You Can’t Take it to Heart: How Czech Residents from MENA and Sub-Saharan Africa Make Sense of Ethnoracial Othering

Abstract

This study explores how immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and sub-Saharan Africa living in Czechia, a new immigrant destination in Central Europe, make sense of their experiences with ethnoracial Othering. Building on comprehensive interviews with 23 research participants and utilizing the interpretive meaning-centered approach of cultural sociology, we explore how they make sense of their experiences in the light of their interactions with perpetrators in Czech society. We find that rationalization represents the dominant pattern of meaning-making and identify three distinct forms it takes, namely, Calling Out the Collective History of Czechia, Calling Out the Individual Ignorance of Perpetrators, and Calling Out the Individual Responsibility of Victims. We trace these rationalizations to locally available cultural repertoires that are fueled by specific aspects of Czech history or reflect broader trends that underpin contemporary discussions about migration and ethnoracial diversity in Western societies. We also show how these rationalizations not only allow research participants to distance themselves from their experiences and to continue carrying out their lives in Czechia but also give rise to long-term strategies aimed at limiting future exposure to ethnoracial Othering. With these findings, we contribute to the existing scholarship on responses to ethnoracial Othering by improving the conceptual understanding of rationalization as a distinct response, highlighting the cultural embeddedness of rationalization, and bringing attention to future-oriented aspects of rationalization that connect the research participants’ meaning-making with social action.

Introduction

‘You can’t take it to heart.’ This short statement appeared so often it was reminiscent of a mantra among our research participants when they described their responses to the everyday racism (Essed, 1991) and other forms of ethnoracial Othering they had experienced in Czechia, their new country of residence. Its surprising prominence points to an attempt to stay emotionally detached from experiences that can be regarded as disconcerting at the very least. It further inspires the primary research question for this study: How do people who have moved to Czechia from the regions of Middle East/North Africa (MENA) and sub-Saharan Africa make sense of their experiences of ethnoracial Othering?

To answer this question, we join the efforts of scholars seeking to understand how the micro-level everyday experiences of racialized ethnic minorities and immigrants connect to the macro-level social structures that represent sources of oppression, all the while mediated by available cultural repertoires (Aquino, 2016; Lamont et al., 2016; Nowicka, 2018). Because we focus on how racialized individuals make sense of their experiences and interpret them through the available cultural repertoires in their surroundings, we contribute to this scholarship by adding a cultural sociological lens to the analysis of ethnoracial Othering. Our attention to ‘cultural structures’ helps to connect the macro level of racialization with the micro level of everyday experience.

The majority of existing scholarship has thus far focused on immigrant destinations with long histories of ethnoracial diversity (for exceptions, see Balogun, 2020; Jaskulowski and Pawlak, 2020). We instead focus on Czechia, a new immigrant destination in Central Europe that has experienced a significant increase in immigration in the last two decades (Janská et al., 2014). The context of Czechia is intriguing for several other reasons. Despite a gradual increase in the population with a migratory background, the notion of Czech national identity continues to be constructed primarily on the basis of shared ethnic origin (Vlachová, 2019), making it challenging for non-Czechs to have their belonging recognized. Moreover, the veneer of ‘colonial exceptionalism’ (Hrešanová, 2023) impedes public recognition of Czechia’s historical responsibility for oppression of the colonized and consequently diminishes attempts to open critical discussions about inequalities and racial injustice (Rudwick and Schmiedl, 2023). Finally, since the migration ‘crisis’ of the mid-2010s, the issue of migration has become highly politicized and features prominently in public debates, especially in relation to immigrants from MENA and sub-Saharan Africa (Jaworsky et al., 2023). Although we focus specifically on Czechia, the fact that these patterns are characteristic of other countries in Central and Eastern Europe affords our study wider regional relevance.

We focus on the experiences of people coming from MENA and sub-Saharan Africa because they are perceived as the most distant Others in Czech public discourse (CVVM, 2023a, b; Rapoš Božič et al., 2023). As ‘visible minorities’ (Song, 2020), they experience Othering based on phenotypical features or outward signs of religiosity. Our analysis builds on comprehensive interviews (Ferreira, 2014) with 23 research participants from these two regions. Utilizing the interpretive, meaning-centered approach of cultural sociology (Alexander and Smith, 2003, 2018) we explore how they make sense of their experience with ethnoracial Othering in Czech society. We identify three distinct patterns of rationalization, which allow the research participants to distance themselves from their experience with Othering and continue carrying out their lives in Czech society. With these findings, we contribute to existing work on responses to Othering (Andall, 2002; Aquino, 2016; Ben, 2023; Castle Bell et al., 2015; Ellefsen et al., 2022; Herbert et al., 2008; Mellor, 2004; Nadim, 2023; Nelson, 2013; Omeni, 2016; Piwoni, 2024) by highlighting how rationalization allows individuals to distance themselves from their experiences, how it gives rise to hopes for potential improvement of their position in the future, and how it nurtures specific long-term strategies aimed at limiting exposure to ethnoracial Othering and creating livable lives in Czechia. We also highlight the striking absence of cultural repertoires that would support a more critical engagement with experiences of ethnoracial Othering in the context of Czechia and Central Europe more broadly.

