Becoming response-able with a protest placard: white under(-)standing in encounters with the Black German Other

1 Introduction

This paper emerged from an encounter with the Black Lives Matter protest placard I understand that I will never understand but I stand with you. I encountered it for the first time leaning against a shop window in Leipzig, Germany in 2020, a day after the BLM protest induced by the global outrage around the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in the US. The placard is the pivot of this theoretical paper. I don’t provide a comprehensive interpretation of it. Rather, I treat the placard as a relational phenomenon that becomes differently in different encounters and intra-actions (Barad 2007). I therefore set out to generate “a force field of possible meanings and readings” (Bock and Stroud 2019: 24) and uptakes (‘uptakes’ also in the sense of actually taking up, i.e. picking up and carrying, the placard), centering one of the constitutive practices of whiteness that became particularly salient in my encounter with the placard: white understanding.

As this collection follows an ethico-esthetic framework it seems appropriate to share my own ethical qualms that accompanied me throughout the research and writing process. The placard is a co-constituent of BLM, a Black-centered and Black-centering movement. The way I attend to and write the placard centers whiteness. This is a familiar move where white people like myself in privileged positions use spaces created by and for Black people to center their own concerns, and even to advance their careers, taking time and attention away from the interests of the marginalized group (di Angelo 2018; Gramling 2022). Yet, what kept me writing this paper is a feeling that, in order to be good allies, white people need a philosophical and an embodied sense of their own whiteness, i.e. of the practices that co-constitute it, and of the consequences these practices might have in specific situations. In line with Toohey (2019: 943) I hope that this research output can add to “potentially useful assemblages for ongoing learning.”

Thematically, conceptually and philosophically this paper contributes to the interdisciplinary field of applied linguistics. Scholars are here increasingly calling for the inclusion, even the centering, of race as an important analytics (Makoni et al. 2023) – in the German context not often directly via the term ‘race’ (see however Oldani and Truan 2022) but for example via notions of ‘ethnische Zuschreibungen’ [ethnic ascriptions] (Wiese 2017). On the one hand, this is driven by concerns about the marginalization of, and systemic discrimination against, racialized student and teacher populations in education (Flores et al. 2021; Flores and Rosa 2015; Wiese et al. 2017). On the other hand, questions around whiteness are also increasingly discussed by bringing practices of the hegemonic white listening or perceiving subject, as conceptualized by Inoue (2003), Rosa and Flores (2017) and others, into focus (Cushing and Snell 2022; Flores and Rosa 2022; Gramling 2022; Kubota 2020). This paper contributes to this second effort of what I would summarize as de/centering whiteness in applied linguistics, i.e. decentering whiteness by centering some of the practices and mechanisms through which it asserts and maintains its power, such as white understanding.

In the first part of this paper, I use my encounter with the placard, together with the raciolinguistic concept of the white listening subject, to shed light on the continuous Othering^[1] of Black people in Germany, and on how whiteness retains its invisibility for the majority population. The next section both critiques and contributes to studies in applied linguistics that draw on new materialism, specifically on the work of Barad (Canagarajah 2018; Pennycook 2018; Toohey 2019), to develop more material and embodied analytical orientations. These, in my view, are essential for attending to racialization as an embodied process, and to the ontological shifts, including the physical, material force, that this process exerts. Barad’s work, for example their concept of apparatuses, has drastic implications that can help bring out the ontological dimensions of the concept of the white listening subject not as ‘perceiving a world out there’ but as ontologically co-constituting the world. This then allows for making a stronger point about white responsibility in terms of learning to sense and mediate co-constitutive practices of whiteness there where they have negative consequences for the racialized Other. This responsibility extends into our writing practices as scholars, because, following Barad, we can no longer write about the world, we can only write the world. Contributing to the ethico-esthetic framing of this collection, I discuss these implications for our writing practices and suggest an aesthethics of wor(l)ding (Barad 2007, 2010, 2019; Barad and Gandorfer 2021). Gandorfer uses the modified term aesthethics to draw attention to the ethics involved in our perception and in our choice of analytical entry points (Barad and Gandorfer 2021: 50) and I use the (l) in wor(l)ding to unsettle conceptual and alleged ontological divisions between word and world, between language and materiality (see Cavanaugh and Shankar 2017 for discussion of language (and) materiality). This aesthethics of wor(l)ding helps to bring together the established focus on meaning making in applied linguistics with a sensitivity for the materiality and texture of written words, opening up possibilities to walk around in words and to thereby find new forms of expression and analysis that de/center – make visible and rethink – white ways of knowing and being in the study of language.

