Swedish universities claim colour blindness while quietly excluding students of colour
A new study reveals how university diversity efforts in Sweden inadvertently reinforce racial exclusion by treating racism as invisible or irrelevant. Student leaders working on inclusion initiatives showed sophisticated understanding of gender inequality but professed ignorance about race—a strategic blindness that allows institutions to appear progressive while leaving structural racism untouched.
Originaltitel: How colour evasiveness reproduces whiteness in Swedish universities
<p>We analyse how the whiteness of science and technology in Swedish universities is reproduced using four interviews with undergraduates involved in groups that work on making their courses more inclusive. Combining discourse analysis with a phenomenological focus on bodies, we begin with their nuanced understandings of gender inequality. We contrast these with their professions of ignorance about ‘race’ and racism and how they naturalise their ignorance. We explore how they create relations of proximity that ‘other’ students of colour and embed racialised distinctions within equalities work. We understand this within a broader colour evasiveness (an extension of colour blindness) in which whiteness is conflated with Swedishness.</p>