Theoretical Framework

Our work dovetails with scholarly efforts to understand responses to everyday racism (Essed, 1991) and other forms of ethnoracial Othering, as we will define later. Lamont et al. (2016: 10–11) identify five categories of responses to discrimination and stigmatization: confronting (including taking legal recourse), management of the self, not responding, a focus on hard work and demonstrating competence, and self-isolation/autonomy. These responses have also been confirmed by prior studies. Mellor (2004) elaborates different types of confrontational techniques, such as taking control of the situation, educating the perpetrator, or asserting one’s rights. Avoidance and not responding are also common strategies, especially with regard to certain ‘no-go’ areas and times of day (Herbert et al., 2008; Omeni, 2016). Other studies have stressed the downplaying or outright denial of racism as a coping strategy (Ben, 2023; Nelson, 2013). For example, Nelson (2013: 89, 93) argues that such denial is a ‘key feature of modern racism,’ delineating four discourses: absence (racism does not exist), temporal deflections (racism is in the past), spatial deflections (racism is in other countries, not here) and deflections from the mainstream (it is only a problem among a few individuals). Ellefsen et al. (2022) chart a range of responses for ‘resisting’ racism, such as ignoring, confronting, sharing experiences about, reporting it and protesting.

While we recognize many of the aforementioned responses to ethnoracial Othering in our data as well, we find that our research participants’ accounts point primarily to forms of ‘rationalization.’ Castle Bell et al. (2015) look at how Black participants, as ‘co-cultural’ (marginalized) group members employ formal strategies to respond to ‘communication challenges’ with (White) dominant group members (DGMs). They define rationalization as ‘providing an alternative explanation or justification that downplays or diminishes the serious nature of various forms of verbal or nonverbal communicative injustices committed by DGMs’ (2015: 2). They add rationalization to already existing strategies co-cultural groups use to succeed, communicate, and interact within the dominant society.

In this study, we focus on meaning-making as a form of response to ethnoracial Othering that informs research participants’ long-term strategies for creating livable lives in Czechia. We argue that it is important to study not only the behavior of victims of ethnoracial Othering during the actual interactions with the perpetrators but also the ways in which they make sense of the incidents. This topic has been largely overlooked in research, with the exception of Nadim (2023) who studies how young Muslims make sense of online racism in Norway, and Piwoni (2024), who identifies three modes in which Germans of migrant background talk about incidents of ethnoracial exclusion: normalizing it, categorizing it (as e.g. racist or exclusionary), or indicating feelings of unease. In our analysis, we look at how research participants make sense of their experiences of Othering, contextualizing them within the broader context of their life in Czechia. We thus uncover the ‘everyday theories’ immigrants employ when they try to comprehend their experiences of ethnoracial Othering and the cultural repertoires they employ in the search for explanations (Essed, 1991; Nadim, 2023; Piwoni, 2024) We draw attention to the rationalizations that emerge in the situation of a research interview, revealing how research participants look for explanations concerning their experiences of Othering. These explanations guide interpretation of these incidents, as well as inform potential long-term strategies aimed at limiting exposure to ethnoracial Othering and creating livable lives in Czechia.

To do so, we construct a theoretical framework that relies on the premises of cultural sociology. First, we take the meaning-making of social actors seriously, reconstructing the deep structures of meanings present in their discourse (Alexander and Smith, 2003, 2018). We recognize that ‘culture structures’ (Rambo and Chan, 1990) have as much constitutive and causal power as more material structures like the economy, the family, and the state. Our theoretical aim is to make explicit the cultural structures of responses to ethnoracial Othering, often reproduced unconsciously with real-world consequences (Jaworsky et al., 2023). To situate our findings in the social, cultural, and political context of Czechia, we utilize the concept of ‘cultural repertoires,’ or the collectively shared and ‘relatively stable schemas of evaluation that are used in varying proportions across national contexts’ (Lamont and Thévenot, 2000: 8). These culture structures, in the form of frames, narratives, scripts, and boundaries, serve as repertoires of meanings that social actors draw upon as they make sense of the world (Lamont and Small, 2008). Cultural repertoires, never static and shifting within their social and historical contexts, both constrain and enable social action (cf. Alexander, 2007). The ultimate goal of a cultural sociological approach is to explore how people make sense of their everyday experiences and how such meaning-making informs social action (Sewell, 1992). We acknowledge that individuals engage in interpreting their experiences, both when they occur and when they are reconstructing them, for example, during interviews (cf. Essed, 1991) Even as experiences are individual, however, they are also intersubjectively constructed from culturally available repertoires.

Second, we treat ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ ‘nationality,’ and, more generally, ‘foreignness’ as social constructions with analytically relative free-floating meanings that depend on the context (Sciortino, 2012; Solomos, 2022). Following Sciortino (2012), we consider them ‘difference-based phenomena,’ a move that answers Brubaker’s (2009: 22) call to develop a ‘single integrated family of forms of cultural understanding, social organization and political contestation.’ This integrated approach is also consistent with the recent calls for an ‘ethnoracial ontology’ that would bridge the commonly accepted distinction between ethnicity and race and recognize the mutually constitutive role of language, religion, nationality, and phenotypical features in triggering the processes of racialization (Ifatunji, 2024).

Third, in line with this integrated approach, we conceptualize the experiences described by our research participants as instances of ethnoracial Othering. In the most basic terms, Othering entails engagement with people perceived as different from oneself (Canales, 2000). It often entails collectivizing and essentializing the process through which groups appear ‘natural’ and are imbued with negative characteristics (Thomas-Olalde and Velho, 2011). We understand Othering as an underlying mechanism behind different forms of exclusionary behaviors, variously described by the literature as ethnocentrism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, or biological and cultural racism. The focus on Othering allows us to capture the relatively general process of inter-group differentiation that can be triggered by different ethnoracial characteristics or their various combinations and thus consider the experiences of our research participants from MENA and sub-Saharan Africa under the same analytical frame.

