Abstract
Racial color-blindness, the belief that race should not be seen and noticed, is widespread in all aspects of Swedish society. However, color-blindness does not necessarily mean that there is no racial prejudice in Sweden. This chapter, based on interviews, explores the discourse of color-blindness in talking about attitudes toward interracial marriages in Sweden. The interview results show that color-blind talk is established through justification of racial attitudes as natural by stressing individual choice and gender equality and through focusing on the cultural differences that can bring problems to interracial marriages and undermine the welfare of the family. These explanations emerge as a rational way of understanding the attitudes and make the racial preference sound reasonable rather than prejudiced.
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Notes
- 1.
For detailed results see Sayaka Osanami Törngren, Love Ain’T Got no Color?: Attitude Toward Interracial Marriage in Sweden (Malmö; Norrköping: IMER/MIM/Malmö högskola; Migration och Etnicitet/REMESO/Linköpings universitet, 2011); Sayaka Osanami Törngren, “Attitudes Toward Interracial Marriages and the Role of Interracial Contacts in Sweden,” Ethnicities (2016), https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796816638400.
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Osanami Törngren, S. (2019). Talking Color-Blind: Justifying and Rationalizing Attitudes Toward Interracial Marriages in Sweden. In: Hervik, P. (eds) Racialization, Racism, and Anti-Racism in the Nordic Countries. Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74630-2_6
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