Even in Sweden

The author writes compellingly about the reawakening of racism throughout Europe at the end f the 20th century - "even in Sweden", a country widely regarded as the very model of social justice and equality. Many thousands of non-European and Muslim immigrants and refugees who took advantage of Sweden's generous immigration policies now find themselves the object of discrimination and worse. Through the cascading juxtaposition of many voices, including his won, the author describes the intensifying cultural racism of the 1990s, the proliferation of negative ethnic stereotypes, and the spatial segregation of the non-Swedish. He quotes the newspaper Dagens Nyheter: "It is high time that Sweden reconsider its self-image as the stronghold of tolerance" (July 21, 1998), and analyses the strategies that allow people to maintain that self-image. Perhaps the greatest strength of this book is that the author gives to the social consequences of global economic restructuring some very specific faces and places and a multitude of expressions of human will, both ill and good.