# The importance of place: defining blackness in Europe and Africa  
Perhaps because of their diverse roots, anti-racist activists in Europe do not wholly agree in their aims or analyses. After all, black Europeans can claim a broad range of familial, historical and cultural influences: North African, West African, East African and Caribbean origins; Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Africanist religions; leftist, centrist and conservative political orientations - as well as a broad variety of European, African and Caribbean languages and dialects. As one can imagine, Maghrebi populations in France, for example, can feel more immediately threatened by Europe's long-standing Islamophobia than black Britons who hail from the Anglophone Caribbean. The black German movement is notable for scholars such as Peggy Piesche and Maureen Eggers (Mythen, Masken und Subjekte Kritische Weisssein Forschung in Deutschland, or Myths, Masks and Subjects in Critical Whiteness Studies, 2009), whose scholarship compellingly links anti-black racism to misogyny, Islamophobia, homophobia and class prejudice. At the same time, this 'large umbrella' approach is relatively rare in activist politics as a whole, much less within the black and African diasporas.