What’s race got to do with it? A decade ago, many scholars of central/eastern Europe would have answered this question with a bemused dismissal of the concept’s relevance to a field dominated by the frameworks of class, ethnicity, and nation. This color-blindness required scholars to whistle past the presence of racialized xenophobia in post-communist societies. Such denialism only began to soften when racism struck back with a vengeance closer to the centers of eastern academic power in the 2010s. The end of the post-racial illusion of the Obama years and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, along with the ascendence to power (from Budapest to Washington, DC) of a backlash to migration forced a long overdue reckoning in our field with this most discomfiting of terms.

Even with race’s more recent inclusion into the conceptual terrain of the region, however, there is still, with a few notable exceptions, a tendency to cast it as an import from elsewhere. Particularly in my own subfield of Soviet history, race remains largely confined to stories of internationalist entanglement that are peripheral to the central narrative of the region’s internal dynamics. Its relevance to central/eastern Europe is attributed to the appearance in the region of racial Others from the west or south, who found inspiration looking toward the region or sojourned in it, bringing their race-ness as an unexpected guest to an otherwise raceless (or, at worst, racist) “second world.”Footnote ¹ In contrast, the works under review in this essay maintain that race—and whiteness in particular—is an analytical category fundamental to understanding the diverse societies our field interrogates. For the authors of these works, race’s seeming absence indicates its overwhelming presence. If scholars engaged in our area of study do not see it everywhere, it is because they are, like fish, swimming in it.

The writers of all three texts (two single-authored and one edited volume) are driven by a sense of urgency to critique claims of “racial innocence” from east Europeans. This is because such claims have disassociated contemporary anti-migrant politics in the region from the taboo racial thinking of the twentieth century, making these politics a more palatable and hence potent source of demagogic messaging for far-right movements. For these authors, the dog-whistling political leaders of countries like Poland and Hungary have concealed the racism behind their euphemistic calls to defend a deracinated “Europe” or “Christianity.” They have done so by shifting the blame to their western European neighbors for the sins of empire and colonialism. Yet, as these authors note, although their calls to preserve European Christendom are couched in terms of civilization and faith, these leaders never fail to warn of enemies at the gate who always just so happen to have darker skin.

Putting the lie to these rhetorical launderings of racism, Ivan Kalmer’s 2022 treatise, White But Not Quite, provides a framework for exploring how the invisible hand of race has been central to the formation of the region’s identity. His landmark study of how racial thinking is foundational to the region sets the terms for the other two works under review, both of which contain citational homages to his groundbreaking intervention. An anthropologist at the University of Toronto, Kalmar finds motivation in his own background as a central European of Jewish heritage—a positionality that gives him unique experience navigating the complexities of belonging and exclusion in Europe and North America. In White But Not Quite, he aims to explain the (for many) surprising rise over the last two decades of the “illiberal” political movements of “Central Europe,” defined for the purposes of the book as the Visegrad Four (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary). Documenting the use by political leaders in these countries of the “affective politics of imagined kinship” based on race, Kalmar argues that this illiberal turn can best be understood as the desperate attempt to “fully access white privilege,” even as the peoples of their countries have been historically othered as “not quite” white (4–5).

The idea that a western gaze has subjugated east/central Europeans to a liminal position in global hierarchies is not new. Yet Kalmar adds valuable, empirical nuance to classic interpretations of this peripherality, such as that of Larry Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe. Footnote ² He does so by asking why political leaders from these countries, whose peoples have historically been relegated to the margins of whiteness, have nevertheless become some of the most ardent defenders of white supremacy in the twenty-first century. The early chapters of the book provide a sweeping intellectual history to answer this question. They complicate Wolff’s static and stark binary of an invented “East” and “West” Europe dating back three centuries, mapping instead a “gradual differentiation” of whiteness across the continent (53). This reconceptualization lays the basis for a more granular historical analysis of the evolution of central Europe’s shifting position in the modern period. Kalmar rejects the monocausal origin story of the “Othering” of eastern Europe in the minds of eighteenth-century philosophes. Rather, he demonstrates how what he calls the “Eastern Europeanism” identified by Wolff and others only solidified during the post-communist transition (55). Although drawing on tropes dating back to German/Slavic national contestations in the nineteenth century, the idea of eastern Europe, and central Europe’s inclusion in it, came at the key moment of transition from communism, when the Cold War division of the continent was maintained as justification for the region’s persistent “immaturity” compared to “Western-style liberal democracies and as capitalist market economies” (45). Not just a product of intellectual fantasizing, the construct grew out of a “need by Western capital to maintain the area as a source of cheap labor and a captive market” during the neoliberal revolution kicked off at the end of the last century (72).

