Looking to US, Europe seeks its own civil rights movement

t took the killing of a black man in the United States, choked under the knee of a white police officer, to bring people out into the streets in Europe.

The Continent doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to tackling racism — or even admitting it exists. Despite the prevalence of racial profiling, police brutality and discrimination against non-white citizens in labor and housing markets, Europe hasn’t seen a tide-turning civil rights movement capable of making an impact on the political sphere.

Now, after an angry week that saw unprecedented protests across the Continent, some activists are seeing reason for hope: that Europe is finally ready to start grappling with racial injustice on its soil.

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or Europeans watching events unfold across the Atlantic — as thousands took to the streets across the U.S. — it was the massive, and seemingly effective, response that followed George Floyd’s death as much as the brutality of his killing that spurred them to action. At a time when U.S. President Donald Trump has tarnished the national brand in the eyes of many in Europe, activists took cues and borrowed slogans from a civil rights movement that has inspired people on both sides of the Atlantic for decades.

In Belgium, some 10,000 people gathered in front of Brussels’ Palais de Justice for a protest organized by the Belgian Network for Black Lives. In a sea of hand-drawn “Black Lives Matter” and “No justice, no peace” placards, people held up signs calling out the country’s history of racism — “Belgium, too” and “We need to talk about Leopold II and Belgian colonies” — and the names of recent victims of police violence.

A planned protest last week organized by families of victims of police brutality in France — including Adama Traouré, a 24-year-old black man who died in police custody in 2016 — drew record numbers of people in Paris. In cities across Germany, Spain, the U.K. and the Netherlands, protesters also flouted lockdown rules to flood public squares to demand justice for the people of color who died in police custody in their own countries. They filled streets in Dublin, Copenhagen and Milan. In Bristol, in the U.K., protesters tore down the statue of a 17th-century slave trader, dragged it through the streets and threw it in the harbor.

“It’s a big surprise for many of us — we’ve never seen this kind of thing before,” said Yassine Boubout, a Belgian activist and law student working on issues of police brutality and racial profiling, of the Brussels protest. “I was standing next to the podium and had a clear view of all the people [across the square] and all the way to the king’s palace.

“It made me emotional, because I don’t only work on this, I’m a victim of this violence myself,” he added. “Only two weeks ago, I had a random ID check by a police officer at night, with no clear reason.”

Politicians who once turned down meetings are now reaching out, said Boubout, who has been invited to speak in the Brussels parliament. “It feels like a door has opened.”

A protest that was initially about an American victim of police violence is getting broader and broader, according to Boubout. “Now people are saying we need justice for us, for the victims in our own country.”

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n comparison to the civil rights movement in the U.S., Europe’s history of anti-racism activism is short. Despite a number of large-scale protest movements, it has yet to break into the mainstream or force lasting political change.

The comparison is unfair, in many ways, because Europe’s history with race relations on its soil is also shorter. There was no large-scale system of slavery in modern Europe; it largely “exported” its racism to its colonies, which it plundered for wealth and cheap labor. Most migration from Africa to Europe is relatively recent, starting in the 1960s. In most European countries, there are people who remember when large numbers of migrants first arrived.

Colonialism is still a touchy subject in a number of countries, particularly in France and Belgium, which have largely failed to grapple with their bloody legacies. There is a “selective amnesia” in Europe about its imperial legacy and a “toxic nostalgia that to this day taints their misunderstanding of that history,” the British journalist Gary Younge wrote in a piece for the New York Review of Books.

The U.K. is largely seen as an outlier in that respect, thanks to a large-scale civil rights movement inspired by the U.S.’s in the 1960s that led to robust anti-discrimination policies. But it hasn’t been spared accusations that it is not doing enough to address racial inequality.

Denial is particularly strong in France, which has a deep-rooted image of itself as a neutral, color-blind republic that champions liberté, égalité and fraternité. Efforts to organize around a racial identity have historically been hindered by an insistence — from the government and in society — that a person’s identity as “French” trumps any other, whether that’s black, Arab or Algerian.

“In the U.S., no one is surprised when people organize themselves to put out black studies journals, or to organize black departments in universities,” said Nadia Fadil, an associate professor at the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Center at the University of Leuven. In France, she added, “there’s a lot of anxiety about that and it’s very much policed.”

The first generation of migrants to places like France and Belgium did mobilize. Most were guest workers from former colonies or came to earn professional degrees and were inspired by the anti-colonial movements taking place in their home countries, according to Fadil.

