As an anthropologist of race and racialization, I have conducted numerous years of research on questions of blackness, whiteness, and marginalization. This includes extended ethnographic fieldwork in Albania and southeast Europe dating back to 2006. One of the key arguments of my research has been that while eastern Europe, broadly defined, is often configured outside of race, silences about race and claims to racelessness must be continually challenged, interrogated, and destabilized. Recent discussions and publications within the greater field of East European and Eurasian Studies have demonstrated the necessity for continued engagement on the subjects of race and racialization, about the questions we ask, the conceptualizations and theorizations we make, and the analytical frameworks that we apply.Footnote 1
Too often discussions and analyses of race collapse into questions about who is or who is not racist. In my recently released book I maintain that greater attention should be paid to racialization and race-making in an effort to probe race as an ethnographic object, and how whiteness, blackness, and otherness are produced, reproduced, and sustained.Footnote 2 As Sunnie Rucker-Chang and I have argued, race in eastern Europe is shaped by global racialization processes that emerge within particular historical and local contexts.Footnote 3 These racialization processes require us to interrogate how race is made, as the logics and building blocks that give race its meaning vary across space and place. This is true for how we probe such concepts as whiteness and blackness. I have recently argued that in the context of Albania, scholars must approach whiteness in terms of what I term peripheral whiteness, which speaks to the ways that Albanians simultaneously occupy a space outside of European whiteness yet locally occupy a local place of whiteness in relation to Roma and Balkan Egyptians.Footnote 4 Global racial analysis requires frameworks that consider the meanings and makings of race, calling attention to interlocking social processes that shape societal fabrics. While race is often limited to western processes of modernity that exclude eastern Europe, racialization processes are global, and I argue that the ethnography of everyday socialities makes them visible.Footnote 5
Building upon my research on racialization, this article examines race and the global color line in terms of antiblackness and anti-Romani racism,Footnote 6 asking how such inquiries can shed light on the ways that blackness and whiteness are configured across southeastern Europe and Europe as a whole.Footnote 7 In their edited volume on antiblackness, Moon-Kie Jung and Joao Costas Vargas contend that antiblackness is not just a form of racism, but rather, it speaks to “the very notion of the Social and the Human underlying [racist] practices and their constitutive rejection of Blackness and Black people.”Footnote 8 Working with this conceptualization, this paper has three primary goals: the first is to probe the complexities of the meanings of blackness. The second aim is to examine antiblackness and anti-Romani racism as parallel processes configured by European whiteness. The third objective is to explore how this type of critical analysis can expand scholarly inquiry beyond the discourses of race as individualized and immoral, and towards more comprehensive examinations of regional and global racial logics that structure social relations.
Complexities of Blackness
My first travel experience outside of the United States was to the high mountains of northern Albania, where my immediate encounters with people centered on my Black woman otherness, where every day I was inundated with questions about my blackness, about my body, my hair, my lineage. As I began to ask questions in response I was quickly told by white Americans and west Europeans, as well as Albanians, that the questions and commentary reflected a simple curiosity, one largely shaped by an extended period of isolation. Or I was told that blackness did not mean anything in Albania or southeast Europe. Whereas I initially believed that my early encounters with race were disruptions to my research, I eventually began to understand that these ethnographic encounters served as sites for probing race itself. Similar to anthropologist Jemima Pierre, my analysis of racialization is formed by my ethnographic research, which includes how my own ethnographic encounters serve as sites for examining the meanings and makings of race, particularly those places thought to be outside of race.Footnote 9
Despite claims of racelessness in the broader region of eastern Europe and Eurasia, my ethnographic research has revealed how race emerges in local landscapes as shaped by global social processes. This includes the exploration of blackness and whiteness, and how Albanians, Roma, and Balkan Egyptians felt racialized outside of European whiteness and articulated a black identity; how Albanians, among those Balkan groups racialized as “Europe’s abnormals,” occupied a space of peripheral whiteness where they are simultaneously racialized outside of European whiteness and yet perform whiteness in relationship to Roma and Balkan Egyptians.Footnote 10 The notions of blackness and whiteness in Albania do not operate with fixed meanings; rather, locally situated racial logics are shaped by global structures and social processes.
