Young, black and yet not a fan of Black Lives Matter
Two young black Germans don't want to be stigmatized as victims because of the color of their skin.
After the death of George Floyd in the US, hundreds of thousands also took to the streets in Germany in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Racism became the subject of many books and debates. Three years later, a public debate about the "N-word" has just set in again in Germany. Read what two young black Germans have to say about this issue.
“I am Davina Ellis. I was born 34 years ago, the youngest child of a British-Jamaican soldier and a German mom. One of my earliest memories was still in kindergarten when my parents always inculcated in me, no matter what, "Black is beautiful." So racism was a part of my life from the beginning.”
“I am an adopted child from Ethiopia, from the orphanage. I grew up in Cologne, raised by a German couple, both white. I came to Germany when I was barely a year old, so I only know this home. The different appearance has never led to different treatment. Because of that, I never had reason to worry about it.”
The young man who calls himself Caesar here lives in a small town in Hesse, Davina Ellis in Düsseldorf, the capital of North Rhine-Westphalia. Both are in their mid-30s, have dark skin and worry that the Black Lives Matter movement in Germany could contribute to a social divide.
“We definitely have our problems here in Germany, but it's very different than in the US. Here maybe a doctor is a racist, but you have insurance and you can go to another doctor. There might be racist structures in the lower ranks of the Armed Forces and police. But that's different from asserting that everything is set up as a racist system. I wouldn't say that Germany is structurally racist.”
Says Davina, who has experienced racism. Even as a little girl on the playground.
“They called me ‘dirty negro!’ I was beaten up very badly on my 14th birthday. We went to a disco and on the way home we were attacked by well-known neo-Nazis. We were all black and blue afterwards. And my English teacher kicked me out of class with the words, ‘You damn monkey kid, why don't you go back to the jungle where you belong?’"
Caesar never experienced such belittling attacks, he recounts.
“When I was 7 or 8 years old, a white child and his mother stood next to me in the elevator, and the child stroked my arm with his finger and then stuck his finger in his mouth. He looked up at his mother and said, quite disappointedly, ‘It doesn't taste like chocolate at all.’ The mother pulled the child away, quite embarrassed. I laughed. That's not racism, that's just ignorance. I actually find it very charming.”
Even later, at the age of 18 or 19, when he was turned away by the bouncer of a club on a Saturday night, it didn't necessarily have to be for racist reasons. Maybe the man just didn't like his face, says Caesar. All the more he was struck by an experience he had last year in his favorite bar. At an advanced hour, his seat neighbor poured out his heart to him. In his soccer club, he said, there were Afghan refugees who hardly spoke any German, and some of their comrades had already switched to another club.
“That everything has not only changed, I think he also used the word ‘aggravated,’ remembers Caesar. “I just sat there and then nodded, because I could understand that very well. And he then sort of in anticipatory obedience said, ‘But I don't have anything against foreigners.’ And ‘Excuse me.’ Which, first of all, wasn't necessary at all, and secondly, in my opinion, came from the source that he thought: Oh, I'm talking to someone who's actually with the other group I was just talking about.”
Caesar, who is pursuing his master's degree in political science and writes for the local newspaper on the side, wouldn't let go of the experience. He decided to write an article for an online newspaper. In it, he explores the question that has been on his mind since that night at the pub: Why did this man feel obligated to apologize? Was it because of his statement itself or because of Caesar's black skin? And he writes:
I fear the latter. And that is the casus knacktus. It is the uncomfortable assumption of some white people that all non-whites are united by a kind of swarm consciousness. The 30-year-old has fallen prey to a misguided and divisive idea - the abandonment of the idea of the individual. In short, group identity as an organizing thought pattern.
The idea goes back to the late 1960s. The American civil rights movement around Martin Luther King had fought to give every single American equal rights, regardless of the color of their skin. This strengthened black group consciousness. At the same time, many whites developed feelings of guilt. The second generation of civil rights activists used this sense of guilt to gain political influence and resources for themselves. Academically, this politics, also referred to as "identity politics," was supported by Critical Race Theory. It was developed at Harvard Law School in the 1980s and is now also taught at German universities. With it, "structural racism."
This means that all structures created by whites are automatically racist. This is because Critical Race Theory claims that whites have unconsciously designed all structures in a way that fundamentally disadvantages non-whites and benefits them.