Kalmar refuses to reproduce this construct’s assignation of his part of Europe to a state of ingrained backwardness and retrograde hatred; its racialization of racism. He rejects the notion that Europe’s east is the inveterately “racist and intolerant” other of a “liberal and tolerant” west (23). Instead, he identifies Islamophobia, homophobia, and other resentments of “illiberal social conservatism” as the “misguided” attempts of central Europeans to “fight back” against their own position on what Immanuel Wallerstein called, in the language of world economy, the “semi-periphery” of global neoliberal capitalism (12; 181). Reframed in the language of race, it is this state of being “partially privileged,” or having to defend their own questioned status as white, that they have in common with the “not-so-poor” who ally with the rich in the right-wing coalitions of western Europe and North America (26). In both cases, the somewhat oppressed refuse to join ranks with the totally oppressed Black and Brown populations of the Global South or west to fight their common oppressor, opting instead to punch down on these groups to build themselves up. This is the book’s most profound contribution—it pinpoints economic precarity as the root of the region’s racial anxieties without minimizing the power of racialized logics as merely epiphenomena of other socioeconomic forces. As a result, it offers an empirically backed explanation for the contradictory status of central Europeans as exploited and exploiters in the neoliberal capitalist world order.

Kalmar’s analysis spotlights a central Europe that excludes the countries of the former Soviet Union and the Balkans—a reasonable focus that still begs to be expanded upon through further research. This is where Off White, a 2024 edited volume with sixteen chapters, adds a more geographically sweeping, densely researched chronicle of how whiteness became a logic deeply embedded in east European societies. If we are to understand the “racial disavowals” of the region’s contemporary racists, the authors in this volume contend, we must contextualize the very familiar historical narratives of east European nation-building in the global context of nineteenth-century “imperial expansion, the growth of race science, and an idea of Europe that was ever more tightly connected to civilizational and racial superiority” (16). Inspired by the giants of critical studies of race (such as Cedric Robinson and Charles Mills), the contributors to this book insist that the provincialization of eastern Europe into a region divorced from this global story of race has rendered the pervasiveness of whiteness’s conceits invisible there, creating the conditions that made the present moment of a-racial racism possible.

This concern with a present deeply rooted in the past provides a coherence to Off White’s wide-ranging selection of topics. These range from historian Maciej Górny’s intellectual history of “Turanism”—a racializing theory of Russians as distinct from Poles and Ukrainians popular among some Polish emigres who rebelled against the Russian empire in the century before last—to a case study by cinema studies scholar Anikó Imre of the 2019 folk-horror film Midsommar, which she argues represents an example of the region’s “historical role as a resource for racial capitalism” and a production where “filmic and real-life enactments of white nationalism” overlap (255). A highlight of the book’s historically deep reading of the present is geographer Zoltàn Ginelli’s chapter on Hungarian “Indian play,” or the donning of American Indian cultural trappings by Hungarian nationalists as part of their victimizing, grievance-driven self-conceptions as warriors fighting against national extinction. Ginelli traces the “two-century-old” history of this racially fantastical appropriation back to the mythologization of Hungarian revolt during the revolutions of 1848 (114). In line with Kalmar, he identifies this Hungarian performance of an imagined Indian culture as a symptom of semi-peripherality that seeks to reconcile a feeling of inferiority and victimhood with a state of relative privilege.

Ginelli’s chronologically expansive piece is indicative of one of Off White’s most important historiographical innovations: its persistent use of critical race studies to upend the traditional periodization of east European history and unearth more profound continuities across revolutionary ruptures. In the Hungarian case, the linkage of the American Indian with the “supposed Eastern nomadic identity and Asian racial origins of the Magyar people” created a powerful narrative of national survival spanning the twentieth century (119). Illustrating that the racial anxieties of Hungarian populists did not appear out of thin air after 1989, Ginelli identifies Indian play as a common thread running through the equally victimizing mentalities of interwar Hungarian irredentists, post-1945 anticommunist “freedom fighters,” and post-communist Orbànist crusaders against “colonizing EU bureaucrats” (114; 127).

As other chapters show, such chronological continuities abound across the spatial borders dividing up the former “second world.” Historian Victoria Shmidt similarly finds that the racial science of interwar Czech anthropologist Vojtěch Suk, who connected the “self-isolation” of nonwhite peoples in Africa and the Americas to the supposed “primitivism” of Roma and other marginalized groups in eastern Europe, had an intergenerational impact on Czech anthropology that reverberated throughout the socialist period to the present day (108–9). In other chapters, scholars Irina Novikova and Yulia Gradskova investigate how implicit racial hierarchies valuing whiteness shaped the Soviet domestic order under Iosif Stalin and after. For Gradskova, distinctions dating back to the Russian imperial classification of inorodtsy shaped thinking long after the 1917 revolution, informing the Soviet civilizing mission (despite its claims to racial innocence) that was sold as the color-blind socialist promise of a more humane alternative to western imperialism. The chapters in Off White, along with Kalmar’s study, collectively demonstrate a major constant in the history of the region: the idea that eastern Europeans, unburdened by the racial guilt undermining the confidence of their western counterparts, could do whiteness “better.” This connects political movements that, at first glance, seem to have antipodal ideologies. These include colorblind socialist internationalists, liberty-fighting Cold-War-era dissidents, and today’s populist protectors of an invented Christian tradition.

