In the zeal to fight racism
, Swedish society has thinned out the word "race" regarding people, both from everyday language and from the official language, as Catrin Lundström and Tobias Hübinette pointed out in their book "White melancholy".
For example, race is not one of the seven grounds of discrimination listed in the Discrimination Act.
This may seem strange considering that racism is at the same time, with a fairly broad consensus, considered one of the most common forms of discrimination.
Or quite naturally, considering that we all know that human races do not exist, but are something that racism invented to sort and devalue people, writes Kulturnyheterna's Per Andersson.
In recent years
, a small group of racism researchers have argued that the word "race" should be reintroduced into Swedish language use.
Not as a false biological concept, but as a social concept - the term for the categories activated in racism.
It has been perceived as an extreme position in the margins of the debate.
They have received several headlines but a rather lame response.
Sometimes frantic resistance, as when the debate was about the reasonableness of keeping statistics with some form of racial concept (instead of some variant of the immigrant concept).
When I myself reviewed Lundström and Hübinette's book in December, I thought it was unrealistic that the deeply discredited concept of race could make a comeback in Swedish.
But a lot can change in six months.
The racism debate has rapidly changed, deepened, complicated and globalized.
Now it feels less unlikely.
Dagens Nyheter's survey
today - with the shocking result that care often and willingly meets racist wishes in the choice of doctor - also shows the relevance of the argument from Tobias Hübinette and others: Without the word "race" it is easy for racism to slip away from description and analysis .
The desire for a "Swedish-Swedish" or "light" doctor means that you want a white doctor, not a black or brown one.
If such reasoning is allowed to take place within a common care language - where users have the right to feel secure in the care situation - it may perhaps be easy to conclude that this is a reasonable requirement.
This patient may be experiencing anxiety and stress at the thought of being physically touched by a black or brown person, and is it not appropriate to take all measures to reduce patients' stress and anxiety?
If you place such demands and wishes
in a language that contains the word "race", you will come to a different result: Choosing a doctor after race is racism, a system that allows it is a racist system.
And isn't that both a truer and more useful analysis?