School is the place where children in Sweden are most at risk of experiencing racism (León Rosales & Norell, 2023) and where they usually encounter racism for the first time (Pérez Aronsson, 2019). Despite this, there is a research gap regarding children’s perspectives on their own experiences of racism (Barnombudsmannen, 2021). Civil rights in Sweden are closely tied to one's status as a Swede. While Swedishness is sometimes defined by citizenship, it more often refers to an imagined national community. Swedishness has clear appearance-based dimensions, linked to eugenics (Mattson, 2005), and is often conflated with whiteness (Lundström & Hübinette, 2023). This paper aims to is to explore how secondary school students describe their experiences of racism in school and how these experiences vary depending on their subject positions within the Swedish racial regime (Mulinari & Neergaard, 2017). Grounded in the framework of normative Swedishness (Mattson, 2005), where Swedishness is conceptualized as a racialized position with flexible, context-dependent boundaries, this paper presents analyses of repeated group interviews with 17 eighth-grade students. The variations in their narratives are explored in relation to whether they occupy, according to Mattson's (2005) terminology, subject positions as indisputable or disputable Swedes. Furthermore, this perspective acknowledges the structurally privileged and therefor implicated (Rothberg, 2019) position of the indisputable Swede. From this viewpoint, the study also explores how the students' everyday conversations can, at times, perpetuate racist power structures. Initial analysis suggests that exposure to racism varies among the students occupying disputable Swede positions. These variations appear to be linked to the extent to which the students pass as Swedes. Passing as Swede, in turn, seems to be facilitated by both whiteness and a middle- or upper- class position. The interview material contains students’ accounts of racist abuse by peers, teachers witnessing but failing to intervene, and harsher disciplinary measures against students perceived as non-Swedish. Some students recount that when they defended themselves, the school accused them of violence and suspected their parents of violent behavior, rather than addressing the racist abuse that caused the conflicts. Other students, occupying the position of indisputable Swedes, express sentiments of white melancholia (Lundström & Hübinette, 2023), bemoaning the loss of ‘good old Sweden’ and projecting unwanted behavior onto the racialized Other. This paper will contribute by presenting students’ lived experiences of, as well as their implication in sustaining, racism, highlighting how these experiences and implications are shaped by their subject positions.

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