Event Highlights: Discrimination of Minorities in Europe
This panel discussion on “Discrimination of Minorities in Europe: Differences, Similarities, and Intersections” with Sultan Doughan, Eddie Bruce Jones, and Margareta Matache took place on Friday, October 23, 2020.
Eddie Bruce Jones, who is currently the William & Patricia Kleh Visiting Professor at Boston University’s School of Law, focussed his remarks on the concept of race and how it is marginalized in European discourse at multiple levels. He described the diverse ways blackness is experienced and comes into contact with other communities and other forms of discrimination in the European context.
Sultan Doughan, a post-doctoral fellow at BU’s Elie Wiesel Center, talked about her work with Muslim communities in Germany and the ways in which legal structures, for example, those governing religious groups, produce racism. She described how holocaust memory has been mobilized to govern religious difference according to a pre-Holocaust logic.
Magda Matache, a Roma rights activist from Romania and director of the Roma Program at Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, addressed the ongoing discrimination faced by Roma in Europe and how the narrative of a post-racial Europe hinders efforts to tackle structural racism. She described the current individual human rights framework as helpful but inadequate to deal with collective injustices, structural inequalities, and present-day racism.
CSE Director Daniela Caruso, responding to the presentations, described the need to call racism for what it is if we are going to grapple with it. The problem she said is not the word itself, but pretending it does not exist.