Over the past weeks, Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests have been organized all around Sweden, both to show solidarity with victims of US police brutality and demand an end to violent racist policing practices at home. Although the protests have been mostly nonviolent, footage has circulated online of Swedish police officers using forms of violence that range from knee-holds to pepper spray — used unprovoked on adults and children alike.

To many observers, the Swedish BLM protests have been surprising. International media coverage of Swedish politics and society rarely discusses race relations and inequality, much less police violence. Instead, it tends to paint the country as an egalitarian utopia. Indeed, even national media has largely dismissed the Swedish BLM movement calling it inorganic — not a response to the realities of racism and policing in Sweden but rather an “import of American racial discourses.”

Yet Sweden is neither some postcapitalist, post-racial utopia, nor does it have a magically benevolent police force. On the contrary, the country has handily participated in the two historical processes that have come to define racist criminal justice systems in the United States and elsewhere — and against which the Swedish BLM movement is now rising up — white supremacy and neoliberalism.