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Migrant acadeMics’ narratives of
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents v
Introduction: Narrating Migrant Academics’ Precarity and Resilience
in Europe ix
Ladan Rahbari and Olga Burlyuk
(Non)Belonging xxxi
1. A Journey to the ‘Self’: From Precarity as Non-Belonging to the
Search for Common Ground 1
Vera Axyonova
2. Unbelonging as a Post-Colonial Predicament: My Tryst With
European Academia 9
Sanam Roohi
3. Unlearning 21
Mihnea Tănăsescu
(In)Visible Inclusions and Exclusion 31
4. Who Do the Dead Belong to? Considering the (In)visibility of Death
as an Outsider in France 33
Norah Kiereri
5. The Invisible Migrant: The (Im)Possibility of Getting Behind the Iron
Curtain of Western Academia as an Eastern European Academic 43
Martina Vitáčková
6. Of Academia, Status, and Knowing Your Place 51
Dragana Stojmenovska
7. A Stroll through the Darkness: The Mental Health Struggles of a
Migrant Academic 61
Anonymous
11. Becoming White?
Apostolos Andrikopoulos
Sometime in the mid-1990s, when I was still an elementary school
student and lived in a small town in Northern Greece, an old lady told
me that dogs were able to recognize Albanians. She insisted it was true.
She asked me to stay with her and notice how the neighbor’s dog reacted
when people passed outside the house. For the time I was there, the dog
was quiet and did not react when another Greek neighbor walked in front
of the house. At some point, an unknown man appeared in the street
and walked along the house’s fence. ‘An Albanian’, the old lady alerted
me. The man would have been in his early 20s. His skin was white with
red marks from sunburn. He had dark blond curly hair and green eyes.
He was wearing a worn-out and oversized pair of trousers and a dirty
t-shirt. Suddenly the dog started barking. ‘You see?’, the old woman
asked me. I was astonished. It seemed to me that the woman’s claim was
conrmed. The dog most likely barked because it saw a stranger, but I did
not understand this as a kid. Then the woman provided an explanation
for the dog’s reaction. According to her, this was due to dogs’ instinct
to detect thieves and other criminals. The association of Albanians with
criminality was rather common and strong at that time. In the 1990s,
Albanian migrants were the most stigmatized social group in Greece
and were stereotyped as ‘delinquents’ and ‘uncivilized.’ These were also
the stereotypes for most other migrants in Greece, who predominantly
came from the Balkans and countries of the former USSR.
I recently recalled this incident when I was again labeled as a ‘white
scholar’ by a Dutch colleague at the University of Amsterdam. In a Dutch
academic context, the category ‘white’ implies some sort of privilege
that our colleagues of color are deprived of. It does not exclusively
© 2023, Apostolos Andrikopoulos, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0331.11
106 Migrant Academics' Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe
refer to a current privileged position but also to the dierentiated
access to resources that enable an academic trajectory. The category of
‘whiteness’ is useful because it allows us to address inequality and the
lack of diversity in Dutch academia. But how appropriate is it to apply
this category to migrant scholars whose pathway to academia started
in contexts in which whiteness had dierent meanings or was less
signicant as a marker of privilege?
In my childhood in Greece, whiteness would not self-evidently imply
privilege. Those who found themselves at the very margins of society,
such as the Albanian man the dog barked for, were white and often had
lighter skin colors than those who claimed to be superior to them. This
particular meaning of whiteness in Greece, at least in the years I lived
there, made me skeptical to accept my categorization as white in the
Netherlands. Sometimes I objected to my categorization as such. But
then my colleagues (or other interlocutors) would comment that this
is another manifestation of my ‘white privilege’: being able to opt out
of a racial categorization. This is something that black people and other
people of color cannot easily do. More recently, I came to accept my
categorization as ‘white’, however unenthusiastically, and even used it
to describe myself in academic contexts. Nevertheless, I still question
the suitability of this category as a means to reect on my privileges
throughout my life and my development as an academic. In this essay,
I explore two parallel processes that are somehow interconnected: the
rst is the shift in my understanding of race throughout my life, from
my formative years in Greece up to my recent years in the Netherlands,
where I began an academic career as an anthropologist. The second is
my own racialization as ‘white’ since I moved to the Netherlands and
became an academic.
