For years, Viktor Orbán, with his anti-migrant and white Christian nationalist rhetoric – sentiments that endeared him to Donald Trump and his Maga base – offered his European counterparts the comforting fiction that racism in the EU was the preserve of a few unsavoury men and women. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple.

Racism is not the work of one individual. It is structural. Racial logic is woven into our laws as well as our political, economic and social systems. It shapes access to jobs, housing, education and justice. It informs policing practices, border controls and foreign policy choices. Racialised biases are being stamped into our AI tools. A major scandal in the Netherlands arose because algorithms used to process childcare benefits wrongly flagged thousands of Dutch parents as fraudsters. A form of racial profiling left ethnic minority or migrant heritage families disproportionately impacted. The victims suffered devastating consequences including severe debt, forced evictions and wrongful prison terms and many are still struggling to recover.

Divisive “us and them” narratives are also consistently reinforced by political and media conversations that frame diversity as a challenge.

Discrimination in Europe today is rooted in age-old anxieties. Racial hierarchies evident in the EU’s migration policies – for instance in the different treatment of black and brown refugees and migrants compared with their white Ukrainian........

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