This special issue on race and European television will begin the work of documenting and understanding the many ways in which television has both perpetuated and critically interrogated racialized regimes in Europe and in European countries’ ongoing relationships to their postcolonial geopolitical spheres. We have a dual goal for this issue: to break the silence and begin to describe, both retroactively and with a look to the future, television’s specific roles in visualizing, naturalizing, subverting and silencing race in Europe; and to account for the enduring reluctance to do this work in the first place.