The Word That Just Lives There

Late one evening, Joachim Herrmann—Bavaria’s Interior Minister, representing the conservative CSU—appeared on Hart aber fair, the standard German political talk format where people in expensive suits discuss problems they have no intention of solving. The topic was the refugee crisis: 800,000 arrivals projected, could Germany manage it. The answer was the usual fog.

What cut through the fog was the moment when Focus editor-in-chief Ulrich Reitz began talking about immigrant success stories, and Herrmann cut in with a smile to mention Roberto Blanco—the Cuban-German entertainer, a beloved fixture of German pop culture for decades—calling him a wonderful Neger who most Germans have always liked. Pleasantly. Casually. The way you’d mention the weather.

There are two kinds of racism that are easy to discuss and one kind that isn’t. The screaming kind, outside a refugee shelter, is easy: everyone agrees it’s bad. The institutional kind, baked into policy, is harder but at least it’s visible. The third kind is the word so deeply embedded in a person’s everyday vocabulary that it comes out live on national television, delivered with a smile, by a senior government minister who genuinely seems to believe he was paying a compliment. That’s the one that’s hard to dislodge, because the person saying it doesn’t even know it’s there. Should politicians who reach for that word be politicians? No. That one I’m sure about.