The discipline of political science should be uniquely placed to understand the role of racism in politics and policy. However, the history of the discipline indicates that the study of racism and discrimination has been marginalized, despite the centrality of race in politics and societal relations. In this chapter, I examine more closely the history of political science and race since the discipline was founded in the late 1800s. The way that race has been handled in my own discipline provides lessons for other disciplines, particularly those in the social sciences, but it is also an indicator of how society has dealt with issues of race over time. We are entering an era of greater awareness of the role of racism in the development of policy and politics, and it is clear that the lack of diversity in political science has had a major impact on the types of research that have been done over time and in many ways the quality of that research was impacted by the lack of taking into account racial biases.

The discipline of political science has been a latecomer to the study of race and politics. Other fields, including sociology, have been engaged in examining race issues since at least the 1950s. What is curious is that the study of race was an important component in the founding of the discipline, as I will examine in the next section of this chapter. Then race disappeared from the agenda beginning in the 1920s through the 1960s. An examination of that time period indicates that the lack of focus on race had to do with our ahistorical approaches that didn't take into consideration long-standing structures that came out of the eras of slavery and Jim Crow.

Sociology had W.E.B. DuBois as one of its founders who put Black America at the center of his research beginning in the late 1800s. Many scholars have focused on the role of DuBois, and how he was erased from the discipline of sociology, as explained by Saint-Arnaud and Feldman:

I have traced the intellectual development of ideas about race in the previous chapter, but along with the ideas came the actions. Defining Africans as sub-human was necessary to legitimate the slave trade. Colonialism was based on similar ideas but added to it was the idea that the subjugated peoples were barbarians that needed to be taught how to be civilized. Underlying those “ideals” were the need for land, power, raw materials, and labor. The original sin of slavery is the beginning point for the roots of racism and the connections that have been built across the Atlantic Ocean since the 15th century. European explorers would begin the trade that would ultimately define a new nation and bind the two sides of the Atlantic in a trade that would destroy lives and souls in Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

Race relations today reflect the ongoing impact of the mass enslavement of millions of Africans, not only in the US, but in the Caribbean and Latin America. The brutality of the slave trade is clearly described in much of the historical literature, but it becomes clearer when one visits the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, DC. Leg irons and other implements, pieces of a slave ship, and historical artefacts bring home the cruelty, confinement, and death that met the slaves who survived the middle passage and made it to America.

Colonialism (and imperialism) were part of the driving force behind the slave trade. In order to understand the transatlantic connections between what would become the US and those in Europe who sought their fortune through trade, it is important to understand the linkages between slavery and colonialism. Slavery would lead to a large population of people of African descent in North and South America, while colonialism would eventually lead to the migration of many of the formerly colonized to the lands where they could speak the language but were mainly wanted for manual labor. This connection between forced migration and the labor migration that followed World War II is an important component of the roots of racism in the US and Europe.

On Memorial Day, May 25, 2020, George Floyd's life slipped away as he said, “I can't breathe.” Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer knelt on his neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds (Levenson, 2021). Floyd's crime was allegedly using a fake $20 bill at a convenience store. The video of his murder was shared millions of times on social media which allowed the world to see his life taken away. It would become a seminal moment with protests against police brutality and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement developing around the world. The demonstrations were historic in that they drew in not only Black protestors, but people from all backgrounds and nations.

The conviction of officer Chauvin almost a year later was a relief, but it also came with the recognition that there would be much more work to do to end anti-Black police brutality and discrimination in the post-Trump era. Voter suppression measures were on the ballot in many US states, and in the UK, a report commissioned by the Conservative government after the 2020 protests denied the existence of structural racism, flying in the face of evidence provided by many who had participated in the study (Cassidy and John, 2021).

In his seminal 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois states, “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colorline”( p 3). Although much has changed since that time, as we enter the second decade of the 21st century structural racism remains an intractable problem, not only in the US, but in Europe. Norms around the idea of Whiteness are embedded in our societies. The groups who are the targets of racism and violence may be different in these countries, but the impact on equality is the same. Whether it's people of Muslim background, African descent, or newly arrived Asian immigrants, the norms around White supremacy and political power come into play. Ideas around race and ethnicity that developed hundreds of years ago still define our social and economic relations.

In the first decade of the 21st century, many hoped that that election of Barack Obama in the US and the growing political activism of minority communities in Europe was leading to an era of post-racial politics. However, those hopes were dashed as racism showed itself to be resilient with the rise of leaders like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and the success of racist, antiimmigrant parties across Europe. Even in 2008, at the time of Obama's first term as president, Howard Winant was arguing that, “far from becoming less politically central, race defines and organizes the world and its future, as it has done for centuries. I challenge the idea that the world, as reflected by the national societies I compare, is moving ‘beyond race’” (Winant, 2008, p 42).

