(B)ordering the Racial Welfare State: The Spatialized Policing of Black Life in Sweden

• In Event: Roundtable: Critical Perspectives in Policing

Abstract

Drawing on three years of community-engaged ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines the spatialized policing of Black life in Sweden. I illustrate how Black people in Sweden are policed wherever they go; whether in the urban periphery or the inner city; whether in spaces encoded as Black or White, poor or affluent; whether in public or private spaces; whether mobile or standing still. Black life is surveilled and policed by fellow citizens, by various law enforcement institutions, and by a growing force of private security guards to whom the police increasingly outsource the responsibilities of order-maintenance and the protection of private property. I posit that while Black people are targeted in the immigrant-majority urban peripheries because of their presumed belonging to those spaces, in the inner-city Black bodies are relentlessly marked as ‘out-of-place,’ thereby reifying the Swedish nation as ‘White space’ and, consequently, Black presence within it as transgressive. I argue that when Black people do not retreat in the face of scrutiny or assert their dignity in encounters with police, police power is mobilized to violently discipline Black people back into their place in both the geographic landscape and in the racialized social order of the Swedish welfare state.

Author

• Jasmine Linnea Kelekay, Howard University