Minority Participation in the Antiracist Movement in Germany

Abstract

In Germany, until the late 1990s, minority self-organizations were rarely active in wider interorganizational antiracist activities and were not seen as part of this field. Antiracist organizing more generally has rarely been researched in Germany. Building on new secondary historical literature and recent theoretical integration between organizational and social movement research, I investigate how this pattern of minority participation came about in the wider German antiracism movement and in a specific case study of national-level organizing in a regularly meeting "network" group between 1997 and 2005. My research shows parallel processes of "oligarchization" (Michels 1925) on these two levels of antiracist organizing. I claim that the domination of white antiracist organizations in the German antiracist field is not only a result of migrant organizations' difficulties in fighting for more rights and resources in the light of a state and society that has not seen their political activism as legitimate. It is also a product of the competition against other organizations that wanted to represent the voice of antiracism. Others active in the antiracism field have had an ambivalent position in creating and supporting but also in blocking openings for minority organizations.