Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-kv2lp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-05T22:09:41.525Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

This is (White) Europe: Race and European Law of the Everyday

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2026

Irina Muñoz Open the ORCID record for Irina Muñoz [Opens in a new window]
Irina Muñoz*
Affiliation:
Institut für Grundlagen des Rechts, Abteilung für Staatstheorie, Politische Wissenschaften und Vergleichendes Staatsrecht, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany Law Department, European University Institute, Italy
*
Email: irina.munoz@eui.eu
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Drawing on insights from critical race theory, this article analyses the subtextual parameters of race in Ben Judah’s This is Europe: The Way We Live Now. I argue that the book effectively marginalises the racialised dimensions of everyday life. By essentialising non-European ‘Others’ and eclipsing the perspectives of Black Europeans and Europeans of colour, the narrative in This is Europe perpetuates a notion of whiteness as the default European identity. This critique contributes to the symposium by highlighting that a nuanced engagement with race is fundamental for conceptualising the ‘everyday’ in European law. First, it affirms race and anti-racism as urgent critiques in a discussion on European law of the everyday; second, it calls for recognition of everyday resistance by racialised people in Europe who are countering structural discrimination and racialised violence and neglect, and asserting their own history and identity as Europeans.

Keywords

European lawraceeverydaycritiqueintersectionalityothering

Information

Type
Dialogue and debate: Symposium
Information
European Law Open , First View , pp. 1 - 14
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press

1. Introduction: Is this colourblind Europe?Footnote 1

Through short stories set in different contexts across Europe, Ben Judah’s This is Europe: The Way We Live Now zooms in on the real lives of the people behind the façade of European democratic values and economic prosperity. In this way, the book exposes largely invisibilised global and regional hierarchies, the deadly impacts of climate change and the precariousness and disposability of the working class in the service of the European economy. The individual vignettes presented in Judah’s book are, of course, in no way representative of all the lived realities on the continent, yet they engage with a breadth of personal struggles. By focusing on individual experiences (which are always clearly connected to regional and global dynamics), the book shows how differently everyone experiences ‘Europe’. At the same time, it will strike a critical reader as odd that the range of experiences presented in Judah’s book completely leaves aside the perspectives of racialised Europeans.Footnote 2 In fact, the book limits itself to exclusively representing the positionality of Black people, Indigenous people and people of colour (BIPOC) as external to Europe. Most of them are featured as new immigrants, thereby ignoring the long historical presence of racialised communities in Europe and the entangled histories between Europe and its (former) colonies.

In 2019, only a few years before Judah published This is Europe (2023), a not so dissimilar book project about everyday life in Europe made the news:Footnote 3 Afropean by Johny Pitts, which documented the perspectives of Black Europeans, has been translated into at least eight European languages.Footnote 4 For this book, Johny Pitts, who identifies ‘as whole and unhyphenated: Afropean’,Footnote 5 travelled through different European countries to document the histories and lives of Black Europeans. Based on his own positionality as a Black European, Pitts thus contributed to articulating the everyday from a specific non-white European perspective. Indeed, Pitts’ book is part of a larger project collecting narratives from the ‘Afro-European’ diaspora.Footnote 6 Despite the ambition to portray Europe in its breadth, a Black European perspective did not feature at all in Judah’s 643 pages, nor did any perspective of (un)hyphenated Europeans – that is, European citizens of colour, or second- or third-generation migrants. In Judah’s account, Black perspectives and perspectives of people of colour appear exclusively in the context of migration. This absence raises some questions regarding the underlying assumptions about who counts as ‘European’ in This is Europe, questions that are reinforced in light of the criticism Judah received for using racialised language and stereotypes in his previous book.Footnote 7

Given the above background, the purpose of this article is to propose a critique of racial representation in This is Europe, connecting it with the specific notion of the everyday that is constructed in the book.Footnote 8 I argue that the book lacks an adequate engagement with the racialised experience of everyday life in Europe; the narrative is tendentious and selective, reproducing the notion that Europeans are exclusively white, thus reinforcing Europe as ‘a racial space’.Footnote 9 In examining the theoretical shortcomings of This is Europe, this article analyses the book from a critical race theory perspective.

By identifying the whiteness in Judah’s narrative, this article foregrounds the issue of racialised structural inequalities in Europe, inviting a more thorough study of how institutional racism as part of the everyday is not adequately captured by European law. In light of the conspicious patterns of redefining exclusive belonging across the European Union (EU),Footnote 10 it is alarming how the white Europe painted by This is Europe plays into the divisive political rhetoric of what Europe, its cities and its people should look like.Footnote 11 The contribution of this article to the symposium is thus twofold: first, it affirms race and racism as urgent critiques in a discussion on European law of the everyday; second, it calls for recognition of the everyday resistance by racialised people in Europe countering structural discrimination, racialised violence and neglect, and those asserting their own history and identity as BIPOC Europeans.

2. ‘Europeans’ and ‘Others’

A. Theoretical Framework: Critical Race Theory

This section provides a brief introduction to the theoretical framework used to critique the specific imagery of Europe and Europeans conveyed in Judah’s book. These theoretical considerations are also relevant for an anti-racist conceptualisation of European law of the everyday. Informed by the rich tradition of critical race theory in the United States,Footnote 12 the concepts of race and racialisation have only gradually – and relatively recently – begun to emerge as categories of critical analysis in mainstream European legal scholarship.Footnote 13 Notably, the concept of race is still contested in Europe, and there are diverging interpretations and political/legal discourses across the Member States.Footnote 14 Recent research also indicates that there has been a relatively low amount of case law at the Court of Justice of the EU dealing with race discrimination.Footnote 15 The omission of explicit references to race in This is Europe is striking, but it does not indicate an absence of racism in the everyday lives portrayed.

Two interrelated theoretical concepts appear particularly relevant for critically dissecting the racialised idea of Europe conveyed in This is Europe: ‘racial aphasia’ and ‘white innocence’. I will briefly introduce each in turn, then develop them further in the case studies below. First, ‘racial aphasia’, coined by the critical race scholar Debra Thompson, emerged as a critique of the passive helplessness conveyed by references to racial or colonial ‘amnesia’ in international relations scholarship.Footnote 16 By contrast, Thompson’s concept of racial aphasia emphasises the intentionality and functionality of erasing certain narratives and pasts, which indicate ‘a calculated forgetting, an obstruction of discourse, language and speech’.Footnote 17 Precisely in contexts where race is treated as no longer relevant, or indeed where purportedly ‘race-free discourses’ are imposed as means to combat racism, racialised hierarchies are often effectively entrenched – albeit under the guise of colourblindness.Footnote 18 By removing the vocabulary of race, the function of aphasia is to protect institutions against opposition rooted in colonial and imperial history. Thompson argues that, whereas amnesia suggests that certain memories, located in a distant past, are (unfortunately) irretrievably lost, aphasia allows for connections to be drawn between ‘our racist past [and] the still racist present’, highlighting colonial and racist continuities in institutional frameworks.Footnote 19

The second, interrelated theoretical concept is ‘white innocence’, a term introduced by the Afro-Surinamese Dutch scholar Gloria Wekker.Footnote 20 Speaking from a Dutch context, Wekker describes how racism is part of Black people’s everyday in the Netherlands. She observes two important facets of racism, denial and disavowal, arguing that ‘race pops up in unexpected places and moments, as the return of the repressed, while the dominant discourse stubbornly maintains that the Netherlands is and always has been color-blind and antiracist’.Footnote 21 Similar to racial aphasia, denial and disavowal entail a deliberate forgetting of a colonial past, and the delusion that racism cannot exist in a society committed to liberal values.Footnote 22 Interestingly, Wekker shows that Dutch liberal society is constructed not merely as national identity, but draws on an idea of a white Europe: a dichotomy between ‘“us”, those constructed as belonging to Europe, and “them”, those constructed as not belonging,’ which denies hyphenated identities.Footnote 23 Instead, it is based on the assumption of a ‘fundamental impossibility of being both European … and being black-Muslim-migrant-refugee’.Footnote 24 Afro-Europeans, as well as any non-white European identities, simply do not exist in this imaginary – and, if they do, it is only as hyphenated, disruptive, not quite European ‘Other’.Footnote 25

