Luke’s Reviews > Afropean: Notes from Black Europe > Status Update

Lisbon pre-dates London, Paris and Rome and was the first and last capital of colonization, and I could feel Africa all over it.

When you look of footage of [Paris on Victory in Europe Day], when the victory of the Allies in the Second World War was officially proclaimed, you won't see a single non-white soldier celebrating in the most symbolic record of the French resistance, despite the fact that two thirds of those soldiers had brown skin.

Russia became insecure and inward-looking, and a secular society (religion was suppressed in the USSR) was now finding meaning in an almost militant Russian Orthodoxy branch of Christianity, encouraged more recently by Vladimir Putin and embodying that old idea that has become synonymous with historical amnesia, inequality, homophobia, racism, violence, bigotry and ignorance: 'Let's make our country great again.'

This really is a great book, but there's no reason for the author to go out of his way to humanize the poor widdle (white) cops just trying to protect rich (white) people's property.

"Ultimately, the one certainty for Europe is that she knows a 'nigger' when she sees one: she should — they were a figment of her imagination, a product of her creative mind."

-Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe