How colour evasiveness reproduces whiteness in Swedish universities

ABSTRACT

We analyse how the whiteness of science and technology in Swedish universities is reproduced using four interviews with undergraduates involved in groups that work on making their courses more inclusive. Combining discourse analysis with a phenomenological focus on bodies, we begin with their nuanced understandings of gender inequality. We contrast these with their professions of ignorance about ‘race’ and racism and how they naturalise their ignorance. We explore how they create relations of proximity that ‘other’ students of colour and embed racialised distinctions within equalities work. We understand this within a broader colour evasiveness (an extension of colour blindness) in which whiteness is conflated with Swedishness.

KEYWORDS:

• Colour blindness
• higher education
• science
• Sweden
• technology

Introduction

Sweden has an international reputation as an anti-racist country having previously taken a leading role in the movement against South African apartheid and in other anti-colonial struggles. This reputation is sustained through Sweden’s broader progressive image and social democratic tradition that embraces trade unionism and gender equality (National Board of Trade Sweden, 2019). However, this ‘exceptionalist image’ as ‘humanity’s avant-garde and a beacon for antiracism’ (Hübinette & Lundström, 2014, p. 423) is shifting. Research evidences ‘the existence of widespread intolerance, structural discrimination of ethnic minorities and a growing number of right-wing parties’ (Arneback & Jämte, 2021, p. 4). In this article we add to the voices arguing that the focus on the rise of the far right obscures the pervasiveness of racism in Sweden (Rydgren & Tyrberg, 2020) by showing how it shapes the views and work of ‘progressives’. We draw on a larger study about access to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education, focusing on interviews with four university student activists who work to combat inequality. While they discuss gender reflectively, they have little to say about race/ethnicity. What they do say is imbued with a colour evasiveness that naturalises the exclusion of people of colour from geek spaces in higher education. We draw on Said’s (1985, p. 1995) writings about orientalism and how racial hierarchies are reproduced through constructions of an ‘us’ vs ‘them’. In so doing, we show how colour evasiveness reproduces whiteness in Swedish universities. Only a few researchers have studied racialisation processes in Swedish higher education. Notably, Mählck (2016) drew on postcolonial theories to analyse experiences of discrimination among Mozambican scholars in higher education institutions in Sweden. She concluded, as we will also show, that ‘racialised processes of exclusion are articulated through ignoring’ (Mählck, 2016, p. 10) thus producing silences around racialised (race-based) discrimination.

Sweden is one of the most heterogeneous countries in the western world in terms of language, religion, and race (Hübinette & Lundström, 2022). It is also one of the world’s most racially segregated: ‘80 percent of all Swedes rarely or never socialise with people of a non-European origin outside of [their] working life’ (Hübinette & Lundström, 2014, p. 424; see also, Behtoui, 2021). In 2020, 11% of Sweden’s inhabitants who were born in Sweden had a disposable income below the poverty line, compared to 39% of those born outside the European Union, constituting one of the largest poverty gaps within the EU (Statistikmyndigheten, 2020). In 2021, unemployment among those born in Sweden was 5%, among those born in other parts of Europe 9%, among those born in Asia 28% and in Africa 33% (Ekonomifakta, 2022). These inequalities relate both to socio-economic factors and increasing housing segregation (Delegationen mot segregation, 2021). They must also be situated in Sweden’s racist and colonial past. Sweden’s ‘history of racial biology’ includes The Swedish State Institute for Race Biology founded in 1922 (Adolfsson, 2021, p. 2). Racism was officially abolished in Sweden through laws and conventions from the 1950s and onwards and the Swedish word for race (‘ras’) is no longer used in legal documents, and no statistics are kept regarding race or ethnicity including for higher education (Al-Zubaidi, 2012; Hübinette & Mählck, 2015). All that is monitored are ‘Swedish’ vs ‘foreign’ students. Among new entrants to higher education in the academic year 2021/2022, 71% came from a Swedish background and 29% from a foreign background, figures that reflect the country’s population as a whole (UKÄ, 2024). Of the 12,800 incoming first-year exchange students in the 2022/2023 academic year, 76% were from Europe, followed by 13% from Asia (SCB, UF 20 SM 2302). The programmes with the most international students in the academic year 2020/2021 were the bachelor and the masters in engineering education (SCB, UF 19 SM 2201).

In that sense Sweden lacks a language to talk about ‘race’. The word ‘ras’ cannot be directly translated to ‘race’ as: ‘the concepts are based on different definitions. … In a European/Nordic context, the concept of race lacks the contextual layers of the [US] race debate’ (Spjut, 2019, p. 65, our translation). We can understand this erasure as expressing a desire not to be associated with Sweden’s racist and colonial past, with racial thinking in general, and with antisemitism in particular (Kolankiewicz, 2015). Swedish policy is colour evasive, or colour blind, expressing a societal ‘reluctance to explain the difference of access to power in terms of race’ (Wiltgren, 2022, p. 446). Bonilla-Silva (2003/2010, p. 47) found that colour blindness forms ‘an impregnable yet elastic wall that barricades Whites from United States’ racial reality’. In the US, Bonilla-Silva (2003/2010, p. 16) identifies colour-blind racism as an ideology that emerged in the late 1960s in response to the civil rights movement. It supplied the ‘rationalizations’ required ‘to justify the new racial order’. Hübinette and Lundström (2014), applying the idea of colour blindness to Sweden, link it to a ‘white melancholia’ that seeks to preserve the image of Sweden as anti-racist.

