Epilogue

One more story. On June 2, 2020, upwards of fifty thousand people take part in an online protest, tagging themselves on Facebook as being present at the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm with status updates that include the image of a clenched black fist, framed by a black circle, and bookended with a text that reads, in English, “SWEDEN IN SOLIDARITY WITH BLACK LIVES MATTER.”1 Afro-Swedish writer, social media influencer, and community activist Isatou Aysha Jones organizes the event, together with Afro-diasporic civil society organizations Stop Afrophobia, Afrosvenskarnas Forum för Rättvisa, and Afrosvenskarnas Riksorganisation. The online protest is a direct response to the brutal killing of George Floyd by officers of the Minneapolis Police Department on May 25. Publicizing the event, the organizers write, “We have had enough and demand justice for George Floyd and all who like him has [sic] been killed by the police as well as by other simply because of the color of their skin!”

George Floyd died from asphyxiation after being pinned with a knee to his neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. (His alleged crime was the use of a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill to pay for a pack of cigarettes.) Onlookers captured video of the gruesome event, showing Floyd’s final moments, his desperate pleas audible: “I can’t breathe, officer. Don’t kill me. They gon’ kill me, man. Come on, man. I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe. They gon’ kill me. They gon’ kill me. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. Please, sir. Please. Please . . .”2 The video, and Floyd’s final words, spread quickly over social media. Community activists and allies in Minneapolis, many under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement, took to the streets, chanting “I can’t breathe!” (Faircloth 2020). They held vigils to mourn Floyd’s death, demonstrations to protest anti-black violence and police brutality, and rallies against endemic structures and expressions of white supremacy: the memory of Breonna Taylor, gunned down by police in her Louisville home on March 13, and Ahmaud Arbery, lynched by white vigilantes while out for a run in Georgia, still fresh; the names of so many others—Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile—not forgotten (Mogelson 2020).

Similar gatherings and marches—the vast majority of them peaceful—soon follow in towns and cities throughout the United States, and around the world, continuing throughout the summer and into the fall.3 In many places, particularly in the United States, police departments have responded with excessive force, using tear gas, pepper spray, batons, rubber bullets, stun grenades, and armored vehicles to quell the protests. Journalists and international observers have also been targeted. In the United States, thousands have been arrested, hundreds have been injured, and dozens have been killed.4 Such violence has been notably egged on by President Trump, who was quick to dub the protesters “thugs,” urging “weak” state and local officials to “dominate” them, threatening to call in the army and national guard “to get the job done right,” and proclaiming on Twitter that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” (Culver 2020). For many, these words and tactics are not only repugnant but also consistent with a long history of state-sponsored anti-black violence, in the United States as elsewhere (see, e.g., Sprunt 2020). In Sweden, protest organizers are keen to make this connection. “I wasn’t inspired to organize this event as much as I was frustrated,” Aysha Jones told the English-language Swedish news site The Local. “I’m frustrated with the way the system works, with how Black people are always targeted, not only in the US but also in Sweden and everywhere else” (Franssen 2020).

Organizers decide to hold the protest online in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, an outbreak that has brought considerable international attention to Sweden of late. Critics and observers, both at home and abroad, have variously assailed and hailed Sweden’s “exceptional” approach to mitigating the novel coronavirus—which, by contrast to more strictly enforced “stay at home” policies in other European countries during the spring and summer of 2020 (Italy and Spain, for example), has been far less stringent: imposing a modest ban on public gatherings of more than fifty people but allowing primary schools and most businesses to remain open, even as illnesses—and deaths—mount.5 But the pandemic does not merely inform the virtual nature of the protest; it also figures into its content. A report released by Sweden’s Public Health Agency (Folkhälsomyndigheten) on April 17, 2020, reveals an overrepresentation of “foreign-born” (utlandsfödda) populations (particularly from the Middle East and the Horn of Africa) among confirmed Covid-19 cases (folkhalsomyndigheten.se). Of these groups, Swedish residents born in Somalia make up 5 percent of total cases registered by hospitals, despite constituting less than 1 percent of the overall population. That Somali Swedes suffer from some of the highest unemployment levels and tend to live in densely populated, geographically removed, and heavily segregated suburban communities is well documented (Carlson, Magnusson, and Rönnqvist 2012; McEachrane et al. 2014c; Aldén and Hammarstedt 2015)—patterns of institutional inequality and exclusion that apply to non-European “immigrant” communities more generally (Örstadius 2015). Many observers have drawn critical attention to the intersection of race, class, and urban geography as key factors in the virus’s pronounced spread among minority populations in Sweden (see, e.g., Canoilas and Nantell 2020), even as some (fringe populists and mainstream politicians alike) suggest that underlying “cultural” differences may be the culprits.6

