In recent years, Nordic antiracism has undergone a visible transformation. After decades of silence structured by colorblindness and narratives of Nordic exceptionalism, race has re-emerged as a legitimate, if still uneasy, object of public discourse. This shift has been driven both by researchers, activists, and artists asserting racialized experiences of minorities, and by broader global circulations of antiracist thought. Yet, this local emergence has not produced a stable or coherent racial literacy. Rather, it has generated a field marked by hesitation, contradiction, and what might be described as a stuttering relation to race.
This instability must be situated within a longer historical trajectory, as the Nordic region was a key actor in the histories of eugenics and biological racism that shaped modern Europe. Finland, Sweden, and their neighbors actively participated in racial science, classification, and hierarchization well into the twentieth century,1 while Nordic imaginaries have long been structured by forms of exoticism and fetishization of the Other. Travel writing, anthropological accounts, and cultural production have repeatedly staged encounters with racialized others as consumable difference – what bell hooks famously described as “eating the other”.2 These histories did not disappear; in the wake of the Second World War, they were archived, silenced, and effectively dissimulated for half a century.
Opening a Pandora’s box?
The contemporary moment is therefore not a beginning but a reopening. What is striking, however, is that this reopening occurs without an established vocabulary for thinking race. Colorblindness has not been replaced by a fully developed critical discourse, but by a patchwork of imported concepts, partial translations, and uneven appropriations. Nordic antiracism currently draws heavily on American intellectual traditions: the “one-drop rule,” the color line, and legacies of Jim Crow function as reference points for articulating racial experience. At the same time, currents such as Afropessimism3 have gained traction within Afro-Nordic artistic and research spheres, sometimes becoming dominant interpretive frameworks.
This transnational borrowing is neither surprising nor inherently problematic. It reflects kinship, genealogies of struggle, and the limitations of local conceptual infrastructures. Yet it also produces tension, as the Nordic racial regime operates differently from that in the United States. Within our emerging local current, identity politics appears to be a powerful mode of articulation. It offers a language that is direct, emotionally resonant, and politically legible. It enables the formation of solidarity, particularly in contexts where the racialized experiences of minorities have long been ignored or marginalized. It provides tools to name and resist racial gaslighting, asserting the reality of a racializing system against a dominant culture that has historically refused to recognize it.
Oversimplified narratives
At the same time, we must be wary of the populist dimension within identity politics. Its strength lies in its capacity to mobilize clear and compelling narratives, draw boundaries, and produce collective subjects. While these features make it effective, they also create risks – most notably an increasing reliance on “strategic essentialism”.4 This concept refers to the temporary, tactical use of simplified or essentialized identities for political purposes. It can function as a pragmatic response to conditions where nuance is politically ineffective or unintelligible; in contexts of denial and erasure, asserting a stable and recognizable identity can be a necessary move. Furthermore, there seems to be a growing demand for historical accountability and for a redistribution of epistemic power. This productive shift has been particularly visible in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, even if such a trend is not equally applicable across all racialized groups. This is reflected, for instance, in the sustained focus on the transatlantic slave trade and narratives of “unpayable debts”.5 However, applying these discourses to the Nordic context raises the question of whether this strategy is being deployed consciously and critically, or whether it is sliding into a more fundamental essentialism.
The fixity of racial categories
There are reasons to be cautious. The broader public in the Nordic countries, including both far-right actors and well-meaning allies, largely lacks a developed understanding of race as a social construct – a “floating signifier”.6 When confronted with essentialized racial narratives, these audiences are likely to interpret them through a biological lens, as matters of skin color and phenotype, attaching them to exoticized cultures and Othered ethnicities. The distinction between the strategic use of race and treating it as something inevitably linked to the body is easily lost. In this context, I fear that strategic essentialism risks reinforcing precisely the biologizing forms of racial thinking it seeks to dismantle.
In my own research, I find that this tension becomes particularly visible when engaging with mixed-race narratives.7 Mixedness brings nuance and complexity that expose the absurdity of racial categories, revealing their reliance on shifting boundaries and contextual interpretations. Yet in public discourse, mixed-race experiences are often reframed through euphemisms of culture, ethnicity, or belonging, rather than race. Within strategic essentialism discourse, mixedness is also frequently ignored, flattened, or even erased. In both cases, these reframings function to maintain the coherence of racial categories by avoiding their inherent contradictions.
