Alana Lentin Postracial Silences The Othering of Race in Europe In Wulf D. Hund and Alana Lentin (eds.), Racism and Sociology. Berlin et al.: Lit Verlag, 2014. Abstract: This paper argues that mainstream sociological research into ‘migration, ethnicity, and minorities’ (MEM) elides, neglects, or denies the role of race in the construction of the boundaries of Europeanness. Relying on an analysis of the work of established scholars in the field, I argue that their dominance marginalises a race critical approach that is attentive to the persistence of coloniality in contemporary raciologies. Inherent in their work is a splitting off of race from racism that is based on a foundational postracialism according to which racism, a Eurocentric concept, could never encompass a reading of the centrality of race - as a technology for the management of human life first worked out in the colonies - to European politics and sociality. Racism, therefore, remains an external force that can only be treated as pathological and as antithetical to Europe’s vision of itself as the pinnacle of liberalism and 1 universalism. Sociology is »self-defined as a science of the modern (Western) world«.2 As such, it has long been involved in the debates that engage the whole of the social sciences about which traditions of knowledge lead to »›universality‹, ›rationality‹ and ›truth‹«.3 However, unlike anthropology which has, due to its foundation in the study of the non-western world afforded to the discipline by the colonial infrastructure in place at its inception, somewhat redressed its role as the ›handmaiden of colonialism‹, mainstream sociology has not attempted to alter its philosophical and geopolitical concentration as a western endeavour with universalist pretensions.4 This has led some scholars to call for a decolonial sociology that would ›provincialize‹ the West, eschewing methodological nationalism and privileging the global interconnections that underpin all historical social processes.5 In any such endeavour, analyses that 1 I would like to thank Bettina Rösler for her assistance in carrying out the primary research on which this paper is based which was made possible by a grant from the Institute for Culture and Society of the University of Western Sydney. 2 Manuela Boatcă, Sérgio Costa, Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodriguez: Decolonizing Sociology, p. 1. 3 Ramon Grosfoguel (2010) Epistemic Islamophobia and Colonial Social Sciences, p. 29. 4 Cf. Wulf D. Hund’s essay in this volume. 5 Cf. Gurminder Bhambra: Historical Sociology, International Relations and Connected Histories; Manuela Boatcă, Sérgio Costa, Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodriguez: Decolonizing Sociology. 1 place race at the centre of efforts to conceptualise the development of global hegemonies in both politics and scholarship are, to my mind, essential. One area in which one might be forgiven for thinking that the epistemological lacunae noted above had been addressed is the sociology of migration and its allied topics, variously referred to as ›minority‹ or ›ethnicity‹ research. However, nowhere is the division between an epistemically racist approach and a decolonial approach, attentive to the global, gendered and racialised inequalities that pertain to deciphering social dynamics and institutions, more stark.6 This is particularly true in European migration studies where we can observe three processes at work: (a) the favouring of a policy- oriented research framework that constitutes migration and its consequences as problems to be solved for national societies, (b) the predominance of »›Western‹ male thinkers and theories, above all those of Euro-North- American males« in terms of institutional recognition, citations, and research funding, (c) the lack of attention to the ways in which colonial histories and their persistent marking of contemporary social and political relations shape the very processes they claim to explain. A consequence of these points (which in turn intersect with and influence each other) is the glaring absence of race as a fundamental theoretical frame through which to historicise and decode the effects of migration in Western European societies. Within the institutional infrastructure of the social sciences, race is generally not thought of as »something that structures the life of the postimperial polity«.7 That this has something to do with the epistemic orientation of those who continue to dominate the discipline is undeniable. These two interrelated points, to be sure, impact upon the possibility for sociology to take a decolonial turn, though we should be heartened that myriad scholars are opening up »a space for a multiplicity of critical projects«.8 6 Ramon Grosfoguel: Epistemic Islamophobia and Colonial Social Sciences, p. 29, describes the operation of epistemic racism as »through the privileging of an essentialist (›identity‹) politics of ›Western‹ male elites, that is, the hegemonic tradition of thought of Western philosophy and social theory that almost never includes ›Western‹ Women and never includes ›non-Western‹ philosophers/philosophies and social scientists«; for the following quote see ibid., p. 30. 7 Paul Gilroy: Postcolonial Melancholia, p. 12. 8 Manuela Boatcă, Sérgio Costa, Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodriguez: Decolonizing Sociology, p. 9. 2  To go towards constructing these new spaces of critique, the ways in which the persistence of colonial logics in world politics is hidden from view in mainstream sociological research, thwarting a decolonial sociology, must be specified. The aim of this paper is to contribute to that endeavour by demonstrating how race as an explanatory framework is sidelined in many European studies of migration, ethnicity and so-called ›minorities‹ (heretofore to be referred to as MEM research). The lack of attention to race has the serious consequence of shifting attention from racism because even when scholars are purportedly concerned with racism, they often fall into the trap of pathologising and individualising it by failing to historicise it against a critical reading of the place of race in establishing the norms of belonging that continue to frame national citizenship and migration policies.9 My paper will examine how value is created within MEM research circles through a discourse analysis of the published work of several key authors. I suggest a correlation between the role played by these scholars in the configuring of MEM research and the sidelining of race therein which could be seen as impacting on the possibility for sociology, as the main discipline in which this research takes place, to be race critical and, because this is not a separate endeavour, to decolonize itself. Theoretically, I make a case for connecting this specific discussion to a wider one, initiated by Barnor Hesse on what he calls the postracial imaginary.10 His case is that the seeds of postracialism are in fact to be found in the genesis of the concept of racism itself, dating back to the early twentieth century. Using new data, I buttress the hypothesis that the postracial is not merely an innocuous political aspiration, but a foundational linchpin that acts to negate the significance of what Hesse calls ›raceocracy‹ in contemporary social and political processes. Any project to decolonise MEM research must start by stitching race/coloniality back in where those connections have been unravelled. The Occlusion of Race 9 Cf. Philomena Essed, Kwame Nimako: Designs and (Co)Incidents. 10 Cf. Barnor Hesse: Self-fulfilling Prophecy. 3 From the beginning of large-scale immigration to Europe in the post-war period, a time marked by resistance to colonial domination and the eventual overthrow of foreign rule in most of Europe’s former colonies, the question of what the quality of otherness in postcolonial societies is has been a vexed one. I have written extensively about the ways in which an anthropological reading of difference came to dominate hegemonic understandings of post- immigration realities. and suggested that attempts to grapple conceptually with the inadequacy of assimilationist strategies in societies that began at this time to perceive themselves as no longer all-white involved negating the role played by race in defining difference itself.11 Most notably, the interpretation of difference as cultural, and hence socially rather than naturally constructed, and thus neutral and non-hierarchical, misunderstood the constructed nature of race itself. This left no room for the inextricability of race from culture as two naturalisable means of classification that could – and were – used interchangeably in the construction of different others, in their externalisation, and their destruction. The determination to sweep race under the carpet by underscoring its lack of scientific utility and its political dangerosity, while resting on correct impetuses, led to a failure to engage with the trace left by race throughout social, political and economic systems. The focus on race as an idea with a teleological logic with a limited number of possible ends led to a silencing of race’s other routes.12 Furthermore even when the ends of race were as genocidal as Auschwitz, racism was often secondary to their explanation and race was bracketed off as special. The taboo surrounding its unfolding within the context of modern Europe continues to impinge on the conditions in which it can be brought to bear analytically. Three interrelated processes are in play. First, European social scientists are in the main epistemically predisposed to turn away from analyses which centre around race as key to any history or sociology of contemporary Europe. This is because, secondly, their subject positioning orients them towards equating racism with irrationality and, therefore, race critical analyses 11 Cf. Alana Lentin: Racism and Anti-racism in Europe; id.: Replacing ›Rrace‹, Historicizing ›Culture‹ in Multiculturalism. 