In the second part of the paper, I then focus on white understanding and how it co-constitute apparatuses of whiteness in Germany (and elsewhere). Specifically, I bring into dialog the philosophers Lévinas and Yancy, and Black German interview participants who commented on the placard. Guided by the notion of apparatuses, white understanding emerges from these philosophical and discourse analytic explorations as counter/productive, holding both the potential for solidarity across often drastically different life worlds, and the potential to get in the way of ethical encounters that require us “to risk ourselves” and “to become undone in relation to others.” (Butler 2005: 136) I then put these explorations into conversation with my embodied, material-discursive practice of under-standing (i.e. standing under; carrying) the placard at a BLM protest in Berlin. I contend that white under-standing is a moment of potentially productive trouble (Haraway 2016), filled with opportunities for learning to become response-able – i.e. able to respond ethically instead of reductively – towards the Black Other, but also towards whiteness, in Germany. I end with some reflections regarding the relevance that these explorations of white under(-)standing have for applied linguistics.

2 The white listening subject and the Black Other in Germany

I didn’t partake in the BLM protest in Leipzig in 2020, but walking through the city with my husband Ali (from Iraq, mostly racialized as Arab) a day later, we found a different version of the placard (include here fig1_understand.jpg) leaning against an empty shop window. I didn’t think to take a picture of it, and we didn’t like the placard at first. I was convinced of the centrality of white understanding for the Black struggle, and one of Ali’s first reactions was to say: “Just another excuse for white people to do nothing.” But wait, white people? In Germany? It was clear to both of us that the “I” on the placard was white (see also Krause-Alzaidi forthcoming). The next realization for me was that a white body in Germany is a surprise. But why? Because whiteness here is normally im/perceptible: perceptible for Others in its effects on them, but imperceptible for whites themselves (like me). The surprise at the white German body resonates with what Inoue (2003: 157) writes about the modes of perception of the listening subject: “A particular mode of hearing and seeing is, then, an effect of a regime of social power, occurring at a particular historical conjuncture, that enables, regulates, and proliferates sensory as well as other domains of experiences.”

This regime of social power in Germany normally constitutes white bodies as the listening subject (Inoue 2003; Rosa and Flores 2017) doing the seeing and hearing while not being seen or heard racially (at least not by those with political power). White listening subjects’ mode of perception is structured by raciolinguistic ideologies (Alim 2016; Alim et al. 2016, 2020) and is exercised from the hegemonic position of (usually invisible) whiteness (Alim and Smitherman 2012). It builds on an implicit notion of one-nation-one-language-one-race, constituted by “the continued rearticulation of colonial distinctions between Europeanness and non-Europeanness – and, by extension, whiteness and non-whiteness. These distinctions anchor the joint institutional (re)production of categories of race and language, as well as perceptions and experiences thereof.” (Rosa and Flores 2017: 622)

While the German state refuses to gather statistical data along ethnic or racial lines^[2] (Ahyoud et al. 2018; CERD 2015), white Germans nevertheless see and hear Black Germans as the Other. Black people in Germany encounter questions and remarks like ‘Wo kommst du her?’ [Where are you from?], ‘Wo kommst du wirklich her?’ [Where are you really from?], ‘Du sprichst aber gut Deutsch!’ [But you speak German well!] (to name but a few) regularly (Hasters 2019; Ogette 2017; Oguntoye et al. 1986). The latter remark shows clearly how an indexical inversion (Inoue 2003) based on raciolinguistic ideologies happens in such encounters: The racialization of the body is the basis for how language is heard by the white hegemonic listening subject (not the other way around, as indexicality usually has it (Nakassis 2018)). As a result, Black Germans are doubly Othered as they “are consistently misrecognized as Africans, even after extensive conversation has established a German birthplace, parents, and education.” Thereby, they are produced as “both an Other-from-Within (a member of that country) and an Other-from-Without (misrecognized as an African).” (Wright 2003: 297) Such Othering leaves marks of continuous dis/placement – of being placed (often having been born and living in Germany all their lives) and displaced (always reminded that they do not fully belong) at the same time. These processes also have violent, sometimes deadly, outcomes, reaching from discrimination in flat or job hunting (if ones name is recognized is non-white), worrying about one’s children being discriminated against in schools, to fearing for one’s psychological and physical safety in certain spaces (Die Bundesregierung 2023). All the while, white Germans remain unracialized – the invisible, yet powerful norm on the other side of the Othering coin. This is why I was surprised to realize that the carrier of the placard must have been white, because whiteness does usually not emerge as an identity in my encounters in Germany. This, in turn, shows how my own perception is embedded in, and steered and sheltered by, hegemonic whiteness.