Missing from many of these chapters are the voices of non-white persons from eastern Europe. In general, the authors fixate on the need to define and diagnose a unique experience of whiteness, which is at times called “not quite” or “in between” to nuance the white/non-white binary. This unsettled terminology of whiteness, which to this “multiracial” reviewer sometimes echoes too closely the conceits of monoracial racial purity (with perhaps more shades of whiteness), is added to by anthropologist Chelsi West Ohueri, who suggests what to me is the less valuative phrase of “peripheral whiteness.” She offers this alternative phrase as a means of describing how “racial belonging is not fully conferred to Albanians” who nevertheless “enact whiteness in relationship to those racialized as ‘black’” in the country, such as Roma and Balkan Egyptians (139). One of the few contributors to Off White who includes non-white eastern Europeans as central players, Ohueri takes seriously the impact of minorities on the racial identities of national populations too often considered raceless because of their perceived homogeneity. In a separate chapter, Sunnie Rucker-Chang elaborates on this idea that “small numbers” of non-white inhabitants matter to the self-definition of whiteness that majorities in eastern Europe develop. In her study of Chinese and African-descended residents of Serbia, she proposes that the designation of these communities as “inveterate outsider(s)” is crucial to the constitution of an “unmarked,” white Serbian identity (294).

The third and final text under review, sociologist Bolaji Balogun’s Race and the Colour-Line, likewise considers the experiences of Black and Brown persons in eastern Europe a valuable starting point for better understanding the peculiarities of white east European identity. In the introduction, Balogun declares that it was only when he visited Poland that he “began to understand what it really means to have a skin that is black or brown” (1). Balogun travels along the same lines as Ohueri and Rucker-Chang in his attention to how the “process of minoritization” of Black/Brown, gay, disabled, and other marginalized Poles challenges and upholds an “ideal national type” of Polishness implicitly racialized as white (8).

Like several of the chapters in Off White, Balogun locates the historical origins of Poland’s contemporary “exclusionist logic” in its trans-imperial entanglements with colonialism and eugenics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (5). In the first part of the book, he investigates how western anti-black racism, Nazism, and imperialism were tapped by Polish nation builders, who were willing participants in colonialism, aspired to Lebensraum (especially through the Polish Maritime and Colonial League), and applied racist ideas to their own handling of Jewish and other minorities. The gestation of the Polish state in these contexts bred a concept of the nation as homogenous and anathema to difference, a definition based on exclusion that informs the contemporary Polish “denial of its heterogenous past” and intolerance of immigrants visually marked as outsiders (88). There emerged out of the violence of the twentieth century an imagined norm of what it meant to be Polish (termed by Balogun as “Polish-centrism”) that essentialized national identity as characterized by “whiteness, Europeanness, Catholicism, and Polish language” (141).

The “historical sociology” of Race and the Colour-Line sets the stage for the book’s second and main part, which interrogates, through interviews with Black and “mixed-raced” Polish residents, the lived experience of race in the country (35). The imperial fantasies and racial animus toward Jews and other minoritized peoples in the first part of the twentieth century invented a tradition of intolerance that carries over into the present panic over immigration from the Global South. Balogun constructs an ethnography of “microaggressions” that demonstrates how nonwhite individuals are denied national belonging in today’s Poland through an everyday discourse that assumes their foreignness. The mundane humiliations they face in Polish society reveal how Polish identity relies on these racial others to define its sameness. Balogun addresses head-on the troubling status of “mixed-raced” people, who are imagined in other contexts, depending on the ideological needs of those racializing them, along the spectrum of black/white as “not quite,” “within,” “outside,” “in-between,” or anywhere in relation to that spectrum’s poles that happens to be ideologically convenient. In the Polish context, Balogun illustrates, they are denied any claim to belonging to a Polish nation, even though a racialized logic of hereditary citizenship would dismember them—in the dissecting language of race—as “part-Polish.” This betrays the unspoken but decisive principle of racial purity at the heart of Polish identity.

If race so deeply defines the region, why has it, until now, remained a relatively niche topic? The authors of the three texts under review show that taking a racial lens to many other subjects can lead to a deeper understanding of them. As Rucker-Chang and other scholars point out in the case of the concept of “ethnicity,” less thorny language has often been deployed to obfuscate the racial realities at the center of east European history (294). In the field of Soviet history, critical studies of race, such as those under review, have the potential to revolutionize how we approach perennial debates over the country’s identity. The age-old discussions of Russia/the Soviet Union’s place in an “East/West” binary (which just so happens to map closely onto global color lines) have been framed as questions of its similarities/differences to “western imperialism,” its belonging to “Europe,” and other deracinated terms that stand in for the white Elephant in the Room.Footnote ³ Scholars from all fields, not just those specializing in “race,” should take their cue from these excellent books and critically interrogate this Elephant, not to fall in line with what some dismiss as the latest academic fad, but to come to terms with the long post- communist transition to xenophobic authoritarianism that has torn to pieces the colorblind delusions of the recent past.