First, it is important to examine what is meant by the term race. As noted in the previous chapter, many disciplines have struggled with defining race as a concept and an issue for research. In a recent example, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) put together a committee to develop a statement to address the concept of race and racism. The authors note in the summary of their statement that:

The authors point out that race is a social construct, while acknowledging that racism is a very real response to people who are not considered White. In this book, I use a variety of terms to describe those who are impacted by racism, including Black, person of color, immigrant, and under-represented minority. Since this is a comparative study, these terms have different meanings in different countries, and I will attempt to be careful in my use of these terms in this broader context.

The development of the idea of race was mainly associated with people of African descent (in conjunction with the development of Whiteness) up until the late 1800s. As immigration policy developed in the US and Europe, a new era of racialization would begin. The conflation of immigration and race is often seen through the impact of immigration policies. For example, the first restrictions on immigration in the US were the Chinese exclusion acts passed between 1882 and 1888 (Givens et al, 2020). The racialization of different waves of immigrants after the US Civil War is echoed in the racialization of ethnic and religious minorities who migrated to Europe after World War II.

Although racism is often based on color in Europe, it is also important to look at issues of cultural racism (Modood, 2005, p 7). As Muslims have become more defined as a group, rather than as part of their respective nationalities and ethnicities, they have become the focus of restrictive immigration policies, punitive integration measures, and citizenship tests designed to test for “anti-liberal” values. Although much attention goes to the issue of Muslims in Europe, many groups face issues of racism and political exclusion. The basis for discrimination is often perceived race, as well as religion and culture. These perceptions lead to policies that impact the ability of immigrants to not only enter and settle in a country, but also whether they can thrive, as noted by Castles et al: “Immigration policies have consequences for immigrants’ future status. Policies designed to keep migrants in the status of temporary mobile workers make it likely that settlement will take place under discriminatory conditions … Visible differences – for instance dark skin color or Islamic dress – can attract suspicion and social exclusion” (Castles et al, 2014, p 271).

In this chapter I focus on three critical transitions that had a major impact on transatlantic race relations. The first was the early 1900s and the era after the Civil War which would define the ongoing inequalities for African Americans and the first race-based restrictive immigration policies in the US.

Donald Trump's election to the US presidency in 2016 was a triumph for far-right, populist politics in the US. Many voted for him simply because he was the Republican candidate, but his extreme positions couldn't be ignored. He launched his campaign in 2015 with a racist attack on Mexican immigrants and his profoundly misogynistic language and violence toward women was revealed in a leaked video from an appearance with Access Hollywood (Fahrenthold, 2016). Despite these revelations, Trump managed to win the electoral college, defeating Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes.

One of the most prominent issues during the election was immigration, in particular undocumented immigrants. Trump consistently called for the building of a wall on the Southern US border (and claimed that Mexico would pay for it). He played into the fears of working-class White voters who feared the flow of immigrants coming from Mexico and Central America. Trump's approach to immigration was in line with many of his compatriots on the other side of the Atlantic, not only on the far right, but also many conservative politicians like Boris Johnson of the British Conservative Party, and the Bavarian Christian Democrats who wanted to set up detention centers on the southern border of Germany.

The politics of White supremacy were on full display in the second decade of the 21st century. The success of far-right parties, increased violence toward ethnic, racial, and religious minorities, and more restrictive policies on immigration were impacting politics on both sides of the Atlantic. In this chapter, I discuss my ongoing work on radical right parties in Europe, the shifting discourses that have impacted mainstream right parties, and the impact on left parties. Political participation by ethnic and racial minorities has also been an important factor in the development of new political coalitions. Since the early 2000s, there have been new organizations that have arisen for Black and Muslim communities in Europe, many with the aim to encourage voting, similar to the efforts of Operation Black Vote in the UK.

From its founding, race and law have been integral components of state-and nation-building processes in the US. Slavery, in effect, transformed people into property, and elaborate rules governed the existence of Blacks, free and slave, in the North as well as the South. Even after the institution of slavery was destroyed by a bloody civil war, Whites continued to use law as a means of subjugating African Americans. As a result, an array of state and federal legal systems, often known by the euphemism “Jim Crow,” codified various racial distinctions, often limiting the capacity of African Americans to vote or to enter into contracts, the two fundamental elements of participation in a Lockean democracy. In addition, under the common law, owners of property and capital essentially possessed a right to discriminate. They could thus refuse services, accommodations, and employment to individuals on any grounds. This right gave Whites, particularly White men, considerable non-state power to shape communities.

