Racism ranks our thinking and living toger. With focus on everyday racism, we want to find out why this is what this means for society and how this can be changed. The beginning is an idea-historical consideration.
There is a drawing from early 19th century that shows Brazilian slave Anastácia. Around her neck she wears a metal ring like a dog collar. A piece of metal is stuck in front of her mouth, tied to back of head by cords over cheeks and forehead. The sheet metal piece continues into mouth between tongue and jaw. It is Máscara de Flandres, a torture instrument: it prevented slaves from eating, drinking or talking to each or.
This mask was used for more than 300 years. For psychoanalyst and artist Grada Kilomba, Máscara de Flandres stands as no or symbol for colonial project and functioning of racism: power On one hand, powerlessness on or, and silence in between. What would white slave owners have to hear if black slaves could have spoken?
Feelings of guilt and shameToday Colonial Lords are gone, slaves are free. The masks, however, wear m to this day, says Kilomba. The masks have only become invisible. To this day, those who wear this mask are often speechless and powerless. Because ors who put on masks are still afraid of ir words today. And because y plague guilt and shame.
If people like me, y say y do it despite my color. If you don't like me, make out you don't do it because of my color. Frantz FanonActually, re should be no racism. The German Basic Law and all or liberal constitutions forbid him. "Xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism must not have a place in Germany and elsewhere," said Chancellor on 25th anniversary of racially motivated arson attack in Solingen.
But reality looks different. "If people like me, y say y do it despite my color. If you don't like me, make out you don't do it because of my color. " Thus it was described by orist Frantz Fanon 1968, who was born in former French colony of Martinique and was treated as a black man re despite legal equality. And so many are experiencing it today, also in Germany: There is, for example, Amaniel, whose colleague put bananas on his job and made monkey noises, Barbara, who has to write much more applications than Bernd, or Ismail, who longer after an apartment Must search as Hanna. The police control a Pakka more often without occasion than a Paul, and a Arpi informs himself beforehand which doctors treat m with respect and which y deal with disgust and condescension.
Racism is silent, perhaps most powerful, ideology of human history. How did that happen?
Biologically, scientists today agree that re are no different, delimitable human races. This is rar an "ideological head birth", writes sociologist Wulf D. Hund. Come into world with help of colonial violence, systematized by Enlightenment of 18th century and brought into wrong state of a scientifically provable fact.
For centuries, people without racism came out. But need to revalue yourself and your own group by derating ors has always been same. The word for "me" is identical in many languages to word "human". Everyone else is not even human in language logic. And people have always fought each or, victors pushed for defeated ir culture or enslaved m after wars. But those who were winners and who were losers decided no physical differences. They were unimportant for a long time.
Date Of Update: 13 June 2018, 12:02
