Comprehending and sensing racism: how Germans of migrant background make sense of experiences of ethnoracial exclusion

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Qualitative interviews
• racism
• discrimination‌
• second generation
• affects

Introduction

Philomena Essed’s (1991) Understanding everyday racism is often recognised as the founding stone of a sociology that attends to the question of how individuals recognise, experience and respond to incidents of ethnoracial exclusion – understood as occurring when individuals experience exclusion based on ‘racial status, ethnicity, nation origin, and/or other ascribed characteristics’ (Imoagene 2019, 265; see Imoagene 2019, 267–268; Lamont et al. 2016, 312). Yet, while Essed had devoted large parts of her analysis to the question of how racism is experienced and how its manifestations are recognised, the scholarship on experiences of ethnoracial exclusion has developed a strong focus on analysing the responses and response strategies that people develop to cope with these experiences (see, e.g. Bickerstaff 2012; Ellefsen and Sandberg 2022; Ellefsen, Banafsheh, and Sandberg 2022; Imoagene 2019; Jaskulowski and Pawlak 2020; Lamont et al. 2016; Mizrachi and Herzog 2012; van Es 2019; Witte 2018; for an overview see Piwoni 2023). Importantly, however, the question of how people respond to incidents of ethnoracial exclusion is distinct from the question of how people understand and make sense of such incidents. And while the former has received a great deal of attention, the latter has received little (but see Nadim 2023), even though it is important to know how people understand an incident in the first place, not least with a view to studying reactions.

This article thus systematically attends to people’s understanding and sense-making of experiences of exclusion. It does so by drawing on Essed’s original approach and bringing it into dialogue with an affect-theoretical perspective. This step is necessary as Essed’s account focuses on cognition and thus side-lines emotions, even though documentation of lived experiences and incidents of discrimination and stigmatisation vividly demonstrates not only that they are emotionally charged (see, e.g. Lamont et al. 2016), but also that they come with an emotional toll on those affected by them, including the need to ‘manage’ emotions in specific contexts such as the workplace (see, e.g. Harlow 2003; Wingfield 2010). Furthermore, the literature has described a range of emotions that come with experiencing racism such as fear, anger, hatred, disgust, grief but also sadness, resignation, anxiety and shame (see, e.g. Bonilla-Silva 2019; Kim 2016; Nowicka and Wojnicka 2023), and recent research has argued that the circulation of affects and emotions is intrinsic to racist situations (see, e.g. Tembo 2021). It is against this background that this study approaches the question of individuals understand and make sense of experiences of ethnoracial exclusion by leveraging an affect-theoretically informed reformulation of Essed’s (1991) classic concept.

Empirically, the study is situated in Germany, a country where, in 2021, more than one-fourth of the population (22.3 million) had a migrant background (BAMF 2023, 15). It further compares three groups: Germans of Turkish migrant background (GoTmb), Germans of Polish migrant background (GoPmb) and Black Germans. These groups can be considered ‘diverse cases’ (George and Bennett 2005, 69) with regard to factors that have been described as relevant for experiencing ethnoracial exclusion, such as phenotype, religion and the group’s history and status in society (see, e.g. Koopmans, Veit, and Yemane 2019; Lamont et al. 2016, 20).¹

Importantly for this study, the three groups are unequally recognised in Germany in terms of being stigmatised, discriminated against and racialised. Not only are debates about the existence and prevalence of racism, discrimination and stigmatisation in German society relatively new – the word ‘Rassismus’ [German for racism] is used reluctantly because of the Nazi period – but certain forms of racism, such as anti-Muslim and anti-Slavic racism, are even less recognised than anti-Black racism (see DeZIM 2022, 68–72).

Thus, while the German case has a number of unique features, it may offer insights that can be generalised to other contexts where racism is a sensitive, ignored or contested issue, or where certain groups are not recognised as racialised, as has been argued to be the case in the European context more generally (Lentin 2008; Lewicki 2023). The comparison of three groups is conducive to theory-building. For example, commonalities between the groups in how they make sense of experiences of ethnoracial exclusion may point to the impact of aspects of the German national and cultural context that are common to all three groups, while differences between groups may help us to understand why and how other, group-related factors, such as a group’s status in societal discourse, are important.

The article draws on semi-structured interviews with second and 1.75 generation GoTmb (23 interviewees), GoPmb (22 interviewees) and Black Germans (21 interviewees). It analyses how interviewees talked about incidents of ethnoracial exclusion, and whether and how they categorised these incidents. The study finds that there are three modes in which interviewees talked about their experiences and specific incidents: (1) by interpreting an experience/incident as ‘normal’, (2) by clearly labelling an experience/incident as ‘racist’, ‘xenophobic’, ‘discriminatory’, ‘stigmatising’, ‘exclusionary’, or ‘disadvantaging’, or (3) by indicating feelings of unease. Moreover, there were substantial differences between the groups with regard to their use of the three modes.

The rest of the article is organised as follows: First, I provide a brief overview of how respondents’ sense-making is considered in the literature on how individuals respond to stigma, discrimination and racism, before revisiting Essed’s (1991) concept of ‘comprehension of racist events’ against the backdrop of insights into the importance of affect and emotion in the experience of racism. I then outline my methods of data collection and analysis before presenting the findings of the study. In the conclusion, I argue for a systematic attention to respondents’ sense-making that goes beyond cognition to include affects and emotions and outline pathways for future research.

