Brown victims and white perpetrators: Race cannot matter only when the attacker is brown

When an attacker is brown, identity is often treated as the explanation before an investigation has even found one. Religion, migration and culture rush into the headline; ‘terrorism’ arrives close behind. But when the perpetrator is white and the victims are brown, that same scrutiny often disappears. The attacker becomes a disturbed individual; the victims become casualties of an isolated tragedy. Even though race has not vanished from the violence, it has been edited out of the story. We cannot come to terms with racism if we continue to sweep it under the carpet.

That contrast should trouble us after the Fagersta attack. A sword attack at Brinellskolan on 21 August killed a 17-year-old girl and injured three other young people. An 18-year-old man has been remanded on probable cause, suspected of murder and attempted murder. From the first hours, the familiar language of personal collapse and a violent online subculture began to gather around the case. Yet the digital trail now under investigation is not raceless.

SVT’s mapping of an account being examined by police found a network built around glorifying mass killers and school attackers. It found 91 AI-generated clips, hundreds of reposts, right-wing political material and misanthropy. TV4 reported tributes to the perpetrator of the 2015 Trollhättan school attack and Nazi propaganda. Evidence like this belongs at the centre of the public inquiry into ideology and race, not in a footnote after pages about one troubled young man.

Trollhättan was a racist hate crime. The attacker methodically selected dark-skinned victims at Kronan school. That history matters when the suspected online ecosystem around another Swedish school attack revered him. A week after the racist Trollhättan school attack, people gathered in Stockholm with a blunt demand: no to racism, yes to humanity. The demand remains urgent because whiteness is too often treated as an individual identity, while brownness is made collective evidence.

This is not an imported American theory looking for a Swedish problem. In 2024, Brå identified hate-crime motives in 2,731 police reports. Xenophobic and racist motives accounted for just over 1,400, or half. Reports involving hate crime in school environments rose from 391 in 2022 to 511 in 2024. Racism already enters Swedish classrooms. Our public language should not escort it out of the story when violence follows.

Swedish law does not define terrorism by complexion, religion or surname. It turns on the offence and the intent to seriously intimidate a population, coerce a public body or destabilise fundamental structures. Säpo’s 2026 assessment names propaganda from both violent Islamism and violent right-wing extremism as leading threat drivers. Its assessment of the far-right threat focuses on young lone actors radicalised online and planning attacks with simple means against accessible targets. A brown name is not evidence of terrorism. Whiteness is not evidence against it.

Bias is measurable before it is admitted. In two experiments, otherwise comparable mass-shooting scenarios produced more attribution to terrorism and less to mental illness when the perpetrator had an Arabic or Muslim name rather than a German one. A separate study of United States terrorist attacks from 2006 to 2015 found attacks by Muslim perpetrators received 357 percent more news coverage. These are not Swedish verdicts. They expose a reflex Sweden would be foolish to imagine it has escaped.

Police, politicians and newsrooms need one standard. Examine target selection, ideology, online references and racial meaning with equal intensity, whatever the suspect’s name or appearance. Use ‘terrorism’ when the evidence and legal test fit, not as shorthand for Muslim. Stop granting white perpetrators individuality while brown communities inherit collective suspicion. Brown victims deserve more than sympathy stripped of analysis. Race cannot matter only when the attacker is brown.

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