Race and anti-race in Europe

It’s like a breeze that blows across your face. You can’t see it and you can’t touch it, but you know it’s there. ¹

In 1988 Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer guest edited an issue of Screen titled The Last ‘Special Issue’ on Race? Near the beginning of their editorial introduction they explained the logic behind this naming:

We chose to call this the ‘last special issue’ as a rejoinder to critical discourses in which the subject of race and ethnicity is still placed on the margins conceptually. … The problem, paradoxically, is that as an editorial strategy and a mode of address, the logic of the ‘special issue’ tends to reinforce, rather than ameliorate, the perceived otherness and marginality of the subject itself. (1988: 3)

By the end of their introduction they conclude:

We must conclude that this cannot possibly be the last word on ‘race’ as these complicated issues [surrounding and raised by consideration of the question of race and representation] are only now coming into view as a result of the critical dialogue that has engaged the blind spots and insights of earlier conversations. (1988: 10)

Twenty-five years later they could well have been speaking for this special issue of the European Journal of Women’s Studies. That this is so indicates the continued and urgent necessity for feminists to uncover and address the play of race and ethnicity across the gendered terrains that constitute their objects of enquiry and activism. Moreover, it is to do so even while acknowledging that this doing inevitably reinscribes the marginality and otherness of race as central to the problematic of feminist scholarship. In some senses this urgency and paradox is even more acute in a context where the turn to ‘intersectionality’ as a key concept or theoretical frame in European women’s and gender studies has sometimes meant the minimising or particularising of ‘race’ among the categories central to intersectional analysis, meaning that both the subtle dynamics of racism and the attention to whiteness as a racialised category and subject position may be foreclosed. Such is the context for this special issue.

For it is no exaggeration to say that in 2013 Europe is struggling as much with a crisis or crises related to race, ethnicity, racism, diversity and social integration, as it is struggling to contain and overcome financial and economic crises. Indeed, in some instances, and the terrain of Europe is scarred by them, the real or imagined causal link between different types of crises can become all too bloody and murderous. ² Paradoxically, and in a gesture of historical amnesia and contemporary disavowal, European countries are among the ‘contemporary, western, postcolonial societies [that] are imbricated in an idea of their constitutive nature as tolerant and democratic and, by association, non-racist or indeed anti-racist’ (Lentin, 2008: 488). So what is actually happening? Has 21st-century Europe managed to reach an entente cordiale with its various forms of super diversity (Vertovec, 2007), or did the alleged ‘death of multiculturalism’ (Kundnani, 2002) during the early 2000s simply make the fault lines between Europe and its internal as much as external Others clearer than ever, more visible and seemingly unavoidable?

The articles in this special issue suggest that there is no single answer to that question, indeed it may be the wrong question to ask because in European contexts, processes of racialisation, the acts and effects of everyday racism (Essed, 1991) and the claims and demands of Europeans with scattered belongings (Ifekwunigwe, 1999) illustrate Theo Goldberg’s argument that race ‘isn’t just a word. It is a set of conditions, shifting over time. Never just one thing, it is a way (or really ways) of thinking, a way(s) of living, a disposition’ (Goldberg, 2006: 337). It is also something that is difficult to grasp, materially or otherwise; as the speaker in the opening quote puts it, race is something that we cannot touch, but we know it is there. We know it is there because, as an effect of racialising processes, it materialises in the minutiae of the everyday, the practices of the state, the psychic expressions of the social, the institutional logics of the security services, border control agencies, schools, hospitals, political parties, welfare agencies, media institutions, finding its vitality in the very real effects and affects expressed and experienced through racism. Yet, despite the dizzying array of locations in which race is brought into being as effect, it remains a complex, changing and slippery concept, shifting chameleon-like as it traverses different terrains of psychosocial relationality. If ‘race’ is a complex and shifting concept because it is an effect, this complexity is compounded by the way it works to constitute an array of differential racialised subjects and populations that are hierarchically organised according to social valorisation, citizenship status, representational validity and belonging. Thus, which of the populations racialised as minority will come to occupy the position of absolute ‘Other’, discursively positioned as fundamentally unassimilable into the ‘European’, will vary in different conjunctures. In these times – times of the ‘war on terror’ even while European investments in militarisation and the US drones drop ever more frequently on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen – this position is occupied by the figure of the Muslim – a figure accorded the status of an absolute alterity that is based in the mobilisation of a reconstituted Orientalist discourse about gender and sexuality, and which oftentimes takes shape in a kind of homo- and feminist nationalism (El Tayeb, 2012)

