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But also if I go into a larger town, especially at night, there is very few swedes out in large parts of sweden nowadays. You see immigrant gangs hanging out everywhere and you can't really walk freely in pretty much any city anymore at night without being afraid of being a victim of some crime. Most of the time, people may just threaten you but you never know and there is no idea to call the police because they aren't doing shit and your problems may just become larger if you do.
I'm a brown guy who's grown up in North America their entire life, and day-to-day conversations with people there suck. There absolutely seems to be a mentality that if you don't fit a specific trope you can't be Swedish.
No amount of token representation in Scandinavian TV will change that. There needs to be a persistent societal change in Sweden to better manage diversity.
The Swedish left sucks by infantilizing minorities and the Swedish right sucks by actively demonizing them. No one actually tries to communicate actively with minority or immigrant communities - they just use "community organizations" to do it for them.
Honestly, despite all the issues the US has - managing diversity is definitely not one of those.
I kinda agree with the prospect that the swedish right demonizing them but the problem is that it usually comes from bad experiences with immigrants. Immigrants that work, are productive and do their due diligence very few swedes have an issue with.
> if you don't fit a specific trope you can't be Swedish.
Swedes are an ethnic group, you can't be Swedish unless you're born Swedish. Just as you can't be Han, Inuit, Ukrainian or Bantu unless you're born with that ethnicity. American, Brazilian, Roman and a few others are nations that are not ethnically bound, but they are the exception.
I didn't. Blame my employer for sending me there to lead a CAB for our Northern Europe customers. I've always hated traveling to Northern Europe. At least in Italy or Greece I can pass as $Southern_European American so I don't get stink eye.
> you can't be Swedish unless you're born Swedish
So how does a non-ethnic Swede who has been living in Sweden their entire life and with Swedish citizenship become fully Swedish?
This is the crux of the issue. If you aren't given a chance to assimilate, there's no reason to.
At the end of the day, Trump can say racist stuff about Mexican Americans, yet Mexican Americans become Governers, leaders of industry, and everyday middle class people in the US. And this is just one example.
I don't see a similar kind of assimilation in most of Northern Europe, excluding the British Isles and Norway (kinda).
Fair enough, then it's work and at least you aren't stuck there forever having to try to make friends.
> So how does a non-ethnic Swede who has been living in Sweden their entire life and with Swedish citizenship become fully Swedish?
He or she will never be Swedish at all. Just as the thousands of Western missionaries who went to China never became Chinese in the slightest, even if they learnt the language and picked up the customs. The person will always be a foreigner. If they have a child with a Swede, that child will be half-Swedish and so on.
Assimilation is a whole different thing. But if the Swedes don't want to welcome foreigners to equal positions of influence, that is their decision. Most of the countries in the world have official policies and laws to limit the influence and the rights of immigrants – including the US.
> This is the crux of the issue. If you aren't given a chance to assimilate, there's no reason to.
Rather, if you aren't given a chance to assimilate, you shouldn't come. If I'm treated rudely as a guest in somebody's house, I'll excuse myself.
You're kidding, right...?
And we're all racist just because of some people you encountered?
It's hard to describe but there's definetly a palpable sense of otherness that I haven't noticed anywhere in the US.
There is absolutely culture war issues everywhere (especially here in the US), but assimilating into being "American" is easy compared to what my relatives back in Europe faced and my own experiences there for work and vacation. And it's a big reason a number of them either emigrated to the US/Canada or back to Asia.