Thread by @RadicalEleanor

A thread on #Swedengate from a white Swede who is surprised that ppl are surprised there's racism in Sweden.

1/12 Of course there's racism in Sweden! At what point did people think that the US held the monopoly on racism?

2/12 The fact that Sweden is progressive (compared to the US which isn't saying much y'all, come on) doesn't mean it's not racist, sexist, capitalist, imperialist.
It is a nation-state.
And all nation-states are built by defining their ppl & thereby defining who does NOT belong.

3/12 In Sweden this meant early on defining the Indigenous of the far north, the Sami, as others, and not welcome in the nation-state of Sweden unless they assimilated, basically unless they killed their identity.

4/12 Tho white supremacy wasn't specific to Samis only, the Samis were - and still are - the prime example. As Sven Lindqvist pointed out in his book "Exterminate All The Brutes" Sweden was only too glad to support the violent colonization of Africa in the 1800s...

5/12 And in the 1900s, Nazism & its cousin eugenics found a solid foothold in this "neutral" nation.
In 1922, Sweden set up the gov't funded eugenics-based Swedish Institute for Racial Biology in 1922. It only closed in 1958.

6/12 Today Sweden is one of the largest weapons manufacturers i the world, supplying the continued colonization and imperialist murder of almost exclusively black & brown ppl around the world.

7/12
So yeah, Sweden is racist.
And it's not bc of awkward dinners.

8/12 If we were to compare, systemic violence against BIPOC in Sweden can't honestly hold a candle to that of the US. In that sense, the US really is exceptional. That doesn't mean that Sweden isn't racist. And it doesn't excuse it. There is no fucking excuse for racism.

9/12 And there is no excuse for trying to whitewash it and pretend that just bc Sweden has free healthcare, beautiful cityscapes and adorable red cottages, we're this egalitarian utopia.
There are innumerable dark sides to this land of the midnight sun...

10/12 And there are also the radical sides: it's worth noting that anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-war and anti-imperialist organizing have also had a home in Sweden.

History, like the present, is not flat and single-faceted.

11/12 But only by learning & acknowledging our history - by tracing the violence of then to the injustices of today can we recognize the collective need to smash the state: the state of racism, of colonialism, of imperialism, of sexism - to smash the nation-state.

12/12
p.s. y'all will always get fed at this Swede's house