I was born and grew up in Kavala, a small provincial city in
Northern Greece. Most of Kavala’s residents, including my family, were
descendants of Greek refugees who were forced to leave their homes
in Turkey and settle in Greece. The Treaty of Lausanne (1923), signed
after the defeat of Greece in the Greco-Turkish War, obliged Greece
and Turkey to exchange populations: Muslim residents of Greece had
to migrate to Turkey, and Greek Orthodox residents of Turkey had to
move to Greece. The exchange of populations radically changed the
demographic composition of Greece. This was especially the case for
107
11. Becoming White?
Northern Greece, where most refugees settled. Kavala’s Muslims, about
half of the total city population, departed for Turkey, and a much greater
number of Greek refugees arrived and settled there. Confronting a
new demographic reality, Greek authorities reoriented their policies
from a model of diversity governance towards a model that prioritized
homogeneity in ethnic and cultural terms.1
The dominant narrative until the late 1980s was that Greece had a
highly homogeneous population. Contrary to countries of Western
Europe, which received a considerable number of migrants in the post-
war era, Greece was a country of emigration and, thus, the ethnic prole
of its population was not aected by migration. Despite the presence
of small ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities in certain regions
of the country, it is not an exaggeration to say that ethnicity and race
were not relevant markers of dierence in everyday life. The term racism
(ratsismos) was commonly used, but (ironically) rarely in relation to
race (ratsa). In that period, the term was mostly used as a synonym for
discrimination on all dierent grounds (e.g. against children of divorced
parents, homosexual people, or lower-educated people). When I was
born in the early 1980s, inequalities in Kavala were hardly ever related
to ethnicity and race. Only a very small number of residents were non-
Greek or non-white. These were some Roma people and a few Western
Europeans who had come to live in Greece with their Greek spouses.
Also, during the summer months, there were tourists from Germany
and a few other parts of Europe. These are the only encounters I recall
with people of dierent ethnic and racial backgrounds.
In my primary school, there were no students of non-Greek origin.
I had two classmates whose parents were migrants, but these were
Greek returnees from Germany and Australia. What mattered the most
was the profession of our parents. As there were only public schools
1 Interestingly, the rst attempt to introduce anthropology in Greek academia
preceded these events. After the annexation of new lands, including Kavala,
from the Ottoman Empire (1912–13), Greece faced the challenge of governing
a very heterogenous population. Seeing how European colonial powers used
anthropological knowledge in colonial administration, Greece sought expertise
on the management of diversity within anthropology. Yet the introduction of
anthropology to university education was eventually abandoned as Greece changed
approach and adopted a national homogeneity model (Agelopoulos, 2010). It was
not until the 1980s that anthropology was formally introduced into Greek university
education.
108 Migrant Academics' Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe
in the whole region of Kavala, without signicant dierences in terms
of prestige, children from all socio-economic backgrounds studied in
the same schools. My classmates whose parents were wealthy and
well-educated were usually more articulate, performed better, learned
foreign languages, and engaged in extracurricular activities. Many of
them continued with a university education, either in Greece or abroad.
Not surprisingly, most of these classmates followed professional careers,
often similar ones to their parents, and became part of Greece’s middle
classes.
The composition of the population in Kavala and, more generally,
in Greece changed once and for all in the 1990s. As mentioned
earlier, Greece used to be a country of emigration, a country from
which people left to seek greener pastures elsewhere. Although the
country has never been formally colonized,2 it had an ambiguously
subordinate relationship with Europe and more generally with ‘the
West.’ Emigration from Greece to Western Europe was indicative of
developmental inequality within Europe and the country’s peripheral
position. In this constellation of regional and global inequalities, many
Greeks developed an admiration for Western Europeans and felt that
‘Western’ lifestyles and cultural practices were superior and worth
imitating (Bakalaki, 2005). But in the 1990s, following the end of
the Cold War, Greece became a destination for migrants. These were
mostly migrants from former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and
the Balkans, undergoing political and economic transformations. The
newly settled migrants accounted for almost ten percent of the country’s
population, and about half were from Albania. For the rst time, Greeks
came into regular contact in their daily lives with foreigners who were
neither tourists nor citizens of wealthier nations. The transformation of
Greece into a country of immigration signied for many Greeks that
their country had become part of the ‘developed world’ or, at least, that
it was no longer a European periphery. The way Greeks treated migrants
and the stereotypes they formed for them directly reected how they
imagined themselves and their country to be in relation to Europe and
the world. The projection of migrants as thieves, poor, and uncivilized
and the fact that migrants sought a better life in Greece enhanced the self-
image of Greeks as resourceful and superior to migrants, and solidied
2 However, it has been described as a ‘cryptocolony’ (Herzfeld, 2002) and more
recently as a ‘debt-colony’.
