Liquid racism in the Greek anti-racist campaign #StopMindBorders

Abstract This study examines the opaque reproduction of racism in an online, anti-racist campaign officially aiming to denounce hate speech and challenge widespread stereotypes concerning migrants. In particular, we investigate the video clips of the #StopMindBorders campaign launched by the Greek branch of the International Organization for Migration. We specifically concentrate on the liquid racism attested in these video clips, namely a highly ambivalent form of racism encouraged in the mass media and usually hard to detect, as it involves multiple interpretations, some of which may not be assessed as racist ( Weaver 2016 ). The multimodal critical analysis of the representation of migrants reveals that these video clips tacitly promote migrants’ linguocultural assimilation as a prerequisite for their acceptance in the host country. In this sense, although the anti-racist campaign under scrutiny attempts to refute discourses of aggression and mainstream stereotypes against migrants, it ends up naturalizing hate speech and reproducing assimilative and monoculturalist ideologies.