Citizenship, civil rights, and voting rights are closely intertwined. In the US civil rights leaders fought for the right to vote after voter suppression laws made voting nearly impossible for Blacks in the American South. Ethnic and racial minorities face similar challenges relating to discrimination on both sides of the Atlantic, but they also have fought for their rights, learning from the various protests and civil rights movements. Although civil rights and human rights movements have been part of the political landscape from a transatlantic perspective since the founding of the League of Nations, policy developments were slow to develop until after World War II. The US took the lead with policy, followed by the UK. It would take action at the EU level for most European countries to focus on racial antidiscrimination policy.

In this chapter I begin with an examination of discrimination in practice in the US and Europe, particularly in terms of housing, labor rights, and cultural practices. I then examine the development of civil rights legislation in the US and its impact on policy and movements in the UK. In the 1990s, antidiscrimination policy shifted to the EU level, with the pursuit of antidiscrimination policy in the form of the Racial Equality Directive, and I conclude with a discussion of developments in political participation and representation for immigrants in Europe.

Citizenship is one of the defining features of a sovereign nation-state. Who is allowed to enter and settle helps to define the nature of a country. The concept of the nation-state was developed in Europe, but it has been refined as democracies like the US have come to the fore. Founding myths, at least in the case of the US, have played an important role in helping define who we are as a country and as a people. As Woodard notes:

In the case of the US, immigration has become an important part of our founding myth, and we have an ideal that citizenship is open to all. France has had a similar approach to citizenship, with an ideal that anyone can be a French citizen, as long as they agree with Republican ideals of liberty, equality, and brotherhood. Germany, on the other hand, had a long-standing commitment to an ethnic version of citizenship, while the UK has had a focus on the broader commonwealth. Each of these founding myths and forms of citizenship has clashed with and been challenged by immigration.

After the US Civil War, citizenship was guaranteed to former enslaved men, yet other groups would be denied citizenship, including Chinese immigrants who would begin arriving after the war to help build the frontier in California and other parts of the West.

“We can't breathe” – a cry heard around the world in the summer of 2020. One of the more egregious forms of discrimination against Black people on both sides of the Atlantic is police violence. In May of 2020 protests broke out around the world after the horrifying death of an African American man, George Floyd, in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Mr. Floyd had been apprehended after being accused of passing a counterfeit US$20 bill. It's not clear that he knew the bill was fake. Outrage came as a viral video of a policeman kneeling on Floyd's neck while he was asphyxiated flew around social media.

Although all four police officers involved in the murder were immediately fired, only one of them was arrested for murder a few days after the incident. Frustration with the situation only grew as a coroner's report tried to place blame for Floyd's death on underlying health conditions. This did not mollify community members who noted that Floyd was pleading for his life, telling the officer that he could not breathe and calling out for his mother.

The ensuing riots came in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with many cities having been under shelter in place orders since mid-March. Given that African Americans were getting sick and dying at disproportionate rates, many in the community were frustrated with the lack of access to health care and the fact that many of those who were considered “essential” workers came from minority communities. That frustration played into the protests, and in some instances, violence that played out from London to Los Angeles.

It should be noted that much of the violence that ensued in the weeks after the death of George Floyd came from the police themselves. Dressed in riot gear and using rubber bullets and tear gas, the police in many cities were the instigators of violence. It is well known that policing in the US has a long history of systematic racism. In fact, some argue that the police were created in order to enforce racial codes and segregation from the time of slavery through the Jim Crow era.

The seeds for this book started back in the late 1990s when I was conducting research in France on the radical right vote in Europe. I remember seeing a large protest for the release of Mumia Abu Jamal, who had been on death row in the US after being convicted for the 1981 shooting death of a Philadelphia police officer. A protest in Paris seemed ironic to me at the time, given that many of the French people marching to save this African American man rarely considered the plight of Algerian immigrants who lived in poverty in the Parisian banlieues (suburbs). This despite the fact that the movie La Haine had done much when it debuted in 1995 to lay bare the life of immigrants in those suburbs and the police violence and oppression they faced.

This book is informed by my experience conducting research on issues related to immigration and race in Europe since the 1990s, as well as my experiences as an African American woman growing up in the post-civil rights era US. My experiences as a researcher and academic frame the way that I approach this analysis of the connections between the US and Europe, particularly the way that ideas and policies have developed around race, and their impacts on the African Diaspora. I’m embarrassed to say that although I studied international relations at Stanford University and political science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), I didn't understand the significance of pioneers in my field, like Merze Tate and Ralph Bunch, until much later in my career.

My experiences in doing research in Europe over the next 15 years would provide me with regular opportunities to observe the difficulties that politicians there had dealing with issues of race. I remember attending an “equity summit” in Berlin where an official in Angela Merkel's administration told me that Germany didn't have much experience dealing with issues of racism, this despite the fact that Germany has had a significant ethnic minority presence since at least the 1970s. Many of those immigrants only got access to citizenship in 1998 when the citizenship policies were liberalized.

