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Comprehending and sensing racism: how Germans of migrant background make sense of experiences of ethnoracial exclusion
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
... The present study aims to focus explicitly on this relationship between understandings of racism and racist incidents on the one hand and responses to such incidents on the other in terms of in-group differences, and to explore these relationships and responses in detail through the analysis of in-depth interviews with 21 Black Germans conducted between 2018 and 2021. Conceptually, the study builds on the author's previous research with interviewees from different migrant backgrounds (including the Black German interviewees in this study), which has focused on how individuals recognise and make sense of experiences and incidents of ethnoracial exclusion (Piwoni, 2024a). 2 This research has shown that racialised individuals do not always "comprehend" incidents as "racist, " but may often only "sense" racism and indicate feelings of unease without explicitly categorising specific experiences as "racist. ...
... As Essed (1991) and Piwoni (2024a) argue, access to knowledge about racism varies between societies and also between different groups in society. It is also, as this article shows, unevenly distributed within particular groups. ...
... While the question of how individuals (and groups) respond to ethnoracial exclusion and/or racism has been discussed vividly in ethnic and migration studies, the question of how (incidents) of racism are understood or made sense of by those who are affected and/or targeted has received less explicit attention in the field (but see recently Nadim, 2023;Doering, 2024). Certainly, as already noted (Piwoni, 2024a), the literature on responses is sensitive to the sense-making of racialised individuals and groups, discussing response categories such as "deemphasising" (Witte, 2018), "retrospect sense-making of negative experiences" (denying significance, and talking down) , "normalisation" (Jaskulowski and Pawlak, 2020) or "ignoring" Lamont et al., 2016). However, these response categories are introduced alongside and as situated on the same level as more practice-based categories such as confronting in the situation as such by, for instance, "striking back" (see Witte, 2018). ...
This article argues that there is a close relationship between individuals’ understandings of specific incidents of racism, their ideas of how racism operates, and their (repertoires of) responses to such incidents. The argument is based on a qualitative interview study with 21 highly educated Black Germans with at least one parent born outside Germany, and draws on both the extant literature on responses to experiences of ethnoracial exclusion and research into how people make sense of such experiences. The analysis specifically explores two contrasting types of interviewees: Type 1 felt that they were constantly and potentially always affected by racism and had a broad knowledge of racism. These interviewees recounted many different incidents, many of which they clearly labelled as “racist.” Type 1 interviewees reported a variety of response options, with direct confrontation being one of them. In stark contrast, Type 2 respondents tended to normalise the relatively few incidents they mentioned or indicate only feelings of unease. They also believed that they were largely unaffected by racism, had a less deep understanding of racism and tended to respond to incidents of exclusion in ways that allowed the encounter to continue without disruption. Overall, the study calls for greater attention to racialised people’s meaning-making in relation to concrete incidents of exclusion and to their knowledge of racism. This requires methodological adaptations to qualitative interview research, which remains the most popular method for exploring experiences of racism. In particular, the study highlights the importance of understanding the ways in which respondents talk about their experiences (categorisation, indication of feelings of unease, and normalisation). It also emphasises the need to go beyond considering only interviewees’ responses to direct questions about their experiences of racism and/or discrimination and/or incidents clearly categorised by interviewees as, for example, “racist.” Moreover, reconstructing interviewees’ knowledge about racism offers a path towards understanding not only their sense-making but also their repertoires of responses. This, in turn, provides insight into why individuals of comparable class position and educational background respond to racism in different ways.
... It can be assumed that the episodes they chose to highlight in the interview were chosen because they had a lasting effect on them -or, as Cantó-Milà et al (2023: 5) point out in their elaboration on 'emotion memories', 'the moments provoking a strong emotional experience leave a lasting memory in our minds'. As Cantó-Milà et al proceed to argue, these moments are often 'moments of emotional unease' and thus 'emotion-laden experiences' that may 'become internalised and inhabit our memories with an echo of the strength of what we felt, or an echo of 'this cannot be right' or 'this I did not expect'' (Cantó-Milà et al, 2023: 5; see also Piwoni, 2024). Narrations of these episodes allow us to zoom in on situations in which the interviewees immediately sensed racism and to understand the elements that come together in such situations. ...
