1

Chapter 3

”Words that wound”: Swedish whiteness and its inability to accommodate

minority experiences

Tobias Hübinette

During the classical colonial period and at the time of hegemonic racism from the

19th to the first half of the 20th centuries, an array of words, names, expressions and terms were used to describe and denote minorities both in the colonies and within

Europe itself. Categories like ”Negro”, ”Redskin”, ”Oriental”, ”Eskimo ”, ”Lapp”,

”Semite” and ”Gypsy” were used both within the scientific world as well as by the state apparatus, by the media, in the cultural sphere and, above all, in daily life. However, after the Holocaust, the end of formal decolonisation and the social revolution of 1968, many of these words have started to fall out of use due to political activism coming from the side of minorities in countries like the US, Canada and Australia as well as in some European countries like the UK, the Netherlands and Germany. For example, the word “Negro” and its even more denigrating version “Nigger” is nowadays in an Anglo-

American and English language context usually known as the N-word, several

American baseball teams which were previously called “Redskins” have changed their names, and in 2002 the United States Congress decided to replace the term Oriental with the word Asian in statistical and official documents (Han 2010; Kennedy 2003;

Olsson 2007; Stapleton 2001). However, a public debate has also taken place in many countries with regards to colonial and racist words and expressions. Here those opposed to questioning the use of racially derogatory expressions, typically people from the white majority population, accuse the representatives from different minorities for 2

espousing hypersensitive hysteria, extremist or conservative censorship, “reverse racism” and, above all, political correctness (PC). Those representing the white majority view propose the continued use of what they argue are objective and value-neutral words and expressions, which they see as deeply rooted in Western civilization.

This issue of how the majority and the minorities are relating differently to

Europe’s colonial and racist history and legacy has lately also come to the foreground in the Nordic countries and in Sweden. In the Nordic countries in general many of these words and terms are still being used uncritically in everyday life as well as within academia and by printed, visual and electronic media (see also Anna Rastas’ contribution to this anthology). This chapter will look at three case examples of contested words and expressions in contemporary Sweden with the background of

Swedish whiteness and by making use of speech act theory and the psychoanalytic concept of melancholia. The first example concerns the word “Negro” (neger) and its various linguistic derivations which in a Swedish context are not considered to be racializing terms in spite of the fact that representatives from the African diaspora have protested against the “naturalized” use of the word (Bondesson 2009; Sabuni 2005). For example, in 2009 a Swedish Facebook group called “The name is Negro ball” (Det heter negerboll) was able to recruit tens of thousands of Swedes in a massive “anti-PC” campaign in a span of a few months after a Swedish journalist had defended the continuous use of the word on public service television.1 The second example is the biggest Asian studies department in Northern Europe, which bears the name of the

Department of Oriental languages and is located at Stockholm University, and its senior

1 A ”Negro ball” (negerboll) is in Swedish the traditional name of a Swedish pastry, which in other countries would

be known as a chocolate ball. 3

staff members are still today using the term Oriental Studies and names like the

“Orient” and “Orientals” although junior members and especially those of Asian background have protested against this old-fashioned naming (Hübinette 2002). The third example was brought up in a critical way by a German woman living in Sweden in

2010 (Liljestrand 2010). She pointed out that a number of rock climbing tracks in

Järfälla outside Stockholm have been named after terms associated with the Holocaust such as Zyklon B, Crematorium and Crystal Night (Kristallnatten), and that these names had been used for almost 20 years without anyone seemingly protesting against them. In the debate which erupted, many Swedes defended the names as a reflection of a subcultural “twinkle in the eye”-humour and a non-political jargon among rock climbers. The empirical data for the chapter is collected from debate texts in magazines and newspapers and Internet pages related to the three examples given above.

