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me In the dining room of the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, a brutalist dream of raw concrete and rusty iron plates, you could choose between three different dishes of the day. When I hesitated a second too long, the fat man behind the counter told me to order or leave the queue. They asked me and I just asked for something, I don’t remember what, except it was boiled potatoes. After me, I ordered my then girlfriend, whose parents come from South America, and then her friend from Sri Lanka. Neither of them heard how the other was treated. As we left and sat at our table, my girlfriend exclaimed, “What a disgusting bastard!” Then our Tamil friend came and sat down and said emphatically, “I’m so tired of these racist Danes who misbehave me.”
We all had received Same lousy treatment, but we interpret it completely differently. I thought of that incident when I read the appeal on Swedish radio, which states that the organization is steeped in racism. In many of the events described in the appeal, there is room for other interpretations besides that it is racism that is behind it. Executive Director Cilla Benkö has responded to the criticism by saying that SR is not a racist company and investigating several of the cases mentioned. According to Benkö, there are factual errors in various statements, which means word for word. As an outsider, it is of course not possible to know what is true and not in each individual case. But in reality, the line of conflict here is between two ways of looking at racism.
