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ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, there has been a strong focus on studying individuals’ responses to stigmatisation, discrimination and racism, while the question of how individuals recognise and make sense of an exclusionary event, has been largely side-lined. To fill in this gap, this study leverages an affect-theoretically informed reformulation of Essed’s (1991, Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory. London: Sage) classic concept of ‘comprehension of racism’ to investigate how individuals understand and make sense of experiences of ethnoracial exclusion. Empirically, the article analyses 419 experiences/incidents of ethnoracial exclusion reported in 66 semi-structured interviews with highly educated, second and 1.75 generation immigrants representing three ‘groups’ of Germans who (may) experience exclusion due to their migrant background: Germans of Polish migrant background, Black Germans and Germans of Turkish migrant background. The study identifies three modes by which interviewees talked about exclusionary experiences/incidents: (1) by normalisation (interpreting an experience/incident as ‘normal’), (2) by categorisation (identifying an experience/incident as, e.g. ‘racist’, ‘discriminatory’, or ‘disadvantaging’) or (3) by indicating feelings of unease. For each of the three modes, the article outlines the role of affects and emotions in interviewees’ narratives, provides insight into the types of experiences/incidents for which the modes were used and highlights differences between the three groups of respondents.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the participants in the study for sharing their experiences with me. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful and constructive comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 At 2.7 million, Turkish immigrants and their descendants are the largest immigrant group in Germany (see BAMF Citation2023, 149). Their migration history began in 1961 following a recruitment agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany and Turkey. They are phenotypically ‘recognisable’ in the German context, and the group’s experiences of stigmatisation and discrimination are well documented, as is their exposure to anti-Muslim racism (see, e.g. BMI Citation2023; Witte Citation2018).
Polish immigrants and their descendants, with 2.2 million people, are the second largest immigrant group (BAMF Citation2023, 149) with a migration history dating back to the Middle Ages, with a massive push in the 19th century and especially after the Second World War (see Loew Citation2014). The group has often been described as ‘invisible’ (Loew Citation2014; see also Pürckhauer Citation2023), as Poles seem to integrate easily and do not appear to differ from the German majority society in terms of phenotype, religion or culture. However, the group has to deal with stigma and ‘tropes of backwardness’ (Lewicki Citation2023, 1494), not least expressed in so-called ‘Polish jokes’.
Black people in Germany typically had one of three possible black ancestries: African immigrants, European soldiers of African descent (i.e. French), or African-American soldiers (see Aikins et al. Citation2021, 75). The current number of Black people in Germany is unknown, as the German census does not include the option of self-identifying as Black, but it is estimated to be over 1 million (Aikins et al. Citation2021, 56–57). More recently, German public attention has been drawn to Black people’s lived experiences of racism through the Afrozensus 2020 (Aikins et al. Citation2021) and the report of the National Discrimination and Racism Monitor (NaDiRa Citation2023).
2 In the literature, various terms are used to categorise individuals’ experiences: ‘experiences of stigmatisation’ (incidents in which individuals have experienced ‘disrespect and their dignity, honour, relative status, or sense of self was challenged’; Lamont et al. Citation2016, 7), ‘experiences of discrimination’ (incidents in which individuals experience being ‘prevented [from] or given substandard access to opportunities and resources such as jobs, housing, access to public space, credit and so on because of their race, ethnicity, or nationality’; Imoagene Citation2019, 265; see also Lamont et al. Citation2016, 7), ‘experiences of racism’ (experiences of being othered, excluded, or discriminated against based on biological or cultural characteristics; see, e.g. Essed Citation1991; Jaskulowski and Pawlak Citation2020), and ‘experiences of ethnoracial exclusion’ (occurring when individuals experience exclusion based on ‘racial status, ethnicity, nation origin, and/or other ascribed characteristics’; Imoagene Citation2019, 265). While ‘experiences of stigmatisation’ and ‘experiences of discrimination’ are often used in tandem (see, e.g. Imoagene Citation2019; Lamont et al. Citation2016; Witte Citation2018), ‘experiences or racism’ and ‘experiences of ethnoracial exclusion’ appear as more encompassing, and the latter term is often used for contexts where racism is a contested issue or where individuals are discriminated against on the basis of their racial status and also (or alternatively) on the basis of their ethnicity or nationality (see Lamont et al. Citation2016).