In a previous post on this blog, Eva Silfver discusses her ‘intellectual journey’ around ‘race’. In this post, Andreas Ottemo reflects further on what terminology to use in discussing race and racism in a Swedish context.
As Eva points out, Sweden is largely dominated by a colour-blind discourse where both the general public and anti-racist activists take pride in not ‘seeing’ colour/caring about race. I have for many years experienced this as a little odd, as if not personally recognising the relevance of race would mean that race loses relevance in society. How can you work against racism without having a word for the category that is the target of racism? Can there really be racism, or even racialisation, without race? At the same time, I agree that there are good reasons to avoid the Swedish word ‘ras’. Even though it is, in a way, a direct translation from the English word race, the Swedish word ‘ras’ carries with it a rather different history. Historically more connected to the atrocities of the Second World War than to slavery, and springing more out of eugenics and ‘biological’ discourses, ‘ras’ in Swedish is not so easy to think of as social construction.
Against this background, I agree with those who argue that there are political and historical reasons to avoid the word ‘ras’ in Sweden. But what about theory? Are there also theoretical reasons to avoid using ‘ras’ when so many of us have no problem using gender even when understood as a socially produced category? To me, this is a more complicated question. From a post-structural perspective, we can understand both race and gender as performative categories, i.e. categories with no independent metaphysical essence but rather ones that are socially produced through and through. As Judith Butler famously formulated it in relation to gender: ‘There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its result’. We can think similarly about race, i.e. that race is not a pre-existing characteristic of bodies but rather the elusive product of performative practice. In this sense, it would be no more complicated to use race than gender, even in a Swedish context.
To further complicate things, both proponents and opponents to the use of the Swedish word ‘ras’ argue in ways that are contradictory. For instance, as many before me have pointed out, it seems odd to argue that we need to keep statistics on gender in order to document and be able to fight gender discrimination, but not to track race in order to document and fight racism. In this context, I agree with the proponents for using race as a category even in a Swedish context. Surely, the notion of ethnicity (often used as a less provocative stand in for ‘ras’ in Swedish) cannot capture the discrimination racialised people meet when for instance entering a department store and being followed by security. That cannot reasonably be in any way related to people jumping like frogs around the midsummer pole during summer, as supposedly ‘Swedes’ do? On the other hand, some who argue for using the word race as a social construction also argue for forms of separatism and privileging of personal experience in ways that I find more suggestive of essentialism than an understanding of race as a product of citing racialised norms. I realise that gender and race carry different political histories, but at least in theoretical terms, the symmetry with gender here seems to collapse.
For the last couple of years, I have, nonetheless, come to the conclusion that the most reasonable and distinct term to use when discussing injustices related to racism, even in a Swedish context, is ‘ras’. That does not mean that I have actually done so, because it stills leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and ‘feels’ wrong. Intellectually and theoretically, I have however still not been able to justify anything else.
Having discussed these issues with my colleagues on this project has, however, again put me out of balance and in a situation of doubt. Both because discussing it in relation to a British context again makes me see the particularities of the Swedish word ‘ras’ more clearly. But also on more theoretical grounds. Maybe my theoretical conclusion that because we can think of gendering processes as performatively producing gender, racialising practices must produce race, is the wrong way to think about this. What if it is instead the static category of gender that is problematic? Then the odd situation we are in, where in a Swedish context we can talk about racism and racialisation, but not race, is actually a more theoretically consistent position. From this perspective, it could be beneficial to give up the category of gender in favour of only recognising its processual character, i.e. talking about gendering not gender. Could this be a way to undermine an everyday understanding of genders as something, an essence that is metaphysically present even after being performed? I am not sure, but am glad to have colleagues who have again pushed me out of my comfort zone, even it if is, then, not very comfortable to be out here again.