... In contrast to interviewees who gave detailed descriptions of specific episodes in which they had immediately sensed racism, interviewees who spoke more generally about the experience of being asked the question tended to highlight feelings of unease, insecurity, doubt, ambivalence and discomfort (except for interviewees who normalised the question; see also Piwoni, 2024). Some interviewees also said that they found the question annoying or irritating. ...
... I felt race even before I knew what race was and long before I recognized myself as a Black Puerto Rican.' Indeed, respondents may not always label a certain experience as 'racist' or 'discriminatory', but they may still indicate that they have 'sensed racism' in a particular situation or encounter (see also Piwoni, 2024). This finding suggests that rather than relying on straightforward questions about whether respondents have experienced racism or discrimination, as is common in research on the topic, research designs and interview formats that prioritise open-ended questions and provide space for respondents to engage in 'emotional reflexivity' (Holmes, 2015) regarding their experiences may offer a better way of understanding the significance of such experiences in respondents' lives. ...
This article discusses the various affective and emotional dimensions of how racialised individuals understand and cope with the ambiguous question of ‘Where are you (really) from?’ Theoretically, the article argues that people do not necessarily ‘comprehend’ racism but sense it, and that it is through affects and being affected that they understand the nature of an encounter. Empirically, the article is based on 21 in-depth interviews conducted with Black Germans, and it analyses respondents’ reflections on and ‘emotion memories’ of being asked the question of ‘Where are you from?’ Only a few respondents said that they had consciously decided to always regard the question as ‘normal’ and thus to ‘switch off their sensitivity’. Overall, when asked this question, interviewees relied on ‘affective thinking-feeling’ to determine whether there was racism to be sensed. By analysing respondents’ narratives of particular episodes in which they were asked the question, the article proposes that a specific assemblage and affective intensities are the main conditions for immediately sensing racism in and through the question. In addition, the article discusses interviewees’ range of response options and why and when respondents may engage in ‘emotion work’ when responding to the question. The article concludes by highlighting different types of emotions associated with sensing racism through the question, particularly the emotions of unease, discomfort, and disappointment that can lead to feelings of non-belonging.
... Empirically, the study is based on 22 semi-structured interviews with 11 male and 11 female interviewees who live (or, until recently, lived) in Hamburg (see also Piwoni 2024, which is based on this and two other samples but which analyses the data from a different theoretical angle). All interviewees were either born in Germany or went there before starting primary school. ...
... As outlined in the introduction, there is ample evidence that anti-Eastern European racism is a reality in Germany, although this type of racism receives limited attention in the German media compared to anti-Black or anti-Muslim racism. Eastern Europeans' avoidance of describing experiences of exclusion as 'racist' may therefore reflect the general use of the term 'racism' in society and in the media (see Piwoni 2024). Similarly, they may not feel 'entitled' to use this description because they are white. ...
While recent studies have focused extensively on the reflexive use of categories and methodologies in research on migrants and refugees, they have paid less attention to individuals whose parents are migrants. Previous studies have noted that the terms second generation migrants and migrant descendants are centered on migration, thereby homogenizing experiences and deepening social exclusion of the people they define. However, we have less understanding of research participants’ perceptions of these categories. Additionally, the focus of most research has been on non-white descendants of migrants, which risks aligning scientific discourse with mainstream narratives that problematize some groups while silencing others. This article bridges this gap by examining the perception of research categories among people raised in Germany by Polish parents. It presents interviewees’ negotiations of categories in the context of their status as an invisible minority as well as their access to various class resources. Drawing from autobiographical narrative interviews, the study first demonstrates how the positioning of interlocutors as invisible begins at the micro level through everyday interactions with the mainstream society and their families. It then reveals the mechanisms of this process: ascribing identifications, creating an anti-migrant environment, exerting pressure on integration, and limiting resources. It argues that invisibility limits interlocutors’ possibilities to negotiate a sense of belonging and express self-identification. Engaging participants in category negotiations and autobiographical narrative interviews, along with considering the class perspective, expands the space for reflecting on identity and helps to align categories with participants’ lived experiences.
Racial discrimination takes many forms and so does opposition to it. In contrast to the dominant emphasis on institutional or state efforts to counter racism, we examine how members of racially minoritized groups resist racism in their everyday lives. Drawing on forty-one qualitative interviews with young, mainly Black, people in Norway, we identify five distinct ways in which they actively counter racism, as opposed to passively accepting or adapting to it. Participants resisted racism by ignoring, confronting, sharing experiences about, reporting and protesting it. Our analysis explicates the characteristics, potential outcomes and social function of such resistance to racism. The study contributes to the literature on everyday racism and antiracism by making it evident how those at the receiving end negotiate and actively oppose racist experiences.