Minorities’ experiences of and responses to experiences of ethnoracial exclusion

Over the past decade, the question of how individuals respond to stigmatisation, discrimination and racism has become an extremely vibrant area of research (see, e.g. Bickerstaff 2012; Ellefsen and Sandberg 2022; Ellefsen, Banafsheh, and Sandberg 2022; Imoagene 2019; Jaskulowski and Pawlak 2020; Lamont et al. 2016; Mizrachi and Herzog 2012; van Es 2019; Witte 2018; see Piwoni 2023 for an overview).² To be sure, some categories of responses identified in previous research indicate sensitivity to respondents’ sense-making such as the response categories of ‘deemphasising’ (Witte 2018), ‘retrospect sense-making of negative experiences’ (denying significance, and talking down) (Ellefsen and Sandberg 2022), ‘normalisation’ (Jaskulowski and Pawlak 2020) and ‘ignoring’ (Ellefsen, Banafsheh, and Sandberg 2022; Lamont et al. 2016). However, closer examination reveals that these categories encompass quite different responses, ranging from respondents’ refusal to understand specific experiences as manifestations of racism to respondents’ talking down of racist incidents by emphasising the negative characteristics of those who offended them. There is, however, a fundamental difference between (a) not interpreting an incident as racist and (b) interpreting it as racist but choosing, perhaps as part of a personal behavioural strategy, to play it down in order to make everyday life easier. This difference can also be considered as impacting individuals’ responses to incidents. An individual who interprets the question ‘Where are you from?’ as ‘racist’ will respond differently to the question than an individual who interprets the question as an expression of genuine interest, or as ‘just normal’. The study of individuals’ understandings of exclusionary incidents is therefore not only important in its own right, but also relevant to scholarship analysing repertoires of anti-racist responses and strategies, as these understandings can help researchers to understand which incidents individuals consider worth responding to (for a similar argument, see Bickerstaff 2012, 124).

Attending to interviewees’ sense-making is especially important in country contexts where the very existence of racism is contested, or where the identification of a particular group as ‘racialised’ is not widely recognised – either by the group itself and/or by society at large. In Lamont et al.’s (2016; see also Mizrachi and Herzog 2012; Guetzkow and Fast 2016) comparative study of how different groups in Israel (Arab Palestinians, Ethiopian Jews and Mizrahim) experience and respond to incidents of ethnoracial exclusion, Mizrahim tended to vehemently deny questions about personal experiences of stigmatisation, and respondents preferred to ‘describe events that happened to other people, often relatives, and usually in the past’ (Lamont et al. 2016, 236), which is explained with Mizrahim being a phenotypically less visible minority, and a ‘relative absence of institutionalized and widely accepted narratives of Mizrahi disadvantage’ (Lamont et al. 2016, 241). Importantly, it was found that Mizrahim have nevertheless experienced stigmatisation and discrimination (Lamont et al. 2016, 235–236, 239–242). Especially when wanting to explore the full range of experiences in a context where narratives of racism are neither long-established nor uncontested, there is thus a need to diligently attend to how respondents comprehend and talk about exclusionary incidents. To do so, I propose revisiting Essed’s (1991) notion of ‘comprehension of racist events’.

Essed’s (1991) notion of ‘comprehension of racist events’ and an affect-theoretical perspective on how individuals sense racism

While Understanding everyday racism is best known for the concept of ‘everyday racism’ (Essed 1991, 50), it also introduces the notion of ‘comprehension of racist events’, through which Essed emphasises that ‘racist events can be conceptualised in terms of specific presuppositions and strategies of interpretation’ (Essed 1991, 73). Drawing on social cognition theory and her empirical material (55 ‘nondirective’ interviews with highly educated Black women in California and the Netherlands), Essed argues that individuals draw on ‘scenarios of racism’ including two types of expectations: expectations about the ‘normal’ procedures in specific types of situations and ‘expectations of what usually goes “wrong” in these types of situations when that situation is simultaneously a racial situation’ (Essed 1991, 75–76).

More specifically, Essed (1991, 79) conceptualises ‘comprehension of racism’ as ‘a “strategic” process following a specific sequence’. Essed claims that individuals follow a ‘sequence of interpretive steps’ so that they can ‘determine whether a specific event potentially has racist implications or consequences’ (Essed 1991, 79). These steps include checking for acceptability and mitigating circumstances, determining the social significance of the act (denial frames the problem as ‘personal’), and evaluation against the background of racism knowledge. Like all researchers who rely on interviews Essed does not have access to an individual’s assessment of racist events in the situation in which they occur. However, Essed claims that interviewees’ accounts of racism reflect the process by which they interpret and evaluate racist events (see Essed 1991, 119–143). Essed (1991, 120) points out that ‘accounts of racism are not ad hoc stories. They have a specific structure based on rational testing and argumentation.’

In contrast to this account of ‘comprehension of racism’ as ‘a “strategic” process’, affect-theoretical perspectives on racism have highlighted that the circulation of affects is intrinsic to processes of racialisation in general and racist events in particular (see, e.g. Ahmed 2004; Bonilla-Silva 2019; Tembo 2021). An example frequently cited in this scholarship is Black feminist Audre Lorde's (1984, 32) description of being on a bus as a child and noticing that a White woman did not want to sit next to her:

And suddenly I realize there is nothing crawling up the seat between us; it is me she doesn’t want her coat to touch. The fur brushes my face as she stands with a shudder and holds on to a strap in the speeding train. Born and bred a New York City child, I quickly slide over to make room for my mother to sit down. No word has been spoken. I’m afraid to say anything to my mother because I don’t know what I have done. I look at the side of my snow pants secretly. Is there something on them? Something’s going on here I do not understand, but I will never forget it. Her eyes. The flared nostrils. The hate.

