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

Abstract

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.