In the following section I show how Barad’s notion of apparatuses, which emerges from their transdisciplinary work in feminist theory, quantum physics and philosophy, can add conceptual nuance and a stronger focus on white responsibility to the concept of the listening subject. This is because notions of the listening subject are mostly conceptualized epistemologically, focusing on knowledge about, and perception of, the world while leaving the ‘world out there’ intact to be ‘seen’ and/or ‘heard’. Apparatuses, however, operate on the ontological level. This means that rather than perceiving a pre-existing Black body in a certain way, the listening subject co-produces said body in co-constitutive measuring intra-actions. This entangles the white listening subject in ethical questions of world-making (rather than world-perception) and therefore helps explore the question of ethical (white) subjectivity central to this special issue.

3 Intra-acting apparatuses of whiteness

4 Ethical subjectivity and an aesthethics of wor(l)ding

If the apparatuses we are a part of bring forth entities and bodies that come to matter in the world, then we are responsible for the world we co-produce and for that which we help to exclude from mattering: “That which is excluded in the enactment of knowledge-discourse-power practices plays a constitutive role in the production of phenomena – exclusions matter both to bodies that come to matter and those excluded from mattering.” (Barad 2007: 57) Here Barad draws on Lévinas, for whom responsibility is “the essential, primary and fundamental mode of subjectivity.” (Lévinas 1985: 95) The self is cut together-apart with the Other in a relation of responsibility and therefore, ethics – the questioning of the self in encounters with the Other (Lévinas 1979) – must be first philosophy. We end up with a notion of ethico-onto-epistemology in which ethics, being and knowing co-constitute one another. This is then also how I grapple with subjectivity as an ethical construct. Subjectivity is co-constituted through particular agential cuts enacted by apparatuses that bring forth subject and object from situated relations. ‘I’ (standing for ‘subject’ here) don’t decide alone about the cuts that co-constitute my subjectivity and about whom or what I am cut together-apart with here and now, or there and then. The relations of responsibility that make my-self and the Other are shifting. Ethical subjectivity is, then, being attentive to cuts and apparatuses, and to what gets left out or is made invisible. It also entails acknowledging responsibility and becoming response-able in encounters with the Other who is cut together-apart with me, in/separable from me.

The way we have been trained to use language in and by Western thought, however, is neither good at expressing shifting rationalities and entanglements, nor at drawing attention to what gets left out. We tend to use words to pin things down rather than to open up possibilities. Prinsloo (2022: 92) explains Derrida’s notion of hauntology – which is also one of Barad’s central inspirations – as invoking “that which gets left out but ‘doesn’t quite go away’ when we delineate subjects and objects in material-discursive practices and by so doing exclude some of their features, thus including an essential unknowing which underlies and may undermine what we think we know.”

