The Swedish city of Boras has removed a commercial that was supposed to promote the municipality following pressure from a local newspaper, which argued that the video featured too many white people.
In the video, produced by the municipal company Boras TME, ordinary Boras inhabitants are depicted engaging in everyday tasks.
"But the film completely lacks people with a foreign background," complained the local newspaper Boras Tidning, ringing the alarm bells over the alarming lack of perceived "diversity" in the "whites-only" ad.
The criticism forced Boras TME to respond, as market manager Alexandra Perez Liberg admitted to errors being made and promised improvement.
"I understand the criticism and we will take it on board. The film is now removed from all our platforms until an updated film is in place. The new version will contain what is in our mission, that is to represent diversity and inclusion," Perez Liberg told the newspaper.
The company also pledged to go a step further and review "other market material" so that "the diversity becomes even more evident even there."
Boras is a city and the seat of the eponymous municipality in Vastra Gotaland County in southern Sweden with about 66,000 inhabitants. It is an industrial city and an important railway junction. According to the city's own statistics, 32 percent of its inhabitants have a foreign background.
This is in line with Sweden's general population, of which about a third has a foreign background, with the share being even higher across younger age brackets.
In a matter of several decades alone, Sweden has undergone a huge demographic shift. The embrace of mass immigration has altered the demographic composition beyond all recognition, with, among others, Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans forming sizeable communities and eclipsing the historic Finnish minority. Fittingly, the percentage of people with a non-European background has risen markedly from nearly non-existent in the 1960s to an estimated 19 percent in 2022.
While commenting on the recent demographic change, Tobias Hubinette, a researcher of race and multiculturalism at Karlstad University and a self-avowed anti-racist activist, described Sweden as "the Western world's most diverse and heterogeneous country after the US."