Race and Europe

Abstract

Modern Europe is often perceived as built on the idea of race. This chapter argues that although the conceptual association of Europe and race provides an important critical dimension to “philosophy of race”, it is actually difficult to grasp a firm concept of Europe when approaching it from the hypothesis of a common, unified “racial formation” – and reciprocally, the concept of race is not decisively clarified when situated “in Europe”. It contends that a socio-constructivist account of race – which understands race as a category of “vision and division” of our social world, and subsequently views races as “racialized groups”, i.e. the social result of racialization processes – is by definition a substantive and methodological contextualist account. The chapter discusses Europe as historical context and argues that such a narrative is distinctly American and will outline three alternative epistemic and political histories of the concept and practices of race as they developed in “modern Europe”.