But academics and activists who tried to start a conversation around race were rebuffed. In the Netherlands, the Surinamese-Dutch anthropologist Philomena Essed was widely panned for her book “Everyday Racism,” which fueled debate in the country in the 1980s but was dismissed as “pretentious,” “biased” and “gloomy.”

Momentum has been slowly building over the years, and at several key moments appeared ready to force a greater reckoning. In 2005, the banlieues around Paris — predominantly working-class, non-white neighborhoods — were engulfed in violent riots for three weeks after two young boys were electrocuted in an electricity substation where they were hiding from police.

“The problem is that racism is still seen as an individual act of bad behavior, rather than a structural problem” — Ilke Adam, professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel

In 2014, protesters took to the streets in solidarity with the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The creation of the global #BlackLivesMatter movement a year earlier — in response to the acquittal of the man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin in Florida — also galvanized activists in Europe.

But in each case, politicians have largely failed to address activists’ efforts with tangible changes in policy. Many of the issues that fueled the 2005 riots in Paris have been left unaddressed.

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esides the reluctance to acknowledge bias, structural issues have stonewalled progress.

“European media is not used to talking about discrimination and police brutality,” said Ojeaku Nwabuzo, a senior research officer at the nonprofit European Network Against Racism. “In the U.S., where the corporate media industry is almost a form of media entertainment, they have 24-hour cable news that really covers these kinds of incidents.”

By contrast, when Adil, a 19-year-old Belgian man of Moroccan descent, was killed in a police chase in April, most local outlets focused on the riots that broke out in his neighborhood following his death and portrayed police officers as those under attack, according to Nwabuzo. “If that is the narrative that comes out of the media, this is the view people will have,” she said.

Most European governments don’t systematically collect data on how a person’s race affects their chances of employment or on the housing market, their treatment in health care or their interactions with police.

“This makes a huge difference,” said Nwabuzo. “You have research studies by universities every once in a while, but it’s not systematic.”

The relative youth of Europe’s movements also means there are fewer images and fewer role models for European activists to look to than in the U.S., where historical figures such as Sojourner Truth and Martin Luther King Jr. and an archive of photographs of brutality and the civil rights movement have created a common language for activists to draw on.

There are also fewer institutions to support protest movements. There is no European equivalent to the American Civil Liberties Union, or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

An EU directive passed in 2003, the Race Equality Directive, required EU countries to set up a dedicated equality body and to adopt legislation to address discrimination in housing and employment.

But implementation is patchy and activists have criticized the approach, because it is designed to tackle individual cases of discrimination rather than address systemic issues, according to Ilke Adam, a professor for migration, diversity and justice at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

“We need to move far beyond that,” Adam said. “The problem is that racism is still seen as an individual act of bad behavior, rather than a structural problem.”

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lthough most of Europe, unlike the U.S., has never put in place a system of legal discrimination explicitly targeting people of color, like the Jim Crow laws, the daily racism experienced by Europeans is no less shocking. In some cases, it’s more so.

“Levels of incarceration, unemployment, deprivation and poverty are all higher for black Europeans,” according to Younge. “Perhaps only because the Continent is not blighted by the gun culture of the U.S., racism here is less lethal.”

“They can condemn racism from Donald Trump, from white supremacists in the U.S., but they don’t say a word about it here” — Yasser Louati, head the nonprofit Justice and Liberties For All Committee

Being a black or brown person in Europe means being confronted from a young age with teachings that paint colonialism as a worthy enterprise. It means you’re more likely to live in poorer, heavily policed neighborhoods. It means your job applications will often go unanswered and you will have a hard time renting property or buying a house.

You’ll have seen people black up their faces and dress up as Zwarte Piet every year in early December. You’ll have watched far-right parties rise in the polls on openly racist platforms and loose language comparing migrants to vermin. You’ll have seen footage of football fans throwing banana skins at black players. And you’ll have seen politicians, most of whom do not look like you, stay silent.

Racism in Europe “might be less visible, but it’s not true that it’s less intense,” said Tunde Adefioye, who is from L.A. and the city dramaturge at the Brussels theater KVS as well as founder of Urban Woorden, a nonprofit that uses poetry as a tool for youth engagement.

In Belgium, Afro-Europeans are four times more likely to be unemployed than white Belgians, despite being more highly educated on average, and 80 percent say they have been victims of discrimination and the target of racial slurs.

