Linda Supik: Dear Aleks, I’ve invited you to this conversation as we share an interest in the mechanisms of discrimination, the politics of anti-discrimination and legal tools such as equality laws. In my own work, I approach and analyse citizenship regimes from the perspective of structural and institutional aspects of discrimination; I want to know how these regimes produce and reproduce equality and inequality. A regime, on my understanding, is a rather rough structural phenomenon. With Michel Foucault’s theory of power in mind, I understand regimes (or the ways certain fields are governed) as heterogeneous rather than monolithic. In a regime, quite different and even contradictory and antagonistic logics are at work. You work on structural inequalities in immigration societies and on mechanisms of institutional discrimination. Where do you draw the line between structural and institutional discrimination? I ask this because you mention structural inequality (see Lewicki 2014 and, for a recent example, Lewicki 2021b), which goes beyond social inequality, in the sense of class differences or differences at the level of capital resources, if I understand you correctly. Inequality cannot be equated with discrimination, but it is one of its consequences. I find that the notions of institutional and structural discrimination are often used interchangeably in debates, although the difference between them, while rather difficult to pin down, is actually quite important. What is your view on this?
1 Regimes, Structures and Institutions
Aleksandra Lewicki: Yes, I agree that concepts such as structural inequality and institutional discrimination are too often used interchangeably—in scholarly work and in public debate, especially as an analytical distinction between them offers key tools that can help us to deepen and specify our understanding of how inter-sectional racism works. I will clarify how I understand each of these in turn.
Structural inequalities are systemic asymmetries—inequalities that result from our social order(s); they emerge from the fundamental organising principles that structure ‘how we do things’ in a wider sense. For example, distinct modes of production, or the ways in which we organise the division of labour in a society, can bring about specific modes of oppression and inequality. Scholarly works have shown that capitalism has relied and continues to rely on a racialised and gendered division of labour (among other things). For instance, we know today that Europe’s Industrial Revolution and the development of the welfare state was enabled by the extraction of riches and the exploitation of labour through colonialism (Bhambra and Holmwood 2018), and while colonialism is not an inevitable outcome of a capitalist mode of production, European governments have historically chosen this path, thereby producing structural inequalities that continue to shape biographies across the globe. Liberal democracy and its mechanisms of representation via membership in a nation state also bring about distinct asymmetries, as does our cultural order, e.g. the way we describe ourselves as ‘Christian societies’ despite Europe’s history of religious diversity. A range of intersecting inequalities thus have a systemic logic and origin—they result from the ways in which we have chosen to organise our economy, run our democracies and formalise public rituals. This does not mean that a socialist mode of production or consensual democratic modes of decision-making would not bring out distinct forms of inequality; however, this perspective invites us to reflect on how deeply rooted inequality can be. This helps us to appreciate that political and pedagogic toolkits such as anti-discrimination laws and anti-bias training can only go so far in addressing systemic asymmetries that have been cemented over generations. Rather than reducing structural inequalities to ‘systemic logics’, however, we also need to appreciate that many are the outcome of political decisions and their effects over time. David Goldberg (2009, p. 71) has illustrated this with the example of segregation in the USA. He shows how housing policies, estate brokering and lending practices in the 1930s produced gated communities along ethnic and economic lines, separating the descendants of colonial settlers from former slaves and new migrants. Growing up in a disadvantaged neighbourhood shapes life opportunities in relation to education, and so on. Disadvantages that have historically been woven into the fabric of our societies can harden into structural arrangements and continue to shape biographies.
The concept of institutional discrimination, in turn, allows us to investigate how inequalities result from the ways in which specific institutions work—and thus to interrogate the ways in which routines are organised, or, in Sara Ahmed’s words, “for whom institutions are made” (Ahmed 2012). This includes schools, universities, public administrations, national, federal and local government, parliament, the police, courts, the military, the provision of health and/or social care and many other institutional settings, in both the public and private sectors. Each of these needs to be examined carefully as to its key mechanisms. How, exactly, do institutions bring about the inequalities that can be identified by empirical research? For instance, which routines within police work result in some people being stopped and searched a few times a month while others are never stopped? Which procedures in schools prohibit teachers from giving pupils—especially if they have moved to Germany from a poorer country—equal marks for equal achievements? Which habits prevent public administration professionals from treating a taxpayer with a Turkish accent with the same duty of care that they offer to someone with a Bavarian accent? Focusing on the institutional dynamics of discrimination or institutional racism therefore offers an additional angle: rather than focusing on the ‘big’ organising principles of society, or how policies have produced structural effects, this perspective invites us to reflect on the specific everyday rule-books and routines in terms of which social life is organised. Rule-books and routines can be revisited and subjected to new legislation, although this always requires a readiness on the part of the institution to self-critically inspect its organising principles and potential outcomes. My research on the provision of health and social care indicates that, in the case of Germany’s semi-public welfare associations, this requires adjustments on various levels: within the routines of each individual institutional setting; within welfare associations at the federal, regional and local level; at the level of the local authority and its funding priorities; within regional government and various committees in which regional welfare associations are represented; and at the federal level of government, including its funding prerogatives and prescriptions.
