Understanding Ethnic-Racial Identity in a Context Where “Race” Is Taboo

ABSTRACT

Ethnic-racial identity (ERI) is an important aspect of youth development and has been well studied for the last several decades. One issue less discussed is how the construct of ERI translates across different countries and cultures. The purpose of our paper is to describe the sociohistorical context of Germany and implications for the study of ethnic-racial identity in Europe. We discuss the German adaption of the Identity Project, an 8-week school-based ethnic-racial identity exploration intervention developed in the United States. We use this as a concrete example of how we thought through the focal construct of ERI to figure out how and whether it is a salient social identity category for youth in Germany where, in response to the history of racially motivated genocide, discussions of “race” are taboo. Digging into the ways ERI may not be directly transferable to different contexts can help us understand its nature as a socially constructed identity with real-life implications. Our hope with this paper is to further discussion, question our conceptualizations, and acknowledge how a detailed understanding of sociohistorical contexts is needed for the study of ERI.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic-racial identity
• race
• Germany
• intervention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Who is considered white shifts over time, demonstrating that race is not a static category but relevant for the process of racialization.

2. The first major national memorial dedicated to African American history to include slavery opened in 2018 in Washington D.C., over 150 years after slavery ended. The first national memorial to focus on racial terror lynching was opened in Montgomery, Alabama in 2019. And the National Museum of the American Indian of the Smithsonian Institution was founded in 1989, serving also as a living memorial. Unlike in Germany, most people in the U.S. are not exposed to these few memorials on an everyday basis to remember and reflect on the U.S.’s violent racist history.

3. The term “ethnic identity” is used in German acculturation literature, but usually only for immigrants and not meant to capture experiences of non-immigrants, meaning ethnic identity tends to refer to heritage culture. Yet, the term “ethnic German” also is used to refer to a shared ancestry, such as between East and West Germans, or so-called German repatriates, (Spät)Aussiedler, from Poland or the former USSR (Titzmann et al., 2011). (Spät)Aussiedler were automatically granted German citizenship, even for children born and raised outside of Germany, while citizenship remained unattainable for generations of immigrants and their descendants until 2000. This is a good example of how being “German” was still officially constructed as having German ancestry and being white (Müller, 2011), a narrative that is still prevalent today, although no longer as explicitly supported by legal structures (Moffitt et al., 2018; Reijerse et al., 2015).

4. The general population census does not gather this information.

5. The Federal Government Expert Commission (2021) has recommended no longer using the term “migration background” to aggregate immigrant, second, and later generations, but rather “immigrants and their direct descendants”. The commission also recommends that “migrant” should be replaced with “immigrant”. Most of the adolescents included in our studies are not immigrants but born and raised in Germany. Thus, we chose to use the term “adolescents of immigrant descent” in this paper.

6. For more detail in how we implemented these steps please refer to Juang et al. (2020).

7. It has been argued that one reason for the emphasis on coupling ethnicity to Germanness was to foster a shared identity in a formerly divided country of East and West Germany. This, however, ended up being exclusionary and is now considered “outdated” (Federal Government Expert Commission, 2021).

8. For German adults without immigrant heritage, a strong German national identity (positive sense of belonging to a nation) has been associated with nationalism (Blank & Schmidt, 2003). Nationalism can be a consequence of national identity, the idea that being German is defined by a specific racial or cultural ancestry, is homogenous, and superior to other groups (Blank & Schmidt, 2003). And yet, the same study found that national identity is not synonymous with nationalism, it also is related positively to patriotism, defined as being critical of one’s nation, supportive of democratic principles, and inclusive of different views. Patriotism is a “counter-concept” to nationalism. Thus, both nationalists and patriots love their country, but for different reasons. One leads to denigration of outgroups while the other leads to acceptance. In their study stronger national identity was related to both nationalism and patriotism, but nationalism was linked to more outgroup hostility while patriotism was linked to less. Further, more adults were oriented toward patriotism (66%) than nationalism (about 40%). Indeed, other studies find that German adults and adolescents do not necessarily define being German as being a nationalist, but also including being multicultural, open, tolerant, and embracing diversity (Calmbach et al., 2016; Ditlmann & Kopf-Beck, 2019). Nonetheless, there is still a mainstream public discourse whereby being German to some extent reflects nationalistic beliefs where “ethnic” and “national” are blurred categories.

9. In 2013, Germany was the first European country to allow a third option (diverse) for registering babies’ gender at birth as a way to acknowledge gender diversity beyond the binary.