Equality and exclusion: ‘Racism’ in a Swedish town

Abstract

Research on racism is prolific but ethnographic studies of what could be termed racism in everyday local social life are much less common. The article examines local Swedish classifications of difference and belonging in relation to meaning of racism and considers how ideologies of equality relate to forms of exclusion and racist expressions. The aim is to discuss the articulation of distinctions of exclusion and inclusion in everyday contexts through the presence of the refugee Other. The material is based on fieldwork conducted during the first half of the 1990s in a small town in central Sweden. The establishment of a refugee reception center in the town had concrete and symbolic repercussions on the local residents, making people's sense of belonging and processes of exclusion more openly conflictual.

Keywords:

• Racism
• refugees
• everyday life
• exclusion

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Marianne Gullestad and Peter Hervik for their valuable comments. Also many thanks for helpful comments from colleagues in Stockholm, Mona Rosendahl, Annika Rabo, Mark Graham, Eva Poluha, and Johan Norman. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers and the Ethnos editors for their perceptivecomments.

Notes

In English, the comparable term is xenophobia, to my mind a misnomer. A phobia is a medicalizing term, used to describe fearful displacement-avoidance. The avoidance in relation to refugees and immigrants is not based on fear, although fear is often used as a kind of explanation of antagonism assuming that strangers and foreigners ‘naturally’ evoke fear. ‘Xenohostility’ would be more to the point, denoting contact, conflict and forms of exclusion.

Gruvbo has more disreputable forerunners in the small town of Sjöbo in southern Sweden. Together with another community, Klippan, in the same region, Sjöbo became almost synonymous with hostility toward immigrants and ‘racism’. In the late 1980s, a year before the government launched a more restrictive asylum policy, Sjöbo politicians actively refused the establishment of a refugee reception center after a local referendum to that effect which was actively supported by leading politicians in Sjöbo (Fryklund & Peterson 1989). Some years later, in the town of Klippan, a young West African refugee was murdered by a group of explicitly racist youth (Wigerfelt 2001).

This is an especially sore issue in relation to persons brought as infants from various non-European countries for Swedish adoption. They are Swedish but can end up being conceived of as not only having ‘foreign’ physical appearance but also as representatives of a ‘foreign culture’ of which they themselves have no experience.

Those years, the government was constituted by a coalition of non-socialist parties. However, when it came to issues of refugee and immigrant policy and its political rhetoric this did not differ from the Social Democrats in any significant ways.

However, it is not certain why the Kosovo Albanians, in particular, were those most often accused of thefts. They were never accepted as ‘real’ refugees, that is, in a political sense, and to Swedes the Bosnians were the victims, not the Kosovo Albanians. They were at the time defined by the government as economic refugees which justified their expulsion. However, other groups of asylum-seekers were also defined in such terms. The occurrence of accusations and suspiciousness may also have been reinforced by a more general view of Albanians as more backward and primitive than others in Europe, except ‘Gypsies’.

BSS was often seen scrawled with anti-immigrant, racist grafitti. BSS is an organization which first made its public appearance in 1980 (Lööw 1995).

Iranian refugees had earlier been one of the largest groups of refugees and many had been sent to municipalities in central Sweden where Gruvbo lies. ‘Iranian’ is then here used as a general antagonistic label, instead of the previously more often heard ‘damn Turk’. In a brief newspaper article, a Swedish-Iranian anthropologist scrutinizes the social position of being a ‘Middle Eastern male’ in Sweden today and also poignantly compares how much less desirable his ‘Middle Eastern person’ is in Swedish homes than the coveted carpets from his own home region in Iran (Khosravi 2003).

In these contexts some Scandinavian anthropologists have also made varying contributions in or about the media on the position of immigrants, nationalism, and the meanings and political uses of culture and gender (e.g. Gullestad 2002b; Kurkiala 2002; Talle 2003; Wikan 2002).