The introductory chapter lays out the dominant features of the cultural and political environment in which the current public debates about racial (in)justice and decolonisation in the regions of Central and Southeast Europe take place. It is concerned with the shifting racial capital that is tightly connected with the position of semi-peripheral areas within the global white supremacy project. By investigating the fields of art and cultural politics, narratives of civilisational trajectories, and ways of adopting the global solidarity movements in European semi-peripheries, the text makes the issue of race and ethnicity visible and central in these debates, which often aim to hide it. It situates these debates into a broader context of the illiberal public sphere, including the mediascape and digital realm. It conceptualises the current usage of the digital environment as a specific place where a partisan cultural identity is shaped, often fuelled by affective historical narratives and memories that can be further instrumentalised and weaponised in contemporary public and political negotiations about the political directions of our societies.