Abstract
State institutions increasingly commit themselves to diversity issues. Talking about diversity, however, has to come along with talking about racism, which in turn questions whiteness as the hegemonic order of the institutions. Through our ethnographic case study, we carve out the risks, costs, and potential gains of teaching about racism at the university in Germany. We apply anglophone literature on Critical Race Studies to ethnographic in situ material in German universities, proving the theories valid also for the German context. The results show how whiteness as a dominant institutional marker frames teaching about racism by getting in its way, undermining the subject, and rendering those teachers and learners vulnerable who do not blend in with or subordinate to institutional whiteness. In our case example, a Black speaker self-confidently argues a racist case and its social remedy, triggering racial stress in the audience and the (white) need to restore the hegemonic order. We analyse the dynamics that follow as a white strike back: denying unequal power structures, levelling racism, and demanding substitute services before even thinking about making amends for racist humiliation. We touch upon a contrasting case from the empirical data of our research project Post-migrant Perspectives on Political Education, where the audience reflects on white defence mechanisms instead of affectively enacting them.
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Notes
- 1.
Research on racism in teaching settings faces the problem that research participants cannot easily be part of the communicative validation, because there are limited ways to talk about racism within racist argumentation structures. Most likely, the analysed defence mechanisms would simply be repeated. We have elsewhere explored the problem of ethically researching on racism (Akbaba and Wagner 2021) and methodologically explored how to do research on defence mechanisms while neither duplicating dogmatic realism we identify in those discourses, nor falling prey to the logic of anti-democratic movements (Akbaba 2021). The tentative proposal for a politically literate methodology is to radically incorporate the researchers’ positionings.
- 2.
This is a pseudonym.
- 3.
During the course of the seminar, students were always able to make suggestions, yet they rarely made use of this opportunity.
- 4.
See: www.whitecharity.de
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We would like to thank Marco Elbahri for his inspiring coping with the challenging situation, which made us start with this project in the first place.
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Akbaba, Y., Wagner, C. (2022). Teaching About Racism Within Institutional Whiteness in Germany. In: Porsché, Y., Scholz, R., Singh, J.N. (eds) Institutionality. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96969-1_7
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