109
11. Becoming White?
the belief that Greece was comparable to countries where Greeks used
to migrate to (Andrikopoulos, 2017a; Bakalaki, 2005).
Ethnicity became an important category through which people
comprehended social life and everyday interactions. Social class
categories became less important than ethnic categories, or were
ethnicized. For instance, the derogatory use of the slang term ‘kagouras’
(a working-class person who unsuccessfully attempts to be fashionable)
started being replaced by the term ‘Albanian’ (e.g. ‘What is he wearing
today? He really looks like an Albanian’). Similarly, in earlier years, men
on the beach whose arms were the only tanned parts of their bodies
used to be mocked for having a ‘builder’s tan’ (maurisma tou oikodomou).
Now, this changed to ‘Albanian tan’ (Alvaniko maurisma). This shift in
terms indicates the ethnicization of working classes and the prominent
place of migrants in the so-called 3D professions (dirty, dicult, and
dangerous). But it also illustrates how dierence was inscribed onto the
bodies of migrants.
Migrants’ bodies became mediums that represented their constructed
otherness. Migrants’ lives and practices, such as manual work under
tough conditions, crafted their bodies in particular ways that rendered
them recognizably dierent (e.g. ‘Albanian tan’). But also, the otherness
of migrants was often seen to be inherent in their bodies. The old lady
in the opening of this essay, for example, believed that criminal behavior
is intrinsic in Albanians, and thus, dogs are able to understand it by
using their senses. Unlike other contexts, in Greece, this process of
racialization was not related to skin color. Nonetheless, this process
shared with other cases of racialization that the bodies of migrants came
to signify an (assumed) dierence and that the essentialization of this
dierence was used to dehumanize them, subordinate them and exploit
them.
In 2001, when I had just started my university education, I worked in
a company with more than 100 employees. I worked in the warehouse
section, where all my eight colleagues were Albanians. Our employment
was not registered, and, as I learned later, it was only us employees at the
warehouse who were paid under the table. Despite our work being the
most physically intensive, our salaries were the lowest in the company. In
addition to this, we had to deal with humiliating and abusive treatment
from the owner and director of the company, who came daily to the
warehouse to monitor us. Upon entering the warehouse, he started
110 Migrant Academics' Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe
yelling at my colleagues, occasionally at me, for insignicant reasons.
Apart from his routine insults and curses, sometimes he became
physically violent. Once or twice, he slapped a colleague on his head
and kicked another one. On a more regular basis, he threw objects at
employees who did not follow his instructions by the letter.
In all these instances, no one protested (including myself). We were
all there because we needed income: my colleagues to support their
families, myself to support my university education. Once I found a
new job, I quit this one. My colleagues stayed in this job for years,
and some even referred other family members to work there. On my
last day, a Greek colleague from the HR department told me: ‘I never
understood why you accepted working in the warehouse.’ I explained
to her that no matter how little the salary was, I was in dire need of
money. ‘You can do other things. This job is for Albanians,’ she replied.
Once again, I realized that even if the nancial situation of myself
and my family was comparable to that of my Albanian colleagues,
as a native Greek, I had more opportunities and dierent access to
resources that enabled me to make dierent decisions. As for my
Albanian colleagues, their white skin—which was, in fact, lighter than
mine—did not secure them any privilege.
In 2008, at the beginning of the global nancial crisis, I moved to
the Netherlands, with a full scholarship, to pursue a Master’s degree in
migration studies. By the time I graduated, Greece had been severely
aected by the global nancial crisis and faced its own debt crisis.