12 Cf. id.: Europe and the Silence About Race . 4 with hysterical or knee-jerk reaction.13 Understandings of modernity that consider race as central rather than marginal are looked upon with scepticism. This is associated, thirdly, with the fact that there is little reward for foregrounding race, as to do so to its full extent would be to see it as internal to the logics of European modernity, rather than, as is more acceptable, as an external, pathological, often individualised attitude or set of time-limited behaviours of specific regimes or persons. There is a wider problem on the lack of attention to race in discussions of Europe and Europeanness.14 Those who are in the West are at once ›not of it‹. Discussing Toussaint l’Ouverture’s disappointment with revolutionary France, both the source of inspiration and the obstructer of his freedom, C.L.R. James joins other figureheads of anti-colonial thought such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, in observing the great fiction of European universalism and fraternity. At the source of this disappointment is the inability to reconcile the significance of race as the very mechanism through which ideas of universalism are worked out. Racism and universalism exist in tandem, for it is only through knowing what it is not that the notion of ›universal man‹ (sic) can be configured.15 That which it is not is the non- European, the ›savage‹, the colonised, today represented by the boat-arriving asylum seekers, the hijab-wearing woman or the feckless black and brown denizens of the sickly banlieue/ ›ghetto‹. Each fear generated by our precarious times is represented by the image of a future in which power is held by non-universal wo/man. The constant opposition constructed between the realm of human rights, intrinsic to the West, and that of natural justice beyond, in a clash of civilizations discourse which continues to orient early twenty-first century global politics, plays into this division between the two purported humanities; one universal, the other particular. Europeanness, Modernity, Race 13 This is clear in Hund’s discussion (in this volume) of the tendency to disregard the racism of the sociological ›founding fathers‹, associating it instead with ›maniacal‹ fringe figures such as Gumplowicz or Gobineau. 14 Cf. Stuart Hall: ›In but not of Europe‹; Paul Gilroy: Postcolonial Melancholia; Fatima El- Tayeb: The Birth of a European Public; for the following see Hall, op. cit. 15 Cf. Etienne Balibar: Masses, Classes, Ideas. 5 Most public interventions into the problems of contemporary European sociality centre around the themes of disintegration and decomposition. Strengthened in an era of economic uncertainty, these pessimistic pronouncements are nonetheless continuous with a 19th century logic which harks back to an utterly racialised fear of civilizational bastardization and ultimate eradication.16 Given the repetitive cycles through which hegemonic intensifications of public fears centred on the alien ›other‹ go, it is curious that many prominent commentators fail to note their historical antecedents. Indeed, academics, public intellectuals and commentators alike, across the political spectrum have, since the early 2000s in particular, described Europe’s relationship with (im)migrants, religious minorities and asylum seekers as though the problems they are deemed to pose for Europe’s understanding of itself were wholly new. Set against the backdrop of a global ›war on terror‹, the repetitions necessary for making what are ultimately arguments for the exclusion (both physical and symbolic) of non-citizens, people of colour and religious minorities, Muslims in particular, from Europe, go unobserved. The fact that none of the arguments that are constitutive of the case for closing the borders, deporting the undesirables, enforcing integration, or criminalising minority cultural practices are set in the politico-historical context out of which they emerge is striking. By failing to couch Europe’s exclusionary practices as consistent and continuous, as a logic that is inaugurated with colonialism, is dependent on raciological modes of functioning, and that perpetuates coloniality, mainstream observers serve to bolster »nationalist or racial conceits«.17 The orientation of mainstream European MEM scholars, whose elision, neglect or denial of race critical analysis I am concerned with, is thus consistent with a dominant paradigm in which the European relationship to its constitutive outside is deracinated from its roots in Europe itself. Nicholas De Genova tethers his critique of »dominant socio-political questions regarding migration, ›multiculturalism‹, and ›integration‹« to the 16 Gavan Titley and I made this argument in ›The Crises of Multiculturalism‹. 17 Nicholas De Genova: Migration and Race in Europe p. 406; for the overall context see also Paul Gilroy: Between Camps; Anibal Quijano: Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America; Stuart Hall, Paul Du Gay: Questions of Cultural Identity. 6 purported »[p]oison [i]nfecting Europe«, invoked by Jürgen Habermas who avoids a direct discussion of the problem of race but repurposes 19th century racial arguments based very much upon the racialisation of class, for the 21st century while, at the same time, refusing to name them as such. Despite being couched in a laudable language of multiculturalism, his argument is »ostensibly deracialised but implicitly and incorrigibly racial«.18 By choosing the term ›underclass‹ to stand for alterity, Habermas not only parrots a particular discourse developed in mainstream US-American social sciences in the 1980s, one which actively sought to deny the salience of racism, laying the ground for neoliberal postracialism. He simultaneously, as David Theo Goldberg has argued with regard to US-sociology, »silently enthrone[es] the demeaning impact of race-based insinuations and considerations«.19 What we are left with, is the approach to otherness that mainstream MEM research embodies: race is rejected therein as analytically insignificant while being de facto reinscribed in hegemonic discourse. Habermas arrives at the conclusion that a new underclass threatens the delicate European cultural balance by way of an argument that emphasises globalised markets and ›cheap labour‹. His »resort to the effectively racialized themes of moral panic« is a reaction that elides the questions, what gives rise to an exploitative global labour market, what forces recreate those global inequalities within the local European context? Habermas has recourse to a circular argument that begins and ends with the fact of immigration which, proffered in absence of any analysis of its origins, can explain none of the social tensions he appears to be at pains to explain. The missing link in the explanatory chain is the European history of colonialism completely neglected by Habermas who refuses to consider racism as in any sense relevant to the portrait of contemporary Europe he attempts to paint – though, for De Genova, racisms are »the most palpable manifestation of the postcolonial condition of Europe«. By denying this, Habermas provides a deracinated, ahistorical account of the problems 18 Nicholas De Genova: Migration and Race in Europe p. 408; for the previous quotes see ibid., pp. 405 (›questions‹), 407 (›poison‹). 19 David Theo Goldberg: Racist Culture, p. 172, quoted in Nicholas De Genova: Migration and Race in Europe, p. 408; for the following quotes and references see ibid., pp. 409 (›resort‹), 413 (neglection of colinialism; ›postcolonial condition‹) 7 identified as facing Europe, whose future cohesiveness is perceived as being undermined by its ›Third World‹ within. De Genova’s reading of this treatment of multiculturalism and the ways in which it denies coloniality and race is complemented by Barnor Hesse’s deconstruction of Habermas’s imbrication of modernity in Europeanness. For the questions we are dealing with here fundamentally concern not only what mainstream European sociological accounts of racism privilege and what they leave out, but also what understandings of Europe they are working with, for example in relation to issues posed as being about ›integration‹ or ›exclusion‹ (to what, from what?). ›Europe‹ is an ›unstable term‹, as much an idea as it is a region, and in fact is constituted by its outsides.20 Through a reading of Habermas’s discussion of Hegel’s modernity, Hesse explains how dominant conceptualisations of modernity as European rely on, yet obscure, the centrality of race to this claim. Habermas at once gives prominence to Hegel’s formative conceptualisation of modernity as he sees it while eliding the reliance in Hegel on the juxtaposition of Europe with non- Europe within the context of European colonial expansion. »For Hegel, modernity was epochal because it was established by its intrinsic relation to rationality. Attributing the appellation ›European modernity‹ to Hegel enables Habermas to contextualize this formulation as marking the ›threshold of modernity‹, which he attaches historically to Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century, exemplified by the (European) ›Renaissance‹, the (European) ›Reformation‹ and the (European) ›overseas discoveries‹ (i.e. the Americas)«.21 Europe, thus, is associated with newness – rebirth, reform, discovery – which can only be constituted as a break with the old and the primitive (non-Europe). However, as Hesse points out, Habermas is not explicit about the colonial and racial implications of the opposition he sets up between old and new that, for him, is central to understanding modernity. The New World of the Americas, central to Hegel’s own boundary-drawing of modernity, are lost in Habermas’s own presentation of modernity as built around a »delimited secular and Christian ›Europe‹ and an obscured colonized ›non-Europe‹«. In this reading, the constitutive nature of non- 20 Cf. Barnor Hesse: Racialized Modernity, p. 647 (refering to Anthony Pagden: Europe). 