Annamma et al. (2017, p. 154) argue for an extension of the idea of colour blindness, identifying how ‘the inherent ableism in this term equates blindness with ignorance. However, inability to see is not ignorance; in fact, blindness provides unique ways of understanding the world to which sighted people have no access’. Further, ‘color-blindness implies passivity. Here, blindness is imagined as something one is struck with or victim to – some thing that happens to them. Yet, that ignores the power of white supremacy, and whiteness situated within it, to actively evade discussions on race’. For these reasons we follow them in adopting the concept colour evasiveness in our analysis. We argue it is colour evasiveness that enables gender activists to evade race/ethnicity, the whiteness of their spaces, and their complicity in maintaining this. Whiteness confers ‘certain privileges where individuals can ‘afford’ to forget their own skin colour and position of power’ (Loftsdóttir & Jensen, 2012, p. 7). Researchers have documented how colour evasiveness works with hegemonic whiteness to position those outside whiteness as different and inferior, marginalising those who do not fit with dominant ways of performing whiteness (Bonilla-Silva, 2003/2010; Hübinette & Lundström, 2014).

In Sweden, Wiltgren (2022, p. 444) notes that ‘there is a clear reluctance to discuss race as the concept is inherently linked to racism in the Swedish political and public debate’. Instead ‘race is articulated in terms of being “Swedish” or being “Other”’. Historical and contemporary Swedish racisms include discrimination against white groups, notably, the Saami and Romani peoples and Jews (Hübinette & Lundström, 2014). However, dominant discourses divide people into two mutually exclusive groups: ‘Swedish’ and ‘immigrant’. The first is code for white. It includes white people born outside the country but not people of colour who are born in Sweden. It conflates Swedishness with whiteness and excludes all those who cannot pass as white from the imagined community of the nation (Behtoui, 2021). Behtoui (2021, p. 356) explains that ‘not all of those who were born and brought up in the country are Swedes. A Swede is born of parents who are native-born “Swedish”; he or she has a “Swedish” appearance and name, and speaks Swedish without a foreign accent’. But it is only some immigrants who become ‘“problematic” immigrants (invandrare). … Those whose roots are in the rich and powerful nations of the Global North are not invandrare, thus not stigmatised’.

Sometimes these two groups are referred to as ethnicities [etnicitet]. Unlike in the UK, in Sweden, ethnicity is linked to immigration [invandrarskap] rather than to ‘race’ (Westin, 2015). The word immigrant, or person with ‘foreign background’, is used in everyday talk to denote people of non-Swedish origin who are permanently residing in Sweden and has come to have social exclusion built-in to it: ‘To be an immigrant is in a sense to be non-Swedish, and in a deeper sense to be nobody’ (Mehrdad & Westin, 2015, p. 18). In this article we use ‘ethnicity’ only when it occurs in the data, otherwise we use ‘race/ethnicity’. We use ‘white/Swedish’ and ‘immigrants’ or ‘people of colour’ following the dominant discourses in Sweden that both the interviewers and the interviewees use. Jenkins (2008) is among those arguing for a theoretical distinction between race and ethnicity, and as we have said, there are significant distinctions in their Swedish usage. We slash them together both to avoid conflating them and to reflect how these distinctions often blur in Sweden. In everyday talk in Sweden, as in policy, ‘race’ is avoided, although the word ‘race’ has become more common in academic circles the past years. Indeed, we avoided it in the interviews, using ‘ethnicity’ in questions targeting ‘race’. Our intent was to frame questions in ways that would be less provocative, and more legible, to participants. But this choice also reflects our ongoing struggles with Sweden’s colour evasiveness in the research.

In the next section we outline our methodology that combines discourse analysis with a phenomenological focus on bodies. Following this, we analyse how the whiteness of science and technology in Swedish universities is reproduced using four interviews with undergraduates involved in groups that work on making their courses more inclusive. We organise our analysis into three themes. The first, centring gender, shows these students’ high level of practical and theoretical engagement in inequalities between women and men within science and technology education. In contrast, the second focuses on students’ relative incapacity to engage in race inequalities, highlighting their professions of ignorance about ‘race’ and racism, and how they naturalise their ignorance evading any responsibility to address racial injustice. Finally, we explore how they create relations of proximity that ‘other’ students of colour and embed racialised distinctions within equalities work. Thus, we show how the whiteness of science and technology in their universities is reproduced, understanding this within a broader colour evasiveness, in which whiteness is conflated with Swedishness.

Methodology

This article draws on a research study, ‘The Geek as gatekeeper? Changing relations between gender, race and technology’, funded by the Swedish Research Council (Grant number: Dnr: 2018-03401). The study received ethical approval from The Ethics Review Authority at Umeå University (Approval number: Dnr: 2019-02860). We, as the authors, report there are no competing interests to declare. Pseudonyms are used to ensure the anonymity of participants, and relevant measures have been taken to protect their identities, such as not naming their universities or degree programmes. For confidentiality, all the data are stored securely and the files are password protected.

