Postracial silences and the othering of race in Europe

Following Barnor Hesse in his recent work on the self-fulfilling promise of the ‘postracial horizon’ (Hesse 2011), I argue that Western Europe has constructed itself as always and already postracial. Talking about Europe’s relationship to race as postracial means not only that there is a denial of the significance of race in the construction of ideas of the nation, modernity, and belonging, but that there is also an implication that Europe is foundationally beyond race. Race, from this point of view, is viewed as base, as unscientific, as ignorant, and thus as opposed to the European idea of itself as progressive. Race, and crucially racism, are therefore externalized and pathologised as intrinsically ‘other’; where race appears in Europe, it is foisted upon an otherwise enlightened continent by its (racialised) underclasses or by aberrant populists.

This reading of race in Europe allows not only for a complete silencing of the colonial past, but also for its dislocation from the analysis of racisms present. This view of Europe’s original postracialism allows contemporary racism to be disconnected from that past and transformed into commonsense. The current anti-multiculturalist paradigm, for example, rejects race as a framework for analysis in favour of the more palatable ‘culture', thus allowing racism itself to be rewritten as either relative or reversed.

Reinserting an understanding of race as the structural framework undergirding colonialism and the benefits incurred by Europe as a result will help reevaluate the contemporary denial of difference that characterizes mainstream European politics today.