“I don’t mean to sound racist but … ” Transforming racism in transnational Europe

ABSTRACT

Thinking of racism through the lens of its geographies and temporality – a transnational lens, as I understand it – is productive for our understanding of the current process of social integration of immigrants in European cities. I argue that an interactive model of racism can help us understand the spread (and revival) of racism in Europe, and develop a new take on intersections of racism and immigration. Using the example of the Polish “post-enlargement” immigration to England, I scrutinize how racism is altered through social networks spanning localities within and across national borders. I demonstrate how the research participants incorporate, reproduce, and transform racism present in the British multicultural public space into a cultural repertoire (habitus) they internalized before migration. I argue that racism is a transnational outcome of ongoing negotiations between past and current experiences, and between parties in two or more geographical locations.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• transnationalism
• habitus
• migration
• Eastern Europe
• United Kingdom

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The team of TRANSFORmIG, as well as myself and the interviewers contracted for the project in 2010–11, which I realized at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany.

2. The Council of Europe and various NGOs document racism against Roma and Gypsies, and most recently also against Muslims (ECRi 2015), while various scholars stress the denial of racism in Eastern Europe (Vrabiescu 2014).

3. It is possible to distinguish a third perspective, which relates racism to convergent imaginaries of “racial others” that get perpetuated and transnationally circulated through press, television (Havens 2013; van Dijk 2012), and increasingly also by social media (Titley 2014). Narrations we collected in England and Germany mirror this “virtual and immaterial racism” (Gilroy 2012). Polish migrants received media coverage on refugees, immigrants, and Muslim fundamentalism through newspapers and television both in the UK and in Poland, the latter via satellite; Internet news portals addressed to Polish migrants in the UK often translate British news to Polish, facilitating the transnational character of media coverage. Furthermore, the policy language of transnational institutions such as the Council of Europe impacts national discourses and vocabularies around multiculturalism and diversity, ultimately also entering migrants' personal repertoires. This perspective is not a core subject of the TRANSFORmIG study and therefore not a part of this paper.

4. The vast majority of publications applies the term “discrimination” as encompassing foreign citizens. A separate body of work is dedicated to the discrimination of Roma, and there the problem is framed as social exclusion–inclusion dynamics within the Polish society.

5. For problems of adequate English translation see Gawlewicz (2016b).

6. Unfortunately, our interviews thus do not capture the possible impact of the Brexit vote on attitudes of the Polish immigrants.

7. “Political correctness” has become an insult in the Brexit and the US-presidential campaign 2016, as well as in Poland, where the right wing populist media and politicians accuse the “politically correct” liberal and leftist oriented voters of political cowardliness and social naivety.

8. In lack of social scientific analyses of these developments, I can refer to a selection of newspaper articles from both countries: in Krytyka Polityczna on 10 September 2016; Newsweek Poland on 30 September 2016; The Guardian and The Independent on 26 June 2016; Newsweek on 6 September 2016; The Guardian on 31 August 2016.

Additional information

Funding

This publication has been made possible by founding from the European Research Council [grant number 313369] awarded to Prof. Dr Magdalena Nowicka.