Stereotypes of geeks and nerds have been used to align STEM with whiteness and masculinity. Our rationale for focusing on the figure of the geek is summed up by Eglash (2002, online) when he asks whether this racialised and gendered category is ‘less a threatening gatekeeper than a potential paradox that might allow greater amounts of gender and race diversity in the potent locations of technoscience, if only we could better understand it’. We have three substudies looking respectively at popular film, informal geek spaces, and university cultures. The data in this article are drawn from sub-study three in which we have interviewed 12 students across two universities. Both are established and well-recognised big research universities. It was not easy to find student participants and the low number of informants is a limitation. However, the macro-level discourses that come through in our micro-level analysis of four individuals mirror discourses in the project’s other sub-studies (e.g. Ottemo et al., 2023), and those found in other research (e.g. Fingalsson & Junkala, 2023; Hübinette & Lundström, 2014; Wiltgren, 2022). The four students interviewed were selected because they were engaged in so called ‘Equality groups’, trying to make STEM education fields more inclusive. These EQ groups were composed of students from different courses. In that sense, the students did not first-and-foremost represent their own course.

Per, Mattias, Elin and Kristina, when interviewed by the third and fourth authors in 2020, were undergraduates involved in groups focused on equality. The semi-structured interviews were conducted in Swedish, and covered their work to promote equality on campus, reactions to this from other students, what they see as the barriers to equality within their universities, and their ideas about geeks and how these relate to gender and race/ethnicity. Interviews lasted about an hour, were audiorecorded, professionally transcribed and the transcripts checked by the interviewers. Both interviewers are, like the interviewees, white Swedes. This may explain participants’ honesty in their talk about race/ethnicity. However, given how normalised colour evasiveness is in Sweden, they may well have expressed substantively the same views to a person of colour. In addition, interviewees and interviewers had the same genders, similar STEM backgrounds, and in Elin and Kristina’s case, shared experiences of being a woman in a male-dominated field. These helped generate rapport.

We began our analysis working with English translations of selected extracts, prepared by the interviewers, constituting about half of each interview including all the material on race/ethnicity. We were struck not just by the hesitancy and sparseness of their talk about race/ethnicity but by the contrast with how they discuss gender. We returned to the original Swedish transcripts, looking at the interviews in full and reviewing translations of key extracts. Our starting point for discourse analysis is that language is productive of ‘reality’ rather than descriptive of it (MacLure, 2003). This requires reliable translations. For each interview, the Swedish researcher who conducted it and the English researcher who led on the analysis reviewed the translations of the data used in this article. Translation like transcription involves analytic choices. Any choice of English words reshapes the original and so involves decisions about meanings. We maintained the original Swedish transcripts as footnotes throughout the writing process which was done collaboratively by the first and second authors whose first languages are English and Swedish respectively. The third and fourth authors checked all translations after the final analysis.

We analyse race/ethnicity as a ‘floating signifier’ (Hall, 1997) that is real through its effects in the world. We take up Ahmed’s (2007, p. 151) phenomenological approach to look at what race/ethnicity does and specifically ‘what ‘whiteness’ does without assuming whiteness as an ontological given, but as that which has been received, or become given, over time’. Ahmed adds to phenomenology’s focus on how bodies orient and move within space, an attention to how space is always already structured by histories of racisms and colonialisms which make the world ‘white’ before any/body arrives. ‘Whiteness is an orientation that puts certain things within reach’ including technologies, careers, aspirations, beliefs and ways of being. ‘Race becomes, in this model, a question of what is within reach, what is available to perceive and to do “things” with’ (2007, p. 154). Our inherited orientations set up relations of proximity which create feelings of likeness and intimacy premised on familiarity and shared attributes. Whiteness can go unnoticed by white bodies because it becomes habitual. We track these patterns in the data showing how relations of alikeness allow some people to pass into and through spaces while others encounter walls and their movement is blocked.

Centring gender

Before turning to Per, Mattias, Elin and Kristina’s talk about race, it is instructive to look at what they say about gender. We will then proceed to compare their centring of gender with their de-centring of race. Elin and Kristina are members of a STEM gender equality group at their university and Per and Mattias are in a general STEM equalities group that has decided to focus on gender. Each spends most of the interview discussing gender injustice. They offer nuanced understandings of how gender inequality operates in their universities and talk about the need to integrate struggles against homophobia and transphobia.

Per and Mattias are involved in the Equalities Group (EQ) at their university where they are studying engineering respectively. Per explains:

We are a very old section, one of the ones that has existed the longest, and we have a lot of old traditions and old societies, so it’s difficult to get rid of these traditions, you might say. Not everything’s bad, but there are bad traditions. … We’re also a programme with a lot of guys and have been like this historically, so there’s a very laddish, and like, macho culture.

