{"id":10729,"date":"2023-02-21T03:07:17","date_gmt":"2023-02-21T02:07:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/?post_type=undoingraceandracism&#038;p=10729"},"modified":"2023-02-23T15:37:06","modified_gmt":"2023-02-23T14:37:06","slug":"introduction","status":"publish","type":"undoingraceandracism","link":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/undoingraceandracism\/introduction\/","title":{"rendered":"Undoing Race and Racism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<style>\n\t.dkpdf-download-icon { height: 1.5rem; }\n<\/style>\n\n\n\n\t<div class=\"dkpdf-button-container\" style=\" text-align:right \">\n\n\t\t<a class=\"dkpdf-button\" href=\"\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/undoingraceandracism\/10729?pdf=10729\" target=\"_blank\">\n\t\t\t<img src='\/wp-content\/themes\/boasblogs\/dkpdf\/download_red.svg' class=dkpdf-download-icon'\/>\n\t\t<\/a>\n\t\n\t\t<!-- <a class=\"dkpdf-button\" href=\"\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/undoingraceandracism\/10729?pdf=10729\" target=\"_blank\"><span class=\"dkpdf-button-icon\"><i class=\"fa fa-file-pdf-o\"><\/i><\/span> Download PDF<\/a> &rarr; -->\n\n\t<\/div>\n\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In Germany today, critiques of racism, practices and forms of racialisation, and their multiple entanglements in anthropology have gained renewed prominence.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On the one hand, in academic discussions an expansive debate around museum practices and colonial collections (in ethnographic as well as natural history museums) has highlighted colonial histories and their\u00a0 connections to the genealogies of racism and notions of national belonging. Anthropology is deeply enmeshed in this history. At the same time, anthropologists are <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/dcntr\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">actively participating in the contemporary<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> discussion by addressing the epistemological and institutional foundations of the discipline and reshaping collaboration and intervention with an anti-racist and decolonial perspective. On the other hand, the discursive, institutional, media and violent dimensions of racism are receiving increased political attention. The unequal treatment of<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.eth.mpg.de\/5829773\/platform_immobilities\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> migrant workers<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/togetherwearebremen.org\/timeline-shut-down-lindenstrase-until-the-outbreak-of-covid-19\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and refugees<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> during the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic and the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.blacklivesmatterberlin.de\/main-ger\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">subsequent summer of protests<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> against racist violence in public spaces have once again brought racism to the fore as a problematic issue in Germany&#8217;s social fabric. Funding initiatives (such as this one from the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.geistes-und-sozialwissenschaften-bmbf.de\/de\/Forschung-zu-Rechtsextremismus-und-Rassismus-2625.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">BMBF<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">) underscore the need to give attention to research on racism and right-wing extremism, which are perceived as threats to democracy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For anthropologists working on racism and racist formations, this new conjuncture has increased critical engagement with the ongoing effects of institutional, everyday and violent racism. The importance of their scholarly contributions to understanding the intricacies of racism is becoming increasingly clear. However, it is clear that the hypervisibility of &#8218;our&#8216; hitherto largely marginalised research topic is only possible because of the ongoing violence against racialised bodies and persons that results in persistent, including: global injustices. In parallel, there is a long history of activist theories and various forms of struggle against racial subjugation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Awareness of the omnipresence and &#8222;everydayness&#8220; of racism is very pronounced among people who experience it in their everyday lives. The public perception and critique of racism &#8211; and thus an attitude of solidarity that goes beyond event-related moments and is directed towards anti-racist structural change &#8211; is repeatedly interrupted by the continuity of racist campaigns. For instance, it became articulated in the political outrage and anti-fascist organising after the right-wing terrorist attacks in <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bpb.de\/kurz-knapp\/hintergrund-aktuell\/316638\/der-anschlag-von-halle\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Halle (2019)<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/19feb-hanau.org\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Hanau (2020)<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Racism gets scandalised in the face of the complicity of Germany and other European states in the atrocities in the Mediterranean, and it becomes visible whenever the brutal <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/forensic-architecture.org\/category\/borders\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">push-back practices<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of the externalised border regimes of the European Union come into focus. Racism is also recognised in relation to the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rassismusmonitor.de\/kurzstudien\/black-lives-matter-in-europa\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">globalised<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.akweb.de\/ausgaben\/661\/die-notwendige-abschaffung-der-polizei\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Black Lives Matter <\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0uprisings after the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd and others in 2020. All of these events have opened up, among other things, the possibility of examining racisms in and from Europe. They also provide a window to the messier undercurrents of racism and the troubling space of legal, bureaucratic and political procedures in regard to the state\u2019s responses to racist terror.