Finally, drawing inspiration from Lamont et al. (2016: 6–7), we further find it useful to distinguish between Othering in the form of ‘discrimination’ (when people are deprived of opportunities or resources) and ‘stigmatization,’ conceived as ‘assaults on worth’ (when people are disrespected and their dignity, honor, relative status, or sense of self is challenged). Although some of our research participants also reported experiences with discrimination (such as not being able to open a bank account or to find suitable accommodation), experiences with stigmatization were far more frequent and prominent in their narratives, confirming the importance of understanding the impacts of racial microaggressions, everyday racism, and other subtle forms of ethnoracial Othering on people’s mental health and quality of life (Essed, 1991; Williams, 2021). Our study thus primarily explores how research participants make sense of various ‘assaults on worth’ that affect their dignity and sense of self but do not necessarily compromise their access to opportunities or resources in Czechia.

The Czech Context

The Czech context is empirically compelling for at least four reasons. First, since the dissolution of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918, the Czech nation has been constructed as an ethnically homogeneous community (Uherek, 2011). Ethnic expulsions following the Second World War, restricted immigration during the communist regime (1948–1989), and the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993 further contributed to this homogenization (Jarkovská et al., 2015). In 2021, 90% of Czech nationals declared themselves to be either of the three majority ethnicities: Czech, Moravian, or Silesian (CSO, n.d.). Nativist discourses prevail and the Czech national identity continues to be constructed primarily around the notion of shared ethnic origins (Holý, 1996, Vlachová, 2019).

Second, Czechia has a veneer of colonial exceptionalism (Hrešanová, 2023). Neither Czech political representatives nor the public recognize Czechia’s contribution to the colonial project, and they often exempt themselves from the historical responsibility for oppression of the colonized. Consequently, social movements bringing attention to global inequalities and racial injustice, such as Black Lives Matter, have not received much public support in Czechia or have even been openly bedeviled (Rudwick and Schmiedl, 2023). Although there is clear evidence of discrimination affecting racialized minorities such as Czech Roma, structural racism is not recognized; instead, the focus is on social and economic marginalization, that is, ‘social exclusion.’

Third, like other post-socialist Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, Czechia is a ‘new’ immigrant destination (Janská et al., 2014). During the socialist period (1947–1989), cross-border movement was strictly regulated, and immigration flows were very limited. Temporary immigration was allowed only to a small number of foreign students and workers from socialist countries (Baršová and Barša, 2005). After 1989, there was a trickle of immigration, but it was not until after the accession of the country into the EU in 2004 and the consequent opening of the labor market to other EU and non-EU nationals that migration flows began to increase notably (Sloboda, 2016). In 2024, the number of foreigners in Czechia was 1,094,090, representing roughly 10% of the population. Most come from Ukraine (589,456) – with more than half recently arrived refugees – Slovakia (121,472), Vietnam (69,015) and the Russian Federation (38,970). The numbers of migrants from the Middle East and Africa are relatively low – only 17,494 foreigners come from MENA and African countries – 1.6% of all foreigners – (Ministerstvo vnitra České Republiky (MVČR), 2024b).

Finally, the issue of migration remains high on political and public agendas, especially regarding people coming from MENA and sub-Saharan Africa (Jaworsky, 2021). The migration ‘crisis’ of the mid-2010s represented an important turning point: even though Czechia essentially experienced a ‘refugee crisis without refugees’ (Jelínková, 2019), the highly negative media and political portrayals of migrants and refugees resulted in significant securitization of the migration issue (Jaworsky et al., 2023; Krotký, 2019). At the height of the ‘crisis’ in 2015–2016, almost 90% of Czech respondents perceived refugees as a threat to Europe, while approximately 80% identified refugees as a threat specifically to Czechia (Hanzlová, 2018).

Against this national context, we situate our study in Brno, the second largest city in Czechia, with a population of 400,566 (Data.Brno, 2024). With fast-growing research and development industries, the city attracts both low-skilled and highly skilled foreign workers and international students. In 2021, the foreign-born population accounted for approximately 8% of the residents, and it doubled to 16.5% with the arrival of Ukrainian refugees after 2022 (MVČR, 2024a). The number of residents from MENA stands at about 1500, and just under 1000 residents come from sub-Saharan Africa (MVČR, 2023). Our previous research (Jaworsky et al., 2025) has shown that the prevailing discourse on migration positions Brno as a ‘city in transition’ towards a Central European cosmopolitan metropolis; in particular, highly skilled labor migrants are recognized as important actors in this transition. However, little is known about how immigrants themselves perceive this transition and their position in society.