We can read Per’s talk about ‘old traditions’ and how they ‘have been … historically’ as identifying that the university’s institutional space is shaped by histories of male supremacy. This creates a ‘macho culture’ among the students reliant on alcohol and humiliating rituals. Per recalls that one student acquired the nickname ‘enormous syphilis’. He connects the macho culture to sexuality, noting negative attitudes towards LGBTQ people and ‘opposition to, for example, Pride badges’. Mattias also mentions resistance to EQ’s work: ‘someone has torn down our posters on our door, and taken our flag … I think there’s a certain mindset’. According to Mattias, the EQ group ‘works for equality among the students so that everyone will feel included’. They focus on gender equality because ‘we feel that this is probably what is most relevant right now with us at the university’. Later, he says: ‘I can imagine that women feel more vulnerable. … I know for myself that there are some teachers who have made some strange comments’. He then recounts an example of a teacher telling a female student: ‘“I was close to saying something I’m not allowed to say, that: You’re not as stupid as you look”. … It’s very possible that there’ll be very many such comments just because you’re a woman’. In Matthias’ account, the teacher makes everyone aware of gendered expectations while denying any agency in constructing them.

Both Elin, who is studying Astronomy, and Kristina, who is studying Physics, are active in a society founded in 2015 by a female student who, as Elin puts it, ‘got very angry’ at a textbook only listing male physicists. The goal of their group is to show the diversity of physicists, challenging ‘Big Bang Theory stereotypes’. In their work, they involve ‘all sorts of gender identities’. Elin describes intersectional work on transphobia and discusses her own and other LGBTQ student experiences. They form ‘a network where you can support each other’. Like Per and Mattias, both Elin and Kristina discuss a lack of interest and solidarity from the majority of men. Although there are more men in their group than in other feminist groups, Kristina says that they are less engaged than the women. Elin explains: ‘Most of the guys I met and talked to … think that the association is a good initiative, it is needed. But then they never want to help’. She is disappointed with ‘feminist lads who just wanted to get laid and get a free pass. Who have absolutely not bothered to be part of a feminist struggle, have not been interested in listening to us’.

Like Per and Mattias, Elin and Kristina look to embedded and embodied cultures and structures that perpetuate gendered power relations. For example, Elin explains:

There’s this elitism too, that you should’ve been able to build computers since you were 13 years old, you should sort of understand how everything works. It should be there. For example, I can feel that I don’t really belong, just because I don’t know exactly what RAM is. … It is definitely a power game. Someone wants to put me on the spot. They want to show how much they know and how little I know, and so they want to feel better, definitely. But it is not always explicit things that make you feel left out.

Elin touches on the intimate relationship between power and knowledge, how this operates at a microlevel to include and exclude, and how it can be hidden. She evidences how ‘technology is very masculine coded’. Echoing feminist theorists like Duchin (2004), Elin identifies the gendered idea of genius, a ‘cult of personality in physics, that there are some miracle workers who just spit out equations and are so fucking smart’. Within the interview, she also talks about the sexism she experiences from tutors and how she challenges this, asking them: ‘“Why are you so aggressive right now?”, “Why do you use that tone?” or “What are you trying to get out of me now?”’.

If, as we have done in this section, we look only at the parts of Per, Mattias, Elin and Kristina’s interviews where they discuss gender and sexism, they position themselves as committed activists who believe all students should be challenging inequality on campus. They answer at length, often giving theoretically-informed responses. As we show in the next section, if we look only at the parts where they discuss race/ethnicity and racism, they largely both position themselves as lacking knowledge due to their whiteness/Swedishness and evade responsibility to address their ignorance.

Race/ethnicity: not knowing and evading responsibility

In comparison with their lengthy and informed discussions of gender and sexism above, when Per, Mattias and Elin are asked about inequality in science and technology, they either omit race/ethnicity and racism or speak about them briefly, after going into detail on gender and usually after the interviewer has specifically asked about them. Below, we analyse how they represent their lack of knowledge on race/ethnicity and how Kristina engages differently with race/ethnicity, before progressing in the next section to analyse how they create relations of proximity that embed racialised distinctions within equalities work.

Discussing campus resistance to the EQ Group, Per explains, ‘there were some people who saw the EQ group as their worst opponent, kind of, because they were the society that killed all the fun’. Their image is that we ‘just sit and examine other people’s events and complain about things they do that are offensive and so on’. His framing recalls Ahmed’s (2010) analysis of ‘feminist killjoys’ and stereotypes of SJWs (Social Justice Warriors) who are accused of ruining popular culture by demanding more diverse films, comics, television series and videogames with ‘politically-correct’ messages (Phelan, 2019). Per continues, ‘people come to us and report things that they don’t think are good, that they have experienced as offensive’. However, it becomes clear, as the interview progresses, that these people are white/Swedish.

Per’s discussion of geek and nerd cultures, delves into the link between these and masculinity. The interviewer intervenes to ask: ‘How would you say that relates to ethnicity and class then’? Per’s reply to this direct question about ethnicity is brief and hesitant: ‘Mm. Regarding ethnicity, I would say that it is more, yes, white western people within stereotypical nerdiness’. It lacks the depth of his responses on gender where, as noted above, he discusses the university’s broader culture and how this draws on society’s gendered discourses. A response of comparable depth to the one he offers on gender might have drawn attention to how the history of science is a history not just of the exclusion of people of colour but of violence against them where they have been the objects not the subjects of science, experimented on, measured and categorised (Gould, 1996).