How do these two concepts – racial aphasia and white innocence – help us understand race in This is Europe? By excluding the perspectives of BIPOC Europeans, Judah’s book reaffirms the assumption of a ‘fundamental impossibility’ of non-white European identities.Footnote 26 The argument is therefore not merely a lack of comprehensiveness, nor is it that Judah fails to account for yet another discarded category of people. Instead, I argue that This is Europe constructs a false dichotomy between non-white – ergo non-European – ‘Others’ and an ethnically homogeneous white Europe. In view of the length of Judah’s book and the breadth of accounts included, the omission of the experiences of any single European of colour speaks for itself.Footnote 27

In fact, in several chapters, the book exploits the trope of the ‘black-Muslim-migrant-refugee’ (Wekker) as essential non-European ‘Other’ coming from violent places outside Europe.Footnote 28 The political, historical, social and economic contexts of the conflicts in those places are eclipsed, suggesting that they are not part of a European reality. Instead, migration to Europe is presented as a form of emancipation from intrinsically violent structures elsewhere.Footnote 29 Because Judah avoids drawing any connections between the environment of crisis from which the protagonists flee and Europe’s deep implications in persisting colonial legacies and neo-colonial extraction, migration is reduced to an individual decision and action, separate from the social, political and economic context. Markedly, when in-betweenness is encountered in the narrative, it converts European spaces into non-European ones – such as the ‘Middle Eastern city’Footnote 30 at the heart of Athens, which makes ‘you forget [that this] really is Europe’.Footnote 31 What are the assumptions about what Europe has to look like if the mere presence of people of colour makes it almost unrecognisable?

Furthermore, the fact that race is not explicitly addressed beyond the proxy of nationality in Judah’s book indicates a certain inability to speak about the topic – or, in fact, a diversion away from it: racial aphasia. While race is implicit in many interactions throughout This is Europe, it remains unspoken. If at all, there seems to be a degree of conflation between citizenship and race.Footnote 32 As the section below will illustrate, the chapters on Baloga and Storkow, respectively, engage with racial hierarchies, but only in terms of nationality. In the chapters on Briançon and Le Col de l’Échelle, Judah addresses the deadly implications of racial borders, reinforced by European asylum and migration law.Footnote 33 The racialised global hierarchy of the freedom to travel becomes clear in those cases,Footnote 34 but is again framed in terms of nationality. When Simone, the rescuer in the chapter on Le Col de l’Échelle, realises that the border is ‘invisible’ only to some, he does not link this fact with race.Footnote 35 For him, there are ‘two categories of human beings’ – implying those with an EU passport and those without.Footnote 36

Arguably, passports have never been racially neutral devices, and modern technology, including biometrics, contributes to an even more complex, racially charged global categorisation of people.Footnote 37 Global mobility, including the ability to legally enter into and move within the EU, is conditioned by an intersectional hierarchy of passport power that reflects ‘centuries of racial inequality’.Footnote 38 In addition, the fact that Simone distinguishes only between these ‘two categories’ indicates an unawareness of the role of race – independently of nationality or legal status – in the European border regime.Footnote 39 Irrespective of an individual’s legal identity, racialised physical features determine whether the border is experienced as invisible in a context where ‘differences in (legal and political) belonging are inscribed onto the body’.Footnote 40 Legal consciousness in relation to borders is, in fact, not only different based on formal elements such as citizenship, but diverges even among EU citizens and permanent residents depending on intersectional positionality.Footnote 41 As such, there are arguably not only two categories of people, as Simone’s account suggests – ‘those that could and those that could not cross the border’Footnote 42 – but at least a third category: those who legally could cross the border but cannot do so without obstacles.Footnote 43 Free movement, lauded as one of the key achievements of European integration, is not experienced equally by all EU citizens regardless of race and ethnicity.Footnote 44

The problem with the assumption that racism does not exist in liberal societies is that, due to categorical denial, structural racism cannot be properly addressed or critiqued. The context of aphasia leaves the victims of racism voiceless (in the sense of not having words to describe their predicament),Footnote 45 a situation that becomes very visible in This is Europe, most strikingly when gender and race intersect. The chapter ‘Evia’ follows Nazneen, an Afghan woman refugee working at an olive factory on a Greek island. Nazneen and her female Afghan colleagues are constantly exhausted, to the extent that they can quite literally no longer speak.Footnote 46 Their voicelessness is exacerbated when they are left alone with a wildfire approaching; even their phones stop working, making it impossible to call for help.Footnote 47 In a colourblind – or, in Wekker’s words, ostensibly ‘innocent’ – society, which assumes that everybody is equal, the experience of these women will barely be noticed as a tragic circumstance. However, it is clear from the sequence of events in the story that it is their position as racialised women with precarious immigration status that exposes them to the highest danger: whereas the Greek workers leave the factory early on when they become aware of the fires, the migrant women receive instructions from management not to abandon their workplace despite the imminent threat to their lives.Footnote 48 It is evident, yet never expressly articulated: an intersection of race, gender and economic precarity determines whose lives are deemed worth saving in ‘Evia’. Nazneen’s example illustrates that for those existing at Europe’s margins, the everyday can be a struggle between life and death.Footnote 49

B. Identifying Othering and Racialised Difference in This is Europe

Throughout the stories, there are hints that the way we live in Europe is (at least partly) shaped by differentiations between people based on nationality, class and gender. This section analyses how This is Europe engages in a construction of racialised difference.Footnote 50 The argument is that Judah’s foregrounding of specific views without context and the omission of relevant alternative perspectives lead to a racialised narrative.

It is apparent that several of the short stories are developed based on a distinction between Europeans and aliens; through the selection of perspectives, it is conveyed that BIPOC are not European, but newcomers trying to make it in Europe. This includes new immigrants – that is, third country nationals (see chapters ‘Budapest’, ‘Berlin’, ‘Evia’, ‘Col de L’Échelle’, ‘Storkow’ and ‘Briançon’), as well as those who arrived long ago and have since built a life in Europe without ever being fully assimilated (see ‘Avignon’). Meanwhile, there is always a risk of either not being let in (‘Col d’Échelle’, ‘Briançon’, ‘Evia’) or, once ‘inside’ and settled, being exposed to the looming threat of expulsion (‘Avignon’).Footnote 51 The implicit message here is that Europeans are white by default, and people of colour are not really part of ‘this’ Europe. Instead, they are either an unwelcome reality (e.g. Turkish business owners referred to in ‘Storkow’), vulnerable and in need of protection from violent non-Europeans (‘Berlin’, ‘Briançon’), an easily exploitable human resource (‘Evia’) or flamboyant outsiders (‘Budapest)’.