Politics, demographics, and White supremacy

In February of 2019 I was invited to record a talk for the PBS show “Blackademics,” and I titled my talk, “Can Democracy Survive Racism?” At the time, my concern was that anti-democratic elements in our societies were using issues of race to divide and in some cases radicalize parts of the electorate. For now, I believe democracy will survive, but this conclusion gives me the opportunity to explore some answers to the dilemmas we are facing for democracy.

The success of far-right politicians in Europe, including Poland and Hungary, has clearly led to an undermining of the free press and judicial oversight. Countries like France and Germany are not currently in danger, as the support for radical right parties there has remained around 15– 20 percent of the electorate but it will be important for under-represented minorities in these countries to feel that they have a voice if democracy is to survive.

The saying goes that demographics is destiny. It is clear that demographic change will continue on both sides of the Atlantic. It is important to acknowledge that racism exists and that it will continue to be a challenge as we struggle with the cultural and economic challenges that will strain the bonds that have held these societies together since World War II. I don't believe that we will face war, but societal upheavals have and will continue to occur whether they come from terror attacks, pandemics, or economic crises.

It was clear to me from my first visit to Europe in 1986 that the issue of race was just as compelling there as it was in the US. As I have shown in this book, many of the ideas that have developed around race were first developed and institutionalized in Europe. The history of racism that led to slavery, genocide, and the Holocaust continues to play a role in attitudes and policies that impact ethnic and racial minorities. These attitudes have continued in new forms, focusing on immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, Muslims in particular, and a willingness to vote for anti-democratic parties who focus on economic and cultural threats.

This chapter is all about a willingness to be vulnerable. When I decided to write this book, I knew that one of the most important components would be to demonstrate my own willingness to do the deep work it takes to get to radical empathy. This chapter was the hardest to write. I had to face some truths that were uncomfortable, and come to terms with a family story that didn't fit into a nice narrative about my parents’ orientation toward social justice, or even being part of the broader Black community in the city I grew up in. However, as I wrote this, I kept in mind the words of Jon Acuff: “Everybody has a story. When we don't take the time to know someone's story or worse, create our own version of it, we lose the chance to understand what they need, which is the first step to empathy.”

For many African Americans, much of the focus in the 1950s and 1960s was on the civil rights movement and the gains made through court decisions like Brown vs Board of Education that found segregated schools unconstitutional, and the passage of civil rights laws, like the 1965 Voting Rights Act. While many were out marching and some lost their lives in the fight for equality, others were simply living their lives. They made impacts in other ways, for example, in the case of my father, being one of the first Black NCOs in the Air Force as the military was desegregated.

The lives my parents led were important to the struggle as well, but they also made choices that impacted my ability to identify with my extended family and the Black community more broadly. As the youngest in the family, I have relied on my older sisters to learn about and understand many of the events that had an impact on our lives. I have also listened to the stories of my aunts, my mother's cousins, and family friends to be able to paint a more complete picture of how we were raised, and why we ended up staying in Spokane, Washington, where I grew up.

Spokane is an important player in my family's story. My father was stationed at Fairchild Air Force Base outside of the city when I was born in 1964.

As I write this on November 12, 2020, my shoulders still ache from the tension I felt over the past week. It has only been 6 days since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were projected to become our new president and vice-president. It was a tense week as we watched ballots being counted in the states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona. I was thrilled on Saturday when the announcement was finally made—Biden and Harris had won. We had friends over for champagne (with masks on), celebrating the fact that we would have a president who was already calling for unity, and the first African-American, Asian-American, woman vice-president. The good news is that 79 million voters chose a new path for our country. The bad news is that over 73 million Americans voted to give Donald Trump a second term. We remain a divided country.

As I reflect on the upheaval and chaos we have experienced in the last four years of the Trump presidency, I worry, knowing that he will remain a potent force in the politics of our country for the foreseeable future. I never imagined four years ago that we would be facing a dangerous pandemic and an economic disaster, as well as the anti-racist Black Lives Matter movement that would so deeply impact our lives. Trump's divisiveness, particularly during the election campaign, left many feeling fearful, whether they supported him or not. His unwillingness to set an example by wearing a mask, even after contracting the virus himself, has likely played into the increasing numbers of COVID-19 across the US.

Winter is approaching and the numbers of people testing positive for COVID-19 in the US and Europe are increasing. Our long quarantine continues. I am hopeful, however, that the message for empathy is gaining traction. I have had many people reach out to learn more about my work, and I am working with several companies and schools as they try to bridge divides in their communities.

It is unfortunate that some political elites have chosen the politics of division, even as our country becomes more diverse. The demographic changes in our country are inevitable, but we must convince people from all backgrounds that we can be better by working together. There is a long history behind the divisions in our societies, and I explore that further in my next project, The Roots of Racism.