Picture from Berliner Morgenpost - Antiracist Demo

Germany: between 2000 and 2006, Enver Şimsek, Abdurrahim Özüdoğru, Süleyman Taşköprü, Habil Kılıç, Yunus Turgut, İsmail Yaşar, Theodoros Boulgarides, Mehmet Kubaşık and Halit Yozgat were murdered by the extreme right-wing organization “National Socialist Underground” (NSU). The group was well structured and targeted specific individuals, receiving enormous financial and strategic support from their local surroundings. No actions were taken against the NSU by the authorities for almost 13 years – who referred to a lack claim of responsibility from the group or evidence connecting the murders to a racist, extreme-right background.Today, there are even more incidents linked to this group. On July 27, 2000, a group of Jewish migrants was assaulted in a suburban metro station in Düsseldorf  injuring 10 and resulting in the death of an unborn child. On June 9, 2004, a nail bomb attack in the Mühlheim district of Cologne injured 22 people. A predominantly Turkish and Turkish-German neighborhood, this was no random attack.  Though many clues hinted at a racially motivated extreme right-wing agenda, police officers did not investigate these charges. Similar to the murders that took place between 2000 and 2006, these incidents were falsely associated with mafia structures or personal matters. Not only did those assumptions criminalize the murder victims, they were widely referred to as “döner murders”(1) another racializing term.Why were these cases neglected for such a long time? In contrast, why did the 2007 murder of a policewoman from Heilbronn — who, according to current evidence, was also assassinated by the NSU — gain so more public attention and a far more rapid investigation?

While the murder of a police officer may trigger the support and concern of colleague, it also seems that when it comes to the investigation and media coverage of these murders, it is important whether a murder victim is considered part of “white German” society or not. It is quite common that murder cases involving “racialized” victims like Oury Jalloh are not investigated, remain unsolved, and thus leave racism to spread without resistance.

Of course, racist incidents took place before the new millennium. Soon after the Berlin Wall fell, the first violent attacks, attributed to organized extreme right-wing groups, occurred in East Germany – and spread onwards to West Germany. The arson attack in Solingen in 1993, and the attacks on residences for refugees and contract workers in 1991 in Hoyerswerda and Rostock in 1992 have been discussed again recently.

But Hoyerswerda and Rostock-Lichterhagen also show that there were not only right-wing extremists involved. In both cases, local residents supported and cheered for the perpetrators, and/or attended the deportations of asylum seekers, expressing their rage by shouting slogans such as “Foreigners out!”

Racism was and still is a problem affecting the social structure in all of Germany – and not just in former East-Germany  or among right-wing extremists, as has repeatedly been suggested by the media in the past few weeks. The idea that racism can only be found among certain groups is not very helpful, because it puts the blame for only on a  specific part of the population. If instead racism is seen as a constructed racial system, that involves every aspect of social, political, economical and cultural part of society and privileges those who are not being targeted by it, then the understanding of it and the fight against it becomes easier.

The choice of words that has been used by the media already demonstrates how common it is to treat racism as a marginal problem. Some call it xenophobia,  hostility toward “strangers,” or “foreigners.” Apparently, addressing “racism” as such is difficult for many people. It does not seem easy to acknowledge that in many cases violence is directed against people who have been living in Germany for many years, whose children were born here, who regard themselves as German and would rarely classify themselves as “strangers” or “foreigners.” Instead addressing this implicit “othering,” people spend a lot of time thinking about whether the National Democratic Party (2)should be banned, and how long right-wing extremism in Germany went by unnoticed. While these issues are important and demand immediate action, a lopsided focus on these the extreme-right might distract us from the most essential questions: How can we proceed against structural racism? How can we clarify that this problem does not just concern a few people, but everyone – victims and attackers as well as the racialized and the privileged?