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New on the Identities BlogFrom Hurricane Katrina to George Floyd
The murder of George Floyd in the spring of 2020 sparked an outcry against police brutality and racial injustice in the United States. In the wake of the killing, support for the Black Lives Matter movement rose sharply among white Americans. Shows of support ranged from the (controversial) posting of blacked-out photos on Facebook and Instagram, to patronage of black-owned businesses, to marching in BLM protests.
Interracial couples and the phenomenology of race
In majority white countries, the Black Lives Matter protests that unfolded after the murder of George Floyd were accompanied by the intensification of public debates on systemic racism and white allyship. Some media focused on Black-white couples, discussing the impact of these events on white partners’ understanding of anti-black racism in their Black partners’ lives. As part of the ERC-funded project ‘Regulating Mixed Intimacies in Europe (EUROMIX), over the past four years I have explored Black-white couples’ experiences of racism and discrimination in their everyday lives.
Governing ‘ethnic diversity’ through urban planning in Bogotá
In the wake of Colombia’s national branding as a pluri-ethnic nation, on the one hand, and of Black and Indigenous social movements denouncing racism, ethno-racial inequality, systemic necropolitics (Mbembe, 2003; Alves, 2014) and social injustice, on the other hand, Bogotá’s municipal ‘multicultural turn’ in the 2010s seemed a precious opportunity to partly reconcile the ambivalent reality of Colombia’s multiculturalism, torn as it is between the pluri-ethnic reality of its social constituencies and the simultaneous inclusion (often as commodification) and exclusion (racialisation) of its ethnic minorities.
Fixing the underrepresentation of BAME participants in medical research
It has been widely reported that the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted Black and Ethnic Minority (BAME) communities across the UK, which have suffered higher rates of hospitalisation and mortality. While the causes of this outsized impact are yet to be fully untangled, it is consistent with longstanding disparities in health outcomes and access to medical treatment between BAME communities and the white majority. The pandemic has, in effect, brought pre-existing health inequities to the fore.
The black Millwall fan – ‘unpacking’ a footballing juxtaposition?
While never entirely going away, the relationship between football fandom and racism has over the past few months come into renewed focus. In a UK context, this concerns the continued controversy over players choosing to ‘take the knee’ before professional matches in protest of racial injustice, as well as online abuse targeting the three black players who missed penalties in this summer’s final of the Euro 2020 tournament. Against a back story of overt racism in English stadia throughout the 1970s and 1980s, these episodes remind us of the need to keep interrogating the use of racist language across English football.
Missing the point: how policy exchange misunderstands knife crime in the capital
A recent Policy Exchange report made waves in criminological circles, (mis)identifying drill music and ‘gangs’ as prime suspects in connection with knife crime, while also defending more stop and search – despite the report’s own criticisms of it. Unsurprisingly, this ill-thought, badly researched and politically dubious intervention inspired a fierce rebuttal from 49 experts in Criminology, youth justice and rap music.
World War II and Indigenous identities
The global Indigenous Rights movement emerged late in the twentieth century, with scholars tracing its origin to postwar international conventions and human rights activism. In my Identities article, ‘World War II and the development of global indigenous identities’, and in a forthcoming book (War at the Margins, University of Hawai’i Press, 2022), I examine how the war created conditions favouring the emergence of Indigenous identity as a form of global political action.
The future will be urban, sure, but how will it look? The subversive constitutionalisation of cities and the possibility of radical change
Cities represent simultaneously one of the crucial evolving realities and at the same time blind spots in the interdependent political and economic order of the early 21st century. This order is dominated by usual suspects of states, corporations and their cross-border operations, and international organisations, as well as occasional rogues such as criminal networks, armed groups or unruly territories and polities. Yet cities are major battlefields of social and political struggles of our time as well as primary theatres of violence and war.
Forced immobility and its impact on transnational family relations
What happens if young migrants are deprived of maintaining contacts to close friends and relatives over a very long period of time and across different countries? What impact does this have on their personal development and their outlook on life?
