Eurowhite Conceit, Dirty White Ressentment: Race in Europe

This paper offers tools to rethink global critical insights on race in the contemporary structural transformation of European identity politics from the perspectives of postcolonial global historical sociologies. Race regimes rest on the following background assumptions: (1) The claim that humankind consists of a finite number of disjunct (non-overlapping) groups, populations or, in the extreme, races; (2) The presumption that it is valid to arrange those groups, populations or races in a system of moral super- and subordination; (3) The contention that the resulting moral hierarchy forms a single constant, irrespective of socio-historical contexts, criteria, or purposes of comparison; (4) Insistence that single, ahistorical/decontextualized hierarchy can be mapped on to body shape, skin pigmentation or other epiphenomenal features of groups, populations, or races, such that (5) Whiteness is always already at the top, Blackness is always already at the bottom of that hierarchy. This paper focuses on the workings of Whiteness as a moral-geopolitical superiority claim, whose defining element is an ahistorical/decontextualized claim, indeed demand, for unconditional global privilege. Whiteness is an unfounded, un-found-able-hence eminently unstable and contested-identity category. It is a relational category whose core is fixed as a constant, inaugurating the White subject's relations (superiority) to its constitutive outside. I introduce two conceptual innovations: eurowhiteness-result of an internal structuring of the category of Whiteness whose purpose is separating an even more exalted, even more superior cultural -racial distinction within the universe of Whiteness and dirty whiteness-to capture the epistemic position of quantitative undervalued, positions within the moral quasi-community of White claims for global privilege, especially in their east European variants.

Automated summary

This paper provides tools to reconsider global critical insights on race in the contemporary structural transformation of European identity politics through the lens of postcolonial global historical sociologies. It focuses on the workings of Whiteness as a claim of moral-geopolitical superiority, introducing conceptual innovations such as eurowhiteness and dirty whiteness to illustrate the internal structuring and undervalued positions within the moral quasi-community of White claims for global privilege, particularly in eastern European variants.