Racism In Europe Research Articles

The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler, Ben Urwand (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 327 pp., hardcover $26.95/ 19.95/ 24.50, electronic version available

On January 30, 1939, the sixth anniversary of National Socialist rule in Germany, Hitler delivered an unprecedented threat aimed at the Jewish people by warning that “if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” This threat, delivered in the Reichstag, was unique in modern diplomatic history and for that reason has been frequently cited not only as an example of Hitler's virulent hatred of Jews but also as presaging, if only faintly, the genocidal actions the Nazis would adopt in case of war. What has not drawn attention was the dictator's implied threat against America's Jews, and Hollywood film studios dominated by Jews in particular. Hitler believed that Jews had been inciting hatred by sponsoring boycotts and hate propaganda (Greuelhetze) against Germany since 1933, but that now in 1939 they were also releasing anti-German films calculated to sully the good name of the German nation.

El huevo de la serpiente al sur del mundo: desarrollo y supervivencia de la ciencia nazi en Chile (1908 -1951)

The paper presents, mainly through the figure of Dr. Max Westenhoffer and in a work of Drs. Barrientos and Schirmer (1937), the connections between the development of medicine and anthropology in Chile with the development of the biological determinist thought and racism in Europe. Chilean Physicians and anthropologists as Otto Aichel, Aureliano Oyarzun, Edgardo Schirmer and Juvenal Barrientos indicate the direct relationship of the Chilean scientific program of the early twentieth century with the hereditarian and racist program, which reached its climax with the Nazi eugenics.

Technologies of Belonging

In many European countries, the explicit discussion of race as a biological phenomenon has long been avoided. This has not meant that race has become obsolete or irrelevant all together. Rather, it is a slippery object that keeps shifting and changing. To understand its slippery nature, we suggest that race in Europe is best viewed as an absent presence, something that oscillates between reality and nonreality, which appears on the surface and then hides underground. In this special issue, we explore how race has been configured in different practices and how race-based identities and technologies are entwined in various European settings.

‘Everyone is blaming us!’ Conceptualising current anti-Roma racism in Europe and its necessary implications for anti-racist social work

Racism was and has remained a key determining element of the life experiences and life chances of Roma people all around Europe. The author provides some examples of current and past anti-Roma racism and analyses how and why the Roma ethnic minority face such racism. Despite many international declarations, European Union legislation, programmes and initiatives to protect the Roma against racism, racism still continues. Across Europe, the Roma are suffering increasing intolerance and hostility, scapegoating, and growing xenophobia. In the field of social work, many critical theoreticians argue that social work education and training have been slow to acknowledge racism in everyday life. This article presents the evidence of growing anti-Roma racism in order to encourage practitioners in the field of social work, students of social work, and social work scholars and researchers to include anti-Roma racism in our theories, practices and research agendas informed by anti-racist social work.

Race and the Mobility of Humans as Things

This article reflects on a significant dimension of the modern history of race in Europe and the world: the processes of mobility of humans as things that accompanied the scientific pursuit of the immutable racial condition of humans. It asks what it might mean to approach racial conceptions as historically embedded in, and shaped by, racial regimes of mobility, that is, the regimes encompassing the practices and apparatuses for the displacement of human bodies (or parts of bodies) as “scientific things” of racial significance for museum and laboratory networks. The article articulates race in Europe as entailed in a history of national, colonial, and postcolonial regimes of mobility. First, it is suggested that the history of race in science can be understood as the history of regimes of mobility of humans as things. It is then discussed how this history of mobility regimes connects with the making of collectives within and beyond Europe—national, imperial, indigenous, and postcolonial. Finally, the article investigates the contemporary expressions of racial regimes of mobility.

