ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

In post-Holocaust Germany, race and racism are taboo words. But as sensitive as the country is to race-related terms, it’s hard to say whether it has been as sophisticated in tackling racism as it should be. The taboo’s replacement, Germany’s “evasive language,” and its controlled focus on right-wing extremists, obscures the reality of racism as a social phenomenon that cuts across virtually all sectors of society. Asians, in particular, who have been considered the “model minority,” have been completely absent from German racist discourse. Thilo Sarrazin’s Deutschland schafft sich ab(Germany is disappearing), which is now the nourishment of the New Right, is only utilized in the political context of targeting other races, and anti-Asian racism itself has rarely been an issue in public discourse. The otherness of Asians is also evidenced by the fact that the 2024 report of the National Monitor for Discrimination and Racism (NaDiRa) was the first to systematically address “anti-Asian racism” in Germany. While the data, which is based on a convenience sample, has methodological limitations that make it difficult to apply to all Asian migrants, we believe it is significant that it categorizes and makes visible actual anti-Asian racism, which is often not captured due to stereotypes of model minorities. In particular, the intensity of discrimination, including physical assaults, the overwhelming rate of unreporting, and the fact that most of the hate and assaults took place in public spaces cannot be explained by anything other than social approval, acquiescence, and complicity. The reputation of being a model minority does not translate into acceptance as a contributing member of society, and given the way in which they were labeled as a “yellow peril” group at the onset of the pandemic, even that reputation is far from solid. This thoroughly othered vulnerability of Asians aligns with recent analyses of the “perpetual foreigner” among Asian Americans, where blacks are the “other” in American society, while Asians are the “other” who shouldn’t even be in American society. However, in the midst of what is sure to be an even more chilling time, the voice of Hami Nguyen, a second-generation Vietnamese immigrant writer who wrote Das Ende der Unsichtbarkeit(The end of invisibility)(2023), gives us hope that the pandemic will mark a significant turning point in the fight against anti-Asian racism. In particular, the process of articulating the problems and visions of the migrant integration debate in Germany, proposing the term “inclusion” instead of “integration,” is noteworthy because it reminds us of the ultimate purpose of the debate - which has become tainted by the logic of political camps. It is these remarks that will eventually nourish NaDiRa’s ongoing research on anti-Asian racism.

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