Racism 1

(…) because I grew up with the feeling that I live here, I was born here, but that I have to leave here one day. Because the first question is always where do they come from and the second is when are they going, when are they going back. It doesn’t matter if this “back” exists or not. And you can’t be German with Black skin anyway.

May Ayim, Part 3, Minute 0:40 – 1:05.

May Ayim (1960-1996) was a German poet, educator and activist in the Afro-German movement.

In the documentary Hoffnung im Herz - Mündliche Poesie by Maria Binders, May Ayim describes how, with the self-empowering designation “Afro-German” or “Schwarze Deutsche”, she refused negative racial epithets, which were still quite common in everyday language in the late 1980s. But she noted that even with these more positive developments, little had changed for Afro-Germans. Even today, the prevailing idea is that being German means being white. As a result, the fact of having lived in Germany for several generations still does not mean that people of colour, Black people or people with a migration history can (discursively) be considered German. Last but not least, the media and discourses about the “other” also make it clear who is German and who has yet to be integrated. Within this framework, people of colour or people with a migration background cannot by definition be German. This is despite the fact that the law on nationality was changed in 2000 in such a way that one no longer needs to have “German blood” in order to be German but can, under certain conditions, be German by virtue of having been born in Germany.

*May Ayim (2003): Blues in Black and White. A Collection of Essays, Poetry, and Conversations. Cape Town etc: Africa World Press.

1991