Research has shown widespread discrimination and hostility
toward Muslims in Western countries. There is less knowledge of
how Muslims resist, oppose, or challenge such behaviour. Based
on in-depth interviews with 90 young Muslims in Norway, this
study explores responses to anti-Muslim hostility. We describe a
repertoire of everyday resistance: talking back, entering dialogue,
living the example, denying significance, and talking down. The
first three forms occur in face-to-face encounters while the latter
two are retrospect sense-making of negative experiences. We
conceptualise these responses as everyday resistance because
they entail ways of actively countering anti-Muslim hostility, as
opposed to passively accepting or adapting to it. This repertoire
of everyday resistance can make it easier to avoid victimisation,
protect religious identities, and ease the daily lives of young
Muslims. Increased attention to narrative resistance in studies of
everyday resistance will provide a better understanding of the
many ways in which marginalised groups cope, resist, and
struggle with their stigma.
At a time when racism remains prevalent in educational spaces, this paper addresses what else we can know about the ways in which race and racism manifest and are experienced in practice. This paper draws on continual mobilisations of affect and new materialist theory to examine the conditions of emergence through which race and racism are experienced within ordinary, yet affective, encounters. I propose that drawing attention to how race surfaces in affective encounters may allow us to develop more critical interventions that challenge racisms in process.
Advances in communication technologies offer new opportunities for the conduct of qualitative research. Among these, Zoom—an innovative videoconferencing platform—has a number of unique features that enhance its potential appeal to qualitative and mixed-methods researchers. Although studies have explored the use of information and communication technologies for conducting research, few have explored both researcher and participant perspectives on the use of web and videoconferencing platforms. Further, data are lacking on the benefits and challenges of using Zoom as a data collection method. In this study, we explore the feasibility and acceptability of using Zoom to collect qualitative interview data within a health research context in order to better understand its suitability for qualitative and mixed-methods researchers. We asked 16 practice nurses who participated in online qualitative interviews about their experiences of using Zoom and concurrently recorded researcher observations. Although several participants experienced technical difficulties, most described their interview experience as highly satisfactory and generally rated Zoom above alternative interviewing mediums such as face-to-face, telephone, and other videoconferencing services, platforms, and products. Findings suggest the viability of Zoom as a tool for collection of qualitative data because of its relative ease of use, cost-effectiveness, data management features, and security options. Further research exploring the utility of Zoom is recommended in order to critically assess and advance innovations in online methods.
In this study we compare rates of discrimination across German-born applicants from thirty-five ethnic groups in which various racial and religious treatment groups are embedded, this study allows us to better distinguish taste and statistical sources of discrimination, and to assess the relative importance of ethnicity, phenotype and religious affiliation as signals triggering discrimination. The study is based on applications to almost 6,000 job vacancies with male and female applicants in eight occupations across Germany. We test taste discrimination based on cultural value distance between groups against statistical discrimination based on average education levels and find that discrimination is mostly driven by the former. Based on this pattern, ethnic, racial and religious groups whose average values are relatively distant from the German average face the strongest discrimination. By contrast, employers do not treat minority groups with value patterns closer to Germany’s different from ethnic German applicants without a migration background.
This article examines migrants' lived experiences with racism in Wrocław, Poland. Drawing on qualitative research conducted among high-skilled migrants, it analyzes various ways migrants encounter, understand, and cope with racism. Our case study broadens discussion about migration and racism by analyzing an Eastern European, post-socialist, predominantly "white" receiving society seldom researched in terms of racism. The article problematizes the assumption that high-skilled migrants experience only minor problems with incorporation. Furthermore, it suggests the importance of racial boundaries in a non-Western society that lacks a colonial background and long-standing relations with migrants. Therefore, our article contributes to a better understanding of how local settings inform the experiences of high-skilled migrants, which are often lost in abstract concepts of global flows and spaces.