How can we open up language to gesture towards that which gets left out? How can we, as Lugones (2006: 84) suggests, move from “liberal conversation [which] thrives on transparency and because of that it is monologized” towards “complex communication [which] thrives on recognition of opacity and on reading opacity, not through assimilating the text of others to our own.” She goes on to write that complex communication “is enacted through a change in one’s own vocabulary, one’s sense of self, one’s way of living, in the extension of one’s collective memory, through developing forms of communication that signal disruption of the reduction attempted by the oppressor.” As part of the ethico-esthetic framing of this special issue, I attempt this change in vocabulary and sense of self by pursuing an aesthethics of wor(l)ding (with aesthethics drawing attention to the ethics involved in our perception and in our choice of analytical entry points (Barad and Gandorfer 2021: 50)), which combines the established focus on meaning making in applied linguistics with a focus on the materiality and texture of written words themselves. By producing a different textu(r)al experience of the words in this paper I encourage readers to “walk around in a word or even a letter” because it is a wor(l)d that “entails stories, different stories” (Barad and Gandorfer 2021: 32) with disruptive potential. Drawing on my interpretation of Barad’s and Haraway’s writing practices, I use the slash (/) as in im/perceptible or un/comfortable expresses the above introduced ““cutting together-apart” between terms on either side of the slash.” (Barad 2019: 546, footnote 9) The ‘im/perceptibility of whiteness’ includes the perceptibility of whiteness through its effects, i.e. through the measuring marks it leaves on Black bodies. But the slash also nudges us into thinking of what gets left out: For example that the power to leave those marks derives exactly from the imperceptibility of whiteness as measuring agency that trains the spotlight away from itself onto the measured object: the racialized Black body.

The hyphen (-) makes us attend to the already existing material-discursive possibilities within a wor(l)d. In re-membering, the hyphen materially brings members or elements back together that had been dismembered. And, in Haraway’s (2016) response-ability, it slows us down^[4] inside the wor(l)d and reorients us from a ‘taking of responsibility’, where responsibility seems to exist out there for us to pick up (or not), towards working on becoming response-able (able to respond ethically) in encounters with the Other. With apparatuses and the aesthethics of wor(l)ding introduced, I will now get in touch with the placard again – helped by Lévinas, Yancy, and courageous Black women in Germany, including my interviewees.

5 The counter/productivity of white understanding

I kept thinking about the encounter with the placard. How would other people relate to it? I began tracing versions of the placard through the German web, and I found it involved in Youtube videos and Instagram posts, which allowed me to contact the posting individuals or organizations. This way I found Black and white Germans willing to be interviewed. This was the beginning of a small research project centered around BLM protest placard in Germany (for more details see Krause-Alzaidi forthcoming). Most interviews took place between December 2020 and March 2021, some online, some face-to-face, always guided by pictures of BLM protest placards. Here I include comments related to I understand that I will never understand but I stand with you by Sarah and Noëmi, two Black German women with very positive attitudes towards the placard that contrasted strongly with my own at the time. The interviews were conducted in German, and this holds the methodological possibility of translingual walks between the English placard and the German interview comments that can enfold new meanings and agencies into the placard.

Understanding – or the German ‘Verstehen’ – is often invoked as a productive force in encountering the Other respectfully. In Farbe bekennen, Katharina Oguntoye, May Ayim, Dagmar Schultz and Audre Lorde made visible societal issues of race, racism and being Black in Germany through bringing together the courageous narratives of Afro-German women. Helga Emde, the daughter of a white German woman and a Black American GI, describes in her contribution the long journey of finding herself in a ‘weißes Bezugssystem’ [a white system of reference]. (Emde 1986: 111) She writes:

Bei meinem Mann habe ich etwas gesucht, was ich nie finden konnte, nämlich Solidarität. Er konnte vieles nicht verstehen, einfach weil er weiß war. Er hat diese vielen subtilen Verletzungen und Anfeindungen nicht erfahren, die seine und leider auch meine Gesellschaft mir zugefügt haben. Immer wieder bekam ich von ihm zu hören, ich sei zu empfindlich. (1986: 109)

[In my husband I was looking for something that I could never find, namely solidarity. He could not understand many things, simply because he was white. He did not experience the many subtle hurts and hostilities that his society, and unfortunately my society, inflicted on me. Again and again I heard from him that I was too sensitive (author’s translation).]

Emde finds the reason for her white husband calling her ‘too sensitive’ in his lack of understanding. Understanding appears here as the only gateway to white solidarity, exactly because the embodied experience of racial discrimination is inaccessible to a white body. However, the placard I understand that I will never understand but I stand with you puts into question the usefulness of white understanding (verstehen) in encounters with the Black Other. Sarah’s reaction when being shown the placard in our interview contrasts with Emde’s account:

… also das find ich tatsächlich gut, weil das ist so ne, so ne, das ist ne weiße Position aber das sone Selbst – son Surrendering. Also das ist so eins, weil ich glaube wir müssten viele Debatten nicht führ‘n, und nicht so schmerzvoll führ‘n, wenn es nicht immer wieder die weiße dominante Position immer wieder der Schwarzen Position sagen würde: „Naja sei mal nicht so, bildest de dir nur ein“, oder ne. (Sarah, Black, she/her, late 30s)

[… so I think that’s actually good because that’s such a, such a, that’s a white position but that’s such a self-surrendering. So that’s one, because I think we wouldn’t have to have a lot of debates and we wouldn’t have to have them so painfully if it wasn’t for the white dominant position always telling the Black position: “Well, don’t be like that, you’re just imagining things”, or something (author’s translation).]

