Mixed Race Studies

Race to be scrapped from Swedish legislation

The Local: Sweden’s News in English
2014-07-31

Solveig Rundquist

The Swedish government announced that it plans to remove all mentions of race from Swedish legislation, saying that race is a social construct which should not be encouraged in law.

“We know that different human races actually do not exist,” Swedish Integration Minister Erik Ullenhag told Sveriges Television (SVT).

“We also know that the fundamental grounds of racism are based on the belief that there are different races, and that belonging to a race makes people behave in a certain way, and that some races are better than others.”

The concept of race is included in around 20 Swedish laws, including criminal code, student financial aid laws, and credit information laws. On Thursday the Swedish government began an investigation into how to remove the concept from all legislation, as has been done in Austria and Finland.

“Legislation should not include the word race, if we argue that there are not actually races,” Ullenhag said. “I have wanted to remove the concept of race for a long time.”

Oscar Pripp, associate professor of ethnology at Uppsala University, welcomed the idea. He said that the concept of race is necessary to understand people’s social behaviour, but that it is not necessary in law…

…The proposal has come under sharp criticism, however, from the National Afro-Swedish Association (Afrosvensarnas Riksförbund, ASR).

“This scientific racism that Ullenhag is focused on, when he says that racism is based on believing in different races, is not true,” Kitimbwa Sabuni, spokesperson for the ASR, told The Local.

“How many people in Sweden really think that way? Maybe 100. That’s not the problem. Racism existed before the concept of race biology. Scientific racism is just one chapter in the story of race and racism.”…

Read the entire article here.

Hybrid Types of the Human Race: Racial Mixture as a Cause of Conspicuous Morphological Changes of the Facial-type

The Journal of Heredity
Volume 12, Number 6 (June 1921)
pages 274-280

Herman Lundborg (1868-1943)
Race-Biological Institution, Uppsala, Sweden

It has been possible for recent hereditary research to show that some racial qualities are inherited according to Mendel’s law. In 1913, Eugen Fischer, the anthropologist, made a close study of questions of this kind and laid a scientific foundation for hybrid research in the human world.

The morphological race-characters, which are formed through an early and complete ossification—for instance the form, the length, the breadth of the skull etc.—seem to be depending upon heredity in a higher degree than, for instance, the length of the body, which is more easily modified by environmental factors, which depend upon an ossification completed at a later period. I have treated this latter question in a recent communication.

During my travels and investigations in the far north of Sweden, among the population there, which has originated through strong race-mingling among Lapps, Finns and Swedes principally, I could not help noticing that the types vary in a very high degree, and that not unfrequently certain obvious changes of the facial type appear, which do not appear among individuals of a purer race. The numerous recombinations of the genetic structure are probably important causes for this circumstance. There will spring up, it seems to me, in these racial hybrids, besides qualities depending solely on the germ-plasm, in many respects stronger modifications, which probably are to be considered as a partial atrophy. Similar phenomena are often observed in crossings in the vegetable and the animal world…

List of Figures

• RACIAL MIXTURE IN ROYAL FAMILIES
• TYPES OF RACIAL MIXTURE IN SWEDEN
• RACIAL MIXTURES IN SWEDEN
• MIXED TYPES OF UNCIVILIZED PEOPLES

Read the entire article here.