Age group athletes in inline skating: decrease in overall and increase in master athlete participation in the longest inline skating race in Europe – the Inline One-Eleven

BackgroundParticipation and performance trends in age group athletes have been investigated in endurance and ultraendurance races in swimming, cycling, running, and triathlon, but not in long-distance inline skating. The aim of this study was to investigate trends in participation, age, and performance in the longest inline race in Europe, the Inline One-Eleven over 111 km, held between 1998 and 2009.MethodsThe total number, age distribution, age at the time of the competition, and race times of male and female finishers at the Inline One-Eleven were analyzed.ResultsOverall participation increased until 2003 but decreased thereafter. During the 12-year period, the relative participation in skaters younger than 40 years old decreased while relative participation increased for skaters older than 40 years. The mean top ten skating time was 199 ± 9 minutes (range: 189–220 minutes) for men and 234 ± 17 minutes (range: 211–271 minutes) for women, respectively. The gender difference in performance remained stable at 17% ± 5% across years.ConclusionTo summarize, although the participation of master long-distance inline skaters increased, the overall participation decreased across years in the Inline One-Eleven. The race times of the best female and male skaters stabilized across years with a gender difference in performance of 17% ± 5%. Further studies should focus on the participation in the international World Inline Cup races.

Eastern Europe as a "Sub-Germanic Space": Scholarship on Eastern Europe under National Socialism

Institutions and Networks of Volkisch Scholarship The Volkisch People and German Soil. In 2008, Ingo Haar, Michael Fahlbusch, and Nicolas Berg published their Handbuch der volkischen Wissenschaften: Personen--Institutionen--Forschungsprogramme--Stiftungen. (1) Its appearance represents an important milestone in the study of history and the social sciences as practiced in Germany and Austria from the 1920s to the 1940s. Volkisch does not easily lend itself to definition, since it always held multivalent connotations, including the experience of the (Volk) and of the (Volksgemeinschaft). (2) Nonetheless, scholars in many fields proved receptive to the influence of the movement. Its roots can be traced both to the Wilhelminian and the Weimar eras, to academic and middle-class members of the right-wing milieu; and it encompassed a variety of ideologies, myths, and lifestyles. The movement's impact on scientific disciplines after 1918 centered on a redefinition of Germandom--as a people and as an ethnic community or ethnic body (Volkskorper). Participants invoked German culture-bearing and a territory of German soil and culture that stretched far beyond the borders of the German Empire or Weimar Republic (not to mention Austria). In the movements, transitions between ethno-nationalism and racism were fluid and usually associated with anti-Judaism (expressed, for example, in the desire to de-Judaize Christianity) and antisemitism in all its different manifestations. The preoccupation with Germandom led to demands that went beyond claims to cultural hegemony in Central Europe. (3) To various degrees, history, sociology, ethnology, theology, and geography opened themselves up to thinking; occasionally experimenting with new methods, scholars in these fields wished to make themselves useful to the administration. Those academic disciplines labeled volkisch in Handbuch der volkischen Wissenschaften both systemized social and political perceptions of reality and created new scientific categories. The outbreak of war in 1939 offered some disciplines and scholars the chance to go beyond interpreting reality to influencing and shaping it. In the worst cases, they did so weapon in hand. Volkisch scholarship, once antiquarian and conservative, became activist. When attitudes combined with brutal activism, which aimed to create a Teutonic-Germanic master race in Europe, they formed the basis of National Socialist war policy. That war policy absorbed many elements of the movement, even as it abandoned several of the movement's key principles. The Handbuch documents these processes admirably. Contributions by 85 authors offer easy access to important components of the so-called sciences. As the subtitle suggests, it covers people, research institutes, foundations, and publications, concentrating on those aspects of history, ethnography, and sociology with greatest practical application to (Volkswissenschaften). The publishers express regret that race hygiene, the study of German literature, and art history could not be studied in greater depth. Readers may also regret that demography, racial anthropology, and spatial planning--all of which were crucially important to the National Socialists--are discussed only in passing. Handbuch der volkischen Wissenschaften is only one of several important publications of the past decade that concentrate on so-called Ostforschung* and Ostexperten. (4) This review article explores the new perspectives and insights they provide into the significance of scholarship under National Socialism and that scholarship's contribution to demographic policies--including policies of extermination--in occupied Eastern Europe during World War II. Already in 1946, Max Weinreich of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in New York published a study of National Socialist Judenforschung. …

