Breaking the race taboo in a besieged Europe: how photographs of the “refugee crisis” reproduce racialized hierarchy

In a “colourblind” Europe, where race talk is taboo, explicit racial resentment towards newcomers is confined to the margins. Nonetheless, a racialized understanding of immigration and asylum persists, as evidenced in the less policed realm of iconographic representation. An analysis of the association between keyword-retrieved discursive frames and 1,500 photographs in Google Image search results from the years starting with the “migrant crisis” of 2015 reveals different regimes of representation and suggests that concepts of illegality and threat are embodied in images as race. Despite the overlapping hierarchies of origins found in today’s racializing discourses, the pillars of old European racial taxonomies emerge as the prevalent codes of racialized difference in pictorial representation of a besieged Europe.