The infamous Troika (International Monetary Fund, Eurogroup, and
European Central Bank) oered bailout loans on the premise of reforms
and the imposition of severe austerity measures. In these dicult times,
the unemployment rate in Greece skyrocketed to almost 30 percent for
the general population and reached 60 percent for people of my age.
Under this condition, the decision to stay in the Netherlands and try to
make a living there was kind of obvious.
In the beginning, I worked as a housekeeper in a hotel. All my
colleagues were migrants. Most of them were from the new EU
countries in Eastern Europe who had just arrived in the Netherlands
and could speak neither Dutch nor English. All of us were paid half of
the minimum legal salary (per hour) through a deceptive scheme that
made our employer appear legal in the books. I tolerated this situation
for several months and left when I found another job. Dutch friends
111
11. Becoming White?
advised me to take legal action against my employer and request to be
paid the legal minimum wage, as stipulated in my contract. In addition
to the legal process, which concerned only a dispute about my salary,
a professor of law, who I had met during my studies, recommended
that I report to the Labor Inspectorate that there were violations of the
minimum salary for all employees. However, she warned me that if
I wanted to do this out of solidarity for my colleagues, I would have
to be sure that all of them resided in the Netherlands legally. If the
labor inspector went on-site for control and found an unauthorized
migrant worker, the worker would be arrested and face the threat of
deportation. The EU citizenship of most of my colleagues and me—let
alone our white skin—may not have prevented us from working under
these exploitative conditions that no other Dutch person had accepted;
still, it placed us in a relatively better position than non-EU migrants
whose legal status was insecure. Therefore, I had to make sure that my
colleagues who were not EU citizens like me resided lawfully in the
Netherlands. Only then did I le a complaint. After an entire year of
legal processes, which were stressful and time-draining, I only managed
to get paid the amount that I should have been paid in the rst place.
My employer was not ned and did not face any other consequences.
Although I testied that all my colleagues were paid under the same
terms, the labor inspector was unwilling to investigate the case further.
She only asked me if undocumented migrants worked in this hotel. This
would have been a solid reason for her to organize an inspection at the
worksite, she said. When I replied negatively, she decided to end the
case. Years later, once I returned to academia, I came to understand this
event in terms of institutional racism.
After the hotel, I started working in the kitchen of a large fast-food
restaurant. My colleagues there were also either migrants or migrants’
ospring. While I worked at the restaurant, I started applying for PhD
positions. After several months of applying for dierent positions
and grants and numerous rejections, an application for a funded PhD
position at the University of Amsterdam was successful. My admission
into the PhD program of the University of Amsterdam marked the
formal beginning of my academic career in the Netherlands and also
a new era of relative nancial stability. My PhD research was about
African migrants in the Netherlands and the new forms of kinship
they created, such as through their marriages with Greek and Eastern
112 Migrant Academics' Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe
European migrants, in a setting of legal exclusion and civic inequality
(Andrikopoulos, 2017b). Since many of my colleagues at the restaurant
were African migrants and migrants from Europe’s periphery, I decided
not to quit this job and continued it part-time. My work at the restaurant
was no longer a means of earning my living but a form of eldwork,
and a way to meet and network with potential research participants.
My colleagues were aware of the reasons I continued working there
part-time and many of them became my interlocutors, assisting me in
nding other research participants. Looking back I realize how vital my
colleagues’ assistance was for the success of my research project on an
otherwise dicult and sensitive topic.
In the rst year of my PhD, I went to Accra, Ghana, to attend a
summer school organized by an Ivy League university. Participants
in this summer school were mostly US American undergraduate and
graduate students, and about a third of them were African Americans.
In this summer school, I heard someone referring to me as ‘white’ for
the rst time in my life. I shared my surprise with the African American
classmate who said it and explained to her why I would not use the
term to describe myself. I told her that whiteness had not been a relevant
marker of my privileges up to that point in my life and gave her some
context about inequalities in Greece and how Albanian migrants came
to be racialized as the most signicant ‘others.’ After she listened to me
carefully, she asked me whether I thought what I told her was relevant
in Ghana and whether I believed that Ghanaians did not think of me as
‘white.’ Indeed, she had a point.
