ABSTRACT
This chapter chronicles how Sweden emerged as the world’s most colourblind state formation by examining the Swedish critique of the concept of race, which ultimately led to the tabooisation and public elimination of the very word itself. The chapter follows three themes – namely, the Swedish critique of race and how it is steeped in a race biological understanding of the term, the construction of Swedish values and in the end of Swedishness itself as being the same as antiracist values and Sweden’s struggle to eliminate the word race also outside of its borders in relation to, for example, the UN and the EU. The chapter concludes that the Swedish colourblind project has in the end been about breaking with the old Swedish racial thinking that prevailed in Sweden during the first half of the 1900s. The country’s colourblind antiracist ideology has both been concerned with Sweden’s place in the world and in particular in relation to the non-Western world and with cleansing Sweden and the Swedes from all vestiges of racial thinking.
