As Black Lives Matter protests spread across Europe in summer 2020, a curious political response accompanied it. When the protests expressed solidarity with George Floyd and protestors in the United States, the political class in Europe joined in, condemning racism, and inviting the USA to do better.

However, when the protests shifted into acts of translation, making connections between there and here, the political class were surprised or angry – “but that evil over there, it doesn’t happen here”. Protestors were faced with something that is very familiar to those who experience racism in their daily lives – the prevalence of denial. Racism is always something else, or somewhere else, or both at the same time.

The youth workers’ round-table discussion reflected on the personal and political costs of denial, and its challenges for education and activism. On the one hand, for young people subjected to racism, anti-racist activism can expose them to serious risks. As one youth worker supporting asylum-seeker organising commented, “because of the more apparent racism, young people we are working with are less prone to being visible and exposing themselves. We are having a more difficult time making projects where they have the time and space to be openly active”. Others underlined how the denial of racism is used to further forms of racist exclusion, where young people of colour and “migrant” background are subject to formal and informal demands to prove the legitimacy of their presence and belonging: “if you try to fully integrate into society, you can be made to feel that you have to reject aspects of yourself, which causes problems with self-confidence, your mental health, your identity. But if you don’t ‘integrate’, there is this normal rhetoric that the issues of racism we face are brought upon ourselves, as they don’t integrate”. And, in many contexts, the very idea of ‘racism’ is considered a foreign concept – or an American import – which “falsely accuses” the society, culture or state of wrong-doing: “it is difficult to talk about the notion of racism, the term is not acceptable, and you can really be faced with problems if you are seen to criticise certain values”.
 

Racism and the politics of denial

Given this, it is important to understand how central denial is to the operations of contemporary forms of racism. This denial is not just disagreement over the definition of racism, or confusion as to what it means. If we understand racism as historical and political, then it must be understood as an aspect of racism in the present moment. There are many reasons why this has come to pass. Since the Second World War, and the Holocaust of Jewish and Roma people, the racism that informed European fascisms and projects of extermination has been firmly repudiated and rejected politically. This racism is centrally associated with the forms of pseudo-science that took shape in the service of colonial domination, organising populations into hierarchies of civilisation and “racial development”. The nationalisms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought this racism “home”, informing ideas of the “race nation”, and national fitness for survival and expansion. The international commitment and architecture of human rights, and of intercultural and anti-racist youth work, are historical responses to this horror and trauma.

However, as Alana Lentin explores in her essay, the forceful rejection of the supremacist, “biological” racism had ambivalent results, as it drew attention away to the ways in which race continued to work in the post-war, still colonial world, and the ways in which it was inscribed into migration from “the third world” to Europe in the decades that followed. The conceptual result is that dominant understandings of racism are very limited, focusing on extremist actors and individual actions and attitudes, and largely exempting the state and institutions. The political result is what we see today; young people of colour and anti-racist movements must mobilise not just against racism – including the overt racism of radical right and nationalist parties – but against the dominant assumption that racism doesn’t really exist, and if it does, it isn’t really that.

The interview with author, journalist and activist Rokhaya Diallo draws out some of these political consequences within the context of France. Most European nations tell themselves an exceptional story of how racism has been overcome in their “home”. France is no different, and it has its own particular story: that the Republic is blind to ethnic or “racial” identity, and that this is the only route to equality and unity. Rokhaya’s reflections show how this official “race blindness” conflicts with the racialised treatment of citizens of north and central African background, and she links this to the importance of shared struggles in the pursuit of justice and equality. In the first essay of the section, Domenica Ghidei Biidu considers what the colonial pasts mean for how European institutions think about inequalities of access and outcome for young people in Europe today.
 

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