In contrast to Essed’s conceptualisation of ‘comprehension of racism’ as a cognitive and strategic process, Lorde’s account demonstrates the significance of affects in racist encounters. Affects, which are ‘relational dynamics unfolding in interaction’ (Ayata et al. 2019, 67), are experienced situationally and relationally through bodies, gazes and facial expressions (Lorde speaks of ‘flared nostrils’). Furthermore, they ‘ground and inform emotions’ (Ayata et al. 2019, 67), which are ‘culturally established and linguistically labeled categories or prototypes’ (Von Scheve and Slaby 2019, 43). Here, reflecting the relational dynamics of the situation, Lorde concluded that the White woman was driven by the emotion of ‘hate’.

Essed’s process of ‘comprehension of racism’ starts with the individual’s realisation that the situation or someone’s behaviour is ‘unacceptable’; moreover, accounts ‘are only called for when reconstructing unanticipated behaviour or unexpected acts that cause difficulties’ (Essed 1991, 121, italics by Essed). But how does one know that something is ‘unexpected’? Essed (1991, 124, italics by Essed) claims that ‘one first tests the acts against norms of acceptable behavior or acceptable reasons for unacceptable behavior and then against notions of racial domination in society’. Lorde’s account, however, does not involve such testing; instead young Lorde affectively understood that what was going on was ‘unexpected’. For Lorde, the incident with the White woman was an ‘affective event’ (Seyfert 2012, 42) that, presumably, left traces – otherwise she would not have been able to remember it many years later.

Because individuals may recognise the ‘unexpectedness’ of an event through affects (and through being affected), we should expect their accounts of racist events in interviews to include not only ‘rational testing and argumentation’ (Essed 1991, 120) but also, or sometimes even alternatively, references to, descriptions of, or reverberations of affects. As scholars of affect have demonstrated, when narrating autobiographical experiences, respondents may offer ‘emotional expressions’ by providing insights into their current emotions and feelings, that is ‘subjective-experiential dimension[s] of [these] affective relations’ (Von Scheve and Slaby 2019, 43), in relation to past events; and they may reverberate or echo the affective intensities of past events and/or recall affects, feelings and emotions related to these events (Ayata et al. 2019; Cantó-Milà, Moncunill Piñas, and Seebach 2023).

In light of these perspectives I pose the following research questions: How do respondents make sense of events of ethnoracial exclusion in interviews? What role do affects and feelings play in interviewees’ narratives of such events? Do interviewees categorise their experiences, and what are the ‘categories’ they use? Are there differences in the way the three groups understand their experiences? And how can these differences be explained?

Respondents’ characteristics

This study is situated in Germany, and the article draws on 66 semi-structured interviews with highly educated Black Germans (11 male, 10 female), German citizens of Polish descent (11 male, 11 female) and German citizens of Turkish descent (12 male, 11 female) living in Hamburg and Frankfurt. All interviewees held either only German or two citizenships. All interviewees had either one or two parents born outside Germany. Interviewees themselves were either born in Germany (second generation), or immigrated before starting primary school (1.75 generation). None of the interviewees had a Polish, Turkish or other accent indicating their migrant background when speaking German. Overall, they can be seen as belonging to the ‘middle class’, which is operationalised to include respondents with tertiary education and who are typically professionals or managers (see Lamont et al. 2016, 289). The rationale behind this sampling strategy was to focus on those who live and work in a ‘multicultural’ city context, who formally belong (they hold German citizenship), and who are well integrated according to parameters such as knowledge of the German language, educational attainment and/or integration in the job market, but whose ‘symbolic membership’ may still be contested in daily life.

Germany is a societal context where racism is a sensitive, often ignored and contested issue (see, DeZIM 2022). Thus, we can expect immigrants and their descendants to be reluctant to speak with regard to their experiences of ‘discrimination’ or ‘racism’, although there is substantial evidence that persons of (presumed) migrant background experience ‘everyday racism’ and are discriminated against on the job market, in the housing market, and in other areas of life (see, e.g. Aikins et al. 2021; Beigang 2017; DeZIM 2022; Koopmans, Veit, and Yemane 2019). This reluctance to label certain incidents or experiences as ‘discrimination’ or ‘racism’ may be even more pronounced among the interviewees who are German citizens, belong to the second or 1.75 generation, and who are highly educated. Given their successful ‘integration’ into German society, they may not consider their experiences worthy of being labelled as ‘experiences of racism’ or ‘discrimination’. On the other hand, it has been shown that more highly educated minorities perceive more discrimination (see, e.g. Verkuyten 2016). In the same vein, it could be argued that not only do they perceive more discrimination, but they are also more confident in describing their experiences as ‘discriminatory’ or ‘racist’.

Methods of data generation and analysis

All interviews were done in the time between 2018 and 2021 either by phone or via (VoIP)-mediated technologies (Skype or Zoom; see Archibald et al. 2019) and lasted between 45 and 160 min (average length 90 min). Interviews were announced as interviews about ‘everyday experiences’ and ‘identity’ to avoid introducing ‘discrimination’ or ‘racism’ as dominant frames. To recruit interviewees, I used multiple points of entry including the engagement of a professional company specialising in the recruitment of immigrants and their descendants. Before the interviews, informed consent was obtained, and all participants were guaranteed confidentiality and anonymity. The entire research process was implemented according to guidelines that were approved by the Ethics Board of the University of Passau (approval number 07.5095).

Interview questions, and interviewing style

All interviews were conducted by the author of this study, with the exception of three interviews with GoPmb conducted by instructed and trained student assistants. The interview questions were designed as open questions to provoke long accounts and narratives from the interviewee. I started by asking the interviewee to provide some information about themselves in terms of age, occupation, citizenship status, and how long they have been living in Hamburg or Frankfurt respectively. We then moved on to discussing the interviewee’s self-understanding and feelings of belonging, and whether (or not) and in what situations they felt their migrant background mattered in their daily life. I also explicitly asked whether they had had any experiences of exclusion, such as getting discriminated against. The interview questions were not designed to ask explicitly about emotions, feelings and/or the affects of incidents or experiences of ethnoracial exclusion, but they emerged as important in many of the interviewees’ narratives. Overall, the interviewing style was receptive in that interviewees had a large measure of control in answering the relatively few questions I asked (Brinkmann 2013, 31).

