Black Lives Matter and the new wave of anti-racist mobilizations in Europe

ABSTRACT

This Special Issue investigates the European Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests that followed the protests in the USA against police brutality in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in May 2020. It takes an interdisciplinary theoretical perspective, interested in cultural and political contexts and the mechanism of how street protests and social movements influence public debates. It shows in various dimensions how the BLM mobilisation transformed existing anti-racist struggles within and across countries, bringing forward new debates, narratives, actors, and forms of resistance and organising in the social and cultural landscape of European countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-racism
• Black Lives Matter
• intersectionality
• political mobilisation
• social movements
• citizenship
• decolonial approaches

Introduction

On May 25, 2020, the violent death of George Floyd during a police arrest in Minneapolis sparked unprecedented mass mobilisations – some of the largest in US history. Not only did half a million Americans take to the streets in 550 locations at the peak of the 2020 mobilisation wave on June 6, but also, according to various surveys, up to 26 million US citizens participated in the protest wave, with an average of about 140 organised events daily (Buchanan et al., 2020). Moreover, the protests had an unprecedented level of societal support, far surpassing that during the Civil Rights Movement. While in the summer of 2020 only 28% of Americans opposed the protests, in 1963 the number was as high as 60% (Parker, 2022, p. 1167; for a detailed analysis of public support for the Black Lives Matter protests, see Azevedo et al., 2022; Drakulich & Denver, 2022; Setter, 2021). In the US, what was also remarkable was the large number of non-Black participants, which had not been observed on such a scale during previous mobilisations for the rights of Black Americans (Oliver, 2021).

The Black Lives Matter movement (hereafter BLM) began in the USA, originating from a social media campaign following the shooting and death of Trayvon Martin in 2012.¹ However, the movement’s impact has gone far beyond the USA and it cannot be reduced to a later expression of the Civil Rights Movement. Instead, we argue it is a global movement with different histories and expressions in different geopolitical contexts, interwoven in various ways and on different occasions with anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist mobilisation, and reparation and liberation movements, in the past through to the present (Balfour, 2023; Bringel, 2023 forthcoming; Issar, 2021; Strickland, 2022).

This Special Issue focuses on the mobilization in the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, and what we might consider a new wave of anti-racist mobilizations throughout Europe. To us, it is a new wave for several reasons: First, it is a new wave in its sheer size and volume. The protests were exceptional in Europe in terms of both the number of protest events and the sheer number of participants. A study on the BLM protests in Germany, Italy, Denmark, and Poland has identified 278 protests, with nearly 280,000 participants in total – which represents an unprecedented mobilisation for the rights of Black populations in Europe (Milman et al., 2021). Second, this wave of mobilisation strengthened, extended, and transformed pre-existing anti-racist activism while engaging large numbers of young, European, first-time activists who identify as minoritized populations or as Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPoC). Third, it takes place at a specific time in Europe – on the one hand, we have witnessed the development of various anti-racist policies, particularly at the level of the European Union and a growing level of public debate on racism across different EU countries. On the other hand, the current BLM protests take place in times of rising nationalism and polarisation based on a denial of the very existence of racism, even if this rejection takes different forms across Europe (Beaman, 2017; El Tayeb, 2001). In France, for instance, the ethos of liberté, egalité, and fraternité, with its egalitarian grounding, hinders the acknowledgment of structural racism (Beaman & Fredette, 2022). In Germany, the anti-Muslim racism of the protest movement PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident) was downplayed by some scholars as ‘culturally based concerns’ (Kocyba, 2016, pp. 173–184) – only the latest racist murders opened up a window of opportunity to publicly talk about and research different forms of racism in Germany (Foroutan et al., 2022; Henrichsen et al., 2022). But the denial of racism seems to be most resilient in European societies that do not have their own colonial history. An illustrative example is Poland, where, despite its colonial fantasies and the penetration of its culture with (Western European) colonial images, the issue of (Polish) racism is fiercely rejected and defined as solely a problem of the former colonial powers (Balogun, 2018; Nowicka, 2017). Thus, in some cases, European anti-racist movements are struggling to even speak about racism at all (see, for instance, the paper by Kocyba and Płucienniczak in this Special Issue). Despite this denial, the influence of far-right movements in government and in the mainstreaming of racist discourse in policy is so strong that it has led to the diminishing of social and civil rights following legislation that stigmatises and criminalises racialized minorities and migrants (Milman, 2022; Siim et al., 2018; Small, 2018). Lastly, we argue that this wave of mobilisation has impacted political and public debates and even legislative initiatives on the national as well as European levels (for an analysis of the German case, see the paper by Zajak, Steinhilper and Sommer in this Special Issue). It has also renewed transnational public debates among activists and intellectuals, and media reporting about the future vision of inclusive, anti-racist, notions of citizenship in the EU, as well as the future of civic solidarity in diverse social movements (Milman and Doerr in this Special Issue). Overall, we suggest that the recent BLM mobilisation, inspired by US protests, has transformed existing anti-racist struggles within and across countries, bringing forward new debates, narratives, actors, forms of resistance and organising in the social and cultural landscape of the European countries.

