Cognitive psychologists have longtime ascertained that humans are capable of learning and changing for their whole life, through various spheres which include environment exploration, play, and study. Psychoanalysts have further illuminated the field, by analyzing the internal psychic and social conditions which contribute to facilitating learning. This means that our perceptions, beliefs and identities are in constant evolution, challenged and modified by learning, and the awareness we have about ourselves and the world is a process, too. I believe it is of utmost importance to state this first, when approaching a discourse about everyday racism in our societies, as one can become aware and learn about the dynamics of structural racism and their own privileges.
Structural racism in society and academia
A plea for bringing the voices of the discriminated ones to the fore
The Black Lives Matter movement, born as a US phenomenon in 2013 to advocate against police brutality and racially induced violence towards black people, has generated an indomitable wave of protests and reactions ever since its birth, in the US and in Europe, too, although with continent and nation-specific characteristics. Violence against black people is sadly nothing new, ever since the brutality of the trade of African slaves in the XVI and XVII Centuries. However, BLM has like never before shed light on the violence that is still very much present in 2020 United States, in many forms. The shocking image of the “knee on the neck” of George Floyd, killed by a white policeman while he was asking and craving for air to breathe, was a punch in many stomachs. That image is difficult to delete – and it certainly should not be. It needs to be remembered exactly insofar as it creates a high degree of discomfort.[1]
But what BLM brought to the surface was something else, too, and thus the acknowledgment that racism, in all its explicit and implicit ramifications, is far from being only a US phenomenon. It exists in Europe, too and despite the oftentimes automatic tendencies to externalization it is more diffused in our daily lives than we are prepared to think. This thought – that structural racism is highly spread, even when we least expect it, and even if we do not think it applies to us – is accepted with difficulty in Western societies. However, what the many voices of People of Color,[2] black people, second and third-generation citizens and migrants that are flourishing more and more often in the Western world are trying to tell us is exactly this.
As many others, I have tried to get a sense of this by immersing myself increasingly in this matter, following the recent debates, on newspapers, blogs, social media and within academia, with a greater focus on Germany, the country where, as an Italian, I recently moved for working and living. What follows is a perhaps clumsy but honest attempt to write down what I have learned so far, while trying to make sense of my own position, too, as a woman who lives her daily life as a foreigner, sometimes experiencing discrimination because of where she comes from, but who is white and privileged on many levels and therefore needs to learn more about racist dynamics. I struggled, and I am still struggling, to deal with this ambiguity, as I did not feel entirely entitled to write something. Eventually, I decided to give it a try, giving priority to the topic, to some concepts that I encountered in my current research about bystanding in the Holocaust, but most of all to the voices of authors and academics who are actively engaged in explaining structural racism.
In Germany, as in many other European countries, many of these debates are focused on explicit racist behavior in society: police violence against black citizens and persons with a migration background, racially-motivated physical or verbal violence operated by extreme right-wing populists and neo-Nazi movements, and diffused Ausländerfeindlichkeit. These practices are sadly much more frequent than it has been spoken about so far, and therefore is political education central in opposing them, and preventing racism, violence and exclusion from happening – again. The National Socialist past is still an open wound and a collective trauma, and luckily and rightly is the broadly intended German progressive society vocal, taking open position against these worldviews and spreading democratic and inclusive values, as well as attachment to the Grundgesetz, marginalizing right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis and discourses grounded on exclusion. This awareness and these democratic antibodies are invaluably precious, insofar as they aim at preventing the diffusion of hate towards “otherness” and they are a tangible result of the long, deep and difficult work the country made in re-elaborating the Nazi past. Also in the past few years, and together with other social sciences, historiography has been posing more and more attention on racism and its theories and practices, and other themes such as colonialism, right-wing extremism and studies on police behavior and practices.[3] Moreover, working groups and commissions promoting “diversity”, despite a slow start, are increasingly present in almost every institution and academic structure in the country.
As serious as explicit racism is, and as essential as all these various strains of commitment and mobilization are, this may not be enough if racism is not recognized as something inherent in our daily lives, too. The theory of “structural violence”, first elaborated in 1969 by Johan Galtung, sociologist and founder of peace and conflict studies, can help in this regard. He defined it as a silent, non-evident kind of violence built «into the structure», and showing up «in unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances».[4] Furthermore, the theory of structural violence was thought as being strongly connected and interdependent with direct violence – just as much as direct racism is interdependent and connected with structural racism, that is, a system in which racial group inequity is embedded and ingrained, in society, economy and politics.
