Interview: Salem Yohannes, part 2

Here comes part two of the interview with Salem Yohannes. Read part 1 here! 

You have been around Sweden presenting your results as well as being interviewed by a lot of different people. Did you expect this kind of response? 

This year has blown me away. I had no idea what I was stirring up and I thank God for all the opportunities he is giving me. My primary goal was to graduate and get a good grade on my thesis. I was so happy to get an A on it and to receive an award for ”Best Thesis” at University West. I was lucky to present this thesis in a time where discrimination and racism has heavily been debated in Swedish society, this has also paved way for Afro Swedes to take part in these discussions. Our voices are important and should be taken seriously, because at the end of the day this is our country too.  

Do you believe that the straight hair norm is something that we as black people can change for ourselves or do the European standards of beauty need to change for this norm to change? 

I think that we need to work with norms from many angles. The straight hair norm is obviously something we in in the black community need to break free from. I had to force myself to stop straighten it at all, with time I started to love my hair and look for different ways of rocking it. We need to support each other, elevate the unique beauty of “blackness” and create new ideals that we can relate to.

But the process will be tough due to social, political and economic issues being ingrained in these ideals. We need to work with these standards and ideals from a broader and more powerful angle, by becoming influential parts of the medial (radio, TV, newspapers, books) and business sectors.By joining these sectors we can create diversified marketing and branding, but also raise strong leaders and entrepreneurs who break “universal” norms with confidence. This is also important for the younger generation, children and teenagers to have role models they look like in all areas of the society.It’s harder to become someone you haven’t seen.

What happens now? Will you continue research on this subject matter? 

I will continue presenting my thesis but also extend my “lecture portfolio” with other themes. I’ve already started lecturing on my second theme called “You and Me = Democracy”. This lecture is for a younger audience attending high school, where we discuss how power is formed in multiple structures and how it is divided in the society. This lecture will make us become more aware of how we as individuals are given different social positions in relation to these different power structures.

The third and last theme is aimed towards the entrepreneurial business sector, where I focus on the assetdiversity itself and how to make it become the “new normal”in these spaces. We now for a fact, that diversity is strongly correlated with creativity, innovation and competitive advantage. The question is, why we’re still wasting tons of human capital bathed in multicultural competence?

Unfortunately, as I mentioned previously, we are all driven by norms and tend to recruit people that look like us, even though we all know that relevant competence should be the one and only asset to hire. Lastly, I will continue working more with commercial marketing to incorporate the aspect of diversity and real representation of Sweden. My plan is toget back to the world of academia later, hopefully in year 2020 ;)

Where can people find your thesis? 

You can google on the online university database called DIVA-portalen and thereafter search for don’t touch my hair.

Where can we find you online? 

Facebook

Blog

Instagram 
Twitter 

Thank you again, Salem, for taking your time to answer these questions!