European leaders are failing to pushback against racist messaging from the Trump Administration, signaling their acceptance of a new geopolitics of whiteness. Among the most recent examples is a standing ovation for US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference after he celebrated the colonial era and reprised warnings about a so-called civilizational erasure of Europe by migrants. The stated reason for the clapping in Munich was the softer tone on Europe taken by Rubio compared to that taken by US Vice President JD Vance a year earlier. In reality, the governing elites in Europe have a good deal more in common with the Trump Administration than most would care to admit. For one, Washington and Brussels both are seeking to justify a radical expansion of migration and asylum policies that brutalize large numbers of black and brown people inside and outside their borders. The difference is that the Europeans have historically sought to obfuscate such actions, says Emmanuel Achiri of the European Network Against Racism. By contrast the Trump Administration bluntly advertises its brutality by announcing ICE operations in racialized communities and posting white supremacist memes to official social media channels. In this episode: Emmanuel unpacks the origins of whiteness in Europe and North America; he examines the use whiteness by the Trump Administration as a main plank of US foreign policy; and he explains how violence on Europe's borders is often effectively invisibilized in what amounts to a form of necropolitics.

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