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Woman at the Black Lives Matter protest in Hyde Park, London, June 3, 2020
Photo: DYLAN MARTINEZ / REUTERS
There are professions in which it is not completely absurd to ask yourself whether, in principle, everything is going well.
Real estate speculator, notary public, sadistic sports teacher, to name a few.
And then there are professions that are actually considered to be unproblematic.
Book author, for example.
Or the expert who is invited to talk shows.
Unless - yes, unless these activities are carried out by persons who experience discrimination.
Then for some the question arises whether this is okay.
And so a few days ago the lawyer and journalist Fatina Keilani made a discovery in the »Tagesspiegel«: »Some participants in the debate (...) have turned the mission 'Fighting Racism' into a private business model: be it as a book author, ex-journalist and book author, talk show regular guest or twittering mother of four. "It is the" daily business "of certain people to" denounce "their disadvantage.
The "targeted search for evidence of ubiquitous racism" is the main activity of these people: "If you think of the issue of racism aside, for example on the assumption that these people have a full-time job, then nothing is left."
Margarete Stokowski, arrow to the right
Photo:
Rosanna Graf
Born in 1986, was born in Poland and grew up in Berlin.
She studied philosophy and social sciences and has been working as a freelance writer since 2009.
Her feminist bestseller "Bottom Rum Free" was published in 2016 by Rowohlt Verlag.
In 2018, »The Last Days of Patriarchy« followed, a collection of columns from SPIEGEL and »taz«.
Now.
If you think of the issue of racism out of a book about racism, then it makes about as much sense as if you think of phone numbers out of a phone book.
But apart from this very special thought experiment, the accusation remains that there are people who firstly make racism a bigger problem than it is, secondly turn it into a "business model", that is: earn money from it, and thirdly want to retain the monopoly on this topic .
As an example, she cites a white woman who, at a demonstration against racism, wore a mask with the sentence "I can't breathe", the last words of George Floyd, who was killed by police officers.
This woman, Keilani writes, was accused of not being allowed to do that as a white person, and from this it follows: "Whites are not allowed to do it right, because then there would be no outrage and the beautiful business model would be broken."
The new edition of the »victim subscription«
Basically there is a fourth accusation here: People affected by racism would complain about racism, but they should actually be happy and grateful that they are still being discriminated against, because this results in the "beautiful business model" of fighting racism.
According to this, however, black, lesbian, single women, who may still be trans, poor and disabled, would have to be among the richest in this country because they would have the jackpot of discrimination.
All of this is basically a new version of the allegation from about nine years ago that women had a »victim subscription« - a term that was rightly chosen as the »nonsense of the year 2012«.
Now it should be people affected by racism who have the »victim subscription« and earn a lot with it.
Interesting.
When I put the buzzwords “racism” and “business model” into my humble brain, the first thing that comes to mind is that there is a party in our parliament whose main business is racism and whose members we all pay with our taxes.
more on the subject
Icon: Spiegel Plus Jasmina Kuhnke tweeted against the right: "I saw through you" by Dialika Neufeld
Icon: Spiegel Plus Three women on their fight against racism: "So, now I'm going to start saving the world" By Jean-Pierre Ziegler
What exactly is the accusation supposed to be when people write books about racism and earn money with them?
Should these people offer their work for free?
Crazy, but they already do: Many of the people who talk about their experiences of racism in books or talk shows also do so on social media without getting paid for it.
You could also call this voluntary educational work.
In the said »Tagesspiegel« text, however, this tweeting against racism is also a problem for the author: Jasmina Kuhnke, the »twittering mother of four«, serves as an example.
Kuhnke is not a full-time mother of four, but a TV and comedy writer, and has a Twitter account with over 70,000 followers.
There she regularly writes about everything, including things that you experience in Germany when you are black.
(SPIEGEL recently portrayed her, more on that here.) Kuhnke is - see: her job - good at writing punchlines, although many of her tweets refer to racism, but by no means all.
Sometimes she just writes to Friedrich Merz: "Your hair is bad."
You don't make money with Twitter
To say it for those who don't know, Twitter doesn't make money.
Unless you tweet for a client who pays for it, for example when you use a company's social media channels.
You can get money from companies on Instagram if you advertise their products, but these are usually bath bombs and not anti-racism.
If an author has a Twitter account, then she can generate attention for her work, her political concerns, her selfies and jokes, but she may also pay a high price for it if she is an anti-racist, because publicly present, left women are often threatened with violence.
These threats of violence can cost those affected not only time, but also a lot of money: costs for a lawyer, for security measures, loss of fees in their actual job.
At this point there is a very unpleasant phenomenon that one can observe more often when journalists talk about the social media behavior of other journalists: a very bizarre form of envy of attention, even if that attention includes death threats.
Journalists who do editorial work rather than writing their own texts, or those who tend to write texts that have little coverage, are sometimes annoyed when they see how many followers their colleagues have - on the one hand this is understandable, on the other hand those with the few followers often only tweet something like "good morning, coffee first".
It is these journalists who consider it a shit storm when - fictional example - five people comment under that they prefer tea to coffee, while for others - not a fictional example - it is normal to receive threats of violence every minute on some days .
Fun fact: If people who write about their experiences of racism on social media were actually about money, then they could stop with these topics at the latest with a medium double-digit number of followers on Instagram, because with such an account it would also be possible to become an influencer To earn a decent four-digit monthly salary by applying a hand cream or a water filter once or twice a week.
Discriminated groups are made up of individuals
But people who are affected by discrimination do not fight this discrimination because it would be particularly profitable, but because it makes life difficult for them and others.
Discriminated groups are usually happy and grateful when outside people stand up for them - but it doesn't matter in what way: Not everything that is done with good intentions to support a discriminated group is really well received.
This is because discriminated groups are made up of individuals.
If you, as a non-Jewish person, want to express your solidarity after an anti-Semitic attack and put on a kippah, then there will be Jewish people who say "thank you" and those who say: What is that supposed to mean, take this thing off.
If solidarity is serious, you listen to what is being criticized.
If it was just vanity and trying to look as heroic as possible, then you react offended.
This leads to conclusions such as the one that white people cannot fight racism anyway.
The other way round is correct: only when white people change will racism go away.
But if you don't consider racism a serious problem, you will always find something wrong with people taking action against it, whether they do it in books, talk shows or tweets.
Jasmina Kuhnke replied to the article in which she was attacked in a blog post: “As long as the white majority society does not recognize that our system is structurally racist, it does not make sense to ask in a friendly tone to gain supremacy to make white privileges aware. "And another author who writes about racism wrote an answer - Hasnain Kazim, who also admits with pleasure that he made money with his book on racist comments:" Well, I can only help To say with some pride: I have actually succeeded in what humanity has failed so far - namely to turn shit into gold. "Like many others, he is regularly insulted and threatened and answers the only correct answer:" You cannot counter such racism only, you have to proceed professionally.
As long as there are professional racists - some of whom sit in the German Bundestag - professional anti-racists are absolutely necessary. "
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