So why do so many Swedes still want to use words and names which are considered to be hurtful by minorities as they are loaded with histories and experiences of oppression and even genocide? Why do highly educated Swedes still cling to old- fashioned academic terms like Oriental Studies, and why do so many Swedes defend the continuous use of the word “Negro” and find words associated with the Holocaust to be funny? Can it be explained by an innocent attitude towards historical events that are seen as unrelated to Sweden, and as an expression of a sincere openness towards neutrality and objectivity concerning controversial historical issues? Or is this about a

Nordic and a Swedish exceptionalism and amnesia accompanied by an inability to accommodate minority experiences on a psychic level and therefore about the reproduction of colonial and racist structures and hierarchies? By making use of Anglo-

Saxon speech act theory and psychoanalytically inspired Critical Race Studies and with 4

a particular focus on assaultive speech or hate speech, I will try to understand Swedish whiteness and its inability to accept that certain words, names and expressions have a long and negative history connected to the lived experiences of minorities. This connection is again and again disavowed in the name of a colour-blind white antiracism, but, as I will argue, can be seen as an expression of a white melancholia, which works alongside the suppression of the fact that Sweden is today a postcolonial society. In other words, the concept of white melancholia is being used to understand why many

Swedes defend the continuous use of colonial and racist words and expressions.

Introducing Swedish whiteness and white melancholia

In contemporary Sweden, being white means being Swede and being non-white means being non-Swedish regardless if the non-white person is culturally Swedish and was born or grew up and have lived most of her life in Sweden. This means that the difference between the bodily concept of race and the cultural concept of ethnicity has collapsed in a contemporary Swedish context. This conflation of race and ethnicity is something that not only non-white migrants and their descendants are experiencing, but also adopted and mixed Swedes of with a background from South America, Africa and

Asia who, in spite of being fully embedded within Swedishness on an linguistic, religious and cultural level are encountering racializing experiences caused by their non-white and therefore “non-Swedish” bodies (Hübinette & Tigervall 2010;

Lundström 2010).

The historical background to this construction of Swedishness in relation to whiteness can be traced back to the privileged position of Swedes in relation to the historical construction of the white race itself, a scientific discourse that was hegemonic 5

for almost 200 years (Hagerman 2006; Schough 2008). Because of this image of the

Swedes as being the whitest of all whites, the Swedish state founded the world's fist academic institute for race science in 1922 and also implemented a sterilization program which affected more than 60,000 Swedes before the program was dissolved in the mid-

1970s, and which was heavily racialized (Broberg 1995; Tydén 2000).

However from the 1960s and onwards, Sweden together with the other Nordic countries became the leading international supporter of decolonization and one of the world's most radical proponents of antiracism, constructing itself as a colour-blind and non-racist country. It is this specific Swedish antiracist whiteness which forms the principal background for this chapter, and not the pre-1968 race hygiene driven Swedish whiteness. This contemporary Swedish whiteness which views itself as antiracist and non-racist is in the chapter seen as the dominant discourse of being Swedish. This

Swedish whiteness includes both native-born whites and immigrant whites, and non- white Swedes can also invest themselves in this discourse.

An important psychoanalytically informed concept in the chapter is white melancholia. In his discussion on postcolonial melancholy, British Cultural Studies scholar Paul Gilroy (2005) argues that this condition characterizes many British people who cannot accommodate the fact that Britain is no longer a world power, or want to accept the presence of so many of the former empire's different subjects in Britain. The

U.S. ethnic studies scholar Ann Anlin Cheng (2001) uses the concept racial melancholy when she analyzes the psychic effects of racism among racialized minorities. However, in another article which I have co-written with Catrin Lundström I argue that it is also possible to talk about a specific Swedish white melancholia which is related to the above introduced Swedish antiracist whiteness (Hübinette & Lundström 2011). This 6

white melancholia is obsessively and anxiously invested in keeping the image of

Sweden as an antiracist country alive and has particularly expressed itself in the antiracist anger towards the entrance of a racist party in the Swedish parliament after the election of 2010.

