Europe and the Silence about Race

Abstract

This article argues that, despite the efforts to expunge race from the European political sphere, racism continues to define the sociality of Europe. The post-war drive to replace race with other signifiers, such as culture or ethnicity, has done little to overcome the effects of the race idea, one less based on naturalist conceptions of hierarchical humanity, and more on fundamental conceptions of Europeanness and non-Europeanness. The silence about race in Europe allows European states to declare themselves non-racist, or even anti-racist, while at the same time continuing to imply an inherent European superiority, which determines both international relationships and relationships with those seen as 'in but not of Europe' within its domestic spheres. The article concludes by asking what the repercussions of this are in the context of the contemporary discourse on cohesion and integration that replaces multiculturalism as a possible way of living together in a Europe always less homogeneous in reality than it is commonly imagined to be.

“¿De dónde eres realmente?” Apuntes sobre las ciencias sociales y la “crisis de la sociedad homogénea”

“…Así, la negación del "poder regulatorio de la raza" (Lentin, 2014: 83) ha perpetuado la comprensión del racismo como patología, ignorancia o extremismo, una visión dominante desde los años 1950 (Hesse 2004a;Lentin, 2008;Maeso y Cavia, 2014). La "crisis de la sociedad homogénea" es analizada a través de esa espectacularidad del "otro", favoreciendo la reproducción del "presupuesto de homogeneidad", su normalización, y no su análisis histórico y los contornos que adquiere en la Europa contemporánea.…”

The multiplicity and situationality of enacting ‘ethnicity’ in Dutch health research articles

“…Ethnic diversity in medical practice [Een arts van In the extended wake of the Second World War, various European countries have sought to replace the concept of race with that of ethnicity, and to this day avoid the word 'race' in public policy and administration in Europe. As Lentin (2008) explains, there is a silence about race in Europe because it was effectively banished from publicly acceptable discourse after the Shoah, the Holocaust of the Second World War. Nevertheless, however, the analysis presented in this paper indicates that race remains a commonly used concept and organising principle in scientific health research in the Netherlands.…”

Migration Perspectives in Social Work Research: Local, National and International Contexts

“…Structural issues of power and oppression, including racism, are experienced by both international and internal migrant peoples (Hickey, 2011;Lentin, 2008), and race oppression intersects with dimensions such as class or nationality (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991). Oppressive and exclusionary attitudes and behaviours impact upon all migrant peoples, influencing self-confidence; self-esteem and self-worth at intra-personal, interpersonal, institutional and macro-political levels (Cox, 2014b;Marvakis, 2011), linking integration, marginalisation and social exclusion-all matters of concern for social work.…”