It was my initial ethnographic encounters with Roma and Balkan Egyptian women interlocutors that drew my attention to ideas of a shared sense of blackness as they addressed me as “sister” and “cousin.” And it was later in my ethnographic research when I encountered the Albanian terms dorë e bardhë (“white hands” or “white side”) and dorë e zezë (“black hands” or “black side”) during several interviews with Roma and Balkan Egyptians. Albanians in Tirana, as I discovered, were often racialized as dorë e bardhë while Roma and Egyptians were racialized as dorë e zezë. These discursive formations prompted me to probe when and how these terms are employed, and by whom. Why and how do Albanians articulate whiteness in relationship to Roma and Egyptians, and why do Roma and Egyptians assert blackness, one in which some interlocutors claimed Martin Luther King, Jr. as their leader too, for example? Such ethnographic moments illuminated how race and racialization are not easily reduced to phenotypic variation. The shared sense of blackness extended beyond the idea that my Roma and Egyptian interlocutors had darker skin; while yes, race speaks to phenotype and the body, my research revealed that Roma and Egyptians articulated a Black positionality, one in which they expressed what it meant to be blackened. Flutura, an Egyptian woman who lived in an informal Romani and Egyptian settlement outside of Tirana described her life this way: “It is difficult to live here—can you not look around and see this? Do you think it is normal for us, for black people, to be forced to live like this?”
Flutura’s understanding of blackness was tied to her social and material conditions, conditions shaped by local color lines. As it pertains to African diasporic blackness, multiple scholars have long theorized about blackness as a social condition, particularly in American and west European contexts.Footnote 11 In this way, blackness, like Romaniness, has been constructed as inferior, as enslaved, and as a social problem. This outsiderness, the pariah syndrome as Ian Hancock has framed it, is one way in which blackness is understood as a condition.Footnote 12 Tracing these local constructions of blackness has additionally revealed the ways that blackness is a mobilizer, particularly for Balkan Egyptians. “We are building a political party, a force, that will speak for all of the black people of Albania.” This is how Rivelino Çuno, leader of the Party for Europeanization and Integration of Albania, framed the then bourgeoning Balkan Egyptian political party when we met for coffee in 2014. For Çuno, blackness spoke to both a Black identity and the possibilities of claiming blackness as means for naming social and political exclusion. To use anthropologist Damani Partridge’s theorization, blackness became a universal claim for naming what it means to be marginalized non-citizens.Footnote 13
Global formations of blackness are constructed as the antitheses of whiteness, with the axes of whiteness and blackness defining one another.Footnote 14 Scholars do not necessarily need to think of race and racialization in terms of a strict, stable binary of whiteness and blackness, and Southeast Europe can help us complicate this such as the ways we address marginal and peripheral whiteness.Footnote 15 At the same time, these hierarchal global formations of whiteness and blackness do reveal the ways that European whiteness is a modality that underwrites racial contracts, demonstrating how the boundaries of European whiteness can shift but still retains its undisputed position of power.Footnote 16 Europe has never just been a geographic referent but rather it is also a moral and geopolitical moniker.Footnote 17 As Aniko Imre has argued, east Europeans’ insistence on their whiteness is a means of asserting Europeanness.Footnote 18 While anti-Romani racism and antiblackness are distinct social processes, the latter, as shaped by white supremacy, can yield insight into the ways that whiteness is constructed in opposition to Romaniness as shaped by global racial color lines. This can expand how we talk about blackness and resist overly simplistic frameworks about the meanings of blackness vs. whiteness. One way to deepen inquiries of blackness and racialization is to engage in more relational rather than comparative analysis; to examine the workings of antiblackness and anti-Romani racism as parallel processes.Footnote 19
Antiblackness and Anti-Romani Racism as Parallel Processes
Antiziganism (also known as antig*psyism and/or anti-Romani racism), was first conceptualized in the 1980s and early 90s to describe the varied forms of oppression and violence (symbolic, political, structural, and institutional) that shape the relationships between majority societies and those considered Roma (or g*psy).Footnote 20 Understandings of antiziganism have not always focused exclusively and explicitly on race and racism but in this paper, I use the broader conceptualization of anti-Romani racism to encompass these symbolic, political, and structural forms of oppression, violence, and racialization that were initially conceptualized as antiziganism. Race is a meaningful analytical category for examining marginalization and inequality in Europe, and as Wolfgang Wipperman has argued, “Antiziganism has become a solid and unaltering component in the mental makeup of European majority societies.”Footnote 21 Anti-Romani racism is not a singular entity but rather exists in the plural manifestations across varying regions and social landscapes that render Roma as social and political scapegoats, problematic vagabonds, scammers, evil, and inferior.Footnote 22 White Europeanness is buoyed by anti-Romani racism and is continually made and remade against it.
