Racism: What did we do in the university?
Last week, my colleague Eva Boesenberg at the Amerikanistik and I have been working on a letter to send to our university’s leadership. The context, as you know, the murder of Georg Floyd by a white American police officer in Minnesota, which caused a tsunami of anti-racist protests around the world. Eva and I wanted our university leadership to take a position by making a public statement against racism, similar to other universities. We also invited around ten colleagues and students who are active in the anti-racist movement, many of them racialized minorities, to contribute to this letter. The letter points out to the anti-racist protests (in addition to global protests, thousands of people in Berlin protested racism last weekend), builds on the racist events in Germany, such as the murders of racialized minorities and immigrants (specific examples as most recently the killing of nine people in shisha bars in Hanau, racial profiling by the police, anti-Asian racism during COVID-19 among others), and concludes with specifically formulated ideas about how our university can take a stance against racism. What we want to address is a critique of structural racism and an official reaction to the anti-racist protests around the world. Publishing a public statement from our university is important for us as colleagues and students who are active in research and activism against racism.
During the co-writing of this letter, we have exchanged very valuable ideas through email. I am writing this blog to discuss three of these: (1) The leveraging of women and diversity policies, (2) Lack of systematic data on structural racism in the universities (3) The ambiguity between anti-Semitism racism.
(1) The leveraging of women and diversity policies: My wonderful colleague Regina Römhild from European Ethnography, has been a very important scholarly influence in my career (photo above). From Regina, I learned the concept of decolonization, I have delved into decolonial spaces, such as an extraordinary art space, SAVVY Contemporary, where she and I held a e-book launch for an e-book we co-edited with Birgit zur Nieden and Anja Schwanhäußer (the e-book is here). Regina has been politically active in the changing of colonial street names in Berlin. Her department is located on M*hrenstrasse. Having a European Ethnography department located in this street is a sad truth in itself.
While we were co-writing our letter, Regina pointed out to a very interesting and peculiar fact: University’s equality policies are still about “women’s equality” in the university, and as a subtext there is discussion about “diversity.” The framing of both of these concepts I find problematic. It is problematic because we are still counting the number of women professors in the university in Berlin 2020. I am in an Institute, where 75% of the professors are women, but not all Institutes reach to this percentage. My colleagues in the social sciences have made a lot of effort to increase the number of women professors in the department over the years. On a positive note, the Women’s Office recently published a document to use gender sensitive language in the university. And many colleagues and administrative staff changed towards a more inclusive language. Along with the recent Berlin regulations, we have staff, who use some of their time for anti-discrimination issues in the university. But it is Berlin 2020, we are still discussing the issues from 1980s, increasing the number of women professors, using a gender sensitive language and so on. I am not saying that these are not good developments, they are definitely steps towards equity, but I am also saying that none of these developments focus on anti-racism.
(2) Lack of systematic data on structural racism in the universities: Fast forward to the second e-mail discussion during the co-writing process of this letter, my good friend and colleague Naika Foroutan rightfully criticized the part which we wrote “structural racism is an endemic problem” in the university. She asked if we have numbers to prove that, otherwise it is anecdotal. She mentioned a policy report that she co-wrote for a Foundation, and it was not published. The reason: There is no statistical evidence that there is systemic structural racism. I can only agree with Naika. Racism research in the universities should be supported, and not blended in with gender equality issues or diversity policies. This blending in is injustice to the specific and contextual problems that students from racialized minorities are facing in the universities.
3) The ambiguity between anti-Semitism and racism: The third and last issue in our email exchange was with a colleague I appreciate her scholarship on racism, borders and migration. She and I got into an e-mail discussion about the connection between anti-Semitism and racism. The discussion derailed, and I am not sure what we have concluded. My take-on of the whole discussion was that the discussions around anti-Semitism in the university should not be subsumed under the racism discussion. Anti-Semitism has a specific pattern, it involves hatred, massive discrimination, and systematic annihilation of Jews with a strong component of conspiracy theories. Anti-Semitism has a special place in German history, and even today, it is treated as such from that special place. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to see today that my colleague Yasemin Shooman gave an interview in der Spiegel, making similar observations.
I am currently reading the book “Learning from Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil” by Susan Neiman (Penguin, 2019) in these days (thank you for the suggestion Irit Dekel). There one can see how much political power and administrative effort is spent in order to establish and maintain Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. In fact, I appreciate the implicit suggestions of Neiman to the settler nations, i.e. USA: “Imagine a moument to the Middle Passage or the genocide of Native Americans at the center of the Washington Mall. Suppose you could walk down a New York street and step on a reminder that this building was constructed with slave labor, or that this site was the home of a Native American tribe before it was ethnically cleansed?” (p. 30) It is, however, unclear how much of this Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung can be systematically transferred into dealing with German colonization and structural racism.
In fact, in Berlin, I see positive action. But due to its strong leftist and art scene, Berlin may be an exception in Germany: For example, last month I have visited the photo exhibition of Akinbode Akinbiyi in the beautiful and prestigious Martin Gropius Bau . Akinbiyi is a Berlin photographer, who took photos on the streets of Nigeria, South Africa and also of Germany, specifically streets of Berlin. It made me happy to see the Berlin streets from his eyes, some places that we both have been (the U-Bahn in Kotbusser Tor). Another example is the German Historical Museum: In 2017, there was a huge exhibition: German colonies: The Fragments of Past and Present, with invaluable artifacts on German colonial history, and its extensions today. And my favorite example: A concert in 2014 by Idan Raichel Project, a multicultural music project from Israel, combining Ethiopian, Middle Eastern, Latin American and other tunes, which form Israeli society. In the piano concert in the occasion of Jewish Culture Days in Berlin, Idan Raichel said that he invited his grandmother to come to Berlin for his concert. The grandmother left Berlin for Palestine as a young woman, due to the atrocities during the Second World War, and she never wanted to come back. The grandmother was convinced that there was noone in Berlin who would be interested in listening to Idan’s music: “Who would come to your concert in Berlin?” she said. The concert hall, Synagogue in the Rykestrasse, started to applaud to show how many people were appreciating Idan Raichel’s music. I had goose bumps at that moment. Idan Raichel said: “My grandmother is here today.” She was listening to Idan at the first row. What constitutes Berlin as a city is the forgiveness and courage of this grandmother to come back to listen to his grandson’s concert in 2014, seventy years after the Second World War. What constitutes Berlin as a city today is the transformative power that artists and musicians bring to this city in order to create a more inclusive society and to position themselves against racism and anti-Semitism. As a university, we should ride the wave with this transformative power.
So Eva and I sent the letter to the university leadership, which we co-wrote with a small number of professors, students and activists who are active in anti-racist protests, some of us are PoC and some are non-PoC, some are well known, and some are not. But we agree that we have to issue a stance against racism in the university, following other universities, such as UCLA, University of Toronto and even our neighbour Hertie-School. Both Eva and I hope that we will have a positive response to our letter.