In this issue the ‘slipperiness’ of ‘race’ is aptly evoked in Stine Bang Svendsen’s article, which addresses the vexed question of how racism can be explained and understood in Norwegian schools, given that ‘race’ is not admissible as an explanatory concept for social divisions in Norway. Bang Svendsen considers affective as well as conceptual dimensions in the classroom struggles over race and racism. She argues convincingly that the denial of the category of race and its causal link to racism conceals the racialised dualisms that underpin Norwegian ethnonationalism, and makes possible enactments of racist exchanges during a lesson that is intended to provide students with the type of knowledge and understanding that should prevent racism. Similarly, Rikke Andreassen and Uzma Ahmed-Andresen’s contribution demonstrates how the lack of a Nordic vocabulary for race, this time in Denmark, leaves minoritised and majority individuals with no language with which to name existing patterns of racial discrimination, inclusion or exclusion in daily life. The article is structured as a conversation between the authors: a heterosexual Muslim woman of colour and a lesbian white woman. They discuss and analyse different everyday interactions through which they are racialised and gendered, while the significance of whiteness to normative understandings and constructions of Danish national identity is silenced.

A look beyond the sensational headlines that are the staple of some media outlets ³ shows that deciphering what is going on when it comes to the question of race in Europe requires a nuanced approach that is cognisant of historical and contextual particularities. Goldberg has rightly suggested that ‘the force of race assumes its power in and from the thick contexts of the different … geopolitical regions in which it is embedded, the specific conditions of which concretize the notion of race representing them’ (Goldberg, 2006: 332). By insisting on the importance of the geopolitical-historical specificity of the play of race as a meaning-making device, he provides an optic that helps to make sense of the coexistence of these realities: (a) that in the aftermath of the Nazi atrocities during the Second World War, some European countries are silent about, and reject the formal categorisation of human beings according to their ‘race’ (Gullestad, 2005; Lentin, 2008; and Bang Svenden and Andreassen and Ahmed-Andresen, this issue); (b) the emergence of revisionist reinscriptions of the national stories of some other European countries which proclaim the ‘failure’ of multiculturalism and multiculture (Fortier, 2008; Lentin, 2008); and (c) the persistence of the many forms and manifestations of racism everywhere in Europe. All three are folded into a discourse of the ‘war on terror’ and the policies and practices of securitisation that are instituted across and beyond Europe. Moreover, and in some ways operating below the radar, in the short period between 2010 and 2013, there have been stories, incidents, instances of violent unrest, expressions of political rhetoric, and murders, all motivated by ‘racial’ difference in the four corners of the continent. ⁴

In the western part of Europe, many such incidents have involved the hyper-visible figure of ‘the Muslim woman’ – the figure who, as already mentioned, comes both to represent the absolute alterity and unassimilability of Muslims, and is deemed to exemplify the reason why this is so. The figure of ‘the Muslim woman’ is also the site around which a plethora of social anxieties about gender and sexuality condenses as what Vertovec (2007) calls ‘super diversity’ is expanded to reference the proliferation of cultural forms that have accompanied changes in the social relations of gender, sexuality and ethnicity. In this context the normative is no longer sufficient to make intelligible the increasing variety of ways of living adopted by those deemed ‘real’ Europeans and those deemed ‘new’, ‘settled’ or ‘immigrant’. At the same time the figure of ‘the Muslim woman’ is not intelligible without the corresponding ‘demonic Muslim man’ or the ‘backward, despotic, patriarchal culture’ or family form that is commonly attributed to both figures.