In my view, ‘structural discrimination’ and ‘institutional discrimination’ are therefore distinct conceptual tools that help us to recognise how inequality is rooted in historical decisions and social orders and in the ways in which institutions work. Each of these requires specific types of interventions. Both conceptual resources, however, invite us to go beyond reflecting on the power of individuals, their personal attitudes and their specific remits, and to think additionally about how social orders, procedures and routines operate and can be rethought, such that the aspiration to equal treatment becomes the guiding norm of society and its institutions rather than ‘merely’ an individual prerogative or responsibility. And while I remain sceptical as to whether legal and institutional reforms can address deep-seated structural inequalities, they can perhaps contribute to making everyday encounters in institutional contexts less traumatic for social groups that experience discrimination on a daily basis.
Linda Supik: You have just clarified the conceptual difference between the institutional and the structural level of discrimination. Discrimination, in the sense of the political and legal discourse on equality and non-discrimination, is about illegitimate differential treatment and the outcomes of this treatment. What I have in mind when asking about these distinctions is that there is a certain notion of discrimination in the discourse that requires some actor—or at least an addressable institution like ‘the police’, ‘the school system’—who must take the blame and be identified as the bad guy, for example, by being legally accused and brought to trial. An institution can be identified as the cause of discrimination, and then we can change it, or at least try to reform it. At the structural level, we can always blame capitalism, or the stubbornly enduring power of religious institutions that are obviously deeply entangled with patriarchy across all faiths. These are structures. But structures, as antagonistic powers, seem much more abstract than actual agents and may be considered too powerful to be opposed and attacked, as if powerful positions were not equally responsible for how societies that are committed to equality and human rights deal with their past, the social climate in general and other effects of structural inequality. Those in power must be held responsible and accountable for the persistent effects of past discrimination, especially the ones that have become structural.
Aleksandra Lewicki: I agree with your point that focusing ‘only’ on structures can give the impression that there are no agents and that nobody is really accountable. However, I also think that discussions about racism come with a certain sensitivity that is not necessarily helped by approaching them through the lens of ‘blame’. I think it’s about using our analytic capacities to identify how something works, which can then help us to rethink and revise procedures, habits and norms. As white Europeans, we need to appreciate that our positionalities and privileges are the product of our histories and that they have been built on the violent extraction of resources from people who were racialised as ‘non-white’. This approach is unlikely to ‘reach’ white supremacists, but it can help us to reach an audience that would in principle be inclined to address racism in its midst but that needs to get a better grip on how it works.
And of course, being white and European comes with privileges, but it does not result in identical positionalities across Europe. Let me give you an anecdotal example of the biographical trajectories of those who have moved from Europe’s East to its West. I recently attended an online wedding here in the UK, of a colleague born in a Central East European country, like me, who has lived in the UK for over a decade, and her British partner. The registrar kept doing two things throughout the ceremony: she preceded every statement with an introductory ‘in this country’, followed by things like ‘we will now exchange the rings’, etc. She also kept radically mispronouncing the bride’s name, repeatedly asking her to repeat her mispronounced name after her. Now these two examples quite helpfully illustrate what I mean by institutional racism: addressing the parties involved and asking them to repeat their names after her is part of the procedure followed by the registrar. This procedure could potentially be adjusted to make this a less embarrassing experience in cases where the registrar is struggling to get the name even remotely right. Now the repetition of ‘in this country’ is an example of individual racism, as the registrar herself added this formula to the procedure, likely because she felt she needed to ‘explain things to the foreigner’. She thereby placed the bride in a position of being lectured to about how things work in the country she calls home, which reminded her, in her own words, of the fact that she was thought ‘not to belong’ at her own wedding. These issues may seem minor, but I think they are helpful in illustrating how everyday, institutionalised racism reflects wider patterns in the distribution of social resources. Notably, these dynamics are also at work in job interviews, with different lasting consequences. Labour market statistics in the UK show, for instance, that those who move from the East to the West, despite being highly overqualified, are concentrated in low-paid professions with precarious contracts. The incident with the registrar occurred at a time when Europe was in lockdown, with strict travel restrictions, although workers from Central East Europe were flown in on charter flights to pick fruit on British and German farms, despite the health risks involved and with limited access to health insurance. Both countries also registered heightened COVID-19 infection rates in meat-processing plants, which provided unsafe working and housing conditions for workers from east of the EU. Thus, we can see that individual and institutional racism is also part of a wider story of structural inequality, in this instance, a systematic reliance on workers from Europe’s poorer ‘periphery’ to provide a reserve army of cheap and disposable labour. Wealthy West European countries reduce labour costs (for instance, for seasonal work) beyond levels that would allow a local to make a living throughout the year, externalise the costs of social insurance to the country of origin, and can easily dispose of this workforce in times of economic decline (thereby also reducing the cost of unemployment) (see also Neuburger and Hinrichs in this volume). Elsewhere, I discuss how these patterns are accompanied by specific stereotypes about ‘Eastern Europeans’ and are entangled with anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim racism and racism against people of colour (Lewicki, forthcoming). This example further illustrates the systemic dimension of racism, highlighting its reliance on racialised hierarchies of labour. It is institutional in that it is perpetuated by procedures and routines and finds expression in everyday encounters. Moreover, people of colour, people who are perceived as or who identify as Muslim or Roma and other groups racialised as ‘other’ are most virulently exposed to the violence of all three dimensions of racism because of the effects of continuous histories of exploitation and because visual markers make othering less ‘escapable’, including over generations. What are your thoughts about structural and institutional discrimination?