21 Ibid.; for the following quote see ibid., p. 648 (›Christian‹). 8 Europe is denied, instead becoming the mere outside. However, Habermas can be read against his own refusal to engage with Hegel’s enthrallment with the colonialist project. Hesse shows how Habermas emphasises Hegel’s temporal location of modernity as being ›our age‹, ›our world‹, ›our time‹.22 The emphasis on the possessive ›our‹ reveals the endeavour to bring modernity back to »things ›European‹«: »›science‹, ›rationality‹, ›freedom‹, ›the nation-state‹ and ›industrialization‹ as self-evident symbols of modernity«. Hence, despite invocations of universalism, Habermas’s understanding of what constitutes modernity is based on an elevation of »›European‹ spatial and temporal particularisms« to the status of universality. What this false inclusivity rejects is the interdependency of Europe and non-Europe in the constitution of the advances Habermas locates as originating in Europe. As Gurminder Bhambra asserts in reference to the theorization of the unicity of modernity, »there are no entities that are not hybrid, that are not always and already hybrid«.23 The point uniting Hesse’s critique of implicit, yet unstated, coloniality with De Genova’s establishment of the racial logics inherent in the problematization of a multiethnic Europe, is the refusal of race that undergirds Habermas’s conceptualisations of Europe and modernity. He is exemplary, because of his leading role as a premier European intellectual, of the silence I claim is at the heart of mainstream European sociological and social theoretical approaches to questions of migration: a silence about histories that are central to the very idea of Europe, those of race and the enduring power of postcolonial coloniality. James, Fanon, and Hall each knew their stories were entangled in those of Europe, but ›native‹ thinkers from whom so much purportedly universal knowledge emanates refuse such ›border thinking‹. Being attentive to the significance of race does not necessitate asking the more commonplace questions of the type, how could the Holocaust happen in Enlightened Europe? It might rather lead to asking questions such as, by what mechanisms were logics for the systematic control and/or annihilation of Europe’s constitutive others, established in the process of colonial expansion, 22 Ibid., p. 649 (refering to Jürgen Habermas: The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity); for the following quotes see ibid., p. 650 (›symbols‹, ›particularisms‹). 23 Gurminder Bhambra: Multiple Modernities or Global Interconnections, p. 59. 9 implemented within Europe? In other words, at which points does the separation between Europe and non-Europe, upon which mainstream accounts of modernity such as Habermas’s rely, overlap or collapse into each other? What are the points at which Europe as constituted by that to which it opposes itself laid bare? Asking such questions would unsettle the idea both of Europe’s uniqueness and also, as is of concern to me here, of racism as definable in the absence of race. The Raceless State of Contemporary Research Nativist exclusions of race critical analyses of the European condition may well be seen as par for the course for figures whose work is not exclusively focused on questions of migration, multiculturalism, and the like. For scholars whose specialist orientation is to be found in the allied fields of migration, ethnicity and minorities (MEM), a sharper focus on questions of race and the legacies of colonialism might be expected. However, this is far from being the case. In what ways does this body of scholarship elide, neglect or deny race in its analyses of processes that, seen from a race critical perspective would place it as central? How, in other words, do studies that are purportedly concerned with challenging racism nevertheless reinscribe a view of European sociality to which race is extrinsic? The aim is not to ›catch racism out‹ but rather to contribute towards an historicised understanding firstly, of how race is already and always displaced in dominant understandings of Europeanness, secondly how this is perpetuated through notions of racism that are instrinsically European, thus paying little to no attention to the constitution of Europe through its colonial other, and thirdly what this means for future sociological understandings of racism in purportedly postracial times. There are several reasons for which mainstream MEM research neglects race. A fuller understanding of this neglect requires the discussion of two interrelated issues: (a) the place of race in the history of European sociology, and (b) its place in contemporary sociological analysis. In essence, the denial of the centrality of Occidentalist worldviews and racist standpoints to the sociological canon has had a direct bearing upon the weight given to race 10 across the discipline. However, this ontological problem is contributed to by a second concern, namely that there appears to be a purposeful intention to deny the significance of race to research into areas that, from a perspective that privileges the interrelationships between processes of coloniality and migration, are undeniably racially underscored. For my purposes here, I will focus on a reading of the ways in which MEM research elides, neglects or denies race with consequences for how racism is addressed. I use the qualifiers ›elide‹, ›neglect‹ or ›deny‹ to represent the differences between the works I have consulted for this research. Not all authors are actively involved in dismissing racism, in fact that is only true for a minority among them. Of more concern, even those works that explicitly set out to address the problem of racism, fail to ground their analyses of its causes in an explanation of the centrality of race to European identity, politics and sociality, and consequently to the link between the colonial past and the multicultural present. The result is a body of work that leaves us with three critical problems. First, it bears little or no relationship to the lived experience of its main subjects: the racialised populations of Europe. Second, it fails to unsettle the precepts upon which Occidentalist European sociology is based. Third, and as a consequence of these last, it cannot propose solutions to persistent racial discrimination because it is mired in its own epistemic blindness to the reasons for that persistence, namely the failure to deal head-on with the legacies of race. Before turning to the analysis of mainstream European MEM research, there is a need to pause to examine the institutional context which gives rise to and indeed privileges their scholarship. Carlos Sandoval-Garcia in his discussion of the utility of migration research makes the argument that public, engaged research in the area of migration should ask »how to forge bridges between spheres of activity and works with (not for) migrants«. He further remarks that the function of sociology is to unveil what is missing and what is emerging: »For the ›missing‹ and ›emerging‹ to be identified, migration studies must operate through a system of partnership and cooperation with migrants themselves«. He calls for an embedded social research that would 11 work out »for whom and for what the knowledge is being produced.«24 In contrast, most mainstream European MEM research tends either to avoid this question by orienting itself around claims to objectivity and universalism, or to openly declare that its orientation is towards the development of public policy in the realms of migration, racial discrimination, integration, and so on. To be sure, it is possible to conduct research that aims to improve public policy or better the analytical frameworks upon which the normative claims that feed in to such policy are made. However, it is arguably difficult to do so in the MEM field if either the voices of (racialised) migrants are in the main absent, the epistemic orientation of the scholarship reproduces hegemonic white frames by not engaging with race critical scholarship, and the work is set within an institutional context that emphasises normalising goals such as integration or even migration control. These problems are exemplified in Philomena Essed and Kwame Nimako’s portrayal of the Dutch ›minority research industry‹. As they remark, »in the course of 25 years, Dutch researchers have been prolific in producing reports and publications on (policies in relation to) ethnic minorities and their cultures«.25 However, their specific focus does not negate the fact that research on race and ethnic relations there largely parallels that in other western countries. In the Netherlands as elsewhere there is a divide between research that is attentive to »de- and neo-colonization, race, racism, intertwined systems of domination, transnationalism, diversity« and that which focuses on »ethnicity, migration, assimilation, integration, multiculturalism, transnationalism, diversity«. Overlapping interests thus exist, but ›minority research‹, the second of these groups of interests, receives the lion’s share of institutional support and recognition.26 The ›minority research industry‹ is marked by three features: opportunity hoarding, limited perceptions of racism, and the problematisation of ethnic minorities. Opportunity hoarding relates to 24 Carlos Sandoval-Garcia: (2013) To Whom and To What is Research on Migration a Contribution? pp. 1430 (›bridges‹, ›studies‹), 1443 (›knowledge‹). 