Methods of data analysis

The interview transcripts were analysed using the software program MAXQDA in several rounds of coding. In a first step, I identified all incidents and experiences of ethnoracial exclusion interviewees told me about. These included, firstly, incidents and experiences that interviewees recounted in response to my direct question about such experiences, and incidents and experiences recounted at other points in the interview that interviewees themselves categorised as experiences of ethnoracial exclusion using various labels. Secondly, I also included incidents and experiences recounted at other points in the interview that were not clearly categorised or even normalised by the interviewee as experiences of ethnoracial exclusion. I did this, firstly, against the backdrop of literature arguing that certain types of incidents are exclusionary (such as the question ‘Where are you from?’; see, e.g. Creese 2019) and, secondly, depending on whether or not other interviewees within the same group had categorised a comparable incident as, for example, racist. After that, I conducted an analysis of those narratives by determining, for each incident/experience, first, the time in which it took place, second, whether the incident/experience had happened to the interviewee themselves or to other people, and, third, the type of incident/experience reported. In so doing, I arrived at 419 incidents and experiences that interviewees said had happened to themselves. I used both counts of incidents of ethnoracial exclusion (and further codes) and qualitative analyses of interviewees’ narratives not to pursue quantification but to present more information (for similar approaches, see Imoagene 2019; Lamont et al. 2016).

In a second step I analysed all 419 narratives of personally experienced incidents, or experiences of ethnoracial exclusion that came up during the interviews in three phases: First, I used in vivo codes, that is, the interviewees' own words or phrases, to capture the interviewees’ meaning-making regarding the incidents and experiences that were talked about. Second, I used the technique of emotion coding (Saldana 2009, 86–89) to get hold on the emotions and affects recalled and/or experienced by the interviewees. In so doing, I relied on interviewees’ words, and occasionally returned to the original recordings. As Holmes (2015, 63) points out, words are ‘imperfect’ in ‘conveying the embodied and relational aspects of emotions’; however, ‘they must be taken as telling us something’. I thus focused on participants’ statements about their feelings and emotions but also on their descriptions and reverberations of affects. I also coded when interviewees explicitly denied being emotional or when they did not refer to any personal feelings or emotions. Third, I drew on the in vivo codes, the emotion codes and my research questions to establish a closed coding frame for further analysis. The main codes were the modes in which interviewees narrated incidents/experiences: categorisation (labelling an incident; sub-codes were chosen to correspond with in vivo codes), normalisation (framing of incident or experience as ‘normal’ and/or denial of negative affects), and feelings of unease (indicating, describing or reverberating affects of unease/ambivalence regarding the incident or experience, articulating personal emotions and/or feelings of unease/ambivalence in relation to the narrated incident or experience). This further analysis within the closed coding frame allowed me to identify, for each of the 419 incidents/experiences, the mode in which it was narrated, and, for each of the three groups, the relative frequency with which the three modes were used (see Table 1).

Table 1. Relative frequencies of the three modes for each of the three groups.

	GoPmb	GoTmb	German Blacks	All
Normalisation	Frequently	Exceptionally	Exceptionally	Exceptionally
Categorisation	Frequently	Frequently	Often	Frequently
Feelings of unease	Often	Very often	Often	Often

Note: Extremely often indicates approximately 80–100 per cent of incidents, very often 60–80 per cent, often 40–60 per cent, frequently 20–40 per cent, rarely 20–10 per cent and exceptionally 0–10 per cent.

Three ways of sense-making across all respondents

Across all three groups there were three modes in which interviewees made sense of incidents of ethnoracial exclusion: (1) by normalising an incident, (2) by categorising an incident and (3) by indicating feelings of unease.

Normalising incidents of ethnoracial exclusion

Interviewees, who normalised an incident, denied the exclusionary potential of the incident, highlighted that it did not affect them in any way, or simply stressed that they found the incident or the experience ‘normal’. In the following excerpt the respondent, a male German Pole, says that, occasionally, he is asked where his name is from and where he himself comes from.

Interviewer: Are you often asked where the name comes from?

Interviewee: Sometimes, yes, yes. It’s just an unusual spelling, so some people ask about it when they’re interested.

Interviewer: And then you answer?

Interviewee: Yes, it’s just a Polish spelling. But I’ve also been asked whether I come from Greece or something. All sorts of things come up.

[…]

Interviewer: Yes, but it doesn’t bother you, this asking?

Interviewee: No, why should it? It’s completely normal. (21_m_GoPmb)

As has been widely argued in the literature, the question ‘Where are you (really) from?’ (with the question of where one’s name is from being an equivalent of this question), asked by an ethnic German when addressing a person who is a presumably non-ethnic German, is othering because it implies that one (or one’s name) is not ‘German’ and that one does ‘not belong to Germany’ (Terkessidis 2004, 180–184; see also Creese 2019). Yet, this interviewee claims that he finds the question of where his name is from ‘completely normal’.

