The “migrant crisis” as racial crisis: do Black Lives Matter in Europe?

ABSTRACT

We are currently witnessing a remarkable conjuncture between the escalation, acceleration, and diversification of migrant and refugee mobilities, on the one hand, and the mutually constitutive crises of “European” borders and “European” identity, on the other, replete with reanimated reactionary populist nationalisms and racialized nativisms, the routinization of antiterrorist securitization, and pervasive and entrenched “Islamophobia” (or more precisely, anti-Muslim racism). Despite the persistence of racial denial and the widespread refusal to frankly confront questions of “race” across Europe, the current constellation of “crises” presents precisely what can only be adequately comprehended as an unresolved racial crisis that derives fundamentally from the postcolonial condition of “Europe” as a whole, and therefore commands heightened scrutiny and rigorous investigation of the material and practical as well as discursive and symbolic productions of the co-constituted figures of “Europe” and “crisis” in light of racial formations theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• borders
• postcoloniality
• migration
• asylum seekers
• refugees
• the Muslim Question

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a global overview of the escalation in migrant deaths, see IOM (2014) and the IOM's “Missing Migrants Project”: http://missingmigrants.iom.int.

2. The Schengen Area, the European area free of border controls or passport checks for travellers from the 26 countries that are signatories of the Schengen Accord, includes 22 of the 28 EU member states, plus an additional 4 countries that are not EU members. The Schengen accord pre-dated the European Union, but was incorporated into the EU's Amsterdam Treaty of 1997, with provisions for some member states to opt out.

3. Even in the extended aftermath of the Arab Spring and ongoing civil wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, alongside political turmoil in Eritrea, in 2012, for example, first-instance “refugee” recognition across all EU member states was only 13.9 per cent, with 73 per cent of all asylum applications rejected outright (European Commission/Eurostat News Release [22 March 2013]: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/3-22032013-BP/EN.PDF).

4. The most comprehensive database documenting migrant and refugee deaths during attempts to traverse the borders of Europe is “The Migrants’ Files”, www.themigrantsfiles.com, a data project coordinated by Journalism++, which estimates the total number of European border deaths at more than 30,000. See also IOM (2014), Spijkerboer and Last (2014), and van Houtum and Boedeltje (2009), cf. IOM's “Missing Migrants Project”: http://missingmigrants.iom.int.

5. This was the principal slogan of a protest on 25 April 2015 directed at the European Commission's offices in London, called by the Movement Against Xenophobia and supported by the Stop the War coalition, BARAC UK (Black Activists Rising Against Cuts), and Global Justice Now.

6. Notably, in their six-point platform of demands, the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a collective of more than fifty Black-identified organizations in the United States – where racial Blackness is presumptively affiliated with African-American U.S. citizens and tends to be systematically dis-articulated from “immigrants” – has nonetheless explicitly recognized that the criminalization of “immigrants” is disproportionately experienced by those migrants who come to be racialized as “Black”. See https://policy.m4bl.org/end-war-on-black-people/.

7. See, in particular, the video call for a UK-wide #Shutdown racism/#Shutdown violence/#Shutdown borders protest on 5 August 2016, posted on the Black Lives Matter-UK Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/BLMUK/home.

8. “Ferguson” refers to the police murder of African-American Michael Brown on 9 August 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, a predominantly Black suburb of St. Louis where community outrage erupted repeatedly in both protests and rioting over an extended period (through the first anniversary of the killing in August 2015).

9. For Žižek's defence of Eurocentrism, see Žižek (1998), and remarks in Žižek and Horvat (2013, 56, 179).