I argue that scholars can examine antiblackness and anti-Romani racism as co-constitutive processes, as European whiteness is defined against blackness and Romaniness. Like race, blackness was invented and made, demonstrating how race is socio-politically and historically constructed but has, since its inception, posed as biological.Footnote 23 I have previously written about the embodiment of racism, drawing attention to the long-term impact of racialization on the body experienced by Black women and Roma and Egyptian women in Albania.Footnote 24 Scholar and activist Ruth Wilson-Gilmore conceptualizes racism as the vulnerability to premature death.Footnote 25 As argued by Joao Vargas, the only thing that is certain about antiblackness is that blackness is rendered permanently uncertain—Black becomes the non-citizen, the non-human.Footnote 26 Anti-Romani racism operates similarly, underpinning who receives humanity fully and to whom it is denied. Anti-Romani racism and antiblackness are pervasive; they smother. These processes are key components for examining the boundaries and limits of European whiteness. As Felix Chang and Sunnie Rucker-Chang explain, relational analysis on the experiences of racialization of Roma and Black Americans highlights the systems that mutually facilitate marginalization of both groups; those systems that shape multiple societal barriers.Footnote 27 As David Theo Goldberg reminds us, Europe’s racial self-articulation has long expressed itself in terms of the denial, exclusion, and ultimately purging of those not white.Footnote 28 Coupled analyses of antiblackness and anti-Romani racism therefore enable us to uncover those things that are constitutive of European white racial belonging.
The local racial formations, logics, and articulations are not disconnected from global racialization processes and racial logics. Blackness and whiteness are made and sustained by racial logics, and whiteness demonstrates how Europe sees itself, as counter to those racialized as non-white and inferior.Footnote 29 Their boundaries are not stable, continuously produced and reproduced, particularly as the answer changes to the question of who is white, why, and how? Anti-Romani racism and antiblackness shed light on some of those answers, revealing the embedded racial logics of such things as humanness, worth, and disposability. In southeastern Europe the racial logics of disposability and degradation shape an everyday rhythm, one in which Roma are criminalized, surveilled, and dehumanized. My ethnographic research illustrates how for many Roma this tempo involves familiar patterns of precarity, questioning whether they might sell an adequate number of second-hand materials, whether they will collect enough money or wash enough windows, whether there will be an encounter with the police or state, whether a family will be displaced from their home or watch their neighborhood demolished. Marginalization and ostracization are made ordinary forms of exclusion that do not necessarily involve regularly occurring acts of spectacular malice but forms that cement non-whiteness as permanent, continually legitimated through racial imaginations that render Roma as perpetual outsiders.
These parallel processes of antiblackness and anti-Romani racism reveal how race is spatialized and how space is racialized.Footnote 30 Antiblackness provides a framework for analyzing the social construction of space, what Setha Low refers to as “the actual transformation of space through peoples’ social exchanges, memories, images, and daily use of the material setting into scenes and actions that convey meaning.”Footnote 31 Those spaces racialized as Black are unsafe, undesired, unbearable, ugly, and yet at times, unoccupied. Black spaces are simultaneously unwanted yet easily reconfigured and transformed when those racialized as white desire renewal and expansion. Spatial and geographic analysis reveals the ways that Roma and Egyptians become Black in relation to whiteness, even if that whiteness is considered incomplete. Segregation itself becomes ordinary, an ongoing process that solidifies the boundaries of socioeconomic and geopolitical belonging.Footnote 32 Antiblackness and anti-Romani racism shape the everyday logics under which segregation happens, and many times remains unquestioned and unchallenged.