Often, these differences are implicit and left for the reader to untangle. Racialised inequality can be identified, for instance, in everyday working conditions. We get an explicit sense of structural racism in Chapter 13 (‘Storkow’), when Aboud, a Syrian driver for Amazon in Germany, explains the racialised hierarchies he observes at work:

It’s the Germans at the top, you can barely see them, they are behind computers. Then the Western Europeans, the ones who think they are their equals. Then the Turks, they own so much here. Then the Eastern Europeans. Then the Asians. Then the refugees: Arabs, Africans, all of them at the bottom.Footnote 52

Indeed, this would have been an interesting cue for a journalist such as Judah to follow up on and get to the bottom of how these racialised hierarchies operate, yet a Turkish German perspective is not included anywhere in the book, nor is there any engagement with the history of Turkish migrant workers and the lived realities of this racialised community in Germany.Footnote 53 Instead, the reader is left with a decontextualised and distorted observation that Turks ‘own so much’ in Germany.Footnote 54

Another example elucidates the othering of non-European ‘Others’ and the concomitant construction of ‘Europeans’: the racialisation of gender and sexuality. This is best illustrated by the two chapters that in one way or another celebrate putative European sexual freedom: ‘Budapest’ and ‘Berlin’. These two chapters engage rather one-sidedly with the Syrian protagonists’ struggles and do not address the intersectional realities of racism against queer migrants and people of colour in Europe. Instead, the selected narratives play into the common Orientalist stereotype built on an inherent difference between Arab communities – depicted as in essence repressive and patriarchal – and generally open-minded, feminist and queer-friendly Europeans.Footnote 55 In ‘Budapest’, Ibrahim, the refugee turned porn star in Europe, receives death threats and his Syrian family breaks off contact after asking him to stop working in the porn industry.Footnote 56 The argument here is not to deny that these threats from his own community are real; the problem is the European sexual exceptionalism, a racialised ‘culturalization of gender and sexuality’,Footnote 57 which is reinforced by the story.Footnote 58 Ibrahim’s Syrian family is portrayed as particularly rigid, but in fact the stigma attached to sex work transcends ethnicity. Most parents of Ibrahim’s generation, regardless of ethnic background, would probably at least hesitate to embrace such a career path.

Similarly, fragile masculinities are framed as a cultural problem of ‘Others’, not a gender issue, when the story highlights that other Syrian men turn against Ibrahim because they feel ‘humiliated’ by the pornographic videos he makes.Footnote 59 Instead of taking this opportunity to address digital hate speech, as well as gendered and racist cyber violence, as pressing issues in European society, the story resorts to a narrative of foreign villains.Footnote 60 A widespread problem shaping everyday life for many in Europe is thus reduced to a single ethnic group. Notably, the chapter does not engage with the convoluted realities of racism with which Ibrahim’s story intersects, such as the complexity of racialised fetishisation and exploitation, or European demand for refugee porn.Footnote 61 From an anti-racist perspective, recognising such intersectional problems within Europe would have been crucial for a more layered and critical account of ‘the way we live now’. By locating prejudice and violence solely among non-European ‘Others’ and outside Europe, Judah misses the mark.

On the other hand, another Syrian protagonist, Haidar, comes to Berlin to escape his violent homophobic family.Footnote 62 In Berlin, he is finally free to live as a queer person.Footnote 63 In both ‘Berlin’ and ‘Budapest’, Syrian families are depicted as conservative and opposed to ‘European’ sexual liberty. After seeing photos of Haidar’s drag performances, his brothers threaten that ‘if you [Haidar] choose to be this way … We’re not your brothers’.Footnote 64 Only Haidar’s mother does not cut ties with him.Footnote 65 Unfortunately, in the arc of the book, this young queer immigrant’s painful experience of alienation from his own family reaffirms the Orientalist narrative of sexual repression that first appeared in ‘Budapest’, while European anti-LGBTQI+ sentiment does not feature at all.Footnote 66 Set in the ‘smiling’ Berlin neighbourhood of Kreuzberg,Footnote 67 Haidar’s story is one of emancipation by embracing ostensibly progressive, open-minded ‘Western values’.Footnote 68 Conversely, intersectional discrimination faced by queer people of colour in Europe remains marginal.Footnote 69 Instead, ‘Berlin’ presents ‘non-Western homophobia’ as the most central problem – a problem Haidar locates ‘over there’, far away from Berlin.Footnote 70 In light of worrying legal and political developments within European countries, it is rather puzzling that reactionary ways of thinking would be uniquely associated with non-Europeans.Footnote 71 Resonating uncomfortably with ‘homonationalism’, European cities are presented as safe havens in terms of gender identity and sexuality.Footnote 72 If ‘this’ is how we are to imagine Europe, the reader could almost be forgiven for forgetting about the pervasive and structural queerphobia among Europeans.Footnote 73 Indeed, there is no mention of homophobia and anti-trans hostility as a European problem at all in This is Europe, let alone an intersectional engagement with the issue.Footnote 74

One could argue that racialised stereotypes and prejudices are merely incidentally reproduced here because Judah deliberately chose to narrate This is Europe through the eyes of his interview partners. Certainly, prejudiced views are – as regrettable as it may be – part of European society.Footnote 75 Since Judah seems to have the ambition to represent even the most uncomfortable realities on the continent, the critique is thus not that such views should have been entirely edited out of the stories. The issue is, however, that problematic views are neither counterpoised by including diverging voices, nor is racism adequately depicted as a structural issue across Europe. Interestingly, there is no representation of Western Europeans with openly racist views in Judah’s book, which is surprising given the rise of the far-right across Europe. The only European with openly racist prejudices is Ionut, an overworked Eastern European lorry driver in ‘Baloga’. Ionut is a victim of discrimination in Western Europe himself:Footnote 76 in his experience, Eastern European workers are treated like ‘sub-humans’ in the West.Footnote 77 He feels unsafe at work and blames mainly non-European ‘immigrants’ (including ‘Turkish gangs’Footnote 78 and ‘illegal Filipinos’,Footnote 79 but also ‘French Arabs’Footnote 80 and other Eastern Europeans) and ‘immigrant-infested area[s]’Footnote 81 for the high levels of criminality on the road.Footnote 82 The exploitation to which Ionut is exposed in his job is shocking, but not as such an explanation for racist views. The main problem here is not the fact of portraying Ionut’s lived experience and personal perspective, but that his racist comments are not contextualised or counterbalanced by the author. Without any empirical basis, the reader is left with the problematic impression that Europe’s roads are unsafe because of ‘rogues’ from outside Europe.Footnote 83

This section has raised questions about the selection of interview partners in This is Europe, and the narratives about Europe that become entrenched through their gaze. It is impossible to overlook that, in the set of protagonists presented, a preconception of a white Europe shines through – indeed, all people of colour who are featured in Judah’s book are new immigrants or somehow forever foreign to Europe.Footnote 84 To put it bluntly, in This is Europe, whiteness seems to be the condition for fully belonging in Europe. Choosing not to engage with the perspectives of Black Europeans and Europeans of colour when exploring the everyday in Europe perpetuates a notion of Europeanness as whiteness.Footnote 85 Indeed, ‘everyday racism and feeling out of place’ are two adjacent everyday experiences for BIPOC in Europe.Footnote 86 Judah’s portrayal of the way ‘we’ live in Europe contributes to this feeling of exclusion, leading to the question of how the whiteness constructed in This is Europe is linked to the everyday of racism.

C. Structures and Repetition: ‘Everyday’ Racism?

Invoking the everyday in the context of racism almost seems to trivialise and normalise the structural and institutionalised harm experienced by racialised people on a daily basis in Europe.Footnote 87 Yet racism is, and has been, undeniably part of the everyday of European law since its inception.Footnote 88 As documented by the EU Fundamental Rights Agency, being Black in Europe often means an exposure to repeated experiences of harassment and sometimes even physical violence motivated by racism.Footnote 89 Racistdiscrimination can impede a free enjoyment of the fundamentals of everyday life in very specific ways: free movement and access to adequate housing, education and employment.Footnote 90 Despite efforts to promote diversity, race and racism impact every aspect of European law, ranging from political participation and representationFootnote 91 to the composition of the judiciary.Footnote 92 Even teaching in European law schools has been described as a racialised experience.Footnote 93