25 Philomena Essed, Kwame Nimako: Designs and (Co)Incidents, p. 284; for the following quotes see ibid., p. 285. 26 The Dutch context is also relevant because, it is at the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies (IMES) at the University of Amsterdam that the IMISCOE (International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion) network, to which several of the scholars whose worked I analysed are attached, is based. 12 the fact that, because the bulk of minority research is funded by the government, it pays for scholars to have ties to Dutch and European policy- makers. Furthermore, the cuts in higher education funding and the increasing reliance on European research funding encourages the establishment of large consortia, such as IMISCOE, and the consolidation of research with partners across the EU. I would add that because research funding allocation generally works according to a logic whereby previously funded research attracts further funding, the circle of scholars benefiting from tightly controlled EU funds means that the money for research persistently flows in the same circles. Furthermore, because large research teams are privileged over individuals or smaller teams, it is strategic for scholars to align themselves with a research consortium. Essed and Nimako further note the »limited perceptions or the denial of racism« that dominates the ‹minority research‹ field. They argue that, »in the course of the 1990s, Race Critical Research all but disappeared from Dutch research agendas« and they go so far as to say that most in the »Dutch minority research industry lack a comprehensive understanding of racism«. They discuss the reasons for making this assertion in detail by making five claims which they back up in reference to the Dutch minority research literature. These are, »naturalizing hostility against foreigners, exceptionalism, resistance against using the term racism, defence of Dutch tolerance, self- victimization: prisoners of tolerance«.27 Many overlaps can be found with dominant discourses in European scholarship on MEM in general. Political culture, shaped as it is by the particular forms of Dutch nationalism, religious traditions, wider Eurocentrisms, colonial histories, or dominant socioeconomic models avoids scrutiny while the question is constantly asked of migrants: why have you failed to fit in? Emptied of its historical baggage, the Dutch nation, or indeed Europe, is portrayed as constant and continuous, unshaped by its encounters with the Other, as universal in the face of that Other’s intractable particularism. Essed and Nimako also discuss the displacement of the problem of white racism onto problematic ethnic minorities. They note a recent alignment 27 Philomena Essed, Kwame Nimako: Designs and (Co)Incidents, pp. 298 f. 13 between academia, politics and policy making, and the media. Focusing on the case of a journalist who was appointed ›Special Professor‹ at the University of Amsterdam in 2003, they underscore his proposal of compulsory assimilation to the problem purportedly posed by ›non-natives‹, »lagging behind socially, educationally, and in the labor market«.28 They also cite a number of inaugural professorial speeches that frame the ›problems‹ of immigration and multiculturalism in opposing ways, making the point that, whatever the ›solution‹, the problem is posed by academics holding chairs such as ›Professor of Cross-Cultural Pedagogy‹ or ›Special Professor of Cohesion and Transnational Affairs‹, as being one that pertains to ethnic minorities. In other words the lens is trained outwards on those construed as ›Other‹ rather than inwards on the historically-rooted dynamics particular to The Netherland’s relationship to its former colonised and migrant citizens and residents. This is, in essence, the main problem uniting the scholarship I am nominating MEM here and migration studies more broadly, even much of that which claims to be critical of the border and of nations.29 The analytical separation of citizens from migrants may well be necessary as a device to explain dominant paradigms. However, it stops serving as an explanatory strategy when the social theorist him- (usually him) or herself is in the category ›citizen‹, writing about those in the category ›migrant‹, thus reinscribing the latter as problematic for a polity in which the scholar is included. For example, Sandro Mezzadra is emblematic of a particular trend in migration studies, one which is critical of the more mainstream policy- oriented research I analyse here, which rejects nationalist integrationism and insists on the necessity of apprehending »the ever increasing prominence of migration and borders as key figures for apprehending culture and society in our contemporary (global) present«.30 Nevertheless, his interpretation of the problems confronting political activism against the borders of Europe rests upon generalisations about migrants’ political orientations which places them in a conservative ›identity‹ camp opposed to the radical ›no borders‹ 28 Ibid., p. 305. 29 Cf. Sandro Mezzadra: Diritto di fuga; Brett Neilson, Sandro Mezzadra: Border as Method; Enrica Rigo: Citizenship at Europe’s Borders. 30 Nicolas De Genova, Sandro Mezzadra, John Pickles: New Keywords, p. 2. 14 orientation of cosmopolitan activist-scholars such as himself and his colleagues. Mezzadra said: »From what I have seen over the years many of these [›immigrant‹] groups are characterised by an extremely corporate political discourse, that emphasises the defence of certain phases of migration and that does not attempt a more general critique of the political meaning of immigration in Italy […]. Certainly, some of these groups have such characteristics: very integrationist, despite the fact that the processes of migration bring to light the crises inherent in models of social integration. They are often strongly culturalist and I think that culturalist tendencies neutralise the more radical aspects of the issues that migration highlights. They are also very paternalistic towards newer immigrants«.31 Such statements sweep across and erase the regulatory impact that race has, both in European societies and within spaces of political intervention specifically. How is it possible to assume that those construed as migrants in Europe universally reject integrationist paradigms? Such a question can remain unanswered because privileges accorded to white, male, straight and cis-gendered subjects do not dissipate in the context of ›progressive‹ activism and, indeed, are often exacerbated due to the very expectation that they will be less dominant and divisive. This lack of attention to the particular ways in which migration regimes act as techniques for the management of human life and are reproductive of race (and gender) on a global scale is carried through into the failure both to foreground race critical analyses and the scholarship of racialised people.32 Thus, despite the professed radicalism of »militant researchers« mobilised around »production and elaboration of new concepts as a […] necessary endeavour with which to enable new forms of politics«, this group often reproduces the »established repertoires of both traditional and critical migration studies« it is critical of.33 Europe and European scholars impose a two-sided relationship to 31 Interview with Sandro Mezzadra conducted in 2003 and which originally appeared in Alana Lentin: After Racism, p. 323 (translated from the Italian original). 32 Cf. Umut Erel, Jin Haritaworn, Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, and Christian Klesse:. (2008) On the Depoliticisation of Intersectionality Talk;. Jasbir Puar: Terrorist Assemblages. 33 Nicholas De Genova, Sandro Mezzadra, John Pickles (eds.): New Keywords, p. 5. As an example, Anna Curcio and Miguel Mellino’s special issue of Darkmatter Journal, ›Challenging Italian racism‹, which includes an article by Mezzadra, did not include a single article by a person of colour. 15 migration, on the one hand an imposed identity, on the other a precarious situation to find oneself in. Thus, »[w]hile present for centuries, communities of color continue to be perceived as ›foreign matter‹, stand-ins for the masses beyond the continent’s borders«.34 The persistent framing of people of colour in relation to their migration status in public policy, political rhetoric and MEM research leads to the processes of migration being perpetually tied to the problems of sociality. There is no point at which the fact of having migrated ceases to be a lens through which to assess a group’s social viability. Similarly, migration can never be normalized as either a perennial process or a contemporary inevitability because it is always constituted as a potential threat to societal well-being. It is within this context that we must understand the genesis of MEM research which explicitly ties migration to ethnic relations. Eliding, Neglecting and Denying Race My analysis of European MEM research focused on a selection of academics chosen for their positioning as highly cited scholars in the field with the institutional standing and research grant income to match. The parameters of the paper forbids an in-depth discussion of the trajectory of each them. However, some overarching remarks can be made. Each of the scholars is widely published in high impact journals. All of them have accrued long lists of honours and hold prestigious chairs in Universities35 where they often direct research centres.36 Many of them are involved in important scholarly 34 Fatima El-Tayeb: ›The Birth of a European Public‹, p. 652. 