STRUCTURAL RACISM

Excerpt from ‘WELCHES ANTIRASSISMUSKONZEPT?’, by Dr Anette Ranko, KAS Kurzum July 2022
(Translated by Katja Theodorakis, with the author’s permission)
“The concept of ‘structural racism’ in its various manifestations is receiving increasing attention in academic and civil society circles. Racism thereby acquired new meaning beyond its primary definition of devaluation and discrimination based on skin colour or ethnicity. The concept now at the same time denotes racism as an inherent feature of Western societies. ‘Structural racism’ [also] no longer only refers to skin colour or ethnicity, but also to (non-Western) cultures and religions. In addition, advocates of the concept focus particularly on language and prejudices as the vectors which anchor racism in society and, therefore, need to be combatted as such.
The prominent sociologist Aladin El-Mafaalani explains the concept as follows: Racism today may no longer be the dominant organizing principle of society and the world – the way it was during Western colonialism. Yet, according to El-Mafaalani, racism has become inscribed in today’s “society and its […] institutions, it manifests in income, wealth and class disparities, it’s experienced in culture and everyday life, and audible in language and so on. Racism holds the (unjust) society together.” He continues: “The ones privileged by racism benefit across all these dimensions, economic, cultural and psychological, whether they want it or not.”

The significance of power relations in ‘structural racism’
The concept of ‘structural racism’ assumes that individual intention is no longer a prerequisite for the constitution of racism. Rather, racism affects all members of a society – either as those who benefit from its manifestations, or as those who are harmed by them. Due to this ‘embeddedness’ and legitimization of racism through the structures and powers that be, it follows that racist discrimination is primarily carried out by members of the ‘privileged’ or ‘hegemonic’ group. In contrast, possible racist behaviours by members of a disadvantaged group are conceptually devalued or described as the consequential expressions of a structurally racist majority society. “¹

Dr. Kostner, ‘structural racism’ appears to have become a bit of a buzzword in German debates. What does it mean in its original academic definition, and how did the term get introduced in Germany?

In Germany, the so-called ‘structural turn’ gained currency in the mid-1990s. In its original meaning, it is about paying attention to the impact of structures. Especially in migration studies, it’s about moving away from looking at individual agency, what individuals have to do to integrate. So, people started to look at how structures that are seemingly neutral affect people in different ways on account of their background.

For example, in terms of educational attainment, a structuralist perspective would show how for a pupil from an academic family it’d be easier to get through school, to get ahead. Particularly the three-tiered education system in secondary schooling in Germany was identified as a structural impediment*. Of course, this stratified system affected people differently, partly on account of their background. That’s what researchers in Germany started to look into, beginning in the mid-1990s.

^{*Editor’s note: In contrast to comprehensive schooling common in Anglo-Saxon countries, in this system there are three different types of secondary schools: basic (finishes after Year 9), vocational (finishes after Year 10), or academic/advanced (until Year 13) – after four years of primary school, allocation is determined based on scholastic performance and aptitude.}

So, does this ‘structural turn’ come down to paying attention to questions of stratification and class, a recognition that access to opportunities and advancement are a matter of socio-economic background?

It was indeed very much related to class, but to a certain degree also to culture. Migrants bringing with them different ideas of how important education is, how important it is to get ahead in life. This way, you see huge differences between different migrant groups. Some of them are highly successful in the education system, others are far less successful. Although when you look at their socio-economic background, it’s pretty much the same. Despite this one group moves faster ahead than the other. That was one of my chief findings in my PhD thesis.

Since the turn of the century, however, German researchers have increasingly taken up the notion that structures and racism are intrinsically linked. Following their colleagues in the US, where that notion was developed, many now view it as given that structures are inherently racist. They claim that the group that built a system, even if unconsciously, structured it in a way to suit its own needs, thereby disadvantaging all other groups. The evidence furnished is rather circular: every statistical imparity between groups is seen as the result of racist structures. Other explanations are hardly looked into anymore. Apart from this notion not holding up to empirical data, it has also changed how many researchers view society, that is: they divide people into oppressors and oppressed, solely on immutable characteristics, such as skin colour or having parents who migrated to Germany.

Drawing on personal experience, when I was growing up, the points of friction didn’t seem to be about race. It was, I went to primary school in a small town in Southern Germany, quite provincial and parochial. Increasingly, we also got classmates from Turkey, later on also from the former Eastern Bloc and the Balkans: migrant kids, with what to my ‘kid self’ were unusual names, clothes and lunchbox contents. Their ‘otherness’ – perceived and actually existing – was mostly cultural/religious, and tied to behaviours, not essentialist markers of difference. It certainly was not about skin colour or other ethnic features. The idea seemed to be that a ‘good migrant’ is one that respects German society – in other words, there’s room to adhere to respective religious customs and cultural practices, such as fasting at Ramadan and Eid celebrations, as long as it’s done within the framework of German society.