This link becomes particularly evident if we read and listen to the voices of People of Color and black people in Germany and in other predominantly white societies. They lead our attention towards at least three aspects on which white academia should reflect more, all of them connected with structural racism. First, as theories of intersectionality have shown, oppression because of a supposed racial identity is oftentimes connected with other kinds of oppression, gender and class-related. Second, exclusion and racism are related to, but not exclusively confined to, extreme right-wing and populist movements. Third, racism, xenophobia and origin-based exclusion, be they territorial or religious, are not only about extreme and visible acts, but they can be subtler, and likewise hurtful, limiting and socially excluding for those affected. I decided to glue these three points together as I believe they all are somehow interconnected, but often underestimated in the dominant public discourse. Awareness about racism necessarily passes through an attentive listening of those who are actually hit by racist prejudices and behaviors in their everyday life, and through an effort to abandon white lenses and consolidated convictions.
Race, gender and class – intersectionality as Weltanschauung
The first, important point which has been emerging in the past 30 years, especially from the voices of women, feminist activists and LGBTQ+ community, is that oppression and discrimination can overlap on many levels: exclusion processes are complex and intersected. Racism needs to be understood against this backdrop, too.
Ever since its introduction by lawyer and civil rights’ activist Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, the concept of intersectionality gained much attention in political activism, social movements, and also in the academic context.[5] For the first time, a theory systematically explained how different biological, social and cultural categories, such as ethnic origin, nationality, religion, gender and sexual orientation, cast, age, disability, and related discriminations and oppressions, can overlap and be intertwined on many, at times simultaneous levels. These connections, however, had been precociously recognized by Marxist feminists, too. Angela Davis’ “Women, race & class”, written in jail in 1971 and published in 1981, highlighted the frequent convergence of racism, sexism, and discrimination due to class difference, and parallelly advocated for antiracism as an element in close interconnection with feminism.[6]
Intersectional theories of feminism have contributed to bringing social and political analysis to a more complex level, proceeding from the assumption that in order to theorize these connections it is necessary to defend the hypothesis of equivalence between oppressions. This provoked confrontations with Marxist feminists at times, because of the decentralization of the concept of class and the elimination of its specificity, which, in the Marxist reading, would subtract significance to the analysis of social inequalities in the capitalist economic and social system.[7] Although in different ways, and with different shades in focus, what these approaches share though is the awareness that the race, gender and class are levels of subjugation which travel hand in hand. This means that a poor black woman, in a white society, will be discriminated not only and not separately as a black person, as a woman, and because she belongs to a lower class, but for all these reasons together.
I am shortly recalling the history and the debates around intersectionality, as I believe they can be beneficial on at least two levels in discourses on structural racism. On the scientific level, for the theory’s call for complexity, and for it rose from the theoretical elaboration of black researchers and activists engaged in various fields of knowledge and political commitment. This does not mean that it is not possible to criticize it from a conceptual point of view – it was criticized, from many voices – but that despite its weaknesses, as it is the case with every theory, it offers a solid and non-simplistic frame to think about racism as a broad societal phenomenon, and does it from the perspective of the historically marginalized and excluded ones.
However, theory should be the starting point, but with the aim of developing an intersectional sensibility, to borrow the words of Maureen Maisha Auma, professor for Diversity studies at the Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal.[8] Beyond the theoretical approach, intersectionality can also be a practice and a vision of the world, a Weltanschauung. It can be key to expanding our frames of thinking and exercising complexity in our daily lives: in society, when we study and work, and when we interact with others, so as to try and be more aware about those who surround us and our own behavior. With a warning: racist issues should not disappear in thinking intersectionally, but should still be studied and recognized with their autonomous characteristics and specific manifestations.