35 Jan Willem Duyvendack is Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam and previous Director of Utrecht Verwey-Jonker Instituut (1999-2003); Andrew Geddes is Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield; Jan Rath is the Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam; Adrian Favell has held Professorships of Sociology at Sciences Po (current), UCLA, Aarhus University and Columbia University (visiting); Virginie Guiraudon is Research Professor at the Sciences Po Centre for European Studies and has held the Marie Curie Chair of Excellence Professorship is Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute (2005-7); Christian Joppke has held Professorships at the University of Bern where he currently holds the Chair in General Sociology, the American University of Paris, International University of Bremen, University of British Columbia and the European University Institute. 36 For example, Paul Statham is the Director of the Sussex Centre for Migration Research; Jan Rath has held the position of Academic Director of the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies at the University of Amsterdam (2005-11); Rinus Penninx is a member of the Executive Board of the IMISCOE network; Anna Triandafyllidou heads the research strand on cultural pluralism at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European 16 networks, most notably IMISCOE, and have been the beneficiaries of prestigious visiting fellowships. They have also been recipients of large European Union research grants in addition to prestigious national research funds.37 Many among them have collaborated among themselves on research projects and publications.38 Lastly, a number of them have been employed by, have studied at or have been/are affiliated to (e.g. Visiting Research Fellowships) with the European University Institute, the premier European doctoral school.39 The aim of the research was to analyse the ways in which the selected scholars related to the concept of race in their publications on a variety of themes under the heading ›MEM‹. Topics covered include East-West migration in Europe, migration and labour markets, anti-discrimination policy, ethnic minorities and EU democracy, political discourses on immigration, civic integration models, ethnic entrepreneurship, integration of migrants, citizenship and migration policy, the consolidation of EU immigration approaches, policy discourses on immigration, integration and the crisis of multiculturalism, the relationship between research and policy on migration, the Muslim veil, citizenship tests, immigrants’ rights, ethnically diverse neighbourhoods, managing migration, and Muslim immigration. Citations for University Institute; Adrian Favell is Director of the Glorea Centre for Global and Regional Ethnographies at Aarhus University. 37 Research grant funding numbers were found by consulting the webpages of scholars hosted by their academic institutions and/or funding bodies. Figures were also found in final project reports submitted to the European Commission although there was sometimes a certain amount of discrepancy between the figures cited on the academics’ webpages and those given by the funding body. Records of research funds allocated were better documented in the case of some academics than others. For example, UK based scholars had better maintained webpages than their Dutch counterparts or those who have been based at US institutions. Likewise, scholars at the European University Institute had very well maintained records. Given these provisos and the additional remark that a full-scale study of the MEM research landscape would require interviews with scholars, institutions and funding bodies to be complete, several examples are indicative. One of the scholars consulted, Anna Tryandafillidou, has been the beneficiary (through research consortia) of 10,585,193 Euro between 2002-2015. Paul Statham has received GBP 3,372,563 between 2001 and 2014 which includes individual and consortia grants. 38 This indicatively includes collaborations between Christian Joppke and Virginie Guiraudon (2012), Adrian Favell and Virginie Guiraudon (2009), Jan Willem Duyvendack and Ruud Koopmans (1992), Paul Statham and Ruud Koopmans (1999, 2000, 2001) and Andrew Geddes and Adrian Favell (1999). 39 Virginie Guiraudon, Christian Joppke and Anna Triandafyllidou have both held Chairs, Directorships or Professorships (in the case of Triandafyllidou, all three) at the EUI; Andrew Geddes, Virginie Guiraudon, and Anna Triandafyllidou have all been Jean Monnet (visiting research) Fellows at the EUI; Adrian Favell, Andrew Geddes and Paul Stathman all undertook their doctoral research (together) at the EUI. 17 the publications examined are no lower than 68 with the highest at 50840 with most articles coming in at around 300 citations, covering articles, chapters and books published in the last 15 years. In order to be able to observe any changes in the ways the authors related to race and racism in their work, the analysis was conducted in two stages: first their most highly cited publications were looked at, followed by their three most recent ones (for which there is not yet substantial citation data). NVivo was used to isolate the number of times the words ›race‹, ›racism‹ and ›racist‹ were used in the works consulted. On this basis, a discourse analysis of the paragraphs surrounding these references was conducted in order to gain an appreciation of the context in which these words were used. In general, it is possible to note that not all of the works made reference to these words at all despite the fact that care was taken to eliminate any articles whose subject matter was considered too far away from the concerns of MEM. To be precise, 29 out of the 58 works looked at contained the word ›race‹, 21 mentioned ›racism‹, and 18 ›racist‹, including when the word appeared in the bibliography as part of the title of a cited work. In general, coverage ranged from 0.01% to 0.18%.41 Even the most race critical analyses among the works has a 0.07% coverage of ›race‹.42 Figure 1 is a visual representation of the salience of various concepts across the research analysed, presented as a word cloud. As is apparent, the references to our keywords are so scant that they are not represented as significant by the software. 40 For a 2004 paper by Christian Joppke. 41 For the word ›racism‹ in Andrew Geddes: Immigrant and Ethnic Minorities and the EU’s Democratic Deficit. 42 Cf. Valerie Amiraux, Virginie Guiraudon: Discrimination in Comparative Perspective. 18 Figure 1 Word Cloud of 58 articles consulted Deepening this snapshot, a reading of how the words ›race‹ and ›racism‹ (the coverage of ›racist‹ was too small to be significant) were used – when they were – gives us a useful overview of the precise ways in which it can be argued that attention to race as a structural condition underpinning the dynamics these authors are concerned with is either elided, neglected or denied. Some authors clearly do not consider race analytically useful, and others seek to actively deny its utility. A tiny proportion of the works cited gives weight to discussions emerging from race critical theory. Racism on the other hand is not generally – though this is not universal – denied. However, the neglect and/or the denial of the relationship between racism, as a behavior, attitude or even policy, and race is stark. In what follows, two tables detail the ways in which ›race‹ and ›racism‹ are discussed. The most cited works (from 1995-2008) and most recent works (from 2009 to date) are separated to demonstrate shifts in authors’ concerns over time. Race: Paradigms and Policies A central paradox can be instantly pointed out in the treatment of the concept, race, in these works. A glance at the table reveals that the most common occurrence of the word is in terms of simple classification, most often as part 19 of a list, such as »race, ethnicity, class, gender«.43 This would appear to mean that the authors accept that race is a concept that has meaning when discussing migration, multiculturalism, anti-discrimination policy or integration for example. However, a clue as to why this may appear to be so may be found by looking for the second two highest instances in which race is used, namely with regards the European Union Race Directive and the UK Race Relations ›agenda‹/policy. In other words, authors are using common terms of reference rather than choosing to apply these terms themselves. It is thus interesting to note the main ways in which race is discussed in relation to the extant discourse as they see it. Reference Most recent Most cited UK Race relations 1 33 paradigm Categorisation 19 28 EU Race Directive 20 5 Ethnic 6 1 monitoring/statistics Race riots 0 5 Critical race 4 0 theory/intersectionality theory UK-EU comparison on 0 6 the use of race Race relations industry 0 4 Criticism of the use of 0 4 race concept in research US-EU comparison on 3 0 the use of race Asylum/immigration and 3 1 race Legacy of Nazism/Vichy 2 1 and references to race Institutional racism and 1 0 race Racialisation 1 1 (‘racialisation of policy’) Reference to race in 1 1 history (e.g. colonialism, slavery) 43 Adrian Favell: Eurostars and Eurocities, p. 263 (tellingly this is contained in a footnote describing Michèle Lamont’s work). 