When most of us consider European colonial history, our attention gravitates toward the empires of Britain, France, Spain, or Portugal. Rarely do Denmark, Sweden, or Finland enter this mental landscape. Nordic societies, in their own national narratives, have long cultivated an aura of innocence—a belief that they were marginal to colonial enterprises and therefore immune from the entanglements of racism and exploitation. This perception has been reinforced by the idea of “Nordic exceptionalism,” a notion that locates the region outside of Europe’s imperial sins and instead highlights its welfare states, egalitarianism, and international diplomacy. Yet this self-image begins to crumble once we trace the historical threads that connect the Nordic countries to colonial projects abroad and racial hierarchies at home.
The centenary of Denmark’s sale of the Virgin Islands to the United States in 1917 offered one of the clearest reminders of these overlooked entanglements. The commemorations did not only highlight the colonial past of Denmark but also exposed the persistence of forgetting. For most Danes, figures like Mary Thomas, a leader of the Fireburn revolt against plantation oppression in St. Croix, were unknown—until two Black artists, Jeannette Ehlers and La Vaughn Belle, created the monumental sculpture I Am Queen Mary in Copenhagen. Their work was not merely an act of remembrance but a direct challenge to the selective amnesia of Nordic history.
Nordic Complicity in Global Colonialism
Once the veil of exceptionalism is lifted, the Nordic region appears not as an outsider but as a participant—sometimes minor, sometimes active—in colonial expansion. Finnish settlers took part in Sweden’s short-lived colony in North America, while others engaged in ventures tied to the Caribbean slave economy. Swedish possession of St. Barthelemy in the 18th and 19th centuries connected ports such as Turku to the flow of sugar, coffee, and other colonial commodities. Missionaries from Finland and Sweden carried with them not only religious texts but also civilizational assumptions that dovetailed with European imperial ambitions.
Colonial involvement was not limited to overseas ventures. The colonization of the Sápmi, home of the Sámi people, stands as a stark reminder that internal colonization was as central to Nordic state-building as overseas projects were for other empires. Land dispossession, forced assimilation, and scientific racism became tools through which the Nordic states defined their “modernity” at the expense of indigenous peoples.
The Science of Race and the Nordic States
Scientific racism, often associated with German or Anglo-European traditions, had its fertile ground in the Nordic countries. Finnish and Swedish scholars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries engaged in anthropometric studies, measuring Sámi skulls and exhuming graves to classify human difference within rigid racial hierarchies. Ironically, while Finns themselves were sometimes viewed as racially suspect by Western European academics, this did not prevent Finnish scientists from reproducing similar hierarchies against Sámi populations. These practices institutionalized racial thinking in national universities and laid the foundation for discriminatory state policies that persisted well into the 20th century.
The Roma community in Finland faced similar repression through vagrancy laws, child removals, and systemic exclusion from economic life. These practices were not isolated but part of a continuum that linked state formation to the management and control of minority populations.
The Contemporary Legacies of Colonialism
The consequences of these histories are not relics of the past; they continue to shape the multicultural landscapes of the Nordic countries today. Immigration from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia has made visible the region’s struggles with racism in employment, housing, and policing. Yet long before these newer arrivals, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark were already multicultural, home to Sámi, Roma, Jewish, and Russian-speaking minorities. The refusal to acknowledge this historical diversity has enabled national myths of homogeneity to persist and has exacerbated the marginalization of those deemed outsiders.
Ethnic profiling by Nordic police forces illustrates how deeply embedded racialized practices remain. Studies of Roma experiences in Finland reveal that contemporary encounters with law enforcement cannot be detached from long histories of repression. The persistence of such practices challenges the narrative that racism is imported from abroad; instead, it has been cultivated domestically across centuries.
Disobedient Knowledge and Youth Activism
Against this backdrop of denial and repression, new forms of what might be called “disobedient knowledge” are emerging. Afro-Swedish guided tours in Stockholm, which highlight the city’s links to slavery and colonial trade, reframe public space as a site of counter-history. In Malmö and Stockholm, grassroots organizations in stigmatized suburbs challenge portrayals of their neighborhoods as “no-go zones,” offering instead visions of community solidarity, cultural production, and political critique.
The rise of spoken word contests across Swedish suburbs illustrates how art can become a tool of resistance, allowing young people to articulate experiences often ignored by mainstream institutions. Similarly, platforms like Brown Girls Media in Finland provide racialized youth with the means to produce their own narratives, linking antiracist feminism with indigenous and Roma struggles. These initiatives are not simply cultural expressions; they are interventions into the very definition of national identity.
Toward a Reckoning with the Past
The Nordic welfare states pride themselves on equality, social trust, and peace. Yet such values cannot be fully realized without confronting the colonial entanglements and racial hierarchies that underpin their histories. Racism is not a marginal issue affecting only migrants or minorities—it is a societal condition that undermines justice and cohesion for all. Inequalities based on race intersect with class and gender, creating layered exclusions that erode the democratic fabric of these societies.
For researchers, policymakers, and citizens alike, the challenge is to go beyond recognition of the past toward active transformation. This means dismantling racialized practices in policing, education, and labor markets, while also reshaping national narratives that continue to obscure colonial complicity. It requires a commitment to hearing the voices of those who produce disobedient knowledge, recognizing them not as outsiders but as essential contributors to the reimagining of the Nordic social contract.
Looking Ahead
As I reflect on these issues, I am struck by the tension between the Nordic self-image and the realities of its historical and present complicities. The question for the future is not whether the region will become multicultural—it has always been so—but whether it will acknowledge this fact honestly and build institutions capable of addressing persistent inequalities. Will Nordic societies continue to cling to myths of exceptionalism, or will they embrace a deeper reckoning with their colonial shadows? The answer will determine not only the future of minority communities but the democratic vitality of the Nordic countries themselves.
