Race - a useful category of historical analysis?

While I was a student at Lund university's history department I came in contact with Joan Scotts famous text "Gender - a useful category in historical analysis" and had the priveligie of visiting one of her public lectures. Almost thirty years after the publication of this article, which launched the concept of gender in history, Scott claimed that here original headline was "Gender - a useful category in historical analysis?" and that her idea was rather to propose than make clear cut claims on the future of the history subject. 

For a long time thinkers such as Scott, E.P Thompson and more Swedish examples such as Lars Olsson were important contributors to my own line of thought. If we added new categories to history writing we would get a writing of history that would largely differ from the old stories of great men with swords. This school is most often labelled social, workers or women history were one of the main aims is to rewrite history from previous marginalized groups, thus giving voices to groups that previously have been unheard. 

As I wrote my thesis this was one of my main points of departure. I wanted to learn what would happened if we did not view the social category of "immigrants" as a nature given point of references, but rather how the category came into being. The result from this study showed that the subject position of the immigrant were not stable, but rather the product of contemporary thoughts. In the 1960's and 1970's immigrants were understood as low-income workers with a cultural differences towards the swede, whilst they during the latter period were seen as unemployed foreigners that threatened swedish culture. 

Whilst writing the thesis one possible way forward would have been to employ critical race theory, a field that is growing within swedish academia. There are several excellent books on the matter of swedish society and race, such as "Race and Whiteness" (in swedish ras och vithet) from 2017. In it is for instance showed that the category of finnish race were the product of scientific construction. And this is perhaps one of the most important points of critical race theory: it does not study biological differences between "races" but rather how race is done in society through the complex social structures of science, public discourse and popular culture. 

For a long time Swedish scientists were obessed
with finding the origins of the "finnish race"

In my own thesis it would have been possible to discuss the concept of race, but still something bothered me. To some extent it has been showed that in Europe, the labelling of ethnicity have replaced the idea of race. Even though ethinicity means cultural rather than biological aspects, this is still often used as interchange for race. Thereby race is not explicity mentioned in the source material that I wrote my thesis on and if I would have based my thesis on critical race theory, I would have to construct race as a meaning that were not in my material. And perhaps this is the most challenging part for discussing race in historical material from swedish society: race is both invisible (by the interchange of ethnicity) and highly visible within this aspect. 

So, can race function as a useful category in historical analysis? I think that it could but that one of the main challenges that the researchs will meet is the need for creating race as a social category within material were it is silenced. Still I also believe that this is perhaps necessary and more doable in studying popular culture or politics at the grassroot levels, if one would depart from questions on how swedish-asian race is created. 

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