The term emotion, stemming from the Latin emovere (to move out or agitate), broadly refers to those affective upheavals in experience that are directed at events or objects in the world and that often prompt us to act in specific ways vis-à-vis these events or objects. Since antiquity, these episodes have been branded by labels like shame, anger, fear, joy, embarrassment, or disgust, and classed into categories. Historically, Darwin's (1872) The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was one of the most influential scholarly works to inform prominent understandings of emotion in many academic disciplines. Across disciplines, there is broad consensus that emotions are discrete in kind; that is, they are characterized by specific configurations of phenomenal experience, bodily changes, expressions, and action tendencies. Emotions are also widely thought to be adaptive, insofar as they are purposeful and meaningful for an individual, and reflect an evaluative engagement with the environment that helps one prepare for specific actions. Related to this capacity, emotions are generally presumed to fulfill communicative purposes, for instance through facial or vocal expressions, which is why they are deemed essential to social interaction. Following Darwin's work, two major debates have refined contemporary understandings of emotion. William James (1884) held that emotions are, first and foremost, a specific class of feelings, to be distinguished from related concepts such as moods, sensations, and sentiments. Emotions according to this view are the subjective feelings associated with bodily changes and expressive behaviors. Hence, as James (p. 190) famously put it, "we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble"-and not vice versa. An almost diametrically opposed shift in understanding emotion is linked to a well-known experiment by Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer (1962), based on which they proposed that only thoughts and cognitions, specifically the interpretation and labeling of events (including bodily changes), can bring about a specific emotion. More recent scholarship has increasingly sought to integrate key insights of these feeling-based and cognitive accounts, resulting in innovative perspectives that emphasize the embodied and socially constituted nature of emotion, which we outline in detail in our own approach. Importantly, in this approach, emotions should be considered part of an integrated conceptual field that encompasses affect, emotion, and feeling. Roughly, whereas "affect" stands for pre-categorical relational dynamics and "feeling" for the subjective-experiential dimension of these affective relations, "emotion" signifies consolidated and categorically circumscribed sequences of affective world-relatedness.
This article argues that mass-mediated public discourse produces a discourse on emotion and disseminates specific feeling rules for different groups of people by studying one of the most heated debates on immigrant integration in Germany during the past decade—that surrounding Thilo Sarrazin’s book Germany Does Itself In. Adapting and further developing Arlie Hochschild’s notion of ‘feeling rules’ as a ‘sensitizing concept’ within a grounded-theory approach, it analyses 427 statements about ordinary Germans’ emotions, which were drawn from a corpus of 961 newspaper articles, letters to the editor and other items. The article shows that the debate’s discourse on emotion assigned different sets of emotions to two different groups of ordinary Germans: ‘Autochthonous Germans’ were predominantly described as having Angst (German for anxiety), while ‘immigrants from Muslim-majority countries’ were partly described as being offended or hurt. It also conveyed different sets of feeling rules for each of them. While ‘autochthonous Germans’ were generally not asked to control their Angst, there was a tendency to ask ‘immigrants from Muslim-majority countries’ to hold back their feelings. The article interprets this pattern as an unequal distribution of recognition and discusses how future research may benefit from the approach presented in this article.
This article explores the efforts of Dutch Muslim women who try to break the ‘oppressed Muslim woman’ stereotype by monitoring their own behaviour in everyday interactions with members of the non-Muslim ethnic majority. In representing themselves as modern and emancipated, they try to change the dominant image of Muslim women in Dutch society, and thus also that of Islam. Based on interviews and archival material, I demonstrate that initially this strategy was mostly adopted by Dutch converts to Islam, and later also by ‘born’ Muslim women. Why do more and more Muslim women turn themselves into ‘ambassadors’ of Islam? And what are the costs of this form of self-essentialization? This article demonstrates the usefulness of studying self-representations of minority groups in the light of existing stereotypes, arguing that Muslim women’s self-representations should be seen as part of a politics of belonging.
The integration paradox refers to the phenomenon of the more highly educated and structurally integrated immigrants turning away from the host society, rather than becoming more oriented toward it. This article provides an overview of the empirical evidence documenting this paradox in the Netherlands. In addition, the theoretical arguments and the available findings about the social psychological processes involved in this paradox are considered. The existing evidence for the integration paradox and what might explain it form the basis for making suggestion for future theoretical work and empirical research, and for discussing possible policy implications.
