I feel like the inability of white Germans to say the Race word is probably why the rest of us don’t want to talk to them about racism.
What you on about?
Reni Eddo-Lodge’s 2017 book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race got translated into German in 2019 as Warum ich nicht länger mit Weißen über Hautfarbe spreche. ‘Race’ mysteriously becoming ‘Hautfarbe’, skin colour. When I first saw this (like 2-ish years ago, when it was first translated), a friend said Rasse sounds very strong and would turn people off from reading it. Apparently because white Germans associate the word ‘race’ with Nazis. I strained a muscle side-eyeing at that.
I’m not aware of the full convo she had in Berlin in 2019 when asked about this, beyond her saying she was ok with the translation because she wouldn’t want to be associated with Nazis through the German word, and the audience being dissatisfied with the title. Which again, to my mind, plays into caring for white Germans feelings over the very long, multigenerational history of BIPoC Germans and specifically Afrodeutsche and Turkish-, Kurdish-, Arab-Germans who have to suck up white Germans discomfort with facing race and their own racism. And not even mentioning Jewish-Germans there ’cos we all know how white Germans’ discomfort played out there.
When I titled this, “It’s Rasse, Not Hautfarbe” I mean the title of the book. And yes, it’s also about skin colour, and a bunch of other things that combine in various shiteful ways. Just that when race becomes specifically defined as and reduced to skin colour what that in fact means is ‘skin colour which is not white, or perceived as not belonging to a white person‘.
The dead staunch Nadine Chemali said, “Tell anyone in Australia you’re an arab or wear a hijab down any suburban area and tell me we are white.” while talking about this, a conversation that’s been had in Australia for a long time now. It feels to me that this inability to say ‘race’ in Germany, in conjunction with redefining skin colour as race, pushes that whole conversation of pale-as-fuck and what it means to be ‘white-passing/appearing and not white’ far down the line. They’re digging a deep hole out of which we’re going to lose another generation of time to because white Germans refuse to learn from people who aren’t white.