20 Opposition of EU 1 0 political leaders to antiracism policy The ‘race card’ 0 1 Table 1 References to race in 35 works by 33 authors written between 1995 and 2014 (including co-authored works) As is plainly evident, race is mainly not spoken about. Very often ethnicity is used synonymously with race, a choice I have written about elsewhere as negating the commonalties between culturalist (ethnic) and biologised (racial) categorisations of human difference.44 For example, in a discussion of ›Migration and Ethnic Relations‹ as a contested political field, Koopmans and Statham discuss the logic of ›ethnic segregationism‹ which they describe as »exclusion from the political community of migrant newcomers who do not share the ethno-cultural background of the majority society«.45 They see ›ethnic segregationism‹ as having its supporters on the Right as well as among migrants themselves. Hence, they set the problem up as a neutral one, playing down the discriminatory nature of the political exclusion of migrants and those of migrant origin, and by emphasising segregation, imply a relativism which negates the divisiveness of citizenship, and its acquisition, as a measure whose purpose it is both to include and to exclude. The denial of inclusion to non-European migrant others (for EU migrants enjoy almost all of the rights of citizenship within the Union) is racially and colonially underscored, yet this goes unmentioned by the authors. In eliding the discussion of race by purportedly setting up an opposition between the explanatory frameworks of race and ethnicity – refusing to see how one begets the other – the ways in which ethnicity comes about as a term within a colonial, raciological framework and not outside or in spite of it are ignored.46 Hence, accompanying discussions of more suitable terminology, such as ethnicity, construed as more descriptive, less divisive and hence more constructive, is a strategy that neglects the continuing significance of race. Precisely because the preferred terms are presented as 44 Cf. Alana Lentin: Replacing ›Race‹, Historicizing ›Culture‹ in Multiculturalism. 45 Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham: Migration and Ethnic Relations as a Field of Political Contention, p. 22. 46 Cf. Robert Young: Colonial Desire. 21 neutral and universal, race is implicitly neglected while, dissociated from their racialised roots, ›ethnicity‹ and ›culture‹ are ahistorically constituted. Put another way, the ease with which a person or group is described as an ›ethnic minority‹, when severed from race’s disciplinary frame, construes who is doing the labelling – hegemonic white Europe – as irrelevant. Hence, Adrian Favell can glibly state on the subject of EU East-West migration: »Post- colonial theories of race, ethnicity and multiculturalism that clutter the shelves of bookstores and the pages of syllabi in the Anglo-American-dominated field of ›ethnic and racial studies‹ are also ineffective and largely irrelevant in relation to these new movements in Europe«, as though racial dynamics have had nothing to do with East-West relations.47 Furthermore, he proposes that a comparative perspective with Mexican migration to the US would provide a better framework, as though this work had not emphasised the racialisation of Latinos as key to understanding that migration.48 Another way in which race is neglected is through discussion of the tendency not to refer to it as a term in continental European contexts. This comes about most frequently in reference to the observation of the different attitudes of US-American and British publics towards the use of race as opposed to their mainland European counterparts. For example, Foner et al. remark, »Take the term ›race‹, which is commonplace in American parlance. The Dutch equivalent would probably be ras […] and in the Netherlands the term ras is rarely if ever used«. However, in attempting to explain this in a later section curiously entitled, ›Is Islam in Amsterdam Like Race in New York City?‹, they note, »In contemporary New York, ›race‹ is basically a color word«. They compare the situation of African Americans and other people of colour in New York to the situation as they see it in Amsterdam where people suffer discrimination on the grounds of foreignness and religion (Islam): »In Amsterdam, Islam (and cultural values and practices associated with it), not color-coded race, is the ›bright boundary‹ and basis for exclusion of many immigrants and their children«.49 Race is thus denied its regulatory function, having nothing to do with the structural discrimination of Muslim minorities 47 Adrian Favell: The New Face of East-West Migration in Europe, p. 706. 48 Cf. Nelson Maldonado Torres: Latinos in America. 49 Jan Rath, Nancy Foner, Jan Willem Duyvendak, Rogier van Reekum: New York and Amsterdam, pp. 13 (›ras‹), 133 (›New York‹), 137 (›Amsterdam‹). 22 and, paradoxically, despite the authors’ obvious objection to the term, taken at face value as a descriptor of phenotype. At only one point do the authors attempt to explain why race is not used in Dutch parlance, citing the »memories of the Holocaust – and Nazi racial laws concerning the ›superior‹ Aryan ›race‹ and ›inferior‹ Jewish ›race‹ – [that] have contributed to a discomfort with the term ›race‹ (as well as ›racism‹) in discussions of present- day immigrants and their children«.50 This ›discomfort‹ is related to a feeling of guilt for the deportations of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust. Here, an opportunity to explore how guilt often paralyses a confrontation with the legacy of murderous histories is lost.51 The theme of the Holocaust as a justification for the lack of attention to race continues throughout several of the works.52 For example, contrasting the attitudes of Britain and Germany with regards the claims making of various minority groups, Koopmans and Statham remark, »For obvious historical reasons related to the race politics of the Nazi period, race has never gained currency in postwar German political discourse«.53 The ›obviousness‹ of the choice not to use racial classification appears to clash with an implicit acceptance that do so is permissible in the US-American context, but not in the European one. On the one hand, they, Favell or Foner et al., appear to be opposing the colour-codedness of race, arguing for example that blackness does not encapsulate the range of differences according to which those construed as ›minority‹ or ›foreigner‹ are disadvantaged. However, at the same time they appear to accept that the utility of race in the European context is undermined by its implicitness in the Holocaust. Yet, race under Nazism was not purely colour-coded; and indeed, through the appeal to the ›genetic code‹54 was not said to be uniquely skin deep. The denial of the analytical utility of race appears, therefore, to be based on an unwillingness or inability to confront the historical trajectories that gave rise to race. For the main part, they accept the orthodoxy that race 50 Leo Lucassen: To Amsterdam, p. 66. 51 Cf. Sara Ahmed: The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 52 David Theo Goldberg: Racial Europeanization, discusses the problem of reducing race in Europe to the Nazi Shoah; I build on his critique in ›After Anti-Racism?‹. 53 Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham: Challenging the Liberal Nation-State?, p. 677 (emphasis added). 54 Cf. Stuart Hall: Race, the Floating Signifier. 23 begins and ends with the Holocaust in Europe and with »slavery, legal segregation, and ghettoization« in the United States.55 In other words, the points in common between Europe and the colonies, including the Americas, to which European acts of genocide and enslavement are central, are almost completely ignored, and thus from an analytical perspective, denied. The opposition created between the EU and the US is complemented by a further divide constructed between the UK and the rest of the EU as regards race. This takes a number of routes and further compounds the denial of the salience of race by seeing racial frames as a hindrance to more ›objective‹ analyses. As can be seen in Table 1, the ›UK Race Relations Paradigm‹ is the top most cited use of race in the earlier works consulted, while ›Race Directive‹ is heavily referenced in the more recent publications. This represents a shift in emphasis with regards the discussion of European anti- discrimination policies, reflecting the period before the passage into law of the EU Race Directive in 2003 and the time since. However, both sets of discussions foreground a similar concern, namely the varying national approaches to confronting discrimination along racial and ethnic lines among the member states of the EU. The British ›race relations‹ paradigm is described as an initiative of »UK political elites« who refer to it as the »›racialised‹ sponsorship of minorities«.56 The use of scare quotes around the word racialised presupposes that the authors are unconvinced that non-white ethnic minorities are indeed racialised. The article examines the nature of political opportunities for Muslims in Britain and rests upon a distinction between religion and race/ethnicity which discursively severs the former from the dynamics of the latter. Seeking to be attentive to the call from the institutionalised Muslim community to be recognised on the grounds of religion, the authors simultaneously overlook the racialised framing of Muslims in the early twenty-first century.57 For example, they describe how Muslims qua Muslims are slowly being catered for in British policy-making, emphasising the role of the community cohesion agenda spearheaded by the 55 Jan Rath, Nancy Foner, Jan Willem Duyvendak, Rogier van Reekum: New York and Amsterdam, p. 133. 