Sweden has a non-European working class and a trash proletariat largely consisting of Africans. We who have parents from the black Africa saw smart, educated and ambitious people who in Sweden only got crappy jobs, we saw people whose lives and dreams were pissed away by something in the Swedish mentality that obviously couldn’t see the value in a black face. While the years went by.
This is blood that has been poured into a bowl. Sit down on a tram or a subway car, go to a suburb and see with your own eyes where black bodies generally are located in Sweden: in the perifery, at the end of the line, in silence, in poverty, deep in struggle.
Question.
Has the following ever happened in Sweden: a black person notes that a white colleague, friend, stranger or government official has acted racist without the white person reacting in anger, with stories of his own absolute innocence. [..] I have never even experienced it to be possible to seriously discuss racism with the leftists in Sweden – not even white people who study postcolonial theory, whiteness theory and who read Fanon and so on – not even they can manage – and this is my experience – to absorb the fact that they sometimes can act racist. The racist is always somewhere else, in the mind of someone evil and armed with an iron pipe, behind a swastika flag.
Why is there such a large group of people in Sweden prepared to immediately make fun of the quite uncontroversial claim that some pictures or words might help maintain a racist structure?
When you read that a school has forbidden gingerbread men [a character in the annual Saint Lucia Day-train] and you immidiately feel the need to write a joke about this on facebook or twitter, what are you doing? Who do you become? What order are you loýal to?
You, who make fun of this gingerbread story. Or you, who felt urged to have Tintin as your profile picture earlier this autumn, during the so-called ”Tintin-gate”. Where does the lightness with which you take a stand against black children come from? You do not see your own hands, your own skin, your own parents pictured in these racist pictures from European children’s culture. What order are you loyal to?
Questions.
When you played ”President and Negro” in school, the words meant nothing to you and you don’t know which nuances of exclusion and pain are created by these small rituals that you fight to keep.
You obviously don’t have any sense of responsibility towards real, living bodies when joking about this. You tell yourselves that this is not at all dangerous. I do not exist. My siblings do not exist. You make fun of this on facebook immediately, without thinking, and in a couple of minutes the jeers have spread across the nation – you are an army always prepared to punish those who suggest that something might be painful for black children.
You say: ”Children are starving to death in the world, but in Sweden we worry about whether or not gingerbread cookies are racist”.
None of you who spoke today has payed for these words with your own skin, your own faces, your own lives, your own history, your own future.
The babbling (Babel) continues.
This is a tower that is built when it is demolished.
Use your senses.
”Johannes Anyuru, Swedish writer.
Extracts from his article on racism “För vita svenskar är rasisten alltid någon annan”/For White Swedes the Racist is Always Someone Else. My translation.
(via kurja)