A 2019 survey of black people living in Europe found that 30 percent of respondents had experienced racist harassment in the previous five years and 5 percent said they were physically attacked. Only 14 percent reported an incident to the authorities, out of fear of the police or because they didn’t believe it would change anything.

It is still rare to see a person of color in a position of power in the political sphere in continental Europe. On his first day in the European Parliament, former British MEP Magid Magid was asked to leave by a security guard “who clearly thought I didn’t belong,” he wrote in an op-ed last year.

The coronavirus pandemic has also highlighted racial inequality.

In France, for example, the strict lockdown featured streams of social media videos from Paris’ predominantly non-white suburbs of ID checks and arrests that turned violent. Reports of racial slurs used by police prompted the suspension of two officers under public pressure, and reignited a debate about racism in the force, where more than 50 percent of officers voted for the far-right party National Front in 2015.

The pandemic also fell heavily on essential workers, often people of color, who are also more likely to suffer from complications of COVID-19. In the U.K, a government-ordered inquiry found people of black and Asian ethnicity are between 10 percent and 50 percent more likely to die of COVID-19 than white Britons. In Sweden, public health data showed that members of the country’s immigrant Somali population, who are more likely to live in crowded households and hold down essential jobs, make up a disproportionate number of casualties.

The vulnerability of people of color, activists say, is the result of decades of discrimination that has caused them to work in the kinds of jobs, live in the kinds of housing and develop the kinds of underlying health conditions that leave them more exposed to the virus.

In addition to the footage of George Floyd’s brutal killing, it was the wave of heartfelt statements from European leaders speaking out against police brutality in the U.S., after they had stayed silent on similar issues at home, that spurred people in Europe to give voice to their own anger.

“It was the perfect example of European hypocrisy,” said Yasser Louati, a French human rights advocate who heads the nonprofit Justice and Liberties For All Committee. “They can condemn racism from Donald Trump, from white supremacists in the U.S., but they don’t say a word about it here.”

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or activists who have been working on raising awareness of police brutality and racism for decades, something about this moment feels different.

“I’ve never seen so many people marching against police brutality,” said Rokhaya Diallo, a French journalist, filmmaker and activist. “I’m used to seeing mostly the same activists. But this time I saw people who never marched before.

“Even the fact that we are now having this debate, that we are comparing ourselves to the U.S., to me that’s new,” she added. “It means people cannot, like they used to do, take for granted that nothing is happening here.”

Sihame Assbague, an activist and journalist who was formerly a spokesperson for a coalition against racial profiling in France, said she took the turnout in Paris — especially among young people — as a sign more people are becoming aware of the issues. “A lot of young people are saying, we’re fed up with police brutality, with structural racism and we are not going to keep silent anymore,” she said.

In some places, the dominoes have started to fall.

On Tuesday, the city of Antwerp removed a statue of Leopold II that had been defaced with red paint and set on fire. A petition to get rid of all statues of the former king, whose rule over the Belgian Congo generated mass wealth for Belgium and killed up to 10 million people, has gathered more than 60,000 signatures.

In the U.K., London Mayor Sadiq Khan announced a review of the capital’s landmarks and pledged to increase the representation of black and ethnic minority groups in the public realm, including street names, public squares and murals.

French authorities banned police from using chokeholds to carry out arrests, saying the method would no longer be taught in police schools. The interior minister also announced 30 investigations had been launched into allegations that police officers used racist slurs in 2019, following reports that police members had exchanged racist messages in private WhatsApp and Facebook groups. Police had responded to the allegations in a Twitter thread, saying, “There is no race in the police force, nor are there racialized people or racist oppressors.”

For years, activists in the Netherlands have campaigned to put an end to the country’s December 5 Zwarte Piet tradition, when crowds of white people black up their faces, wear afros and paint their lips red in celebration of St. Nicholas Day.

The frenzied debate happened every year, then typically died down again, as people insisted it was a harmless bit of fun and a Dutch tradition.

But last week, following anti-racism protests in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said his attitude to the tradition had undergone “major changes” after speaking to black children who told him they felt discriminated against. Rutte, who in 2014 admitted to having dressed up in blackface as part of the celebrations, predicted that in the next few years, there “will be no Zwarte Piets any more.”

“Politicians are shook up, they know they have to do something,” said Boubout, the Belgian activist. “The debate is finally happening. Not only in the streets, but on TV, in parliament. We’ve never seen that before.”