Why certain words wound

Beginning in the late 1980s a new research field was formulated in the U.S. under the name of Critical Race Studies or Critical Race Theory (CRT) among scholars with a minority background. They drew attention to the fact that the anti-discrimination laws introduced in the country since the abolishment of formal discrimination and segregation did not seem to overcome the persistent racial inequalities in American society (Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller & Thomas 1993; Delgado & Stefancic 2000). At the same time, another new field of research, Critical Whiteness Studies, developed among primarily white antiracists. This field carries out research on and critically reflects upon what it means to belong to the white majority in a racist society (Dyer 1997;

Frankenberg 1995; Hill 1997; Ignatiev 1995; Roediger 1991). Together, these two closely related fields are often put together and designated as Critical Race and

Whiteness Studies. The birth of these fields owe much to emergence of the new USA that appeared after various civil rights movements among the minorities had begun to ebb away. In its wake an increasing colour-blindness had come to dominate built on many white Americans’ belief that racism had simply been legislated away in the 1970s and 1980s. To them the only thing explaining the non-white populations’ continued economic, political and cultural marginalization in American society came from individual shortcomings in a neo-liberal post-civil rights US. 7

Although the twin fields do not exist within the Swedish academia in an institutionalised sense, there are a number of Swedish researchers who identify with

Critical Whiteness Studies and seek to apply its theories, models, results and perspectives on contemporary Swedish conditions (see for example Anna Lundstedt

(2005), Catrin Lundström (2010), Lena Sawyer (2001, 2006), Oscar Pripp and Magnus

Öhlander (2008), Ylva Habel (2008) and Katarina Mattsson (2006), and the special issue on whiteness in the gender studies journal Tidskrift för genusvetenskap (2010).

With regard to Critical Race Studies applied to Swedish contemporary contexts, my own and Carina Tigervall’s study of the (adoptee) non-white body and its relation to

Swedishness can be seen as an attempt at conducting a Swedish Critical Race Studies research project (others include Cederberg 2005; Hübinette & Tigervall 2008; Hällgren

2005; Kalonaityté, Kawesa & Tedros 2007; Lundström 2007; Mattsson & Tesfahuney

2002; Motsieloa 2003; Pred 2000; Sawyer 2000; Schmauch 2006).

One of the research questions which CRT took on from the beginning was the relationship between power, knowledge and language. This was exemplified by the relationship between the continued use of colonial and racist words and expressions in everyday life, media, and popular culture, and the continued existence of a discriminatory majority society despite the relative success of the civil rights movements and an official antiracist legislation and rhetoric. The CRT researchers drew inspiration from the linguistic theories developed in Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy, and especially the everyday life-oriented part of it focusing on the everyday role of language in the creation of human culture (Austin 1986).

CRT researchers see racist expressions as falling within a certain type of utterances which are called illocutionary speech act (Matsuda, Lawrence III, Delgado & 8

Williams Crenshaw 1993). This type of sentences are usually followed by an expectation that the promise will be carried out. Illocutionary speech acts are also characterized by an often ceremonial and ritualized nature, that is, they derive their power from constant repetition, and are known in philosophy of language as iterative.

One illustration of this could be when a white person utters a racist word or a racist opinion. This statement draws upon a long history of colonialism and racism that is activated and a contemporary segregated and discriminatory society becomes legitimized.2

Furthermore, CRT is also based on the understanding that race is a social construction as well as a performative act, which means that when a white person for example utters a so-called racial slur, or a derogatory racist term, directly at a non-white person, the latter becomes racialized, and the speaker is placed in a higher position and identified with whiteness while the recipient is put into a subordinate position as a lesser non-white subject (Alcoff 2005). In other words, the non-white body is neither subordinate nor non-normative in itself - instead the subordination and the non- normativity are created by language that relates to the social imaginary of the normative white majority.