In the Sociology of Emotion and Affect Studies, affects are usually regarded as an aspect of human beings alone, or of impersonal or collective atmospheres. However, feelings and emotions are only specific cases of affectivity that require subjective inner selves, while the concept of ‘atmospheres’ fails to explain the singularity of each individual case. This article develops a theory of social affect that does not reduce affect to either personal feelings or collective emotions. First, I use a Spinozist understanding of the ‘body’ to conceptualize the receptivity and mutual constitution of bodies, to show how affects do not ‘belong’ to anybody; they are not solely attributable either to the human or to any kind of body alone, but emerge in situations of the encounter and interaction (between bodies). Next I build upon Jean-Marie Guyau’s concept of transmissions to show how we can theorize affect as an emerging transmission between and among bodies. Finally, I demonstrate how we now have a complete conceptual frame for theorizing affect in relation to all bodies in any given social scene, the grand composition of which I call affectif.
This article argues that, despite the efforts to expunge race from the European political sphere, racism continues to define the sociality of Europe. The post-war drive to replace race with other signifiers, such as culture or ethnicity, has done little to overcome the effects of the race idea, one less based on naturalist conceptions of hierarchical humanity, and more on fundamental conceptions of Europeanness and non-Europeanness. The silence about race in Europe allows European states to declare themselves non-racist, or even anti-racist, while at the same time continuing to imply an inherent European superiority, which determines both international relationships and relationships with those seen as `in but not of Europe' within its domestic spheres. The article concludes by asking what the repercussions of this are in the context of the contemporary discourse on cohesion and integration that replaces multiculturalism as a possible way of living together in a Europe always less homogeneous in reality than it is commonly imagined to be.
Racism operates though material discrimination and through emotions. Racialised subjects feel their location in hierarchical social space, and spatial arrangements can facilitate racial perceptual segregation. The first aim of this article is to discuss which emotions are involved in young people's narrations about their experiences and exposure to racism in Berlin, Germany. Second, it engages with how emotions impact articulations of racism and empathy for those who are racially discriminated against. Out of a larger data corpus consisting of narrative interviews, individual and group, with young people with migration history and various experience of racism, we present three cases which offer us new possibilities to disturb the existing theories of racism and emotions. We believe that the German case is instructive because of the complexity of migrantisation and racialisation that is different to the well-studies American and British contexts. We address the contextual factors in which emotions emerge and are articulated. We consider how our research participants' different socio-spatial positionalities – mobile, local and betwixt - mould their emotional engagements with racism. We also thematise how these positionalities shift in time.
This article focuses on the fundamental role that emotion memories play in constructing autobiographical narrations. It suggests that the analysis of emotion memories can provide a deep insight into a variety of processes and fields of individual and social life (Cavarero, 2000). Based on the analysis of emotion memories in life-story interviews, this article will show the deep-rooted interrelatedness between the self and its social environment with emotion memories as an influential element. This article aims to show that strong emotional experiences mould the interviewees’ narrations because they penetrate and shape the remembered past and anticipated future by enhancing, suppressing and hence shaping past and future experiences. If turned into emotion memories, these experiences allow the channelling, taming and/or evoking of emotions. This practice relates different memories and life-story moments with each other and puts them into a new context. This article claims that emotion memories have therefore a crucial structuring effect for autobiographical narrations and are therefore also a valuable element of analysis of interviews. We claim that emotion memories become visible and therefore analysable as emotional expressions or emotives, as emotion performances intentionally performed or accidentally caused (Austin, 1975; Reddy, 2001).
A growing scholarly literature describes people who moved from Europe’s East to its West as racialised. Others speak of ‘migratization’ or ‘xenophobia’. Many of these contributions have in common that they conceive of discrimination as occurring after migration. What is more, they focus on the attitudinal dimension of ‘prejudice’, as expressed in the media or the narratives of East–West movers themselves. What thereby slips from view is that racism has geopolitical-economic and legal dimensions, and structures life opportunities. This article explores how categories such as ‘Eastern European’ are invoked, deployed and how they are put to work – via policy or the law. The analysis shows that neoliberal policies have attributed a distinctive positionality to ‘Eastern Europeans’ in West European racial hierarchies. I argue that people from Europe’s East are distinctively, yet ambiguously racialised, and discuss facets of this ambiguity. Most notably, they are inferiorised within Europe, but often positioned within global racialised categories of ‘Europeanness’. This racialisation is not a product of twenty-first century mobilities but reflects and reproduces the peripheralisation of Europe’s East. Of course, racialisation shapes everyday lives after migration; yet, it also channels the life opportunities of those born in the East over the course of generations.