When asked about if this question occasionally bothers him (and thus causes negative emotions), he responds with a rhetorical ‘No, why should it?’. In light of Essed’s theory, ‘normalisation’ is either based on the interviewee not understanding a specific behaviour or (verbal) practice as problematic (as in the above example), or on their willingness to excuse that behaviour or (verbal) practice (see Essed 1991, 80–84). However, while the interviewees’ normalising accounts were indeed reflective of at least one of these interpretations, I also found that, when ‘normalising’, interviewees either highlighted that they were unaffected by these experiences (as in the above example), or stressed positive affects in relation to those experiences. As in the following example, in which a male GoTmb reflects on his ethnic German girlfriend’s grandparents:

Interviewee: They are very sweet, the grandparents, towards me. But of course, they ask questions that even my girlfriend has to laugh at. They are just so completely absurd. Now, I don’t know, they hear about [Turkish president] Erdogan on the news and have this image that Erdogan is sitting in front of every window and somehow looking in, or something. […] But, I mean, these are people who came from … , who probably … , well, they also experienced [the] war. Then the post-war period, and so on. So, they have an ordered world. And then they have a certain image of foreigners. So, exactly, for them it is also impossible that I know Turkish. Because I know German so well, they can't believe that I know Turkish. […] But as I said, I don’t hold it against them at all. I am the first Turk who has come into their lives. They are very friendly and open with me. But they ask my girlfriend funny questions. She comes home [like this] and laughs and says ‘They asked this and that.’ (7_m_GoTmb)

Here, the interviewee does not say that his girlfriend’s grandparents’ comments are unproblematic but he ‘excuses’ them (‘they also experienced [the] war’ and ‘the post – war period’; moreover, he is ‘the first Turk who has come into their lives’). Additionally, he begins and ends his reflections on a very positive note: He indicates a positive relationship with the grandparents (they are ‘very sweet’, ‘friendly and open’ towards him) and thinks their questions are ‘funny’ making (‘even’) his girlfriend laugh.

Of all types of incidents that were normalised by interviewees, the question of where one was (‘really’) from was the most common type. However, a few interviewees also normalised ethnic jokes, the confrontation with stereotypes, being asked to position themselves regarding ‘one’s’ country’s politics, and situations in which one’s career, achievements, or language skills were ‘lauded’ given that one was Black, or had a Polish or Turkish migrant background.

Across all groups, ‘normalisation’ was used by every second interviewee for around one tenth of all incidents. However, Black Germans and Germans of Turkish migrant background used ‘normalisation’ only exceptionally (for less than 10 per cent of all incidents), while interviewees of Polish migrant background used it quite frequently and framed almost every fourth incident as ‘normal’ (see also Table 1).

Making sense of ‘the unacceptable’ through categorisation

Some interviewees were not hesitant to explicitly categorise a situation, an experience, an incident and/or the offender as ‘racist’, ‘xenophobic’, ‘discriminatory’, ‘stigmatising’, ‘exclusionary’ or ‘unfair’. A male Black German told me the following:

Interviewee: As I said I was born in 1975 but may not look like it and quite often people believe I am in my early 30s. When I go into a shop, however, then I get addressed differently than a 30-year-old White man who is entering a shop.

Interviewer: In what respect?

Interviewee: Well … it is simply that they do not call me “Sie” [polite form of address in German]. In 80%, 95% of cases they call me “Du” [colloquial form of address in German]. I go into a shop and they call me Du. That is … partly, well … . Quite often, by discrimination, one understands some sort of penetration, or something degrading. But I think … . Well, I feel it that way, too. Because that is no equal treatment. (4_m_Black German)

At first glance, this categorisation very much corresponds with Essed’s (1991, 80–82) ideal-typical process of assessing events – the interviewee first elaborates on his experience (by interpreting it as unacceptable, and as happening because of his racial-ethnic background) and then evaluates it by drawing on his knowledge of discrimination. He even defines the category before explaining why he uses it. Notably, however, there is also a reference to his feelings (he indicates feeling degraded) – his account thus represents more than just ‘rational testing’ (Essed 1991, 120) and is informed by an introspection of his feelings.

In contrast to this almost text-book like account, the following interviewee, a mother of Polish migrant background, categorises more in passing when recalling a scene in which she was confronted with the widespread stereotype in Germany that Polish people are thieves:

So as a mum you get to know a lot of other people, whether you want to or have to. And then you start chatting and I just say something Polish to [son’s name] and then they say: “Oops, what did you talk to him about?” And then: “Yeah, Polish.” And then sometimes it’s like: “Oh God, are you Polish?” Really, like they say “Oh God”! And [I answer]: “Yes, I am Polish.” [And then they go:] “Oh, I’ve got to make sure my pram doesn’t get lost.” And then they laugh and leave you alone with these thoughts, yes. And then I also say [to them]: “Well, I don’t think that’s my kind of humour. You’re welcome to talk about stigmas, but maybe only about your own”. (9_f_GoPmb)

Here, the interviewee reverberates the affective intensities of specific incidents – through a reporting of direct speech and a detailed rendering of her affectively driven reaction in the situation as such (see Ayata et al. 2019). Because of that, her feelings of isolation and alienation (‘then they laugh and leave you alone with these thoughts’), but also her emerging anger, are palpable. It is within this context of revisiting a scene that became an ‘emotion memory’ (Cantó-Milà, Moncunill Piñas, and Seebach 2023) that she points out that she categorises the other mothers’ behaviour as stigmatising.