To believe in the Orient

2 But if an underprivileged non-white person would call a white person something which would allude to

his or her racial categorization, that is the opposite, such utterance would most probably fail as there is

neither a history nor any contemporary context to relate to when and where non-whites are oppressing

whites on a structural and systemic level. Such a statement is instead perhaps met by surprise or a sneer or

an aggressive counteract or maybe most probably completely ignored. 9

Northern Europe’s largest institution for Asian Studies can be found at Stockholm

University’s Department of Oriental languages. The department is home to teaching and research on the Middle East and North Africa, Turkey and Central Asia, India and

South Asia, and China, Japan and Korea. During the colonial era, the scientific name for

Asian Studies was Orientalism or Oriental Studies all over the Western world, and its practitioners were called Orientalists. At that time, in addition to being a geographically diffuse and almost imaginary place (as it still is), the Orient was associated with decadence and despotism and the “Orientals” were represented as being cunning, untrustworthy or even evil as Edward Said demonstrated in his famous book

Orientalism in 1978. After formal decolonization and postcolonial immigration to the

West, however, this view of Asia and Asians has changed, a process accelerated by

Said’s book and the postcolonial scholarship that followed in its wake.

Said’s book was a general attack on the Western perception of and research on

Asia and Asians, and the debate that followed the publication in particularly in

Anglophone Studies, has made it virtually impossible to use the terms “Orient” and

“Orientals” without using quotation marks, while the adjective “Oriental” today is mostly used in connection with various animal species and to designate certain objects, events and meals. Said’s criticism focused on the Orientalists’ intimate relationship with the colonial project where researchers intellectually and scientifically legitimized the

European empires in Asia through their representations of Asians (Ahluwalia, 2003;

Hübinette 2003; Macfie 2000).

The debate concerning the Orientalists and Oriental Studies, however, has not been taken seriously in Sweden, as the maintaining of the department name at

Stockholm University also indicates. Said’s book was not translated into Swedish until 10

1993, and was then provided with a introductory chapter written by the author Sigrid

Kahle (1993), daughter of a famous Swedish Iranist, where she defended her Swedish

Asian studies colleagues who unlike other Westerners had not, according to her, been guilty of creating an Orientalized image of Asia and Asians. Kahle’s attitude towards former Swedish Asian Studies scholars has been reiterated by other contemporary Asian

Studies researchers in Sweden. Together with other students and researchers, I myself tried to change the name of the department to the Department of Asian studies in 2002 with the backing of a number of legal texts and conventions that promote a non- discriminatory stance (Hübinette 2003).

The then head of the department and all the full professors were, however, against a name change even though most of the staff members of Asian background were for it.

The head and the board of the department instead stated that terms like the “Orient” and

“Orientals” cannot possibly be seen as reflecting a colonial and racist attitude in a specific Swedish contemporary context. Northern Europe’s largest institution for Asian

Studies thus showed that it had completely missed the last 20 years of debate on

Europe’s colonial and racist past and asymmetrical relationship vis-á-vis Asia and

Asians. This also has repercussions for the department’s image in the future as it will receive more and more students with an Asian background who have grown up in

Sweden and who perceive concepts like the “Orient” and “Orientals” as not only old- fashioned and “unscientific” but also as offensive and derogatory.

The beloved Swedish N-word

The Swedish twin words “Negro” (neger) and “Nigger” (nigger) have up to present time been socially acceptable to use next to older European and domestic 11

designations such as “Moor” (morian), ”blue man” (blåman) and “darky” (svarting)

(Adelswärd 2009). The word “Negro” is not only ascribed to Africans, but sometimes non-white people in general, while the word “Nigger” is sometimes provided with positive associations, as in exotic children’s songs and children’s books and to describe and celebrate black American musicians.

