“This is Not America”: Race and Protest in Europe

A mural depicting Adama Traore, who died in police custody in Paris in 2016, and George Floyd, in Seine-Saint-Denis, near Paris. It was defaced with racist messaging.

“This is not America”: it’s a go-to mantra for  those who claim a European exceptionalism in matters of racism.

“La France n'est pas les Etats-Unis” (“France is not the United States”), exclaimed France’s Interior Minister Christophe Castaner in early June 2020, as he denied there was institutional racism in French policing.

Such statements of moral superiority have been commonplace among European political and policy elites as they respond to protests following the murder of George Floyd in the US. They lay down an irreducible distance between European and American experiences of and responses to racism. 

The problem with this European disavowal of “American” racism? It displaces recognition of local issues of race and the roles they play in the making of national identities in Europe.

Anti-racist activism in Europe must bridge this symbolic gap. It must call out European exceptionalism and critically illuminate the forms of racial violence and exclusion that underpin the making of European identities.

Racism Without Race

The protests across Europe have mutated to trigger activism and debate on police violence, racial profiling, the detention of asylum seekers, the removal of monuments, and much else. The range and intersectionality of the causes reflect the multiple ways in which race is at the heart of so many socio-political issues in Europe.

Yet, race and racism are rarely addressed directly in many European countries, where disavowal is the norm. Across the continent, racism is often framed as cultural or religious difference, thereby displacing the primacy of race and yet perpetuating “colour-blind racism”.

As French intellectual Étienne Balibar wryly remarks, the “idea of a ‘racism without race’ is not as revolutionary as one might imagine.”

Historical context is important to understanding the different ways in which the US and European countries have dealt with their legacies of racism and colonialism. The British writer Gary Younge points out:

“One of the differences between America and Europe is that when it comes to anti-black racism, Europe’s most egregious acts took place abroad. Our civil rights movement took place abroad, our segregation, our slavery…But the fact of that distance, that arm’s length, means that it hasn’t been internalized in the same way.”

The distance continues to feed into the disavowals of racism in Europe. It is both temporal and spatial: racism is what happened in the past in European colonies or what happens in the present in the US. Europe remains racially innocent. 

The Grammar of Race

The fixation on racial injustices in the US can be frustrating and challenging for black activists in Europe. Donnay Musombo, an activist organising a Black Lives Matter protest in Belgium, noted that for members of the Congolese community, “[We] came to the conclusion that an African American is considered more than an African. An African American is valued more than an African…It took George Floyd to have Europe listening to us.”

At the same time, the attention presents opportunities for activists in Europe as they seek to mobilise public displays in defence of racial justice. European protests have powerfully amplified an American discourse and iconography of anti-racism as they confront local instances of the precarity of black life in Europe.

Part of the challenge for activists is to disarticulate the grammar of race, to disrupt both the deep structures and accepted discourses that normalize everyday relations of racial power. As the protests disturb national complacencies and silences around race across Europe, they must dislodge deeply embedded grammars of racial domination.

In France, the protests have sparked discussions about the validity of what are widely viewed as American concepts, such as “identity politics,” “white privilege”, and “affirmative action”. For many, these are alien concepts, often dismissed as “communitarianism”, that threaten to undermine the social contract and universal ideals. 

In Germany, there has been consternation as the term “Antifa” became widely used in American media, since it is understood by Germans as shorthand for “antifaschistisch” (anti-fascist) and has troubling historical connotations for many. The hashtag #IchBinAntifa (“I am Antifa”) has been embraced by left-wing groups and provoked backlash.

While the incendiary nature of such discussions signifies the entrenched ideological perspectives around the currency of race as a discourse, it also signals the beginnings of Europe’s public debates. The “American” protests are being leveraged to undo the embedded codes and grammars of race.

Who Counts as Human?

A driving question in protests in both the US and Europe is: why do some lives and bodies matter? Impelled and inscribed in the Black Lives Matter movement, this has both universal and particular connotations. It emphasizes racialised definition of who counts as “human”, while also entailing other identifiers of inclusion and exclusion, including: who counts as European?

The grammar of race in Europe, in ways that are different to the American context, must be understood in terms of immigration – the influx of previously colonised peoples and the anxieties (and violence) that this has induced. The symbolic grafting of Black Lives Matter onto protests against European states’ treatment of refugees and asylum seekers underlines that the migrant crisis is a racial crisis, whatever the denials of structural racism in EU migration policy.

The US protests have been a catalyst for long-overdue engagement with these issues and with the legacies of empire and coloniality, including the ongoing vulnerability of black populations to “premature death”.

They show us what is being disavowed in the claim that “This is not America.”

Liam Kennedy is director of the Clinton Institute.