It would be easy to assume that the pointing out of ‘the unacceptable’ through categorisation was always associated with strong affects and the articulation of emotion – as in the previous example. However, while this was occasionally the case, I also found that many interviewees narrated incidents in a thoroughly unemotional manner as the following interviewee, a Black German and very successful young business man, who responded to the question of whether he had experienced racism in his past as follows:

Yes, starting in infancy with “Can I touch your hair?” and so on. Then with stupid jokes. There was a situation once, when I was on a mother-child cure with my mother, where I was teased so much because of my skin colour, that at some point I wanted to break off the cure and so on, which is actually the opposite effect of a cure. […] Exactly, primary school a bit, but that actually went well. At the Gymnasium [upper secondary school in Germany] I would say almost not at all. […] At least I can’t really remember. And then it started again, where it was all about going out and clubs and so on. Then you felt it very strongly when it came to getting in [the club]. Exactly, everybody wanted to get in line with the White people in the group, and so on, to have a chance of getting in. (1_m_Black German)

Here, the interviewee lists all sorts of experiences of racism he had gone through in his childhood and as a young man, as if providing a required list of things rather than remembering personally experienced and potentially very hurtful incidents. Similarly, at a later stage in the interview, he described how he coped with questions reflecting stereotypes about ‘Africans’ in the workplace: by trying to determine whether arguments would help eroding these stereotypes, or not (which would imply seeking out other cooperation partners at work). As outlined, I had not specifically asked all the interviewees about their feelings and emotions in relation to their experiences. In this case, however, I was surprised and spontaneously asked him if he was at all offended by such questions. He replied as follows:

Well, I would say that when I tell you this, I still have [the] person, the [his] face in front of me, in the back of my mind. Now would I say that it doesn’t affect me at all [?]. I would say that if it didn’t affect me at all, I wouldn’t even remember it. Of course, it affects me and of course it hurts because it is a vulnerable point. So, this point of not being accepted, not belonging, not being recognised. So, I say, I have other people where I get my validation from. Therefore, let’s say, it’s not that I sit at home emotionally crying for a week. But it’s like that, I notice it, I register it and it’s a hard time in any case. (1_m_Black German)

This statement is a powerful illustration that it is through affects that an individual recognises a particular situation or someone’s behaviour as ‘unacceptable’. The interviewee also points out: ‘If it didn’t affect me at all, I wouldn’t even remember it’. Thus, it is through the affects that are virulent in exclusionary events that these events are remembered and become ‘emotion memories’ (Cantó-Milà, Moncunill Piñas, and Seebach 2023). Moreover, the contrast between the interviewee’s description of his rational coping with stigmatising comments at work and his later account of the emotions these comments aroused in him suggests that the interviewee was skilled at managing and suppressing negative emotions and that he was used to performing ‘emotion work’ in the work context (Hochschild 1979; see Wingfield 2010). As in other cases of clearly categorised incidents, the interviewees’ ‘emotion work’ in response to these events, combined with their clear and unambiguous understanding and categorisation of these events, may have fed into presenting unemotional narratives.

Across the three groups, explicit categorisation was used frequently to describe almost 40 per cent of all incidents that had happened to oneself either in past or present (see Table 1). Within the group of GoPmb, however, it was not used more often than ‘normalisation’ and by only every second interviewee. German Blacks, on the other hand, used it for around every second incident they narrated, and only two interviewees did not use explicit categorisation once. GoTmb took the middle-ground: they used explicit categorisation for around every third incident, and there were eight interviewees who did not use explicit categorisation once.

Thus, interviewees of Polish migrant background were more hesitant than the other two groups to use explicit labels. They also used different labels than the other two groups: GoPmb did not once use ‘racist’, or ‘racism’ to describe their experiences, spoke instead of ‘discrimination’, ‘exclusion’ and ‘stigmatisation’ and, mostly, with reference to incidents and experiences in their childhood or teenage years. In addition, many of those incidents were presented as ‘exceptions’.

GoTmb spoke mostly of ‘racism’, and ‘discrimination’ (occasionally also of ‘xenophobia’ or having been ‘disadvantaged’), while ‘racism’ was the predominant categorisation among Black Germans. Moreover, the majority of Black German interviewees did not hesitate to label at least some experiences and incidents as ‘racist’, and many of them interpreted their general experience of life as affected by racism and discrimination.

Indicating feelings of unease

Around half of all incidents and experiences were narrated without categorising them and by highlighting, in lieu of explicit categorisation, affects, emotions and feelings reflective of ambivalence, irritation, discomfort and doubt. In the following example, a GoPmb reflects upon two experiences:

Interviewee: Well, I’m often asked, for example, in kindergarten, I speak Polish with [son’s name] and then the kindergarten teacher asked me about it because she said I didn’t have an accent, you wouldn’t be able to tell. It’s always a bit like that, yes … . But, exactly, I often had the situation during my studies [at university] wherepeople told me that I looked Polish once they knew I had a migrant background. Yes, that’s … when you just know [that one has a migrant background], right? Yes, that’s a little bit when you think … . I don’t know what German or Polish should look like. So, in that respect, I think I’ve been received quite well in society. (6_f_GoPmb)

As for the first experience, the kindergarten scene, it is only a brief moment of irritation that is remembered and echoed, supplemented by a reference to the fact that the scene is not a singular event (the interviewee says ‘always’). Regarding the comments she remembers having received as a student she again only hints at her discomfort and continues by simply stating that it is unclear to her ‘what German or Polish should look like’. Notably, she refrains from categorising her experiences as, for example, ‘racist’ or ‘discriminatory’. Instead of finding clear words of condemnation, she ends her reflections on a positive note: ‘I think I’ve been received quite well in society’. This statement is somewhat surprising in light of her earlier articulation of feelings of unease, but it may well have been her way of stressing that, in general, and notwithstanding these slightly irritating experiences, she felt well in German society.

