Public Service Announcement—

Hello? I’m Jasmine, a third year student in the PhD program at the Annenberg School for Communication. This is my first blogging experience, so bear with me. I agreed to try this blog bit out as a way to catalogue some of my summer travel experience—a perk that has come to characterize my time at Annenberg. This year my summer starts in Amsterdam for a two-week summer school course on Black Europe offered through the International School for Humanities and Social Sciences (ISHSS) at the University of Amsterdam.

Experiencing race abroad, punctuated by the study of race, seems especially blog-worthy. When sharing my travel plans with various people before I arrived, I was frequently told something like: “Race in Europe is very different” or “that’s interesting, ‘Black’ is not really the same in Europe as it is in the United States.” I would resound with an internal “hmph!” As the course is underway, I find that my scoff was entirely warranted. Skeptic that I am, I expected “Black” to be both convoluted and problematic in Europe, much as it is in the US. Moreover, in the raised eyebrows and cynical responses I received to my travel/study plans I often sensed the wrongful assumption that anti-Black racism was a problem solved outside of the US—which I then extend to assume (I like to assume) that a preoccupation with Blackness is an especially American preoccupation.

Wrong. Black in Europe is jacked up in all the ways colonialism jacks up everything. The dynamics of its jacked-up-ness are certainly contextual, and different from those of the American landscape, but not unrelated. So far I have learned that the legal system ensures the imbalance of power where race is concerned, and that part of the difficulty some people have in understanding why or how one approaches the idea of “Black” and “Europe” is very much related to language and the formation of the European Union. Interesting stuff.

Course work aside, Amsterdam is very cool. Very green—not just because of the bikes. A little chilly (weather wise), but a rather welcoming place. While in Europe I’ll be visiting a few other countries as well so stay tuned for more ranting.

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Jasmine