Race and demography in Sweden

A debate about racial demography is developing in Sweden. This is the background - recently, the Swedish government decided to create a national institute against racism and extremist violence. This task has been assigned to Gothenburg University. It has drawn a range of criticism from scholars exploring racism.

Among other issues, critics have pointed out that all the working group that has been appointed to develop the centre are all white and none of them have specialized in the study of racism. The critics argue the omission of non-whites and racism scholars is rather remarkable given the group's mission. They describe the appointment process as columbusing, i.e. where a group of power-holders "discover" something that was already known outside their own circle.  The obvious comparison is, what would the reaction be if a centre was set up for the study of gender equality, but the working group to develop this centre were all males without any experience of gender studies?

There was an immediate reaction to this critique, particularly from professor Rothstein. For context, he is one of the most luminary Swedish political scientists, with a highly distinguished publishing record. It's not possible to get an undergraduate degree in political science in Sweden without reading some of his work. He considers the critics' attention to the racial background of the appointees deeply troubling. He then turns to the time in the 1930s when the Swedish government asked the government of Nazi Germany to introduce the stamp "J" in the passports of its Jewish citizens. He argues that the attention anti-racists give to the racial or ethnic background of applicants or employees amounts to copying the Nazi German model.

Shortly afterwards, an influential editorial by Teodorescu (on the political right - these issues often become politically polarized quickly) came out essentially repeating Rothstein's position. Her development of the argument essentially lands in the conclusion that we should stop speaking about racial or ethnic categories all together, because doing so reinforces racism and exclusion.

The argument is bizarre for anyone who has worked in the field of combating ethnic discrimination for any period of time. One of the primary tools for tracking processes of discrimination is to chart the demography of employees in the workforce. This is routinely being done in both private and public organizations in several countries, notably the United States and Canada.

A typical example of how such tools are implemented is diversity management (yes, it is loaded with controversy, but that goes beyond this post). A classic problem is that recruitment processes can be unintentionally discriminatory, when a homogeneous group sets up standards or criteria for recruitment, they might "rig the game" in a way that ends up excluding relevant competencies and experiences in such a way that the homogeneity is maintained. When that happens, there is a risk that the organization becomes characterized by group-think and develop blind-spots where important perspectives are missed. To prevent this, human resource departments can do internal surveys of applicants and employees to make sure that the demography of these groups is not too homogeneous. If it is, there is likely something wrong in the recruitment procedure. This is an example of such a survey, which is now a regular tool in the appointment of academic positions in the United States:

There is then a question for those who argue that all discussions on the charting of racial or ethnic demographics are problematic: How could anyone develop practical tools for preventing discrimination without being able to measure the outcomes of human resource practices? Is the survey above really racist, or an equivalent to Nazi German practices? I find that position difficult to sustain, and it becomes really troublesome when the logic leads to the position that talking about racism is racist.