Eastern Europe’s ‘Peripheral Whiteness’: Class and Gender Racialization

Описание: In this talk, Dr Dominika Blachnicka-Ciacek and Dr Sylwia Urbańska developed the concept of peripheral Whiteness in the context of Eastern Europeans, arguing that their position is characterized by conditional access to the privileges associated with Whiteness. Focusing on the example of Polish migrants in Western European labour markets and Polish returnees at Poland’s eastern borders, the talk demonstrated how processes of racialization are deeply intertwined with dimensions of class and gender. In the context of East–West migration, the speakers argued that while some individuals are able to pass as ‘middle-class White’, the majority experience a form of not-quite-Whiteness, marked by racial deficits in comparison to Western Whiteness, while simultaneously retaining the capacity to racialize other groups perceived as non-White. At the same time, the emergence of new migration routes to Europe via the Polish-Belarusian border, followed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting influx of asylum seekers, has elevated the strategic importance of Poland’s eastern borderlands. In this context, Poles living in the eastern border regions, some of whom are returnees from Western Europe, increasingly participate in the construction of new racialized hierarchies that determine who, and on what grounds, can be admitted to the EU’s racialized community of value.