Black barrio women’s BLM demonstrations in Sweden 2020
A decolonial analysis of corporate media’s regime of anti-Black misrepresentations
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v38i1.146749Keywords:
black women, racialized regime of representation, corporate media, Sweden, intersectional failureAbstract
The first months of the COVID-19 quarantine coincided with the anti-racist protests against police violence directed at Afro-descendants. In Sweden, the societal response to such police brutality was relatively lukewarm. On one hand, the head of the Health Authority blamed the higher numbers of infections and deaths in Sweden on a “lack of discipline among immigrants.” Blaming immigrants for the spread of COVID-19 follows a pattern of stigmatization in which time seems to be frozen in presentism. On the other hand, various streams of the extreme right were deeply disturbed by the 'irresponsible measure' taken by #BLM of protesting against police violence amid the pandemic.
On June 7, 2020, one day after the national day celebration, #BLM organized a large demonstration in Gothenburg, which was probably the largest ever held by Afro-descendants in Swedish history. This article analyzes the temporalities displayed during this demonstration, focusing on concepts such as presentism, stolen time, frozen time, arrested time, and the defuturing of black bodies in Sweden. The different speeches during the demonstration were delivered by black suburban women, who took a poetic approach in their appeals.
The response from the (white) corporate media to such an innovative decolonial approach was total silence, imposing ostracism on both the form and content of the action. Three hours after the demonstration ended, their cameras and editorial focus shifted to highlighting the spontaneous acts of vandalism carried out by boys and young people of color in central Gothenburg.
A decolonial analysis of the temporalities surrounding the demonstration can reveal two key insights. First, it can show how racism exerts its hegemony to defuture black bodies, thereby reproducing the coloniality of power in society. Second, it can illustrate how the contestation of these temporalities during the demonstration aimed at futuring, envisioning in the speeches a Swedish society free from racism and colonialism.
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