56 Marta Bolognani, Paul Statham: The Changing Public Face of Muslim Associations in Britain, p. 233. 57 Salman S. Sayyid and Abdoolkarim Vakil (2010) Thinking through Islamophobia. 24 former Labour government at the height of the ›war on terror‹, yet fail to note the context of multicultural backlash and moral panic regarding Muslims extremism that gave rise to it. 58 Racism: Between Acceptance and Denial The discussion of racism cannot be dissociated from the evasion, neglect or denial of race in the works consulted. Racism takes on a curious role. It is both admitted, as a ›better‹ concept than that of race, and denied as being explanatory of wider processes than direct cases of discrimination. Racism is thus confined to situations over which there is little ambiguity, such as workplace discrimination or physical abuse. For this reason, racism is mainly discussed in relation to anti-discrimination policies which is the subject matter of a number of the publications looked at. Reference Most recent Most cited Political commitment to 9 40 tackling racism/Antiracism policy Racism - attitudes 7 1 Racism and failures of 4 4 integration Denial of racism/failure 0 5 to use concept of racism Racism and immigration 3 4 Intensification of racism 3 0 Racism and the far right 2 3 Race critical approach 3 0 to racism (all references to Lentin) Austerity/poverty as 1 3 drivers of racism Criticism of use of 1 3 explanation of racism Racism as extrinsic to 0 2 liberalism and nationalism Daily/systemic racism 2 1 Cultural racism 2 0 Antisemitism 2 1 58 Cf. Alana Lentin, Gavan Titley: The Crises of Multiculturalism; Arun Kundnani: The Muslims Are Coming. 25 Ignoring race in fighting 0 2 racism Subtle racism 0 2 European roots of 1 1 racism Emphasis on racism as 0 1 postcolonial guilt Pathologisation of overt 0 1 racism Table 2 References to racism in 35 works by 33 authors (including co-written works) Bar some references to ›subtle‹ or daily racism, and one discussion of the connections between persistent racism and the failures to address race,59 looking at the above table reveals that racism is generally taken to concern either antiracist policies or attitudes and behaviours. The overbearing reference to racism is in regards to existing texts (policies, laws, etc.) that use the term. Very often, racism is coupled with xenophobia60 and constructed as being an attitude or behaviour, sometimes of extreme right-wing parties, such as the Austrian Freedom Party.61 Racism is thus at times described as being ›on the rise‹ precipitating the needs for legislation or other policy measures, but rarely is the cause of that perceived rise given nor is it contextualised within a history of European racism which looks beyond the Nazi era. The roots of the entrenched racisms that were workshopped outside Europe in the colonial setting to be exported back through nationalism, class, antisemitism and migration are left unexplained. There is also for some an irritation with the invocation of racism that goes hand-in-hand with the perceived inutility of race. For example, an acclaimed book mentions racism only three times, once in an interview, once in scare quotes to refer to a white migrant who perceived himself to be the victim of Belgian racism, and once in a citation, persistently denies its analytical usefulness.62 In his discussion of integration, Favell claims, »European nations are obviously at different stages of development in their internal 59 Cf. Valerie Amiraux, Virginie Guiraudon: Discrimination in Comparative Perspective. The authors cite my work (›Racism and Anti-racism in Europe‹) on the failure to historicise race as European. 60 Cf. Andrew Geddes: Immigrant and Ethnic Minorities. 61 cf. Andrew Geddes (2006) Britain, France, and EU Anti-Discrimination Policy. 62 Cf. Adrian Favell: Eurostars and Eurocities. 26 debates, but in most cases academic thinking is now moving beyond purely denunciatory work on the negative consequences of immigration (such as studies of racism) into the conceptualization of practical integration solutions and trajectories of multicultural social change«.63 Beyond why racism would be couched as denunciation, implying that this is far-fetched or at least strategically impolitic, his opposition of racism and integration belies the racialised contours of the integration framework. He engages not at all with criticisms of integration as unidirectional and fails to set the rise of integration, against multiculturalism, within a political consensus on migrants and the racialised, Muslims in particular, as oppositional to the nation. The theme of integration is expanded upon by Christian Joppke who is at pains to decouple integration from racism. While admitting that ›civic integration‹ is ›illiberal‹, he is convinced that it bears no relation to »sources extrinsic to liberalism, such as nationalism or racism«.64 In other words, integrationism is integral to liberalism itself. The author’s severing of racism and nationalism from liberalism contributes to the mainstream view on racism as a pathological position, proper to extremist, exceptional regimes, and of no relevance to liberal democracies save in the case of far-right parties and groups. This is echoed in his book on the Muslim veil in which he repeatedly denies that policies banning the public wearing of the hijab or the burka are in any sense racist.65 The denial of racism is further entrenched in Joppke and Guiraudon’s discussion of migration controls. They seek to break down »taboos« relating to »increasing crime rates among migrants (particularly of the irregular kind)«.66 They argue that it is possible to rule out institutionalized racial discrimination due to the variation in crime rates among different groups of racialised minorities. However, they claim that increased control over 63 Adrian Favell: Integration Nations, p. 20 (emphasis added). 64 Christian Joppke: Beyond national models. p. 14. 65 Cf. Christian Joppke: Veil. His approach to racism is extensively discussed in Alana Lentin, Gavan Titley: The Crises of Multiculturalism. 66 Christian Joppke, Virginie Guiraudon: Controlling a New Migration World, p. 1; for the following quote see ibid., p. 16. It is fascinating to note Virginie Guiraudon’s promiscuous attitude to the discussion of race which appears to be wholly dependent on who her co-author happens to be. While with Valerie Amiraux, a well-known critic of race and racism, Guiraudon emphasizes intersectionality and critical race theory, with Joppke she adopts a much more skeptical approach to the analytical utility of race, remaining somewhere in the middle as sole author. 27 migration promotes risky behaviour (›illegal‹ migration) that is more likely to be engaged in by those with a propensity to criminality. Be that as it may, and it is possible to find alternative data to those cited by the authors who propose that, for example, »the proportion of irregular immigrants […] among criminal immigrants is exceedingly high everywhere«, the fact that this can be seen as extrinsic to racism is remarkable. For the authors, European migration controls, and the ›risky‹ behaviours they encourage, are not seen as related in any sense to the colonial power matrix to which racism is central. The main problem with how racism is discussed in these works is their lack of reflection on or their flagrant denial of race. Even discussions of the problems inherent in eliding racism avoids a contextualization foregrounding race.67 What seems to evade the concern of most of the authors is that the very debates they attempt to intervene in are structured by the persistent ramifications of race for making sense of European polities and socialities. The very reason for which postracialism advances a ›no taboos‹ attitude to the discussion of the place of migrants in Dutch life, for example, is because a racially conceived divide institutes the separation between native and non- native central to Dutch rhetoric. It does not seem possible, thus, to engage in a meaningful discussion about racism without paying attention to its purpose in repeatedly institutionalizing and performing racial logics. Yet, in conclusion, I argue that this precise separation is at the heart of Eurocentric conceptions of racism, and that consequently, the connection to race is placed continuously out of sight. Conclusion: Post-Race, Ante The argument that it is possible to discuss and confront racism without having recourse to race in studies of migration, ethnicity and minorities cannot be accepted as an expression of good faith. It is a position that is, at its core, fundamentally epistemically racist. Proponents of the analytical separation between race and racism warn of the ease with which race is open to reification. Yet, such a position is based on an acceptance of the idea that 67 Cf. Rogier van Reekum, Jan Willem Duyvendak: Running From our Shadows. 