This article advances the debate on responses to experiences of ethnoracial exclusion by proposing a heuristic for comparative qualitative research. The heuristic is developed based on an overview of the literature and of existing classifications of responses. It first introduces a differentiation between cognitive and practice-based responses to experiences of ethnoracial exclusion and, second, a differentiation between responses to incidents of racism and/or the general experience of racism on the one hand and strategies for gaining recognition in society on the other. The article also addresses challenges that occur when applying the heuristic in interview-based research (e.g. the trade-off between exploring interviewees’ meaning-making and accessing the whole spectrum of incidents experienced by the interviewees) and discusses the heuristic’s benefits: Most importantly, the heuristic enables comparisons between pre-existing findings in the field and provides a tool to guide qualitative comparative research.
Beim Thema Rassismus denkt man hierzulande an jugendliche Gewalttäter oder unverbesserliche Neonazis. Doch die meisten Einwanderer haben mit Extremismus kaum eigene Erfahrungen. Was sie kennen, sind permanente, kleine Erlebnisse, in denen ihnen klar gemacht wird, dass sie keine Deutschen sind und dass sie woanders hingehören. In diesem Buch geben Migranten zweiter Generation Auskunft über diesen ganz banalen Rassismus. Sie erzählen, warum für sie Fragen wie »Woher kommen Sie?« oder »Sie sprechen aber gut Deutsch!« nicht nur naive Neugierde oder freundliches Lob bedeuten. Rassismus ist eben der Apparat, der Menschen systematisch zu »Fremden« macht.
In this presidential address, I advance a theoretical sketch on racialized emotions—the emotions specific to racialized societies. These emotions are central to the racial edifice of societies, thus, analysts and policymakers should understand their collective nature, be aware of how they function, and appreciate the existence of variability among emoting racial subjects. Clarity on these matters is key for developing an effective affective politics to challenge any racial order. After the sketch, I offer potential strategies to retool our racial emotive order as well as our racial selves. I end my address urging White sociologists to acknowledge the significance of racism in sociology and the emotions it engenders and to work to advance new personal and organizational anti-racist practices.
This paper explores how the query “where are you from” is central to processes of racialization in Canada, and how such encounters shape identities and belonging among second-generation African-Canadians. The study is based on qualitative interviews with young men and women whose parents migrated from countries in sub-Saharan Africa, who are racialized as black, and who grew up in metro Vancouver. Although the second-generation embodies the usual markings of local accents and place-based knowledge, other residents frequently question their origins in the belief they cannot be local. These interactions make it clear that the presence of a black body is seen as out of place rather than at home and shapes negotiation of identities as Canadian, African and black.
This article examines the workplace experiences of upwardly mobile second generation Nigerians in Britain. It uses data from semi-structured in-depth interviews with 73 second generation Nigerian adults. The analysis distinguishes between incidents of discrimination and stigmatization (assaults on worth) and finds that incidents of stigmatization were more common than incidents of racial discrimination among the Nigerian second generation. Contextual factors, specifically Britain’s colonial history, national identity, and the cultural repertoire of the British class system shaped how individuals perceived, recognized, and interpreted incidents of ethnoracial exclusion. Strategies of non-response, social adaptability, and conciliation were used both to respond to these incidents of ethnoracial exclusion and facilitate economic mobility. The findings present a more complex story than one of simple racial discrimination for second generation Africans in British workplaces.
This article combines the concept of responses to stigmatisation with the boundary making approach. It differentiates situational and discursive destigmatisation strategies of ethnic minority members. The analysis of in-depth interviews with Turkish residents of Germany yields four dominant response types at the level of action: (1) confronting, (2) deemphasising, and (3) ignoring/avoiding. While these responses vary situationally, the fourth category of (4) boundary work subsumes discursive strategies of boundary making and boundary blurring. This is the first systematic analysis of Turkish minority members’ destigmatisation strategies. The analysis reveals personal and situational prerequisites of particular destigmatisation strategies. The article discusses commonalities and differences between Turks in Germany and ethnic minorities elsewhere.
