Terms and concepts Glossary

This term describes the fact that racist ideas, racist language and images are reproduced every day in individual, structural and collective actions, in the media, at school, at work and in public. Everyday racism often manifests itself unconsciously and unintentionally, for example in the form of praise for ‘speaking German well’ or abusive behaviour such as ‘touching people's hair without permission’. For those affected, everyday racism is often a recurring traumatic experience - they are exposed to ‘othering’ again and again.

Microaggressions are everyday racisms that at first glance may even be meant as a compliment from the person acting (‘but you speak German so well’) or superficially seem to express curiosity/interest (‘where do you (really) come from?’), but which actually signal that the person being addressed does not belong to the norm or cannot belong to ‘normal’ society due to their appearance or presumed cultural origin. This questioning of identity might be manageable as an individual case, but it unfolds its destructive effect through the recurring everyday experiences that act like recurring hurtful pinpricks of marginalisation for those affected. White people often react to microagressions with ‘white fragility’.

The term ‘othering’ was introduced in 1985 by the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. It describes the process of deliberate or unconscious demarcation through constructions of ‘us’ and ‘the others’ in a society. Compared to the ‘we’ of the majority society, ‘the others’ are either openly devalued as being ‘less enlightened’, ‘less educated’, ‘less capable’ or assigned supposedly positive characteristics such as ‘exotic’, ‘close to nature’, ‘racy’, ‘naturally talented in sports/dancing’. Those affected experience the attribution and reduction to stereotypical, racist characteristics, for example in the form of everyday racism such as microagressions, as constant marginalisation that prevents a sense of belonging and makes it difficult to find one's own identity.

(Source on the term ‘othering’: Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1985): The Rani of Simur. An Essay in Reading the Archives. In: Barker, Francis et al. (eds.): Europe and its Others. Colchester: University of Essex, 128-151).

Racism is an ideology that devalues people on the basis of external characteristics, their names, their ascribed origin, culture or religion. Racism has a variety of manifestations ranging from everyday racism to structural racism and acts of racist violence. Racism does not need a declaration of intent; actions and statements can be racist, even if they are made unknowingly or unintentionally. In reality, racism always exists in the context of unequal power relations, in which one group of people is considered the ‘norm’ and has more participation and power resources than others, who in turn are affected by exclusionary mechanisms.
Classic biologistic racism has its origins in modern colonialism. On the basis of scientific ‘research’ into phenotypical characteristics such as skin colour, the existence of ‘human races’ was constructed, which were hierarchised on the basis of ascribed (lacking) characteristics and (lacking) abilities. White Europeans were at the top of this hierarchy. The hierarchical racialisation and devaluation of non-white people served as a basis of legitimacy for the exploitation and enslavement of ‘subordinate races’, who were then to be ‘dominated’, ‘civilised’ and - in some cases - ‘saved’ by European colonial powers as ‘uncivilised’, ‘stupid’ and ‘instinct-driven’.
In 1989, the British sociologist Stuart Hall coined the term cultural racism, a racism without races, which had replaced biologistic racism. Instead of ascribing deficiencies to alleged human ‘races’, the term now referred to unchangeable cultural deficits. From a Eurocentric perspective, members of an alleged culture were ascribed a set of (mostly negative or deficient) characteristics and stereotypes that primarily emphasised their ‘foreignness’ in order to illustrate their incompatibility with Western values and norms and legitimise Western culture's claim to hegemony.

(Source on cultural racism: Hall, Stuart (1989b): Racism as an ideological discourse. In: Das Argument 178, Hamburg: Argument Verlag. S. 913-921).

Structural or institutional racism means that racist knowledge has been (unconsciously) passed on for centuries in our social structures, on the labour and housing markets, in educational institutions and public offices and in the administration of justice, and is thus still being reproduced. As a result, racialised or migrantised people experience barriers to participation, discrimination or racist violence in school, education, when looking for work or housing or at the hands of state authorities. Recognising the fact that our social structures are racist and that we as individuals are therefore also socialised in a racist way is a first step in the critical debate on racism.