Meritocracy, Recognition and Double Consciousness: Why Black and Muslim Italians Move to (and Sometimes Leave) Post‐Brexit Britain
PMCID: PMC12950205
PMID: 41221663
Abstract
ABSTRACT This article rethinks meritocratic ideology as practical knowledge that transforms through biographies of social and geographical mobility. Drawing on 37 interviews with Black and Muslim Italians living in Britain or returned to Italy, the article shows that meritocracy is rarely invoked as a coherent ideology but works as practical, embodied commonsense about the world order, with Britain leading a hierarchy of European societies. The article explores three dimensions of meritocratic commonsense and racialised minorities' double‐consciousness (Du Bois). First, 'meritocratic Britain' is not simply a neoliberal narrative, but draws from postcolonial, intergenerational histories of family migration that include desires for equality and security. Second, participants' encounters with British racism do not necessarily challenge beliefs in meritocratic Britain, as being racialised as 'foreigners' in Italy leaves deeper scars on their sense of identity, belonging and recognition. Third, meritocratic Britain can lose emotional resonance when participants feel desires for connectedness and home that are not satisfied by occupational and educational mobility. By centring racialised minorities' double‐consciousness, practical knowledge and struggles for recognition, the article highlights the limitations of false consciousness, misinformation and psychological compensation as explanations for meritocratic belief. Moreover, it unravels how meritocratic narratives transform across life stages.
Full Text
Sociology and related social sciences are increasingly concerned with a paradox: belief in meritocracy ‐ the notion that economic rewards reflect individual effort and talent ‐ appears to strengthen as inequality rises, particularly in highly unequal societies like the US and UK (Littler 2017; Mijs 2021). Quantitative studies suggest that many continue to hold positive views about the role of ‘hard work' in shaping life chances, which underscores the ideological force of meritocracy. Yet, these conclusions remain contested, given the limits of survey‐based attitudinal measures (Bartram 2023; Zhu 2024).
This article approaches this puzzle differently. Drawing on interviews with Black and Muslim Italians living in post‐Brexit Britain (or who returned to Italy), we rethink meritocracy as a practical, embodied commonsense that is reshaped through experiences of social and geographical mobility. Elaborating on Du Bois's notion of double‐consciousness (1903/2007), we show how self‐formation in structurally racist societies sustains emotional investment in meritocratic narratives, as racialised minorities see ‘hard work' as a path to social respect and recognition (Fraser and Honneth 2003). Yet, this investment co‐exists with nuanced understanding of racial inequalities, while belief in meritocracy proves to be context‐dependent, relational and temporally changing.
Our findings highlight three dynamics. First, post‐1970s neoliberalism offers a historically limited frame for understanding our participants' relationship with ideas of merit. These draw on longer‐term, intergenerational histories of migration, premised on aspirations towards equality and security. Second, participants' encounters with British racism do not necessarily undermine belief in meritocracy, as the experience of being racialised as stranieri (foreigners) in Italy leaves deeper wounds on their sense of self, leading to a search for recognition abroad. Third, meritocratic narratives can be challenged by desires for connectedness, belonging and home, which are not satisfied solely by occupational and educational mobility (the practices historically tied to meritocratic recognition; Littler 2017).
Methodologically, the article focuses on how meritocratic ideology shapes a tangible social practice: international migration. Youth migration is tied to aspirations of self‐improvement and upward mobility (Varriale 2023; Franceschelli 2022). Thus, it offers a more defined context (compared to attitudinal survey questions) for exploring the power of meritocracy across temporal, geographical and social dimensions. By focusing on Black and Muslim Italians, the article also addresses a group of minoritised Europeans who remain at the periphery of debates on racism and inequality (Hawthorne 2022), and whose views about Italy, Britain and meritocracy are influenced by experiences of racism that cross borders and generations.