Women’s rights, gay rights and anti-Muslim racism in Europe: Introduction

Women’s rights, gay rights and anti-Muslim racism in Europe: Introduction

Hannah Arendt and the Concept of Revolution in the 1960s

In my essay I want to explore the issues raised above and then propose that if we look at C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins (1938; 1963), Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Arendt's On Revolution (1963), we have three models of revolution. James emphasises the social and economic dimension; Fanon the psychological; and Arendt the political. From this perspective, Arendt was tone-deaf to the Haitian Revolution because she was pre-disposed to fear revolutions whose main goal was the alleviation of poverty and clearly disliked Fanon's emphasis upon the reconstruction of self aimed for through revolutionary violence. In truth, Fanon's emphasis upon recognition signalled another goal of Third World revolution beyond national liberation--the forging of a new individual and group identity through revolutionary struggle. Finally, I will suggest that in the post-colonial era, Arendt's focus on the importance of a 'constitution of liberty,' implying for her a politics of democratic participation in the context of stable institutions, remains a worthy, if more limited, goal of post-colonial regimes. Hannah Arendt's attitude toward revolutionary upheaval in the non-European world was always ambivalent and her views on it ambiguous. Almost uniquely among (white) European and American thinkers, she underlined the importance of the colonial experience for understanding European fascism, even though it was a widely shared assumption among Black and Third World thinkers such as WEB Du Bois, Aime Ceesaire and Frantz Fanon. Despite this daring claim, which generally received little attention and even less credence, Arendt's depiction of sub-Saharan African cultures in The Origins of Totalitarianism has proven an embarrassment to even her most convinced admirers. A resolute and outspoken critic of racism in Europe, she adopted Eurocentric formulations to describe the African societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century conquered by Europeans. (1) Surprisingly, Arendt all but abandoned this cluster of problems--race and culture, colonialism and imperialism--after Origins. To be sure, she published a controversial, short essay casting doubt on the morality or wisdom of school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas (2) and also wrote essays dealing with aspects of the New Left, the US Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and the anti-Viet Nam War protests of the 1960s. Much of this work, primarily in the US, demonstrated relatively little research into, or philosophical depth, about the complex transition, for instance, from the Civil Rights Movement to the Black Power movement of the late 1960s. She could also sound awfully dismissive of the political insurgencies in non-European parts of the globe, as when she wrote in 1969 that 'The Third World is not a reality but an ideology'. (3) It's hard not to feel that Ned Curthoys is correct when he underlines Arendt's 'lack of interest in a colonized or subaltern perspective on the racist exclusions and colonialist inheritance of Western liberalism', (4) though most Third World thinkers would have levelled that indictment at the European left in general, not just liberalism. So, was her rather daring boomerang thesis in Origins a fluke and the pertinence of her thought for Third World liberation movements minimal? I don't think so. Much of what she proposed about the effects of colonialism on European culture and politics in Origin still needs study by political, cultural and intellectual historians. For instance, Paul Gilroy's Between Camps: Nations, Culture and the Lure of Race (5) refers favourably to Arendt's boomerang thesis at numerous points, while several of the essays in a recent collection of essays, Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History, point up her relevance for contemporary African Studies. On the subject of revolution per se, which I will explore in what follows, her On Revolution remains one of the most important, even if eccentric, post-1945 texts for rethinking the modern revolutionary tradition of the West and global revolutionary traditions in general. …

How to turn difficulties into opportunities: drawing from diversity to promote social cohesion

Racism in Europe is an ongoing reality that shapes many people’s everyday lives. Diversity is often perceived as a barrier to social cohesion or educational success. These discourses are very often translated into measures that tend to assimilate or segregate those with a migrant or minority background. In this article, drawing from the results of the INCLUD‐ED project, it is argued that through the implementation of successful actions diversity can be turned into an opportunity to enhance learning and social cohesion.

Fear of Foreigners: Recession and Racism in Europe

A decade-plus-long European economic recession has fostered and hardened racist and xenophobic attitudes toward immigrants. As immigrants often occupy the very bottom of the economic ladder, their labor contribution is rarely acknowledged, and their very unpopularity is routinely exploited by politicians seeking re-election.

Is Body Fat a Predictor of Race Time in Female Long-Distance Inline Skaters?

The aim of this study was to evaluate predictor variables of race time in female ultra-endurance inliners in the longest inline race in Europe. We investigated the association between anthropometric and training characteristics and race time for 16 female ultra-endurance inline skaters, at the longest inline marathon in Europe, the 'Inline One-eleven' over 111 km in Switzerland, using bi- and multivariate analysis. The mean (SD) race time was 289.7 (54.6) min. The bivariate analysis showed that body height (r=0.61), length of leg (r=0.61), number of weekly inline skating training sessions (r=-0.51) and duration of each training unit (r=0.61) were significantly correlated with race time. Stepwise multiple regressions revealed that body height, duration of each training unit, and age were the best variables to predict race time. Race time in ultra-endurance inline races such as the 'Inline One-eleven' over 111 km might be predicted by the following equation (r(2)=0.65): Race time (min)=-691.62+521.71 (body height, m)+0.58 (duration of each training unit, min)+1.78 (age, yrs) for female ultra-endurance inline skaters.

