Eclectic Grounds

A new study by by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation and University Bielefeld compared levels and nature of prejudice against immigrants, ethnic-cultural minorities, Jews, Muslims, women, gay men and lesbian women, homeless and disabled people in several European countries. Eight countries were selected for the study: Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Poland and Hungary. The results are alarming.

These are some results of the study:

50,4% of the Europeans somewhat or strongly agree that “there are too many immigrants” in their country. This statement indicates a generalized and blind rejection of immigrants.

24.5% supposes that “Jews have too much influence in [country]“. Here, a traditional facet of anti-Semitism appears that mirrors anti-Semitic conspiracy myths.

54.4% of the Europeans believe that “the Islam is a religion of intolerance.” This makes obvious that many Europeans share a generalized negative image of the Islam (and of Muslims as the agreement to additional statements reveals).

Nearly one third (31,3%) of the Europeans somewhat or strongly agree that “there is a natural hierarchy between black and white people”. Thus, they agree to a very blatant and direct statement indicating the belief in ethnic hierarchies legitimised by implied natural differences.

A majority of Europeans of 60.2% stick to traditional gender roles that result in economical and power gender inequality as they are demanding that “women should take their role as wives and mothers more seriously.”

42,6% deny equal value of gay men and lesbian women and judge homosexuality as ‘immoral’.

Download the press release and short report here.

In a new film, German investigative journalist Günther Wallraff “has a makeup artist cover him in dark brown makeup, he wears brown contact lenses and he dons an afro wig. Then, using the alias Kwami Ogonno, he takes a trip across Germany to discover for himself what it’s like to be black in Germany” (SpOn).

He apparently didn’t think it was more approriate to simply ask black Germans. Instead, he hired a make-up artist, a camera team, he dressed up as an “African” and  went on to release a book and a movie. Supported by predominantly positive media coverage, this concept is a box office hit. Germans seem to be startled: ‘Racism, here?’ – it’s something most people seem to be blatantly ignorant of, unless they are told by a white guy.

The international site of Spiegel Online reports citically:

There’s just one odd thing about the movie: If Wallraff really wanted to find out what it’s like to live as a black in Germany, why didn’t he take the time to let any blacks living in Germany answer the question? [...]

Black Germans are on the fence about the film. “We find the mindset behind Mr. Wallraff’s film very problematic,” says Tahir Della, a spokeswoman from the Initiative of Black People in Germany (ISD). “As is so often the case, someone is speaking forrather than with us.” Noah Sow, an educator and musician associated with the media watchdog organization Der braune Mob (The Brown Mob), even goes so far as to accuse Wallraff of “making money from our suffering” regardless of whether he “really intends to combat (racism) or not.” [...]

The main criticism levied against Wallraff’s film is that it fails to portray the debate about racism against blacks in Germany as being as advanced as it really is. For example, Della criticizes the film for “making absolutely no mention” of how much blacks in Germany have organized themselves. “We’re happy that racism is discussed,” he says, “but black groups have been doing the same thing for over 25 years.”

Sow has a similar criticism. “Wherever you look,” he [sic] says, “whether it’s in academia, publishing or the annual reports of anti-discrimination offices, knowledge about everyday racism is present — and accessible with the click of a mouse.” He adds that: “Whites just have to stop ignoring and doubting these findings.” As he sees it, the only reason Wallraff succeeds in drawing attention to the plight of Kwami Ogonno is that he is “privileged in the racist system (over) research results, publications and testimonials produced by blacks.”

Update: see Noah Sow trying to earn a buck by dressing up as Wallraff here.

The term “Third World” is the issue of a post in an interesting new blog I recently discovered. Author Mar writes:

Hate the state in which your office bathrooms are kept? Liken it to a Third World country. Annoyed that your hotel only offers three varieties of cream cheese at breakfast? Call it a Third World diet. It’s an exaggeration, see? So it’s funny! Lawl and stuff!

Implicit in these comparisons is the realization that the speakers not only have no idea about the reality of life in the so-called Third World, but further, don’t give a crap. They’re able to so flippantly refer to the poverty and lack of opportunity in some of these nations because they’re comfortable – not with the actual state of things, of which they have only a vague knowledge, or none – but with the fabled state of things.

While I agree with much Mar says, I differ with her in that I think the generalisation ‘Third World’ is often used with apparent positive intentions, by politicians, aid advocates or in every other Sunday’s sermon. The inherent negative, patronizing and racially charged character of the word, however, is all the same.