Everyday racism constitutes a destabilising repetition.Footnote 94 This is far from a new revelation, and Judah’s omission of the everyday hurdles and threats for racialised people in Europe, as described by his predecessors including Pitts and Philips,Footnote 95 is stunning. The racist encounters Caryl Phillips described in 1987 could just as well have happened in 2025. For people experiencing racism, this repetition is a core element of their experience of the everyday – both in the sense that it happens every day, but also that it repeats itself over and over again. Most likely, Judah did not encounter the same obstacles collecting testimonies as Pitts and Phillips did for their own book projects. Pitts, for instance, became a victim of racial profiling at least twice during his travels across Europe. He describes his experience of exiting the refugee camp in Calais, which he had visited for his research, as follows:

I left … on my bicycle and slowly realized that I was being watched and followed through the blustery streets of Calais by the French military police, the Gendarmerie. Attempting to enter the white gates of the port to catch my ferry back to the UK, I was stopped before I could even get to passport control, searched, asked for my ID, where I was going, where I’d come from, how long I’d been away, and why. Finally, after more questioning and looks of suspicion, I was allowed to enter an official compound I’d seen other brown-skinned men of my age look longingly at from a distance. I was in; they were out.Footnote 96

Because whiteness is systemically embedded in Europe’s political, economic and legal system, racism is a part of the everyday that is felt only by some of us.Footnote 97 Who is in and who is out is not only a question of epistemic justice,Footnote 98 in terms of representing more different perspectives, but an existential one. As many critical race scholars have noted, individual awareness and education are important steps, but they are insufficient to combat this problem.Footnote 99 EU legal scholars need to tackle ‘coloniality and structural racism in the everyday’ both cognitively within the discipline and materially in the legal architecture of the system with which they work.Footnote 100

Race determines the everyday both at and within European borders, but also in the context of larger global structures. Timo Zandstra makes an important contribution to the debate by analysing the reproduction of Eurocentrism and (neo)coloniality in Judah’s This is Europe.Footnote 101 Indeed, the way we live now in Europe materially depends on and is sustained by the extraction of resourcesFootnote 102 and European political involvement beyond its borders.Footnote 103 The problem of race cannot be fully understood without a deeper analysis of Europe’s history of colonialism and persisting coloniality.Footnote 104 Colonial legacies, alongside the racialised nature of the everyday in Europe, bear the key to understanding the deep-rooted nature of white Europe and how law structures and reproduces experiences of discrimination, exclusion and extraction.

3. Conclusions

Based in the secluded hills of Florence, at a research institute that is known for shaping the imaginary of ‘Europe’,Footnote 105 this EUI symposium used Ben Judah’s book as a starting point for a discussion about what it means to live in Europe. This article has argued that the emerging discussion on European law of the everyday needs to fundamentally question the pervasive presumption of Europeanness as whiteness, and challenge which ‘stories … are seen as important to tell’.Footnote 106 While Judah’s book does not claim comprehensiveness, it showcases a tendentious selectivity. In This is Europe, prejudices are reproduced and remain largely unchallenged, including the racialisation of criminality.Footnote 107 Even if we accept the premise that Judah’s aim was to stick to the authentic perspectives of his interview partners, who are often victims of prejudice themselves, it is concerning that these narratives were not properly counterbalanced.

What does it reveal about European legal scholarship that the decision to include the perspectives of hyphenated or unhyphenated Europeans only came as an afterthought? There is sufficient material about the ‘everyday’ as it is faced by racialised Europeans: POC and Black European feminists,Footnote 108 European Muslims (and those read as such),Footnote 109 by Black Europeans who have been in Europe for generations and still face racism every day.Footnote 110 Where in Judah’s book are the voices of Roma,Footnote 111 or the descendants of low-paid imported labour that ensured European prosperity,Footnote 112 or the young people all across Europe committed to building an archive on Black European history and coloniality?Footnote 113 Is this symposium satisfied with pointing at foreigners featured in This is Europe, while ignoring the everyday struggles of activists opposing European reactionary politics and authoritarian backsliding within Europe?Footnote 114 What about the many people residing in Europe who do not feel safe, whose everyday is shaped by exclusions and threats to their lives?Footnote 115 Is this not also Europe? Without opening the space to the multifaceted perspectives and experiences of Europeans who are forced to constantly fight for their place in Europe, we will not be able to develop a profound concept of the everyday.

How do ‘we’ really live now? And how do we want to live in Europe? Most of the stories in This is Europe seem to be about human material, highlighting how the hunger for commodities turns humans – especially those already marginalised – into a disposable resource. Using Judah’s book as a point of departure, this article has argued for the development of a method that fits the diversity of European experiences and does not reproduce racialised Europeans as an ‘Other’, but instead interacts with them as integral part of Europe today and historically. In fact, this symposium was convened at a time when the European peace project was shadowed by crushing moral abdication.Footnote 116 Now more than ever, the facets of white complicity – including the omission of the realities of race – must be scrutinised.Footnote 117 This article has therefore tried to contribute to the debate by centring aspects of the everyday as it is lived by racialised people in Europe. Too often, this perspective has been left out in discourses on European law.Footnote 118 Let us not make the same mistake again in this effort to conceptualise European law of the everyday.

Acknowledgements

This article was initially presented at the conference ‘Is this Europe? Conceptualising the Everyday in European Law’, EUI, Florence (10 June 2025). I would like to extend my sincere thanks to my discussants Päivi Neuvonen and Paul Linden-Retek, and the conference organisers and participants for their valuable comments on my presentation. Special thanks to Diamond Ashiagbor, Loïc Azoulai and Jack Meakin, as well as Prince Amadi, Katie Fry, Hannah John, Enise Şeyda Kapusuz, Aruna Michiels and Gabriele Wadlig for their thoughtful feedback on previous drafts. Merve Eryoldas’ check-ins and encouragement kept me motivated. An earlier version of this article was published in L Azoulai et al (eds), The Law of the Everyday: An Inquiry into the Legal Fabrics of European Lives, EUI, LAW, Working Paper, 2026/05, https://hdl.handle.net/1814/95045.

In loving memory of Saniya Amraoui.

Funding statement

This work received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Competing interests

The author has no conflicts of interest to declare.

References

1 ‘Colourblindness’ is used here in reference to the cross-cutting problem described in K Crenshaw et al (eds), Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines (University of California Press 2019).

2 According to the European Network Against Racism (ENAR): ‘In Europe, racialised people include Black persons, people of African, Arab, Asian, Caribbean, Latin American, Roma or Sinti descent, Muslims or Jews (or perceived as such) as well as indigenous people, including migrants among these groups. ENAR, A Europe for All: A Roadmap for Change European Elections 2024 Manifesto (ENAR 2024) 1, n 1 <https://www.enar-eu.org/enar-eu-elections-manifesto-europe-for-all> accessed 22 April 2026.

3 C Grant, ‘Afropean by Johny Pitts Review – Black Europe from the Street Up’ (The Guardian, 30 May 2019) <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/30/afropean-by-johny-pitts-review> accessed 22 April 2026.

4 J Pitts, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (Allen Lane 2019) available in English; as of April 2026, translations have been published in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish and Spanish. Pitts received multiple awards for the book, including the 2021 European Essay Prize and the 2021 Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding, see ‘Johny Pitts | European Essay Prize’ (Prix Européen de l’Essai 2021) <https://fondation-veillon.ch/en/johny-pitts_en> accessed 22 April 2026; ‘Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding’ (City of Leipzig 2021) <https://english.leipzig.de/leisure-culture-and-tourism/literature-prizes/leipzig-book-award-for-european-understanding> accessed 22 April 2026.

5 Pitts (n 4) 1.

6 See the blog collecting and articulating the ‘Afropean’ experience in Europe: ‘Narratives – Afropean: Your Guide to the Afro European Diaspora and Beyond’ (The Afropean 2026) <https://afropean.com/category/narratives> accessed 22 April 2026; For the ‘Afro-European’ identity, see ‘De Afro-Europeaan’ (VPRO 2024) <https://www.vpro.nl/programmas/de-afro-europeaan.html> accessed 22 April 2026.

