Introduction

In this book, we have examined how minority women survive and resist the French and British austerity regimes. We have demonstrated how the Scottish, English and French contexts create particular opportunities that shape minority women's political behaviour and as well as specific kinds of obstacles. These obstacles often foreclose collective debate and action on minority women's existing intersecting inequalities and austerity's asymmetrical effects. In particular, we have explored how political racelessness operates in each country, despite putative support for multiculturalism and racial equality in Scotland and England, which serves to silence and undermine minority women's social justice claims.

We have also argued that we must resist the temptation to treat minority women's precarity as a fundamentally ‘new’ experience under austerity. Rather, austerity only worsens an already existing crisis of minority women's economic insecurity. Taking seriously minority women's institutionalised inequality requires a historical understanding of:

• • how the European racial contract was constructed as a key organising principle of European modernity;

• • how the racial order is sustained in contemporary Europe through racialised policy and practice in which race is never explicitly named;

• • how the racial order continues to be defended on both the political Left and Right through a practice of deeming race irrelevant to the European polity.

Further, taking minority women's inequalities seriously also requires a different way of organising and mobilising anti-austerity movements that centre, validate and legitimise minority women as active agents and authors of their lives. Anti-austerity activism necessitates a complex understanding of the dynamics of race, class, gender and legal status. Ignoring race and gender in order to build a falsely unified Left based solely on class and/or populist politics is to wreak profound material and discursive violence on minority women and their interests. Eschewing race and gender also misunderstands how capitalism operates to disproportionately devalue minority women's labour and to depress their income and wealth. Without a working knowledge of racial capitalism, anti-austerity movements will continue to exclude and marginalise minority women for the sake of a mythically all-white, and presumably all-male, working class.

We have also examined how the reshaping of the third sectors in each country dramatically transforms the terms of minority women's activism.