Refugee Racial Form in Late Liberalism

At first glance, to speak of refugees as a racial category would seem a categorical error, since a refugee could be of any race, ethnicity and nationality (as well as ages, gender identity, sexual orientation and so on). “Refugee,” one may argue, is not a racial construct but a legal label assigned, per the 1951 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Convention, to someone who, due to “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.” In this definition, the violence aimed at one's racial identity may be the reason for one's refugee status, but the latter does not constitute race. Nonetheless, in her seminal 1943 essay “We Refugees,” Hannah Arendt opines, with a poignant use of the first-person plural pronoun, that “we don't want to be refugees, since we don't want to be Jews” (Arendt 1994, 117). This denial of identity by many in the European Jewry, Arendt suggests, evinces not so much self-loathing as an unwavering belief in cultural assimilation and state sovereignty as safeguards of belonging in Europe. Nazism shattered that belief when all over Europe it destroyed the kernels of liberalism, namely, abstract citizenship and equal rights under the law.

During World War II, refugees, as opposed to immigrants, were living examples of the demise of the liberal nation-state, whose Enlightenment political principles enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen shockingly lost their grip.

Refugeehood, by which I mean the condition of being a refugee, thus carries a racial burden in a transitional limbo from persecution to protection. As such, everywhere they went, refugees encountered a new kind of racial suspicion specific to their statelessness. This racial animosity differs from anti-Semitism: Arendt distinguishes “we refugees” from “Jews” in general and observes that “the mere fact of being a refugee has prevented our mingling with native Jewish society” (Arendt 1994, 116).