\u00a0 In Dessau, for example, after more than seventeen years, investigators have still not outlined the &#8222;exact causes&#8220; of <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/initiativeouryjalloh.wordpress.com\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Oury Jalloh&#8217;s death<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">; the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/fragdenstaat.de\/dokumente\/234186-abschlussbericht-zur-aktenpruefung-im-lfv-hessen-im-jahre-2012\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">files of the NSU<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> underground were officially classified as &#8222;secret&#8220; and a debate about the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bundestag.de\/dokumente\/textarchiv\/2021\/kw25-pa-recht-rasse-847538\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">deletion of the word &#8222;race&#8220; from the Basic Law<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> remains uncomfortably unresolved in public.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">At the same time, the broad circulation of right-wing populist phrases (e.g. &#8222;refugee crisis&#8220;), the recent debate around \u201cfailed integration\u201d in the light of <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/geschichtedergegenwart.ch\/spaltung-von-oben-zur-anti-demokratischen-und-rassistischen-logik-der-integration\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">New Year&#8217;s Eve <\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">in Berlin or the invitation of AfD politicians and professors to lecture at <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/mediarep.org\/handle\/doc\/4473\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">German universities <\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">in the name of academic freedom document a lack of in-depth debate about racism, democracy and belonging in the broader public.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Are we witnessing an inability to deal with (the complexity of) racism, and if so, why? On the one hand, liberals often shy away from addressing questions of complicity in racist structures or clumsily deny them, as in the debate on the concept of race, on the restitution of art and human remains from colonial contexts, or on refugee and migration policy. On the other hand, a range of right-wing actors increasingly deny their own racism while openly professing a racialised Germanness and resorting to racist taxonomies. In so doing, they present themselves as victims of any critique of racism &#8211; the recent debate around the former head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bundesamt f\u00fcr Verfassungsschutz<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">) and member of the Christian Democrates (CDU), <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.deutschlandfunk.de\/hans-georg-maassen-cdu-parteiausschluss-werteunion-100.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Hans-Georg Maa\u00dfen<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> is only one case in point. Maa\u00dfen had publicly expressed that left-green \u201crace-lessons\u201d have created \u201can eliminatory racism against whites\u201d. This statement is only one of many, so that party expulsion proceedings have now also been initiated against him.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In light of this incomplete sketch of the public sphere, we argue that researching and undoing racism in Germany was and is an urgent methodological, theoretical, and also ethical and political project.\u00a0 Anthropology and anthropologists are well positioned to contribute to this growing research field. This necessarily entails a critical reflection on the ambivalent positioning of our discipline in the historical constitution of \u201crace\u201d and racism, as well as their critical rejection. It is therefore quite appropriate that we have this discussion as part of the boasblogs series, given Franz Boas&#8217;s significant role in establishing an anti-racist ethos in anthropology, which, while constitutive for US cultural anthropology, was too long ignored in German anthropology. Nevertheless, the current discussions about the ambiguous legacy of anthropology\u2019s\u00a0 \u201cracist anti-racism\u201d (<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1111\/traa.12222\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Baker 2021<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">) also demand that we pay much closer attention to the critical analysis of contemporary forms of racialisation and racism. We thereby follow Leith Mullings plea for \u201canthropologically informed and ethnographically sensitive studies (that) can potentially illuminate the ways in which contemporary institutions, policies, and structures reproduce racial inequality without overtly targeting its victims\u201d (<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.annualreviews.org\/doi\/10.1146\/annurev.anthro.32.061002.093435\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Mullings 2005: 679<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">). The contributions to our blog series address some of the most pressing questions about racialisation, racism, anti-racism, anthropological knowledge production and pedagogy. They demonstrate that there is a substantial and vivid discussion about these matters in Germany. In some ways, most, if not all, contributions level critiques unto liberal antiracisms and their effects.