Such perceptions (that Black and Brown Swedes are perceived as endemically other to the majority white population) and realities (that those same populations also suffer from excessive poverty and unemployment, poor educational and health outcomes, and targeted hate crimes) are focal in the minds of protest organizers and participants in Sweden on June 2.7 During a livestream that accompanies the event, Rahel Weldeab, a board member of Afrosvenkarnas Forum för Rättvisa, remembers fifteen-year-old Ahmed Hassan, a Swede of Somali descent brutally killed at a public school in the town of Trollhättan in 2015; the pregnant Black woman violently pulled from a Stockholm subway car in 2019, who was forced to the ground onto her stomach while her child, restrained by guards, watched in horror; and the many young men and women of African descent who are the frequent targets of racial profiling in the shopping centers and public spaces of towns and cities throughout the country. Anti-racist activist and sociologist Anders Neergaard expresses solidarity with those struggling for racial justice in the United States but reminds those watching and listening that “racism is injurious, deadly, and sometimes murderous in Sweden as well.” The clear and present issue, Neergaard affirms, is the rampant and frequently lethal police violence against Black people, in the United States and around the world, “but,” he says, “structural racism kills in other ways, too”—among them, access (or lack thereof) to quality health care. “We shouldn’t forget that we are living through the Covid-19 pandemic, in which people with dark skin color have been, for a variety of reasons, more exposed to the illness.” Thus, he continues, “when we join in solidarity with the struggle in the United States, we are also in solidarity with all those who are subjected to police violence and structural racism.”

Of course, the protest also has its fair share of critics and detractors. On the political left, some anti-racist activists question the “we” in the protest’s message of solidarity, with particular regard to the breadth and scope of the community addressed by the tagline. On Facebook, one critic wonders aloud if the protest slogan ought to read, “ANTI-RACIST SWEDEN IN SOLIDARITY WITH BLACK LIVES MATTER” (my emphasis), drawing attention to the pronounced xenophobic and outright racist currents in the Swedish public sphere. How can such a “Sweden” be in solidarity with Black lives? Another activist, while sharing this concern, affirms the provocative importance of “claiming Sweden” in such a discursive context, in which “speaking for the nation” is all too often associated with nationalist rhetoric. Beyond the community of activists and allies, however, other observers target the raison d’être of the online rally, and the transnational social movement of which it is a part. Writing for the daily newspaper Aftonbladet, liberal commentator Daniel Claesson (2020) accuses the Black Lives Matter movement in Sweden of a vulgar “importation” of racial ideas from the United States; ideas that do not, in Claesson’s view, correspond to Swedish sociohistorical realities. “To begin with,” he writes, “we don’t have any races,” a biological truth set in stone after the Second World War. While history might justify a racial politics in the United States, he notes, “there is no reason to import such ‘pretend history’ [låtsashistoria] to warrant remedial measures” in Sweden. To assert that Black people in Sweden are structurally discriminated is, for Claesson, “a pure fabrication.”

Other commentators strike a more reactionary and much uglier tone. On June 13, Swedish social commentator and media personality Alexander Bard, indulging in well-worn anti-black stereotypes, posts the following statement to his Twitter account: “If black lives want to matter, then black lives get their fucking shit together, study hard, go to work, make their own money instead of depend [sic] on welfare, stop lying, get out of prison, and becomes heroes instead of self-appointed victims for the world to laugh at. That matters!” The backlash to these caustic words comes quickly, though there is no shortage of support on the Twitter thread as well. Bard is well-known nationally (loved by some, loathed by others) for his shamelessly goading—frequently misogynist and often racist—public commentary, a mocking critique of what he views to be an extreme political correctness in the country. However, his words also reflect, for many, a deeply prejudiced and spiteful worldview. As an apparent result of the above tweet, Bard abruptly ended his affiliation with the center–right Liberal Party (Liberalarna) and lost his job as a judge on a popular reality television show (Svahn 2020b). But the words have not gone away, nor have the rough-hewn sentiments that underlie them.

