My thoughts about Ferguson

The aftermath of the Ferguson shooting as well as the recent Grand Jury verdict on the case have made it as far as the German news media, and this compelled me to write down my own thoughts on this issue.

A Nation in Fear

The United States, a very high percentage of armed people. Anyone around you might be armed, and thus anyone around you might be a threat to your life.

And "I was afraid for my own life" is a legitimate reason for lethal self-defence. And since, in the United States, there is almost always a reason to feel threatened like that by a stranger, it becomes disturbingly easy to justify shooting shooting said stranger in a manner that will satisfy the average jury. This, of course, includes the police - who are far more likely to shoot for kill in the USA than elsewhere in the developed world. In all of 2013, German police officers shot 42 bullets at other people, killing eight. In the USA - a country with only four times the people of Germany - police officers killed 45 people in January 2013 alone.

So shooting others is easy to justify. And it becomes especially easy if said stranger is a member of an ethnic group which is portrayed as especially "violent" and "prone to crime" by the prevailing media narratives.

Echoes of Trayvon Martin

If the shooting of Martin Brown had been an isolated incident - if it had been a single aberration - there wouldn't have been so many protests. But there are ample precedents.

It may be instructive to go back to the shooting of Trayvon Martin. The "mistake" of Trayvon Martin was walking around a neighborhood where a local thought he didn't belong. That was enough to cause his death.

His second mistake may have been that he didn't carry a gun of his own. After all, he was provably stalked by an armed stranger - and that, according to the logic established above, would have been enough to make him fear for his life and establish a legitimate case for lethal self-defense. It wouldn't even matter if - as George Zimmerman claims - that Trayvon Martin threw the first punch during their altercation. As long as he had sufficient reason to be afraid of his life - and who wouldn't, if stalked by an armed stranger? - he would have been amply justified in using any force necessary to stop Zimmerman from posing a threat to him.

Though it remains an open question if the jury would have seen it the same way, or indeed the police wouldn't have simply shot him at the scene. But he didn't have a gun while Zimmerman did, so Zimmerman shot him, survived, and got free.

And immediately afterwards a campaign began to vilify Trayvon Martin - painting him as a "violent thug" instead of a normal teenager who had every reason to be afraid of his life - while Zimmerman was lauded as a "hero" by too many people - standing up for the right to shoot black teenagers who look "suspicious".

Young black people apparently can't win. As long as the narrative portraying them as "violent" and "dangerous" persists, they remain targets that can be shot nearly at will. If they try to look as unthreatening as possible - playing out "respectability politics" - they need to constantly watch their steps and live under constant fear about "stepping out of line", to a far greater degree than white people do. And the other alternative - arming themselves so that they can better defend themselves - looks rather dubious, since that would only play into the "blacks as violent thugs" narrative and is thus far more likely to get them killed. In fact, considering recent cases where carrying toy guns was enough for black men to be shot, carrying actual weapons looks like an invitation to suicide-by-cop.

Police - The Face of Oppression

Which brings us to the next point - law enforcement. I've seen people claim that if Michael Brown and other young black people in similar situations had acted just like the police wanted them to, nothing would have happened to them.

I find that dubious. Maybe they wouldn't have been killed, but it is still very possible that something bad could have happened to them with no fault on their part. It needs to be remembered that the police in Ferguson - and too many other places like it - does not act as the "friendly neighborhood cop", always willing to assist ordinary citizens. Instead, there is plenty of evidence that they were simply the biggest extortion racket around, preying upon the community's poorest members because those had the least access to legal counsel.

How long would you be willing to remain quiet in the face of oppression? Ask that yourself, before you condemn the protesters of Ferguson.

And while Ferguson might be an extreme case, it is hardly the only one. Systematic abuse of, for example, forfeiture laws is disturbingly common. Not all police departments in the United States are rotten, but in many the rot sits deeply. They are the oppressors in many cases, and it is the poorest who have noticed it first - and that includes much of black America.

And as long as it remains easy to justify shooting others, and as long as black people continue to be portrayed as a threat to others, the killings will continue.

What is to be done?

Frankly, I do not know if it is even possible to fix this. Guns are too prolific and too much a part of American life to eliminate the constant fear of violence, and harsher gun control laws probably wouldn't change anything - just like with Prohibition, it would only drive the guns underground instead of removing them.

And the narrative of black Americans as dangerous will continue as long as poverty affects black Americans disproportionally - after all, it is always useful for the upper classes when the middle classes have a lower class to look down to, and fear.

So this narrative will only end if there is a long-term, concentrated movement to lift black America out of poverty - but that will require fixing housing discrimination, unequal school funding, job discrimination and so many other forms of structural discrimination that even stricter gun control seems less of a long shot in comparison.

So no, I don't have any ideas for how to fix this, except to keep on talking about it. What are your thoughts?

#Aufschrei

Aufschrei (noun):

1. A cry of pain.
2. A cry of rage or indignation.

 This double meaning fits the #aufschrei hashtag very well which has been trending in the German language parts of Twitter for the last few days as women recount their experiences with sexism. How did it come to this?

Obviously, the sexism has always been present and despite this allegedly more modern age it has not gone away or even been reduced as much as some might want to believe. But the ultimate trigger for the current discussion were several recent news stories:

• A Catholic hospital in Cologne refused an examination to a rape victim because they didn't want to be "in the position of having to advise on possible unwanted pregnancies resulting from [...] attacks".
• Rainer Brüderle, one of the great unreconstructed Old White Men of the German Liberal Democratic Party who has been scheming for years to return to the party leadership has been accused by a female journalist of making a sexist joke at her expense.
• Another female journalist has reported on her experiences with the rampant sexism within the fairly young Pirate Party.