Survey studies explore the power of meritocratic ideology especially via questions about ‘hard work' and its importance for individual success (Mijs 2021; Morris et al. 2022; but see Bartram 2023). This literature explains meritocracy's power via explicit or implicit notions of false consciousness, broadly defined as ‘beliefs which are false but make sense of the world [individuals] inhabit' (Mijs and Usmani 2024, 58). Research on the upper‐middle classes shows that they report stronger belief in hard work compared to more disadvantaged groups (Bucca 2016; Bottero 2019, 25–53). The working classes, however, are also invested in meritocracy, which has been explained as a form of psychological compensation: meritocracy provides a way of rationalising one's disadvantage as deserved (Solt et al. 2016, 2) or to protect one's self‐esteem by ‘hold[ing] out the promise of future advancement' (Morris et al. 2022, 423). Either way, meritocracy remains conceptualised as a false consciousness that distorts the ‘real' causes of inequality. Mijs and Usmani (2024) recently elaborated on meritocracy as a (mis)information problem. They argued that people underestimate causes and levels of inequality because they are embedded in socially and geographically distant networks. Belief in meritocracy is thus an ‘inferential error' sustained by lack of contact across socio‐economic divisions.
As argued by Fercovic (2022: 119), survey‐based literature on meritocracy risks ‘neglecting the contextual specificities and the meaning‐making processes in which these phenomena are embedded [original emphasis]'. By contrast, work inspired by Gramsci's hegemony (1975) and Hall (1986) highlights the importance of a more contextually sensitive take on ideology. These studies agree that meritocracy contributes to the legitimation of growing inequalities (Meghji and Saini 2018), but unlike stronger notions of false consciousness, they conceptualise hegemony as fuzzy, potentially relying on contradictory ideas and open to transformation (Hall and O'Shea 2013). Hegemony is also a composite product of different historical narratives. Indeed, while ideas of self‐responsibility and individual effort were key to the legitimation of post‐1970s neoliberalism, meritocracy also draws on earlier social‐democratic discourses, which saw state infrastructures as means to guarantee equality of opportunity (Littler 2017, 51–53); a connection this article will unpack further.
The notion of hegemony resonates with recent qualitative literature, which shows that individuals can mobilise both meritocratic and structuralist narratives of (in)equality in different contexts (Andersen et al. 2021; Asahina 2021). Lamont and et al. (2016) show that meritocratic narratives of self‐resilience and self‐improvement co‐exist with critique of racial inequalities among Black Americans. Fercovic's work on Chile (2022) shows that upwardly mobile working‐class individuals do not misjudge how inequality affects their lives, but forge moral stories about their families as ‘people of effort', rethinking merit as a combination of individual work, family support and luck. Similarly, Ho (2024) approaches meritocracy as a cultural narrative that allows working‐class youth to construct ‘agentic selves'. Her participants are aware of being structurally disadvantaged, but mobilise ‘hard work' as a pragmatic strategy to keep going in life.
Expanding on this literature and our previous research (Varriale 2023; Franceschelli 2024), we address meritocratic ideology as part of practical commonsense that develops via socialisation in national, classed and racialised contexts, including family histories of migration (see empirical sections). Practical logic operates via ‘often imprecise but systematic principle[s] of selection' (Bourdieu 1990, 102). These principles of ‘vision' of the social world are embodied in the habitus, a ‘system of structured, structuring dispositions […] which is constituted in practice and is always oriented towards practical functions' Bourdieu (1990, 52).
Meritocratic beliefs can thus be conceptualised as cognitive‐emotional 'maps' shaped by trajectories of social and geographical mobility. Drawing on Bourdieu's emphasis on the embodied, pre‐reflexive and fuzzy nature of practical logic, we demonstrate how participants' imaginaries of meritocratic Britain gained significance through the experience of growing up as racialised Italians. These imaginaries then evolved as participants navigated migration and the realities of British society, within new fields of practice (Bourdieu 1990).
An emphasis on practical knowledge also helps unpack the contradictory, ‘intertwined' character of cultural narratives (Lamont and et al. 2016, 82). As this article shows, in the context of migration, meritocracy is not mentioned as a coherent ideology, but as part of wider stories about the postcolonial world order, which associate the Global North with more economically advanced, meritocratic societies, and Southern geo‐political regions (including Southern Europe) as 'backwards'. These understandings of world hierarchies have been influential in post‐2008 Italy (Varriale 2023), but are documented also in scholarship on the historical framing of global inequalities in Europe (Boatcă 2015).