An even more revealing conceptual tension lies in transraciality – the idea that some individuals identify with a different racial group than the one they are perceived to belong to. This is a fairly common phenomenon in narratives of transnational adoptees, for instance.8 When taken seriously, transraciality foregrounds the performative and relational dimensions of race. It also exposes how racial belonging is policed, not only through physical looks but through norms of authenticity, history, and legitimacy.
Introducing transraciality into Nordic debates tends to produce discomfort or outright rejection, a reaction I find instructive. To me, it indeed reveals the limits of a constructivist understanding of race within antiracist discourse itself. While race may be described as socially constructed, it is nonetheless often treated as if it possessed an underlying essence that cannot be transgressed.
A critical crossroad
This is where the paradox identified by theorists such as Judith Butler9 and Linda Martín Alcoff10 becomes relevant: people often prefer a subaltern identity to no identity at all. In the Nordic context, where racial identity has historically been denied, the emergence of strong, coherent racial identities can be experienced as empowering and necessary. They provide recognition, community, and a sense of grounding. However, this desire for stability can also make it difficult to sustain a fully relational and non-essentialist understanding of race. The result is a fragile equilibrium. Nordic antiracism operates between the need for political efficacy and the risk of conceptual regression. Strategic essentialism offers short-term gains in visibility and mobilization, but it may undermine the long-term project of dismantling racial categories altogether. This tension constitutes what I see as the Achilles’ heel of contemporary Nordic antiracism.
To address this vulnerability, it is not sufficient to reject identity politics or strategic essentialism outright; both respond to real conditions and fulfill important functions. The challenge is rather to maintain a critical awareness of their limits. This requires developing a more robust racial literacy that can hold together the experiential reality of race with its constructed and contingent nature. It also requires engaging more deeply with the specific histories and configurations of race in the Nordic region, rather than relying predominantly on imported frameworks. Ultimately, the question is about how race operates, how it is sustained, and how it can be transformed. Nordic antiracism stands at a crossroads where these questions can no longer be deferred. Its future depends on its ability to navigate the tension between strategy and ontology without collapsing one into the other.
- Keskinen, Suvi. “Intra-Nordic Differences, Colonial/Racial Histories, and National Narratives: Rewriting Finnish History.” Scandinavian Studies 91, nos. 1–2: 163–81, 2019. https://doi.org/10.5406/scanstud.91.1-2.0163. ↩︎
- hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. New York: Routledge, 1992. ↩︎
- Wilderson, Frank B., III. Afropessimism. New York: Liveright, 2020. ↩︎
- Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 66–111. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1988. ↩︎
- Ferreira da Silva, Denise. Unpayable Debt. London: Sternberg Press, 2022. ↩︎
- Hall, Stuart. “Race, the Floating Signifier: What More Is There to Say about ‘Race’?” In Selected Writings on Race and Difference, edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, 359–73. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021 [1997]. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478021223-023. ↩︎
- Matikainen-Soreau, Maïmouna. “They Need Someone to Put Their Hair in Order”: Afro-Finns, Black Racial Isolation, and Identity Formation. Scandinavian Studies, special issue on Afro-Nordic Feminisms, edited by J. Kelekay and B. Mier-Cruz, 2026. ↩︎
- Matikainen-Soreau, Maïmouna, and Tobias Hübinette. “Att queera ras: Transrasialitet i icke-vit nordisk samtidslitteratur.” Avain: Kirjallisuudentutkimuksen aikakauslehti, special issue on Whiteness in Finnish literature, edited by M. Matikainen-Soreau and I. Pöllänen, 2026. ↩︎
- Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. ↩︎
- Alcoff, Linda Martín. “Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics?” In Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, edited by Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-García, 312–44. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. ↩︎
To cite this article:
Maïmouna Matikainen-Soreau, ‘The Achilles’ Heel of Contemporary Nordic Antiracism,’ The Helsinki Notebooks, Vol. 2, No. 13 (1 May 2026).
The Achilles’ Heel of Contemporary Nordic Antiracism © 2026 by Maïmouna Matikainen-Soreau is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Feature Image:
Taistele ja tee vastarintaa (”Fight and resist!) #BLM – photograph by Salamata Mboup (Used with author’s permission)
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