The website Rummet [The Room] the Instagram account Svart kvinna [Black Woman], the TV-documentary Raskortet [The Race Card], and a report on Afro-phobia were four events in the spring of 2014 that jolted the media debate concerning racism directed against black people in Sweden.
The purpose of this case study is to examine the content of the alternative media site Rummet and the coverage and debate, which immediately followed its launching in January 2014, in Swedish mainstream news media. The focus will be on how issues of belonging interact with racialized, corporeal and gendered aspects. Rummet presents itself as a separatist platform for ”racialized feminists and anti-racists”, where only non-whites are welcome to participate.
Rummet focus on the lived experience of racism, thus contesting the norm of whiteness and power relations in the public space. The main stream media coverage both supported the content of the website and accused it for being racist by excluding whites.
Notions of race and ”whiteness” are important distinction markers of national belonging in the Swedish society. It is argued that Rummet challenges these boundaries of belonging present within mainstream media. Conversely the founders of Rummet diligently used the mainstream media arena to get their message through.
The data consist of material published on Rummet’s website and in the largest Swedish mainstream media during the first three months of 2014, the period when the media debate was the most intense. Theoretically the paper draws mainly on intersectionality (Crenshaw 2006; De los Reyes & Mulinari 2005), gender and identity politics (Anthias &Yuval-Davis 2002; Ross 2010, and whiteness (Dyer 2000; Frankenberg 1997).The method used is a qualitative framing analysis. I identify the main frames and determine how framing devices in a texts/programmes form underlying patterns of meaning (D’Angelo & Kuypers 2010; Entman 1993, 2004; van Gorp 2005).
