Being European without being white and Christian does not only put one in a strange place, but also in a strange temporality: Europeans who lack one or both of these qualities tend to be read as having just arrived or even as still being elsewhere – if not physically, then at least culturally. In European discourse (legally, culturally, socially, economically, academically…) the term ‘migrant’ describes someone who moves across borders, but also includes all racialized European communities, which are reframed as non-European through their ascribed permanent status as migrating (from somewhere that is not Europe). This status is transmitted across generations and thus increasingly decoupled from the actual event of migration, shifting the meaning of ‘migrant’ from a term indicating movement to one indicating a static, hereditary state. In other words, movement into Europeanness is impossible as long as racialized difference is still visible.
Racialized populations are thus positioned within a spatial and temporal paradox: they are permanently frozen in the moment of arrival – and the further away the actual moment/movement of migration, the stronger the paradox, i.e. the ‘queerness’ of their presence in space and time. The current so-called third generation of post-war labour and post-colonial migrants is perceived to be more alien and out of place and time in Europe than their grandparents, the first generation of actual migrants, exactly because they are (made) impossible as an internal presence within (and by) the ideology of normalized colour-blindness that places ‘race’ and thus racialized populations necessarily outside of Europe. [...]
Instead they are framed as an attempt at silencing necessary critiques of migrant communities and their supposed innate sexism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia (the prominence of discourses around ‘migrant extremism’ notwithstanding, there is an equally prominent assumption that it is taboo to criticise these communities). And indeed, at first glance it might seem as if Europe exists outside of the US American (post)racial temporality. While the latter is built on a narrative of having successfully overcome intolerance and discrimination, the myth of European colour-blindness claims that Europe never was ‘racial’ (anti-Semitism is still often analysed as both an exception to this and as clearly separable from racism). That is, despite the origin of the concept of race in Europe and the explicitly race-based policies of both its fascist regimes and its colonial empires, the dominant assumption is that this history had no impact on the continent and its internal structures.
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