Why is the classroom called the White Sea at Konstfack just like that? Well, because some studio walls in the 1950s were demolished for more light, and the great hall was painted white. Stockholm Castle also has a white sea, and radical Konstfack thought it was a bit fun to steal the royal name.
It’s not about skin color, there is no racist connection. Still, a group of students in 2018 want to change the name of the hall. The school nods nervously and appoints a working group, which proposes that Konstfack should in future be viewed through a “decolonial, intersectional lens” and that the White Sea changes its name to Havet.
If we were employed at Konstfack, most of us would probably have taken note of the proposals, thinking that the decolonial lens is unlikely to be more than a company phrase among phrases and that Havet is a name as good as any other. Anyone who has worked long enough knows better than to get up and get wet in the storm, you find shelter and let the idiot storm pass by.
But that approach was not for Sara Kristoffersson, professor at the school and author of the new “The whole sea storms” (Volante publishers).
You may remember the fiery debate just over a year ago. Kristoffersson quarreled. She opposed herself. Wrote debate articles, appeared in the media. Why? Because she considered that the White Sea was not a racist name and that there was therefore no reason to change.
Sara Kristoffersson certainly can is said to qualify for the description “troublesome bastard”. I am not saying this as something negative. Galileo Galilei, who is apostrophized in the book and who insisted that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, was guaranteed to be seen as a troublesome bastard by the Catholic Church at the time.
Most whistleblowers are annoying bastards to their bosses and colleagues. The story is full of tragedies where people have not listened to them.
The more charged a question becomes, the more important it is to proceed slowly. Instead, it is often the other way around.
When I read “The whole sea storms” I see Kristoffersson a bit like a Lena Andersson. A person who does not follow the current but who instead with an almost diagnostic stubbornness wonders why everyone flows in the same direction and if there are other possible ways to go. It is often a way to – in the short term – become magnificently unpopular.
The book is of course a party entry, but the herd mentality directed at Kristoffersson is well documented. Her colleagues arranged a petition against her. Why? Because she, like a real annoying bastard, argued against the White Sea being a racist name.
Because she refused to seek shelter in the storm at her workplace. Because she insisted on acting rationally in an emotionally driven subject.
The more loaded a question becomes, and it is difficult to find something sharper charged than racism, the more important it should be to proceed slowly. Listening to more voices, letting opinions be broken on equal terms, acting thoughtfully.
Instead, it is the opposite. When racism comes to the table, stress and hysteria arise. Easiest to do as the loudest group wants.
Sara Kristoffersson describes what Konstfack’s gender equality work has looked like in recent years. It is norm creativity and power, exclusion and postcolonial issues, the book “Anti-racist dictionary” that is distributed to the staff, intersectionality, activist lectures, structural racism and racism.
The staff, so well-trained in norm criticism, could not stand a single approach that deviated from the norm.
And this does not have to be wrong. The fault is the lack of alternative perspectives on how anti-racist work should best be conducted. Despite this enormous investment in inclusion and diversity, the school could not include a different opinion on the White Sea issue.
The staff and management, so well-trained in norm criticism, could not stand a single approach that deviated from the norm. It was not diversity they were looking for, but confirmation that they were right from the start.
What’s worse: The art college is an authority. A tax-funded institution that took the right to freeze a whistleblower.
“Who at Konstfack dares to write a critical article again?” writes Sara Kristoffersson at the end of her book. That’s a key point. Annoying bastards are an endangered species.
Read more texts by Erik Helmerson here