How did we get to the current concept of ‘structural racism’ and the debates taking place in German discourse – the so-called ‘Anti-Rassismus Debatte’?

In the context of migration, ‘race’ is mainly an imported concept from the United States. The chief problem stemming from this US-import is that the parameters of US history and society are transplanted to Germany, only the victims of racial oppression are adjusted to the German context, that is: black Americans are replaced by migrants, particularly non-European migrants. The latter are all seen as victims of a structurally racist society, in the same way, black Americans are seen as victims of racist structures in the United States. And in the same way that in the US research is condemned as racist that highlights that Afro-Americans who share aspirations, work ethics etc. with their white peers have made great educational and occupational headway, research in Germany that shows that migrants who integrate or even assimilate are much more successful is labelled as racist.

The very idea of migrants being expected to socially and culturally adjust to the norms and values of the receiving society – in the current context of the ‘anti-racism debate’ – is being seen as oppressive, particularly, when such expectations are directed toward Muslims and/or ‘people of colour’.

In contrast to Australia and other countries where nation-building required immigration, many of those engaged in the German ‘anti-racism debate’ have not accepted that you cannot succeed as a migrant without making adjustments and that for first-generation migrants it takes a while to do so, that it takes some time to find your feet and really compete on an equal level with the locally-born population. For most of us, it just takes a while. And, I guess, most migrants accept that too. They don’t migrate and think you don’t have to deal with any setbacks. They know and they accept that you have to put in the effort.

No doubt having to find your way and identity as a ‘migrant-German’ was filled with challenges –especially, when the expectation was to make yourself a worthy part of German society, to ‘behave like a German’. Nuances between assimilation and integration weren’t particularly well-articulated or even defined in official public discourse at that time. I guess, that’s why we have comedies now about immigrants, integration and multiculturalism, to help make light of difficult experiences. As subsequent decades showed, the ideals of a multicultural, diverse society didn’t hold up to reality. Could you explain some of the dynamics at play that led to what some have even called ‘the failure of the multicultural project’?

In Germany, up until 1998, the federal political level claimed that “Germany is not a country of immigration.” As they had for so long held on to that believe, no migrant-incorporation policies were developed. Moreover, they clung to the idea that those who in the 1960s and 70s had migrated as so-called ‘guestworkers’ would eventually return home. As long as that was the official line of thinking, there was no necessity to put any expectations on migrants and their offspring. Hence, regarding migrant-incorporation Germany for decades was a ‘laissez-faire-country’. That only changed in the late 1990s/early 2000s. On the local and state level as well as in academia, there were debates and initiative regarding how to incorporate migrants. One of the ideas was multiculturalism, but, in contrast to Australia, it has never become an official policy. When Germany turned to develop migrant-incorporation strategies in the early 2000s, they looked to other European countries, especially to the Netherlands. An integrationist turn had taken place in the Netherlands in the late 1990s, which greatly informed German policy development. The Netherlands, like many other European countries at the time, realised that migrant youth was underperforming in the education and labour market systems, and that this would greatly impact the country’s economic well-being in the future as well as the viability of its welfare system. So they started to develop programs to redress the educational and occupational attainment gaps. Germany followed suit. And they set up compulsory ‘integration courses’ and ‘integration tests’ for most immigrants from non-Western countries.

Additionally, policy development coincided with 9/11 and subsequent Islamist terror attacks, which made European countries view their Muslim populations with greater suspicion. In this climate of suspicion, multiculturalism wasn’t seen as an appropriate concept, with then Chancellor Angela Merkel declaring in 2010: “Multiculturalism has failed, it has absolutely failed!” What she meant by that regarding Germany was that the laissez-faire-approach, which ultimately accepted cultural and religious separateness, had failed.

That Germany adopted policies that stemmed from the integrationist turn, didn’t go down well with many on the left. They perceived the discourse about integration as a way to shift the blame for societal problems onto migrants. This made many of them double down on the notion of structural racism, with an ever stronger emphasis on problems being exclusively “the receiving society’s fault”. For example: When migrant children do not succeed in the education system, the only acceptable reason is that the system had not got rid of its inherent racism. Instead of demanding migrants to adjust, they demand that the receiving society had to adjust to migrants and their needs, mostly by examining their structures for signs of racism. Like with all myopic approaches, there are consequential blind spots, first and foremost, the effect this approach has on migrant children. If, as a pupil, you learn that if you underachieve this is due to racist structures, you are likely to develop some sense of resentment towards those structures and the people who created them, and even more importantly, it locks people into inertia, because if the structures are responsible for it all, it’s natural to think “Why should I make an effort?”.