Methodology

Our findings are part of a qualitative research project ‘People Like Us? A Reverse Sociology of Migration in Czechia’ whose aim is to understand how different groups of immigrants make sense of their position in Czech society. In this article, we focus specifically on people from MENA and sub-Saharan Africa and their experience with ethnoracial Othering. Our analysis builds upon data coming from 23 semi-structured, comprehensive interviews (Ferreira, 2014) conducted between May 2023 and June 2024 with people from MENA (n = 12) ¹ and sub-Saharan Africa (n = 11) living in Brno. We recruited the research participants through a combination of personal referrals from our wider social circles and a public call posted on social media groups targeting foreigners and circulated through local NGOs working with immigrants and municipal intercultural workers. We targeted ‘middling migrants,’ people who moved to Czechia as adults and occupy average positions in the local socio-economic structure, belonging neither to the often-precarious working class nor to the economic elite (Raj, 2003). By focusing on ‘middling migrants,’ we strived to make the research participants’ economic status roughly comparable across cases and, in this way, foreground the role of ethnoracial classifications for shaping their positionality. Besides their origin, the other two conditions for participation in the research included at least five years of residency in Brno and completion of a high-school education. Following the principle of maximum variation (heterogeneity) sampling (Patton, 2014), we further kept the sample diverse with respect to age, gender, occupation, and country of origin. As regards religion, our sample is more homogenous based on region, with nearly all of the research participants from MENA declaring as Muslim, and the sub-Saharan Africans as Christian. For an overview of our sample, see Online Appendix 1. We obtained written informed consent from each research participant, as mandated by the ethics approval committee at Masaryk University (EKV-2022-032).

The interviews focused on different aspects of research participants’ everyday life in Czechia. The questions about experiences with ethnoracial Othering were located towards the end of the interview, to ensure sufficient time to establish rapport and trust between the research participant and the researcher. We elicited the discussion by asking the research participants whether they have ever been treated differently by people in Czechia based on their ethnoracial background. We then encouraged them to develop complex narratives by posing additional questions. The interviews were conducted in English, with the exception of one MENA interview in Czech. They lasted between 60 and 120 minutes, were audio recorded and fully transcribed.

We analyzed the interview transcripts utilizing ATLAS.ti software, subjecting them to several rounds of open, focused, and theoretical coding (Thornberg and Charmaz, 2014). In the open, inductive phase, we focused on the identification of experiences of Othering and understanding how research participants made sense of them and responded to them. We then performed focused coding by categorizing different responses to Othering. Once we discovered that rationalization represented the most frequent category of responses, we included a number of theoretical codes that linked the rationalizations to underlying cultural repertoires.

Studying racism and other forms of ethnoracial Othering represents a notoriously challenging task, always mediated by the positionality of researchers, the cultural competences of research participants, and the local context (Wojnicka and Nowicka, 2023). The interviewers (including the authors of this study) were four white women of US, Czech, Czechoslovak, and Ukrainian nationalities. Three out of four members of our team have moved to Czechia from abroad at some point in their life and have thus experienced the challenges of migration first-hand, including the necessity to renegotiate their identity in the cultural context of Czechia. Nevertheless, given our skin color and origin in countries that are either considered economically advanced (the United States) or culturally close to Czechia (Slovakia, Ukraine), our position in Czech society was likely seen by the research participants as privileged. Although our positionality did not prevent them from sharing vivid details with us about their experience with ethnoracial Othering, it might have impacted how they constructed their narratives. We assume that the cultural background and competences of our research participants also influenced their narratives. We noticed that research participants from MENA were less likely to attribute their experience with Othering to their skin color and other physical characteristics, compared to research participants from sub-Saharan Africa – an important difference we address in our the analysis below. The question about differences in treatment worked well in this respect, as it was general enough to allow research participants to talk about their experience with ethnoracial Othering in their own vocabulary, whether they talked about racism or Islamophobia. Finally, like other CEE post-socialist countries, public discourse in Czechia has been marked by a culture of racial denial (Nowicka, 2018, Omeni, 2016). We believe that this fact might have altered how our research participants made sense of their experience of Othering – possibly downplaying the role of their physical characteristics in favor of their language competences and status of foreigners – as well as how they responded to it. However, rather than treating this context as a limitation of our study, we incorporated it into our analysis. We elucidate how locally available cultural repertoires inform the ways research participants make sense of their experience with Othering.

Making Sense of Ethnoracial Othering in Czechia: Three Forms of Rationalization

All research participants report to have experienced some form of ethnoracial Othering since their arrival in Czechia, although the frequency, intensity, and nature of these experiences differs among them. For some, it is easy to recall a whole series of situations in which they felt Othered, while others emphasize their good fortune in interactions with the wider society and present Othering experiences as singular incidents. Their experiences mostly include situations in which they were stared at, labeled with derogatory terms, treated roughly, verbally abused, or, on the contrary, overlooked and ignored, corresponding to what Lamont et al. (2016) conceptualize as ‘assaults on worth.’ Due to the fleeting and often ambiguous character of such situations, research participants generally struggle to determine which of their personal characteristics (or their various combinations) represent triggers for Othering (cf. Nadim, 2023). While the research participants from sub-Saharan Africa tend to attribute their experience with Othering mostly to phenotypical features such as skin color, the research participants from MENA attribute it to the combination of their phenotypical features and visible signs of religious identity, such as headscarves, highlighting the importance of gender. What is more, research participants from both regions occasionally downplay the importance of their ethnoracial background by attributing their experiences with Othering to their status of foreigners who do not speak Czech. Despite these inter-group differences, we found that there is a striking overlap in how both groups make sense of their experience with Othering in the light of their interactions with perpetrators, typically native-born Czechs. Here we identify three patterns of meaning making that dominate in our data: (1) Calling out the Collective History of Czechia, (2) Calling Out the Individual Ignorance of Perpetrators, and (3) Calling Out the Individual Responsibility of Victims, which we categorize under the overarching concept of rationalization, a way of making sense of Othering by seeing it as a logical consequence of collective histories or individual deficiencies on the part of the perpetrator or the victim. We trace these rationalizations to locally available cultural repertoires and highlight their implications for research participants’ long-term strategies aimed at limiting exposure to ethnoracial Othering and creating livable lives in Czechia.

