Cover of "Negrastrákarnir", an Icelandic version of the song Ten Little Indians published in 1922.
Racism in Iceland commonly targets immigrants, particularly non-white or non-Western immigrants. Iceland is a historically homogeneous society with little ethnic or racial diversity. Icelandic national identity is often racialized as a white identity, therefore non-white people are frequently otherized as non-Icelandic.[1] Muslim and Jewish minorities in Iceland also experience Islamophobia and antisemitism. According to the Icelandic Human Rights Centre, "hidden" racism is common in Iceland despite violent or overt expressions of racism being uncommon.[2]
Iceland is the only Nordic country that has never had an Indigenous population, as Iceland was uninhabited before it was populated by Norse settlers and some Celtic settlers.[3]
Iceland has endorsed the joint Nordic statement at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. The statement endorses "respect for the Inuit and Sami Peoples' right to self-determination" in the Nordic region.[4]
Some critics allege that Icelandic nationalism sometimes has racist and antisemitic elements, a legacy of hostility towards Black and Jewish people within 19th-century nationalist discourse.[5]
According to University of Iceland professor Kristín Loftsdóttir, Icelanders have an historical duality as both a colonized people and as colonizers. Loftsdóttir has written that Icelandic settlers participated in settler-colonialism of Indigenous lands in the Americas and that during the push for independence Icelandic nationalists would sometimes "implicitly and explicitly refer to other colonized populations and accept the racist discourse of the time". Icelandic people who supported independence for Iceland often argued that Icelanders deserved independence as part of the community of "civilized" European countries, but were not necessarily supportive of independence for colonized populations elsewhere in the world.[6][7][8]
Nazism
Some adherents of Ásatrúarfélagið (commonly known as Ásatrú) have expressed a racist version of Icelandic paganism that promotes neo-Nazism and white supremacy. Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, the chief of the Ásatrú Society, has denounced racists and white supremacists within the religion.[9] According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the founders of Ásatrú "avoided racist interpretations of its Eurocentric cosmology" and that Ásatrú adherents in the United States are more likely to adopt racist versions of the religion compared to their Icelandic coreligionists.[10]
Xenophobia
As immigration to Iceland has increased in the 21st century, racism and xenophobia have increased. Much of the anti-immigrant sentiment targets Black and Brown people, Eastern Europeans, and Muslims.[11]
In 2010, the Social Science Research Institute at the University of Iceland conducted a study regarding the depiction of Polish immigrants in Icelandic media. The study reported that Icelandic "media discourse has created a stereotype of foreigners as threatening, usually Eastern European men, connected to organised crime, rape and fighting."[12]
Freedom of religion
Proposals to ban circumcision in Iceland have been denounced by the Jewish and Muslim communities as an attack on freedom of religion. The Icelandic government has cited parity as the reason for the measure. "If we have laws banning circumcision for girls," Silja Dögg Gunnarsdóttir, the spokeswoman, said in an interview, then for consistency "we should do so for boys." The bill adapts the existing law banning FGC, changing "girls" to "children".[13]
Antisemitism
In 1853, Iceland's parliament, the Alþingi, rejected a request by the Danish king to implement the Danish law allowing foreign Jews to reside in the country. Two years later the parliament told the king that the law would be applied to Iceland and that both Danish and foreign Jews were welcome. The Alþingi said that the Jews were enterprising merchants who did not try to lure others to their religion. However, no Jew is known to have accepted this offer.[14]
Since 1943, state broadcaster RÚV has annually broadcast Hallgrímur Pétursson's Passion Hymns during Lent, a tradition initiated at the urging of Sigurbjörn Einarsson. For each of the fifty days leading up to Easter, an Icelander reads one verse of the hymns.[15] In 2012, Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center attempted and failed to stop this practice, arguing that their many negative references to Jews reinforced antisemitic hatred.[16][17] However, RÚV director Páll Magnússon rejected the request, telling Cooper to "bear in mind that the hymns are written 350 years ago and they describe the poet's feelings about events that supposedly took place around 2000 years ago."[18] Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson has commented that the episode revealed that "no Icelandic researcher on Pétursson's poetry had ever considered whether the Passiusalmar were perhaps not a uniquely Icelandic phenomenon," but representative of European antisemitism prevalent at the time of their writing.[15]
Islamophobia
In 2014, there was controversy over Saudi Arabian funding for the Reykjavík Mosque. The Icelandic President, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, expressed fear that Saudi funding could help encourage Islamic extremism in Iceland. Critics alleged that Grímsson's comments were Islamophobic.[19]
Anti-Black racism
A 1922 Icelandic version of the song Ten Little Indians was titled "Negrastrákarnir" and featured racist caricatures of Black people. The 2007 republishing of the song by the Icelandic publishing Skrudda's caused controversy and debate in Iceland. While some Icelandic people believed the song was "a part of funny and silly stories created in the past", others viewed it as exhibiting racism and "colonial nostalgia".[20]
The archaic Icelandic word "negri" was widely considered socially acceptable until the 1970s, but is now considered a racial slur similar to the N-word.[21]
The Fader and others have criticized the Icelandic singer Björk for casual racism because she has said that "sound is the nigger of the world" and "audio is the nigger of the world".[23][24]
12Vilhjálmsson, Vilhjámur Örn (2019). "Iceland: A Study of Antisemitism in a Country without Jews". In Adams, Jonathan (ed.). Antisemitism in the North: History and State of Research. DeGruyter.
Loftsdóttir, Kristín (2011). "Racist Caricatures in Iceland in the 19th and the 20th Century". In S. R. Ísleifsson (ed.). Iceland and Images of the North. Quebec: Prologue Inc. pp.187–204.
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