Its division of the globe into three distinct “worlds” makes it particularly ugly. But replacing “Third World” with “Global South” or “underdeveloped countries” doesn’t make things much better.

One might wonder which term to use instead, and it seems like there is no solution because the problem is not the term itself but how it is charged. If a new, “politically correct”, term might arise of the discussion over the word “Third World”, it will soon be charged with the same demeaning and orientalist stereotypes as the former.

Is a generalisation like “Third World country” really necessary? There is no homogenous group of countries that can be classified with such a term. Countries with, say, a comparable GDP level, differ fundamentally based on their region, their political system, their cultural history, even their economic structure.

Writing a comparative macroeconomic study, it makes sense to group countries in relation to the indicator used: HDI, GDP, GNH, any other index (which all reveal quite different results, by the way). “An analysis of countries with HDI indicators between 0.35 and 0.40 reveals…” – this sounds like a promising start of a sentence. Using the term “developing countries” instead would be a pretty arbitrary step away from the former set.

From the perspective of dependency theory, it appears that “underdeveloped” vs. “developed” is a necessary dialectic to describe world systems. Yet it seems to me that it would make much more sense to focus on the system parameters that create dependency (terms of trade, political and military power) than to use detached and de-politicised language such as “Third World” or “Global South”.

To me, such a distinction is utterly useless for anything beyond grossest economic theory . There is no essential cultural, political or historical insight that can be derived from such a terminology. What’s the similarity between North Korea, Botswana and Colombia, please?

In the end, the classification of “Third World countries” or “developing countries” does not evoke anything more useful than obscure colonialist fantasies. So let’s drop it altogether.

Reminding individuals of a negative stereotype about their social group decreases their confidence, their performance, and ultimately creates a situation where the stereotype becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is suggested by Allen McConnell’s and Sian Beilock’s research, which they present in the video below.

While the research presented here focuses mainly on steretypes against women, the results also add to the debate on the educational achievements of other social groups. The German weekly Der Spiegel, for example, remarks in a report on a recent study on the educational attainments of immigrant groups in Germany that:

If your name is Ümit rather than Hans or Gülcan rather than Grete, you’re less likely to climb the career ladder. Some 30 percent of Turkish immigrants and their children don’t have a school leaving certificate, and only 14 percent do their Abitur, as the degree from Germany’s top-level high schools is called — that’s half the average of the German population.

The study draws a complex picture, yet “low prestige, negative stereotypes and lack of role models” are central features in the explanation of the results.

Negative stereotyping and its ugly consequences are not easily fought off. An example: last week, a prominent social democratic (!) politician stated that “a large number of Arabs and Turks in [Berlin] have no productive function except selling fruit and vegetables”. A sad state of affairs…

‘The Situationist‘ recently featured research by Mahzarin Banaji and Thierry Devos on the connection between being white in the US and being regarded American. It’s a sensible addition to the “birther” conspiracy on Barack Obama’s citizenship (if you have not heard of it, watch this Daily Show segment that presents the debate with the scrutiny and mock it deserves).

Here is what Banaji found out:

Amazingly, white Americans did see a white European like Hugh Grant as being somehow more American than the Asian-American Connie Chung. And similar research in 2008 found that whites thought of ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair as somehow more American than Obama. So the mental framework to believe that Obama is foreign probably was, to use a health care term, a preexisting condition. [emphasis added]

On ResetDOC, Michael Dillon comments on violence by the Chinese government against the Uyghur population and points to the underlying structural racism:

If [Uyghurs] don’t speak and read Chinese correctly, then they do not get a job. But they are also excluded for ethnic reasons: Han Chinese prefer to work with Han. Simply, there is a strong anti-Uyghur racism there.

Dillon also comments on the hesitant role of European countries and the US:

The difference is certainly that the Uyghurs are Muslims and Muslims are not very popular in the West right now. Though the main difference is that with Tibet there is an alternative government in exile under the Dalai Lama, so the Chinese have always been able to point at the Dalai Lama and say that he is undermining their control over Tibet. And a lot of Tibetans as we know support the Dalai Lama. That is not the case for Xinjiang. The Uyghurs do look to Central Asian states, such as Kirghizstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, as a sort of a mother, but there is not an alternative government.

