Our research about contemporary geeks focuses on gender and race. Sweden has an international reputation as an anti-racist country. Yet, in contrast to their focus on gender inequality, racism, while much discussed, is seen as confined to people in Sweden’s past and in fringe white supremacist groups. The word ‘race’ has been abolished from legal documents. In its place there are two ethnicities: Swedish and immigrant. The first is code for white: it includes white people born outside the country but excludes from Swedishness all those born in Sweden who cannot pass as white. In this post, Heather Mendick looks at how this limits efforts to diversify geek spaces.
The limits to geek diversity
We are interested in how the geek stereotype can be challenged and how this can make geeky spaces more inclusive. So as part of our research we are talking to people who are consciously trying to change who can fit into science and technology.
My colleague Andreas Ottemo interviewed one such ‘geek activist’. She talked at length about her struggles as a woman in engineering facing the everyday sexism of textbooks which include male but not female engineers and male tutors who make sexist remarks. She discusses her disappointment with men who pretend to be feminist but who take no responsibility for change. She shares with Andreas the pioneering intersectional work her group has done within the university on transphobia and discusses her own and other LGBTQ students’ experiences.
However, when asked about the impact of ethnicity in her field of study, she can think only of a Syrian-born student who has told her that he struggles with the Swedish language. Andreas presses her, “How do you think the few, as you describe it, who have a different ethnic background- How do you think they like it at school”? She replies: “It’s hard for me to say as white and raised in Sweden. But I definitely think they feel different. Because they are definitely in the minority. I think that is one hundred percent. And I really hope it does not affect them as much as it could affect them. But I have no idea, unfortunately”. For someone who is engaged in fighting for progressive change, her dissociation from race and ethnicity is striking. Here and in other interview data we see the impact of Sweden’s national refusal to address race.
My colleague Maria Berge interviewed a man from a tech equalities group at another university. This group also focuses on gender. When Maria asks what distinguishes them as a group, the interviewee replies: “Well we are pretty homogeneous I think in what we want to do, then we all have different political views … also, we are all very white after all. The whole campus is very white, too”. When Maria later asks if they are whiter as a group than the campus as a whole, he hesitates, “Mhm. Yes, I would say that. That’s probably my opinion of it. Yes”.
Maria pushes him, “Why is that so then”? He replies: “But as I said, it’s- well yes hmm, it’s a good question. I think that the reception [to the university society] has a lot of impact on everyone who starts. So if you enjoy the reception and enjoy all the events there and feel that you get into the group, then it is often that you apply to the association’s life. So it feels like there are large groups there that are missed in the reception. Mm, that a different mentality”. In this reply racial segregation is reduced to differences of psychology. “Many international students, they got involved in their special associations for just international students … and that feels like another part of the university”. He positions students who are not white as separating themselves from the unspoken norm of whiteness. He does not say, “Many white students, they got involved in their special associations for just white students”.
Swedish colourblindness
Because Sweden has a progressive reputation globally including for its role in the anti-apartheid movement and other anti-colonial struggles, these interviews shocked me. We discussed them at a team meeting with one of our advisory board members Uvanney Maylor. We collectively made sense of them in relation to Sweden’s colourblind policies.
As Tobias Hübinette and Catrin Lundström note, Sweden is now one of the world’s most racially-diverse countries. 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 working life, and while the poverty and unemployment rate among white majority Swedes and white migrants from Europe and North America … stands at around 5 percent” the poverty rate for those who are not white stands at 30-40%.
As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva writes, colourblindness in policy and practice forms “an impregnable yet elastic wall that barricades Whites . . . from racial reality”. It is Sweden’s colourblindness that enables even the two gender activists discussed above to ignore race and to ignore the whiteness of their spaces and their complicity in maintaining this. It restricts to gender and sexuality, the efforts in Sweden to make science, technology and the geek more inclusive.
Spaces are orientated ‘around’ whiteness, insofar as whiteness is not seen. We do not face whiteness; it ‘trails behind’ bodies, as what is assumed to be given. The effect of this ‘around whiteness’ is the institutionalization of a certain ‘likeness’, which makes non-white bodies feel uncomfortable, exposed, visible, different, when they take up this space. (Sara Ahmed)
Swedish colourblindness excludes from geek spaces those who cannot pass as white, while simultaneously disappearing the reasons for their exclusion.