Blog post by Karim Murji, University of West London, UK and Ipek Demir, University of Leeds, UK

This blog is linked to the Identities Special Issue: The Global Configurations of Whiteness.

How do two recent instances from the UK provide a window into a wider picture of White supremacy?

In late 2025 Robert Jenrick, then the Conservative Shadow Justice Minister (who defected to the Reform Party in 2026) made headlines when he complained of ‘not seeing another White face’ in Handsworth, Birmingham. Handsworth is indeed one of most diverse places in the UK, hosting many ‘postcolonial’ immigrants – data compiled from the Office for National Statistics by Birmingham City Council shows the population as, for example 9% White, 25.1% Pakistani, 23.1% Indian, 10.2% Bangladeshi, Black Caribbean 8.2%, 8.7% White alongside many other ethnic groups.

When challenged Jenrick said he was highlighting a ‘lack of integration’. This claim skates over the fact that racial diversity does not in itself equal a lack of integration. Nor can integration be measured by people’s skin colour. Jenrick’s claim is not really about a lack of integration but rather turns racial diversity itself into a problem and threat which needs urgent attention.

This is how one branch of contemporary Whiteness is constituted when it can present White people as victims of multiculture. The Civil Rights movement in the US reminded us that ‘equality feels like an oppression if you are used to privilege’. Presenting racial diversity as an oppression by those used to dominance is an expression of supremacy.

Blog post by Bridget Anderson, University of Bristol, UK and Ioana Vrabiescu, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands

Blog post based on Identities' Special Issue, Affective Control: The Emotional Life of (En)forcing Mobility Control in Europe. 

​The European Union presents itself as a global champion of human rights, yet its external borders are marked by hostility, surveillance and death. There is also an intricate network of borders within Europe that marginalizes and excludes migrants and asylum seekers. The vast majority of those excluded at the border and within Europe are people of colour. Two contemporary developments shape the context of our Identities Special Issue, Affective Control: The Emotional Life of (En)forcing Mobility Control in Europe – the global social movement for Black Lives and the COVID-19 pandemic. They have shaped conversations on structural racism and crisis-driven migration management and exposed the intersectionality of emotions and policies. For example, the invocation of national protection measures in the context of COVID-19 allowed European states to enforce border security under the guise of health protection, emphasizing the emerging pattern of governing migration through crisis management.

Blog post by Ov Cristian Norocel Lund University, Sweden and Alberta Giorgi University of Bergamo, Italy

Blog post based on Identities' Special Issue, Disentangling Radical Right Populism, Gender, and Religion, Volume 29, No 4, August 2022.

​A broad and perhaps underappreciated feature of radical right populism is its simultaneous mobilization of cultural Christianity, on occasion combined with secularism, and women’s (and sometimes LGBT+) rights in a racializing, anti-immigration, and anti-Islamic discourse. Take for example the recent reaction in the USA of Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who proclaimed on Twitter that ‘I am being attacked by the godless left because I said I’m a proud Christian Nationalist’ and added that she is even being called ‘a Nazi because I proudly love my country and my God’. By the same measure, in Italy, the League (La Lega) chairperson Matteo Salvini has previously maintained publicly his certainty that ‘Madonna will bring us the [political] victory’ and praised in religious conservative media the ‘traditional (heterosexual) family’. 

It may be a truth not so universally acknowledged that editing a special issue of a journal can often be a nerve-wracking affair. Guest editing a special issue for Identities titled 'Archives of Coloniality and Solidarity: Kashmir and Palestine, in medias res', goes beyond this experience. The razored concertina wires, the militarised checkpoints, the open brutality, the violence against the living and the dead, and the permanent warfare against entire populations that characterise the experiences of Palestinians and Kashmiris permeate this special issue. These experiences may not be exceptional to those editors and authors working on state violence and occupations. However, the experience itself must be acknowledged. 

Author emails in the summer of 2019 demonstrate the porous ways in which the occupations of Palestine and Kashmir have pervaded this guest editing process.