Despite increasing visibility of anti-racism led by racialized minorities in Europe, comparative empirical research on how experience-led anti-racist activism has unfolded across diverse European contexts remains limited. In this introduction, we situate the volume’s contributions within the current societal and academic debates, and reflect on the framing of anti-racism through the historical metaphor of “waves”. We highlight how the book’s contributions offer fine-grained narratives of the ways those who experience racism have self-organized and mobilized, revealing migrant self-organisations in Europe as quintessential-yet often silenced- anti-racist actors. Their solidarity-based organising challenged dominant, liberal understandings of antiracism as state-oriented action. We further underscore how the contributors reveal racialized minorities’ long-standing, yet silenced, roles in mainstream, anti-racist struggles. This silencing complicates claims of a “new” wave of anti-racism, as many histories of experience-led activism remain unwritten. What appears “new” lies in shifting positions: from the margins, anti-, post-, and decolonial anti-racism, have moved closer to the movement’s core—though not without backlash. The chapter concludes by exploring how contributors adopt, reject or critically reapproriate the “waves” metaphor, while cautioning that both its use and abandonment can risk drowning out the quiter, continuous currents of resistance that persist beneath the surface.