Similarly, in responding to a question on the relative importance of different equality issues in university societies, Per speaks briefly about race/ethnicity only after an extensive discussion of gender:

Then if you take for example ethnicity, it’s difficult to say anything about it, because I have basically never seen anyone who’s not white Swedish in a society. … Then there’s generally not very many non-Swedes in the programmes either, but yes, there may be something that I do not even think about because I myself am white and Swedish, something that makes people with other ethnicities not even join in the world of societies.

When Per says that ‘it’s difficult to say anything about it’, he evades responsibility to learn and speak about ethnicity. He suggests that there may be factors ‘that I do not even think about because I myself am white and Swedish’. Race/ethnicity is clearly an uncomfortable topic for Per, one that he may not have had reason to critically examine previously. He does not express a sense that he should think about this, as someone who works on equalities. Per positions race/ethnicity as separate from gender, unlike sexuality, as we showed earlier. As Dovemark (2013, p. 18) argues, ‘not only action but also inaction is important in the analysis of contemporary racism’.

The interviewer presses him pointing out that Per’s programme is not all white:

Interviewer:

There is still a certain representation I guess on the programme, I mean, with people from like-

Per:

Yes, it does.

Interviewer:

Yes. So everything-

Per:

Exactly. So there are definitely people in the programme, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone in a society actually.

Interviewer:

No. What can explain that, then?

Per:

I don’t really know. I’ve tried to think about it but I haven’t really been able to think of something very specific that people do to them or what to say. But I mean, one factor can certainly be that if they don’t see anyone except white Swedes, it might make them less inclined to apply as well.

In this extract, the interviewer has to use a series of questions to secure a response. This is typical of Per, Mattias and Elin’s interviews when they speak about race/ethnicity. In contrast, single questions on gender elicit long replies. Here, Per repeats his uncertainty: ‘I don’t know … I haven’t really been able to think of something … ’. His final response, to which we return in the next section, is similar to the ‘catch-22 situation’ that Wiltgren (2022, p. 449) encountered in a Swedish high school: ‘to be included, you need to be alike, but to be alike, you need to be included. The outcome being that only those who already are alike are included’. Per again positions himself as white and Swedish and constructs ‘non-Swedes’ as different.

Like Per, Mattias sees the EQ group as marked by sameness but fails to question what produces this. When asked what distinguishes EQ as a group, he replies: ‘Well we are pretty homogeneous I think in what we want to do, then we all have different political views. … But then it’s also that we’re all very white. The whole campus is very white too’.

Interviewer:

The whole of student life is quite built on the student societies, sort of, so I think those who come in at Master’s level, I mean, they bring a lot of diversity to [University]. But, you say that for the EQ group, that it’s not easy for you to absorb, sort of, but is it absorbed better in other societies?

Mattias:

At least when I lived in dorms before- Many international students, they got involved in their special societies just for international students and as selection committees, and that feels like another part of [University] a bit. So it doesn’t get so inclusive, with the Master’s students. But they do have some things to get involved in at school, but maybe not together with everyone else. … 

Interviewer:

Is the society’s life whiter than the rest of [University], if you put it that way?

Mattias:

Hmm. Yes, that’s what I would say. That’s probably my opinion. Yes.

Interviewer:

Why is that so then?

Mattias:

But as I said, it’s- well yes hmm, it’s a good question. I think that Freshers Week has a lot of impact on everyone who starts, so if you enjoy Freshers Week and enjoy all the events there and feel that you get into the group, then you’ll often find your way into the world of societies. So it feels like there are lots of groups that get left out during Freshers Week. Mm, a different mindset.

Mattias’ talk is full of equivocations, as well as the hmms, there is ‘maybe’, ‘probably’ and ‘it feels like’. This exemplifies the ‘higher than usual level of incoherence’ that Bonilla-Silva (2003/2010, p. 53) noted as characteristic of colour evasive talk about race/ethnicity and through which people’s reasoning and statements can become ‘almost incomprehensible’ (2003/2010, p. 68). Mattias reduces racialised segregation to differences of psychology: ‘a different mentality’, a matter of enjoying different things. His views here contrast with his empathy with women (‘I can imagine that women feel more vulnerable’) and his capacity to generalise from one sexist incident to a wider culture of exclusion that we discussed earlier. Instead he positions students who are outside whiteness/Swedishness as separating themselves, by getting ‘involved in their special societies for just international students’ (which we take to mean students of colour). The white/Swedish societies are positioned as the norm rather than as ‘[our] special societies for just white students’. ‘Although [color-blind racism] engages … in “blaming the victim,” it does so in a very indirect, “now you see it, now you don’t” style’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2003/2010, p. 25).

We can see the same pattern of colour evasiveness when the interviewer asks Elin for ‘the challenges when it comes to equality and diversity’ across different programmes. She speaks about the male dominance of different levels, noting ‘more boys than girls who apply for doctoral positions’ and asking a series of questions, including: ‘What is it that happens in the teaching, in the meetings with employees and so on, that makes girls not feel as welcome’? Thus, initially, she interprets equality and diversity in terms of gender and seeks structural explanations for gender differences. She then briefly mentions social class and finally, she shifts to race/ethnicity:

I kind of know an immigrant who studied the Bachelor’s programme in physics. And he came to Sweden from Iran when he was 13. He is the only one I know of. And he’s said that one problem is language. That he doesn’t speak Swedish completely fluently. He can sometimes forget certain words and things like that, and he doesn’t read and write in Swedish very well. And that’s a kind of a building block.

