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).