By examining the tensions between practical knowledge and lived experience, and how they unfold across biographical trajectories, this article explores ideology's power in more dynamic ways than survey‐based literature. Additionally, it moves beyond the focus of some qualitative studies on the alignment between ideology and experience; namely, when individuals invoke meritocratic narratives as explanations for (achieved) upward mobility (Fercovic 2022; Meghji and Saini 2018).
The literature discussed above largely ignores the linkages between meritocratic ideology and questions of recognition and racism, despite a history of ‘vernacular' forms of self‐resilience within the Black Diaspora (Gilroy 2013). Yet this neglected history might help studies of meritocracy better understand the limitations of ideological power and how minoritised communities adapt hegemonic narratives to their search for recognition and equality.
Du Bois's work (1903/2007) provides an important link between recognition
and racialised self‐formation (Itzigsohn and Brown 2015; Meer and Du Bois 2019). He famously began his reflection on ‘double‐consciousness' by discussing how Black Americans develop unique insights into the workings of racism:
Du Bois's emphasis on racialised minorities' 'dogged strength' is especially relevant for debates about meritocratic ideology. His analysis does not stop at self‐stigmatisation, but dialectically accounts for the development of a 'second sight' into the phenomenology of racism. Misrecognition is thus not passively accepted but actively struggled with, and potentially challenged (Meer and Du Bois 2019). This resonates with findings on Black Americans' ‘dual perspective' regarding both the existence of racial inequalities and the value of hard work (Lamont and et al. 2016). It also aligns with evidence of growing activism among minoritised Europeans, as the ‘unreconciled strivings' of feeling Black, Muslim and Italian are increasingly documented (Hawthorne 2022; Pesarini 2021). As discussed below, the experience of being misrecognised as 'foreigners' in Italy makes narratives of meritocratic Britain appealing to participants, but only under certain structural, relational and temporal conditions.
A Du Boisian perspective on recognition thus challenges discussions of meritocracy as a defence mechanism among the less privileged, which stop at self‐stigmatisation and system justification (Jost 2019). This does not account for ambivalence, critique or resistance, while theoretically more sophisticated accounts of meritocracy as a cultural script (Ho 2024) do not address the specificity of racialised self‐formation and its consequences across the lifecourse. The concept of double consciousness can thus support an analysis of meritocracy's power which acknowledges the enduring impact of racism, while remaining attentive to questions of agency, biographical change and social‐geographical mobility.
Migrations between Italy and Britain are relevant to the meritocracy debate because they highlight the possibility, so far neglected, that people's ‘sense of inequality' (Bottero 2019) is not fully constrained by national borders. Indeed, after the 2008 economic crisis, wage stagnation, labour market precarisation and growing unemployment fostered new emigrations from Italy to Britain; a destination that Italian media frequently associated with better opportunities and a more meritocratic culture (Varriale 2023). While Italy's structural problems remain ongoing, Britain experienced major economic and political crises since Brexit. This allows us to explore the tensions between meritocratic ideology and lived experience across different socio‐political contexts.
Both Italy and Britain have colonial histories that inform their ethno‐racial stratification. However, institutional and everyday racism manifest differently in these contexts. Britain has a history of postcolonial migrations dating to the 1950s: racial equality legislation was introduced from the mid‐1960s and data collection about ethno‐racial inequalities has become institutionalised (Finney and et al. 2023; Mirza and Warwick 2024, 428–430). By contrast, Italian institutions do not collect data on ethno‐racial inequalities, while the word ‘race' (razza) and Italy's colonial history have been erased from public debate throughout the post‐war period (Pesarini 2021). Moreover, large‐scale immigration from the 1980s was met with increasingly restrictive citizenship and immigration policies (Lombardi‐Diop and Romeo 2015; Obasuyi 2025). Compared to Britain, Italy thus resembles wider patterns of European colour‐blindness (Beaman 2017; Balogun 2023). This can normalise overt everyday racism (Benson and Lewis 2019) and policies with structurally racist impacts. Indeed, Black and minoritised Italian activists have increasingly criticised the contradiction between colour‐blind institutional practices and everyday racist violence (Ghebremariam Tesfau' and Picker 2021; Obasuyi 2025).