As discussed earlier, in Sweden, racialised differences are framed by the opposition between whiteness/Swedishness and immigrant/Otherness, within which ‘the Swedish language is used as an important marker of Swedishness’ (Yang, 2016, p. 845). Zavala and Hand (2019, p. 813), in the US, identify an ‘English-Only master narrative of success, further normalizing whiteness using language as a proxy for race’. Elin draws on this ‘to explain away racial phenomena’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2003/2010, p. 28) rather than on challenging this normalisation of inequality by discussing structural factors like economic inequality and discrimination in education and employment.

The interviewer presses Elin: ‘How do you think the few, like you describe it, who have a different ethnic background, how do you think they get on at school’? She replies:

Super-tough for me to say being white and brought up in Sweden. But I definitely think they feel different. Because they’re definitely in the minority. I believe that one hundred percent. And of course I really hope it doesn’t affect them as much as it could affect them. But I have no idea, unfortunately.

Again Elin’s evasion of race/ethnicity (‘Super-tough for me to say’, ‘I have no idea’) is represented as something over which she has no control, an inevitable consequence of ‘being white and brought up in Sweden’. While possibly reflecting how white people speaking for people of colour is problematic, Elin does not mention such concerns. Neither does she discuss how to create spaces for people of colour to represent themselves. This contrasts starkly with her discussions of gender, where she criticised men who have ‘absolutely not bothered to wage a feminist struggle, have not been interested in listening to us’. The different structural positions of gender and ‘race’ within Sweden mean she does not connect this to her own whiteness/Swedishness but instead positions herself outside anti-racist struggle.

For Kristina, in the interview, race/ethnicity initially appears to be something to which she too has given little thought as, when asked about ‘ethnicity’ in her department, she replies: ‘Yes, it’s really white. No, you know, there isn’t any one. … Well, there are probably some exchange students’. The interviewer then asks Kristina about the mechanisms that make her university so white. She answers:

It’s probably because we have a fairly segregated society, and … that everyone who has a foreign background lives in the same areas and goes to the same schools. And those schools are of much lower quality so they don’t get to learn as much. And then it also becomes more difficult to get into higher education.

This avoids the rhetorical incoherence of the other students’ responses and points to social structures: racialised segregation and educational inequalities. The interviewer asks about the role of parents. Kristina rejects this explanation, returning to structures: ‘They maybe care just as much, but it may just be that they don’t know that it makes a very big difference which school you go to’. When the interviewer asks ‘Class background, is it noticeable?’, Kristina replies:

Well, not very much, because only middle-class people study here [laughs]. … But actually, it’s a bit noticeable. Because I’m also from an academic home. I kind of grew up on such a hillbilly farm, so I’m from the country as well. So I kind of come from a little different, I don’t know. And I kind of sometimes feel maybe that I’m among the brats. … The ones who don’t work in the summer. And you can take it easy.

She uses the English words hillbilly and brats which signal working and upper-middle class respectively in the US. Growing up on what she calls a ‘hillbilly farm’ with parents from academic backgrounds, may give Kristina a consciousness of class that informs her understanding of race/ethnicity, paralleling how Bonilla-Silva (2003/2010) found that, ‘white racial progressives’ were more likely to be women from working-class backgrounds. Kristina, despite such thoughtful intersectional understandings of Swedish society, sets up patterns of sameness and difference, in relation to whiteness/Swedishness and immigrant-ness, similar to those in Per, Mattias and Elin’s talk.

We finish our analysis of these interview data by exploring the spatial dimensions of the patterns identified in this section, at how these naturalise inclusions and exclusions, thus reproducing the whiteness of Sweden’s universities.

Whiteness and otherness: proximity, intimacy and orientation

In the last section we showed how Per, Mattias and Elin position themselves as both not knowing about race/ethnicity and unable to know about it on the basis that they are white/Swedish. In so doing, they other ‘immigrants’ by ‘establishing opposites and “others” whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and re-interpretation of their differences from “us”, and where this designation of others re/produces hierarchical power relations’ (Said, 1970/1995, p. 332). In Said’s (1985, p. 97) original formulation, the others ‘cannot represent themselves, they must therefore be represented by’ their opposite, who can know them better than they can know themselves. In our data, otherness operates via the impossibility of knowing those outside of whiteness/Swedishness and through an ‘avoidance of social contact between immigrant groups and “Swedes”’ (Dovemark, 2013, p. 21). In both, being white is conflated with being human and so ‘to be not white is to inhabit the negative: it is to be “not”. The pressure of this “not” is another way of describing the social and existential realities of racism’ (Ahmed, 2007, p. 161). In this section, we go beyond these activists’ performances of ignorance to understand how their groups’ whiteness is reproduced.