The same day, we had our rst outing as a group in the city. As we
walked along a central street in Accra, a few street vendors approached
us and tried to sell their stu. ‘Obroni! Obroni!’ one of them said to me
several times in his eort to attract my attention. I was told that obroni
means ’white person.’ When he realized that I did not intend to buy
anything from him, he shifted his attention to others in our group. He
approached my African American classmate and addressed her in the
same way: ‘Obroni! Obroni!’ That was a surprise for me. And certainly,
for her. In Ghana, people perceive African Americans as obroni, the same
category they use for white Europeans. Many African Americans who
traveled to Ghana as a pilgrimage to the lands of their ancestors were
deeply frustrated by this experience (Hartman, 2007). Skin color is not
the only criterion for categorizing someone as obroni and sometimes skin
113
11. Becoming White?
color and phenotype are irrelevant. Ghanaians call people obroni if their
mannerisms indicate a privileged position (Darkwah and Adomako
Ampofo, 2008). ‘We rarely name someone by their appearance as
opposed to their character, ability, or trait,’ Ghanaian artist Wanlov the
Kubolor (2015) maintains and suggests that the term obroni originates
from the Akan phrase ‘abro nipa’ meaning ‘wicked person.’
In the years that followed, during my PhD and later post-doc,
I was classied more and more often as a ‘white scholar.’ In various
academic settings, in the Netherlands and elsewhere, colleagues and
students would almost automatically perceive me as ‘white.’ Sometimes
I felt puzzled that I was placed in a category that signied privilege
together with scholars whose trajectory to academia had a dierent
point of departure and they had dierent resources at their disposal.
My classication as ‘white’ prioritized my skin color as a marker of
privilege and downplayed its intersection with other characteristics that
either enhanced my privileged position—such as me being a man—
or undermined it, such as my social class background and origin in
Europe’s periphery. Perhaps this reects the predatory capacity of racial
categories in the sense that when these notions are strongly loaded,
they can gobble other categories of dierence with which they intersect.
Nevertheless, despite my original discomfort with my classication as
‘white,’ I gradually came to accept it and became less hesitant to describe
myself as such. The reasons for this shift are multiple and interrelated.
As I became more and more part of the society I was living in, I had
to relate with categories of dierence that were meaningful there. Now I
live in a society where social inequalities are racialized. These inequalities
are visibly clear when I walk out of my university campus. I encounter
more people of dierent ethnic and racial backgrounds in the city than
among my students and colleagues (see Wekker et al., 2016). Moreover,
as an anthropologist who has conducted research on racialized African
migrants in Europe, the category of ‘white’ is useful for reecting on
my positionality in relation to my interlocutors and the privileges my
academic position entails. Nevertheless, this does not mean that African
migrants in the Netherlands place me in the same category with white
Dutch. A nding of my PhD research was that African migrant men
who got a residence permit through marriage preferred a spouse from
Europe’s periphery, such as Greece or Poland, than a white Dutch
woman. They were concerned that their legalization through marriage
114 Migrant Academics' Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe
would place them in a highly unequal position in the relationship and
make them dependent on their spouses. Thus, they preferred women
who were more or less in a similar socio-economic position, such
as working-class migrants from Europe’s periphery, for whom they
could also care in material terms. For my African interlocutors in the
Netherlands, I was undoubtedly white but not as white as native Dutch
people.
As I continued my academic career and climbed a few steps in the
academic hierarchy, I became more similar in terms of privileges to my
Dutch colleagues and more dierent than my colleagues in Greece.
Even as a PhD student in the Netherlands, my salary was comparable
to the salary of an Associate Professor in Greece and, furthermore, I
had access to resources that allowed me to make my work more widely
known and therefore less marginal in academic debates of my eld.
These are important reasons that might explain how I came to use the
term ‘white’ as a means to reect on my current privileges. But does this
mean that I became white? This is a question that I have yet to answer.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Ladan Rahbari and Olga Burlyuk for their invitation
to participate in this collection and their attentive reading of my essay. I
am also grateful to Myriam Lamrani and Joël Illidge for their comments
on an earlier version of the manuscript. I acknowledge that I wrote this
essay during a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship which was funded
from the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under
the grant agreement No 894547.
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