During 2020, the human rights movement Black Lives Matter, BLM, gathered new momentum after the eight minute recorded murder of George Floyd by an American police officer caught widespread global attention. By the end of the year the BLM protests had spread internationally, with a purpose to most of all bring the issues of structural racism in their own country to the surface. This sparked a debate in Sweden and earlier research show that the dominant understanding of racism is that of racism as individual, caused by certain deviant individuals. The structural understanding of racism, the one where racism is a global power structure, has been on the outer margins of the Swedish debate since the 90’s, but gathered more spread from 2012 and forward thanks to academics and journalists studying post-colonialism, but the individual understanding of racism is still the dominant one. This study aims to analyze and gain a deeper understanding of how ideas are constructed around the understanding of racism in Sweden in relation to BLM and to analyze main arguments and patterns to see if gaslighting is exercised. With structural racism and gaslighting as theoretical frames together with Norman Faircloughs critical discourse analysis as method, the study finds that the debate was still in those two different understandings; questioning discourse and reproducing discourse. Within the questioning discourse, postcolonial ideas and theories were being made, while the reproducing discourse would admit to structural racism in America, but denied its existence in Sweden. They denied structural racism by accusing BLM and the antiracists of importing American “race ideas”, importing a “made up history” to Sweden which are all patterns aligned with gaslighting. Which one of these discourses that will “win” will have an impact on our view of racism and will thus have political, judicial, structural and social consequences along with changes for systems of knowledge and meaning.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:ths-1210 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Kjellgren, Maria |
| Publisher | Enskilda Högskolan Stockholm, Avdelningen för mänskliga rättigheter och demokrati |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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