BLM protests from an interdisciplinary social movement perspective

This Special Issue advances an interdisciplinary theoretical perspective interested in cultural and political contexts, as well as in the role of social movements advancing public debates about citizenship and political participation. Contributions highlight how the protests represented a critical moment for European societies to deepen the self-reflexive potential of public debates about exclusion and inclusion in democratic processes and citizenship, national belonging, and resistance to racism, as well as the legacies of Europe’s history of colonialism and slavery. In times of increased uncertainty regarding social and civil rights following the rise of far-right movements and illiberalism in many European countries (Miller-Idriss, 2022; Wodak, 2020), the BLM protests questioned the EU’s self-proclaimed anti-racist, equal, and inclusive vision of citizenship, which has also been a goal of left-wing and progressive social movements.

Building on fresh empirical case studies, the contributions to this Special Issue present various facets and characteristics of the new wave of anti-racist mobilizations, including, changing articulations of race, Blackness, ethnicity, and racialized communities; forms of resistance to different forms of racism and their intersections, such as anti-Muslim racism, antisemitism, antiziganism, and anti-Black racism; the socio-cultural impact of the recent wave of anti-racist mobilisations and its links to previous cycles of anti-racist and anti-fascist mobilizations (i.e., within the context of the ‘long summer of migration’ or even earlier protest waves – see della Porta & Steinhilper, 2022). The contributions come from an interdisciplinary engagement with cultural and political sociology and cognate academic disciplines, focus on different parts of Europe, and are written by junior and senior scholars.

Anti-racist struggles have a long tradition of connecting civil society groups, activists, and intellectuals in the US with Europeans to varying degrees in different countries (Lentin, 2004; for a historical account of transatlantic networking of Black scholars, see Oguntoye et al., 1986). Yet, the violent death of George Floyd also transformed anti-racist movements with regard to forms of action, networks, and frames of collective action. In the following papers, we examine how this mobilisation interacted with national cultures of protest and domestic debates, including issues such as post-colonialism, anti-fascism, protest against police brutality, or solidarity with ethnic and racialized minorities. Furthermore, we reveal how activists from different regions localised and translated the message of the BLM in the US and how the mobilizations affected other forms of progressive activism. We also ask about alliances and new conflicts emerging between mobilising actors, as well as about the role of transnational networks and the perception of the US in the European context.

Outcomes and consequences of the mobilisation: A new understanding of racism in Europe?

Mobilisation can impact politics and society in many ways. Enduring changes are regularly mediated through culture; policy changes often depend on broad changes in public attitudes, which can be triggered by social mobilisation. Movements have the ability to make some forms of behaviours and social practices inappropriate or appealing; they transform what counts as knowledge and expertise, and they fight categorical boundaries or create new ones (della Porta, 2020). The recent wave of BLM protests has shifted the broader discourse and public understanding of racism as an individual misbehaviour to a structural and institutional problem, re-producing and perpetuating racial hierarchies and inequalities through cultural, political, social, and legal norms (Beaman, 2021). With the contributions in this Special Issue, we demonstrate how the mobilisation changed dominant narratives of race, ethnicity, and colonialism in different contexts in Eastern and Western Europe. We trace which narratives of anti-racist protests spread in the national public discourses and were translated into political actions at the level of the city, the region, the state, or the European Union. And we examine to what extent activists impacted the cultural representations of ethnic and racialized minorities in the new media, social platforms, or other public and private institutions (e.g., business, politics, academia) (see the paper by Milman & Doerr as well as the paper by Blaagaard in this Special Issue).