... writes German historian and migration researcher Sandra Kostner from the University of Education Schwäbisch-Gmünd in Baden-Wuerttemberg, who has also conducted research on the USA. Critical Race Theory would divide people into the privileged and the non-privileged according to their skin color. Whites would count as privileged per se, blacks as non-privileged. Sandra Kostner continues:
Real justice, in this understanding, can only be achieved if structures are changed, and changed in such a way that they favor non-whites, that is, privilege them, until absolute equality is achieved. Added to this is the notion that whites must own up to their quasi-inherent racism: Only in this way can justice be done to non-whites.
Davina Ellis has a bookshelf full of literature on this subject in her living room.
“The gist of it is basically this: the reason black people have a bad life all over the world is because White Supremacy. Because white people think they're superior, and because racism. Racism or White Supremacy these days is considered to be punctuality, efficiency, and hard work. Deadpan. I've seen the list. That implies that whites are actually superior. What a nonsense!
Caesar also strongly rejects this construct that automatically makes whites the guilty, or, perpetrators, and blacks the victims.
Hello dear friends, my name is Caesar and I would like to contribute to the racism debate in this country.
This is how Caesar begins a video he posted on YouTube.
Racism used to be, and for most of us, racism continues to be simply: a person has a different skin color, therefore I treat them badly or look at them in a derogatory way. And we've all learned, "Don't look at the color of the skin, look at the person!" And then Critical Race Theory comes along and says that racism can only exist in a power structure. So: if a group has power, in the sense of, they're a majority or they have more money, then they can be racist. But a group that doesn't have power can't be racist.
Davina wrote up her thoughts on this in an article. In it, a lot of it is about her Jamaican father. Since his parents divorced, he has been living again in the UK. During one of his visits to his daughter in Düsseldorf, they talked extensively about his life. He was born in colonial times and moved from Jamaica to England as a teenager in the early 1960s. For forty years he was in the British military and thirty of those years were stationed in Germany. Davina writes:
At that time, black people were more than rare here in Germany, and thus my father had some "interesting" experiences. I told my father that currently there are many people who claim that there is no racism against white people. He almost choked up in response. He said that the statement was one of the most absurd things he had ever heard. The most racist person he had ever encountered, he said, was a close relative from Jamaica. I know the woman he was referring to: she hates white people with an abyss and has made my mother and me feel it at every opportunity.
Because while Davina is seen as black in Germany, she was seen as white in Jamaica - because of her mother. Perhaps, Davina reckons, the current discourse literally invites too much "black and white" thinking. She recalls an anecdote:
“I once had an older woman said to me, ‘Oh, you Negro women are always so pretty!’ Am I supposed to be angry then? I said,
‘I think it's nice that you think black people are beautiful.’
‘Oh, black?’
‘Yeah, I think that's better than 'Negroes'.’
And done. I've had a lot of situations like that. Yes, is it racist what the woman said to me. But actually, she was paying me a compliment. That is, definitely no ill intent behind it. And that's still the crucial thing for me: the intention.”
For this reason, Davina never went to one of the demonstrations after George Floyd's death. In her eyes, the Black Lives Matter movement stylized the dead man into a martyr.
"Georg Floyd died in a horrible way. But the man was on drugs, the man was violent. If the issue of police violence had been at the forefront of the protest, it would have been different for me. But am I not willing to go to an event where someone who was very much but not innocent was being portrayed as innocent."
And then there's the matter of Sasha Johnson, one of the central activists of the UK's Black Lives Matter movement. She was shot in London in March 2021. Sasha Johnson, mother of two young children, has been in a coma since then. Davina is angry:
"On the day the news came, all our anti-racism activists shouted: 'That's what White Supremacy does!' And the very next day it turns out that the shooters were three or four young blacks. It's some gang thing - and she was ‘collateral damage.’ Since then: not a peep. All ‘Black Lives Matter’ - except when black people take a black life. Then we don't talk about it because it doesn't fit the narrative. Where is the solidarity?"
Scholars such as the US black university professors John McWhorter and Glenn Loury point to the negative consequences Black Lives Matter and critical race theory can have on black people. For example, the dogma that blacks depend on the purification of whites would paralyze black initiative. Caesar sees it that way. He himself would like to be seen in all his facets, not as a member of a minority needy of protection.