Sarah connects white assertions of Black sensitivity (similar to those of Emde’s husband) to white understanding and not to the lack thereof. White understanding emerges here as an enactment of white dominance that produces ‘painful debates’. So while white understanding can be a central gateway to white solidarity and support, this view forgets that, in apparatuses of whiteness, depending on the exact measuring practices that constitute white understanding, its gateway function can easily turn into a gatekeeping function, getting in the way of true connection. I gesture towards this fine line when writing of white understanding as counter/productive, and Yancy gives us a philosophical starting point to explore the counter/productivity of white understanding:

It is only through the medium of “white understanding,” though, that the black voice will be heard. This “white understanding,” however, need not function as an insuperable barrier, but as an opportunity for the development of a porous horizon, one that responds positively to the Other in his or her difference, learns from the Other, and changes based upon an encounter with the Other. (Yancy 2004: 14)

So what constitutes white understanding as this ‘insuperable barrier’? To approach this question, let’s take a translingual walk in the space constituted by the English placard and two German interview comments by Sarah and Noëmi.

6 The BLM protest apparatus and under-standing whiteness

Eventually, I created my own version of the placard (Figure 1) and went to the BLM protest in Berlin 2021 as both a researcher and a protestor. Therefore, my participation was pre-informed my experiences and observations might have little to do with those of other white protestors. However, I hope that my way of getting in touch with the BLM protest apparatus can help co-constitute, new learning assemblages (Toohey 2019) to help us grapple with how to encounter each other ethically within and beyond the protest space.

Figure 1:

Placard created by the author, not identical to the one encountered in Leipzig but using the same wording.

A BLM protest is a racializing apparatus that contrasts with the apparatuses of whiteness dominant in Germany. Now Blackness emerges on the side of the measuring agencies, Black organizers set the terms for who moves where, speaks when and how, and Black speakers and artists take the stage, while the normally im/perceptible whiteness of members of the majority population who join cannot hide. Whiteness has to stop denying “its own potential to be Other (to be “the not-same”)” (Yancy 2004: 13) and to encounter the Other as Other from a position of ethico-onto-epistemological un/certainty. Here whiteness cannot be sure not to stand out, cannot be sure not to be judged on racial grounds. Here, whiteness is in un/comfortable trouble.

White people are not in a position to speak publicly at a BLM protest: “…the only voices that should be heard are Black voices.” (BLMB 2020) But like every-body, they can join the chants initiated by Black voices and they can show up with placards. Most placards I have seen could be, and are, carried by any-body. In White Silence is Violence; Black Lives Matter; Say Their Names and many more, there is no clear indexical relation between the subject positions Black and white and the carrying body. Instead, Black and white index addressee groups that could both in- or exclude the carrier of the placard. I understand that I will never understand but I stand with you is different. It only works with a white body – like mine. Carrying the placard as a participant in the protest apparatus that produces me as the measured object, as the white Other, I felt the ‘I’ to have an indexical and an affective dimension. It indexes the carrier of the placard: The ‘I’ does not index a group but me. It implicates me. When I was carrying the placard, the ‘I’ was the heaviest part. I became increasingly uncomfortable with the ‘I’, with my ‘I’. The measuring agencies in the BLM apparatus – the speakers and their speeches; the route through the city with its street signs and buildings that re-member violence against Black bodies; the placards; the banners; in short: the spatial repertoire of the BLM protest (Baynham and Lee 2019; Canagarajah 2018a; Pennycook and Otsuji 2015) – produce my I as an un/allied I. My I adds strength to the protest by showing up, and yet it also co-constitutes the white ‘we’ that perpetrates racism and makes the protests necessary in the first place. The subject position of perpetrator and ally is held together by the kind of whiteness BLM measures for: un/allied whiteness, un/comfortable whiteness. My ‘I’ was the part of the placard that I wished to delete or re-place. At least I wanted to stop under-standing it, to stop standing under it.

