TheEconomistAugust 8th 2020 371F
rom the1940s-60s, philosophical ideas
about racism tended to flow westward
across the Atlantic. Writers of the Franco-
phone négritude school such as Léopold
Senghor and Aimé Césaire foreshadowed
America’s “black is beautiful” movement,
as did Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay “Black Or-
pheus”. Frantz Fanon’s polemics against
French colonialism influenced American
debates on violence in the civil-rights
movement. African-American writers and
musicians like Richard Wright, Miles Davis
and Nina Simone went to Europe to escape
America’s colour bar. Analyses of Nazi rac-
ism by the philosophers of Germany’s
Frankfurt School crossed the Atlantic with
Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse. Mar-
cuse’s student Angela Davis earned her
doctorate in Berlin; after she joined the
Black Panthers, ending up on the run from
the fbi, James Baldwin wrote in support of
her from his home in France. Segregation-
ists made the most of all this, disparaging
the civil-rights movement as a conspiracy
of European socialist eggheads.
This summer, as the Black Lives Mattermovement spread internationally, some
Europeans felt that the tide had turned: the
latest American ideas about racism were
now flowing into Europe. Academics—es-
pecially those who have studied in Ameri-
ca—have embraced concepts like institu-
tional racism and white privilege, eagerly
translated by local news media (“weisse Pri-
vilegien”, “le privilège blanc”). Activist jour-
nalists like Rokhaya Diallo in France, Alice
Hasters in Germany and Clarice Gargard in
the Netherlands are elated that anti-black
racism is being taken so seriously. So are
many Europeans, black and otherwise.
Yet others see it as part of what Régis De-bray, a French centre-left thinker, calls the
“Americanisation of Europe”. Some argue
that the focus on anti-black racism diverts
attention from bigotry against Muslim mi-
norities, who are more numerous in Eu-
rope. Paul Scheffer, a Dutch immigration
scholar, thinks applying an American con-
ception of race gets it wrong: “African-
Americans’ history is one of slavery and
forced segregation, but the history of black
communities in Europe is one of migra-
tion,” with more social mobility and fluid
status. The question is whether the new
American-influenced vocabulary fits.
One tug-of-war is over the term institu-
tional racism, meant to convey that sys-
tems can produce racist outcomes even if
no one in them is racist. French and Ger-
man government bodies accept the term;
but deny it describes them. However, they
generally do not gather data on ethnicity,
an ostensibly anti-racist measure that
makes it almost impossible to detect insti-
tutional racism. Last month Germany’s in-
terior minister cancelled an inquiry into
institutional racism in the police. France’s
interior minister resists calls to probe the
police. Yet in 2015 a study found that 22 out
of 26 recent victims of French police kill-
ings were “visible minorities”. Some Dutch
cops cheerfully admit racial profiling, no-
tably in the case of Typhoon, one of the
country’s top rappers, whose car they
stopped in 2016 because it was posh and he
is black. In June Mark Rutte, the Dutch
prime minister, said the Netherlands suf-Racism in EuropeSee no evil
American ideas about race and politics are coming to countries that don’t collect
ethnic statisticsEurope
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