Calling Out the Collective History of Czechia

The first way research participants rationalize Othering involves calling out perpetrators on the collective history of Czechia, which they perceive as a country largely unfamiliar with immigrants and ethnoracial diversity. This rationalization is fueled by several locally specific cultural repertoires embedded in particular aspects of Czech history, most notably the legacy of a closed-border regime during the socialist times (Baršová and Barša, 2005), the limited historic exposure of Czechia to Islam (Mendel et al., 2007), and the legacy of ethnic nationalism that continues to play a role in the self-understanding of Czechs as a nation (Vlachová, 2019). This rationalization allows the research participants to distance themselves from behavior that might seem offensive at first glance by proposing that Czechs are just ‘curious’ about Black people because they have not seen them before, or they ‘fear’ Islam because it has not been historically present in Czechia.

One of the ways this dynamic plays out is through discussions about African hair and skin color. Joy from Ghana shares her own experiences and those of her young daughter, who often notices that people stare at them and sometimes even come to touch their hair:

Initially, when I got here, I realized that when you go out, a lot of people will be looking at you, because we didn’t have a lot of Africans here back then. So, they will just stare at you. And you feel somehow, because you think – what comes to my mind when I go out and they stare at me is: Okay, probably they haven’t met anyone that looks like me. So, I don’t take it in a negative way. Because it’s normal if you go somewhere and you haven’t seen that person, you will probably stare at them. (Joy, F, 49, Ghana)

As apparent from the quotation, Joy is rationalizing the ‘staring’ and ‘touching’ behavior through Czechs’ lack of experience with Africans: ‘they’ve not seen it before, so they’ll probably want to touch and see how it feels.’ She is not overtly bothered by this ‘normal’ curiosity, in fact, laughing it off. Another vignette shared by Gloria, also from Ghana, vividly points to how she rationalizes an extreme case of such curiosity when she describes her experience from a party in Ostrava, a small city north-east of Brno.

There’s this guy from Ostrava who was a flatmate with a Ghanaian guy. And we had a party there. And when he [the flatmate] came out, he saw a lot of Black people in the kitchen. And he called his friends and said, ‘Hey, I’ve seen [a bunch of] Black people.’ And the friend said, ‘It’s a lie.’ And he put it on video, and we’re all saying hi. And the friends were screaming, ‘They’ve seen Black people. They’re in Ostrava.’ And he was excited, we were hugging him. And he said that was the first time he seen a lot of Black people, and he wanted to show his friends that it was true. (Gloria, F. 34, Ghana)

Even though this case is reminiscent of the gaze of 18th–19th-century Europeans who put Black people ‘on display,’ often in ‘freak shows’ (Biers and Clary, 2024), Gloria describes it in a matter-of-fact manner. She does not become outraged about the Othering behavior, instead rationalizing it by the fact that the main perpetrator, the flatmate of her friend, had never seen a lot of Black people in one place before.

Research participants from MENA also rationalize the behavior of perpetrators by invoking the collective history of Czechia, but instead of curiosity they more often speak of fear. Hala from Egypt occasionally experiences Othering in the form of stares and unfriendly behavior from Czechs, interpreting it as a sign of fears about foreigners:

Sometimes they [Czechs] get afraid. This is one of the things which I see. Sometimes they even get afraid of me [laughs]. [. . .] When you get to the tram, when you go to the kindergarten for kids. Maybe because they had a special regime before, the communistic regime, they weren’t very opened. So, when they have a foreigner, it’s something really very, you know. . . sudden. (Hala, F. 37. Egypt)

Honza from Syria has experienced a more explicit form of Othering, when his landlord refused to give him a rental contract and forced him out of the apartment upon discovering his nationality. He has also witnessed several other instances of Othering directed at Muslims living in Czechia, including incidents when someone wrote a threatening message on the local mosque or when his wife, a Muslim born in Czechia, received threats in public transport. Although he expresses his disapproval of such behaviour, he nonetheless rationalizes it by highlighting the lack of historic exposure of Czechia to Islam:

The Ottoman empire spread until Spain. . . Africa until Spain. But Czechia never encountered Islam as a country. It just encountered it in the 1990s when students from the Soviet Union came. And mostly they were Iraqis and Yemenis who started the mosque here. So, before the 1990s, they didn’t have that encounter. For them it’s something new. (Honza, M, 32, Syria)

Contrary to Honza’s narrative, Czechia had actually experienced exposure to student immigration from MENA countries during socialism (Hannová, 2014). Nevertheless, this immigration was small in scale and does not translate into a current cultural repertoire that would allow the Muslims from MENA countries to meaningfully emplace themselves within the collective history of Czechia.

Besides allowing the research participants to distance themselves from the behavior of the perpetrators, the past-looking nature of this rationalization also allows them to raise expectations about potential improvement of their position in the future. Several reflect upon gradual changes in Czech society in response to immigration, asserting that greater openness of native-born Czechs toward immigrants and ethnoracial diversity is simply a matter of time. As Bella from Nigeria shares:

Earlier, you could see when you go around, people look at you. Because of course you look a bit different from them. So, I think it’s from a place of like, curiosity. But I think now, with more foreigners coming in, I think they’re slowly getting used to it. I think they are becoming more open. Of course, I don’t think they’re there yet. But I think it’s getting better by the day. (Bella, F, 26, Nigeria)

This rationalization is not necessarily conducive to any active long-term strategy aimed at preventing experiences with ethnoracial Othering in the future. Instead, it presents Othering as a relic of the past that needs to be endured until it eventually passes.