Read together, Claesson’s critique (“structural racism is a fabrication!”) and Bard’s provocation (“black lives should get their fucking shit together!”) may appear contradictory—with one voice denying the reality of race and racism, while the other seems to revel in them—but they are in fact complementary as expressions of anti-black discourse. The former denies the existential conditions of Black life in Sweden, calling structural racism and Blackness as a racial ontology a “pure fabrication,” while the latter lays the blame for such fabrications on the “self-appointed victims”—Black people themselves. In other words, if neither “race” nor “racism” exists, then the myriad social ills commonly associated with Black life—stupidity, laziness, helplessness, deceit, and criminality (all taken from the canonical lexicon of anti-black stereotypes, going back to the transatlantic slave trade)—have their real roots in the personal failure of those who naively “import” problems and concepts foreign to Sweden. This is a textbook example of what critical race scholars have termed “color-blind racism” (Bonilla-Silva [2003] 2018). As Henry Giroux (2003, 198) notes, “Color blindness does not deny the existence of race but denies the claim that race is responsible for alleged injustices that reproduce group inequalities, privilege Whites, and negatively impacts on economic mobility, the possession of social resources, and the acquisition of political power.”8 Claesson’s argument thus absolves Bard of an otherwise blatant racist intent (after all, race is merely a fiction), allowing Bard to deride and assail those engaged in a collective struggle for the dignity and well-being of Black lives, in Sweden and around the world. (Such lines of reasoning are not much different, it should be noted, from those that blame Somali “culture” for elevated Covid-19 infections, rather than the intersecting structures of race and class.) If Bard lost his job because of these remarks, which is certainly an important outcome for Sweden’s anti-racist activist community, it does not alter the discursive field that makes such remarks possible—the very “structural racism” that, Claesson tells us, does not exist.

For the Black Lives Matter activists in Sweden, particularly those engaged from within the Afro-Swedish community, such critiques are hardly new, recapitulating, as they do, a long history of color-blind racism in Sweden (as related in the introduction and the first three chapters of this text). The response from Black community members and their allies is twofold, evidencing the generative Afro-diasporic modes of identification and agency explored and elaborated in this book: remembering and renaissance. “International solidarity is very important,” Rashid Musa, president of the Young Muslims of Sweden (Sveriges Unga Muslimer), affirms during the June 2, 2020, livestream. “What is happening in the United States is our responsibility.” He compares the global African diaspora to a common body. “When you hit your little toe when going to the bathroom at night, it’s not your toe that screams but your tongue,” he explains. “So, when brothers and sisters are murdered in the United States, we will also feel their pain and raise our voices here in Sweden.” Musa’s metaphor is as poignant as it is powerful. His words recall wa Thiong’o’s potent image of “dismemberment” to describe the crippling effects of centuries of slavery, imperialism, de jure apartheid, and de facto oppression on African and African-descended people worldwide, as well as wa Thiong’o’s concomitant call for a cultural politics of re-membering, to cohere and care for African diasporic subjects in the wake of such violence to Africa’s transnational body social. Musa’s clarion call gives voice to this politics of diasporic remembering, recollecting the deep and recent past to assert a common struggle, purpose, and striving—in the present, and for the future.