Linda Supik: I find your example of the registrar at the wedding ceremony and your identification of the different levels on which racism is reproduced very telling. I often find it difficult to convey this distinction—and more generally, the concept of structures—to students (for several years, my work was not with social science students but with students in education, most of whom wanted to become teachers). I think that even more so in the broader society, a vague picture of what social structures actually are prevails—i.e. patterns that are mostly only made visible via statistics, patterns that prevail over long periods of time and that change only very slowly in social relations of representation and inequality. And this difficulty in understanding has real consequences. I learnt from lawyers and legal scholars that even judges often lack an understanding of institutional and structural discrimination and the differences between them, and this lack of clarity regarding these concepts has consequences for the administration of justice (Bartel et al. 2017).
2 Legal Activism and Statistical Representation
Aleksandra Lewicki: How can we ‘measure’ structural or institutional discrimination? And how does the absence of clarity play out in court? Also, have there been any moves towards systematic data collection within singular areas of public life or specific institutions?
Linda Supik: We can measure discrimination by collecting data and keeping statistics. To be precise, what we can actually measure is the unequal representation of people in different (more or less privileged) social spaces; we can measure the inequality effects that result from discrimination. The structural level of society, the ‘big picture’, is actually only accessible to our perception via the taking of statistics.
The absence of clarity plays out in court because judges have studied the law but not the social sciences; they do not necessarily see social structures and social inequalities as resulting from past governance and power relations for which governments, companies and organisations are accountable. A judge may have an understanding of racial discrimination as an act by a person who clearly holds an extremist political world view, but that conception underestimates how far-reaching the opportunities afforded by law now are. The expansion of equality law in Germany at the beginning of the millennium from the field of equal opportunities for two genders (men and women) by the German Equal Treatment Act (AGG)—a European project that was influenced by British legal culture—brought about new strategic options for fighting racism and discrimination against migrants and ethnic and religious minorities as well as other forms of discrimination that had previously only been applicable to sexism. It actually opened up the field of civil rights to minoritised groups, allowing them to fight for recognition as the equal citizens they have been for so long, an alternative to working within the paradigm of integration politics. Equality law has implications that can, if played right, change social structures. I think the possibilities are underestimated. I can even imagine a day when the very uniquely segregated German public school system, with its separation of the elite Gymnasium kids as young as nine or ten years old, is ruled discriminatory in the courts. Human rights activists are using strategic litigation to shift these boundaries as we speak. We regard law as part of the regime and the stable framework of citizenship, but laws change; they can be reformed, and new laws can be issued. With strategic litigation, law is filled with life; activists are showing us what is possible and are leading the way for other claimants to follow.
Systematic official data collection regarding racist discrimination (i.e. with information on self-reported socially ascribed ethnicity or race) is not being undertaken in the German public sector. The City of Munich conducted a survey that pioneered questions on subjective ethnic identity and showed how unrelated it is to the increasingly meaningless concept of ‘migration background’1 (Landeshauptstadt München 2021). Interesting projects include a one-time survey of the Berlin culture administration by the NGO Citizens for Europe (Ahyoud et al. 2018) and (especially) the civil society–driven and community-organised AFROZENSUS2 conducted in 2020. An alliance of NGOs of Germans of colour and Afro-Germans has conducted the first ever social survey on Black life in Germany. I cannot wait to read the report. But the AFROZENSUS still faces a problem: we do not even have a rough estimate of how many Black people live in Germany. Unlike in Britain, there is no decennial census where everyone ticks off their ‘ethnic group’—or, as has been proposed in the German context, their ‘ascribed ethnicity’. We cannot compare the AFROZENSUS results to the Black population in Germany as a whole. Even so, the results will be valuable.
