Does the terminology of "race" have its place in the Constitution of a country? In Germany, the debate resurfaces in favor of anti-racist mobilization in the United States and in the world after the death of George Floyd.
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Environmentalists, the country's second political force in voting intentions, were the first this week to suggest an amendment to the Basic Law of May 8, 1949, the pillar of democratic Germany with content marked by the desire to radically oppose the persecution of the Nazis against minorities. "It is time to forget about racism, all together," proclaimed leader of the Greens Robert Habeck in a joint column published in the left-wing newspaper Tageszeitung .
"A strong signal in this sense would be to delete the term" race "from the Basic Law" , he proposed in the wake of numerous demonstrations denouncing discrimination and paying tribute to George Floyd. This 46-year-old black man, who died on May 25 in Minneapolis in the United States while he was kept on the ground under the knee of a white policeman, has become a symbol of this movement.
"No races"
The offending passage of the German Constitution is Article 3, which states that "No one shall be discriminated against or privileged on the grounds of sex, descent, race, language, country and origin, his belief, his religious or political opinions ” .
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For environmentalists, “there are no '' races ''. There are human beings ” . And the Constitution written in the post-war period is imbued with a racial and biological vision of human beings inherited from the 19th century and now obsolete. This demand, carried for many years by the left, had already emerged in February after a racist attack in Hanau in which a German had killed nine people of foreign origin.
The Greens received the support of the radical left Die Linke, of the liberal party FDP (right) but also of the social democrats (SPD), minority partners of the government coalition with the conservatives of Angela Merkel. The very influential head of the federal anti-discrimination office, Bernhard Franke, also pleads for its removal. He suggests replacing it with "racial discrimination" or "racial attribution" , as has already been done in part at the level of the Länder.
Read also: The National Assembly removes the word “race” and replaces it with “sex” in the Constitution
So far silent on this issue, the Chancellor's conservatives also seem to be evolving. Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, a Bavarian known for his traditionally very conservative positions, said he was "open to discussion" . "I will not get in the way" of a possible change, he said on Wednesday, however, saying that it was a debate in his eyes theoretical and that it was more important to "contain racism in practice ”.
Linguistic debate
Conversely, the Ministry of Justice, despite its social-democratic portfolio, defended this term by placing it in the post-war context. It "clearly does not indicate the existence of different human races or any acceptance in this sense, the fathers and mothers of the Basic Law were precisely concerned to send a clear signal against racial mania" preexisting under National Socialism, justified one of its spokesmen, Stéphanie Krüger, on Wednesday.
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According to his ministry, the term "race" also constitutes the "linguistic starting point of the term racism, against which we also want to act clearly". In this debate, the conservative daily Die Welt jokes: "Some Germans have now made progress so wonderful that they find the word '' race '' unbearable (...) Nevertheless, they do not send their child to the school with the many Arabs and Turks, but in a place where they find the same ethnicity as them. And that's exactly what has to change. ”
However, the obstacles for such a modification are still significant: any change to the Basic Law requires a two-thirds majority in Parliament.
