Christmas has been over for a few weeks now, but the BMZ’s Christmas ad is still generating discussion after the fact. While Prof. Theo Rauch headlines “Welcome to the stone age of development policy”, the BMZ defends the motive and choice of words of the advertisement with reference to the Christmas story (see below).
Tag Archives: Racism
Dear White People
“Settler Sister” Gillian Schutte started the year with a letter to her white fellow citizens and thus once again flared up the debate in South Africa about historical responsibility and the strategies of anti-racist and decolonial struggles. In their response, Black Consciousness activists Athi-Nangamso Esther Nkopo and Andile Mngxitama criticize Schutte for producing herself as the good white woman and suggesting that whiteness can be individually discarded or transformed into a good, anti-racist whiteness. Jackie Shandu’s critique is more directed at blacks who are celebrating Schutte and thus indulging their longing for the white messiah rather than fighting their own battles. Here is a collection of many worthwhile comments in response to the letter and on the debate as a whole. Schutte then also spoke up again yesterday. Such politically engaged and intellectually high quality debate in the mainstream press … And all that is left for us to do is to get angry about the thin-board drilling in Zeit and Spiegel.
Delhi gang-rape: look westward in disgust
Emer O’Toole, writing in The Guardian, sheds light on the neocolonial way in which the gang rape of a female student in New Delhi is being reported in the British and U.S. media. This comment is again criticized by Sunny Hundal: According to him, India does not need a well-meaning defense by whites who are afraid of being labeled as racists. Rather, Indian women should finally be listened to.
Twisting History
We were recently in Munich for a workshop and were made aware of the Völkerkundemuseum. The museum celebrates 150 this year. The company is celebrating its 50th birthday with a new slogan: “Weltoffen seit 1862” (“Open to the world since 1862“). Given the close involvement of ethnologists with colonial conquest and exploitation as well as with race theory, such a slogan is more than cynical. While most ethnological museums refuse to return so-called collection items to their countries of origin, Munich’s Museum of Ethnology is celebrating its birthday with an exhibitionentitled “Network Exoticism“. The elementary connection between racism and exoticization is not only ignored. Through its cosmopolitan slogan, the Ethnological Museum actively rewrites history and denounces its own entanglement in violent history.
A week later in Göttingen, we stopped by the Institute of Zoology and Anthropology. Here the ethnological proximity to biologistic ideas is even anchored in the name.