In Britain, despite persisting ethno‐racial inequalities (especially for Black Caribbean, Black African, Bangladeshi and Pakistani minorities), growing educational mobility sustained the emergence of a Black and South Asian middle class in the last 25 years (Meghji and Saini 2018). A similar process was not visible in Italy during the 2010s, when participants moved abroad (see Asma's discussion below). Moreover, racialised minorities remain concentrated in lower‐status manual and care work in Italy (Obasuyi 2025). This was a common experience among participants' parents, which fed into worries about their children's future.
These historical trends sustained narratives that associate Britain with more opportunities and meritocracy (as for white Italians). However, for Black and minoritised Italians these narratives include expectations of more institutional support towards equality and multiculturalism, and more respectful everyday interactions. These narratives circulated within participants' transnational family networks while growing up in Italy (e.g., through visits to family members in Northern Europe). Yet they became more salient during the 2010s, when Italy's worsening economy fostered new migrations (Varriale 2023; Franceschelli 2024).
This article draws on 37 biographical interviews with Black, Muslim and other minority ethnic Italians who moved to Britain since the 2008 economic crisis. Sampling followed a theoretical rationale: we recruited participants exposed to different forms of racialisation in Italy (Morning and Maneri 2022). We used the concept of ‘second generation Italians' in recruitment materials, as this concept is significantly established in Italian public discourse on racialised minorities and, in previous research, facilitated recruitment of participants with different ethno‐national and religious backgrounds (Varriale 2025). Furthermore, the principle of jus sanguinis in Italian citizenship legislation prevents all children of migrants from becoming legally Italian until 18 (or until a parent becomes Italian), leading to shared experiences of legal violence (Menjívar and Abrego 2012) across ethno‐racial backgrounds, as discussed later.
The majority of participants studied or were studying at university level (27). However, their families worked predominantly in working‐class sectors in Italy. The majority had factory, cleaner or care jobs, while a minority (9) were or had been self‐employed (mostly as small business owners or skilled workers). Only 3 participants with mixed backgrounds had (white) fathers in white collar jobs. This is consistent with research on immigration and stratification in Italy: both non‐EU and Eastern European migrants are more likely to be in working‐class and precarious occupations (Panichella et al. 2023; Obasuyi 2025).
Participants were contacted through social media, via public recruitment or individual messages. This strategy expanded the project's geographical focus, an important step given the paucity of official data on racialised Italians in Britain. Only 11 participants lived or had lived in London; the majority lived around areas with established minoritised communities (e.g., Manchester, Leicester and Birmingham). Since Brexit, all participants except one had obtained pre‐settled or settled‐status. This article does not address the complexities of pre/settled status (Zambelli et al. 2023), but it means that participants felt they had a secure legal status when interviewed.
The first author conducted online interviews via Teams between late 2023 and mid‐2024, each lasting an average of 80 min. Following a strategy developed in previous research (Varriale 2025), we asked general questions about motivations for emigration, life in Britain and plans for the future, and more specific questions about educational and professional trajectories (before and after migration), relationships in Britain and Italy, and experiences of Brexit and cost of living. We asked a question about reasons for leaving Britain when relevant, then reconstructed participants' trajectories across national contexts.
We did not ask questions about meritocracy. Following previous work (Varriale 2023), we focussed on how participants spontaneously invoked meritocratic commonsense within broader narratives and in relation to specific social fields and lifecourse transitions. This strategy has the advantage of tapping into practical sense's fuzziness and contextual dimension. Moreover, the interview's biographical design addresses issues of temporality and change, which, as discussed above, remain underresearched in debates on meritocracy.