7 B Judah, This is London: Life and Death in the World City (Pan 2016); see critique by J Herrmann and A Kersley, ‘A Government Advisor Wrote a Libel against London. Why Did We Believe It?’ (The Londoner, 13 December 2024) <https://www.the-londoner.co.uk/a-government-advisor-wrote-a-libel-against-london-why-did-we-believe-it> accessed 22 April 2026.

8 Note that the arguments in this article are not directed at Judah ad personam, but reflect my interpretation of certain aspects of the book in view of the questions around the everyday raised by the symposium. The focus lies in a critical understanding of race in This is Europe, irrespective of the intentions of its author. Indeed, an analysis of racial bias does not presuppose intent: see S Mullainathan, ‘Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions’ (New York Times, 3 January 2015) <https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/upshot/the-measuring-sticks-of-racial-bias-.html> accessed 22 April 2026.

9 N Dube, The Unbearable Whiteness of EU Law, EUI Working Paper, 2025/12, 6 <https://hdl.handle.net/1814/93725> accessed 22 April 2026.

10 A Kóczé, ‘Codifying Belonging’ (Verfassungsblog 2025) <https://doi.org/10.59704/2507072b4fdcbbcd> accessed 22 April 2026.

11 See, for instance, the German chancellor’s remark from October 2025 indicating that in his view there is a problem with the ‘urban image’ linked to migration. A Epik et al, ‘Stadtbilder’ (Verfassungsblog 2025) <https://doi.org/10.59704/4653dcd41303c1cd> accessed 22 April 2026.

12 For a good overview, see R Delgado and J Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (3rd edn, Temple University Press 2013); K Crenshaw, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New Press 1995).

13 Despite the long-standing EU principle of equal treatment irrespective of racial or ethnic origin, which is enshrined in the Race Equality Directive, Council Directive 2000/43/EC of 29 June 2000, implementing the principle of equal treatment between persons irrespective of racial or ethnic origin; for a critical analysis, see S Atrey, ‘Race Discrimination in EU Law after Jyske Finans’ 55 (2018) Common Market Law Review 625; N Dube, ‘A Typology of Comparators and Comparisons in EU Equality Law’ 62 (2025) Common Market Law Review 49; regarding the uptake of critical race theory in European legal thought, see C Barskanmaz, ‘Critical Race Theory in Deutschland’ (Verfassungsblog 2020) <https://verfassungsblog.de/critical-race-theory-in-deutschland> accessed 22 April 2025.

14 D Liebscher, Rasse im Recht – Recht gegen Rassismus: Genealogie einer ambivalenten rechtlichen Kategorie (Suhrkamp 2021) 293–9.

15 Especially compared with other areas of EU equality law, such as sex and age discrimination respectively. G De Burca and V Passalacqua, The Curious Absence of Race Discrimination Litigation in EU Law, EUI, LAW, Working Paper 2025/15 <https://hdl.handle.net/1814/93987> accessed 27 February 2026.

16 ‘Amnesia’ is used as a critique of denial and forgetting of Europe’s colonial past: see K Nicolaïdis, ‘Southern Barbarians? A Post-colonial Critique of EUniversalism’ in K Nicolaïdis et al (eds), Echoes of Empire: Memory, Identity and Colonial Legacies (IB Tauris 2014) 285–8. For a legal critique of Europe’s colonial ‘amnesia’, see D Ashiagbor, ‘Rethinking EU Social and Labour Law through Racial Capitalism’ in H Eklund (ed), Colonialism and the EU Legal Order (Cambridge University Press 2025) 138; A Vauchez, ‘The Missing View from the Cathedral: European Law During and After Colonies and Empires’ in H Eklund (ed), Colonialism and the EU Legal Order (Cambridge University Press 2025) 345ff. It has become quite common to refer to ‘amnesia’ in this context, although this implies a sort of force majeure in the form of an illness, as critiqued by Thompson.

17 D Thompson, ‘Through, Against and Beyond the Racial State: The Transnational Stratum of Race’ 26 (2013) Cambridge Review of International Affairs 133, 135.

18 Ibid., 135 and 146.

19 Ibid., 135.

20 G Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Duke University Press 2016).

21 Ibid., 30–1.

22 Ibid., 1.

23 Ibid., 21.

24 ‘Black-Muslim-migrant-refugee’ is used by Wekker here as a hyphenated amalgam to illustrate the point. Ibid.

25 In everyday interactions, this is frequently exhibited through the question ‘Where are you really from?’ N Morrison et al, ‘“Where are You Really from?”: A Qualitative Study of Racial Microaggressions and the Impact on Medical Students in the UK’ (2023) 13 BMJ Open e069009. Orlando-Salling and Steininger recently discussed how such an exclusionary perception of European society is also legally entrenched in European law: J Orlando-Salling and S Steininger, ‘Decolonising European Society’ 4 (2025) European Law Open 739, 750–4.

26 Wekker (n 20) 21.

27 Especially in light of the European Network Against Racism’s estimate that racialised people make up at least 10 per cent of the people living in the European Union. ENAR, ‘Challenging the Status Quo: A Critical Analysis of the Diversity Trends in the European Parliament’ (European Network Against Racism 2024) 6 <https://www.enar-eu.org/wp-content/uploads/ENAR-Diversity-in-the-European-Parliament-2024.pdf> accessed 22 April 2026.

28 Chapter 5 ‘Budapest’, Chapter 10 ‘Le Col de l’Échelle’, Chapter 11 ‘Briançon’, Chapter 13 ‘Storkow’, Chapter 18 ‘Avignon’, Chapter 20 ‘Evia’ B Judah, This is Europe: The Way We Live Now (Picador 2023).

29 See Chapter 15 ‘Berlin’ and Chapter 11 ‘Briançon’. In fact, the reader learns that the dream of freedom in Europe is so great that people are willing to sacrifice their lives for it: see Chapter 10 ‘Col de l’Échelle’. Ibid.

30 Ibid., 546 (direct quote from the book); for the racialised connotations of ‘Middle East’ in Eurocentric frames of reference, see L Ben Hafsa, ‘Overcoming the “Other’s” Stigma: Arab and Muslim Representations in US Media and Academia’ 7 (2019) International Journal of Social Science Studies 1, 2.

31 Judah, This is Europe (n 28) 546–7. Note that this is not written in italics, meaning it is not a direct quote of an interview partner; these are Judah’s own words.

32 Judah’s approach here is not unique. In academic literature, other placeholders for race (‘the R-word’) are also frequently used, diverting attention away from the problem of racism. See critique by OU Rutazibwa, ‘From the Everyday to IR: In Defence of the Strategic Use of the R-Word’ 19 (2016) Postcolonial Studies 191.

33 ET Achiume, ‘Racial Borders’ 110 (2021) Georgetown Law Journal 445; A O’Donoghue and A Gray Meral, ‘Tyranny at Europe’s Borders …’ (Critical Legal Thinking 2025) <https://criticallegalthinking.com/2025/03/14/tyranny-at-europes-borders> accessed 22 April 2026; S Ganty and DV Kochenov, ‘How the EU Death Machine Works’ (Verfassungsblog 2024) <https://verfassungsblog.de/how-the-eu-death-machine-works> accessed 22 April 2026.

34 Achiume (n 33); see also D Kochenov, Citizenship (MIT Press 2019).

35 Judah, This is Europe (n 28) 268.

36 Ibid.

37 In fact, ‘[t]he very origin of biometric surveillance stems from colonial practices of dominating and discriminating against certain groups of people’. L Meyer and C Barthélémy, ‘The Colonial Biometric Legacy at Heart of New EU Asylum System’ (EUobserver, 8 April 2024) <https://euobserver.com/migration/arc9435f8b> accessed 22 April 2026.

