Word: wallraff
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...using white privileges. He is mimicking suppressed minorities and earning money, attention and even respect," Noah Sow, a black journalist, academic and musician, said in an interview with the news website Tagesschau.de. Tahir Della, a spokesman for the Initiative of Black People in Germany (ISD), said Wallraff's methods hark back to the minstrel shows of the 1920s in the U.S. "[Those shows] came about because blacks weren't allowed to perform in clubs and theaters, so whites dressed up to caricature them," Della told the news website TheLocal.de. "Mr. Wallraff is using the same form, playing a role...
...pills and traveled through the Deep South as a black man, chronicling his experiences in the classic American novel Black Like Me. The American author and journalist Grace Halsell embarked on a similar journey in the late 1960s and wrote the novel Soul Sister, which was also highly acclaimed. Wallraff, who came across both books after he started shooting Black on White, says he has wanted to make this kind of film for years. In the 1980s, he had prepared to go undercover as a black man in South Africa, but then Nelson Mandela was suddenly freed, apartheid came...
...journalistic influences come from America rather than Germany, where my type of journalism has little tradition," Wallraff tells TIME. Still, Wallraff's work has gained him notoriety in Germany, along with financial success. His book about the two years he spent posing as Turkish guest worker Ali Levent Sinirlioglu, The Lowest of the Low, sold more than 5 million copies and forced Germany to have a national discussion about its long-neglected Turkish minority. The dialogue led to a strengthening of the rights of temporary workers in the country and gave Germans of Turkish descent their first real foothold...
...Asumang released a film called Roots Germania about her search for her family's descendants. And the latest album and book by the popular Hamburg rapper Samy Deluxe, That's Where I'm From, released earlier this year, deals extensively with his feelings about being black in Germany. Wallraff's film is seen as a dated contribution to what is already a lively discussion. Some consider it little more than a stunt - or a "carnival," as Sow put it. (See the 25 most important films on race...
...Wallraff rejects the criticism. He says a black person could not have made the same film because the transformation of his identity from a white German to a black German is an integral part of the story and resonates more powerfully with white audiences. "Germany is a developing country as far as racism is concerned," he says. "There is something close-minded and ill-at-ease about it. Germany is harboring more prejudices than it is ready to accept...