The uses of racism: whitewashing new Europeans in the UK

Abstract

In many respects, recent East European migrants in the UK look like past migrants to the UK: they left poorer parts of the world in search of work and the better life in the UK. But in other respects, they look different: they are white. Their putative whiteness, however, has not exempted them from the effects of racism. But while there is growing evidence of how they have been targets of racism, less attention has been focused on how they are also perpetrators of racism. The purpose of this paper is to compare the ways Hungarians and Romanians wield ‘race’ to assert and defend the relatively privileged position their putative whiteness affords them in the UK's segmented labour market. I argue that these migrants mark, evaluate and rank difference in racialized ways to secure both social-psychological and material benefits.

Keywords:

• racism
• whiteness
• migration
• East Europeans
• racialized hierarchies
• segmented labour markets

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number RES-000-22-33-58) for the financial support that made this research possible. I am also indebted to Dr Laura Moroşanu and Dr Eszter Szilassy for the excellent work they did as research assistants on this project. This article would not have been possible without their substantial contribution. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Migration Research Forum at the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, University of Bristol and at the British Sociological Association's 2012 Annual Conference. I would like to thank participants of both these venues for their valuable feedback.

Notes

1. On how ‘I'm not a racist, but…’ is used to preface racist remarks, see van Dijk 1999, p. 551.

2. We coded sixty-two discrete instances of racialization from thirty-four Hungarian interview and focus group participants and forty-nine instances of racialization from thirty-three Romanian interview and focus group participants. Hungarians targeted ethnic minorities fifty-four times as compared to seventeen times by Romanians. Two-thirds of the Romanian instances of racialization (thirty-two) were directed at Roma (Hungarians targeted Roma eight times).

3. Our participants might have felt more comfortable expressing views about racial difference to co-national researchers, thus resulting in a higher incidence of racialization data. It is perhaps telling that a similar study of East Europeans conducted by Ayona Datta (who self-identifies as South Asian) generated data on everyday cosmopolitanism (for her discussion of interviewer effects, see Datta 2009, pp. 357, 360).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jon E. Fox

JON E. FOX is Senior Lecturer in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies and Assistant Director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of Bristol.