This is about making migration society work, with the very real societal tensions that come from managing ‘diversity’ in democracies – which is not about race or skin colour per se, but the friction of navigating cultural difference/ hegemonic culture, values, identity and belonging.

How did narratives of race and whiteness come into this then?

German academics have imported the tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and applied it to the German context, where, on account of a very different history, the empirical flaws of CRT are even starker than in the U.S. To illustrate this point: African-Americans were legally – hence systemically – discriminated against on the basis of their skin colour. What’s more, they did not migrate to the United States on their own volition. In contrast, migrants have come to Germany on their own volition.

That doesn’t mean migrants have not encountered racism in the Federal Republic of Germany, but it has not been legally proscribed. To make the CRT concept work in Germany, skin colour and other physical traits had to be divorced from racism. That gave birth to ‘Critical Whiteness Studies’, which deem everyone as a PoC (Person of Color), and, thereby, an underprivileged or oppressed person, who belongs to a minority group whose demographic make-up is not statistically represented in specific areas of society, mainly the higher echelons. By now, among the proponents of CRT and its ‘offspring’ studies, such as ‘Critical Whiteness’, the existence and pervasiveness of ‘structural racism’ has become an unquestionable truth.

Non-migrants are required to examine all their actions for unconscious biases, all their societal structures for traces of racism and – to boot – they are confronted with the demand to accept preferential treatment for everyone who is termed a “person of migrant background” (i.e. everyone who has a parent that was born in another country or who was born in Germany but did not acquire German citizenship by birth). If you want your local population to be receptive to accept more migration, and that is what CRT-adherents want, then it does not appear to be a good idea to ask non-migrants to forgo all kinds of opportunities in relation to study opportunities, jobs, parliamentary seats etc.

So, you are saying as postcolonial theories became more and more dominant, they got applied fairly indiscriminately, which means we end up with oversimplified assumptions?

The most compelling assumption is: “the West colonised the rest of the world and justified this by applying racist narratives. In the process it has divided the world into oppressors and the oppressed.” This part is largely correct. The next part, however, is oversimplified: ‘Since refugees mostly originate from ‘the rest’, they are automatically considered victims of the racist and oppressive West” by the proponents of postcolonial theory. Colonialism, and the racist notions it was built on and spawned respectively, is equated to an original sin, which the West can never rid itself of. It will forever have to try and make amends for it.

It’s also important to highlight that there has been a shift in how we determine what classifies as ‘racism’: it is the purview of those who are or feel affected by racism to define what is racist, dispassionate judgements or views from ‘outside’ observers aren’t allowed to factor in as much.

The key point is that we should still be able to distinguish and not subsume all of this by indiscriminately subscribing to imported notions of structural discrimination and violence.

A DIFFERENTIATED LENS: INSIGHTS FROM A RECENT NEW ZEALAND STUDY
“Racism in Aotearoa New Zealand has been increasingly under the spotlight in recent years. The 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks amplified conversations about racial equality that continued in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests. But racism is a complicated topic and not all minorities experience it in the same way or to the same extent. As our recent research found, financial wealth and a person’s ability to “pass” as white can have a significant impact on how they experience racism. This challenges the conventional wisdom that systemic and interpersonal racism affects all minorities equally. Recently, the government and other agencies have explicitly prioritised efforts to address racism. In 2022, the government launched the National Action Plan Against Racism, which is committed to progressively eliminating racism in all its forms. But there is lack of agreement on what racism looks like, and consequently what constitutes effective anti-racism action. In part, this is because racism is largely still defined by histories of colonisation, although societies like New Zealand have transformed socially, culturally and demographically…
[In our research], we argued against the assumption that all ethnic youth are equally discriminated against based solely on their ethnicity. This oversimplifies the experience of racism.”
Sonia Lewycka, Rachel Simon-Kumar & Roshini Peiris-John, December 2022. ²

Is this the impact of Critical Race Theory (CRT)?

