Casual

Joachim Herrmann, a CSU minister, was on a German talk show about refugees when he decided to demonstrate how well Black people had integrated. He smiled as he did it. He talked about Roberto Blanco, that wonderful Black singer everyone loved, and all those Black players on Bayern Munich—see, we accept them, everyone likes them. He called them n-words. Said it while smiling, said it on television at prime time like it was the most natural word in his mouth.

For a moment nothing happened. Then the room went quiet.

What bothers me isn’t that some bigot somewhere thinks this way. It’s that someone educated enough to be a government minister, someone refined enough to talk about integration and tolerance, has let this language dig so deep into his speech that he doesn’t register it as a choice anymore. He wasn’t ranting. He wasn’t performing hatred. He was just talking. That’s the scarier version. That’s the racism that’s comfortable, that’s nested in respectable institutions so long it doesn’t apologize for itself anymore.

There’s a difference between the drunk outside a refugee center screaming slurs out of pure hatred and the man in the suit on television saying them while explaining how well things are going. At least you know what the first one is. The second one is the infrastructure—the system that lets racism work without anyone having to admit what it is.

The answer to whether someone like that should be a politician is simple: no. It should be obvious. The fact that it’s apparently not is the problem.