However, the discussion has grown beyond these individual stories. The same people as usual are trying to downplay the problems - but for the time being at least the women's stories are heard. Time will tell if this changes anything in the long run, but if you can read German now would be a good time to pay attention to the stories.

On Privilege in Germany

Much has been written about Privilege in the sense of aspects like White Privilege, Male Privilege, or First World Privilege. In particular, I've participated in many discussions about Privilege in the United States. It is therefore only fair that I discuss how Privilege shapes German society. These are my own personal views only, and very likely incomplete or possibly even wrong in places - so if you have alternative views, please share them.

First, let us look at Privilege based on the social class of one's parents (disregarding ethnicity for the moment, as I will talk about that later). While of course wealthier parents have more opportunities to send their children to private lessons and private schools, these have less of an impact as social class selectors than in other countries. The problems are more subtle:

• After elementary school (which goes up to 4th grade), children are generally sorted into different school types based on their aptitudes, grades - and the evaluations of their teachers. Only one of these school types - the Gymnasium - directly leads to university (though graduates from other schools can get there as well with lots of extra work). And there are plenty of studies that show that children of parents with academic degree will get a recommendation for the Gymnasium far more often than children from poorer or non-academic backgrounds - even if their school performance is identical!
• On most days, school ends at 1 pm - which means that at least one parent needs to be home from work at noon, and that presents difficulties for families where both parents - or a single parent - need to work to make ends meet. While there has been a push to provide afternoon supervision and activities at school, that's still far from universal, with perhaps only 50% of schools offering this service (the actual percentage varies widely by state). Furthermore there is an expectation that parents supervise and assist with the homework of their children - which not all parents are able to (especially if the subjects weren't covered in their former schools) and again provides an advantage to children of parents with an academic degree.

Once you have actually finished school and entered university, your social background doesn't matter all that much any more - there are no tuition fees for public universities in all but two states (and even those will likely abolish them this year), though cost of living can still be a problem if you don't study in your hometown.

Next we come to Male Privilege. I'd say that in Germany if you are a woman you can reach pretty much any position, including that of Chancellor of Germany... as long as you don't have any children. While there has been a push recently for a greater availability of whole day schools and daycare centers, many people still expect one of the parents to stay home in the afternoons and watch over the children... and in most cases, that means the mother. Many will still call mothers who refuse that role "Rabenmütter" ("raven moms"), alleging that they are "abandoning" their children. This attitude is reflected in a recent law pushed through by the Christian Social Union - a junior coalition partner in the current federal government - which gave €150 per months to parents who didn't use their right to daycare and instead kept their children home.

Thus, mothers who stay at home during the afternoons will have to take poorly paid half-day jobs to have any source of income at all - and and demand for jobs accommodating this schedule far outstrips supply. Meanwhile fathers who watch the children for the afternoons will find it almost impossible to find any suitable jobs at all, since men are expected to work for the whole day and not take any breaks from work for their children - which confirms the saying that "The Patriarchy hurts men, too!"

Next we come to Privilege based on ethnicity. The kind of racist prejudice based on idiotic ideas about "racial superiority" found among the Nazis and their kind still exist, but fortunately these represent minority views. There are two "historic" ethnic/religious communities in Germany which have suffered and still suffer prejudice:

• The History of the Jews in Germany is well known, including the horrors perpetrated against them in the Third Reich. Today there are about 300,000 Jews living in Germany (200,000 of them recent immigrants from the territories of the former Soviet Union). In professional and everyday life there is little active prejudice against them - primarily because they are indistinguishable from the rest of the German population - but there are still racist... fuckwits is probably the most accurate term who sometimes vandalize their graveyards and houses of worship.
• The Sorbs are an ethnic group living in parts of Eastern Germany with their own language whose culture has often been suppressed and parts of their territories confiscated - and even today some old wrongs still haven't been addressed, such as continued use of their territory for the open pit mining of coal.

Earlier waves of immigrants - such as the Hugenots, French religious refugees or 19th century Polish immigrant workers - have been absorbed and assimilated into German society and culture and can only be recognized by their family names. They are Germans for all intents and purposes and do not suffer from any prejudice. With more recent waves of immigrants - that is, any that came after WWII - prejudices persist, and they largely parallel the experiences of immigrants to most other wealthy nations. Prejudice and discrimination largely parallel the prosperity the immigrant comes from, with immigrants from wealthier nations being better of. Personally, I'd rank the acceptance of various immigrant groups in the following way, ranging from best regarded to worst regarded:

• Western/Northern Europe, North America
• Southern Europe/Eastern Europe
• East Asia/Latin America
• South Asia, Turkey, Middle East, Africa

This is largely a matter of cultural snobbery than explicitly based on race - for instance, many black Americans noted a marked improvement in the attitudes of the Germans they encountered when they realized that they were from the USA instead of sub-Saharan Africa. Another aspect which can make a huge difference in the treatment of foreigners and immigrants are their academic credentials, as people with graduate degrees are given tremendous amounts of respect in social situations in Germany. Any visitor or immigrant with a PhD should take care to mention this to any German officials they encounter, as this will make them much more helpful and accommodating!

As for discrimination in everyday matters, German laws outlaw discrimination based on ethnicity, but they also don't track ethnicity - there are no government forms or census data on ethnicity, and no explicit affirmative action practices based on it. There are also no steps to prevent discrimination during job applications - it is still customary to include a picture in your job application, and as studies show it still matters if you "look German" or not.

I think this should cover the basics. If you have further questions, don't hesitate to ask!