'no internationals pls' - experiences and negotiations of everyday racism in the Rotterdam housing market

International students are a growing group in the Netherlands. While often marked as privileged, literature shows they are generally disadvantaged in the Dutch housing market as a consequence of structural constraints. Previous research has shown racism is still present in our day-to-day interactions and behaviour. However, little is known about the different housing market experiences among international students. This article seeks to reveal how non-Dutch students of colour subjectively experience and negotiate everyday racism in the housing market. My grounded theory approach is based on interviews conducted with 9 international students of colour living in Rotterdam. The interviews aimed to understand experiences and sense-making of racism through a combination of Clapman’s (2006) housing pathway approach and Essed’s (1991) reflection on everyday racism method. The findings of this thesis explain how excluding people from the housing market becomes acceptable, how and why this has an impact on international students of colour and how they can act. Acceptable racist practises, I discovered, included the denial of housing for international students of colour on the illusory ground of language or normalised racist microaggressions in communication and behaviour. As the Netherlands thrives on its endless innocence - the passionate denial of racial discrimination that coexists alongside racism - racist interactions have become tolerated. Simultaneously, when privileging white experiences, responsibility is deflected, and this results in the inability of students of colour to act on their own terms. With these power dynamics at work, where the white Dutch decide what is accepted and who belongs, there is a need to dismiss the innocent character they would like to hold on to so tightly to create inclusion.