Racialization and Counter-Racialization in Times of Crisis: Taking Migrant Struggles in Italy As a Critical Standpoint on Race

Migrant struggles in contemporary Italy offer a critical standpoint for understanding the uses of race in times of crisis. This paper analyses racialization first as a structural feature of neoliberalism in Italian society, and then as a crisis management strategy in the transition to late neoliberalism. Against this background, migrant struggles – for freedom of movement and the right to life, for equality at work, for the right to housing – will be interpreted as examples of counter-racialization. Through the development of counter-discourses on the crisis and austerity, in terms of causes, responsibilities and alternatives policies, and through practices of solidarity those struggles deconstruct the dominant frame of 'ethnic competition for scarce resources' and try to reunite 'those below' against 'those above' across national and other racializing lines.