Symbolic boundaries, understood as the conceptual distinctions used to demarcate in-groups and out-groups, are fundamental to social inequality. While we know a great deal about how groups and individuals construct and contest symbolic boundaries along lines of class, race, ethnicity, religion, and nationality, less attention is given to (a) national belonging as a component of symbolic boundaries distinct from citizenship and (b) comparing how distinct symbolic boundaries shape individuals perceptions of, and reactions to, instances of stigmatization and discrimination. To examine these issues we compared two marginalized groups in Israel, Arab Palestinian citizens and Ethiopian Jewish immigrants. Analyzing 90 in-depth interviews, we find that exclusion based on boundaries of nationality engenders different ways of interpretating and responding to stigmatizing and discriminatory behavior, compared with exclusion based on racial and ethnic boundaries. While Ethiopians see everyday stigmatizing encounters as part of their temporary position as a recently immigrated group from a developing country, and react accordingly with attempts to prove their worth as individuals and ultimately assimilate, Palestinians view the line between them and the Jewish majority as relatively impermeable and attempts to fully integrate as mostly useless, viewing solidarity and education as a means to improve their group’s standing.
The everyday novelties of contemporary society require emotional reflexivity (Holmes, 2010a), but how can it be researched? Joint interviews can give more insight into the relational and embodied nature of emotional reflexivity than analysis of text-based online sources. Although textual analysis of online sources might be useful for seeing how people relationally negotiate what to feel when feeling rules are unclear, interviews allow observation of emotional reflexivity as done in interaction, especially if there is more than one interviewee. This highlights not only the relational, but the embodied aspects of emotional reflexivity, and shows how it is a useful concept for researching aspects of emotionality not well addressed by other concepts such as “emotional intelligence” and “emotion work.”
Research has shown how black scholars' experiences differ from those of their white counterparts in regard to research and service, but few studies have addressed the influence of race on professors' teaching experiences. In this paper I examine how and to what degree race shapes professors' perceptions and experiences in the undergraduate college classroom. I analyze how students' social and cultural expectations about race affect professors' emotional labor and management, shaping the overall nature of their jobs. The findings suggest that black professors' work in the classroom is different and more complex than that of their white colleagues because negotiating a devalued racial status requires extensive emotion management. Social constraints affect the negotiation of self and identity in the classroom, influencing the emotional demands of teaching and increasing the amount of work required to be effective.
This study examines how members of minority groups in Israel cope with stigmatization in everyday life. It focuses on working-class members of three minority groups: Palestinian Arabs or Palestinian citizens of Israel, Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin) and Ethiopian Jews. It reveals the use of racial, ethnic and national markers in daily processes of social inclusion and exclusion in one sociopolitical context. Palestinians, a group with a fixed external identity and a limited sphere of participation, were found to use the language of race and racism when describing stigmatizing encounters. Ethiopian Jews, the most phenotypically marked group, strictly avoided this language. For their part, Mizrahi Jews perceived the very discussion of stigmatization as stigmatizing, while often using ‘contingent detachment’ to distance themselves from negative group identities. Despite differences between the communities and the powerful role of the state in establishing symbolic and social boundaries, members of all three groups expressed their intention to achieve or retain avenues for participation in the larger society.
This exploratory study makes a contribution to the literature on antiracism by analyzing how first-generation French Blacks of sub-Saharan African descent practice everyday antiracism. In doing so, it expands the demographic terrain of this research to highlight some particularities in the experience of everyday racism and antiracism for ethnoracial minorities of immigrant origins. In addition to experiencing forms of racism encountered by both immigrants and other native ethnoracial minorities, first-generation French Blacks (like other non-White first-generation Europeans), face symbolic exclusion from the national community and delegitimization of their claims to Europeanness. Examining their experiences sheds light on how race, immigration, and national identity intersect to generate unique experiences of racism and antiracism. This paper also contributes to our understanding of how social context shapes the range of everyday antiracist strategies at a person's disposal. Specifically, integrating Kasinitz et al.'s (2008) framework for categorizing incidents of racial discrimination and prejudice with Fleming et al.'s (2010) categorization of responses to stigmatization, I present an analysis of antiracist responses that takes into account both the nature of the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator of racism (i.e., impersonal vs. personal) and the social context in which the encounter occurs (e.g., school, work, public space, etc). In doing so, I highlight how the conditions of a given incident of racism or discrimination set constraints on the range of antiracist responses an individual can practically (or feasibly) employ.