‘New’Scots? (Re)writing Somali histories in Scotland
How is history written and by whom? These are questions that have been raised with frequency across the decolonising movement and in particular, by the Cadaan Studies movement, which has focused on knowledge production relating to Somali people. Started in 2015 by Harvard doctoral candidate, Safia Aidid, the movement provides a framework through which to critique the role of whiteness and white privilege in shaping narratives about Somali people.
Imbrications of gender and religion in Nordic radical right populism
On April 11, 2015, Pia Kjaersgaard, former leader of radical right populist Danish People’s Party concluded in her opinion piece: ‘We must dare to say that Christianity is better than Islam’. One year later, during the so-called burkini debate in France, Marine Le Pen, leader of radical right populist National Rally (formerly National Front), wrote in her blog: ‘This is the soul of France that is in question (…) France does not lock away a woman’s body, France does not hide half of its population under the fallacious and hateful pretext that the other half fears it will be tempted.’
The role of nativist discourse in racist ideology
'Refugees must be taught how to best fit in': so reads the title of Times columnist Clare Foges following the fall of Afghanistan in August 2021 to the Taliban and the subsequent mass exodus of Afghan men, women and children towards Britain. This wilfully juxtaposes a ‘non-native’ other with the presumed ‘natives’ of the UK and places expectations on the new arrivals to adapt to ‘our way of life’.
The fluid nature of rural ethnic identity: encounters between non-Roma and Roma people in a Central-Eastern European context
In the early 2010s, France repatriated a large number of Roma back to Romania, following a series of highly controversial reforms by Nicholas Sarkozy’s government (BBC, 2010). Campaigners for human rights, free movement, and workers’ rights hotly contested those harsh actions of forced repatriation, which were widely discussed in international media. A Romanian article called ‘Back to the life of Gypsy in Romania’ (Micu, 2010) suggested that most of the transnational worker Roma went back to their homelands in the rural part of southwestern Romania.
Race: a never-ending taboo in France
Recent events in France have revealed how race remains such a loaded concept in French society. But policymakers must emphasize that this is nothing new, and that public policies need to address historical and present racism in France in order to move forward.
Turkish-Dutch Muslims countering stigma in the Netherlands
In the aftermath of the 2016 attempted coup against the Erdoğan government in Turkey, several hundred Turkish-Dutch citizens took to the streets in the Netherlands. Some protesters harassed a journalist documenting the protests. Prime Minister Mark Rutte responded by telling the demonstrators to ‘piss off to Turkey’. This statement exemplifies how Turkish-Dutch citizens, born and raised in the Netherlands, can be scrutinised and quizzed about their loyalty and the extent of their integration. When they express deviant behaviour or political views in the eyes of the majority, they are considered ‘Turks’ or ‘Muslims’ only, which is not reconcilable with being ‘Dutch’.
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Call for Commentaries to
Identities COVID-19 Blog Series:
COVID-19 Response and the Remapping of the Boundaries of State, Nation and Citizenship
Despite COVID-19 being officially a pandemic that poses a global threat to health, economic well-being and political stability, and instead of generating new forms of transnationalism and global solidarity, it has, in fact, nourished various exclusionary ideologies. These have reaffirmed the role of the nation-state as the pre-eminent institution and ‘power-container’ in the Global North, and in ways that have made apparent colonial legacy and practise.
The current climate of populism, resurgent exclusionary ethno-nationalism, authoritarianism and racism, and retreating internationalism reinforces existing (as well as creating new) patterns of discrimination and inequality both at state and individual level. Undoubtedly, this disproportionately affects poorer countries and those groups/individuals already facing intersecting social, economic and health vulnerabilities....
The current climate of populism, resurgent exclusionary ethno-nationalism, authoritarianism and racism, and retreating internationalism reinforces existing (as well as creating new) patterns of discrimination and inequality both at state and individual level. Undoubtedly, this disproportionately affects poorer countries and those groups/individuals already facing intersecting social, economic and health vulnerabilities....
