Racism is not based solely on skin color
Arrival of the President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumahand president of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Titoat the Non-Aligned Movement conference, Belgrade, 1961. Photo from the legacy of Konstantin Koča Popovic and Leposava Lepa Perovic, album no. 25, provided to Wikimedia Commons by Historical Archives of Belgrade as part of the GLAM project in Serbia. (CC BY-SA 3.0.)
This story by Ana Sladojević was originally published by Sbunker. An edited version is republished by Global Voices with permission.
In the context of the decolonial turn in art, culture and academia over the past decade, as well as social movements such as Black lives matter, the topic of race has regained worldwide attention. In the post-Yugoslav region, however, many people tend to deny the existence of racism when asked about it.
This is due to a common misconception that regions or countries that were not directly involved in the colonial project are somehow immune to racism. The notion of coloniality, however, shows that the legacy of colonialism remains in the power structures, inscribed in different social and cultural formats of modernity. This highlights, among other things, the pervasiveness of race on a global scale, meaning that no region should be exempt from the current reshaping of its consequences.
This piece, based on the 2023 course project Musine Kokalari Institute Academy, looks at the topic of race and racialization, keeping in mind recent academic results.
Racialization process
Given the region’s long history contempt for this important subject, it seems relevant to emphasize that race is not a biological or scientific fact. It is a social construct used from positions of power to express human differences in a hierarchical manner. As such, it has had serious and detrimental consequences on people’s lives.
When we think of racism, most people will identify it with anti-Black racism. Indeed, the global presence of the “color line” still makes the lives of Black and Brown people more vulnerable than those of white people. However, racism is not based solely on skin color. Many other social categories, including ethnicity, religion, class, citizenship and others, can contribute to processes of racialization. Instead of a singular racism, it would be more accurate to talk about different racisms, which are not static: they are relational, and they also evolve over time.
The concepts of institutional and systemic racism further suggest that racism is not an isolated act of violence or a biased view of an individual, but rather a generalized form of inequality directed against groups of people through of the process of racialization.
The Balkans as a border
Understanding the concepts of race and racialization must take into account the continuities and discontinuities of this region with Western modernity. There are complex, centuries-old histories of empires and nations, as well as different regional influences, that complicate attempts to generalize about this part of the world.
Looking at more recent history, the notion of ethnicity, particularly since the wars of the 1990s, has remained predominant in explaining interregional relations, at the expense of other notions such as race. Before that, since the 1960s, Yugoslavia’s anti-colonial and anti-racist principles were part of Yugoslavia’s foreign policy, and were further expressed through its engagement in Yugoslav foreign policy. Non-Aligned Movement. Even if anticolonialism and antiracism can be understood as a positive historical heritage to which we must connect, the lack of recognition of the processes of racialization In socialist Yugoslavia asks us to observe even such legacies with a critical eye. All the more so since ignorance of race or color blindnesswrongly understood as a form of anti-racism, spread to the countries of the post-Yugoslav region, transforming into new sets of racialized relations.
In his book “White speakers. Racial capitalism and coloniality along the Balkan route», Piro Rexhepi uses examples from Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania and Bulgaria to show how the racialized geopolitical cartography of this part of the world re-emerged after the Cold War. Observing such processes within the broader framework of international power relations, it depicts a complex situation of Balkan states as both (neo)colonized and instrumentalized in the protection of white/Christian Euro-Atlantic homogeneity, turned inside out. against racialized groups such as Roma, Muslims and ethnic minorities. migrants. It contextualizes the Balkans as a border area, with reference to migration along the “Balkan route” and the subsequent strengthening of EU borders. measures.
European supremacy of the “Gadjo”
According to Rexhepiinstitutional and systemic racism in the Balkans particularly affects people at the intersection of Rome and Muslim identities. This manifests itself in the form of forced displacement, house demolitions, movement restrictions and denial of documentation. THE complexity and importance of overlapping forms of marginalizationare also highlighted in his work.
Jelena Savić written from a position informed by the lived experience of Roma in Serbia and the region. She draws on US-based critical race theory, whiteness theory, as well as Black feminist theory, to show how racialized inequalities extend to all areas of life, including housing, education, employment, health care, and legal issues. Analogous to backpack of invisible white privilege as described by Peggy McIntosh for the American context, Savić highlights the privileges that white people Gadjo – which is a Romani name for non-Roma – has about Roma. Although her experience is more closely linked to the post-Yugoslav region, the concept of “Gadjo European supremacy”, which she coined to denote a naturalized or “unmarked” position of European whiteness in the process of racialization of the Roma , concerns Europe in general.
With whom do we think
Savić and Rexhepi apply such methods and interpretations in their own work that prioritize the perspectives and experiences of the most vulnerable individuals and most marginalized groups – including their histories obscured over time. They both show that who we choose to think with will dictate our ability to disengage from the coloniality of knowing and being, while an important part of this decolonial work will be recognizing our own positions.
But what impact will this have on racialized hierarchies? Being aware of privilege does not necessarily mean being ready to give it up. And even being willing to give it up does not guarantee that we will recognize all the cases in which we continue to perpetuate certain forms of epistemic and other violence without even knowing it. The long struggle against racism that lies ahead requires both unlearning and denaturalizing certain “truths,” such as (post)Yugoslav color blindness, and – as Savić points out – being prepared to feel uncomfortable. comfortable with the process.
