"Eurowhite conceit," "dirty white" ressentiment : "race" in Europe by Jozsef Borocz : a comment

“Eurowhiteness” is both a practice, and an idea writes József Böröcz, a “conceptual instrument” based on a “self-racialization” imagined as “a pristine, untainted ‘White’ subjecthood” (p. 18) and “a marker of difference all over the world” (p. 22). The whiteness is detached from the “Euro” even as it gives it form and structure. To talk about this, especially to theorize it in the overbearingly white spaces of European academia, is to meet a response similar to that received by Böröcz from a Scandinavian colleague who discussed the conditions faced by Roma communities without mentioning racism: “We don’t have ‘race’ in Europe. That is an American concept” (Böröcz 2021, p. 1): The silence enveloping race in Europe implicitly severs the Euro from the Anglo and the American, from the crassness, the stomachs hanging out of shirts, the guns slung, the thin skins: “Why are you making everything about race? We have no need for such divisiveness. This is Europe!”