Word: racism
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When Günter Wallraff sprayed his face with dark paint and put on a black curly wig and dark contact lenses, he discovered how it felt to be black in Germany today. Sometimes he was subjected to thinly disguised or casual racism. Other times people were openly hostile to him. On one occasion, he even felt threatened...
...chains to expose the conditions the employees faced. In the 1980s, he posed for two years as a Turkish "guest worker" and wrote a best-selling book revealing shocking examples of discrimination and exploitation. But Wallraff's latest project may be his most controversial yet. His attempt to address racism in Germany by donning blackface makeup has drawn strong criticism from black Germans, some of whom see his movie as patronizing, if not racist itself. (See pictures of the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall...
...Black on White is not being met with the same level of enthusiasm. Some feel the reason may be that racism remains a touchy subject in Germany. The country's black population, which numbers between 300,000 and half a million, is mainly made up of African immigrants and the descendants of children born to black American and French soldiers and German women at the end of World War II. And even though their numbers are rising and there has been talk lately about Germany becoming a multicultural society, many minorities say they still feel like outsiders because they...
...What strikes you first of all about the way Germany treats black people and racism is the avoidance of the subject," says Marina Jones, a doctoral fellow in the history of African Americans and Germans at the German Historical Institute in Washington. "As an Afro-German, you are often confronted with the situation that you look 'different' and people react differently, but then [people] also treat you with something like willful color blindness. You are often deemed a foreigner, so you are alien in your own country...
Smith is at her parodic peak when depicting the characters’ cultural misunderstandings, and their casual racism. In a flashback where the pair are lost in a tank, waiting out a war, Samad and Archie’s talk inevitably turns to girls, specifically Samad’s unborn betrothed. This amuses Archie. “‘Where I come from,’ said Archie, ‘a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her.’ ‘Where you come from it is customary to boil...