Race Against Gender? Re-Racializing Discrimination: How European Anti-Racist Organizations Reclaim Intersectionality in the EU Arena

This paper intends to study the mobilizations of EU-level civil society actors to promote an intersectional approach to discrimination, i.e. tackling the interconnectedness of discriminations rather than separately. For anti-racist activists, the goal is to give more salience to discriminations based on race, a highly sensitive category in Europe. A controversial point is the centrality of a gender-focused approach to intersectionality in EU governance. The prohibition of gender-based discrimination was already enshrined in the Rome Treaty and feminist activists were in a privileged position to influence the extension of EU anti-discrimination policy. Since the 1990s, the development of European anti-racist movements and their demands for a better fight against racism at EU level created the conditions of a competition between grounds of discrimination. While a gender-focused institutionalization of intersectionality has been studied (Lombardo & Verloo 2009), the response of anti-racist organizations to this dominant frame has not been explored yet. Anti-racist activists consider that the erasure of race from intersectionality by European feminists has had far-reaching consequences for the fight for racial justice. In the last decade, they mobilized to “(re)claim a non-negotiable status for race” (Bilge 2013). These mobilizations will be analyzed through the two axes: a study of interactions and competitions between gender and anti-racist “velvet triangles” (Woodward 2003), i.e. advocacy networks that involve activists, academics and EU officials; an analysis of the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement and intersectional expertise on the adoption of the EU Action Plan against Racism (2020), focusing particularly on the coordinated lobbying of three civil society organizations: the European Network Against Racism (ENAR), the Centre for Intersectional Justice (CIJ) and the Open Society Foundations (OSF).