Children’s games like “Nigger” and ”Who is afraid of the black man?” (Vem är rädd för svarte man?), songs about the “Negro” performed by popular artists like Evert

Taube, Povel Ramel and Cornelis Vreeswijk, poems about the “Nigger” written by poets like Arthur Lundkvist, Gunnar Ekelöf and Jesper Svenbro, Pippi Longstocking’s father the “Negro king” (negerkungen), place names like “Negro village” (Negerbyn) which can also be used as a nickname for specific neighbourhoods, nicknames such as

“Negro-Johan” and “Negro-Anna” which many adopted and mixed Swedes with

African ancestry are being called by their white relatives and friends, slang compositions as “blue Negro” (blåneger) and “Negro job” (negerjobb), and established names in the world of chocolates and pastries such as “Negro kiss” (negerkyss) and

“Negro ball” (negerboll) which are both still included in the Swedish Academy’s dictionary from 2006 all suggest and point to a long time everyday and normalized use of what could be called a specific Swedish version of the N-word. It was only in 2006 that the Swedish Academy in its 13th edition of its highly esteemed dictionary added the comment “may be perceived as derogatory” after the entry word “Negro” (in small print and in parenthesis), and it was also in that edition that the word “chocolate ball” for the first time was introduced as a synonym to “Negro ball”, and not until 2009 was a the name of a neighbourhood called “Negro” replaced in the city of Karlstad (Modin 2007). 12

It was only in the 2000s that an official debate regarding the word “Negro” arose in Sweden after a bakery had been notified to the Ombudsman against Discrimination in

2003 for displaying written signs selling “Negro balls”. Even though the owner was never fined, other bakeries and cafés around the country started to advertise both

“Negro balls” and “Negro kisses” in a sort of a popular and defiant underdog-style civil disobedience campaign (Kidebäck 2004, Persson 2006). Still there are Swedish bakeries, confectioners and recipe writers who use the name “Negro ball” or joke about

“PC censorship” by instead selling “immigrant ball” or “Call it whatever you want to”, and it has been repeatedly reported that official representatives and particularly police officers make use of the word “Negro” or phrases such as “blue Negro”, “Oscar Negro” and “Negro Niggerson” in reports, inquiries and learning material (Jonsson 2009).

It has for many Swedes become something of a radical “anti-PC” act of resistance to continue their use of the word “Negro” although Sweden is currently hosting an estimated number of 150,000 people with some form of African origin, including

African slave descendants from the Americas and adopted and mixed Swedes. The ongoing debate on the specific Swedish N-word and whether it is a word that wounds also manifests itself in more unexpected contexts such as in the culture and art world when slef-identifying antiracist and leftist journalists, writers, artists, actors, musicians and artists use the word “Negro” explicitly in articles, novels, poems, exhibitions, movies, lyrics and on stage to be seen as liberated and anti-bourgeois (Polite 2005). The pervasive argument for continuing to use the word expressed by Swedes as well as by the Swedish authorities, is that the word belongs to a historical heritage and is part of a

Swedish vocabulary, and hence regarded as authentic and important to protect and preserve for the future (Nordberg 2009). All the public agencies that responded when 13

being asked about the neighbourhood name “Negro” in Karlstad in 2009, including the

National Land Survey, the Nordic Museum and the county council, said that precisely because of the place name’s long history it is a part of the Swedish cultural heritage.

The agencies argued that it should be understood as “imaginative” in a positive sense and of course that it cannot be seen as derogatory (Nilsson 2009).

In November 2008, the television program leader Carin Hjulström defended in her talk show program Carin 21:30 on the public service channel SVT2 the continued use of the word “Negro” in a discussion with the author Jonas Hassen Khemiri. She illustrated this argument in a rather unsubtle way by placing a dish of chocolate balls on the table in the studio. Hjulström said that she felt more sorry for “all children” who “do not understand why you cannot say Negro ball” than for those who felt that the word was offensive (Wirfält 2009). The same kind of exclusivist majority perspective was also revealed when the Swedish Police Union said in a statement after new revelations that the word “Negro” was used routinely by police officers on duty that “all police officers” are now exposed to a “value system panic” (värdegrundspanik) which can result in a “horror atmosphere” (skräckstämning) due to their fear of being reported for using derogatory names (Olsson 2010; Stiernstedt 2010).

