On My Positionality
Year after year, when I travel from Ohio to southeast Europe, I gain insights into where I fit in the local racial imaginary. When I travel, my brown skin serves as a soft border demarcating the spaces of colonized and colonizer, black and white, and possible hybridity. Local reactions to me decode the inner workings of a racial regime that provides, or does not provide, space for difference. In France, people speak to me in French. When I am routed through the Netherlands, people speak to me in Dutch, and likewise if, or when, I find myself in Germany, people speak to me in German. Likely because of the afterlives of conquest, violence, forced servitude, and migration, racial boundaries indicate to a group that I belong. Once I board the plane to travel east, however, flight attendants immediately greet me in English and linguistic interactions with strangers begin exclusively in English unless I inform them that I speak their language, which is always met with surprise. In these instances, I am reminded of Dubravka Ugrešić’s traveling insights in the early years following Croatia’s independence, when Ugrešić “felt on [her] own skin that frontiers really do exist.” In this passage, Ugrešić describes the manifest difference between the way she saw herself and how those in Europe saw her as “Other,” noting that her “difference” and “identity” were “doggedly determined by…others” (298).
It is from a Du Boisian sense of double consciousness, or “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” that I approach the topic of race and privilege in central and southeast Europe (Du Bois 194). My experience highlights the instrumentalization of borders, boundaries, and even physical difference that produces meaning beyond the immediate context of colonialism and imperialism.Footnote 1 My own engagement with the subject also acknowledges a complicated, layered meaning that understands my body as a border. As a Black American woman, I have passport privilege but my skin remains under the veil and behind the color line.
In this piece, I address the contours of east European whiteness and interrogate what it means to be unmarked in central and southeast Europe to better understand the underarticulated and understudied racial convergences and boundaries of local and transnational whiteness for east Europeans. This essay approaches the question of whiteness from the experience of the majority that is white at home but “off-white” or “peripherally white” when away.Footnote 2 To unpack ways these spatial differences matter, this article centers the idea of being “unmarked” from a critical whiteness studies perspective to offer suggestions on how one can understand whiteness as a facet of racialization, and the attendant production of privileges that emerge in central and southeast European racial formations.
East and West European Relationality
In 2001 Howard Winant wrote that there had been “a profound upheaval in the meaning of race” emerging to challenge the white supremacy common throughout the Western world (100). Although he focused on postimperial and decolonized societies, the sentiment is applicable to east European countries in meaningful ways. While the idea persists that east European countries were without race owing to a lack of empire, they, like their west European counterparts, are in fact multiethnic and multiracial.Footnote 3 In considering southeast European as multiracial, I recall Dušan I. Bjelić, who reminds readers that physical difference is not the only factor in racial formations (“Toward” 915–17). Even in recognizing the complex structures of race, I believe it important to underscore that Blackness in particular is, perhaps, one of the most consistent markers defining and constructing racialized borders globally. While there is a general disavowal of race in the region and in scholarship about the region, the racial contract that Charles Mills confronted in his work remains firmly in place in both central and southeast Europe.Footnote 4
Indeed, east Europe, central Europe, southeast Europe, and west Europe exist as discursive categories that move in and out of various definitions imagined and theorized from the point of view of the unmarked majority and the scholars who assign meaning to the terms.Footnote 5 In west Europe, as in east Europe, unmarked majorities represent major ethnic groups that correspond with territory and language, demonstrating what historically constituted nation and ethnicity, or race. In this context, indexes of belonging converge in linguistic preferences, first or last names, religious paraphernalia, and expressed or assumed religious affiliation. In southeast Europe specifically, these markers define as much as ninety percent of some populations, so the majority has many opportunities to reinforce power. Since majorities make up such a significant percentage of the polity, those of “small numbers” receive little attention; and in most cases the nation is constructed, or at least imagined, without them (Appadurai).
