Alice Hasters “Black Germans between Erasure and Tokenism”

Journalist and author Alice Hasters is a major contemporary Black German voice. Her bestselling 2019 book Was weiße Menschen nicht über Rassismus hören wollen, aber wissen sollten (What White People Don’t Want to Hear About Racism, But Should Know Anyway) led to animated public debates about race and racism in Germany. In her lecture, Hasters will address the central assumption that frames Black German life today: the perception that Black people are “new” to Germany. This assumption erases the fact that Black people have lived in German–speaking lands for hundreds of years. As she shows, it also allows anti–Black racism and its history to be falsely viewed as only an American or Western problem with no relation to the German context. Examining the dynamics that unfold from this skewed understanding, Hasters argues that attending to the history of anti–Black racism in Germany enables a deeper understanding of German identity, racism, and antisemitism today.

Royce Hall 236

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