To prevent harm, we avoided asking questions about personal experiences of racism. However, Black, Muslim and non‐white
participants frequently addressed the connections between emigration and being treated like stranieri (foreigners) in Italy. The project was presented as aiming to document the ‘diversity' of Italian emigration, which potentially suggested sympathetic listeners. The interviewer and first author is a white, male Italian migrant with a Southern Italian, low‐middle class background. While he felt that sharing language, cultural references and experiences of migration to Britain facilitated discussion, whiteness
also affected discussion in significant ways. As discussed below, some participants suggested that the experience of growing up as 'foreigners' in Italy needed further explanation, given that the interviewer did not share it. This potentially produced richer narratives about the experiences that are central to this article. However, participants were also relatively young (between their twenties and early forties) and were striving to achieve upward mobility. This might have limited their willingness to disclose more difficult experiences in Britain, especially to a white co‐national with a middle‐class job. Our sampling strategy might also sustain self‐selection of participants with ‘positive' experiences of migration. Yet, ambivalences and critiques about Britain emerged nonetheless, while returnees were even more explicit about what changed earlier perceptions of Britain's meritocracy.
As anticipated above, rather than discussing meritocracy as an abstract principle, participants drew on meritocratic commonsense by referencing broader cultural scripts (Lamont and et al. 2016) about modern multicultural societies, which allegedly facilitate upward mobility for racialised minorities. This section shows that this narrative is not simply a product of late‐1970s neoliberalism, but draws on earlier intergenerational stories of migration towards Western Europe, which accommodate social‐democratic notions of equality and institutional support.
Asma's discussion of Britain's ‘meritocracy' draws from practical knowledge that is common also among white Italian migrants (Varriale 2023; Franceschelli 2024). However, as an Italian with Moroccan (Muslim) parents, Asma approaches the ‘Italian' story about meritocratic Britain from a racialised position. Britain is thus also a ‘multicultural' country where, contrary to Italy, one can see a ‘Moroccan lawyer' and other 'foreigners' in ‘very important jobs', namely, a country where upward mobility for racialised minorities is easier.
This intergenerational perspective helps understand both meritocratic Britain's emotional power among participants, and why this cultural script includes apparently contradictory, more ‘structural' elements, like a search for better institutional support. The latter appears at odds with scholarship that stress the links between meritocracy and neoliberalism. However, this is not a contradiction if meritocracy is conceptualised as practical commonsense embedded in broader, ‘fuzzier' historical narratives, which include earlier discourses about equality of opportunity (Littler 2017). Moreover, practical knowledge is activated in relation to specific structural contexts, like experiences of class inequality. Awa, whose parents moved to Italy from Ivory Coast, remembered how her dad discussed Britain when the family moved there:
The ‘England' evoked through the stories of Awa's father is associated with more sustained institutional support towards equality. ‘School uniforms' and welfare provisions (like free school meals) reduce economic and status inequalities; they are ‘small things' that can ‘save costs' and hence facilitate upward mobility. This narrative about support thus co‐exists with the idea, discussed above, that Britain also offers better educational and occupational opportunities (as reported also in recent research on the Italian‐Bangladeshis community in London; Morad et al. 2021).
Most participants experienced some educational and occupational mobility in Britain. While moving abroad in different circumstances, they mostly completed A levels or vocational qualifications and applied to UK universities, albeit largely in non‐elite institutions and almost always by taking on student debt. The majority also worked part‐time or full‐time during their studies (in hospitality, customer service or various forms of agency work), while some older participants eventually landed middle‐class jobs in areas like administration, marketing and teaching. Having parents with predominantly working‐class jobs (in Italy or later Britain), participants' trajectories took classed forms. Nevertheless, the story of meritocratic Britain maintained emotional resonance, even as they learned its contradictions via new information and social ties (Mijs and Usmani 2024). This section shows that the experience of racialised self‐formation in Italy and participants' search for recognition explain why learning about ‘British' racism did not challenge, per se, their emotional attachment to the script of meritocratic Britain.
