Next faux pas for Annalena Baerbock?
The Green Chancellor candidate utters a racist word in an interview.
The Greens let the word fade out.
Berlin - In an interview with the Central Council of Jews, Annalena Baerbock (Greens) used a racist word.
In a conversation about anti-Semitism and racism, she told of an incident at a school near her and uttered a word that can hurt people with non-white skin - the so-called "N-word".
In an interview with the Central Council of Jews, Baerbock had described a scene from her circle of acquaintances - not precisely defined.
There a student would have refused to write a picture story on a worksheet with
the word on it.
Subsequently, however, it was not the worksheet that was problematized, but the behavior of the student.
In the original interview, she said the word; in the broadcast, the Green Party had the word muted.
According to reports in the
Bild
newspaper, the Greens initially even wanted to have this interview point shortened.
Annalena Baerbock: "Unfortunately I quoted the word in the emotional description of the incident"
Annalena Baerbock apologized for this in a nine-part tweet - but at the same time triggered a social media debate on this topic, in which the N-word was used several times. "Unfortunately, in the recording of the interview, I quoted the word in the emotional description of this unspeakable incident and thus reproduced it myself," she wrote. The reactions to it boomed and dominated the trends on Twitter on Sunday evening. Among other things, it was said that the politician failed because of her own claims, or that the debate was not important.
Baerbock was also attacked for calling for her Green colleague Boris Palmer to be excluded from the party when he uttered the same word.
Unlike the Chancellor candidate in the federal election, Palmer did not quote a document, but used the word as a - supposedly ironic - designation.
(kat / dpa)
Annalena Baerbock: That is the background to the debate about the so-called N-word
Is it bad to keep pronouncing the word after having used it for decades?
The debate polarized.
Potentially affected people usually speak out in favor of deleting the word completely from the vocabulary.
“The N-word is traumatically linked to the experiences I've had,” says David Mayonga, who describes himself as Afrobajuware. He was called that by others as a child and experienced painful marginalization that he could not explain rationally at that age. In an interview with SZ he pointed out that what had long been considered normal has always been wrong. Having done something “always” is not a good pro-argument: “The word has always been normal for some, but it has always been painful for others. Many people feel that the word is suddenly a problem now. But that's not how it is. The people who have endured the pain for decades are only heard and seen at once. "
If Annalena Baerbock now apologizes for having pronounced the word anyway, then it is essentially about having triggered a re-traumatization of the affected people. "If the word is uttered without warning, then I have to reckon with the fact that a man, for example, who is behind the wheel of a car and hears an interview, suddenly fails to concentrate or even has to cry," Mayonga said in an interview with Bayern2.