This is the issue addressed in the article by Aisha Gill and Avtar Brah about the murder of Shafilea Ahmed by her parents. They argue that the so-called crime of ‘honour killing’ within different minoritised communities in the UK needs to be viewed in all of its complexity. The current tendency to construct honour crimes as characteristic of particular ‘backward’ cultures fails to acknowledge: (a) the fact that the home is a site of the murder of women and girls in all sections of British society; and (b) ‘honour’-based violence is one particular form of violence against women perpetrated by individual members of a social group, who must be apprehended and punished for their crimes without the wholesale condemnation of the culture of that group.

If the discourse of ‘honour crimes’ offers familiar terrain for gendered racialisation, Charlotte Kroløkke’s article on trans-European oöcyte donation shows how racialisation and constructions of boundaries around Europe and the European insinuate themselves in less expected yet no less fertile terrain. Thus, in analysing women’s narratives about their experiences of travelling from Denmark to Spain for oöcyte donation, she reveals how western Europeanness stands in for racialised constructions and understandings of white Spanish oöcyte donors. Kroløkke discusses how the Danish women explain and justify choosing Spain and not countries in Eastern Europe where oöcyte donation is also possible, because such countries are seen to be both culturally and biologically (read racially) different. Here we get a glimpse of the complicated ways in which processes of racialisation are inextricably bound to time and place, making it possible for a range of, sometimes unexpected, subjects/objects to be viewed through a racial lens and (mis)treated accordingly.

The articles by Diana Mulinari and Anders Neergaard, and by Teresa Sorde et al. highlight the issue of immigration, which has emerged as the critical fault line in party politics in most European countries. Mulinari and Neergaard’s article argues that the populist radical right-wing party Sweden Democrats (SD) is a cultural racist party with an ideology that is reactionary and takes an anti-feminist approach to gender equality. At the same time, the party also holds gender equality up as a uniquely Swedish value that is threatened by the continued presence of migrant, particularly Muslim, Others. This paradox is reflected in the narratives of the women supporters of SD that were interviewed by the authors: they exhibited a ‘caring racism’, through which they sought to nurture and protect the (white) national Self against the (non-white) migrant Other. The women also talked about a more inclusive version of this ‘caring racism’: protecting ‘Swedes’ from the migrant Other was also a way of caring for the migrants themselves.

Sorde et al.’s article discusses the plight of Roma people, and the acute racism and exclusion that they have faced over time and continue to be confronted with across Europe. But while Roma (and Gypsy) populations across Europe are subjected to some of the most draconian levels of state racism together with the most vociferous everyday expressions of racist hatred, Sorde et al. show some of the ways in which it is in the practices of self-organisation that an implicit agenda of ‘anti-race’ takes expression. Highlighting Roma women’s activities within their own organisations and solidarity-based networks in Spain, Sorde et al. argue that their collective and individual attempts to organise and determine the course of their lives represent a powerful counter-discourse of Roma agency. In concrete terms, such networks provide Roma women with knowledge and a supportive structure, thereby facilitating their interactions with Spanish local authorities, as well as enabling Roma women to find jobs and/or further their own and their children’s education.

In her article Passos explicitly takes up the theme of oppositional discourse invoking the work of postcolonial male writers such as Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha and Edward Said to explore how their discourses have been reinterpreted by committed artists/writers whose works seem to share the aim of challenging audiences to think differently about race, cultural difference, invisibility of oppression and right of ‘belonging’. Two of the selected works address gender issues in articulation with domesticity and patriarchal genealogies, while the other two pieces address race and marginalisation without any particular gender inflection.

This special issue shows that Europe’s generalised silence about race persists with little evidence that it will be broken, making it a vital issue for feminists to address in both scholarship and activism. For there is a real and urgent need for more, and varied, perspectives to be given voice, for more research, more discussion and more dialogue about race and expressions and experiences of ‘anti-race’ in Europe, and the particularities of European racialising processes. Collectively, the articles here contribute to such efforts. Individually, the articles offer further evidence that the task of dealing with rather than burying the physical and epistemic violence done by racialisation and racism in Europe is far from over.