ABSTRACT
Based on an analysis of a mosque arson, this chapter explores the ways in which the Swedish judiciary deals with crimes that potentially involve racism. The materials used are police files and court documents produced during the investigation and the trial. Different narratives present in court are analysed: those told by the witnesses from the Muslim community and those of the defendant and his friends who witnessed the acts. The trial is read as a scene of address, providing those involved with a language for claiming injuries, defining motives and constructing accounts of the self in relation to the legal definitions of injury, motive and subject as well as in relation to the court’s understanding of racism. The rationale of the judiciary present in the judgement is analysed in order to examine the definitions of the crime and the process of dispensing justice. I argue that the court’s interpretation of the arson, in which the possibility of a racist motive is not taken into consideration, has to do with how the court conceives of racism as identifiable in motives and in a racist subject understood as rational, independent and ideologically self-conscious.