Much of the research on emotion work in organizations has focused on the ways in which emotional performance reproduces gender inequality. Yet, most of these studies overlook the racial character of professional workplaces and how emotion work is experienced by racial/ethnic minorities. In this article, I examine how the normative feeling rules that guide emotional performance in professional workplaces are racialized rather than neutral or objective criteria. Based on 25 semistructured interviews with black professionals, I contend that feeling rules have different implications for black workers and ultimately reinforce racial difference. This research contributes to the sociological literature on emotion work by further developing the racial components of emotional performance.
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Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. By Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 331p. 20.00 paper.
In recent years, there has been a surge in work on what has come to be known as “qualitative methods.” The trend is essentially reactive, developing as a response to the outpouring of work on quantitative and formal methods and the assertions by scholars in those areas that case studies and historical work are impressionistic, unscientific, and noncumulative. To counter such claims, some of the field's most distinguished qualitative scholars (e.g., Stephan Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science, 1997; James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds., Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, 2003; and Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History, 2006) have spent much time and ink to show that researchers who eschew regressions or game theory can be just as methodologically aware and sophisticated as those who embrace them. Alexander George and Andrew Bennett's Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences is an impressive and welcome addition to this literature.
Diskriminierungserfahrungen in Deutschland
- S Beigang
Beigang, S., et al. 2017. Diskriminierungserfahrungen in Deutschland. February 28, 2023. https://
www.antidiskriminierungsstelle.de/SharedDocs/downloads/DE/publikationen/Expertisen/
expertise_diskriminierungserfahrungen_in_deutschland.pdf?__blob = publicationFile&v = 6.
Rassistische Realitäten: Wie setzt sich Deutschland mit Rassismus auseinander?
- Dezim
DeZIM [Deutsches Zentrum für Integrations-und Migrationsforschung]. 2022. Rassistische
Realitäten: Wie setzt sich Deutschland mit Rassismus auseinander? February 28, 2023. https://
www.rassismusmonitor.de/fileadmin/user_upload/NaDiRa/CATI_Studie_Rassistische_Realit%
C3%A4ten/DeZIM-Rassismusmonitor-Studie_Rassistische-Realit%C3%A4ten_Wie-setzt-sich-Deutschland-mit-Rassismus-auseinander.pdf.
Rassismus und seine Symptome
- Nadira
NaDiRa [Nationaler Diskriminierungs-und Rassismusmonitor]. 2023. Rassismus und seine
Symptome. December 7, 2023. https://www.dezim-institut.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Demo_
FIS/publikation_pdf/FA-5824.pdf.
Antislawischer und antiosteuropäischer Rassismus
- A Pürckhauer
Pürckhauer, A. 2023. Antislawischer und antiosteuropäischer Rassismus. November 17, 2023.
https://mediendienst-integration.de/artikel/antislawischer-und-antiosteuropaeischerrassismus.html.
Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation
- D W Sue
Sue, D. W. 2010. Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation.
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Witte 2018), 'experiences or racism' and 'experiences of ethnoracial exclusion' appear as more encompassing, and the latter term is often used for contexts where racism is a contested issue or where individuals are discriminated against on the basis of their racial status and also
- Lamont
see, e.g. Essed 1991; Jaskulowski and Pawlak 2020), and 'experiences of ethnoracial exclusion' (occurring when individuals experience exclusion based on 'racial status, ethnicity,
nation origin, and/or other ascribed characteristics'; Imoagene 2019, 265). While 'experiences of stigmatisation' and 'experiences of discrimination' are often used in tandem (see,
e.g. Imoagene 2019; Lamont et al. 2016; Witte 2018), 'experiences or racism' and 'experiences of ethnoracial exclusion' appear as more encompassing, and the latter term is often
used for contexts where racism is a contested issue or where individuals are discriminated
against on the basis of their racial status and also (or alternatively) on the basis of their ethnicity or nationality (see Lamont et al. 2016).
Anti-Muslim Sentiment-Germany Takes Stock
BMI [Bundesministerium des Inneren und für Heimat]. 2023. Anti-Muslim Sentiment-Germany
Takes Stock. November 21, 2023. https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/downloads/EN/
publikationen/2023/BMI22030.pdf?__blob = publicationFile&v = 1.
Muslim Women as "Ambassadors" of Islam: Breaking Stereotypes in Everyday Life
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Terkessidis, M. 2004. Die Banalität des Rassismus. Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag.
van Es, M. A. 2019. "Muslim Women as "Ambassadors" of Islam: Breaking Stereotypes in
Everyday Life." Identities 26 (4): 375-392. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2017.1346985.