Calling Out the Individual Ignorance of Perpetrators

The second prominent form of rationalization involves the individualization of the perpetrator. Perpetrators are demarcated as individuals or small sub-groups among native-born Czechs who are deviant (often, this means drunk) or ignorant, uneducated, close-minded, or lacking experience of living abroad, while the ‘victims,’ our research participants, portray themselves as the deserving ones, generous, educated, open-minded, and forgiving. Consider the following narrative, in which Hala from Egypt first describes her experience of being underestimated and looked down upon, then rationalizing it by highlighting the ignorance of perpetrators:

Hala:

[I hear] ‘You are Egyptian, how come you can speak good English? How come- can you, will you teach our [children] – you are not native.’ [. . .] So, this is what I sometimes have from some people, not all people, but some people. They think that you are lower than them [. . .].

Interviewer:

How does it make you feel when you experience something like that?

Hala:

I laugh [laughs].

Interviewer:

You laugh?

Hala:

Right. I discovered that it comes from the uneducated side. So, I decided to get more in touch with the educated side, you know? Because if the person is educated, graduated from university, being open-minded, studying a lot of things, cultures in the world, this is the kind I should communicate and work with. But the uneducated side, they have their own world, they have their own beliefs, let’s say. (Hala, F, 37, Egypt)

Hala clearly dissociates herself from her experience, portraying the perpetrators as less educated, narrow-minded, and ignorant of other cultures, in contrast to her and her acquaintances or friends. This rationalization allows her to remain above experiences of Othering and eventually laugh, asserting her morally superior position. Ben (2023) observes a similar tendency among highly educated Eritrean migrants in Australia, interpreting it as an attempt to de-emphasize racism and assert their middle-class position instead.

As opposed to the previous rationalization that highlights the ignorance of Czech society as a whole, when the research participants call out the individual ignorance of the perpetrators, ethnoracial Othering is rather conceived as something exceptional and it is attributed to a small cohort of individuals, what Nelson (2013) calls ‘deflection from the mainstream.’ Besides exceptionality, Nadim (2023) observes intentionality is another important dimension in calling out ignorance of the perpetrators of racism. The research participants often dismiss the significance of the incidents of ethnoracial Othering, claiming that they could not blame the perpetrators who were seen as ignorant or deviant. Joy from Ghana, for example, describes an incident in which a drunk man was shouting at her in a tram: ‘But I didn’t take it to heart because he was drunk.’ Andall (2002) finds that despite the interviewees she spoke with being subjected to incidents of everyday racism (Essed, l991), they frequently considered them instances of ‘ignorance’ rather than ‘real racism.’ Marking the perpetrators as ignorant or deviant allows the research participants to portray the wider Czech society as non-racist (cf. Nadim, 2023). We interpret this tendency in the light of the lack of cultural repertoires that would make it possible to speak openly about racism in Czech society. The cultural repertoire of racial denial, namely, the lack of recognition of race as a structural and relational problem can be observed in many contemporary societies (Andall, 2002; Nadim, 2023; Nelson, 2013).

Another way in which research participants call out the individual ignorance of perpetrators is by presenting them as a minority group in Czech society, typically defined by age or (lack of) experience from abroad – either traveling or living outside the country. Older people (born and raised under socialism) and those who do not have experience from abroad are seen as more prone to be the perpetrators of Othering. In contrast, young people and those Czechs who have experience with living abroad are perceived as more tolerant and open to foreigners. This portrayal is apparent in the following statement by Nancy from Cameroon, who makes a clear distinction between the older and younger generation of Czechs:

I just wish, because most of the awful encounters that I’ve had, I’ve had with older people. I just wish the younger generation could enlighten these people more. Because the younger generation is still nice [. . .] I understand that that era of their grandfathers was different, but if it could change and they understand that people are humans, like we are not here to [cause harm]. Some of us are really happy for the opportunities that we have had being in this country. (Nancy, F, 38, Cameroon)

It is clear from Nancy’s narrative that constructing the perpetrators of Othering as deviant or ignorant in contrast to other individuals or segments of society who are accepting, helpful, and accommodating allows the research participants to sustain a belief that the major part of Czech society is open to immigrants and ethnoracial diversity and that by eventually educating the ignorant part, the acceptance of Otherness in Czechia will increase in the future (see also Ben, 2023; Nelson, 2013). This rationalization is also conducive to two contrasting long-term strategies aimed at future prevention of experiences with ethnoracial Othering. First, research participants try to limit social contact with people who are perceived as ignorant, as exemplified by Hala. Second, they instead try to engage with them actively, with the hope of educating them and changing their views. Such a strategy has been exemplified by the active involvement of several research participants in civic initiatives aimed at fostering tolerance, including cultural events and educational seminars for schools.

Calling out the Individual Responsibility of Victims

The third form of rationalization involves the individualization of victims. Research participants rationalize their experiences with ethnoracial Othering by seeing them as logical consequences of their individual deficiencies, typically related to ‘failed’ integration efforts. The cultural origins of this rationalization can be traced back to the neoliberal insistence on individual performance that has become very prominent in contemporary immigration policies (Joppke, 2024). This rationalization shifts the responsibility to immigrants themselves who, by failing to meet the expectations laid upon them by the native-born Czechs, become accomplices in their own Othering.

