Andreas Johansson Heinö is replying to an interesting piece by Lorenzi who rightly raises some concerns about the European onslaught against multiculturalism that I've been following on this blog. She concludes that the critique has largely been founded on strawmen - i.e. a false representation of what multiculturalism actually consists of and has consisted of historically. I largely agree. Johansson Heinö apparently does not, and produces Sara Mohammed's piece in the same number of Axess where he, himself participates.
Sara Mohammed is a Kurdish champion of women's rights and have been working hard to raise awareness around so-called honour-related killings. There is no doubt her work has been very important. There is no doubt that her work can ultimately save many lives and should be supported.
Her article, however, is filled with contradíctions. She is heavily critiquing the Swedish public sector for its awkwardness in handling issues gender equality in immigrant communities. But then she's also critiquing the public sector for "downloading" the issue to immigrant communities and let immigrant organizations address the issue in "integration projects", a choice that, according to her, has led to further enclavization and segregation of the issue. The signal it sends, she asserts, is that honour related killings is something that concerns immigrant communities only. Therefore, such funding and such projects should immediately be cancelled.
This makes little sense. As she herself states, the Swedish public sector has proven ultimately incompetent with regards to handling the matter. Unlike Mohammed, I would not attribute this to the "ideology of cultural relativism", but rather to a fundamental lack of competence with regards to how to relate to the "ethnic others". The Swedish public sector has, historically, been an ethnically very homogenous one, and very little has been done to create an intitutionalized awareness of how inter-cultural matters should be handled in everyday life. Indeed, research, by scholars like Kamali, de Los Reyes, Mulinari, Hertzberg, Pripp and Neergaard, has shown that discriminatory stereotyping is rather entrenched in the Swedish public sector.
The question for me then would be: how would stopping immigrant actors from being agents on this arena alleviate the problem? What about Mohammed's own association - Never Forget Pela and Fadime? My own impression of the NGOs website is that the organization is desperately underfunded - it doesn't even have the resources to produce a website in English - so my feeling is that it would rather need more funding, not less. In my opinion, the organization (like several other similar ones, Terrafem comes to mind) should get sufficient funding to operate several centres for the protection of young girls and boys who become threatened in this fashion by their families, precisely because the public agencies do not have sufficient understanding for how to reach out and find these persons and what sort of support they need. It's exactly these kinds of bottom's up-solutions that are needed to address such issues.
But according to Mohammed's own rationale, any funding to her own organization - an immigrant organization - should apparently be stopped immediately, because funding it would lead to enclavization of the issue. That seems very counter-intuitive to me. I have to ask, why is Mohammed so confident that the public sector agencies, which by virtue of being public operate in a top-down manner, will handle this matter better than her own organization?
If multiculturalism was replaced with increased top-down assimilation-policies, the result would likely be the even more complete dominance of the large public sector organizations on the arena, and organizations like Never Forget Pela and Fadime or Terrafem, those very actors that have been most active and effective in raising awareness on these issues precisely because they are rooted in a particular grass-root practice, would be completely marginalized. Ethnic Swedish civil servants would define what gender equality is, and likely do so based on prejudice and stereotypes of the immigrant "others". That would lead to the further disempowerment of immigrant communities and groups, and further entrench an ethnic hierarchy in society with immigrants on the bottom.