Yes, in Germany, a lot of academics looked to what was happening at Ivy League campuses in the United States, CRT originated at Harvard. And this intellectual leadership is one of the main reasons why it spread all over the world, because everyone was like “Oh, what is happening at Harvard? We’ve got to emulate that.“ And they’ve taken that theory and transplanted it into the German context without adapting it. So, in this system, German migrants are now basically African-Americans.

This way, and coming back to the structural turn, we see how over time the actual markers for statistical imparity became less and less important: For example, if you want to investigate the claim migrant children don’t succeed in schools in an equal way with non-migrant children, you have to employ a finer-grained lens on social and socioeconomic background, and remember it’s also very context and time-specific. When you do that, in Germany, you could, for example, see that Greek children were on average more successful in the education system than Italian children. When looking just at Muslim migrant groups, Iranian children are much more successful than Turkish children. But when you compare children of Turkish descent to children of German descent in the same socioeconomic group, children of Turkish descent are more successful than the ones of German descent.

So, for the claim of structural racism to be empirically valid, you would really need to narrow it down and critically examine statistical parities and imparities.

But that has been subverted now, this idea of the role structures play, because Critical Race Theory (CRT) has taken over the original idea of the impact of structures on people’s ability to get through the education system and get certain occupational positions.

The CRT version of structures, and particularly structural racism, is a much more indiscriminate lens, by design, and with very strong moral underpinnings. Basically, it divides society into the privileged and the underprivileged.

The empirical evidence is against CRT as a wholesale explanation, but it’s been successfully employed as an overarching lens. So, you are either on one side or the other side, and there’s no way to cross, because it is an immutable characteristic – or immutable characteristics when the intersectional view is applied –, you’re born with it.

So, what happens if a member of the perceived underprivileged group does the criticizing? Especially, when they do well in society, despite obstacles?

Drawing on the U.S. experience shows quite clearly what happens in such cases: successful African-Americans, especially from the 1980s onwards, have been accused of ‘acting white’. Those who have challenged CRT tenets have been denigrated with the charge of displaying ‘Uncle-Tom-behaviour’. Both is seen as a reprehensive betrayal of the African-American population as a whole. You are seen as someone who wants to let the white of the hook, which betrays the theory, too, which has it that when you underachieve, the only reason for that is because the structures built by whites are against you. The ‘science’ goes that you can never really be an achiever, as long as those structures are in place.

Many CRT academics are also activists and apply their theories to practice, by acting on behalf of ‘the oppressed of the earth’. They put forward an agenda that calls for equality of outcomes between those whom they label as perpetrators or victims of racial oppression.

So by being successful, you falsify the theory. And the more people are successful, the more the theory is falsified. Ultimately, it becomes untenable. It’s untenable in the first place, but you’ve got to hide that by smearing the reputation of everyone who dares to point that out by furnishing empirical data. It’s completely unscientific.

Could we unpack this phenomenon of equating success with ‘acting white’ some more: within the CRT line of reasoning, what explanation is applied when ‘white people’ are not performing well? They obviously are not seen as having the same obstacles as non-whites or non-migrants?

There are striking double-standards when it comes to who or what is the cause for individual achievement. If non-migrants, especially those from an academic background, underachieve, the system and its structures are not regarded as the cause for this. If the same happens to a migrant, structures are perceived as the principal reason. Now, as I said before, structures affect people differently, and it is, for example, true that having parents who are academics makes it easier for pupils to navigate the education system successfully, but this is only statistically true, which means there are substantial individual variations among groups. Moreover, there are other factors that determine educational outcomes, first and foremost the amount of work an individual is prepared to put into getting ahead. In other words: individual agency matters greatly, yet it is the very factor that is completely denied by CRT proponents, as it does not fit their narrative that says that the only thing that matters is whether you are regarded as a member of a privileged or underprivileged group.

CIRCULAR LOGICS
“DeAngelo’s White Fragility seeks to convert whites to a profound reconception of themselves as inherently complicit in a profoundly racist system of operation and thought. Within this system, if whites venture any statement on the topic other than that they harbor white privilege, it only proves that they are racists, too ’fragile’ to admit it. The circularity here – ‘You’re a racist, and if you say you aren’t, it just proves that you are’—is the logic of the sandbox.”

John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.³

Image Source: https://honisoit.com/2020/04/dearwhite-women-your-tears-wont-drown-your-guilt/

And even if it’s got nothing to do with skin colour anymore, it is still brought back into it? Can you please explain this dynamic in more detail?