Migration and Race in Europe: The Trans-Atlantic Metastases of a Post-Colonial Cancer

This article examines dominant socio-political questions regarding migration, ‘multiculturalism’, and ‘integration’, as a politics of citizenship (and race) in contemporary (post-colonial) Europe. The argument unfolds through a critique of the nationalist complacencies and racial complicities in Jürgen Habermas’s remarks on ‘multiculturalism’ during the 1990s. With recourse to ‘underclass’ discourse, Habermas’s reflections were themselves a trans-Atlantic metastasis of a distinctly US ‘American’ hegemonic sociological commonsense with regard to, but actively disregarding, the fact of white supremacy. Habermas’s thoughts are critically situated alongside their subsequent metastasis, back across the Atlantic, into Francis Fukuyama’s recent invocations of ‘terrorism’ and his advocacy of the ‘American melting pot’ model as a trans-Atlantic prescription for Europe’s ailments. Treating ‘immigrants’ as a kind of societal illness, both are preoccupied by the same ‘problem’ — non-Europeans (as disaffected ‘minorities’). Thus, these discourses of ‘immigration’ manifest a distinctly post-colonial cancer coursing restlessly through the larger social formation of ‘the West’.

Obama, Africa, and the Post-Racial

In his article Obama, Africa, and the Post-Racial Michael Janis examines aspects of U.S. president Barack Obama's election in the context of the epistemology and history of racism. Following an introduction to the history of racism in Europe and in the U.S., Janis discusses the media in the U.S. and in Africa in relation to African American and African politics. The debates on race ignited by the campaign are considered in the light of Africana perspectives on relations between Africa and the West and on the history of slavery and colonialism. Based on selected data in the media of the U.S. and Africa, Obama's critical reception reveals that the post-racial remains contingent upon reparations and the historical contextualization of Western hegemony. What remains to be seen is the extent to which Obama's vision of the U.S. will draw from the African internationalist perspectives with which he is aligned. Michael Janis, Obama, Africa, and the Post-Racial page 2 of 12 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 11.2 (2009):

Europe and the Silence about Race

This article argues that, despite the efforts to expunge race from the European political sphere, racism continues to define the sociality of Europe. The post-war drive to replace race with other signifiers, such as culture or ethnicity, has done little to overcome the effects of the race idea, one less based on naturalist conceptions of hierarchical humanity, and more on fundamental conceptions of Europeanness and non-Europeanness. The silence about race in Europe allows European states to declare themselves non-racist, or even anti-racist, while at the same time continuing to imply an inherent European superiority, which determines both international relationships and relationships with those seen as `in but not of Europe' within its domestic spheres. The article concludes by asking what the repercussions of this are in the context of the contemporary discourse on cohesion and integration that replaces multiculturalism as a possible way of living together in a Europe always less homogeneous in reality than it is commonly imagined to be.

State-led efforts in eliminating racial discrimination

There is no denying the existence of racism in Europe. We pride ourselves on having advanced democratic systems, a legal framework that protects and guarantees the rights of the individual and a welfare State that supplies basic services to all citizens, equally. All the same, no European society is free from the phenomenon of racism. Besides structural and persistent racism, which is often rooted in stereotypes, there are also new tendencies brought about by immigration.

Migration, Racism and Citizenship in Europe

Bashy Quraishy examines the difficult task of resisting racism in Europe. Development (2003) 46, 71–74. doi:10.1177/10116370030463011

Invisible Fences: Egalitarianism, Nationalism and Racism

With its specific combination of a bureaucratic welfare state and an open, globalized capitalist economy, Norway, along with the other Nordic countries, provides a particularly interesting context for the examination of the relationship between egalitarianism, nationalism, and racism in Europe. A racialization of difference takes place, as immigration emerges as a site for racial and racist discourse, and as a site of conjuncture between the welfare state and its citizens. By presenting an analysis of the contemporary debate on immigration in Norway, this article demonstrates how equality conceived as sameness (‘imagined sameness’) underpins a growing ethnification of national identity. Widely different utterances and points of view refer to metaphors of home and family life, a close link between territory and generalized kinship, and the renewed importance of Lutheran Christianity in contrast to Islam. A model of group identity and relationship is therefore suggested, in which organizational boundaries and cultural substance inflect one another, rather than being the bases of different or even opposed approaches. It is also argued that anthropologists need to take a more serious interest in the European majority populations.

