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Non-white adoptees and a new relationship between race and Swedishness
Karlstad University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (starting 2013), Department of Language, Literature and Intercultural Studies (from 2013). (Kulturvetenskapliga forskargruppen)ORCID iD: 0000-0001-6775-6476
2023 (English)In: Race in Sweden: Racism and antiracism in the world’s first “colourblind” nation / [ed] Tobias Hübinette; Catrin Lundström; Peter Wikström, Abingdon: Routledge, 2023, p. 93-113Chapter in book (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

This chapter presents a study of a debate that raged in 1960s Sweden over the large-scale adoption of non-white children from abroad. This debate is used as a focusing prism for examining how Sweden transitioned from being a race-obsessed nation to a doctrinally antiracist nation, as well as how the relationship between race and Swedishness changed due to the arrival of the country’s first coherent group of non-white immigrants, or, differently put, the “importation” of a permanently settled non-white population. Notably, this adoption debate was to become Sweden’s last explicit debate on race, as race talk was increasingly to become taboo and colourblindness dominant in the Swedish publics. The arrival of these children in 1960s Sweden sparked a discursive battle between “race optimists” and “race pessimists” – two labels that were coined in the debate and employed analytically in this chapter. While the race pessimists feared the supposed risks of a loss of racial purity and homogeneity for white Swedes, the optimists envisioned the adopted children as being unproblematically embraced by a society that no longer cares about race and possibly even as the vanguard of a future in which racial thinking, and thus racism itself, would finally become obsolete.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Abingdon: Routledge, 2023. p. 93-113
National Category
Cultural Studies History Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology) Social Work
Research subject
Intercultural Studies
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-97714DOI: 10.4324/9781003345763-5Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85192296649ISBN: 9781032385891 (print)ISBN: 9781003345763 (electronic)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kau-97714DiVA, id: diva2:1819283
Funder
Swedish Research Council, 2019-03291Available from: 2023-12-13 Created: 2023-12-13 Last updated: 2024-06-17Bibliographically approved

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
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