The television program launched a storm of sympathy on websites, blogs and discussion forums, and in the social media Facebook a group calling itself “The name is

Negro ball, and it has always been called that” (Det heter negerboll, och det har det alltid hetat) in record time succeeded in recruiting more members than the “Save us from street violence” (Rädda oss från gatuvåldet) group, which previously could call itself the largest Swedish Facebook group. In the presentation to the approximately

60,000 members of the group during the spring of 2009 and before it was deleted by the 14

end of the year by Facebook’s headquarter in the US, the founders of the group again referred to the struggle for the Swedish cultural heritage and resistance against the “PC mafia” and “reverse racists” who believe they know that “dark-skinned become hurt by the use of the word”. At the same time, several antiracist groups were launched, but none of the dozen or so antiracist Facebook groups ever reached over a thousand members.

Subcultural Anti-Semitic humour

In the municipality of Järfälla outside Stockholm there is an ancient fortress situated on a rock that bears the name Gåseborg. The rock is composed of several climbing routes which according to the custom of the rock climbing community have been named by the first climber who created and marked out the trail across the rock.

The roughly 40 trails at Gåseborg were created and named by various climbers from

1987 to 2001, and around 20 of them are named after historical events, phenomena and people associated with World War II. There are names such as “Spitfire” and “Stuka”, but also a number of names that are directly associated with National Socialism and the

Holocaust including “Zyklon B”, “Himmler”, “Swastika”, “Crystal Night”

(Kristallnatten) and “Crematorium”.

The routes have had these names for many years and the names have been marked on different semi-official maps. Hundreds of climbers must have made use of them during this period, yet it was only in August 2010 that a woman with a German background criticized the names publicly in the main Swedish morning paper Dagens

Nyheter for downplaying and trivializing the genocide of European Jews and for expressing disrespect for the Holocaust and World War II victims (Liljestrand 2010). In 15

the Dagens Nyheter article, one of the climbers who had named one of the tracks after

Hitler defended this by saying that the type of names given to the trails should be seen as an “internal thing” among climbers, and added that he could not understand how they could be interpreted as disrespectful. The article did not lead to any closer journalistic scrutiny, let alone a debate in the Swedish media, but the story was highlighted in both

American, German, Austrian, British and Israeli newspapers, where it caused a stir because of Sweden’s international image as an anti-Fascist and antiracist country.

However, an extensive internal debate followed among Swedish climbers on the

Internet. An overwhelming majority of the Swedish comments claimed that the Dagens

Nyheter article was only an expression of intolerance, abuse hysteria and prohibition zeal. Several debaters also linked it to the “ridiculous” debate concerning the word

“Negro”, and it also emerged that apparently there are plenty of routes around the country named in a similar spirit such as “Bolted Negro” (Bultad neger) and “Negro balls of steel” (Negerbollar av stål). Many writers had also difficulties in understanding why a humorous attitude in a subculture could be seen as offensive at all, and the main forum for the Swedish rock climber community Bloxc.com published a petition for free speech and introduced a fake competition which involved coming up with a new name for Gåseborg where proposals like “Hess against an ethnic group” (Hess mot folkgrupp) and “Klettern macht frei” (climbing liberates) figured. The first name refers to the main

Swedish law against hate speech which is named “agitation against an ethnic group”

(hets mot folkgrupp), and the last name is a direct reference to the sign with the text

“Arbeit macht frei” (labour liberates) which was placed above the entrance to many concentration camps.

16

White melancholia in Sweden

What connects these three contemporary Swedish examples which at first glance may seem so different from one another? They originate from three completely different spheres; the example of Orientalism is taken from the elite world of academia, the example “Negro” appears to be localized at the more popular level of Swedish society, while the trail name example derives from a specific subcultural context. All three examples, however, are produced by the Swedish majority population, thus making it appropriate to place them within a Swedish whiteness discourse. In Anglo-American critical whiteness research, the term hegemonic whiteness is sometimes used to explain and understand that white people despite different social backgrounds and political views can still share the same privileges and perspectives on whiteness, even including racists and antiracists (Hughey 2010). Based on the three examples, a Swedish hegemonic whiteness in this case means that many white Swedes apparently want to continue to use words and expressions which are offensive and hurtful to minorities regardless of gender, class and regional and generational differences.

