Migrants as Visitors

A Colour-Blind Approach and Imagined Racial Hierarchy

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  • Nicola Raúl
  • Jaroslav Šotola

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14712/12128112.3287

Klíčová slova:

racial hierarchy, attitudes towards migrants, colour-blind approach, power asymmetry, Czech Republic

Abstrakt

This article provides the results on research into the attitudes of Czech seniors towards foreigners of non-European origin. It is based on an interpretation of ten semi-structured interviews of a biographical nature, focused on the participants’ encounters with otherness. Regardless of the political regime and the period of time, the main feature of this contact is distance and separation from foreigners. From the point of view of seniors, migration is an unnatural and only temporary phenomenon that has to be controlled and restricted by the state. Negative attitudes towards foreigners in the narrations are concealed by seemingly neutral statements that are subject to an effort of not providing any reason for being labelled as a “racist”. Nevertheless, it is still possible to uncover the idea of self-evident power superiority over categories of people understood as racially different. Although the seniors expressed various levels of sympathy, indifference, or antipathy towards the individual non-European groups, we believe that these differences are not a manifestation of selective acceptance, but rather a manifestation of imagined racial hierarchy in which groups perceived as submissive are preferred.

Biografie autora

Nicola Raúl

is a graduate of Cultural Anthropology and French Philology at Palacký University in Olomouc, where she currently continues in her master’s studies. Her interest is focused on everyday racism, questions of power, and post-colonial studies. Last year, she received the Rector’s Award of Palacký University for the best academic bachelor’s thesis.

Jaroslav Šotola

is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, Andragogy and Cultural Anthropology, Palacký University in Olomouc. He earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology at Charles University in Prague. His main fieldwork experience is from Roma neighbourhoods in eastern Slovakia. He is co-author of the book Ethnography of the Social Mobility. Ethnicity, Barriers and Dominancy, which focused on the upwards social mobility of Roma people from Slovakia. Besides this ethnographic research, he is also interested in qualitative research methodology, Muslims in the Czech Republic, and the informal initiatives and international volunteers helping the refugees on the “Balkan route”.

Stahování

Publikováno

2018-07-01

Jak citovat

Raúl, N., & Šotola, J. (2018). Migrants as Visitors: A Colour-Blind Approach and Imagined Racial Hierarchy. Lidé města, 20(2), 237-265. https://doi.org/10.14712/12128112.3287

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