Becoming ‘Black’ in a ‘White’ Nation: Roma, Racialization and Lithuanian Law Enforcement

Terms like "white supremacy," "coloniality," and "racialization" are widely used in Western contexts, particularly in the U.S., but remain largely absent from public discourse in Eastern Europe, especially Lithuania (Imre 2016, Christian 2019). The topics of race, racism and white dominance are rarely addressed in Lithuania, where the general belief is that racism exists "elsewhere", not at home. Here whiteness is taken for granted and largely uncontested, with society protected by a double-shield of racism “elsewhere-ness” rhetoric (Goldberg 2006): first, Lithuania’s identification as a country without colonial history; second, its legacy as a former Soviet colony, with socialist anti-racism and friendship-of-peoples discourse and recent EU-promoted values of equality and multiculturalism (Kościańska, Petryk 2022). This lack of engagement with racism and ‘whiteness’ has created minimal space for reflecting on social inequalities in racial or post-colonial terms. Even while preparing this abstract, I feel the weight of the "white gaze," uneasy about addressing such taboo topics and condemning myself for what I dare to talk about. Yet, I ask: How can some persons in a Lithuanian society still feel and be perceived as "black"? In my conference presentation, I will explore how Lithuanian Roma construct, experience, and navigate their "blackness" in relation to the dominant national forms of whiteness through their interactions with the law enforcement. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the Vilnius Roma community between 2022 and 2024, I will highlight how these encounters reveal complex racialization processes, despite the country’s self-perception as predominantly “white” or “color-blind. Additionally, I will examine the challenges of developing proper analytical tools to investigate the “racism” and “whiteness” in Lithuania and its impact on local Roma inclusion/exclusion.