Schwarze Deutsche und ihre sozialen Identitäten (English shop)

Eine empirische Studie zur Lebensrealität von Afrodeutschen und deren Bedeutung für die Entwicklung einer schwarzen und einer deutschen Identität

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Black Germans do not, in outward appearance, correspond to the notion of the “typical German” shared by the dominant white majority society.

Although born in Germany (mostly to a white German mother), at home here as native speakers, raised and socialised here and thus self-evidently and unambiguously representatives of the local cultural community, Afro-Germans are apparently often mistakenly categorised by their white compatriots not as nationals but as foreigners, as strangers, as migrants, and are thereby excluded from the midst of the domestic community. In this way, the up to an estimated 500,000 Black Germans are denied from the outside the sense of belonging to a home group that is described as elementary and beneficial (to self-worth).

The lived reality of Black Germans moves, among other things, within the field of tension between stereotypical judgements, prejudices, ongoing racism and isolation. In childhood and youth, white socialisation figures, agencies and contents dominate. Black socialisation, considered highly relevant in Black psychological research, is in many cases entirely absent. Experiences tied to skin colour can mostly not be addressed within the Black (family) collective. The minority status that in Germany often extends into one’s own family fundamentally distinguishes the life world of members of this group here from all lived realities of Black minorities in white majority societies analysed to date.

Do Black Germans nevertheless develop a group identity related to their skin colour, as is frequently described as self-evident and beneficial for Black US-Americans and Britons? And if so, what developmental processes underlie the formation of such a Black identity in Germany? What effects accompany it in this country?

In the present work, the particular life experiences of Black Germans and the immense psychological challenges bound up with them, together with their connections to the development of a Black and a German identity, are systematically ordered and described for the first time; they are analysed psychologically in a precise and detailed manner, translated into clearly defined constructs with a theoretical frame of reference (including social identity theory), converted into hypotheses and complex models of effects, and empirically tested and discussed on the basis of the detailed responses of more than 200 study participants.

Manifold practical implications for the Black community and the white majority society are derived from the results of the study.