Never Unanswered: Anti-Racist Movements in Europe and South America

Every rise of the far right has called forth an answer. From the streets of Paris to the plazas of Brasília, people of color and their allies have built organizations to fight racism where it lives: in police stations, in citizenship laws, in elections, and in memory itself. Their work rarely makes headlines until a crisis does. It deserves a longer look.

"Hands Off My Pal": France Organizes

In 1984, a group of young activists in Paris founded SOS Racisme after a wave of racist killings and the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front. Their slogan, Touche pas à mon pote ("Hands off my pal"), was printed on a yellow hand-shaped badge worn by millions. The group grew out of the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism, which began in Marseille with young people of North African descent and ended with a crowd of about one hundred thousand in Paris.

A newer generation has moved the focus to policing. After Adama Traoré, a young Black man, died in police custody in 2016, his sister Assa Traoré built the Comité Adama, which brought tens of thousands into the streets in June 2020. Its message tied French suburbs to American cities: the same questions about who is stopped, who is restrained, and who dies.

Britain: From Rock Against Racism to Stand Up to Racism

In the late 1970s, as the National Front marched through immigrant neighborhoods, the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism staged concerts that drew reggae and punk fans together. Their 1978 carnival in London's Victoria Park drew around eighty thousand people. Today, Stand Up to Racism, founded in 2013, organizes counter-protests, and in August 2024 thousands answered anti-migrant riots by lining streets outside targeted asylum hotels and mosques. Black British groups such as the Monitoring Group and campaigns built by bereaved families, including that of Stephen Lawrence, have pushed police reform for decades.

Germany: Millions Against "Remigration"

Germany's Black community organized early. The Initiative of Black People in Germany grew out of the work of Afro-German writers such as May Ayim in the mid-1980s and has fought for recognition of Black German history, from the colonial genocide in Namibia to the present.

In January 2024, the investigative outlet Correctiv revealed a secret meeting at which far-right figures, including members of the Alternative for Germany party, discussed "remigration," the mass removal of people of immigrant background, including citizens. The response was among the largest protests in modern German history. Over several weekends, organizers counted well over a million people marching in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, and smaller towns under banners reading "Never again is now."

Italy: The Second Generations

In Italy, young people born to immigrant parents formed networks such as Rete G2 and, later, Italiani Senza Cittadinanza ("Italians Without Citizenship") to demand a path to the citizenship they are denied at birth. Their campaigns supported the reform championed by Cécile Kyenge, Italy's first Black cabinet minister. In June 2020, Black Lives Matter marches filled squares in Rome, Milan, and Turin, carrying signs about Italian racism, not only American.

Brazil: The Black Movement Rises

In South America, the deepest roots run through Brazil, home to the largest Black population outside Africa. On July 7, 1978, activists gathered on the steps of São Paulo's Municipal Theater, under military dictatorship, to protest police killings and the exclusion of Black athletes from a club. That moment launched the Unified Black Movement (MNU), which challenged the myth of "racial democracy" and helped win the 1988 Constitution's provision making racism a crime without bail or statute of limitations.

The movement's pressure later produced affirmative action in federal universities, formalized by law in 2012. On November 18, 2015, tens of thousands of Black women marched on Brasília in the March of Black Women Against Racism and Violence and for Well-Being. The 2018 assassination of Rio councilwoman Marielle Franco turned grief into a new wave of Black women entering politics.

Across the Continent

In Colombia, the Process of Black Communities, founded in 1993, fought for collective land titles for Afro-Colombian communities under that year's Law 70. One of its heirs, environmental activist Francia Márquez, became Colombia's first Black vice president in 2022. In Uruguay, Mundo Afro, founded in 1988, pushed for a census that counted Afro-Uruguayans and for affirmative action in public jobs. In Argentina, where official history long claimed Black people had "disappeared," Afro-Argentine groups won the inclusion of an Afro-descendant question in the 2010 census and a national day of Afro-Argentines on November 8.

A Shared Struggle

These groups differ in language, history, and strategy. Some are mass street movements; others are small circles of lawyers and researchers. What unites them is the refusal to let racism hide behind national myths, whether France's colorblind republic, Italy's "good people," or Brazil's racial democracy. They are part of the same long fight that Black Americans know well, and they show that the backlash described in the replacement myth never goes unanswered.

Keep Reading

• Welling, 1993: The March Against the BNP, the day 60,000 people marched on a far-right headquarters in South East London.

The deeper story: Contested Belonging follows the "replacement" myth from France to Germany, Italy, Britain and beyond, and the people who refuse it. It appears in the debut issue of Black Thread, our members' magazine. Join before November 1 for $9.99 a month, locked in for life.