Across all interviews, I found that indicating feelings of unease was interviewees’ favoured way of talking about incidents which appeared to them as ambiguous or unclear. While many Black Germans and German Turks were not hesitant to label a racist slur as exactly that – as ‘racist’ – some of them narrated incidents of possible discrimination on the job market, at university or in school, or when looking for an apartment by indicating only feelings of unease without having the confidence to use a definite label such as ‘discrimination’ or ‘racism’. Although they were not entirely sure whether they had been discriminated against, they suspected that ‘things were not normal’. The following interviewee, a GoTmb, reflects about how she was graded in school and gives a unique insight into her doubts and considerations regarding the question of whether she had been discriminated against in school:

So, I think I was graded a little bit lower because of this knowledge about my [migrant] background. At least in retrospect I would say so. I don't know if it’s now [that I think like that]. Well, of course it could be that I'm constructing it all for myself, just because of all the knowledge you have now, I can’t rule it out [that I am constructing things in retrospect]. But it’s, well, it's more of a feeling, I have to say, quite honestly, but, um, yeah, because in the end [that] has already shown itself at some point. I can’t imagine now why I was inferior to the other students in something, actually … So, a little bit, so I can’t really explain it to myself, so I would say, yes, it’s possible. (3_f_GoTmb)

The interviewee suspects that she has been discriminated against, but what dominates her account are feelings of doubt. She wonders if it is possible that she only believes she has been discriminated against ‘in retrospect’ and ‘because of all the knowledge you have now’. Still, she has a certain ‘feeling’ that feeds her doubts. Her last sentence again reflects ambivalence. Likewise, a Black interviewee reflected on a situation during his final exam at the ‘Gymnasium’ [upper secondary school]:

Interviewee: But no. I always compare it with other people. It’s difficult to say, it’s really difficult to say for what reasons teachers give poorer marks. Especially with a person like me, who was not necessarily a model pupil.

Interviewer: So, you often just don’t know?

Interviewee: Yes. Well, I remember one examiner, an older gentleman in the Abitur [final exam], oral. But he wasn’t my teacher, he was really just an examiner. He didn’t shake my hand. I found that very, very strange. But I have no proof of that.

Interviewer: So that he doesn’t behave like that as a matter of principle?

Interviewee: Exactly. So I had the feeling that it was a very strange atmosphere when I came in, from his side. I also had the feeling that my actual German teacher was uncomfortable when he didn't shake my hand. […] But we also never talked about it again. I never saw the person again. In this respect, these are just things where you think: Hm, it could be, but it doesn’t have to be. (2_m_Black German)

As in the previous example, personal feelings and reflections on these feelings play an important role. In contrast to the previous example, however, the interviewee elaborates on the affective intensities of the situation: ‘it was a very strange atmosphere when I came in, from his side’. He also remembers to having had the feeling that his German teacher ‘was uncomfortable when he didn’t shake my hand’. As pointed out by sociologists of emotion Cantó-Milà, Moncunill Piñas, and Seebach (2023, 5), emotion-laden experiences can ‘inhabit our memories with an echo of the strength of what we felt, or an echo of a “this cannot be right” or “this I did not expect”’. Although having sensed ‘strange’ affects, he neither knew then nor now (in the interview situation) what to make of that experience and whether or not the examiner had acted in a racist way: ‘Hm, it could be, but doesn’t have to be’. While the interviewee’s interpretations of his own feelings, but also the atmosphere and his teacher’s emotions, demonstrate his ‘emotional reflexivity’ (Holmes 2015), he was unable to translate these interpretations into a conclusion regarding the incident. Indeed, many interviewees, who expressed feelings of unease in lieu of a concrete categorisation, seemed to be immersed in inconclusive processes of interpretation.

Overall, feelings of unease without further categorisation were indicated by almost all interviewees (and by three fourths of all interviewees with a Polish migrant background). They could come in the form of only a brief indication (as in the first example), or as part of a deeper reflection (as in the second and third example). Across all three groups, feelings of unease were expressed in relation to approximately every second incident (see also Table 1).

Discussion and conclusion

While a growing body of literature studies individuals’ anti-racist strategies and responses to stigmatisation, discrimination and racism, this study focuses on how individuals recognise, understand and make sense of experiences and incidents of ethnoracial exclusion – a focus that has largely been side-lined in the literature to date, or presented as a response category and alongside other response categories (see, e.g. Ellefsen and Sandberg 2022; Ellefsen, Banafsheh, and Sandberg 2022; Jaskulowski and Pawlak 2020; Lamont et al. 2016; Witte 2018). Yet, attending to respondents’ sense-making in its own right can be regarded as important for understanding which incidents individuals and groups believe are worth addressing and thus for understanding individuals’ and groups’ choice of responses and response strategies. Therefore, drawing on an affect-theoretical reformulation of Essed’s classic notion of ‘comprehension of racism’ (Essed 1991), this study explicitly focuses on interviewees’ understanding and sense-making and finds that there were three modes in which interviewees made sense of their experiences: normalisation, categorisation, or the indication of feelings of unease: While normalisation came with a refusal to acknowledge negative affects in relation to the experience, the narration of incidents that interviewees categorised as, e.g. ‘racism’ echoed often (but not always) the affective intensities of the experiences and incidents. Alternatively, experiences and incidents were narrated by indicating feelings of unease only (and without explicitly categorising the incident) through either the echoing of the situation’s affective intensities and/or through explicit reference to these feelings (‘I had the feeling’).

Especially the finding that every second experience or incident was narrated by indicating feelings of unease only, demonstrates the importance of going beyond a focus on cognitive understandings of racism (the focus of Essed 1991, and, recently, Nadim 2023). In these cases, interviewees had affectively sensed that a specific situation was ‘different’, ‘inappropriate’ or ‘unexpected’, and the incident had left them with feelings of unease. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2019, 2, italics by Bonilla-Silva) pointed out: ‘I have been feeling race all my life. I felt race even before I knew what race was and long before I recognised myself as a Black Puerto Rican.’ Although individuals may not comprehend an experience or an incident as racist, they may still have (long persisting) feelings of unease, ambivalence, irritation and doubt regarding the situation because they sensed racism. Attending to these feelings provides a vital key in interview research, firstly to elucidate interviewees’ experiences and incidents of exclusion that are subtle, unclear and ambiguous – which are, as the literature shows, characteristic of contemporary forms of racism (see, e.g. Sue 2010) and which are often difficult to study precisely because they are unclear and may not be narrated in response to direct questions about experiences of exclusion. Second, and relatedly, such focus may help to elicit the experiences of especially those groups and individuals who do not understand their experiences as, e.g. instances of discrimination, stigmatisation, or racism and/or avoid the language of racism. As previous research has shown, this can be the case with specific groups who perceive the very discussion of stigmatisation as stigmatising, such as Mizrahi Jews in Israel (Mizrachi and Herzog 2012), and/or more generally in country contexts where racism is a sensitive, ignored, or contested issue (Lentin 2008).

