Universal Human Rights and the Coloniality of Race in Sweden

Abstract

This article makes an argument that using the term race and considering structural racial discrimination as such and the impacts on it of European colonialism are needed for Sweden's observance of universal human rights. This argument is contrary to the view of the Swedish state and challenges an image of Sweden as a champion for universal human rights without any colonial history or racial problems of its own. Keywords Sweden. Race. Colonialism. Universal human rights. CERD How, if at all, are race, structural racial discrimination, and European colonialism relevant to the observance of universal human rights in Sweden? Some social scientists would argue that there is a widespread denial in today's Europe that race and colonialism are politically relevant (

Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France. By Jean Beaman. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. 170 pp., $34.95 (paper)

“…The specific historical backdrop of French processes of racialization, in the context of colonialism in Haiti and North Africa, was part of a larger Europe-wide phenomenon in which European countries sought to dominate peoples and cultures outside of Europe, and invented racism as a justification for empire. In this way, for example, Citizen Outsider is in dialogue with recent work on racialization in Scandinavia (see McEachrane 2018). Rather than confining her analysis to either the concept of race or the concept of ethnicity, or to race as a subcategory of ethnicity, Beaman argues for the two terms as “co-constitutive of each other” given that her informants are excluded from Frenchness both as people “having ethnic origins in the Maghreb” and because they are “racialized as nonwhite” (p. 19).…”

On Conceptualising African Diasporas in Europe

“…Although the outcomes of the Middle Passage vis-à-vis the Central Mediterranean Route differ with respect to their magnitude of racial horror as well as the racial and cultural identities of Black African diasporasthe socio-political outcomes are continuous. For example, being racialised as Black, finding oneself in socio-political systems based on the privileging and domination of white people politically, legally, economically, culturally and socially or in terms of belonging to the nation be it in the US, Brazil, Italy, or Sweden (McEachrane 2014b(McEachrane , 2018Mills 2003Mills , 2017. Socio-politically, the African diasporic processes of the Central Mediterranean Route graft on to those of the Middle Passage.…”

“Just Throw It Behind You and Just Keep Going”: Emotional Labor when Ethnic Minority Healthcare Staff Encounter Racism in Healthcare

“…This self-image has its roots in the 17th century idea of the “hyperborea”, a Nordic version of eurocentrism, which enabled Sweden to have a double moral advantage in relation to colonization. On the one hand, Swedes could claim superiority vis a vis colonized peoples and on the other, as impartial explorers “in service of science and culture” ( Schough, 2008 , 36–38, 52), they could distance themselves from other colonizers ( Björkert & Farahani, 2019 ; McEachrane, 2018 ). This moral high ground has been reinforced through the social and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, when Sweden emerged on the international scene as a model of solidarity and equality, where decolonizing and anti-apartheid movements were widely supported, in the context of a strong welfare state identity ( Pred, 2001 ).…”