“GO BACK TO YOUR LAND”?

A CRITICAL OVERVIEW OF RACIST DISCRIMINATION IN PORTUGAL

Abstract

 In the current contextual climate, the phenomenon of racial discrimination in Europe is prevalent across media, politics and education in the international community and EU societies seeing more of the global South within the global North. Racist discrimination is not limited to the EU and is based on gendered, racialised, ethnic/religious and other sociocultural markers reproducing difference. Structural apparatus of bias must, arguably, be considered and treated as an urgent societal issue in EU communities. This thematic overview discusses some of the perspectives of racism and other segregation in the EU and scopes records of discrimination within the Portuguese context to highlight the sociopolitical and legal urgency to acknowledge and counter racist prejudice in its overt and covert forms. The paper traverses across literature on racism in the EU, outsider-within experience, and EU records in Portugal to critically reflect to what extent the EU contains the global South within its colonial lingers and contribute to research on racial discrimination in EU societies towards anti-racist commitments across Europe.