Furthermore, it is highly possible that the vast majority of the white Swedes who consider themselves to be fighting for freedom of speech and the preservation of

Swedish cultural heritage would not label themselves racists, but rather identify themselves as non-racists, and many would most probably call themselves antiracists.

One of the main arguments to defend the contemporary use of words like “Oriental” and

“Negro” is that they in no way can be perceived to be racist when being used in a

Swedish contemporary context. This specific Swedish context refers to a self-image which says that Sweden and the Swedes had no colonies in Asia, had no links to the slave trade and the plundering of Africa, and much less with Nazism and the Holocaust, 17

and most importantly that Sweden of today is not a racist country (see Ylva Habel’s contribution in this anthology). This Swedish whiteness is similar to the other Nordic countries’ versions of whiteness, where it is not recognized and accepted that the Nordic people were and still are positioned above the non-Western world and participated in the colonial project just like all other Western countries.

Another important ingredient of Swedish whiteness concerns a desire to remain neutral and objective to all that has happened and happens outside the borders of

Sweden to be able to feel benevolent, advanced and moral (Schough 2008: 12-24). This

Swedish exceptionalism which again has many similarities and parallels to other Nordic countries’ exceptionalistic attitudes as they appear in several of the other anthology articles, can also be seen as a deliberate forgetfulness grounded in a desire for not wanting to understand that minorities may feel offended and humiliated by certain words and expressions that are loaded with Europe’s colonial and racist history and for not wanting to take in that Sweden today is a country marked by racial diversity.

Furthermore according to my analysis in this chapter, it is also possible to talk about a white melancholy in Sweden caused by a mourning that the Swedish population is no longer as white as before, that a Swede today can potentially be both non-white and non-Christian and perhaps above all that before non-white immigration to Sweden it was much easier to be antiracist. This Swedish white melancholia requires that the idealized phantasm of a homogeneous and white non-racist Sweden is maintained on psychic and imaginary level, but in order for the grief to not become too overwhelming, white melancholia must manifest and articulate itself. So behind all the excited talk of a struggle for freedom of speech, of righteous rebellion against political correctness and of heroic defence of the Swedish language and cultural heritage, and beyond the alleged 18

intention of being objective and neutral, one finds according to my psychoanalytically inspired analysis a white melancholia and an anger against non-whites caused by their permanent presence in the country. This presence is seen to destroy antiracist or even non-racist Sweden, and is expressed through the continuous use of colonial and racist words, expressions and jokes in the everyday life of Sweden. It does not manifest a triumphalist whiteness, but a whiteness in crisis, and a whiteness structured by feelings of bewilderment and loss.

The preservation of Swedish whiteness as the hegemonic discourse of Swedish society is in other words a continuing denial of the idea that non-whites and non-

Christians can be Swedes, a continued disregard for the experiences and perspectives of minorities, and a continued lack of and absence of a postcolonial ethic that is so necessary in the new diverse Sweden in spite of all the talk about tolerance, respect, values and ethics, and despite all official antiracism. Through this white melancholia over the passing of white antiracist Sweden, the Swedish majority population continues to disavow the fact that a new postcolonial Swedishness requires a reckoning with

Sweden’s own colonial and racist cultural heritage, and at the same time minorities are being humiliated and their histories, experiences and perspectives are being silenced and made invisible in the name of a white antiracism. To be able to once and for all cure this white melancholia and to be able to transform and annihilate today’s excluding

Swedish whiteness requires that words that wound no longer are practiced as illocutionary speech acts.

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