Analyzing the Emergence of New Racism in Europe

Analyzing the Emergence of New Racism in Europe

Ethnography within a Pluralist Europe

Ethnography within a Pluralist Europe Douglas R. Holmes States of Grace: Senegalese in Italy and the New European Immigration. Donald Martin Carter. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997; xv + 221 pp. The New Racism in Europe: A Sicilian Ethnography. Jeffrey Cole. Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, 107. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; xiii + 133 pp. The two works under review by Donald Martin Carter and Jeffrey Cole are significant efforts to deal with the possibilities and limitations of ethnographic inquiry within a pluralist Europe and, as such, they deserve serious attention and scrutiny. Though both studies are set in Italy at virtually the same time, it is hard to imagine two more different delineations of the aims and modalities of ethnography: one aligned by the conventions of political economy, the other, preoccupied with the poetics and politics of cultural discourse. Jeffrey Cole begins his account with the passage of the Martelli law of 1990, Italy's first comprehensive law regulating resident foreigners. The law set the terms for a wide-ranging debate in Italy on race and immigration, against the backdrop of Italian political history. The bill was specifically designed to align Italian law with European legislation in anticipation of the open borders agenda of 1992. It thereby, as has been widely noted, linked advanced European integration to new configurations of racism. The result was a complex discourse on race and identity crosscut, as Cole notes, with idealism, naivete, and ambivalence. Fieldwork for the study was conducted in urban districts of Palermo drawing on extended interviews among working class families as well as on supplementary questionnaires administered to university students, students at an elite high school, and adult students seeking equivalency diplomas. Cole states the initial aim of his study to provide an ethnographic perspective on the notion that working people are structurally inclined by their insecurity to express "working class racism" or class specific hostility towards immigrants (p. 19). By setting the study in Palermo, Cole can investigate systematically how new forms of racism operate in counterpoint to the Sicilian experience of emigration and anti-Southern bigotry. Cole's analysis is framed by classic assumptions of political economy that locate working class fears and aspirations between traditional manifestations of solidarity-rooted in class consciousness-and chronic forms of insecurity and marginality incited by shifting regimes of capitalist production. This theoretical stance allows Cole to engage his informant's sensibilities, even when tinged by racism, with insight and candour. Yet it also creates a peculiar dilemma that Cole continually struggles with in the first part of the text. By construing the forces that give rise to racism as largely outside the control of working people the space for ethnographic inquiry is attenuated. Indeed, the way Cole seeks to deal with, if not resolve this problem is by adhering closely to his data, by insisting on the diverse responses to immigration on the part of Palermitans and emphasizing the inherent conflicts and anxieties incited by immigration. Thus, Cole negotiates with subtlety and intelligence the central issue of the study, the problem of working class hostility to immigrants. Cole, drawing primarily on his survey data and supplemental interviews, also creates a picture of bourgeois attitudes towards immigrants. He delineates a series of paradigms of immigration to assess the degree to which major political and intellectual agendas in Italy promote racial tolerance or intolerance. As he acknowledges, this analysis of bourgeois values is limited insofar as it not supplemented with more a comprehensive ethnographic treatment. In other words, his "paradigms of immigration" are largely attitudinal constructs that are not measured against systematic observations of social action. Had this ethnographic analysis been pursued, it could have significantly enhanced Cole's inquiry. In the penultimate chapter, "The Politics of Race and Immigration in the Italian North and South," Cole makes the most interesting and radical moves of his study. He shifts his analysis to the appalling anti-immigrant protests that surfaced during the Florentine Carnival in 1990 and spread across northern Italy marking, as he puts it, the "intense [End Page 39] politicization of immigration in the north" (p. 118). These violent attacks notably on North Africans and Senegalese traders revealed not just...