[Quartz] Sweden is supposedly a liberal utopia: a land of generous welfare, substantial foreign aid donations, and green-fingered sustainability. But Sweden's noble image is hiding an ugly truth.They've obviously not tried Planned Parenthood, employment preferences, free food, cellies, and education. What about an NFL or NBA franchise ?
Racism is blighting Swedish society, and people of African descent face daily harassment and hate crimes, according to a United Nations report presented to the UN human rights council earlier this week. Yet the country is so convinced by its tolerant reputation that it refuses to acknowledge the problem. The report found:
The Swedish philosophy of equality and its public and self-image as a country with respect for human rights, non-discrimination, and liberal democracy blinds it to the structural racism faced by Afro-Swedes and Africans in its midst.
"Why can't we all just get along?"
There has been a 31% rise in reported "Afrophobic" hate crimes from 2010 to 2014, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (pdf). The UN Working Group of Experts of People of African Descent reported "a real fear within the communities, especially for young black men, that they could be violently attacked at any time." Structural racism means that black people in Sweden have reduced access to health care and education, according to the UN report, while "the police view people of African descent as criminals rather than a vulnerable community that needs protection."
Yes, the police are generally the problem as they must deal directly with the issue at the grassroots level. If we only had some sort of U.N. policing.
But Sweden is so convinced by its own reputation that the government has removed the word "race" from the Discrimination Act--because the law assumes that all people belong to the human race. The United Nations was unimpressed:
Obviously an image and attitudinal change issue. Has anyone tried teevee shows emphasizing African heroes and victims, or comedies portraying white Swedish men as dimwitted simpletons?
The Working Group is aware that to delete "race" from the lexical corpus does not eliminate racism based on racial discrimination. Rather it may be a way to ignore, minimize, or obscure the reality of the specifically "racial" racism faced by a part of the Swedish population.
There are roughly 200,000 Africans and people of African descent living in Sweden, who make up 2% of the country's 9.6 million population. But the UN found that Sweden did not properly address or acknowledge its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.
Changing words and naming conventions should have resolved these problems. Appears it is time for U.N. sanctioned boycotts and heavy fines.
A xenophobic political party, the Swedish Democrats, won almost 13% of the national vote in 2014 and became the third-largest party. Yet Sweden continues to cling onto its "self-perception of being a tolerant and humane society," according to the UN report.
And there you have it, if the U.N. can't be believed, who can you believe.