Suddenly, it’s OK to be German and to talk about race | Mithu Sanyal

For years if you wanted to discuss racism, people looked at you as if you were a Nazi, but now there's a new openness

When I was growing up there was no racism in Germany. In the 1980s every child learned at school that race was a construct that fascists had used to justify segregating and killing people. So if race didn't exist, it naturally followed that racism didn't exist either. If you wanted to talk about it people looked at you as if you were the Nazi.

All this is changing. It is dizzying to watch my motherland grapple with the concept of race. And, to be honest, to grapple with it myself because when you stop speaking about something you stop thinking about it eventually too. So we're all walking on eggshells; the discussion about racism is on the agenda but we're whispering "race" as if it were a dirty word. Except for members of Alternative fi1/4r Deutschland, the far-right party, who keep pushing the boundaries of what you can and can't say, and at every opportunity tout their worries about "other races" outbreeding white Germans. Germans of colour, meanwhile, worry about the AfD's success in winning a quarter of the votes in recent state elections in Saxony and Brandenburg.

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