However, and perhaps most importantly, attention to affects, emotions and feelings is also important in its own right, as it offers a way of better understanding the impact, consequences and ramifications of experiences of exclusion in respondents’ lives than an exclusive focus on types of experience and respondents’ responses to those experiences allows. This is because ‘race cannot come to life without being infused with emotions’ (Bonilla-Silva 2019, 2). Such emotions are not always identical to what has been described as ‘paradigmatic racial emotions’ (Kim 2016, 459), namely fear, anger, hatred, disgust and grief, but can also be experienced, as the prevalence of feelings of unease in interviewees’ narratives shows, as unease, insecurity, doubt and discomfort.

In addition to pointing out three modes in which interviewees made sense of their experiences and the significance of feelings of unease, the study also provided a comparison of three groups of Germans of migrant background in relation to the three modes of sense-making. This comparison shows that there are no major differences between the groups in terms of feelings of unease, with all groups expressing such feelings often or very often. Normalisation, however, is most common for GoPmb, while GoTmb and Black Germans normalise their experiences only exceptionally. And while GoPmb and GoTmb use categorisation frequently and Black Germans often, there are important differences with regard to the concrete labels used. GoPmb, for example, shy away from speaking of ‘racism’. Drawing on Lamont et al. (2016, 20), who have argued that ‘cultural repertoires’ within a specific national context, such as ‘repertoires of group disadvantages and shared experiences’ and ‘ready-made scripts about exclusion’, influence how people respond to incidents of ethnoracial exclusion, one can argue that such repertoires are important for how different groups comprehend their experiences, too. These repertoires are different for the three groups studied; and a look at German societal discourse around ‘racism’ in relation to each of the three groups testifies to these differences. Within this discourse, the experiences of Polish and, more generally, Eastern European immigrants and their descendants are largely neglected (see Pürckhauer 2023). Just as in the case of Mizrahim in Israel, who tended to deny questions about personal experiences of exclusion, which Lamont et al. (2016, 241) explained with the ‘relative absence of institutionalized and widely accepted narratives of Mizrahi disadvantage’ (Lamont et al. 2016, 241), one may argue that GoPmb were unable to draw on narratives of anti-Slavic racism to make sense of their experiences. Similarly, GoTmb’s use of a variety of categories can be explained by the fact that Turkish immigrants have traditionally been at the centre of public debate about ‘integration’ and migration-related inequalities in Germany (see, e.g. Piwoni 2020). Knowledge about the group being ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘discriminated against’ is therefore widespread, although the use of ‘racism’ in public debates about the group is more recent and is more often used in relation to the experiences of Muslims (rather than Turks). By comparison, the existence of anti-Black racism is more widely acknowledged by the German public (see DeZIM 2022, 71, 76). The study thus suggests that ‘cultural repertoires’ are important not only in terms of how different groups respond to experiences of exclusion, but also in terms of how they make sense of such experiences, and whether or not they acknowledge having experienced stigma, discrimination or racism in the first place.

There are also questions that the study could not address, but which provide inspiration for future research. First of all, the study focused on well-educated, middle-class descendants of immigrants who, one might assume, have access to German public discourse and debates about racism and group disadvantage. Would the results of the study be different if we looked at either the first generation or less well-educated members of the second generation? Given that more highly educated minorities tend to perceive more discrimination (see, e.g. Verkuyten 2016), it is possible that first generation immigrants or less well-educated members of the second generation make even less use of explicit categorisation and are even more likely to express feelings of unease, which would further strengthen the argument about the importance of feelings of unease. Second, the study was not designed to analyse within-group differences in how respondents made sense of their experiences. However, in analysing respondents’ narratives, I noticed differences between respondents in each of the three groups, with some respondents even more inclined to normalise certain events (and avoid explicit categorisation), while others tended to explicitly categorise their experiences – possibly because of different political positions and agendas. Attending to and explaining such within-group differences seems to be another promising avenue for future research.

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).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under Grant PI 1148/3-1 (Project Number 467462804).

Notes

1 At 2.7 million, Turkish immigrants and their descendants are the largest immigrant group in Germany (see BAMF 2023, 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 2023; Witte 2018).

Polish immigrants and their descendants, with 2.2 million people, are the second largest immigrant group (BAMF 2023, 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 2014). The group has often been described as ‘invisible’ (Loew 2014; see also Pürckhauer 2023), 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 2023, 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. 2021, 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. 2021, 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. 2021) and the report of the National Discrimination and Racism Monitor (NaDiRa 2023).

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. 2016, 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 2019, 265; see also Lamont et al. 2016, 7), ‘experiences of racism’ (experiences of being othered, excluded, or discriminated against based on biological or cultural characteristics; see, e.g. Essed 1991; Jaskulowski and Pawlak 2020), and ‘experiences of ethnoracial exclusion’ (occurring when individuals experience exclusion based on ‘racial status, ethnicity, nation origin, and/or other ascribed characteristics’; Imoagene 2019, 265). While ‘experiences of stigmatisation’ and ‘experiences of discrimination’ are often used in tandem (see, e.g. Imoagene 2019; Lamont et al. 2016; Witte 2018), ‘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. 2016).