Contributions to this Special Issue

This Special Issue is a result of an international project financed and led by the Berlin-based DeZIM Institute (German Centre for Integration and Migration Research). Here, teams from four countries collected protest event data and conducted interviews with organisers of BLM protests in Denmark, Germany, Italy, and Poland (Milman et al., 2021). After finalising the project, a workshop was organised in which the project’s findings were presented and colleagues were invited to submit their recent research on BLM protests. Parts of the papers presented there have been included in the Special Issue.

The eight articles collected here cover a variety of topics from different disciplinary perspectives. In her contribution, Bolette B. Blaagaard introduces the reader to the establishment of a social media counter-public by the Danish chapter of Black Lives Matter (BLM-DK). In reaction to the brutal murder of Phillip Mbuji Johansen, a young Danish-Tanzanian man, which took place shortly after the murder of George Floyd, anti-racist activists responded to the (de-racialising) media coverage of the police investigation with critical memes and posts. Drawing on theories of critical memory and Black publicity, Blaagaard argues that social media content can be understood as an act of Black witnessing and resistance, and in this case, one that, through its embeddedness in the US context, constructs a transnational political subjectivity.

Likewise, Noa Milman and Nicole Doerr connect a cultural perspective of citizenship studies with a multimodal analysis of BLM ‘visibility acts of citizenship’ in the public sphere and a critical, visual discourse analysis of media (mis)interpretations and hegemonic translations of the BLM movement in Denmark. By combining insights from gender studies, visual, multimodal analysis, and decolonial approaches to citizenship, Milman and Doerr show how public statues of heroes of colonialism were altered by anonymous activists during BLM mobilisations in Greenland and Denmark. They then trace how these ‘visibility acts of citizenship’ are translated, re-interpreted, and filtered in conservative Danish media discourse and visual caricatures of BLM activists themselves. Milman and Doerr’s conceptual and methodological contribution on translation and visual discourse analysis develops a critical multimodal perspective to both protest actions and their visual caricature and discursive reactions to protest in (conservative) mainstream media.

Sabrina Zajak, Elias Steinhilper, and Moritz Sommer address the influence of the BLM protests on media coverage. However, they do not focus on misinterpreting certain forms of protest in specific media outlets but ask how far BLM influenced the debate about racism in Germany. Through quantitative content analysis and interviews, the authors demonstrate that the public discussion on racism did indeed shift. On the one hand, there was more reporting on racism directed against Black Germans. Also, more space was given to discussing German involvement in colonialism or the lives of Black people in Germany. In addition, racism was divorced from being exclusively a problem of the far right. Yet, the influence of the BLM protests was selective, as only certain frames of the BLM movement were intensively echoed in the public sphere.

Alexandra Cosima Budabin’s paper, like the contribution of Milman and Doerr, addresses protests that unfolded around statues. Her focus, however, is not dealing with the media (mis)representation of such protests but introducing the reader to a concrete example embedded in a minority context. The case study discussed here presents the painting of a Roman column – a symbol of Italy’s colonial and imperial past – with red paint. She shows how this form of ‘ideological vandalism’ can intertwine international as well as national debates with local concerns and set them into a constructive dialog – especially when the national and international context enters into an exchange with the grievances of a locality with a vivid minority culture.