Owing to this population imbalance, the majorities in central and southeast Europe, just like in west Europe, can exist without knowledge of their privileged position in society, a prominent feature of what is commonly known as “whiteness,” which David Theo Goldberg recognizes as foundational to the idea of racelessness (359–60). Martha Mahoney notes that belonging to such a majority and enjoying the benefits “is as invisible as air” (221; see also Harris 1733). Relatedly, the pioneer of whiteness studies, Ruth Frankenberg, further notes that whiteness is itself unstable and “difficult for white people to name” (75). Accordingly, naming “whiteness” in postsocialist Europe continues to be challenging.
With some notable exceptions, the idea of whiteness in east Europe emerges in the literature, frequently from a transnational or external perspective rather than as an interrogation of internal racial logics. In other words, much of the scholarship engages with the pathbreaking notion of race that Michael Omi and Winant offered, as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (123). This literature also offers a consistent discussion of what Anca Parvulescu describes as “situational racialization” realized in a “relational chronotope of European whiteness” (“European Racial Triangulation” 38).
The literature on transnational, relational, or comparative east European whiteness likewise under-scores what Frankenberg described as the “all-too-real effects” of racialization, and the challenges in naming whiteness for a population long constructed as external to it (73). However, as Bjelić, in recalling Cedric Robinson, argues, racism has roots in capitalism and not just “white people meeting black people” (“Cedric J. Robinson” 3). In other words, racialization affects both majorities and minorities; for one group their racialization confirms their privilege and for the other their limitations. These distinctions are frequently denoted in the Western racial dichotomy of white/nonwhite, but these categories evade such analysis in “eastern Europe.”
In a roundtable presentation, for example, Ivan Kalmar stated that “migrants from eastern Europe suffer the same kind of problems as migrants of color” (“Conceptualising” 01:21:05–12). He offered possible remedies to the racisms that east Europeans experience, one of which was to include east Europeans in “affirmative action…policies” (01:22:20–25). While he specifically addressed the position of east European migrants in Germany, his comments advance an idea of east European parity in experiences of racialization, raising serious questions on what race can mean in the context of societies overrepresented by a majority, particularly a majority that codes, or “passes,” as “white” in migration, even if uneasily.
On Whiteness in Central and Southeast European
Two decades have passed since Anikó Imre wrote about how east European whiteness has “been called upon to provide legitimacy to the post-socialist nation-state” (80). When Imre wrote this sentiment, the prevailing idea in the field and on the ground was that the region existed outside race because of a lack of colonial engagement. Similar ideas also still exist in western Europe, despite a long history of colonialism and human categorization based on racialized features and corresponding behaviors. The patterns of trans-European production of racial innocence prove that racial logics remain despite clear differences in development, political systems, and geopolitical alliances.
Scholars working in Slavic and east European studies regularly accused those working on race of importing ideas from the United States as if it was the only society with racial formations. Imre’s writing set the stage not just for discussions of race in east Europe, but specifically the issue of whiteness, its uses, and its analytic possibilities in studies of countries constitutive of “eastern Europe.” Her analyses also provided a way to address the meanings and functionality of internal whiteness in countries where white east Europeans are the majority and the beneficiaries of privileges related to their majority status, or their whiteness.
To situate whiteness, it is also useful to understand the regional structures and socioracial hierarchies of differing “east European” communities. I have written elsewhere on how people of Asian and African descent complicate the racial hierarchy in Serbia, and how members of Romani communities are systemically marginalized and face discrimination in housing, education, and work opportunities among other things throughout Europe (Chang and Rucker-Chang). One need only look to the work of Romani scholars for evidence of the systemic as well as everyday racisms that Roma experience. As ethnic studies in the United States regularly adjusts to sociocultural realities to interrogate the technology of race and racism, critical Romani studies scholarship performs a similar function in decoding what has been cloaked in the language of sameness, color blindness, or even nature. Angéla Kóczé has contributed greatly to this scholarship and recently addressed the idea that “racial logic (attributed to an imagined, fixed biological hierarchization) and racialization constantly structure and re-inscribe the unequal hierarchical power relations that lead to humiliation, exploitation, and elimination” of Romani communities (123). Despite official statements and proclamations from state and multilateral organizations declaring victory over racism and bias, biological and cultural racism persist.