28 race really went away. In fact, as an analysis of debates over the scientific utility of race within the UNESCO antiracism project show, the scientific status of the race concept is far from being resolved. Indeed the rise of genomic research has brought race uncontroversially back onto an agenda that many would argue it was never taken off.68 It was the postcolonial and decolonial scholars of racism, not the MEM researchers, who instituted and insisted upon the constructedness of race, recalling Du Bois’s call to heed not the »physical bond« of race but the »social heritage of slavery; the discrimination and insult«.69 However, they also realized that to do away completely with race would be to ›bury it alive‹,70 thus denying its function in instituting the separation between Europe and non-Europe that continues to constrain equality. The unwillingness to take race seriously in MEM scholarship may be understood by further interrogating the analytical separation between race and racism that seems central to it. This appears paradoxical because, if my line of argument is to be accepted, a denial of race must lead to a denial of racism. However, the distinction is made clearer if we accept that racism does not hold the same meaning for everyone. In other words, it is quite possible to insist that the best way to oppose racism is to deny the significance of race if one’s understanding of racism is restricted to obvious manifestations (covert as well as overt) of racist discrimination against groups and individuals by particular entities (persons or institutions). To do so, one would need to agree that the belief in racial hierarchy is an attitude that may well have a bearing on how individuals are treated in discrete situations, but that such a belief bears little to no relationship to mainstream European political philosophy and consequently, governance. In other words, race must be transformed into an unusual and outrageous belief, beyond the pale in any modern polity. Several scholars have argued that to take this position is to deny the persistent significance of race in defining European public political culture. However, we can deepen this critique and apply it to the problem for dealing with racism posed by MEM scholarship by adapting our understanding of what racism is. 68 Cf. Juan Comas: ›Scientific‹ Racism Again?; Lisa Gannett: Racism and Human Genome Diversity Research; Robert Carter: Genes, genomes and genealogies. 69 W.E.B. Du Bois: Dusk of Dawn, p. 59. 70 Cf. David Theo Goldberg: Racial Europeanization. 29  …Or rather, when racism is. Discussions of whether or not race has past its relevancy have, over recent years, centred around the question of whether racism may not have largely been overcome. Some have suggested that western societies with significant numbers of racialised minorities, have become postracial,71 an argument amplified in the wake of the election of Barack Obama to the US presidency. This line of argumentation has its positive and negative variants. The first strikes a self-congratulatory tone and is the embodiment of twenty-first century liberal antiracism; the second resonates with a right-wing constituency which emphasises the ascendancy of a hegemonic black elite that has turned racism on its head through the reign of political correctness. This largely US-American discourse nonetheless has its European version argued by those who now attack multiculturalism as responsible for the rise in extremism, the attack on secularism and as a threat to social cohesion.72 But postracialism can be better understood, not as a new phenomenon responding to a set of contextual political changes of recent decades, but as foundational to the conceptualisation of racism itself. This argument, convincingly put by Barnor Hesse, is based on a critique of the critique of postracialism itself.73 This problematisation of the idea of the postracial is predicated on the notion that racism continues to structure societies ›racelessly‹. Race is privatised, no longer governable by the state – implicit as an explanation for debility yet inadmissible as a grounds for redress – so that its stratifying functions remain hidden from view: neoliberalised.74 However, for Hesse, this plausible explanation of the state of affairs nevertheless implies a common, unchanging understanding of the meaning of racism. This argumentation is useful for understanding the problem posed by the MEM approach to race and racism: the meaning and significance of race therein is wilfully misunderstood, while the meaning of racism is taken for granted, and in so doing, excised from the meaning of race. Race has been misconstrued, even in race critical theory, as a concept 71 Cf. Dinesh D’Souza: The End of Racism. 72 Cf. Alana Lentin, Gavan Titley: The Crises of Multiculturalism. 73 Cf. Barnor Hesse: Self-fulfilling Prophecy. 74 Cf. David Theo Goldberg: The Threat of Race. 30 relating to ›different types of human bodies‹,75 to their ordering and management and the conflicts that arise as a result. This narrow explanation of the significance of race as a mechanism of power relies on the situation of the origins of race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, such a reading »fails to theorize the European colonial historicity of modernity from the sixteenth century onwards, or the European scientization of race during the eighteenth century«.76 For this reason, racism is a Eurocentric concept that cannot encapsulate the implicitness of race to the European project of nation-building and colonial expansion which is crucial to making sense of Europe’s place in the world, both materially and discursively. Read against the universalism of Europeanness, the Eurocentric conception of racism construes racism both »minimally […] (e.g. exclusion, discrimination)« and generally, and not »as a concept with a particular history of emergence and a particular logic of indicting race«.77 In this logic, everyone is capable of racism; racism is decoupled from its history in race, which does not emerge everywhere as a concept, but in Europe under the precise conditions of colonialism. In essence, the analyses of race and those of racism proceed along two tracks, rarely cross-cutting the other. This is observable in the body of MEM research I describe too: for MEM scholars, ephemeral race is irrelevant to their grappling with racism as a set of contemporary concerns for policy and action. Part of the reason for this is to be found in the epistemic racism that structures the divide between race critical and MEM scholarship. The extent to which MEM research is not only a white dominated terrain, but also how the politics of citation pay little to no consideration to black scholarship is striking. This is continuous with the splitting off of race from racism that is key to understanding the centrality of postracialism to making sense, not only of current dynamics, but of the origins of thinking on the meaning of racism. What is thus disregarded is race’s »colonial formation […] and its taxonomic translation into the forms of discipline and governance that comprise its 75 Cf. Howard Winant: The World is a Ghetto. 76 Barnor Hesse: Racialized Modernity, p. 646. 77 Id.: Self-fulfilling Prophecy, p. 157. 31 power«.78 Through the elevation of the term, ›racism‹, narrowly defined and split off from this ›raceocracy‹,race has meaning only within irregular national contexts, construed pathologically such as Nazism, and not as a convention »of the international regime of racial rule«.79 The nation becomes the only feasible setting for racism to take effect, understood as a perversion of its course. Hence the argument about what constitutes racism can turn around discussions of purported national character that give rise to racism to a greater or lesser degree. For example, antiracist activism in the French context can unabashedly be claimed to be based on the intrinsic non-racism of republican principles.80 Similarly British ›obsessions‹ with race can be theorized as originated in the failure of British colonialists to assimilate their subjects, accepting instead their ethnic particularisms. Such debates construe racism as a problem for nation states which adjustments to their national ethoi could alleviate. The focus of the majority of the MEM studies I examined, was just such a national comparison which argued the virtues of the approach to racial discrimination, integration or multiculturalism of the various EU states as though this endeavor could lead to the resolution of the persistent problems of discrimination of racial groups. It is hardly surprising then that racism is so narrowly interpreted by the majority of MEM scholars and why so many of them balk at suggestions that race is constitutive of European sociality and politics in a fundamental sense. The Eurocentric idea of racism as an inappropriate, narrow and extreme application of race in conditions of irregularity is a ›self-fulfilling prophecy‹ that heralds post-race. Racism contains the idea of its ›postness‹ within itself. The scepticism about race of the European MEM group is an expression of the idea at the heart of Eurocentric racism that it is always an excess and that, in so being, will be reset to the default setting: liberalism and democracy, seen as irreconcilable with racism or nationalism. The problems inherent in such a position require little explanation. Not only do they make it practically impossible to explain the actions of liberal democracies in terms of race, but 78 .Ibid., p. 160. 79 Ronán Burtenshaw: An Interview With Dr Barnor Hesse – Part I. 80 Cf. Alana Lentin: Racism and Anti-racism in Europe. 32 they make it impossible to explain the persistent significance of race as a logic, because the »colonial institution of race and its performativity« are »rendered inevident and irrelevant«.81 Paradoxically although MEM researchers berate race critical approaches for being unable to provide concrete solutions to racialised inequalities, for the most part they reproduce the racialised schemas they purportedly resist. They do this through their Eurocentric preservation of the idea of race as a failed biological concept that is irrationally misused in pressured national situations (e.g. economic crisis, mass immigration, etc.). 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