"Thankfully, my parents tried to instill in me quite a bit of confidence and self-esteem. So maybe that's part of the difference between me and people who look a lot like me, that those scars of feeling inferior to white people - that these scars never came into being for me. I must have asked my parents at some point why I look different, probably at kindergarten age. My mother certianly answered something - and that was fine with me. Otherwise it was never an issue. Doesn't that show that, in terms of ethnic relations, we already were further along in this country than we are today?"
Davina thinks so too. In the 1990s, when right-wing extremists set fire to asylum homes in Germany, she was really scared, she says. From the turn of the millennium, the social climate would initially have changed for the better.
"In the early 2000s it was very chill. I saw more and more black people, and mixed partnerships. I was asked so much less about my skin color. Then unfortunately, unfortunately. It happened: in 2015, the refugee crisis [when German took in about one million war refugees from Syria, author’s not]. At that time, an intensification of identity politics set in both left and right."
In the eyes of Caesar, Black Lives Matter also contributed to this development. Because whether classification of people into groups is used for the purpose of devaluation or, as is now the case, for revaluation, in his view, is quite similar in the end.
“If someone isn't white, then suddenly we think that's great. And we constantly try to give that a positive connotation. One should no longer tolerate - but celebrate. And nothing is further from my mind than to celebrate the color of my skin. Just as I would not celebrate if I belong to a sexual minority. I don't know what's remarkable about it.”
The historian and migration researcher Sandra Kostner indirectly confirms these analyzes when she writes:
This new racism, which only reverses the direction of discrimination, is typical of Black Lives Matter and was adopted in Germany. Applied to Germany, however, the narrative from the USA loses its historical frame of reference. In order to make it appropriate, people with a migration background are declared to be non-privileged and therefore non-white.
Caesar is against such a reinterpretation of an alleged systemic racism. Despite the color of their skin, he and Davina feel privileged to live in Germany.
“I believe that skin color is almost never an advantage or disadvantage, and that ethnicity is often simply a code for certain behavior. That's why I think very few white Germans would say that I'm not German, and that I am not a part of their community. Because Germany has little to do with skin color for me. “Germany” has something to do with certain values, also with certain traditions.”
How did the idea of Germany as a structurally racist country convince so many people in a short time? Caesar and Davina see it this way: Because of the hype surrounding Black Lives Matter, "People of Color" are now in. Companies, the media and politics are trying to give themselves a cosmopolitan look. With black faces you could make a lot of money or polish your image. Davina says:
“We've been seeing beautiful caramel-colored kids in commercials for the last few years. And we will certainly get a few colorful faces as board of directors in companies. The problem is that nothing changes systemically. It’s a bit like the women's quota. That's what Black Lives Matter calls for: quotas. Unfortunately, in practice this only means that we have a lot of colorful people - but in their heads they are all the same. I like diversity in opinions and thoughts.”
In other words: Diversity isn’t shown by people of as many different skin colors as possible, but by people who have different world views and experiences. In order to counteract the increasing social divide, spaces for discussions and analyzes should be created - free of moral judgments and ideologically completely detached from Black Lives Matter in America.
Davina: “Where are the problems of the black community in Germany? We talk about racism, but nothing is said about what the specific problems are. Is it that we have poor schooling? What is it? We do not know.”
Caesar: “It's always about privileges, special treatment. No. It's important to have a strong character. Not any special rules, ‘safe spaces’, or political correctness. White people should also show more self-confidence. They should never apologize unless they feel they did something wrong. Above all, they should no longer allow themselves being lulled by accusations of racism. By this, in my opinion, disgusting tactic of reinterpreting inequality as injustice - in order to be able to justify other injustices.”
Davina Ellis and Caesar want to continue fighting against collectivist thinking. Better, they think: see the otherness of the counterpart as an enrichment.
Davina: “You also have to differentiate between those who were born and raised here, who are German, and those of us who immigrated. There are major cultural differences. There is nothing like the black people, there are only people.”
Caesar: “What was created here in the 20th century, with the advance of the Enlightenment in the 19th century, is very desirable. Because we focus on individual freedom. This conviction is the best protection against group hatred. If we lose that, we lose the basis of what makes us great.”
This story was first published in German as a radio feature.