“Der Rassismus kommt bei Ihnen immer, nicht?”: the (re)production of anti-Muslim racism and whiteness in Germany

While scholars are increasingly studying the maintenance of racial and national hierarchies as interrelated systems of categories in Europe, there are few studies examining the ways that Europeans produce and maintain their respective societies as “spaces free of race” (El-Tayeb 2001:xv) while nonetheless maintaining racial and national categories “in good repair” (Heritage 1984) as discursive and interactional resources. In the wake of the Holocaust, popular orientations to race as a social construct, and thus “not real,” have resulted in a shift in articulations of racial thinking towards culturally essentialist arguments that also serve to reproduce nationhood. This has led to a popular conception of Germany as a “space free of race,” wherein race is popularly understood not to be a category of practice (Brubaker 2013), and thus often disregarded as a category of sociological analysis. In this study, I take up this gap by analyzing the practices and resources available to and deployed by Germans for producing commonsense knowledge about both Muslims and Germans as racialized and nationalized social categories. To do so, I combine discourse-historical and conversation analytic methods, examining texts and archival resources, as well as naturally-occurring interactional data collected from parliamentary speeches. This methodological approach is fundamentally informed by an ethnomethodological perspective that emphasizes the local, moment-to-moment sense-making processes, participant orientations, and the (re)production of human sociality in everyday life–namely, in interaction. The first part of my analysis emphasizes the (dis)continuities in anti-Muslim racism across the 20th century, exploring German colonial and imperial projects in Eastern Europe, West Asia, and at home. Next, I examine the discursive resources publicly available to and deployed by Germans after 2000 as they are organized around contrasting conceptions of Germans and Germanness as liberal-democratic and Christian. I also demonstrate the ways that this contributes to a conception of Germany as non-racial. Finally, using conversation analysis, I analyze the practices members use to produce accusations of racism and, through doing so, exculpate themselves of culpability for racism. In doing so, I show some of the ways whiteness or white racial privilege is produced and maintained as relevant, yet invisible, and thus deployable through “dog-whistles” or other subtle and unmarked utterances. I conclude with a discussion of the quotidian practices through which racial and national categories are nevertheless (re)produced in everyday life through interaction. Specifically, I take up how the treatment of anti-Muslim racism (Fekete 2004) as something commonsensically done by neo-Nazis or other extremists, allows for the mainstream and everyday practices for the reproduction of racialized conceptions of German nationhood that do not rely on the explicit use of racial categories