What a ridiculous thing to say: You can’t say race in German. After all, Germany more than any other country in the world has a history of sorting people by racial criteria, excluding people from citizenship on the basis of race, or judging certain races fit or unfit for life. To this day, German citizenship law still is based almost exclusively on the principle of jus sanguinis. Germans in several cities buy medicine in pharmacies called Mohrenapotheke. How, then, could it be impossible to say race in German?
I don’t even mean that it is not permissible, due to reigning notions of political correctness, to use the word race in the German language. That may be a part of it, but on a more profound level, there is no word for the idea of race in the German language anymore. That is, there is no way to talk certain modes of difference or alterity.
Recently, I went through a little thought experiment. I imagined I had attained my goal, finally earned my doctorate, moved back to Germany (where I was born and raised), and got a chance to teach a sociology course of my choice at a German university. Given this opportunity, perhaps even on the tenure track, what would I like to teach? It would likely be something that I wasn’t exposed to in my undergrad training in Germany. For instance, I might do a reading-intensive seminar on the theorists we skipped over because they didn’t fit with the rational-choice, systems-theoretical or constructivist approaches dominant in my department (and many other departments throughout the Federal Republic). Thus, we might read Georg Simmel and use him as a jumping-off point to talk about vitalism or the importance of form. Or we might read some of the classics of American social thought, from Veblen, Mead and DuBois through Dewey and James to Mills, just to mention a few big names that were ignored in my department—which is not to say we didn’t care about what happened in U.S. social theory; two Americans, Parsons and James Coleman, towered above all other theorists.
But would these really be the most relevant things to discuss with undergraduates at this juncture? No. One of the things that makes me most uneasy and that requires the most reflection is the idea of integration as it figures in current debates about the presence of foreigners in Germany. To make a long story short, the general argument is that migrants perform poorly in school, business, etc., because they are inadequately integrated in German society. Remove the barriers to integration (language, cultural values, religious customs, patriarchal families, etc.) and these migrants will finally “arrive” in Germany. It is pretty obvious that integration is just a euphemism for assimilation. What is more, this discourse is not limited to the right; the language of integration is widespread and seldom problematized, even on the left and in progressive churches. In other words, it has become hegemonic.
Hence the idea to teach a class on the sociology of race. Only by talking about race can you get at the underside of the demand to assimilate. As the Toni Morrison put it with regard to the United States, “Only when the lesson of racial estrangement is learned is assimilation complete.” Continuing my thought experiment, I quickly ran into a big problem. What would this hypothetical course on the sociology of race be called? Rassensoziologie? That would be the direct translation, but Rassen-anything would be sure to provoke an outcry. When referring to English-language work on race, most German scholars will either use the word in English or put Rasse into scare quotes. This indicates that Rasse is not, in fact, a word for race—at least not in the way that word is used in the critical writings of, for instance, black or postcolonial intellectuals. Hence my claim that you cannot say race in German.
What are the effects of this, aside from an impoverishment of public debate on so-called integration? It means that well-intentioned folks who are committed to the cause of antiracism lack any kind of analysis. The most egregious example is Günter Wallraff, a veteran journalist who has made questions of social justice a central concern in his writing for over 40 years. Using assumed identities, Wallraff has repeatedly entered milieux to write about them from the inside and expose injustices. He became so famous for this method that the Swedish language now knows a verb, wallraffa, meaning “to expose misconduct from the inside by assuming a role.” In 2009, Wallraff, a white man going on 70, decided to assume the identity of a black man, Kwami Ogonno, and travel through Germany to expose “everyday racism.” To this end, he literally painted himself black—that is, he put on blackface! He then wrote about his experiences as a black man in the left-liberal weekly Die Zeit and produced a film, aptly called Black on White, that was shown in movie theaters throughout Germany in late 2009.
Largely, Wallraff’s effort was praised for exposing widespread latent racism. He was called out on his methods by Afro-German critics, however, and was made to answer to the charge that his minstrel-show methods reproduce the very racism he purports to combat. His answer? He was ignorant of the history of blackface, and to claim his methods were ill-advised is a “total misjudgement of his intentions.” Unfortunately history, even when we are ignorant of it, does not bend to our intentions. But what is worse is that Wallraff thinks his ignorance exonerates him. In the same interview, he informs us that he had plans to do a blackface project in apartheid-era South Africa, so it has been at least 20 years in the making. Throughout these two decades, it never occurred to Wallraff to read anything about he subject he was so deeply concerned about. In his estimation, everything about racism readily meets the eye. No analysis necessary. Race can be immediately experienced by temporarily changing the apparent pigmentation of one’s skin. Ontological and historical concerns go out the window.
This scandalous intellectual lapse is excusable in Germany because of the lack of the very concept of race.