Blackness in Western Europe

Dienke Hondius

"While the study of race relations in the United States continues to inspire and influence European thinking, Europeans have yet to confront their own history. To be black in Europe--whether during the sixteenth century or today--means sharing one crucial experience: being part of a small, but visible minority. European slave-owners, company directors, and investors in the distant past maintained an ocean-wide gap between themselves and the enslaved in the plantation colonies of the Caribbean. In the following centuries, this distance persisted. Even today, to be black in Europe often means to be one of a few black persons in a group. A racial pattern of exclusion has characterized European policy for more than four centuries. Dienke Hondius identifies ideas and attitudes toward "blackness," the concept of race as visible difference, developed in western Europe. She argues that racial...