Introduction

In this chapter, we set the scene for our empirical examination of minority women's misrecognition and invisibility – but also minority women's resistances. We examine political racelessness in Europe, which is reproduced and legitimised in ways that violently erase and exclude minority women and their interests from the European polity. We take the concept of ‘political racelessness’ from David Theo Goldberg, who defines it as a key element of ‘racial Europeanisation’, in which ‘race is to have no social place, no explicit markings. It is to be excised from any characterising of human conditions, relations [or] formations’ (Goldberg 2006: 336). Europe seeks to abolish race epistemologically and empirically through a process of forgetting its colonial history and disavowing its ongoing postcolonial entanglements with those it classes as ‘Others’ within its borders.

Minority women must negotiate a hostile political context, in which their intersectional social justice claims are often rendered invisible and inaudible. For minority women activists in particular, they must confront their erasure from both the political Right and Left. Indeed, as we will go on to argue, political racelessness is not only a project of the reactionary Right in Europe. The European socialist and social democratic Left also actively deploys political racelessness to further its twin – although contradictory – project of economic populism, by appealing to a raceless and genderless ‘people’ and by reasserting the importance of a unified (and presumably all white) ‘working class’.

We begin this chapter with a discussion of why political racelessness is a central feature of postcolonial amnesia in Europe. We move on to discuss how political racelessness is achieved and defended in Europe through the cultivation of ‘white ignorance’ (Mills 2007) and ‘white innocence’ (Wekker 2016). We then turn to examine how the white European Left – despite a long tradition of anti-racist and anti-fascist resistance – perpetuates political racelessness at the expense of minority groups and minority women in particular. We conclude with a in a context of white ignorance in Europe.

The racial logic of Europe

Making racial justice claims is extremely difficult to achieve and sustain in Europe, because of Europe's commitment to political racelessness. As we demonstrate throughout this book, political racelessness does not manifest itself in the same way across various nation states.