The hieroglyphics of the border: racial stigma in neoliberal Europe.

In the summer of 2015, 1.5 million refugees arrived at Europe's borders. This article examines how and why this humanitarian crisis was transformed into a "racist crisis". It begins by recounting a highly publicized event in the Czech Republic which saw police forcibly removing hundreds of people from trains at midnight in the border town of Břeclav, before inking numbers on their arms and transporting them to detention centres. Thinking with this scene, the article develops the conceptual framework of "racial stigma" to capture some of the multiple practices that characterize border regimes in contemporary Europe. Racism, it argues, is the stigma machine of sovereign power in neoliberal Europe. The article concludes with some reflections on how Europe's current "racist crisis" reanimates both historical spectres of race and spectral geographies of racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]