The material effects of Whiteness: Institutional racism in the German welfare state

Abstract

The scholarship on institutional racism has emerged from contexts such as Australia, the UK or the US. Less is known about how racism operates within institutional settings elsewhere. What is more, our understanding of Whiteness is shaped by this Anglocentric literature. In this article, I explore the contextual features of Whiteness in residential care in Germany. More specifically, I trace how institutional routines shape affective subjectivities and thereby develop material effects. The study draws on 17 expert interviews and 20 interviews with managers of care homes run by the two largest providers, the Christian welfare associations Caritas and Diakonie. Respondents frequently highlighted their organisation’s commitment to equality, which they saw grounded in its Christian ethos, their professional self-understanding as carers, or Germany’s post-racial nationhood. Paradoxically, however, my analysis shows that respondents also deployed these ‘representations of self’ to justify access and service quality differentials. On this basis, I argue that Whiteness materialises via self-ascribed civility, ‘goodness’ and egalitarianism in the German welfare state. Signified by visual markers, Whiteness emerges from projections of purity, innocence and good intentions. In varying ways, groups distinctively racialised as ‘Other’, notably as ‘Black’, ‘Muslim’ or ‘Eastern European’, are placed outside this notion of Whiteness.