Insufficient knowledge of the Czech language is the most discussed individual deficiency perceived by our research participants. The belief that a better command of Czech would boost their integration and shield them from Othering is consistent with their tendency to attribute some of their experiences with Othering to language misunderstandings rather than to ethnoracial identity. Diala from Syria is just one of the many research participants who insists that if only she could speak Czech better, she would not be experiencing Othering.

Sometimes when I need to go to the hospital, I have difficulties because of the language. Sometimes, they act really. . . not that nice. I needed to do some [examination] for my daughter. And they were not that helpful, you know, like. . . Yeah [sigh]. But I guess it’s normal. I don’t say it’s something really bad. I understand [those] people. The pressure of life, the pressure of work, we are all human beings, everyone has their own [Short pause]. Yeah, to say. . . I just need to improve my Czech, I guess it will get better. (Diala, F, 38, Syria)

As becomes apparent from Diala’s narrative, she does not blame the medical personnel in the hospital for not being ‘nice’ to her. Instead, she shifts the responsibility to herself, suggesting that it is she who needs to improve her Czech to prevent similar incidents in the future. Kenjohnmwas from Kenya goes even further in insisting on individual responsibility. He has also experienced a fair share of Othering experiences that included people calling him names, accusing him of taking their jobs, insisting he should return to his country or origin, or even telling his Slovak wife she should be ashamed of having a child ‘with this kind of a person.’ Yet when asked what would make him feel better in Czechia, he insisted any sort of improvement would have to come from his side:

The only thing that would make me feel better to be here would have to come from me. Yeah, from my side, mostly. I have to work for it, by learning the language and integrating myself into the culture. Rather than expecting the Czech people to accept me with my culture. Because it's their country. So, I think it's more like the work is for me. (Kenjohnmwas, M, 37, Kenya)

The implications of this rationalization for the future are thus clearly present. They are based on a belief that experiences with Othering can be prevented or even entirely mitigated by immigrants’ individual performance, particularly through their integration efforts. This rationalization is conducive to an active strategy aimed at future prevention of experiences with ethnoracial Othering that relies on self-improvement. The experience of the research participants who continue to face Othering despite their self-improvement efforts, however, exposes the limits of this strategy. Asma holds a university degree in Czech, in which she is almost fluent. Nonetheless, neither her language competence nor her other integration efforts shield her from frequent stares in the public space of the city that she attracts when she wears her headscarf, and which compromise her sense of belonging in Czech society. She finds it difficult to make sense of her feelings, because they go against the logic of her integration efforts.

I’m still processing; why do I feel that? It’s not logical. Because you would belong to a place if you’re, I don’t know, abiding by the rules, speaking the language, [being] positive in the community. And I’m doing all this stuff, but I still don’t feel like I belong. (Asma, F, 28, Egypt)

Nevertheless, instead of acknowledging the limits of her self-improvement efforts, she believes that if she tried even harder, her position would eventually improve.

I guess I will feel more belonging if I do more stuff. If I volunteer more. If I show myself more out in public, like in positive situations, in positive places, you know. Like some kind of charity or something. If I did something nice for one person, it would maybe affect the whole family. Because they would go back and they would say: ‘Ah, today, I had a wonderful day. And then, like, this lady, she’s wearing a [head]scarf, I thought like she’s a terrorist, but then she turned out to be very nice.’ (Asma, F, 28, Egypt)

Asma’s narrative thus reveals a striking paradox – even though her efforts at self-improvement have thus far not shielded her from Othering, she still believes in their potential to do so in the future. In this way, it exposes the extent to which the neoliberal insistence on individual performance obscures the nature of systemic racism.

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Although the narratives described in the previous sections clearly demonstrate that rationalization allows research participants to gain some distance from their experience, to take some of its edge away, and to see potential improvement of their situation in the future, by no means does it completely shield them from the emotional tolls of ethnoracial Othering. Some admit that despite their best efforts to rationalize their experience, they are not always capable of doing so and the experience sometimes simply weighs them down. This nuance is evident in an excerpt from the interview with Nancy from Cameroon, who admits taking these experiences to heart. In describing how they bring down her self-confidence, she explains that she nevertheless does not confront people who attack her, preferring instead to ignore them and walk away.

Interviewer:

But it gets to you sometimes.

Nancy:

Oh, not sometimes. Always. All the time. Yeah, all the time. Sometimes, I feel, I don’t know, I feel like maybe I’m too emotional to be taking it to heart, because I know some guys [Africans] that it will happen to them, they will just stand and laugh at the person.

So, I was discussing this with one of my friends. I said: ‘This man was just making as if I’m a monkey.’ So, he just laughed: ‘If I was the one, I would laugh very loud. And make him look so stupid.’ I said, ‘But I don’t have the time just to laugh at somebody like that. I’m just walking.’ Well, the guy said no, that what he practices is just to laugh at people who do that, because not all Czech people or all white people do that. He just feels like those people who do that, they are not. . . they themself have problem with their own personal life. That they want to project it onto others through making others feel less about themselves. (Nancy, F, 38, Cameroon)

Although Nancy, encouraged by her friend, can clearly think of possible rationalizations for the hurtful behavior, it nonetheless affects her gravely. Rationalization thus should not be understood as a readily accessible form of meaning-making that prevents the victims of ethnoracial Othering from its harmful effects, but rather as a costly enterprise that requires reflexivity, inner strength, and an active effort on the part of the victims.