In ‘the white world’, bodies of colour become diminished. ‘For bodies that are not extended by the skin of the social, bodily movement is not so easy. Such bodies are stopped, where the stopping is an action that creates its own impressions. Who are you? Why are you here’? (Ahmed, 2007, p. 161) We can read this stopping in our participants’ talk about race/ethnicity. When asked about ‘representation in your own group then, when you look at gender, ethnicity’, Per offers this account of a student ‘with a foreign background’ who failed to engage with EQ:

Ethnicity – now we are only Swedes, or yes, white and Swedish. I think maybe that may have been the case last year as well. But I know that earlier, or we actually had one person with a foreign background who dropped out at the beginning of the year because he had too much to do, and he was Swedish but had parents with a foreign background then.

Perhaps he had ‘too much to do’ or perhaps this was a way of explaining his departure without talking about race/ethnicity and how, when bodies of colour encounter spaces structured by whiteness, they experience a ‘stopping in action’. Their very presence is subjected to question, inhibiting their movement into and within that space. Malone and Barabino’s (2009, p. 488) study of US science and technology graduate students showed that being the only person of colour on their course led to a focus on their race/ethnicity and a ‘failure to be recognized or to be positioned as one who possesses certain rights and obligations as a future scientist’. Returning to Per’s statement that ‘one factor can certainly be that if they don’t see anyone except white Swedes, it might make them less inclined to apply’, we can read the EQ group, and other student societies, as ‘orientation devices’. Such devices ‘take the shape of “what” resides within them. … white bodies gather, and cohere to form the edges of such spaces’ (Ahmed, 2007, p. 157). As for the Iranian student mentioned earlier who struggled with the Swedish language, the University is always already ‘white’. This embodied history, that he encounters there, makes his appearance noticeable, it ‘is what we receive upon arrival’ (Ahmed, 2007, p. 154, original emphasis). Whiteness is invisible for those who inhabit it, a white habitus (Bonilla-Silva, 2003/2010), but not for its others who must either ‘pass’ or become hypervisible. These university societies remain white not just via inherited orientations but via ongoing processes including recruitment.

Mattias is asked whether the category of geek/nerd, in terms of ‘gender and ethnic background and class, is it an equally accessible position for everyone today’? Following the pattern we identified, he responds first, at length, on gender. He then moves briefly to race/ethnicity ‘just from my own background as well, growing up in primary school, the people that had a different ethnic background were not the ones that were geeks, I would say’. The interviewer pursues this:

Interviewer:

So, ethnicities, ethnic background, do you think it makes a difference as to whether you feel more or less comfortable [at University] in relation to that?

Mattias:

T- hmm. Especially in the Bachelor’s track, it feels like, because those who have- or those who have a different background, an ethnic background, they thrive in groups where there’s others with the same background, so it’s quite rare to come across them, it is. So I actually don’t know. It’s not that often you see them on student- or on like, yeah dinner sittings [sittningar]. Not because I’ve been to so many myself, but I don’t feel that they are part of student life in the same way maybe.

Mattias makes a series of claims despite his professed lack of experience of students ‘who have a different background, an ethnic background’. Once again it is these students who are constructed as removing themselves. Whiteness is the unspoken norm, not ‘an ethnic background’, but the absent centre of university life. This is naturalised as others seeking spaces of sameness where ‘they thrive’. Thus ‘it is quite rare to come across’ these others. They are absent from the societies and dinners that characterise ‘student life’ for Mattias. In this context we can understand how the EQ group takes ‘shape by being orientated around some bodies, more than others’ (Ahmed, 2007, p. 157).

We also see similar dynamics in Kristina’s talk about race/ethnicity:

Interviewer:

What do you think about ethnicity, ethnic background? Does everyone feel equally well?

Kristina:

No, in this case, I actually think- Or like I can just guess. There are like very few. It feels like exchange students are feeling pretty bad generally. … But I think, yes, that if you have a different ethnic background and kind of a different culture, then it can probably be difficult to get into the group and stuff. I have a friend who comes from [a suburb associated with immigrants] and his parents, so he’s a second-generation immigrant. And he sort of identifies himself as ‘suburb guy’. And we hang out with him. But I still kind of know that-. Because he’s like not in our- his main group of friends. Although he likes being with us, I notice that he prefers to hang out with the friends that he has … who also have a foreign background. So, it still feels like he wants to be with, that he has more fun with his group, that they understand each other better, sort of. I think maybe he feels that he’s out of place a lot of the time. But I can only guess.

As noted above, Kristina is more willing to talk about race/ethnicity than the others and to present structural rather than individual reasons for racialised differences. She is the only one of the four who speaks about a person of colour as a friend. However, in so doing, she: conflates people who are Swedish but have an immigrant background with those, like exchange students, who are not from Sweden; admits to ignorance about the impact of race/ethnicity; and suggests ‘I can only guess’ how they feel. She does not appear to have considered asking her friend. While this does not imply, she is unable or unwilling to do this, her friend remains unnamed, indicating a distance between them and limits to his inclusion. These are ascribed to his actions, identifying as ‘suburb guy’ and ‘prefer[ring] to hang out with his friends … who also have a foreign background’. These distinctions are naturalised: ‘they understand each other better’, otherwise ‘he feels that he is out of place’. The role of whiteness in shaping the spaces of friendship in the university is evaded. Here, as in the other analysis in this section, colour evasiveness naturalises whiteness and others anyone outside of it.

