Challenging the hierarchies of Swedish whiteness

Negative experiences and undesired effects of passing as white and Swedish

Abstract

This article focuses on the hierarchies inherent in the Swedish version of whiteness and shows how these hierarchical structures are challenged by subjects placed within the category white. Passing as white is often presumed to be something sought after. The aim of this article is however to empirically explore the other side of the coin, that is, negative experiences and undesired effects of passing as white. With theoretical inspiration drawn from critical race- and whiteness studies, interview narratives from 31 women and men in the rarely researched area of descendants of Polish migrants in Sweden, are examined. The analysis shows that the descendants in various ways contested racialized ascriptions of whiteness, Swedishness and sameness. They furthermore voiced a dissonance between the sameness they were attributed and their own perceptions of otherness, thereby illustrating that betweenship can also be experienced by descendants that pass as white.