\u00a0 In so doing, they employ critical ethnographic analyses: sometimes accompanied by sumptuous doses of essayistic, speculative theorizing, but also traversed by careful attention to detail &#8211; such nuance remains a pillar and promise of ethnography. In its pursuit, we hope, emerge not just an understanding of racial thinking and racism, but also paths towards undoing the structures which perpetuate them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We open our conversation with three contributions that critically examine our own academic field and practice. Staying with the troubles of doing antiracism, Nasima Selim\u2019s contribution invites us to ruminate upon the fallibility of antiracist pedagogies and the ongoing ethics of un-learning \u201crace\u201d in a racist context. In her reflexive piece extrapolating from encounters with students, she sketches out the difficulties of doing antiracist teaching and learning in anthropology classrooms in Germany. In a similar vein, Sahana Udupa also analyses her engagement with anthropology students and discusses pedagogies that can interrogate the here and now of racism &#8211; its globality as well as its troubling proximity to our own homes. In an interview with Katharina Schramm, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni compares his experiences with institutional transformation and the challenges of \u201cdecolonising the University\u201d in South Africa and Germany.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the following weeks, we will learn more about multisensorial ethnographies of racism and anti-racism, about queer perspectives on far-right racism and more.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Note on language:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We invited contributions in German or English. Most authors chose to write in English, which we understand as an indicator for the significance of the topic that transcends the national boundaries of Germany or German academia. We are aware, however, that the omnipresence of the English language is saturated with colonial and imperial <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.printedmatter.org\/catalog\/61197\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">connotations<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. For most of us, including the editors, English is only one of our languages, and often not the first. More experimentation with the multiplicities of expression are therefore called for (and some of the forthcoming contributions will make an attempt at this).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><em><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Manuela Bojad\u017eijev<\/strong> is professor at the Institute for European Ethnology and at the Berliner Institut for Integration and Migration Research (BIM) at Humboldt University. She has widely published on migration and racism. Her research is informed by an ethnographic and socio-theoretical approach, with a focus on processes of digitisation and labour transformations. She is a member of the interdisciplinary research group \u201e<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.berlin-university-alliance.de\/en\/commitments\/grand-challenge-initiatives\/call-social-cohesion_end\/call-2020\/celikates\/index.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Transforming Solidarities: Practices and Infrastructures in Migration Society<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201c and one of the co-editors of the forthcoming \u201cHandbuch Rassismusforschung\u201d (Nomos-Verlag 2023).<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Katharina Schramm<\/strong> holds the Chair for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, where she is also a member of the \u201cAfrica Multiple\u201d Cluster of Excellence. She is facilitating the working group <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/anthropologyofglobalinequalities.com\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cAnthropology of Global Inequalities\u201d<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> which is invested in a critical public anthropology at the interface of STS and political anthropology. Her own work focuses on race as an unruly object in political and scientific practice. During the academic year 2022\/23 she is appointed as Theodor-Heuss-Professor at The New School in New York City.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Mihir Sharma<\/strong> is a researcher and lecturer with the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ethnologie.uni-bayreuth.de\/de\/team\/Ndlovu-Gatsheni_Sabelo\/index.php\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Epistemologies of the Global South<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and a member of the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/anthropologyofglobalinequalities.com\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cAnthropology of Global Inequalities\u201d <\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">working group\u00a0 at the University of Bayreuth. He writes about antiracism, social movements, and political subjectivity, among other interests. He has also written for and spoken in radio interviews with a range of public media and scholarly forums. He tweets <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/mihirzabaan\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">@mihirzabaan<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Katharina, Manuela, and Mihir have all been co-conveners of the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/easaonline.org\/networks\/are\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity Network <\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">as part of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). Whilst Katharina is a founding member of the network, Manuela and Mihir currently serve as its conveners. They all live (at least partially) in Berlin.\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"autor":[83,630,631],"class_list":["post-10729","undoingraceandracism","type-undoingraceandracism","status-publish","hentry","autor-katharina-schramm","autor-manuela-bojadzijev","autor-mihir-sharma"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/undoingraceandracism\/10729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/undoingraceandracism"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/undoingraceandracism"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/undoingraceandracism\/10729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10771,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/undoingraceandracism\/10729\/revisions\/10771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"autor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/autor?post=10729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}