Offener Brief über ://aboutblank

I was invited to participate in TOP B3rlin’s January event at About Blank. I initially said yes to this offer, as I only recently moved to Berlin and wanted to get to know people and scenes here. However, on hearing about the venue’s door policy, I withdrew from the event. As most of you will know, the policy is as follows: under the guise of a ban on all national symbols, guests are not allowed to enter wearing keffiyehs. On this ground I am disappointed that TOP chose to hold an event at About Blank, and that the venue’s racism seems to have gone unaddressed by left political groups here.

What follows is an explanation of why I think the keffiyeh ban is not just a small matter and how more careful thought on this issue might illuminate other problems of how we try to live and act together (in our different ways of doing so). I feel a little embarrassed and vulnerable to have written at such length about one tiny facet of everyday racism, but I think that it isn’t me who should have to feel embarrassed.

We all read the same news so we all know: globally, Muslim and “Muslim-looking” people are vulnerable to exclusion and attack by the state and vigilantes. Europe, Israel and the US enthusiastically imprison, torture and bomb the fantastical enemy they have found in a “Muslim world” that stretches from Pakistan to Palestine. The white-colonial states also manage to find members of this mythic unity on their own home ground, identified through the conventional processes of racialization: othering, silencing, criminalization, etc.

Through the on-going development of European nationalism and colonialism, many constitutive others have been constructed out of the dubious raw material of phenotype, religious practice, or cultural habit. German people know very well that, for a long time in Europe, Jewish people stood in for some kind of foundational alterity and many Jews died for it. I also know this history well as my German-born Jewish grandmother was a holocaust survivor and her experiences, not to mention the pure contingency of her survival, continue to reverberate in my life and the life of my family.

The encounter, also long and storied, between Arab and European worlds, also expresses the deep violence of race, a violence that presently extends from the everyday to the world-historical: the racist co-optation of white liberal feminism as a stick to beat “oppressed” Muslim women with; street harassment and attacks on Muslims and people who “look Muslim”, a global network of modern concentration camps where Muslims are imprisoned and tortured, the circulation of obscene images of the dead, including young children, killed in their homes by Israeli colonizers… These are the procedures of white supremacy, the operations of which always run the gamut from microaggression to global warfare.

Here in Germany all your wars are now elsewhere but your prisons are disproportionately full of those classified in the official data only as “foreign”. As in all white countries, recognition, cultural representation, freedom from police harassment and so on – even love and money – are disproportionately allocated according to whiteness. Every day and in a thousand different ways, German society, like all white societies, makes it clear that whiteness is the superior norm, and that black, Arab, Turkish people (and others) are bizarre exceptions, social “problems” or “questions”, gratifyingly assimilated outsiders, or exotic tokens. Assimilation is put forward as policy even though the history of German assimilation, in the case of those Jewish people who embraced your culture and were killed anyway, gives little evidence of its efficacy.

In keeping with the essentially white-supremacist modern desire for the “multicultural” homogenization of peoples (always according to the baseline of dominant whiteness), About Blank has banned tokens of cultural or national specificity. In practice, this just means that people are not allowed to enter wearing the keffiyeh. The argument is that it has become symbolic not only of the Palestinian liberation struggle but also of neo-Nazi anti-semitism. The problematic conflation of these two symbolic meanings of the keffiyeh also ignores that it is also a garment of predominantly Arab origin and use. The origin of anti-semitism is not Arab but European. Forcing an Arab garment, sometimes associated with Palestinian liberation, to stand in for contemporary anti-semitism suggests a strange dissociation on the part of white Germans. Is anti-semitism a problem of Palestinian liberation, or, rather, is the colonization of Palestine a problem partly created by European anti-semitism?

What the ban says about About Blank’s relation to actually existing people of Arab descent is an open question: at best, it implies that About Blank is indifferent to the suffering that spans from subtle social exclusion to state-sanctioned death; at worst, that About Blank supports the racist ideological depiction of the Muslim/Arab world as fundamentally hostile to “civilization” (always implicitly coded as white). At About Blank, people wearing a keffiyeh must remove this symbol of Arab culture at the door; for those racialized as Arab, some things are more problematic to divest yourself of: your appearance, your family history, your experience. Are those things welcome where their symbols are not?

Symbols are slippery and can come to mean different things. The Star of David, for example, which I was once able to see as a symbol of Jewish endurance, now makes me think of images of Zionist violence. My grandmother’s story, my particular inheritance, has become an aliquot part of the material collated by Israeli politicians into a racist fantasy of manifest destiny. And yet I still talk about it, because it also belongs to me, even though its meaning has been co-opted and even though as a black person I don’t “look Jewish” (from the point of view of the same ossifying white gaze that renders the keffiyeh a fixed symbol). Racialized people living in white societies have to navigate a complex relation to identity and ancestry. In contrast, I am amazed by how confident many white people feel about attributing fixed meanings to objects/events drawn from histories to which their primary relations have traditionally been ignorance or attempted destruction. This is the process by which a scarf from an Arab lineage/history you don't actually care about can become a symbol of your own spectacularized guilt.

This small matter of a scarf is worth dwelling on because it evokes the way that white Europe, despite centuries of astonishing innovations in violence, somehow manages to perceive itself as the ethical and temporal metric of history. This habit blunts analysis and licenses bigotry. Despite the best efforts of your governments, you have no automatic right to legislate the meaning or disposition of non-white lives and cultures.

I am surprised to find supposedly radical organizations reaffirming the same bullshit, while asking me to come and perform at their event, presumably because my critique of white supremacy is more palatable than the critique that might be read as concretized in the keffiyeh. It’s a tiny gesture for me to refuse this distinction, but I would like to make this tiny gesture anyway. I refuse this normalization of racism. I hope that TOP and affiliated organizations will reconsider their implicit support for About Blank and its door policy, and any similar instances of anti-Arab racism in Berlin