The material effects of Whiteness: Institutional racism in the German welfare state

Abstract

The scholarship on institutional racism has emerged from contexts such as Australia, the UK or the US. Less is known about how racism operates within institutional settings elsewhere. What is more, our understanding of Whiteness is shaped by this Anglocentric literature. In this article, I explore the contextual features of Whiteness in residential care in Germany. More specifically, I trace how institutional routines shape affective subjectivities and thereby develop material effects. The study draws on 17 expert interviews and 20 interviews with managers of care homes run by the two largest providers, the Christian welfare associations Caritas and Diakonie. Respondents frequently highlighted their organisation’s commitment to equality, which they saw grounded in its Christian ethos, their professional self-understanding as carers, or Germany’s post-racial nationhood. Paradoxically, however, my analysis shows that respondents also deployed these ‘representations of self’ to justify access and service quality differentials. On this basis, I argue that Whiteness materialises via self-ascribed civility, ‘goodness’ and egalitarianism in the German welfare state. Signified by visual markers, Whiteness emerges from projections of purity, innocence and good intentions. In varying ways, groups distinctively racialised as ‘Other’, notably as ‘Black’, ‘Muslim’ or ‘Eastern European’, are placed outside this notion of Whiteness.

“The kids get haggled over”: how institutional practices contribute to segregation in elementary schools

“…In line with a series of studies on the influence of parental choice on school segregation, our study illustrates how institutional norms and routine practices in the educational sector help shape access to schools and, subsequently, contribute to school segregation. While most studies on institutional discrimination focus on the UK, the US, and Australia (Lewicki, 2022), our case study sheds light on organizational routines in Germany -an interesting educational context where accountability levels and the frequency of mandatory standardized tests at schools are far less pronounced than the OECD average (OECD, 2016).…”

“…Based on our study, we see a great need for further research into the interactions between the individual and institutional levels in the school admissions process. With parents with social characteristics such as low educational attainment and a non-German background under-represented in our study, a more targeted focus on these and other characteristics from an intersectional perspective would help further uncover the influence of institutional players and institutional discrimination on more vulnerable groups of parents and how groups are racialized as 'other' (Lewicki, 2022).…”

“…Moreover, as a result of rules being applied to all customers or clients (for example language skills), "different groups may have fundamentally unequal chances of complying with them" (May, 2021, p. 3;Gomolla and Radtke, 2009, p. 281). Exploring the presence of institutional discrimination thus involves looking at the often very subtle interconnections of administrative processes and inequalities (Murji, 2017, p. 82;Lewicki, 2022).…”

‘Finding My Own Way’: Mobilization of Cultural Capital through Migrant Organizations in Germany

“…However, research on social protection has focused on social capital in the sense of networks and personal relationships and how they contribute to' risk aversion strategies, in the context of migration and settlement (Bilecen 2020). This research is very important because it shows the various sources of protection outside formal structures that might be discriminatory or not accessible (Lewicki 2022). However, similar to social capital, cultural capital provides a useful conceptual and empirical tool to investigate the complex trajectories of skill-mobilization and life-making in changing social, economic, and cultural contexts.…”

“…made the experience rewarding and pleasant for Hamid. In this way, MOs provide a key alternative, especially for people who experience institutional racism and racialized exclusion, for example, in the educational system, the labor market (Heinemann and Mecheril 2016) and the care sector (Lewicki 2022). In their role as official representatives of a registered association, members of the MO staff, such as Sofian, can issue certificates.…”