Expanding Beyond Hate
Race is not a western framework that can be applied to the Balkans to tell us something new, but a place like the Balkans could perhaps broaden conversations about race and how it operates. Race is not solely American. Race is Europe, is European, and is integral to Europeanization.Footnote 33 It is structural and constitutive of Europe, but race is not bounded nor restricted by borders.Footnote 34 Race travels; it is produced, reproduced, and emerges in multiple contexts and multiple ways. Some might ask why we might consider antiziganism, that is racism towards Roma and Egyptians broadly, alongside antiblackness. This question is understandable and from a theoretical perspective, we could ponder whether such an analytical inquiry is yet another example of the westernization or Americanization of race and racial identities, such that Black folk are deemed so in the Americas, and so therefore other non-white folks in different geographical contexts must have the exact same experiences. Or to put it another way, many may ask why the American binary of black and white must then be applied as a lens for understanding difference in other places or every other place. But instead of thinking about a comparative approach, what if scholars took a relational approach to examine antiblackness and anti-Romani racism to study both the constructions of blackness and otherness, as well as the functions of global white supremacy. Because the racial dynamics in any given society do not emanate solely from the logics and structures of that society, a multifaceted analysis that considers parallel and intersecting processes provides the opportunity to more critically study white supremacy, oppression, and coloniality.Footnote 35
I teach a first-year seminar at my university entitled Heritage and Hate. One of the key goals of the course is to complicate our understandings of these two concepts and problematize notions of ancient ethnic hatreds in southeastern Europe. One of the other primary tasks is to destabilize ideas that whiteness and white supremacy are relics of the past and to explore how whiteness actively shapes contemporary Europe.Footnote 36 The adoptions of human rights frameworks post-WWII, the widespread refutation of race in the period of state socialism, and the rhetoric of democratic inclusion and political engagement in the aftermath of state socialism, has created multiple of associations of race and racism with hate, tolerance, respect, and value shifts as the antidotes. Race continues to be denied across Europe while discursive platitudes about hatred abound, with vacuous calls for stability or peace as its counterparts.Footnote 37 But this linkage of racism and hate obfuscates the racializing systems of power and oppression within Europe’s sociopolitical landscape. Racism against Roma, as Ioana Vrăbiescu underscores, is brought to be bear by Europe’s political structures.Footnote 38 Writing about systemic racism against Roma, Vrăbiescu argues that anti-Romani racism cannot be addressed through human rights campaigns or minority protection efforts: these types of approaches can ultimately worsen racism as they erase the language of race while racialization is ongoing but made invisible and subtle.Footnote 39 Critical Romani scholars Margareta Matache and Angéla Kóczé have similarly argued that a continued focus on Romani marginalization, without paying attention to structural race-making processes, inhibits the possibilities for remedying racialized and gendered hierarchal domination in European societies.Footnote 40 False notions of racelessness subsequently prevail without the ability to name or address race.Footnote 41
Thinking Relationally
Race is an epistemological tool, and I am arguing for a mode of inquiry that considers the intersections and parallels of antiblackness and anti-Romani racism to interrogate European socioracial formations. To quote Frantz Fanon, there remains a “fact of Blackness,” whereby blackness is imposed upon Black people based on their appearance.Footnote 42 At the same time, I maintain that blackness and whiteness are so commonly (mis)understood as singularly phenotypic and racism as an individual moral failing.Footnote 43 Within these types of frameworks, regions like southeastern Europe are at times constructed and conceptualized as raceless. Yet this approach of thinking relationally about racial formations of blackness and whiteness, and about parallel processes of antiblackness and anti-Romani racism allow us to move beyond dominant narratives of ethnicity and nation and ask complex questions about the ways that race is lived, indexed, and embodied. We can ask greater questions about racialization of space and the spatialization of race. We can broaden our historical analyses to consider race’s global forms and those hierarchies that sustain white supremacy.
In my ethnographic work, I demonstrate how local ethnography can speak to broader social processes, but I do not argue that such phenomena always take the same form and shape across different terrains. Studying these articulations of and claims to blackness and thinking together with antiblackness and anti-Romani racism can expand our scholarly inquiry into blackness and racialization and can foster coalition and collaboration against structural racism.Footnote 44 At the same time this type of approach can also create challenges as it pertains to assuming false equivalences between different socioracial groups. Romani people and Black African diasporic groups have parallel experiences and struggles against white supremacy, but we must not fall prey to the idea that these experiences constitute uniform articulations of blackness, recognizing that in some areas of southeastern Europe there are no articulations of blackness at all among Roma populations. When it comes to studying racialization, scholars need to ensure that our research is historicized and contextualized, recognizing that race and racial logics are fluid and unstable. There is a need for further research about the ways that blackness, for example, is contested and/or refuted. At the same time, while frameworks of antiblackness both overlap with and diverge from anti-Romani racism, I maintain that it is antiblackness that can illuminate how the embedded logics of anti-Romani racism and whiteness shape the very notions of the social, the outcast, and the human, including in “raceless” regions. In doing so, both concepts speak to the notion of full humanity and how global white supremacy continually dehumanizes those racialized outside of whiteness.
Chelsi West Ohueri is Assistant Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, with appointments in Anthropology, African and African Diaspora Studies, and the Health Humanities Program. She is the author of the book Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife (Ithaca, 2025).
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