Racism (un)spoken: Exclusion and discrimination in emotional narrations of young migrants in Berlin

Abstract

Racism operates though material discrimination and through emotions. Racialised subjects feel their location in hierarchical social space, and spatial arrangements can facilitate racial perceptual segregation. The first aim of this article is to discuss which emotions are involved in young people's narrations about their experiences and exposure to racism in Berlin, Germany. Second, it engages with how emotions impact articulations of racism and empathy for those who are racially discriminated against. Out of a larger data corpus consisting of narrative interviews, individual and group, with young people with migration history and various experience of racism, we present three cases which offer us new possibilities to disturb the existing theories of racism and emotions. We believe that the German case is instructive because of the complexity of migrantisation and racialisation that is different to the well-studies American and British contexts. We address the contextual factors in which emotions emerge and are articulated. We consider how our research participants' different socio-spatial positionalities – mobile, local and betwixt - mould their emotional engagements with racism. We also thematise how these positionalities shift in time.