Overseas Korean Adoption and the Birth of Swedish Color-blindness: A Study of How Korean Adoptees Transformed Sweden’s Attitude to Race and the Relationship between Race and Swedishness

Abstract

This article consists of a study of how the first wave of Korean adoptees to Sweden were imagined and represented in a political debate that raged throughout the 1960s concerning whether or not Swedes would adopt non-white children from abroad. The study examines how the arrival of the Korean adoptees came to transform Swedes’ attitude to race and the relationship between race and Swedishness, and how they made it possible for Sweden to transition from a country with a racial obsession to an antiracist nation in the 1960s, whenSweden was one of the Western world’s whitest and most racially homogeneous countries.