Racism is also in the middle of society
The second point which emerges from the voices of the People of Color in Germany, and beyond, is that racism is not only confined to the right, but it exists also in the middle of society. Among several newly published books is Unter Weissen. Was es heißt, privilegiert zu sein, written by Mohamed Amjahid, born in 1988 in Frankfurt am Main from a Moroccan family, political reporter and editor of ZEITmagazin. In his book Amjahid mentions, among many sources, the so-called Mitte-Studie: a scientific study published every year since 2000 which gathers regularly the «group-related anti-human tendencies in the middle [in der Mitte] of German society».[9] Interviewed in the study, reminds the author, are also Germans who are earning good money and have an education, many of whom he includes in the group of so-called Biodeutsche: a word he employs to describe the majority of people living in Germany, which imposes the commonplace norms and defines what or who is “other” or deviating from such a norm.[10] The results of the study are quite worrying with regard to diversity. In 2016, 21.9% of the surveyed ones declared themselves in need of a strong single party representing the German Volksgemeinschaft; 41.4% thought that migration of Muslims to Germany should be prohibited, and 40% that it was disgusting to see homosexuals openly kissing in the streets.[11]
Amjahid makes a provocative point: as the very name of the study indicates, these results come from the so-called Mehrheitsgesellschaft (roughly translatable with “majority society”), and not from its margins. They also come from the middle, not only from the extremes. In his opinion, neo-Nazis, functionaries of the Far-Right National Democratic Party, right-wing populists and AfD supporters are not the point, or at least not the only one. He thinks that it is «very easy to get against extreme right-wings, and racists are anyway always only the others. Those who think and speak like that, consciously or unconsciously ignore their own racism».[12] Alice Hasters, from Cologne, also journalist and author, thinks the same: racism is not only a problem of right-wings. Her experience as black woman born in Germany, being constantly and repeatedly discriminated in her daily life, is put black on white in her 2020 book Was weisse Menschen nicht über Rassismus hören wollen aber wissten sollten.[13]
While this discourse is of particular impact in Germany, because of the difficult heritage of the Nazi past, made even more complex by the division of the country during the Cold War, it is not surely its patrimony only, but it is applicable to basically any country of the Western world. Another recent book originally published in Great Britain and translated for the German public – it features among the Spiegel bestsellers – is that written by Reni Eddo-Lodge, likewise journalist based in London who writes for The Guardian, The New York Times and The Independent. The title is Warum ich nicht länger mit Weissen über Hautfarbe spreche (Original: Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race). She makes a similar point: «For years, racism has been defined by the violence of far-right extremists, but a more insidious kind of prejudice can be found where many least expect it – at the heart of respectable society».[14] People feel, she writes, that «if a racist attack has not occurred, or the word “nigger” has not been uttered, an action can’t be racist. If a black person hasn’t been abused or spat at in the street, it’s not racist».[15] However, that is not the case, according to the author: the problem must have deeper roots. Her understanding of it lies in the conviction that we oftentimes tell to ourselves that «good people can’t be racist. We seem to think that true racism only exists in the hearts of evil people. We tell ourselves that racism is about moral values, when instead – she concludes – it is about the survival strategy of systemic power». This subtler, covert form of racism – the structural, systemic one – is much more difficult to detect. In Eddo-Lodge’s words, it is an impenetrably white workplace culture […], where anyone who falls outside the culture must conform or face failure. “Structural” is often the only way to describe what goes unnoticed – the silently raised eyebrows, the implicit biases, snap judgments made on assumptions of competency.[16]
As difficult to hear and digest this is, these reflections open new perspectives on racism in the Western world as a whole, and on the position of PoC, and in general of second or even third-generation non-white appearing people in predominantly white societies.
As it appears from Amjahid’s reflections, Mehrheitsgesellschaft is a concept which is increasingly used in today’s political, journalistic and intellectual debates, but it is was first born in the frame of historiography. The expression “majority society” has mostly been used in Holocaust studies, to define the highest percentage of the population, in Nazi Germany, which cannot be included neither in the victims nor in the perpetrators, nor in the minority of the rescuers or members of Resistance. Often associated to it is the term “bystanders”, utilized by historian Raul Hilberg to describe the “observers” or “spectators” of the Holocaust;[17] those who were witnessing racist and antisemitic episodes, but were to various degrees, and for a wide variety of reasons, «passive and indifferent towards escalating persecution».[18] While recent historiography has partly stepped away from an a priori presumption of moral guilt and responsibility towards “bystanders” and the “majority society”, analyzing instead the variety of reasons – social pressure, fear, powerlessness, desire to not be excluded from a constructed Volksgemeinschaft representing “normality” – which led to passivity, indifference, or silence, what brings most interpretations together is the analytical potential the concept of Mehrheitsgesellschaft has, and the possibility it offers to explore both the breadth and depth of the consent that Nazis reached in the 1930s and 1940s, and the agency that “normal people”, that the Mitte of the society had in ultimately helping and sustaining the racist project – rather obviously taking into consideration the evident coercion and a system based on fear and repression.
