‘If You Can't Pronounce My Name, You Can Just Call Me Pride’: Afro‐German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop

Abstract

The history of the black German minority, now estimated at around 500,000, goes back several centuries. It is only since the twentieth century, however, that Germans of African descent have been perceived as a group. This did not lead to their recognition as a national minority, but rather, from the 1910s to the 1960s, they were defined as a collective threat to Germany's racial and cultural ‘purity’. When a sense of identity emerged among Afro‐Germans themselves in the 1980s, the majority population continued to deny the existence of ethnic diversity within German society. At the turn of the twenty‐first century, Afro‐Germans seemingly suddenly appeared as a new, ‘hip’ minority. This appearance was largely focused on the immense public success of the Hip Hop collective ‘Brothers Keepers’, conceived as an anti‐racist, explicitly Afro‐German intervention into German debates around national identity and racist violence. This article explains the success of ‘Brothers Keepers’ by contextualising it within the tradition of two decades of Afro‐ German feminist activism and the transnational Hip Hop movement of European youth of colour.

Far Away So Close: Race, Whiteness, and German Identity

“…This denial of the existence of anybody who does not fit the German look is a common experience for black Germans and other minorities (El-Tayeb 2003Mandel 2008). As El-Tayeb explains, black Germans "are under constant pressure to explain, or rather, redefine, their existence, expected to be something they are not and not allowed to be what they are " (2003: 29).…”

“A New Spelling of My Name”: Becoming a (Black, Feminist, Immigrant) Autoethnographer ThroughZami

“…Difference, then, oftentimes did not remain without a name, but received labels that were pejorative, disrespectful, and dehumanizing. According to El-Tayeb (2003), the term “Afro-Deutsch” [Afro-German] returned to the German mainstream in 2001 with the popularity of the German hip-hop project “Brothers Keepers.” The term, which had emerged during Lorde’s work with German women of African descent in Berlin, was coined specifically for the purpose of creating language to self-identity and, more importantly, to assign a positive connotation, one that opens avenues for movement building, for understanding differences and claiming a diasporic identity that is both, Black and German.…”

Black German Identities: Validating the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity

“…2. Black Germany has also been the subject of several recent publications in English, for example, Campt (2005), El-Tayeb (2003), Fehrenbach (2005, Gilroy (1993), Lusane (2003), andWright (2004).…”