Germany’s Contemporary Colorscape: Part II

One night we were out to dinner with friends, chattering away in English about the difficulties with language and adjusting to the reserved German demeanor, when the woman at the next table began speaking to us.

She was originally from the Caribbean, but came here as a young woman to learn German to help the family business. She ended up staying and raising a family. Even though she had spent most of her life in Germany, she said she went “home” to visit the Caribbean periodically, because she had never felt accepted here.

Things are not always as "schoen"
as this curvy model casting call
would suggest

At the time I assumed her story was an exception. The nerdy, ever-hopeful American in me wanted to believe that if you worked hard enough you’d find your niche, no matter where you were.

Sometimes there are bigger challenges to overcome.

The German edition of The Local, an English-language European news outlet, has had several articles over the past year about systemic and specific instances of racism. I was surprised to find that many of them were not centered here in conservative southern Germany, but in supposedly hip and laid-back Berlin.

Berlin and Hamburg were both occupied after the war, and, as the first- and second-largest cities in Germany, have a larger percentage of Afro-Germans (an exact number is not known, because ever since the Holocaust census data does not include ethnicity or religion).

While Hamburg has the resources to address its changing population, Berlin--the one European capital that actually drags down the wealth of its country’s citizens--seems to have neither the funds nor the inclination to create one big happy family.

American Isaiah Lopaz confronts racism
in Berlin by wearing a series of t-shirts
with the questions people always ask him

With the rise of the right-wing AfD party, it’s not just the every-man who’s a target. Noah Becker, son of German tennis legend Boris Becker, is pressing charges against an AfD official who called him a “little half negro” on Twitter following Becker’s complaints about racism in Berlin.

Last year, UN experts determined there are “no-go” areas in Germany for blacks, such as Saxony (where even the state’s deputy leader admitted the police there had a problem with racism). 

The UN team's preliminary findings also suggested a lack of willingness by police to investigate racial violence and hate crimes. 

But it’s not just on the streets.There are also indications black children are disproportionately given grades that prevent them from pursuing higher education (here’s a quick video explaining how the German system works).

I think it’s telling that even though there‘s a group called Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (Black People in Germany), who are supposed to promote the presence of contributions of Afro-Germans, my searches for Black History Month events in Germany came up with few options, and of those, 99% were focused on some aspect of American black history.

So I’m left wondering exactly who’s going to stand up and carve out that much-needed niche for this overlooked segment of the population? And how does the recent refugee situation further complicate the German colorscape?