When Kimberlé Crenshaw at Harvard first came up with CRT, she wanted to reform the system. That was in the 1980s. By now, the focus of many younger CRT adherents has shifted from reforming the system to dismantling it. They justify this shift by reasoning: “Well, we’ve tried to reform the system for 40 years. We haven’t managed. Despite decades of effort through CRT, we haven’t managed, so the only solution is to completely scrap those structures and build up a new system.”

That new system would most likely be one that privileges those deemed underprivileged by design, while including exclusionary measures for those regarded as privileged. That would be the resurrection of the GDR system, where, for example, children of farmers and workers were given preferential access to tertiary education. This time round, access would not be based on social background but on privilege stemming from an immutable characteristic.

The more people buy into this believe, the more resentment is being bred between them. People tend to resent those they believe prevent them from getting ahead. Equally, people resent being seen, simply on account of them having white or German parents, as responsible for other people’s place in society. This is an inevitable outcome, when you do not view and treat people as individuals, but only as members of a group.

So it’s coming back to that dangerous mantra of ‘there are no political solutions’ – which is the territory of extremism, because it’s not trying to work within the system and reform it, but by tearing down the existing order?

Exactly. Unattainable goals lend themselves to radicalisation. And you see this in some parts in Germany with, for example, the ‘Migrantifa’. This is an Antifa group, which focusses on migration issues and the treatment of migrants, comprising migrants and their non-migrant ‘allies’ alike. You see similar radicalisation tendencies among the ‘Black Lives Matter’ (BLM) movement in the United States. What drives radicalisation is that there is no way out, because if the structures are deemed racist simply because they were built by non-migrant/whites, they would always privilege non-migrants/whites. The only way to get rid of this strucutral racism is to completely abolish and destroy the structures and build a new system.

MIGRANTIFA (in their own words)

THE POLITICS OF ANGER, RAGE… EVEN HATE?

How can we resolve this issue in order to move forward? How can we reclaim that space for having frank but civil debates?

This ship is far out of the harbor, but it hasn’t completely reached the ocean. I think you have pushback now because ever more people have come to realise that this is not just some ideological talk academia engages in but that it has spilled over into society and is affecting their lives. Additionally, the demands are growing ever more absurd, being so over the top that people are fed up with it.

Concerning academia, it is of the utmost importance that we defend academic freedom, as a right that applies to every individual. In Germany, this right is even enshrined in Article 5 of the country’s constitution. Everyone needs to be able to pose research questions, present their research findings, argue their point, without having to be afraid of professional consequences, such as being unable to find a publisher for one’s academic work, not because it is academically lacking, but because publishers fear to become the target of a smear campaign when they publish ideologically inconvenient research. First and foremost, we have to push back against the trend where instead of engaging with an argument, you attack the person presenting it by trying to destroy their social reputation.

Of course, academics and students can hold political views and even ideologies, but they need to be open to have them falsified or verified. Otherwise, it gets nasty very quickly, if it gets personal. By pointing out what is wrong with specific arguments or points, showing the evidence for it. It is important to clearly distinguish:  “this is supported by facts. That is not supported by facts.” And if the evidence isn’t there, if you’re in love with a theory but the evidence doesn’t support it, you need to say goodbye to the theory you love, and not to try to hold onto it by ignoring or twisting evidence or engaging in moral relativism. So, in other words, get the science back in, push the ideology out. And do this time and again, and time and again.

‘APPLAUSE FROM THE WRONG SIDE’?
In Germany, ‘applause from the wrong side’ has been established as an admonishing phrase in recent years, to avoid debates on inconvenient topics, such as migration-related issues. ‘Applause from the wrong side’ means that right-wingers might approve of something someone says, even if that person didn’t come from a right-wing perspective.
But this can develop into an unhealthy mechanism, when people will refrain from naming facts or making arguments, because the ‘wrong side’ might approve of the point and instrumentalize it. This way, the fear of receiving ‘applause from the wrong side’ has become a powerful tool, with many rather biting their tongue than running the risk of being accused of fostering right-wing agendas. I’ve observed this frequently when I openly address migration-related problems during public talks or panel discussions. Reliably, someone in the audience says, ‘I think it’s very good that you’re bringing that up, but you know that the AfD says that, too.’ To which I always reply, ‘What you just said makes me conclude that you allow the AfD to dictate what you think and say.’ This is always indignantly rejected with the words, ‘No, I don’t!’ To which I reply: ‘That is exactly what you do when you point out that the AfD says this as well. By saying that, you are giving the AfD the sole power over what can be said and thought in this country by ‘respectable’ citizens.”

‘Using racism claims to stifle debates on women’s rights’, an interview with Dr Kostner by German journalist Rebecca Hillauer 2021 ⁵