Breaking the race taboo in a besieged Europe: how photographs of the “refugee crisis” reproduce racialized hierarchy

ABSTRACT

In a “colourblind” Europe, where race talk is taboo, explicit racial resentment towards newcomers is confined to the margins. Nonetheless, a racialized understanding of immigration and asylum persists, as evidenced in the less policed realm of iconographic representation. An analysis of the association between keyword-retrieved discursive frames and 1,500 photographs in Google Image search results from the years starting with the “migrant crisis” of 2015 reveals different regimes of representation and suggests that concepts of illegality and threat are embodied in images as race. Despite the overlapping hierarchies of origins found in today’s racializing discourses, the pillars of old European racial taxonomies emerge as the prevalent codes of racialized difference in pictorial representation of a besieged Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee crisis
• race taboo
• racialization in Europe
• visual frames
• otherness
• Google Images

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Ann Morning for her thoughtful editing and incisive comments on an earlier draft of this study. Thanks also to Karin Horler for her thorough editing of the final version and to the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 There are hundreds of commercial advice pages. For Google Support, see https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/70897. As for scholarly publications, see for example Su et al. (2014).

2 An analysis with Google Trends shows that, in most European countries, the keyword search “refugees” spiked immediately after the lifeless body of Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy, washed up on the beach of Bodrum, Turkey on 2 September 2015. This string would continue to be more frequent in users’ searches than the keyword “migrants” until the end of the year.

3 Note however that photographs taken in a given year can be uploaded multiple times in successive years and thus appear in more than one period.

4 https://www.gettyimages.it/detail/fotografie-di-cronaca/migrants-are-escorted-through-fields-by-police-fotografie-di-cronaca/493896788. For an analysis of the biblical source of much of the iconography on refugees, see Wright (2002).

5 https://www.wired.it/attualita/politica/2019/10/14/guerre-mondo-dati-rifugiati/?refresh_ce=.

6 https://time.com/4063972/refugee-crisis-massimo-sestini/ and https://rmx.news/article/article/czechia-rejects-berlins-proposal-to-change-the-eu-asylum-policy.

7 https://www.lastampa.it/milano/2017/02/23/news/la-parola-clandestini-e-denigratoria-condannata-la-lega-nord-1.34658701.

8 https://voxnews.info/2014/04/26/emergenza-in-fuga-30-clandestini-con-la-scabbia/.

9 An inter-coder reliability test performed on a sub-sample (n = 100) returned a Krippendorff α coefficient > .800 (Freelon 2010). The proportion of “blacks” and “non-blacks” is calculated excluding the few pictures that portrayed people from both groups or depicting only European politicians or volunteers, and, in the search with the string “migrants” in 2019, the many pictures documenting the “migrant caravan” in Central America. The pictures excluded for these reasons account for 26.6 per cent of the total.

10 This additional analysis was performed using “refugees” and “rifugiati”, for the years 2013 (already depicting refugees from Syria) and 2011, on 100 pictures for each year and keyword.