ResetDOC also features two more articles that portray the economic backgrounds of the conflict as well as the role of Turkish language spoken by the Uyghurs.

This piece should be read by every Hollywood actor, adventure travel writer and aid-worker out there who talks about “Africa”.

Interestingly, the video was produced for (red)wire, the online plattform of Bono.

You must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment.

I wonder if Bono has ever read this text himself and if it made any impression on him, since his patronizing and neocolonialist “I am the voice of the starving Africa” posture  might well have been basis the for Wainaina’s text.

Thanks to renee and macon.

Contrary to the 2008 “Racism and Extremism Monitor” in the Netherlands which observed a hightening negative climate towards Muslims (see my post here), the latest quarterly survey by the Social Cultural Planing Office has revealed a changing attitude of the Dutch towards immigrants.

Over the last 3 months, the amount of people stating that the Netherlends would be better off if it had fewer immigrants sunk from 41 to 35%. The number of people who see a presence of different cultures as an asset increased  from 36 to 44%.

At the same time, a student initiative made headlines that handed out 5,000 headscarfs in orange, the Dutch national colour, for the Queen’s Day celebrations on April 30. Their goal was “to allow Muslim women to express loyalty to their faith as well as to the queen.

Source: Radio Netherlands [1] [2], via Crossroads.

“Obama fingers” on sale in Germany

The sales manager obviously didn’t get what’s wrong with this:

The idea, she claimed, was to get in on the Obama-mania which is continuing to grip Germany. The word “fingers” in the name refers to the fact that it is a finger food. “It’s like hotdogs,” Witting said. “No one would ever think they are actually from dogs.”

Full article here.

Darkmatter recenty had an excellent post on a topic that has interested me for a while: it is about how sexual tolerance is becoming a tool that is used to present immigrant groups in Germany as inferior.

Darkmatter picks up a report from the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung on a report on the issue: 

According to Süddeutsche, the study showed that ‘migrant kids in particular strongly rejected homosexuality’, and that German kids were more likely to be weltoffen, that is, open minded or cosmopolitan. While on the one hand all migrant subjects are hereby constituted as a single category – that is, not German and hence not weltoffen – there is at the same time a hierarchy constructed within the migrant community through the problematization of religion.

and examines the report against the backgrop of the “integration discourse”

The question of open-mindedness (Weltoffenheit) is directly linked to the question of ‘integration’: those marked out by a religious identity are considered unable or unwilling to integrate. German values (symbolized, of course, by ‘cosmopolitan’ Berlin, the nation’s moral as well as political capital) are accordingly placed under threat by Islamic migrants. 

The conclusion is that

Homophobia is thus simultaneously nationalized and racialized. In an act of audacious historical revisionism, Germany becomes equated with gay rights (as an expression of its general regard for ‘human rights’), while Islam is constituted as homophobic (and thus outside a discourse of ‘human rights’). Gay rights are thus mobilized in anti-immigration discourse as a key signifier of European cultural superiority, as (white) gay Germans assert their membership of the national community through the construction of the figure of the homophobic Muslim.

[...] 

As gay rights become articulated to the nation and used as markers of European, Western or ‘civilizational’ superiority, they are simultaneously becoming detached from their historical relation to a left-wing politics. Borders and battle lines that were once thought set and certain in our wars of position are suddenly revealed to be in flux, as political antagonisms are more than ever before ‘being formulated in terms of moral categories’, and the seductive lexicon of liberation struggles is mined by a variety of dubious social actors intent on providing for themselves a veneer of ethical legitimacy. As sexuality has come to play a major role in shaping dominant Western attitudes towards cultural difference, scholars and activists the world over are becoming starkly aware of the normative racial bias in hegemonic forms of sexual politics.

Darkmatter adds an extensive overview of the connection between postcolonialism and sexuality in the context of counterterrorism and national assertion against multiculturalism. It reveals the ‘whiteness’ of theories on sexuality and the implicit racism that comes with it. It worth reading.

It notable in this context that anti-immigrant discourses from the right seem to be quite pragmatic in incorporating rather leftist political issues and constituencies for the purpose of creating a national identity against immigrants or cultural difference – not only when it comes to sexuality. Another example is the  the sudden embracement of animal rights against halal Muslim practices of slaughtering, or also the conservative flirt with women’s rights and laicism used to alienate Muslims  - by a party that calls itself “Christian Democrats” (see Jytte Klausen’s excellent book about it).