38 AS Rosenberg, ‘Racial Discrimination in International Visa Policies’ 67 (2023) International Studies Quarterly sqad032, 12; ET Achiume, ‘Race, Borders, and Jurisdiction’ 82 (2022) Zeitschrift für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht 465, 478; AKM Ahsan Ullah et al, ‘Mobility in a Globalised World: How Countries Regulate Mobility with Passports and Visas’ 24 (2024) Journal of Public Affairs e2932. Regarding the hierarchies between holders of passports of the same nationality, see J Gašperin Wischhoff, ‘Naturalised and Muted’ (Verfassungsblog 2026) <https://verfassungsblog.de/naturalised-and-muted> accessed 8 July 2026.

39 This concerns racial and ethnic profiling in intra-European border controls: see Basu v Germany, no 215/19 (ECtHR, 18 October 2022); note that ethnic and racial profiling concerns ID checks in general and is not limited to border crossings: Open Society Justice Initiative, ‘A Divided ECtHR Fails Victims of Discriminatory ID Checks in Spain, Argue Human Rights Groups’ (Open Society Justice Initiative 2022) <https://www.justiceinitiative.org/newsroom/a-divided-ecthr-fails-victims-of-discriminatory-id-checks-in-spain-argue-human-rights-groups> accessed 22 April 2026.

40 S Salomon, ‘The Racialized Borders of The Netherlands’ (Verfassungsblog 2022) <https://doi.org/10.17176/20220129-180143-0> accessed 22 April 2026; the projection of identity on the basis of physical features was also striking in the facts of the case in Muhammad v Spain: the applicant of Pakistani origin holding a long-term Spanish residence permit, describes how, when asking for the reason for an ID check by police on the street, one of the police officers replied: ‘Yes, because you are Black, and that’s all. I am not going to stop a German citizen’. Muhammad v Spain, no 34085/17 § 6 (ECtHR, 18 October 2022).

41 A Salama, ‘Racial Profiling Practices at EU Internal Borders’ (European Network Against Racism, 5 March 2026) <https://www.enar-eu.org/booklet-racial-profiling-practices-at-eu-internal-borders> accessed 22 April 2026.

42 Judah, This is Europe (n 28) 268.

43 J Ringelheim, ‘Basu v. Germany and Muhammad v. Spain: Why the First European Court of Human Rights’ Judgments on Racial Profiling in Identity Checks are Disappointing’ (EJIL: Talk! 2023) <https://www.ejiltalk.org/basu-v-germany-and-muhammad-v-spain-why-the-first-european-court-of-human-rights-judgments-on-racial-profiling-in-identity-checks-are-disappointing> accessed 22 April 2026; M Möschel, ‘Basu v Germany and Muhammad v Spain: Room for Improvement in the Court’s First Judgments on Racial Profiling’ (Strasbourg Observers, 8 November 2022) <https://strasbourgobservers.com/2022/11/08/basu-v-germany-and-muhammad-v-spain-room-for-improvement-in-the-courts-first-judgments-on-racial-profiling> accessed 22 April 2026; M Amjahid, Alles nur Einzelfälle?: Das System hinter der Polizeigewalt: Über Racial Profiling, NSU 2.0 und Machtmissbrauch in der Polizei (Piper 2024) 195ff.

44 This is not a new insight. Already in 1987, Caryl Philipps – arguably one of Judah’s predecessors – wrote about the racism he experienced on his travels across Europe. C Phillips, The European Tribe (Faber 1987); note that racial profiling has received more attention in recent years due to resistance by Europeans of colour. See, for instance, F El-Tayeb and V Thompson, ‘Alltagsrassismus, Staatliche Gewalt und Koloniale Tradition: Ein Gespräch über Racial Profiling und Intersektionale Widerstände in Europa’ in M Wa Baile et al (eds), Racial Profiling: Struktureller Rassismus und antirassistischer Widerstand (Transcript Verlag 2019) 311ff. Courts at Member State level have increasingly been confronted with this matter: see S Boysen, ‘Racial Profiling’ (2020) 42 JURA 1192.

45 Indeed, one could argue that there are two types of aphasia: active aphasia on the side of the dominant society and individual perpetrators that consists in ignoring, silencing, denying and disavowing racism; and a passive aphasia on the side of victims of racism that limits their ability to speak about their experience.

46 ‘Most of the women are so tired after working so hard they eat dinner silently and they seem to simply collapse and immediately sleep. They are crowded together in that room with bunk beds’. Judah, This is Europe (n 28) 551.

47 Ibid., 559.

48 Ibid., 555–7.

49 See also Ganty and Kochenov (n 33).

50 Liebscher (n 14) 26.

51 ‘La juge des référés valide l’expulsion de l’imam Mahjoub Mahjoubi’ (Tribunal administratif de Paris, 4 March 2024) <https://paris.tribunal-administratif.fr/decisions-de-justice/dernieres-decisions/la-juge-des-referes-valide-l-expulsion-de-l-imam-mahjoub-mahjoubi> accessed 22 April 2026.

52 Judah, This is Europe (n 28) 342.

53 JA Miller, ‘A History of Turkish Guest Workers in Germany’ in A Arkilic and B Senay (eds), Routledge Handbook of Turkey’s Diasporas (Routledge 2024) 48ff.; R Mandel, ‘“Fortress Europe” and the Foreigners Within: Germany’s Turks’ in C Shore et al (eds), The Anthropology of Europe: Identities and Boundaries in Conflict (Routledge 1994) 113–24.

54 Such a statement is not only distorted and ignorant of patterns of racism in Germany, but also dangerous, as it reaffirms a prevalent latent racial prejudice about ‘unmerited’ economic advantages. A recent survey by the German National Monitor for Discrimination and Racism (DeZIM) found that almost a quarter (22 per cent) of respondents agreed that religious and ethnic minorities had benefited more economically than they deserved. See L Fuchs et al, ‘Verborgene Muster, Sichtbare Folgen. Rassismus & Diskriminierung in Deutschland’ (DeZIM 2025) 18 <https://www.rassismusmonitor.de/publikationen/monitoring-rassismus-und-diskriminierung-in-deutschland> accessed 22 April 2026.

55 Such a racialised opposition has been critiqued, for example, by S Manzoor-Khan, ‘The Feminist and Queer-Friendly West? The Patriarchal Rest?’ in Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia (Pluto Press 2022); see also L Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Harvard University Press 2015); R Zakaria, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption (WW Norton 2021).

56 Judah, This is Europe (n 28) 141.

57 G Dietze, ‘Sexueller Exzeptionalismus als Kulturalisierung von Geschlecht und Sexualität’ 23 (2017) Freiburger Zeitschrift für Geschlechterstudien 21.

58 G Dietze, Sexueller Exzeptionalismus: Überlegenheitsnarrative in Migrationsabwehr und Rechtspopulismus (transcript Verlag 2019).

59 Judah, This is Europe (n 28) 141.

60 Indeed, it would have been insightful to highlight marginalised communities’ specific exposure to targeted hate speech online. A Unlu et al, ‘From Prejudice to Marginalization: Tracing the Forms of Online Hate Speech Targeting LGBTQ+ and Muslim Communities’ 28 (2026) New Media & Society 1338, 1342ff. E Psychogiopoulou, ‘The Fight Against Digital Hate Speech: Disentangling the EU’s Regulatory Approach and Hurdles’ 25 (2024) German Law Journal 1182, 1184ff.

61 See M Amjahid, ‘Sexism: A New Desire for Refugee Porn’ (Die Zeit, 15 May 2018) <https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/2018-05/sexisms-refugeeporn-refugees-pornography-germany-analysisy> accessed 22 April 2026.

62 Judah, This is Europe (n 28) 395.

63 ‘Haidar felt something: something that felt like freedom’. Ibid., 404.

