This essay examines the relationship between contemporary racialized subjects in Germany and the process of Holocaust memorialization. I ask why youths from these contexts fail to see themselves in the process of Holocaust memorialization, and why that process fails to see them in it. My argument is not about equivalences, but instead I examine the ways in which the monumentalization of Holocaust memory has inadvertently worked to exclude both relevant subjects and potential participants from the process of memorialization. That process as a monumental enterprise has also worked to sever connections between racialist memory and contemporary racism. The monumental display of what presents itself, at times, as moral superiority does not adequately attend to the everyday, mundane, repeatable qualities of racialized exclusion today, or in the past.
In this essay, I explore the micropolitics of citizenship and sovereignty via the emerging street bureaucratic status of “white” German women in relationships with “black” men in Germany and Berlin. In the midst of the fallen Berlin Wall and increasing Europe‐wide restrictions on immigration and asylum, it examines further the extent to which a consistent “black” male hypersexual performance is necessary for legal recognition via “white” German women who, taking on an informal bureaucratic status, ultimately decide which “black” subjects to marry. A history of desiring “black” bodies, the essay argues, coincides with several important moments of sexual liberation (incl. post–World War II African American military occupation, 1970s West German feminism, and the fall of the Berlin Wall), which make these relationships both possible and public; however, the hypersexualized conditions under which “black” subjects get incorporated into contemporary German life are also ultimately exclusionary.
On October 16 and 17, 2017, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, we brought together scholars from around the world to collectively investigate the concept, history, and administration of the global discourse and practice of "diversity." In particular, we were interested in how the US Supreme Court decisions in Regents of University of California v. Bakke and Grutter v. Bollinger had ultimately led public universities in the United States to shift away from the original intent of affirmative action, which worked to redress historical inequality, and toward the concept of "diversity." 1 We were struck by the ways that university-led diversity initiatives have shaped our everyday lives and by the extent to which we have been called to manage them.It is not, we argued, that diversity is new -it was already there, as a form of "integration," at least since the 1970s (see Dresch 1995) -but that affirmative action and other legal forms of broader social redress are in many places either no longer in effect or in rapid decline. We were interested in scrutinizing how, as a consequence of this shift, inclusion has come to be theorized through diversity as an approach that systematically denies access to minoritized populations (including indigenous people, in nation-states and in the world more generally), regardless of actual demographic status. While the number of minoritized populations in the United States is moving toward the status of becoming a demographic majority, the logic of diversity assumes that they will remain in the minority at key sites
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