Similarly, Jelena Savić, a Roma feminist scholar, activist, and artist, writes on some of the structural aspects of what she terms “gadjo,” or non-Roma, privileges in justice, political representation, culture, public space, employment, social services, health, and housing (110–11). In other words, the privileges of “gadjoness,” or non-Roma people, are pervasive and affect nearly all sectors of society. Savić notes an unawareness of privilege on behalf of the beholder, akin to the way that Mahoney noted that whiteness “is as invisible as air” to the beneficiary. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas and Margareta Matache also discuss aspects of “gadjoness,” what they term “a shade of whiteness” that “remains implicit and normalized as the prototypical standards—the blueprint—the norm within societies, cultures, policies, laws, and scholarships, furthering marginalizing and relegating Roma people to the absolute periphery.”
Since their arrival to Europe from the Indian subcontinent, Roma communities have been imagined through an entire sign system of racial prejudices (Heng 417–55). They are structurally marginalized and racialized as a group different and distant from majorities. Their treatment reinforces the existence of a racial contract, informed by the histories and practices of former, local empires. Racial imaginaries and stereotypes produced about them are part of a legacy of empires that enslaved those with less power, such as the Ottoman Empire, or the Hapsburg empire that colonized, organized, modernized, and displayed people believed to be inferior.
Southeast European nations have been influenced by the global flows of information, local empires, and even imperial aspirations of their rulers.Footnote 6 To understand how race is structured and realized in the region requires knowledge of both internal and external influences. Regarding the former Yugoslav space specifically, Dejan Sretenović and Ana Sladojević demonstrate how notions of the racial inferiority of African people and superiority of white Yugoslavs remained within the cultural memory and framework of regional racial hierarchies even as they worked to normalize, and even promote, the incorporation of Blackness. Furthermore, Piro Rexhepi articulates the complicated internal matrix of racial difference in southeast Europe and implores scholars to consider Islam, ethnicity, and sexuality—especially in relation to Roma, Albanians, and queer people—to find intersections of otherness that present consistently as at odds with dominant paradigms that scaffold the nation.
Scholarship of the last decade has tackled questions of the location, origins, and even appropriateness of the study of race and provides powerful interventions about the mechanics and features of race and racialization in “eastern Europe.” Questions of the appropriateness of race as an analytic category have lingered for generations in the scholarship. Nevertheless, writings from the last decade, which include those by Bolaji Balogun, James Mark, Chelsi West Ohueri (Encountering and “Peripheral Whiteness”), Elana Resnick, and Miglena Todorova, among others, demonstrate the significance of race as a topic of analysis. It is likely that race will remain a source of contention in Slavic and east European studies writ large, but its relevance as an analytic category in the field can no longer be denied.
Transnational Whiteness as Immobile and Also Delayed
In the case of many central and east European individuals, their physical coding as “white” or “European” renders them unmarked in their home countries and therefore able to benefit from the systems and structures built for their protection and advancement. For other “nonwhite” individuals from central and east Europe, these systems work against them and can even undermine their health and safety. For white east Europeans migration likely renders them “deprived of a normative and structurally invisible position,” contributing to an unfamiliar and racialized state different from what they are accustomed to at home (Lundström 6). By contrast, the prejudice experienced by the majority is temporary, demonstrating the limits of privilege for “white” east Europeans in the global regime of white privilege beyond their home countries.