We leave the protest briefly to get a coke and something to snack on and I then leave my placard behind for people to find like I found it in Leipzig, but also because I felt I needed to get rid of it and be ‘only’ my body – or be a different body. (reflective field notes, 2.7.2021)

Of course this is the story I told myself at the time. But I think I was just tired of the trouble, tired of white under-standing, or rather: of under-standing whiteness. I need a break. I have to practice. And I get to practice. I also get to remove my-self from the few spaces in which I under-stand whiteness. The Black Other in Germany doesn’t get breaks. And what that’s like is what I will never understand.

7 In/conclusive trouble

Commenting on the hegemony of white scholars in applied linguistics, Pennycook asks why white scholars so at ease in the field (Pennycook 2021: 8). Considering what I have discussed in this paper I would say that one reason is the ontological certainty that white understanding, as a practice of the white listening (or: measuring) subject, comes with. Rarely are white ways of knowing and being challenged there where the study of language is at stake, which has historically been steeped in methodological whiteness, built as it is on representationalism, structuralism, expansionism and colonialism, separating language from everything embodied and worldly (Pennycook 2021). White understanding, that measures according to the parameters of Western science, ordnet the world and its languaging ein, also in applied linguistics, marginalizing the knowledge of (especially women) scholars of color (Kubota 2020). I have admittedly not centered such knowledges here. As a white scholar, Barad’s attempts to unsettle the Western canon from within have picked me up where I was and helped me to become un/settled – I remain settled in my comfortable faculty position inextricably entangled with whiteness, but hopefully unsettled enough to open up to different ways of knowing, being and writing. Most importantly, it has been helping me to find different ways of intra-acting with students, colleagues, friends and family who embody histories of racism which I, inevitably, have been co-producing through the cuts I help to enact. I hope there might be some inspiration in this for my white colleagues as well.

The encounter with the placard has pushed me to engage with various conversation partners in this paper, who have, in turn, made me attentive to the counter/productivity of white understanding in Germany. In the process, through measuring intra-actions that whiteness didn’t always control, I was briefly and fleetingly produced as an under-standing white person, a white person who stood under the weight of un/allied whiteness. Under-standing is an expression of being measured (instead of measuring) in which the white listening subject doesn’t usually find itself. Under-standing feels risky for me, the white subject, because I lose control over the measuring agencies and therefore I don’t know who I might become in a given measuring intra-action. This is the risk that comes with ethical encounters: the risk of being produced as some-body who one might not want to be. It is from this troubled position, from this un/kn-ow-n-(ed) subjectivity, that we have to become response-able to the call of the Other.

In apparatuses controlled by white measuring agencies a response could be to consciously ver-stehen (understand, but also stand in the way of) our kn-own, established measuring parameters, attempting to shift them for example by asking the Other questions. However, there where we under-stand, where we are measured and produced through the Other’s measuring intra-actions, the response is harder to imagine, exactly because the position of the (racially) measured object is so unusual for white people. How can we learn to respond as the white Other without re-instating a white understanding that shifts the measuring agencies and reliefs us of the weight of our own Otherness? One of the ways is to practice being in spaces where our racial hegemony is unsettled – whether these are protest spaces or the scholarship of colleagues of color from various fields, who have been fighting to unsettle the hegemony of whiteness in science production – where we are being measured, and where we can learn to just stay with the trouble (Haraway 2016) that entails, including our troubling privilege of being able to choose when to enter such spaces.

I also suggested that when we get in touch with, inter-rupt, sense, dis/entangle or pick up and carry words, we co-constitute ‘complex communication’ (Lugones 2006) through different stories, different analyses, different in/conclusive worlds. We must handle these wor(l)ds as our ethical responsibility. Every dash, every slash reminds us of the tendency of our scholarly writing to make things absolute, to argue for or against, to summarize rather than disperse, to conclude rather than to open up. By treating words like einordnen, verstehen and understand the way I did in this paper, my aim was to open up critical conversations in applied linguistics around how we approach words and language and how this might limit the imaginations for new futures that our work can inspire.