“My name is Mohamed and I am very worried about my physical integrity, my existence, my life in Germany, in Europe, in the so-called West.” Many people in Germany feel like Mohamed. But because that hardly plays a role for large parts of the majority society, although there is more discussion than ever about the disadvantage of minorities in public as well as in private, the journalist and author Mohamed Amjahid, born in Frankfurt am Main in 1988, tells his readers right at the beginning towards this dark “white spot”. Look, again and again, that is what it must be about in this country, which has actually vowed to “never again” allow racism.
In his previous book, “Among Whites. What It Means to Be Privileged”, 2017 was about making everyday racism more visible. Because this racism is not only evident in those who have no problem showing it openly, but also in many who they actually consider to be tolerant and cosmopolitan – and permanently about their own, if partly unconscious, Stumble racism.
Mohamed Amjahid tells about this in his new book. If, for example, people in the “victim Olympiad” absolutely want to fight their way up – for example in the sense of the permanent guest called “old white man”, who always feels right and after criticism regrets being suppressed by “political correctness and virtuous terror”. Even more embarrassing: when a group makes itself the victim of discrimination for no reason. When the Katjes company advertised its vegan gummy bears with a woman wearing a headscarf a few years ago, a vegan proudly threw at the author: “We minorities have to stick together.”
Whites are not used to their whiteness being addressed
All of this makes it all the more important that every person at least thinks about the structures in which they operate, says Amjahid: “Because whites mostly only exist in public as individuals, as personalities, as subjects.” They are not used to their whiteness being discussed.
Mohamed Amjahid’s family returned to Morocco from Frankfurt am Main in 1995. The three children are angry, they feel “deported to Africa”. While the father tries to play down the real reason with jokes, the mother is clearer: The return has to do with the racism that they experienced in Germany. Amjahid experienced it first hand when he began studying political science in Berlin in 2007.
Today he is firmly convinced that his life would have taken a different turn if the family had stayed in Frankfurt: “With great luck, as a warehouse worker, in the garbage disposal or in a cleaning company to increase the German gross domestic product, I would have had the dividend more wealthy Investors or the comfort of white people are allowed to toil. ” He is not concerned with playing off individual wage labor against one another, but rather with “which paths Western capitalism has in store for non-whites”.
In the book he asks how it is that many terms in the racism debate were invented and further developed by authors of color, but the non-white sources are then not cited. Instead, white writers preferred to let the issue of racism be dictated into the block with the argument “whites tend to listen to whites”. Elsewhere it is about why it is nonsense when anti-racist people discuss whether the captain Carola Rackete should be taken seriously in her rescue of refugees from drowning in the Mediterranean – because of her dreadlocks.
You are not the same anti-racist just because you have a person of color among your friends
The chapter on “refugee porn” is particularly disturbing. In Germany, at peak times, refugee porn is searched for up to 800,000 times per month on the xHamster.com site alone. In it, actresses play hungry refugee women who are humiliated by the white man. Sex versus food. Arab men, on the other hand, are portrayed as particularly violent. It is now difficult to assess sexual preferences, but Amjahid has researched that the demand for clips of this type has increased, especially since 2015, in times when refugees from Hungary came to Germany and upper limits were discussed. The reactions that Amjahid then gets to his research: Surely it was Mohameds like him who watched such videos. Germans would never watch something like that.
Here and there it is harder to follow the indignation. For example, when Amjahid tells how horrified the white passengers on the train look around when he turns on the WiFi hotspot on his smartphone, which he called “parallel society”. Hard to imagine a bunch of people actually collectively angry about a hotspot name. Or when he complains about plastic-free supermarkets as a flat copy of the bazaar or souk. It may be correct that it has been possible to shop “plastic-free between Casablanca and Calcutta” for centuries. But even in the West people once carried their lenses home in their bags. Ultimately, however, exaggerations like these only distract from what is really important.
In the end, the author asks himself a simple question: What now? Which is why he doesn’t just describe how deep the drawer with white privileges is. He also gives 50 specific recommendations. For example: First ask if you can help someone instead of imposing yourself as a white savior. Or just listen when someone talks about their discrimination instead of somehow wanting to get rid of their own little alleged victim story. And make it clear to yourself that you don’t become an anti-racist just because you have a person of color in your circle of friends.
It is clear that just thinking about racism is far from over. Why making the “white spot” visible is so important becomes clear by the end of the book at the latest. The dedication simply contains nine names one below the other: the names of the people who were murdered by a right-wing extremist in Hanau on February 19, 2020.
Mohamed Amjahid: “The white spot. A guide to anti-racist thinking”. Piper Verlag, Munich 2021. 224 pages, 16 euros.
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