When Blattar Succeed - Or Do They?

Sammanfattning: Sweden is facing a sociocultural movement through high waves of immigration and it is more important than ever to address issues related to ethnic diversity. This research set out to study diversity from an ethnic lens by exploring and understanding what challenges students with an immigrant background experience in Sweden, and how their ethnic identities are affected by these difficulties. Using a qualitative, hermeneutic and abductive approach we could extract empirical and theoretical findings that supports our study. Our results suggest that these students are assigned a blatte identity due to having an immigrant background. This label is contributing to integration difficulties in Sweden as the label is fueled with negative preconceptions reinforced by Swedish society. Being a blatte also impacts the students’ ethnic identities and they experience a sense of in-betweenness and ethnic belonging to two worlds. Consequently, the participants create a multidimensional identity composed of different ethnic backgrounds and the new composed identity is constructed as a good blatte identity. The existing preconceptions about blattar is also preventing their good blatte identity from reaching full stability and acceptance as this identity can be both positive and negative. Lastly, our study suggests that although blattar succeed by integrating in all the right ways, Swedish society prevents complete integration and success.