Benjamin Abrams discusses the mobilisation of the BLM movement in the United Kingdom, which turned out to be the largest anti-racist protest wave since the abolition of slavery, despite unfavourable political opportunity structures as the protests were confronted with a closed political system and without significant advocates, either at party level or through corresponding state institutions. Only athletes and pop culture elites (themselves mostly belonging to an ethnic minority) showed solidarity with the BLM protests, which did not alter a generally hostile public discourse. Moreover, the legal framework for protests was not only restricted because of the pandemic but also tightened again in the context of the BLM mobilisation. Despite this context, Abrams demonstrates how mobilisations in the UK movement occurred. There were four main factors that contributed to the readiness for action: the amount of time available due to the pandemic measures increased the number of potential participants; the adoption of frames from the United States; the moral shock over the brutal murder of George Floyd; and the incentivised resource mobilisation dynamics.

In their contribution to this Special Issue, Piotr Kocyba and Piotr P. Płucienniczak analyse the transnational diffusion of protest. The authors use Poland as an example, illuminating diffusion into contexts that offer little hope for a broad and sustainable spread of the original movement. There are several reasons for this. One is the weakness of the Polish Black movement and the resulting low public visibility of its demands, compared to Western Europe. Above all, however, it is the denial of racism, which is particularly prevalent in Poland, that stands in the way of successful diffusion. Because the rejection of racist dispositions is so widespread in Poland, this leads to the de-racialisation of core demands of the BLM movement. For example, organisers regularly emphasised discrimination in general, rather than basing their protests on race. The same applies to examples of police violence, where not only Black victims were remembered.

Donatella della Porta, Anna Lavizzari, Herbert Reiter, Moritz Sommer, Elias Steinhilper, and Folashade Ajayi also examine international diffusion processes. Through a German-Italian comparison, however, they undertake a theoretical reflection on diffusion processes by comparatively analysing the influence of specific receiving contexts. They find that the triggering event (George Floyd’s murder) reshaped existing social movement families in similar directions, despite the different national contexts. At the same time, they also indicate differences in the ways in which existing actors adapt ideas coming from outside, notably through their recontextualization. Here, despite the similarities between Germany and Italy, the different discursive opportunity structures and configurations of actors result in diverging adaptation processes.

In the epilogue to this special issue, Beaman discusses all the contributions and provides her own analysis of the present wave of antiracist mobilizations in Europe following George Floyd’s murder and how we might make sense of the global resonance of the Black Lives Matter movement outside of the US. She writes with particular reference to the July 2023 police killing of Nahel Merzouk, a 17 year old of Algerian and Moroccan descent, in the Parisian banlieue, or suburban outskirt, and the ensuing protests and demonstrations.

The three book reviews accompanying this special issue, while not directly in dialogue with the BLM movement, all address themes of racism and discrimination. Flávio Eiró offers a personal yet scholarly appraisal of Gloria Wekker’s already classic work White Innocence (2016), which investigates the denial of racism and colonialism in the Netherlands, which perceives itself as a beacon of progressivism. Thus, the book not only offers a compelling analysis of historical discourses and cultural practices (such as the now-infamous “Black Pete”), but “is, above all, a call to action for white people to work towards greater representation and visibility of Dutch marginalised groups”. Le Cao discusses Model Machines by Bui T. Long (2022), which investigates historical discourses on “the Asian” in the United States exploring “the co-evolutionary relationship between the stigmatisation of race and fantasies of machines”. Our reviewer misses a discussion of American identity, for which the othering of Asians and Asian Americans has been constitutive, but still recommends the book, not only to scholars in the field, but also non-academic readers interested in (resisting) racism. Finally, Olga Zhmurko reviews Native Bias (Choi et al., 2022), a methodologically innovative study of attitudes towards immigrants in Germany that highlights the role of “symbolic triggers” in discriminatory practices and offers policy reccomendations. Through field experiments the authors were able to show that female immigrants wearing a “hijab” were more often discriminated against than their male peers and that female natives were more discriminatory towards them than their male counterparts.

Notes

1 Please note that while Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometti are often credited with starting the social movement Black Lives Matter following Martin’s death, we clarify that the first use of the Black Lives Matter hashtag was by sociologist Marcus Anthony Hunter (Jones, 2019). Throughout this article we focus on the broader social movement and identify BLM protests as those in conversation with BLM mobilisation in the United States.