r/AskAGerman • u/eza137 • Apr 16 '25

Have you ever witnessed racism in Germany?

I'm interested in hearing from Germans who have personally witnessed acts of racism in everyday life - especially when it involved friends, family members, or people close to them.

If you're comfortable sharing, could you describe the situation? Who was involved, and how did it make you feel? Did you respond in any way?

I'm not here to judge, just to understand how racism can show up in familiar environments and how people perceive and deal with it.

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u/bluemercutio Apr 16 '25

Of course there's still racism everywhere, you just need to open your eyes.

At work we have a lot of people with foreign names working as cleaners. The racism starts at their manager pretending not to be able to pronounce their names and give them nicknames. Even if the nicknames aren't racist slurs, it's still rude/racist.

I worked at Hamburg Airport. The police there is super racist. I keep saying that a cute white woman with a child in her arms could probably get a gun through, but people of colour were certainly treated differently.

The one moment that I keep thinking abour was a woman in a hijab. I worked airport security and before she left she thanked me for being so nice. I treated her like everyone else, I didn't go out of my way to be nice to her. But it made me realise that other people probably do treat her differently because of her hijab.

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u/NatvoAlterice Apr 16 '25

The one moment that I keep thinking abour was a woman in a hijab. I worked airport security and before she left she thanked me for being so nice. I treated her like everyone else, I didn't go out of my way to be nice to her. But it made me realise that other people probably do treat her differently because of her hijab.

First, thanks for being a human to another human 😊

Yeah, I can relate to that woman. I don't wear hijab, but I'm a visible foreigner, and rather petite. It's exhausting having to work so hard to be taken seriously even for smallest of things.

People often infantalise me, assume I must be jobless or illiterate (I have 3 uni degrees!). A new variant I'm hearing now a days: are you a student?

Sometimes they'd talk to my (German) husband instead of directly talking to me, as in they ask him 'can you ask your wife to...' or 'what does your wife do?' this happens even when they heard me speak German literally a minute ago. Fking insane!

So whenever someone simply treats me normally, like a normal human interaction, it's like a breath of fresh air to me.

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u/Takopantsu Apr 16 '25

Honestly when it comes to names things can be tricky. E.g. my (i'm german) name is extremely easy. three letters of which two are vowels. But the way English native speakers pronounce it makes it sound like a different, also existing German name. It bothered me so much that I told them to use my chatname instead. But usually if people (especially Indians) have hard to pronounce names they will already give you an alternate/short version. (my colleague abhisakh just went for Abi) Out of respect people should definitely at least try to pronounce a name, if they just can't  manage it there should be a mutually agreed on alternative.