Stating that Nazi Germany and today’s democratic Germany are on opposite ends, when it comes to the meaning that Mehrheitsgesellschaft has in the two contexts, is an obviousness from a historiographical perspective, which is based of contextualization. However, the theoretical power of the concept is still considerable and instructive today, in the extent to which it allows to see that exclusion and racism are not confined to the extremes, and to realize the effects that passivity, inactivity, inattention or ignorance about the mechanisms of structural racism, as “normal people”, and as teachers and colleagues at the university, can have on everyone who is marginalized for the color of their skin and their “different” origins, but also for their religious faith, their sex and gender, and, not least, their class and starting conditions.
Microaggression and unconscious biases in everyday life, and in universities
A third, and last point raised by People of Color, often minimized, ignored, labeled as just too sensitive, or even ridiculed, is that related to microaggression in day-to-day interactions. The debate about this issue in the Anglo-Saxon context has been going on since some time, while in continental Europe that is not yet the case. Psychologist Derald W. Sue, who has longtime worked on these practices, sees microaggression as daily criticism or indignity, be it verbal or non-verbal, intentional or intentional, which communicates hostile or negative attitudes towards culturally marginalized groups. This applies to black people, people with a so-called Migrationshintergrund, members of the LGBTQ+ community or people with disabilities,[19] but the main focus in this contribution will be on appearance-related and origin-related discrimination. Sentences such as “your language is good, though!”; “where are you from?”, oftentimes asked to people (and students) with non-conforming sounding names, which have perhaps, however, been living in a country for generations; or again: “you’re very good at this, to be [of a certain ethnic background]” can be seen, from a white perspective, as a sign of curiosity and interest towards someone “different”, and sometimes, perhaps, they truly are in the intentions; but they are highly risky, insofar as they bring an oftentimes non-reflected, automatic assumption of superiority and cultural domination with them, and, depending on the circumstances and the balances of power involved in the context, they can be labeled as discriminating up to racist.
These comments may be subtle and look innocuous, but they can be hurtful, limiting and socially excluding for those affected. As far as Germany is concerned, these kinds of discrimination have been reported on numerous occasions in society but at the university, too, as registered by the most recent study of the since 2013 existing group Uni ohne Vorurteile, active at Bielefeld University.[20] The athenaeum, a “reform university”, is well-known for its strong and direct orientation against racism and sexism. Despite this, however, experiences of individual discrimination at the daily level do exist, and they were reported anonymously. University is, after all, part of society and although it is the place where research and teaching should tend towards progress, it is also composed by human beings and citizens of a broader societal context, bearing privileges and prejudices. So, for instance, a story is reported about a professor asking to a student with a Turkish name, who interacts with him fluently in German, whether she can actually read texts in German in a correct way. Other experiences of systematic underestimation are also reported: it happened to «not being credited for one’s abilities by German colleagues […] because you are not German»,[21] in this being enriched by many other narrations outside Bielefeld University.[22] These experiences are perceived as extremely difficult to detect and to report, first because there is no habit and training in seeing them, and second, as many students, workers and employees are afraid of the consequences that they could have in their everyday interactions. To openly speak up about such discriminations requires a certain strength, as it can lead to indifference, marginalization and isolation.
How can we act upon this, in our individual lives and in our societal presence, also in universities? I am afraid there are no straightforward answers. Perhaps the greatest possibility is to work deeply on the cultural level, trying to overcome a sort of «interiorized colonialism» which prevents more privileged people from recognizing discrimination in language and images.[23] We should try to keep uncomfortable thoughts alive, live within these tensions, and step away from an idea of white antiracism as “good” and “right”, looking at it, instead, more as a «chain of sometimes clumsy attempts to get closer to the problem».[24] We should try and work on our own prejudices and attitudes, and keep learning. Continuous education for both teachers and students appears to be central, so as to have universities as places of knowledge in the broadest possible sense, where conscious teachers and younger future citizens are interacting daily. This process has already started, with an increasing policy of “diversity” in research and teaching, with the creation of commissions and working groups aimed to provide support for the discriminated ones. Perhaps it is possible to bring all this even further, by being open to new kinds of pedagogical education, possibly conducted by those who are discriminated and thus know the dynamics of structural racism directly;[25] by bringing more and more “peripherical” and marginal histories into education and research, for instance, through decolonizing higher education and research methodologies; by exercising our empathy; and by listening attentively, bringing the experiences of the discriminated ones to the fore.[26]