In conversation with Alexandra Bauer

I'm also very happy to see you again, thank you for contacting me! Yes, multi-classification is really not a word that is suitable for everyday use. But as an analytical term, it describes exactly the racialization processes that my interviewees with one Korean and one non-Korean parent encountered throughout their lives. It describes the racialization process of people with differently racialized parents, whereby they are also racialized differently depending on the context.

The women in my study were singled out as multi-racial, 'illegitimate', 'deficient' or 'fascinating' even before birth and into adulthood. This was mostly done through the women's bodies and languages. As a result, most women often developed negative multi-racialized affects, which were then re-produced by the dominant society as 'illegitimate' or 'inappropriate' in the sense that, for example, supposedly subtle everyday racism should not be described as such or perceived as violent.

For many women, this meant doubting the legitimacy of their negative affectivity as they grew older. There was a strong struggle with these multi-racialized affects between shame and anger, for example, from which there was no way out. They often stagnated in the back and forth struggle, which I know only too well from myself. And it is precisely this stagnation that is an important factor in maintaining white supremacy, which allows racism to remain the undisputed norm in Germany. On the other hand, a small radius of movement was always recognizable in the struggle, which allowed women to free themselves from stagnation depending on the context and thus question power relations, but this was not without immense affective effort.

I actually encountered several or unplanned challenges with the research that emphasized vulnerability. Like so many others, I had planned my research at the beginning of 2020 and was about to really get going when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which meant moving the research almost entirely into the digital space. At the same time, the research naturally coincided with a time of increased racism against South/East Asian racialized people, and since I was approaching the project as a researcher myself, the methodological approach was quite a challenge in several respects.

At this point, I would therefore like to mention a special method of qualitative research and for psychological anthropology, namely Gravett's “story completion method” ¹ Gravett, Karen. 2019. „Story Completion: Storying as a Method of Meaning-Making and Discursive Discovery.“ International Journal of Qualitative Methods 18. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406919893155. . This method considers stories as data and examines what meaning the interviewees draw from the stories. Specifically, I prepared a document that contained hypothetical scenarios from everyday life, each with protagonists representing multi-racialized girls or women of the Korean subsequent generations. Multi-racialization processes at school, at work or when looking for an apartment were addressed. The most important thing was that the women themselves decided which scenes they wanted to perform and how, and whether they wanted to show me their stories afterwards and talk about them. And this method actually went down really well! The more distanced relationship created by a story, but also talking about it in the digital space, where only the respective interlocutor and I were present, suddenly opened up a strong access to reflection and helped to talk about affective phenomena that had previously existed in a state of 'gut feeling'.

Being given a break to reflect on their own afflictions with racism and finally being allowed to take them seriously or to realize that their experiences were not isolated cases or 'bad luck' could be a moving or even “healing” experience for some women, myself absolutely included. Because the stories opened up time and space that is simply hardly or not at all available in everyday life to think about the shame, fear, sadness and anger in the experiences of racism or to find a language for them at all. So some women used the stories not only to give their own testimonies about their experiences, but also to let the stories end with their imagination or to approach untouched and tabooed feelings such as anger or revenge.

I can really only praise this method, because it opened up a creative space in a very sensitive way, which also softened the power relationship between the interviewees and the researcher to some extent. As it was not possible for me to accompany the women in their everyday lives as often as previously planned, the method was also suitable for pursuing the multi-racialization processes in everyday life and following them together in a more 'protected' setting.

Yes, exactly, the recognition or normalization of negative affectivity is totally important. I follow the sociologist Çiğdem Inan ² Inan, Çiğdem. 2023. „Affekttheoretische Perspektiven auf Rassismus.“ In Rassismusforschung I: Theoretische und interdisziplinäre Perspektiven, hrsg. v. Nationaler Diskriminierungs- und Rassismusmonitor, 191–229. Bielefeld: transcript. on the extent to which there is great emancipatory potential in de-stabilizing racist power structures. Because just as affects strengthen power relations, they can also weaken them. In other words, according to Inan, it is not about overcoming negative affectivity, but about politicizing it.

The productivity behind sadness and grief, for example, being allowed to feel this, enables, among other things, the formation of communities, as many women had also expressed the wish for in the research. I must emphasize this again at this point: The most frequently expressed wish in the research was namely to get to know the other women interviewed. As a result, a group of women came together after the research, which meets at regular intervals. The meetings are not always about these negative emotions, but there is always room for them. One interviewee said: “Allowing yourself to feel all this [...]”, which ultimately became the title of my dissertation.

The quote precisely summarizes the possibility of these empowering spaces where feeling is allowed. Some women described the open display of injuries, the anger about them, the mourning, the general recognition of these injuries as injuries that occur even in the closest relationships, such as in the family or with a partner, without having to be afraid of being shamed for them again, as “healing”.

The possibility for the development of a political potential of multi-racialized affects therefore lies precisely in the fact that these can be felt instead of remaining in a struggle with one another. Encounters with people who are similarly affected are therefore of crucial importance, especially on an affective level. This is exactly what many of the people we spoke to repeated: That although the more advanced recognition of institutional discrimination or the dissemination of knowledge and vocabulary critical of racism meant that there was certainty on an epistemic level that experiences of racism could be classified as such, the affective level was usually excluded from this, which is why this struggle between anger and shame was triggered in the first place and persisted in it. Of course, this not only has damaging consequences for the psyche of those affected, but above all means that those affected become entangled in the maintenance of existing power structures.

So, yes, these spaces are of really great importance, and I am so curious to see how they will continue to develop. But, I must emphasize at the end, at the end of the day these spaces are 'just' spaces for a little time out, as one interviewee aptly put it. Without significant structural changes, no changes can be achieved for a society with less discrimination, which is ultimately what causes these injuries and violence in the first place.

Thank you for these important questions! I would definitely like to argue for a racism-critical and committed psychological anthropology, as the central role of affects in racialization processes has hardly been considered scientifically so far. Yet affects are central to racialized orders of belonging, to imagined communities in nation-state formation. It is essential to take unconscious affects into account in order to gain further insights into internalized relations of dominance and oppression, i.e. to develop an even deeper understanding of how oppression works.

In concrete terms, this could mean, for example, a further merging of affect and critical research on whiteness in Germany, such as the investigation of white feelings as 'legitimate' and 'normal'. Further long-term ethnographic work is needed here in order to make the unspoken feelings associated with racism legible, i.e. to create an affective and discursive approach to them. And that also means working out the double effectiveness of affects, which lies in the simultaneous re-production and shattering of power relations. My discussion partners opened up the questions of what their scope for action as multi-racialized women is and how they can counter the current resurgence of racism or biologistic definitions of “race”.

I therefore urgently call for the further investigation of the history and reappraisal of the powerful structural category of “race” to be carried out not only by psychological anthropology, but also by philosophy, political and social sciences or law, and not to leave the field to scientific or bio-medical research.