Samuel Girma, a prominent Afro-Swedish and Black queer activist and producer and spokesperson for the CinemAfrica Film Festival (cinemafrica.se), strikes a similar tone during his speech, livestreamed outside the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm (he was one of a handful of activists who were physically present at the site that day). Addressing “our Black siblings in America,” Girma appeals, in English, to shared sentiments of Black solidarity and diasporic remembrance, punctuated with a common sense of anger and rage: “This day is shared. We see you. We are in solidarity with you. Black lives matter. Black lives all over the world, we matter. We are survivors of five hundred years of global anti-blackness, slavery, oppression, police brutality.” He pauses, looking straight into the camera before saying “Ain’t it a damn miracle that we haven’t burned down this world?” Girma then turns his attention to Sweden, addressing his public in Swedish: “You can’t handle the truth when we explain it to you!” The psychosocial toll of confronting anti-blackness falls heavily on Black lives, he argues, a burden largely unnoticed by the mainstream public: “We are babysitting your feelings!” Afro-Swedes are not only subjected to racism, Girma explains, with words that are simultaneously acute and exhausted, they are continually forced to explain its effects and impacts to an otherwise inattentive white majority: “We are doing the emotional labor, and our psyches are beaten down, again and again.” Then, Girma turns his attention to the urgency of the present and the otherwise possibilities of global Black futures: “Sweden, you are waiting for us to die a violent death and be filmed to call it ‘racism’ here. But, even then, it’s not at all certain. When we say ‘Black Lives Matter’ we mean now, while we live. Not when we’re dead. Not when we’ve been murdered.” Time is short, and the issues are urgent. “Sweden, your self-image is fucking broken,” Girma says, articulating the expletive in English for emphasis. “We are not going to justify our existence.” Echoing filmmaker Dani Kouyaté’s existential mantra, Girma insists that change must come “while we live” (medan vi lever). He then turns his gaze forward to the next generation of Black lives: “To all the Black children out there, we love you, we will protect you, we are here for you.” Remembering and renaissance are, together, an intergenerational project of nurture, care, and support—of love—in diaspora. Like the Black culture Toni Morrison seeks to illuminate in her writing, Black remembering “must make it possible to prepare for the present and live it out,” and Black renaissance must identify “that which is useful from the past” and clarify the “problems and contradictions” of the day (Morrison 1984, 389). Remembering and renaissance are, as such, projects of historical excavation, cultural production, and social mobilization—a conscious, creative, and confident assertation of a Black presence, its history and futurity. “So now it’s time for all of you to symbolically check in at the American Embassy,” Girma concludes. Tens of thousands show up. #blacklivesmatter

I began this book with another story of diasporic correspondence between America and Sweden, from the vantage of the United States. On The Daily Show, host Trevor Noah made light of the Swedish authorities’ insistence on keeping artist A$AP Rocky imprisoned while awaiting trial in Stockholm. “Come on Sweden! Let the guy go!” There’s no place for a Black man to hide, Noah suggests, in such a pearly white country. For many outside observers, liberals and conservatives alike, Sweden still appears as a uniquely homogenous society, with its culture of consensus, social welfare, hi-tech modernity, and, though most would not say it as directly as Noah does, its uniform whiteness—the historical homeland of, to return to Langston Hughes’s words, “Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, [and] Nordic art.” For today’s xenophobic nationalists, people like President Trump and parties like the Sweden Democrats, it is precisely this racial (they would say “cultural”) purity that is under threat by myriad societal “enemies”: “postmodern” liberalism, domestic “multiculturalism,” and, most menacingly of all, the non-European (and certainly not white) “foreigners.” But this racial mountain (pace Hughes) is not the sole domain of the radical right. Perched on the peak, self-proclaimed “anti-racist” liberals, too, promote their own brand of socially myopic “cultural consensus.” When discomfiting questions of phenotypic diversity and difference arise, they take refuge from their lofty heights in an absolutist color-blindness. Buried under the steady progress of history, racialized identities have no place in the Swedish public sphere—erasing the “Afro” from “Afro-Swedish” altogether. On the racial mountain, all lives matter.

By sharing the story of the virtual protest in Stockholm, I invite readers of this book to look back across this transatlantic space, now from an Afro-Swedish vantage. I urge you to see this oceanic geography not as an invariable gap between “us” and “them” (America and Sweden), discerned by the relative presence or absence of “race,” but a dynamic and diverse cultural landscape that incorporates a robust African diaspora. My sincere hope is that the foregoing chapters have provided the necessary context to allow for a more sensitive and nuanced understanding of the Afro-Swedish community’s present struggles, frustrations, commitments, and aspirations—expressed at a time of profound pain and mourning, in which a very real desire for collective healing and social change is no less palpable. From a rarefied and provincial corner of northern Europe, Afro-Swedes are adamantly asserting their belonging to a broader African and Black diaspora. They are declaring that the experiences and knowledge they share with the global Black community are not “pure fabrications” but a coherent if diversely constituted worldview. They are insisting that Swedish society, civil and political alike, take seriously the fact of their pain and suffering as a racialized community, not as a domestic aberration, but, indeed, as a global pandemic. And they are proclaiming, with words full of rage and joy, that another world is possible, using art as a beacon of the imagination. This is the diasporic work of remembering and the promise of renaissance in Afro-Sweden today.