64 Ibid., 413.

65 In fact, Haidar makes a considerable effort to accommodate his mother’s feelings, noting the initial ‘denial in her voice’. Haidar’s mother even tells him: ‘What you’re feeling, what you’re saying, it’s not true’. Haidar realises then ‘just how difficult this was for her’. Yet the mother is the only family member not to break off contact. Ibid., 413–14.

66 ‘LGBTQI+’ is the acronym for ‘Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer and Intersex’; the plus sign represents the multiplicity of additional sexual orientations and gender identities. Notably, the readers of This is Europe also do not learn about the multiple facets of queerness and feminism in predominantly Muslim countries. M Amjahid, Let’s Talk About Sex, Habibi: Liebe und Begehren von Casablanca bis Kairo (Piper 2022); regarding a critique of essentialism in queer legal theory, see D Banović, ‘Queer Legal Theory’ in D Vujadinović et al (eds), Feminist Approaches to Law: Theoretical and Historical Insights (Springer 2023) 78–80.

67 ‘The streets in Kreuzberg, like they were smiling’. Judah, This is Europe (n 28) 405.

68 For an insightful critique of legal reasoning centring westernisation in European asylum cases, see N Nosrati and D Tomaselli, ‘Whose Values?’ (Verfassungsblog 2025) <https://doi.org/10.59704/13a335ddac0c6dcc> accessed 22 April 2026; concurrently, note also the critique regarding the political link between ‘our European way of life’ and migration, see M Stevis-Gridneff, ‘“Protecting Our European Way of Life”? Outrage Follows New EU Role’ (New York Times, 12 September 2019) <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/world/europe/eu-ursula-von-der-leyen-migration.html> accessed 22 April 2026.

69 S Debele, ‘Anti-Black Racism: Queer Europe’s Inconvenience Beyond the Law’ (Verfassungsblog 2024) <https://doi.org/10.59704/423811719d3c680b> accessed 22 April 2026.

70 ‘No, it would just cause too much pain for him, trying to explain it to them, over there [in Syria]’. Judah, This is Europe (n 28) 412; see R Rao, ‘The Locations of Homophobia’ 2 (2014) London Review of International Law 169, 173.

71 ‘Hungary: Pride Ban is Full-Frontal Attack on LGBTI People and Must Not Be Signed into Law’ (Amnesty International, 18 March 2025) <https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/03/hungary-pride-ban-is-full-frontal-attack-on-lgbti-people-and-must-not-be-signed-into-law> accessed 22 April 2026.

72 Debele (n 69); JK Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press 2007); KE McNeal and S French Brennan, ‘Between Homonationalism and Islamophobia: Comparing Queer Caribbean and Muslim Asylum Seeking in/to the Netherlands’ in RCM Mole (ed), Queer Migration and Asylum in Europe (University College London Press 2021) 162–83.

73 Note that research on anti-trans violence in Europe found that, ‘Among both trans people and cisgender LGB people, having ethnic minority backgrounds and disabilities was related to experiencing higher levels of anti-queer discrimination and violence’. J Evje et al, ‘Transgender People Experience More Discrimination and Violence than Cisgender Lesbian, Gay, or Bisexual People: A Multilevel Analysis across 30 European Countries’ 27 (2026) International Journal of Transgender Health 736, 746; see also DJ Connolly et al, ‘Transphobia in the United Kingdom: A Public Health Crisis’ 24 (2025) International Journal for Equity in Health 155.

74 For a more detailed critique, I refer to my colleagues Karla Žeravčić and Davide Tomaselli’s illuminating piece, ‘Beyond a Queer H(e)aven. Reading EU Law through Haidar’s Story’ in L Azoulai et al (eds), The Law of the Everyday: An Inquiry into the Legal Fabrics of European Lives, EUI, LAW, Working Paper, 2026/05 <https://hdl.handle.net/1814/95045>.

75 See L Azoulai, ‘“Living Together” in Europe’s Polarised Societies: Navigating the ECtHR and CJEU Case Law’, EUI, LAW, Working Paper, 2024/18 <https://cadmus.eui.eu/handle/1814/77442> accessed 22 April 2026.

76 We get a glimpse of how Ionut has internalised the prejudices against Romanians, for instance when he says: ‘Who the fuck cares about a Romanian lorry driver?’ Judah, This is Europe (n 28) 30; regarding internalised racism, see KD Pyke, ‘What is Internalized Racial Oppression and Why Don’t We Study It? Acknowledging Racism’s Hidden Injuries’ 53 (2010) Sociological Perspectives 551.

77 Judah, This is Europe (n 28) 45.

78 Ibid., 36.

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid., 27.

81 Ibid., 30.

82 Ibid., 48. The racialised distinction between immigrants of different ethnic origins could also be discussed in the context of recent legal developments in EU law: see S Steininger, ‘They Not Like Us’ (Verfassungsblog 2025) https://doi.org/10.59704/7df434a515a94342.

83 Judah, This is Europe (n 28) 48.

84 In the chapter featuring Mahjoub, a long-term resident and imam in Avignon, a large part of the story focuses on his migration story and his childhood in Tunis, a city described in Orientalist tropes, such as ‘the basket-weavers in the street, the beggars in the souk … the donkey carts behind the shiny new buses, the cries of the morning hawkers’. His first childhood memory is of his erratic and violent family. Ibid., 489ff. Notably, Mahjoub, the only non-white interview partner who was also settled in Europe (and is not a newcomer), was later subject to an expulsion order: see the court order by the administrative court of Paris (n 51).

85 Regarding the notion of white Europe or ‘Eurowhiteness’, see recent critiques by N Begum, ‘“The European Family? Wouldn’t That Be the White People?”: Brexit and British Ethnic Minority Attitudes towards Europe’ 46 (2023) Ethnic and Racial Studies 3293; H Kundnani, Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (Hurst & Co 2023).

86 N Begum, ‘Is Being European a White Identity? Brussels Needs Deep Reflection in the Wake of the Black Lives Matter Movement’ (The Conversation, 8 July 2020) <http://theconversation.com/is-being-european-a-white-identity-brussels-needs-deep-reflection-in-the-wake-of-the-black-lives-matter-movement-141902> accessed 22 April 2026.

87 Instead, ‘everyday racism’ should be seen in the context of structural and institutional discrimination, see M Benson and C Lewis, ‘Brexit, British People of Colour in the EU-27 and Everyday Racism in Britain and Europe’ 42 (2019) Ethnic and Racial Studies 2211.

88 H Eklund, ‘Peoples, Inhabitants and Workers: Colonialism in the Treaty of Rome’ 34 (2023) European Journal of International Law 831.

89 European Agency for Fundamental Rights, ‘Being Black in the EU – Second EU Minorities and Discrimination Survey’ (Publications Office of the European Union 2018) 27ff. <https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2811/791339> accessed 22 April 2026; see also European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, ‘Being Black in the EU – Experiences of People of African Descent’ (Publications Office of the European Union 2024) <https://doi.org/10.2811/2874773> accessed 22 April 2026.

90 European Agency for Fundamental Rights, ‘Second EU Minorities and Discrimination Survey’ (n 89) 54ff.

91 This is true for the national level: see, for example, T Jones, ‘Why is Italy Still So Racist?’ (The Guardian, 30 July 2013) <https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/jul/30/italy-racism-cecile-kyenge-esterofilia> accessed 22 April 2026; K Connolly, ‘Germany’s First Black African-Born MP to Stand Down after Racist Abuse’ (The Guardian, 10 July 2024) <https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/03/germanys-first-africa-born-mp-to-stand-down-after-racist-abuse> accessed 22 April 2026; as well as for the European level J Kantola et al, ‘“It’s Like Shouting to a Brick Wall”: Normative Whiteness and Racism in the European Parliament’ 117 (2023) American Political Science Review 184; M Bartłomiejczyk, ‘How Much Noise Can You Make Through an Interpreter? A Case Study on Racist Discourse in the European Parliament’ 22 (2020) Interpreting 238.

