Brief report back from the anti-"SD Pride" protest

The march yesterday by supporters of the far-right Sweden Democrat party under the guise of a Pride parade did not go unnoticed in the press both domestically and internationally. It was good that the ploy by these unashamed racists was exposed for what it actually was - an attempt to pit immigrants and the LGBT community against each other - but that level of attention was not matched on the ground by an equal level of organization in the areas where the march actually occurred.

This is not to say that nothing was done; there was a spirited demonstration of more than one hundred anti-racist, pro-LGBT activists at the spot where the march was supposed to have ended. The marchers themselves - numbering less than twenty - instead stopped a few hundred meters away. It is not clear whether they did so of their own volition or were stopped by the police accompanying them, but in an interview after the march, organizer Jan Sjunnesson was clearly unwilling to be confronted and called out on his thinly-disguised provocation by a group five times the size of his own.

The march started in my own neighborhood - Tensta, a suburb to the northwest of Stockholm that is heavily populated by immigrants from a number of countries and that also has a large Muslim presence. A fellow activist and I went to the location where the step-off was to occur, to see how things would start off. Though the group itself and the police presence attracted a great deal of attention from area residents, it quickly became clear from talking to several of them that very few were aware of who was actually organizing the march. With that low level of awareness, it fell to the handful of protesters to organize visible resistance, which - though it attracted a fair bit of media attention - actually accomplished very little. The march stepped off exactly at 12 without a hitch.

As noted earlier, there was a demonstration at the planned location for the end of the march: Husby, another northwestern suburb with a heavy immigrant population and Muslim presence. (The march, in fact, wound its way through several similar suburban areas.) It definitely had a greater effect - stopping the march a little earlier than planned - but my impression was that it failed to attract and retain a significant number of the actual residents of Husby, both for the demonstration itself and for the picnic and hangout afterwards.

I cannot speak for Husby or most of the other neighborhoods plagued by this farce on the part of the Sweden Democrats, but in Tensta there was absolutely nothing done in the week or two leading up to the march to raise residents' awareness of the event and to try to organize a more neighborhood-based resistance to it. Had that been done (even if it had been just something like putting up flyers) we might have been able to have a demonstration of equal size at the start of the march, possibly preventing them from stepping off at all. That would have been a far greater victory.

This, for me, is the key lesson to draw from yesterday's events - we experienced activists need to make sure we're reaching out to the working people in our own neighborhoods when our neighborhoods are forced to play host to racist provocations. If they're not aware, they can't join the fight; if they don't join the fight, we'll never have a hope of winning - whether it's stopping a handful of racists staging a parade, or building a world without racism in the first place.