Having lived in Stockholm for nearly 3 years, I am completely unsurprised and wholly disgusted by the swing towards fascism in Sweden. As an Asian-American woman, I have never experienced as much racism in my life until I moved here. This country is xenophobic as hell.
— Kat Zhou 💭 (@katherinemzhou) October 20, 2022
An Asian American woman, Katherine Zhou who has lived in Stockholm, Sweden since 2020 spoke out about her experience with racism via Twitter on 20 October 2022 and later faced more racism after the post went viral.
“Having lived in Stockholm for nearly 3 years, I am completely unsurprised and wholly disgusted by the swing towards fasicm in Sweden. As an Asian-American woman, I have never experienced as much racism in my life until I moved here. This country is xenophobic as hell,” she tweeted.
According to AsAm News, Zhou pointed out that she believes confronting racism is a “newer” problem for Sweden as the country “may not have the toolset that the U.S., which she described as having ‘an ugly legacy of racism,’ does to talk about race and racism.”
“We have the vocabulary, we have the tools to talk about it. Not all of that exists here,” she said.
In January 2020, Zhou moved from Austin, Texas, the US to Sweden after being offered a position to work at Spotify.
However, she said she did not expect to be bombarded with all types of microaggressions including being coughed at, tutted at, mocked for her eyes, avoided when crossing the street, and even being cornered by two men at a city train station in February 2022.
Zhou said “I like to compare it to death by a thousand cuts when these kinds of things happen again and again and again.”
She told AsAm News that she thinks Sweden cannot afford to alienate and abuse immigrants as countless important positions across a variety of industries are responsible by internationals.
Thus, besides making progress on the more political structure like increased police presence, we, people whether in Sweden or any other part of the world should keep working raising the awareness that racism does exist and it is unacceptable because no one needs to endure discrimination based on their heritage, ethnicity, nationality, genders, etc.
Humans are diverse and should all be treated equally, so even if some of us still have a long way to go before opening up their hearts and accepting diversity, the elephant in the room must be brought up to discussion, more actively.
