INTERVIEW WITH SWEDEN’S CARLITO

While attending the Urban Voices 2014 music festival in Stockholm, Sweden, Freedom Beat interviewed the festival’s performing artists about their music, the political atmosphere in their respective countries, music of nonviolent resistance, and how their own music engages these issues.

Social Movements and Segregation in Contemporary Sweden by René León Rosales

The May 2013 riots in Husby, a suburb in Stockholm, turned the world’s eyes to Sweden. Around the world headlines in newspapers took up how this was yet another event changing the image of Sweden. The Telegraph wrote “Stockholm riots leave Sweden’s dreams of a perfect society up in smoke”, while The New York Times noted that “In Sweden, Riots Put An Identity in Question”.

The debate on the causes of the riots was intense and highly politicized. While representatives of the government blamed the riots on “angry young men” and demanded an increased police presence, other actors emphasized issues of growing class differences and discrimination as the most crucial explanations. Although the riots in Husby contributed to a change in the international image of Sweden, it was certainly not the first time riots occurred in areas vulnerable to poverty and stigma in the country. But the international attention helped to once again put issues of segregation and growing inequality on the national agenda. Sweden stands out as one of the European countries with the sharpest ethnic residential segregation, as well as one of the countries where people with a migrant background experience the most difficulties entering the labour market. This is a phenomenon that also affects Swedish born youth whose parents originated abroad.

In parallel with the increasing ethnic segregation and the growing class divide in society, the Swedish Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), a far-right political party, have experienced a period of significant growth. This party, which in the 90’s was openly Neonazi, has in the last election received around 12% of the votes and assumed a pivotal role in the parliament. Their success has been achieved through a rhetoric that constantly pairs immigration, Romas, and Muslims with crime and threats to Sweden’s national culture.

New Social Movements

Over the last few years we’ve seen the emergence of a variety of social justice movements in Sweden that have grown out of the activism of groups that previously had no voice in Swedish public debate. Activists from discriminated minorities such as the Afro-Swedes, Swedish Muslims, and Romas in addition to organizations that defend the rights of asylum seekers, and new anti-racist organizations have all helped to articulate a resistance to the nationalist and racist trends developing in Swedish society. Young people, in what is considered some of the most socio-economically disadvantaged metropolitan neighborhoods of Sweden, are responsible for starting some of these new social movements. These are neighborhoods where the vast majority of residents have originated from countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Movements such as Megafonen (the Megaphone) and Pantrarna för upprustningen av förorten (the Panthers for the rehabilitation of the suburb) organize and raise awareness among the youth in their neighborhoods.

These organizations have successfully managed to win struggles including the need for the development of youth centers in vulnerable areas, the opposition to the sale of public housing to the private sector, and have upheld a constant struggle against the stigmatization of these neighborhoods.  These struggles highlight the negative effects that particular political and social developments have brought in Sweden in recent years, i.e., a higher unemployment and the emergence of a precariat, which have been particularly hard for the children of parents who have non-European backgrounds, as well as an ever-increasing and overlapping ethnic and economic segregation in housing, education, and labour.

The Importance of Music

Music has in many ways been important for the emergence of these movements. Rap music especially has emerged as the music genre that has undergone politicization lately, with many Swedish artists raising issues of inequality, racism, and segregation. For instance the rap-duo Ison & Fille makes an explicit reference to the new social movements Megafonen and Pantrarna in their 2013 song Our Side of Town:

The atmosphere is rawer, more harsh over the years
No one listens or sees us so we grab the megaphone (Megafonen)
All in the same boat until the ship started to capsize
Leave us in the wreckage but we grew up to be Panthers (Pantrar)
A lot happens that they up there just want to silence
A lot of betrayal against today’s young people here in my neighborhood

The reason that music contributes so effectively to social movements is that it is a powerful medium for the dissemination of new ideas, visions, knowledge, and social critique. These messages can spread quickly through music to a wider public, thereby contributing to the creation of new standards, values, and possibilities for action.

Social movements can also be seen as what sociologist Manuel Castells calls “movements of emotions” – they are often born out of people’s shared experiences and feelings. Segregated societies also create structures of emotions – fear, mistrust, alienation, and despair. These feelings are often perceived as individual and not linked to a larger social structure. Socially critical music contributes to the process of creating awareness. The listener discovers that the feelings and thoughts they have are not experienced in isolation, but are a shared experience, and articulated in the music’s lyrics. This can be a liberating and unifying experience for the listener, creating a sense of belonging to a wider community, thus also enabling collective action. The new justice movements among young people in Sweden can be said to provide the opportunity to transform individual feelings of anger, outrage, and injustice into collective feelings of empowerment, hope and community participation through organization and joint actions. In these actions, music plays a very important role.

René León Rosales works as a researcher at the Centre for Child and Youth Studies, Department of Education, Uppsala University. His dissertation was an ethnographical study of the impact of economic and ethnic segregation, policies and masculine ideals on boy’s identity formations in a multiethnic school. Current research project deals with the emergence and politicization of youth movements from disadvantaged multiethnic neighborhoods in Sweden’s urban areas.