Komal explains how the early days' 'welcoming feeling' developed into a more nuanced view. Like others, she mentions 'the law' (Britain's equality legislation) as a protection against racial discrimination.
However, she now sees legislation and the rhetorical promotion of ‘community' as more superficial aspects of British society, framing racism as something that underpins more polite interactions. She elaborated further on the actions she now takes, such as avoiding certain places, or thinking twice before applying for jobs in companies where 'they are all white people', or selecting her social circles:
While Komal explains how racialised 'communities' act as a protection towards everyday racism, she makes clear she still believes you can achieve upward mobility (‘get the job') and be ‘less discriminated' than in Italy. New knowledge and changing social networks (Mijs and Usmani 2024) have qualified, but not challenged, Komal's view of Britain as more meritocratic. Alternatively, the literature on meritocratic ideology could interpret this discussion as a self‐interested defence of Komal's social mobility. However, Komal stressed that the experience of being treated as a ‘foreigner' in Italy remained central to her feelings about Britain. She introduced the issue by telling twice ‘I really need to say this to an Italian', thus acknowledging a ‘veil' (Du Bois, 1903/2007) that removes white Italians from the experience of growing up as 'foreigners' in Italy. Having still connections in Italy, she was concerned that what happened to her was now happening to her younger cousins:
Other participants, particularly visible Muslim women like Komal and phenotypically Black participants, talked extensively about how, as children, they were addressed as 'foreigners', despite being born or growing up in Italy. Du Bois's double‐consciousness helps connect this foundational experience of misrecognition to socialisation processes. One learns from a young age that despite feeling Italian they are not recognised as such, which generates both what Komal calls ‘inferiority complex', and a ‘second sight' (Du Bois, 1903/2007) about the phenomenology of Italian racism, particularly how the repeated use of straniero reproduces status hierarchies between white and minoritised Italians.
Isaac evoked similarly ‘formative' experiences, despite being in a different position in Britain. While Komal had experienced middle‐class occupational contexts, Isaac was still working in hospitality and via agencies when we met. He moved to Britain alone about 10 years before, re‐enrolled into high school and went through university education in non‐elite universities (like others, taking on student debt). He had always lived in shared accommodation and, at the time of our conversation, was applying for his first graduate jobs. He acknowledged that things were getting ‘hard' in Britain, given rising prices and inflation. His emphasis on having to ‘work really hard' resonates with Ho's (2024) findings about meritocratic individualism as an emotional resource for working‐class youth, who craft ‘agentic selves' to navigate structural inequalities. However, while reflecting on the impact of cost of living and Brexit, Isaac stressed that compared to what he went through in Italy, these issues were ‘nothing':
Like Komal, Isaac recognises a ‘veil' (Du Bois, 1903/2007) that removes white Italians from the experiences he is describing (‘I don't know if people have told you'). He highlights openly disrespectful forms of racism (‘you look all the same'), which are normalised by the legal violence of residence permits and citizenship applications (Menjívar and Abrego 2012). These stories are part of Isaac's memories about becoming Italian, hence they touch on an ontological sense of self (Du Bois, 1903/2007) that is unlikely to be challenged only by learning about ‘British' racism and inequalities.
The participants who left Britain, or were thinking about it, mentioned a sense of cultural and social connectedness, associated with ‘home', that was not satisfied by the meritocratic promise (or reality) of more opportunities. Leaving Britain was thus triggered by feeling that occupational and educational mobility ‐ the practices historically associated with meritocratic recognition (Littler 2017) ‐ were not sufficient sources of meaning and identity.
Taking advantage of its qualitative, biographical methodology, this article showed that meritocracy is not the only principle of recognition driving participants' considerations. Other sources of meaning and self‐worth, like sense of community and cultural comfort, also influenced their evaluations of social‐geographical mobility. By contrast, quantitative studies provide limited insight into the contexts of people's relationship with meritocracy, or how meritocracy interacts with other narratives of (in)equality (Zhu 2024). This risks overstating meritocracy's power and portraying social actors as overly rational and individualist, while confining their understandings of inequality to national borders.