Harnessing Halloween for Diversity in Sweden.

• Author: Camp, Beatrice

American Diplomacy

November 1, 2021

www.americandiplomacy.org

Title: Harnessing Halloween for Diversity in Sweden

Author: Beatrice Camp

Text:

When my husband David and I starting working at the U.S. embassy in Stockholm in 1989, formerly homogeneous Sweden was beginning to grapple with an increasingly diverse population. I was surprised that the international school included a large number of students from Yugoslavia, and then equally surprised how they melded into the local community as their home country broke up.

Faced with growing immigrant issues, the Swedish government generated programs to help foreigners assimilate; David and I spent one weekend brushing up our Swedish language skills with Iraqi Kurds in a government-run language camp. Little did we imagine that we would later be supporting Swedish diversity training by introducing the exotic American holiday of Halloween to schoolchildren.

As U.S. embassy spokesperson, I was regularly on the receiving end of a wide range of inquiries. One day while I was out of the office, a journalist called asking to talk to an American about Halloween. In my absence, one of our local employees thought to transfer the reporter to my husband. David obligingly regaled the reporter with stories of Halloween pranks from his childhood, including one involving a mean old man, his prized Cadillac, a cat, and Ex-Lax. His account made the front page

of SvenskaDagbladet the next day; fortunately, no one in the embassy seemed overly disturbed by this unauthorized messaging.

Having thus become the face of American Halloween, we were approached by the Ministry of Education for a project aimed at getting more diverse stories in educational materials. The Swedish school system had decided to produce a booklet about holidays around the world, with each month representing a celebration from a different country. Halloween was chosen for October. To write the...