This panel critically examines questions of race, racism, and whiteness in Europe. The rise of radical-right parties across Europe and the emergence of antiracist protest movements like Black Lives Matter raise urgent questions about the need to understand the current political moment from a critical race perspective. For too long, cultural and religious difference, associated with postcolonial and labour migrants and their descendants, has been analyzed using a non-racial framework. Still, many in Europe, in academia and the popular press, remain attached to a non-racial view of the current political moment, presenting the European continent as an exceptional space where race does not matter. In particular racism, as a concept and critique, has been marginalized by European academics as missing the point. This panel will discuss the limits and shortcomings of current analytical frameworks, centered on such ambivalent concepts such as “culturalism” and “nativism” (premised on the supposedly clear distinction between culturalism, ethnocentrism, and racism), as well as debate new approaches to race, racism, and whiteness. We explore these interrelated issues by focusing on the case of the Netherlands as a way to discuss wider European dynamics:  

1. The ways in which race is operative in the politics of culture, immigration, and integration in European societies, including constructions of self and other;
2. The denial of race and racism in Europe - the notion that Europe constitutes an exceptional, non-racial space;
3. The politics of whiteness in Europe;
4. The rise of antiracism and black and postmigrant political movements and identities across the continent.