sweden, located in-between different ‘global’ market-based solutions and a national welfare system.

Emerging from the concepts of white cosmopolitanism and white cosmopolitan femininity, this article analyses “cosmopolitan narratives” of Swedish migrant women who lived abroad for an extended period and eventually returned to Sweden. Based on eight months’ ethnographic work, including 46 in-depth interviews with migrants who had returned in Sweden, the article explores how national boundaries are both maintained and traversed in the construction of a “world citizen”. It is argued that the women’s self-identification with a cosmopolitan ethos is structured by whiteness, nationality, and class that grants uninterrupted mobility and “worldliness”. As symbolic bearers of the Swedish nation, national ideals act on the white women’s bodies internationally, in ways that both uphold and re-inscribe the nation into the global. Thus, apart from obscuring global inequalities, white cosmopolitan femininity is imbricated in both national and global politics as a place where global structures reconnect with the white nation, thereby enabling Swedish migrants to re-install themselves into contemporary global settings as self-defined cosmopolitan subjects