Passing and assimilation are two available strategies that differentiate the experiences of east Europeans who code as white in west Europe from the experiences of those whose skin serves as a deterring border.Footnote 7 Also important to consider is the role of the kin nation in bolstering whiteness, particularly as it offers possible mobility of race for the majority and the spatiotemporal parameters of privilege. Passing is typically understood as an intentional strategy, but for a white east European it can be a form of unintended camouflage and even safety, if only temporary—that is, until they reveal their nonlocal origins through accented language, creating the conditions for their racialization and possible discrimination. Nevertheless, as Slavenka Drakulić notes, the mark of difference exists for those populations only in the first generation (223). For those who remain and create a second or even third generation in their adopted country, they become local, revealing their racialized selves only through, perhaps, their surnames and bi- or even multilingualism, but not in their presentation. For the second generation the need to pass is minimized, if it exists at all. Their racial fluidity demonstrates the mechanics of the global Euro-American racial hierarchy, which affords privilege to some but not others. As Kalmar notes in his work White but Not Quite, generations of Europeans whose heritage originates in the east are now simply “European,” which is to say “white” (44–45). While their names mark their east European origins, their skin provides them a privilege to pass or integrate into the majority, demonstrating that their distance from the norm, or whiteness, is temporary, unlike for those with darker skin. Physiognomy continues to play a powerful role in constructs of power and racialization. “Whiteness” is in a continual state of being dressed and undressed, of marking and cloaking, particularly in relation to geography and religious affiliation. Conversely, Blackness, as a lived or social experience, does not shift. It remains a mark of backwardness and dispossession. As Olivette Otele notes in quoting the comedian Trevor Noah, “white is an ‘exclusive club,’ while black is like an ‘all-you-can-eat’ buffet at which everyone is welcome” (82).
This idea of the temporary displacement and prejudice is central to understanding white racial formations in general, however. As my colleagues and I wrote in 2022, “migration renders racial categories of belonging unstable and subjective based on external coding of the body: majorities become minorities as their bodies become inflected; others who never considered their identities as anything other than fixed to their national and or ethnic belonging become ‘white’” (Hashamova et al. 7). Whiteness, even if peripheral, can serve as a shield in external environs. It provides a pretext to be invisible and ignorant to the benefits of the status, or privilege, even if peripheral or delayed.
This is not to say that those whose identities fall within or even under the discursive category of “east European” do not experience prejudices. Scholars such as Daria Krivinos, Manuela Boatcă, Parvulescu (“Eastern Europe” and “European Racial Triangulation”), and Alyosxa Tudor provide powerful insights explaining the mechanics and means of east European marginalization, difference, and racialization. These differences have deep historical roots and are realized or instrumentalized depending on the sociocultural realities of a particular time. However, there is a need for critical reflection on what is lost and ignored when the mutability of whiteness, even of the east European, is underexamined, particularly when its benefits are simply inaccessible to so many others.
Transnational Privilege, Whiteness, and “Slavic Studies” in the United States—Considerations for Future Research
The important counterpoint to the negative racialization of east Europeans in west Europe, or when traveling in general, is the positive racialization of the white east European “at home.” Central and southeast Europe, as broader extensions of the analytic category of “east Europe” are rarely constructed from the perspective of its marginalized populations, however they may contribute to its external construction as other (Lynch). It cannot come as a surprise that scholarship on race remains contested in a field defined by populations who are now for the most part recognized as “white” and offered some of the benefits that such a status affords. The region and its people are European, albeit on the periphery, and its majorities are insufficiently white in migration or travel but can find privilege in their countries of origin. Engaging in a full picture of the uses and idea of race in “east Europe” allows the scholar to understand the various ways that “race,” as an analytic category as well as a lived reality, exists in the region. This allows the scholar to see that contemporary realizations have a long lineage and are in no way new or imported. Adding a self-reflective conversation about whiteness as it can be understood and analyzed situationally in the countries of central and southeast Europe in addition to its manifestations in migration or travel can help further expand how we as scholars analyze and understand race as well as internal whiteness and its privileges.
