Everybody's a little bit racist, sometimes

BUT ESPECIALLY THE GERMANS*

Well, no, but, here's the thing... Jump to the end for the disclaimers, and just stick with me.

Race and racism or, more specifically, how different societies deal with the fact of cultural diversity and migration, have been topics I've been wrestling with a lot in my own PhD research, as well as personally as an American and a migrant myself. As I've come to better understand how German society talks about and politically deals with diversity, the more and more startlingly foreign it has begun to seem. My native society admittedly has a huge number of lingering racial issues, but the discourse (excuse the academic language) here in Deutschland is at times striking for how.. and this isn't a word I use lightly.. backwards it can seem to someone from the outside.

I finally decided to write something about this partially in response to a piece in a magazine for expats, written by Jacinta Nandi, a British woman with a South Asian heritage who has been living and raising a child in Berlin for quite a few years. Click here to read it, then come back to me. It is obvious that she was in a state of anger while writing (and for good reason) - it's a feeling that has bubbled up inside me from time to time when hearing the things people can say, or learning of policies I find racist and offensive. I'm a cis-gendered, white, American male - if this shit pisses me off, I can't imagine what it would be like to be personally targeted by the people around me based on how I look. The worst I get is, "O, yeah, I could tell you were US-American from your dialect." (you mean accent, jackass) I can't imagine how I'd feel if I were a black person and someone referred to my baby as a 'chocolate sprinkle' or if I were of Asian heritage, and suddenly people on the subway starting pulling their eyes into slits and saying konichiwa. (Check the comments section on the original article.)

Anyway, her piece brought up a bunch of really interesting insights into the 'topography of the discourse' on racism in Germany that I've been exploring academically, and want to just delve into them here. By 'topography of the discourse' I mean the way people from all 'sides' of the debate talk about the issues, rather than just the positions they take. This is, in any case, as much an exercise in working out my own thoughts as it is (hopefully) a contribution to a debate that is desperately needed.

Jacinta Nandi: "Sometimes I don't think Germans find anything racist except for Nazi demos in Hellersdorf, the actual Holocaust and Rosa Parks not being allowed to sit down on the bus."

I've had a version of this thought many times. It has seemed to me, again and again, that Germans, especially liberal/lefty types, spend lots of energy obsessing over the fringe neo-Nazi element in society, while ignoring the fact that, HELLO, everyday racism can be found right across the broad spectrum of the population. Sure, violent Nazi attacks are bad, but the way of thinking that makes them possible are not exclusive to the fringes of society. There are, as I see it, some historical and psychological reasons for this focus.

So, there was the Nazi era. That is the last time anyone speaking German talked about "races" as if they were real, actually existing things. Of course, scientifically, they're not - the human population is biologically and genetically very uniform in comparison to, for example, some other primate species. Due to history, however, 'race' as such is a very real social fact in places like the United States and denying that it plays a role in social life is delusional. Use of the word race in German, on the other hand, automatically makes you sound like you're participating in a Nazi era discourse (sort of like using the word Negroid would make you sound crazy and old-timey in America) - you can't. As a result, the only people who can be racist, in this logic, are people who actually are Nazis. In the German discourse, then, stopping racism means the same thing as stopping Nazis. It rarely means checking your privilege, or reflecting on the way using certain words might make minorities feel, or whatever. Of course, it is also understood that racism exists where there are no Nazis, but this usually means America or other foreign countries. I also think it's a lot easier to just focus on hating Nazis than it is to look at oneself and one's own friends and families for the fucked up ways of thinking that are inevitably lurking in the background.

Obviously there are not only the fringe Nazis and then everyone else in Germany, free of any racist/xenophobic thoughts. Racism, or ethnicism, or whatever you want to call it, is pervasive in society. Sure, you can't say 'the Jews' without someone spitting out their drink, but call a black kid a chocolate sprinkle or call mallowmars Nigger-kisses, and that's just fine, because you don't mean them in a negative way. Consider this recent (sadly, real) conversation I had with a new acquaintance (a young, hipstery type, not a grandpa from Brandenburg):

Dude: Oh, wow, you haven't been here that long but your German is really good. (disbelief! cuz, German must be the hardest language, like, ever!)
Me: Oh, well, you know, I had three years of it at university in the US first. Plus, its not like.. Chinese, it's not the hardest language for a native English speaker to learn.
Dude: Tell that to the Turk* (dem Türken) who was born here and has lived here for twenty years and still can't speak German properly.
Me: OMG THAT'S SO RACIST.
Dude: It's not racist if it's true. (!!!!!!) You can hear them on the U-bahn and at work, it's ridiculous.
Me: ::Vomits on his shoe::
*emphasis added

See what he did there? The "Turk" was born here and has lived here his whole life.. but, he's somehow still not German. Of course, many people don't see it that way, but this way of thinking has roots in the ethnic notion of citizenship that was law in Germany right up until just about 10 years ago. Also, no one has lived here for their whole lives without being able to speak German. I just don't believe that. He may have a different accent and use some different slang because of the community he's from, but so do lots of white kids from those areas nowadays. And that's not a failure, or a degradation of society. That's called diversity!

Accents shift, new immigrant groups change the societies they come into (why do you think Boston and NYC have different accents? Different mixes of immigrant groups historically and today!). This, however, is unacceptable to lots of people. If it is not viewed as a failing of the minorities, then (and this is often the lefty view) it is a failing of the state to integrate them properly. The "foreigners", in this view, need to be helped to be more like the majority, and that's somehow not a racist way of approaching the issue, because helping them is a positive thing. It can be, only, it's not, not when you approach it that way. Banning kids in kindergartens and primary schools from speaking Turkish to each other is NOT OK even if you're just trying to help them learn German. If schools are majority 'migration background', then bring in white kids from other parts of the city, don't ban the 'brown ones' from speaking their second native language to each other on the playground. If kids in majority-minority schools bully the few white kids, that isn't equivalent to the structural and individual racism people with Turkish backgrounds face throughout their lives. I'm sorry, it's just not. That's bullying, not racism. That the term Deutschfeindlichkeit (hostility to Germans) exists, as if it were some equivalent to Ausländerfeindlichkeit (hostility to foreigners), boggles my fucking mind.

The way the discourse plays out here can sound really naive, and even offensive, to some people coming from the outside. Sometimes it feels like no one here has heard of structural racism, intersectionality, examining one's own privilege, etc.  Even a lot of the people who mean well just seem hopeless sometimes, because they are sort of stuck, stuck in the discourse this society can offer. Like when the Carnival of Cultures in Berlin, instead of being like the Notting Hill Carnival in London, ends up feeling a lot like one of those human-zoo World's Fair exhibitions from the 1890s. Or the Marxist party campaign posters with little black kids in 'traditional garb' shaking maracas, with some bullshit slogan about solidarity underneath. All that gets really frustrating. So frustrating that at times you need to write a piece like this one, or the one Jacinta wrote, because you just can't even take one more minute of it. This isn't to say that the US or British ways of approaching these issues are 100% right, or that they're racism-free (ha!), but I do think they have more experience of confronting these issues than German society does. It's not only the minorities who need to adjust to be successful in Germany, it's Germany that needs to adjust to be successful as a modern, diverse society.

*I use 'the Germans' here broadly, knowing full well that it is really generalizing - but sometimes you need to generalize. German society DOES have a different discourse on race and minorities than the US, even if individuals within the society might not always fit into this generalization. But, societal and political discourses aren't individual so I don't care, in this instance, about speaking in broad terms. Sorry in advance if you feel offended by that - go and check your privilege.

Now if you made it this far and you're really pissed off at me, or racism, or whatever, watch the video.