Conclusion

In this study, we have explored how immigrants from MENA and sub-Saharan Africa make sense of experiences with ethnoracial Othering in Czechia, a new immigrant destination in Central Europe. Despite the modest numbers of immigrants from these two regions, their highly negative media portrayal contributes to their hyper-visibility and steers their negative perception by the native-born Czechs (Jaworsky et al., 2023). In the light of this specific positionality and the overall immigration context of Czechia, we have focused on understanding how the micro-level everyday experiences of racialized immigrants connect to the macro-level social structures that represent sources of oppression, all the while mediated by available cultural repertoires (Aquino, 2016; Lamont et al., 2016, Nowicka, 2018).

We find that rationalization represents the dominant pattern of meaning-making through which research participants make sense of their experience. We identify three distinct forms of rationalization: (1) Calling Out the Collective History of Czechia, (2) Calling Out the Individual Ignorance of Perpetrators, and (3) Calling out the Individual Responsibility of Victims. We show that these rationalizations allow the research participants to gain some distance from their experience or, as some of them put it ‘not take it to heart’ by presenting it as a logical consequence of the collective history of the country or individual deficiencies on the part of the perpetrator or the victim. Capturing an important nuance in the narratives of our research participants, we also demonstrate that rationalization is a costly enterprise that is not always possible, and sometimes, the experiences with Othering simply weigh one down.

We have further traced the rationalizations to locally available cultural repertoires that sustain the image of Czechia as a country with limited historical experience of migration and ethnoracial diversity, a country in which systemic racism does not exist and is only a matter of specific individuals or groups, a country in which immigrants need to prove themselves by demonstrating their integration efforts and work performance. Some of these cultural repertoires are fueled by specific aspects of Czech history (and Central European history more generally), such as the legacy of a closed-border regime during socialist times (Baršová and Barša, 2005), the limited historic exposure of Czechia to Islam (Mendel et al., 2007), or the legacy of ethnic nationalism (Vlachová, 2019). Others reflect broader trends that underpin contemporary discussions about migration and ethnoracial diversity in Western societies, such as racial denial (Andall, 2002; Nadim, 2023; Nelson, 2013) or the neoliberal insistence on individual performance (Joppke, 2024). It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that the three forms of rationalization occur in some form in other national contexts as well.

Finally, we have demonstrated that rationalizations are not only past-oriented, but they also entail future projections. In this way, they allow the research participants to imagine future improvement of their position in Czech society and give rise to specific long-term strategies aimed at limiting exposure to ethnoracial Othering, such as patiently waiting until Czechs become more open to foreigners, seeking out interactions with open-minded and educated people or, alternatively, trying to educate the ignorant ones, and boosting integration efforts by learning Czech and presenting oneself as a ‘good immigrant’ who contributes to the society. We would like to stress that neither the rationalizations nor the long-term strategies they give rise to are mutually exclusive; they represent cultural resources that are available to individuals and can be flexibly utilized depending on the context.

All in all, our findings contribute to the scholarship on responses to racism and other forms of ethnoracial Othering (Aquino, 2016; Ben, 2023; Herbert et al., 2008; Lamont et al., 2016; Mellor, 2004; Nadim, 2023; Nelson, 2013; Omeni, 2016; Piwoni, 2024) by improving the conceptual understanding of rationalization as a specific response to Othering experienced by immigrants, highlighting the cultural embeddedness of rationalization, and bringing attention to future-oriented aspects of rationalization that connect the meaning-making with social action. Future research could explore other context-specific forms of rationalization and their underlying cultural repertoires in response to ethnoracial Othering. This call is especially important for new immigrant destinations like the CEE region, where racialization and racism are not often publicly discussed.

We would like to conclude by bringing attention to a striking absence of cultural repertoires in Czech context that would allow immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa and MENA to make sense of their experience with ethnoracial Othering beyond rationalization, in a socially critical manner, for instance, by highlighting its structural origins or demanding social change. What we find in our research is a strong pressure to conform felt by immigrants, including avoidance of conflict and efforts to comply with the requirements of Czech society on the one hand, and only modest claims for the accommodation of difference, such as higher proliferation of English in public spaces and tolerance for ethnoracial and cultural differences, on the other hand. Our findings thus have policy implications. Besides the spread of English-language competence throughout public institutions, we believe that raising awareness about the structural origins of racism could contribute to greater acceptance of diversity in Czechia and the CEE region at large, which would, in turn, help immigrants to assert belonging and more critically engage ethnoracial Othering when it does occur.

The results of this study, as well as recent findings from other studies from the CEE context (e.g. Balogun, 2020; Jaskulowski and Pawlak, 2020) reveal the need for recognition of the structural origins of ethnoracial Othering and an open debate about the experiences of non-white immigrants in these societies. At the same time, they are relevant beyond this context, especially for more recent immigrant destinations in Europe and beyond, revealing how immigrants strive to create livable lives despite the omnipresent experiences of ethnoracial Othering.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-cus-10.1177_17499755251336818 – Supplemental material for You Can’t Take it to Heart: How Czech Residents from MENA and Sub-Saharan Africa Make Sense of Ethnoracial Othering

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-cus-10.1177_17499755251336818 for You Can’t Take it to Heart: How Czech Residents from MENA and Sub-Saharan Africa Make Sense of Ethnoracial Othering by Ivana Rapoš Božič, Radka Klvaňová and Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky in Cultural Sociology