Conclusions

Very little of the growing body of research looking at the reproduction of white privilege within universities focuses on Sweden. We look at interviews with four Swedish students to show how colour evasiveness shapes their understandings and their activism. Both the equalities groups to which they belong focus on gender while engaging with sexuality and its intersections with gender. Neither group engages with race/ethnicity, nor do their universities have any comparable student groups addressing racism. In Dunbar-Hester’s (2010, p. 132) ethnographic study of a US technology equality collective, she found that members ‘have been more successful in combating a gendered division of expertise than a “raced” one’. She concluded that ‘even among activist and antiracist people, the association of certain forms of affective technological engagement with Whiteness may be entrenched’. However, those who Dunbar-Hester met in the US, centre race in their work and take responsibility for addressing racism. In contrast, the Swedish equalities group members we interviewed have difficulties ‘seeing’ unequal structures and practices other than gender and sexuality. With the exception of Kristina, they do not appear to have reflected on these.

One way to understand this is highlighted by Yang (2016): ‘gender equality is an important marker for “Swedishness”’ and ‘being a feminist is in a way “becoming Swedish”’ (pp. 850–851). That gender equality ‘functions as a national trait’ works to exclude people of colour by ‘normalis[ing] an imagined modern, highly developed “we” and an “other” that lacks those attributes’ (Öztürk et al., 2022, p. 549). Thus the ‘responsibility’ to work against racism is evaded. We saw this when we contrasted Elin, Kristina, Per and Mattias’ clear articulation of the responsibility to address gender and sexism with their evasions of such a responsibility regarding race/ethnicity and racism. These are mutually constitutive. The Swedish state also conflates equality with gender equality and does not recognise people of colour as representative of Swedish gender equality discourses. Swedish colour evasiveness is based on the assumption that Swedes are anti-racist; it creates an environment in which ignorance coexists with the (for some) discomfiting realities of an increasingly diverse society. Colour-evasive racism is ‘a mode of feigning an oblivion to race’. It is an attempt ‘to observe – indeed to see – race in a way that maintains whites’ equilibrium’ (Leonardo & Porter, 2010, p. 150, original emphasis). For the four students discussed in this article, their spaces, while ostensibly focused on equality, are, as we have shown, ‘orientated “around” whiteness, insofar as whiteness is not seen’. The effect of this is an ‘institutionalization of a certain “likeness”, which makes non-white bodies feel uncomfortable, exposed, visible, different, when they take up this space’ (Ahmed, 2007, p. 157). As Joseph-Salisbury (2019, p. 4) identifies, we have to move from ‘post-racial’ understandings in which each exclusion is ‘an isolated aberration: a mere blip in a social order that has moved beyond race’ to structural understandings of these as reflecting a ‘web of whiteness’.

Our work is limited by being based only on the views of white students. Absent from our analysis are the voices and perspectives of people of colour in Sweden who are studying and working in astronomy, design, engineering, physics and similar programmes. As one of our referees asked, ‘What terms and views might we learn from those subjects to racialized stereotypes and discrimination in an ostensibly colour blind society? How would those ideas and experiences inform the overall argument of the article?’ This is something that we have addressed through further data collection in the overarching research study that we are drawing on here. That these voices were not built into the study from the outset reflects our own colour evasiveness and this is something about which we are currently writing. We hope that by ‘taking the counter narratives of racially minoritised students seriously, … we are better able to move more forcefully towards disrupting the whiteness of Higher Education’ (Joseph-Salisbury, 2019, p. 13).

As noted in the methodology, we avoided the Swedish term ‘ras’ when posing questions in the interviews, an evasion which likely contributed to the evasions of the interviewees. Ideally, we would have carried out follow-up interviews with Elin, Kristina, Per and Mattias. We failed to do this for two main reasons: we had to rethink our research methods due to COVID lockdowns which, among other things, made it more difficult to recruit participants; and we took time to notice race/ethnicity as salient to these interviews.

Colour evasiveness has impacts across Swedish society and we have located our research in the growing body of work that looks at these (for example, Behtoui, 2021; Hübinette & Lundström, 2014; Wiltgren, 2022; Yang, 2016). It has specific impacts in relation to STEM. Powerful discourses of ‘natural ability’ and ‘passion’ locate science, technology, engineering and mathematics as belonging to those who were always already engaged, those with ‘natural ability’ and ‘passion’, and exclude those not expected to be so (Martschenko, 2023). Students of colour must negotiate a position in relation to this and against ‘the ideal of intelligent, absorbed geniuses’ (Johansson, 2020, p. 2435). While we are aware of research from other countries, particularly the US, that explores how people of colour manage this negotiation and at what effects it has, again, we have not been able to find any research on this in Sweden and we call on researchers to address this gap. Following Ahmed (2007, p. 165) we believe that: ‘It is by showing how we are stuck, by attending to what is habitual and routine in “the what” of the world, that we can keep open the possibility of habit changes’. We hope that we have contributed to this by showing how colour evasiveness works to reproduce the whiteness of (STEM in) Swedish universities, even in spaces with a professed focus on equality.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Swedish Research Council for funding this project (Grant number: Dnr: 2018-03401), and Uvanney Maylor and Anne Phoenix for their helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Swedish Research Council: [Grant Number Dnr: 2018-03401].