92 I Solanke, ‘Where are the Black Judges in Europe?’ 34 (2018) Connecticut Journal of International Law 287.

93 R Choudaha, ‘Editorial #39: Hey! Teacher! Leave Them Kids Alone!*: On the Racialized Experience of Teaching “Almost” International Law’ (Völkerrechtsblog 2024) <https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/editorial-39-hey-teacher-leave-them-kids-alone> accessed 22 April 2026.

94 As Kilomba notes: ‘The term “everyday” refers to the fact that these experiences are not punctual. Everyday racism is not a “single assault” or a “discrete event,” but rather a “constellation of life experiences,” a “constant exposure to danger,” a “continuing pattern of abuse” that repeats itself incessantly throughout one’s biography - in the bus, at the supermarket, at a party, at a dinner, in the family.’ G Kilomba, Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism (2nd edn, Unrast 2010) 45.

95 Phillips (n 44); Pitts (n 4).

96 Pitts (n 4) 3.

97 K Andrews, The Psychosis of Whiteness: Surviving the Insanity of a Racist World (Allen Lane 2023) xvi.

98 M Fricker, ‘Evolving Concepts of Epistemic Injustice’ in IJ Kidd, J Medina and G Pohlhaus Jr (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (Routledge 2017) 53–60.

99 Andrews (n 96) 47.

100 Rutazibwa (n 32) 197. I Solanke, ‘Decolonizing Research and Teaching in EU Law: Purpose, Principles and Practice’ in H Eklund (ed), Colonialism and the EU Legal Order (Cambridge University Press 2025) 362 seq.

101 T Zandstra, ‘Where in the World is Europe?‘ in L Azoulai et al (eds), The law of the everyday: an inquiry into the legal fabrics of European lives, EUI, LAW, Working Paper, 2026/05, 167 <https://hdl.handle.net/1814/95045>.

102 Illustrated by the case of EU external fisheries, see the chapter on ‘Corrubedo’, Judah, This is Europe (n 28) 589. See further, C Kilpatrick and J Scott, ‘Is the EU’s Turn to Sustainable Supply Chains Neo-colonialist?’ 63 (2026) Common Market Law Review 785–832.

103 There are several layers of this in ‘Briançon’, where the European Union’s relations with Niger and Libya are touched upon: ibid., 272.

104 See H Eklund, ‘Colonialism and the EU Legal Order: An Introduction’ in H Eklund (ed), Colonialism and the EU Legal Order (Cambridge University Press 2025) 29.

105 J Komárek, ‘Political Economy in the European Constitutional Imaginary: Moving Beyond Fiesole’ (Verfassungsblog 2020) <https://doi.org/10.17176/20200904-125013-0> accessed 22 April 2026.

106 I Solanke, ‘Conclusion: Embedding Decoloniality in Empirical EU Studies’ in MR Madsen et al (eds), Researching the European Court of Justice (Cambridge University Press 2022) 346.

107 See ‘Baloga’, discussed above. Judah, This is Europe (n 28) 27 seq.

108 A Emejulu and F Sobande, To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe (Pluto Press 2019); podcast projects, such as S Diedro Jordão and S Hassan, ‘Vocal About It’ (Podcast, Soundcloud 2020) <https://soundcloud.com/vocal-aboutit> accessed 22 April 2026; Y Ouirhrane, ‘We Belong’ (Podcast, Les Cavalcades 2020) <https://lescavalcades.fr/podcast/we-belong/> accessed 22 April 2026.

109 S Manzoor-Khan, ‘White People of France: Being Forced to Undress Wasn’t the Liberation I Wanted’ (The Independent, 24 August 2016) <https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/burkini-ban-muslim-women-france-nice-beach-forced-undress-liberation-burkha-islam-dear-white-people-a7207811.html> accessed 22 April 2026; H Heimann, ‘Mohamed Amjahid: “Unter Weißen” – Wie Alltagsrassismus ein Leben prägt’ (Deutschlandfunk Kultur, 25 February 2017) <https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/mohamed-amjahid-unter-weissen-wie-alltagsrassismus-ein-100.html> accessed 22 April 2026.

110 O Otele, African Europeans: An Untold History (Basic Books 2021); N Wojcik, ‘Making Afro-German History Visible’ (dw.com, 8 October 2023) <https://www.dw.com/en/africa-germany-history/a-66493515> accessed 22 April 2026.

111 A Oprea, ‘Re-Envisioning Social Justice from the Ground up: Including the Experiences of Romani Women’ 1 (2004) Essex Human Rights Review 29; A Kóczé and M Rövid, ‘Roma and the Politics of Double Discourse in Contemporary Europe’ 24 (2017) Identities 684.

112 P Hille, ‘In 1961, Germany Needed Workers and Turks Answered the Call’ (dw.com, 5 October 2021) <https://www.dw.com/en/the-german-turkish-recruitment-agreement-60-years-on/a-59398455> accessed 22 April 2026; J Gonnot, ‘As France Moves to Limit the Rights of Migrants, Research Reveals Just How Reliant on Them It Is’ (The Conversation, 22 December 2023) <http://theconversation.com/as-france-moves-to-limit-the-rights-of-migrants-research-reveals-just-how-reliant-on-them-it-is-220243> accessed 22 April 2026; B Sarbo, ‘Rassismus und gesellschaftliche Reproduktionsverhältnisse’ in E Roldán Mendívil and B Sarbo (eds), Die Diversität der Ausbeutung: Zur Kritik des herrschenden Antirassismus (3rd edn, Dietz 2023) 51–6; M Bayraktar, Aydin: Erinnerung an ein verweigertes Leben (Unrast 2021).

113 J Pitts portrays the Black Archives Project in Amsterdam: see Pitts (n 4) 162 seq. There are many similar projects across Europe; examples include D Budasz and M Wurzer, ‘Postcolonial Italy: A Public History Project Mapping Colonial Heritage’ (2024) 26 Interventions 1069; ‘Decolonising Europe Booklet’ (Decolonial Europe Day, 10 April 2023) <https://decolonial.eu/booklet> accessed 22 April 2026; Y Beebeejaun, ‘Regarding Statues: Whiteness, Space, and the Postcolonial European Imagination’ (2025) 45 Journal of Planning Education and Research 951.

114 S Suteu, ‘The Rule of Law Crisis was Always Gendered: The Anti-Gender Playbook in Europe’ 21 (2025) European Constitutional Law Review 58; A Kubal, ‘The Women’s Complaint: Sociolegal Mobilization Against Authoritarian Backsliding Following the 2020 Abortion Law in Poland’ 31 (2023) Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 585.

115 O Herzog Astaburuaga, ‘The Hanau Massacre and State (in)Action: A Dossier’ 64 (2023) Race & Class 87; R Diallo, ‘A Worshipper is Murdered in a French Mosque. How can this be “Just Another Crime”?’ (The Guardian, 13 May 2025) <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/13/worshipper-murdered-french-mosque-politicians-crime-islamophobia> accessed 22 April 2026.

116 D Fassin, Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza, G Elliott trans (Verso 2025).

117 M Okwonga, ‘White Complicity Matters: The Nazis by the Lake’ (Byline Times, 5 June 2020) <https://bylinetimes.com/2020/06/05/white-complicity-matters-the-nazis-by-the-lake> accessed 22 April 2026.

118 With some exceptions cited above, and including M Möschel et al (eds), Fighting Discrimination in Europe: The Case for a Race-Conscious Approach (Routledge 2016); J Miller and FG Nicola, ‘The Failure to Grapple with Racial Capitalism in European Constitutionalism’ in J Komárek (ed), European Constitutional Imaginaries: Between Ideology and Utopia (Oxford University Press 2023) 320–39; diverse contributions in U Belavusau and K Henrard (eds), EU Anti-discrimination Law Beyond Gender (Oxford University Press 2019).