Integration departments in state- and communal-level government and equality officers at universities are looking for ways to monitor equality and diversity. And I can tell you of another, very practical, example, where information on a person’s ethnicity is directly of use in reporting discrimination: the nationwide Muslim Student Organisation RAMSA3 files complaints of discrimination and is officially acknowledged by the Federal Antidiscrimination Agency in this capacity. Thus, Muslim students (people who identify as such) can fill in a complaint form on RAMSA’s website and report discriminating incidents, and this form also asks about your ethnic background. Such a question would be commonplace in Britain, but hardly anyone ever asks for people’s ethnic background or ethnicity in Germany. But when we want to learn about the extent of discrimination, this is the most crucial information, not one’s passport or place of birth. For RAMSA, this is evident because, alongside whether you wear the hijab or not, your skin and hair colour and facial features are relevant to whether you will be targeted and discriminated against as a Muslim.
Other examples of equality data collection—that is, providing statistical tools to measure racial discrimination—include a small number of social surveys which introduced a question that comes close to being the question of self-reported ‘ascribed ethnicity’ for which I am advocating. Survey participants were asked whether they ‘look German’, i.e. whether other people accept them as ‘German’ at first sight. This is a step in the right direction, but the very idea that there is a ‘German look’ and a ‘non-German look’ is already racist—and unacceptable in a post-migrant society in general, and especially to all Germans of colour. Looking white or Black has nothing to do with your passport. But, apart from these operational problems regarding how to ask for what, exactly, the collected data do show that outward appearance has a significant effect on one’s experience of discrimination (Wittlif 2018), and in the second study, being of colour is shown to play a role in experiencing police brutality (Abdul-Rahman 2020).
Aleksandra Lewicki: Could you say a bit more about why you think there is resistance to collecting equality data in Germany? I have been intrigued by the frequent references to Germany’s historic legacy, for instance, which is deployed as an argument to rebuke the collection of equality data. Minority groups have been mobilising around the issue, and they are then told that Germany cannot do it because it has historically been racist. Do you have any thoughts as to how and why this has been met with so much resistance?
Linda Supik: You hardly hear people, especially experts, positioning themselves explicitly against data collection—an exception is the report of the Fachkommission Integrationsfähigkeit published early in 2021 (Fachkommission 2020), which explicitly recommends that data on subjective self-identification and ascribed ethnicity not be collected. Silencing issues of race and racism has been the dominant strategy in Germany and most of Europe. You refer in particular to the use of the Nazi regime’s collection of data on race (and, by the way, its introduction of the decentralised, personalised Melderegisterwesen we still have today) as an excuse to turn a blind eye to structural and institutional racism, but I think it is right to put this sentence in the past tense; dynamics are changing. In France, as an exception to the silence characteristic of continental Europe, debates on statistiques de la diversité have been intense. But let us be clear: this is a delicate matter, and collecting such data while maintaining strong privacy protections and a transparent research process that these communities can trust remains a challenge—especially since these communities have suffered so much from data misuse and from harmful forms of research on them, over their heads and behind their backs. Social researchers must not underestimate how real and strong—and completely justified—the mistrust of academic research can be. This caveat has been articulated most clearly from positions inside the Rrom*nja and Sinti*zze communities in Germany (Weiß 2018, Schuch/Jonuz 2015).
3 Building Equality Law
Linda Supik: You have been following developments in German non-discrimination law, like me, from the issuing of the German Equal Treatment Act in 2006, and, much more systematically than I have, compared it to British equality law. You described German law as being weaker than British law; it was only built on the British model, and decades later. Do you think that German equality law will improve over time?
Aleksandra Lewicki: A crucial question that we need to ask regarding the German equality legislation is: Who was it made for? I have looked more closely into the protection the law is designed to offer to people who experience racism and discrimination on the basis of their actual or perceived religiosity. At the moment, for instance, people who self-describe or are perceived to be Jewish or Muslim experience disproportionate levels of differential treatment, denigration, discrimination and violence in various areas of public and everyday life. Yet the law provides exemptions from the prohibition against discrimination on grounds of religion (e.g. to faith-based organisations, including Germany’s leading providers of health and social care services, Caritas and Diakonie, who interpret this as a right to legally discriminate against non-Christians in their hiring practices but who, in principle, are legally entitled to choose a Christian applicant over a non-Christian applicant for a position in a Christian institution, such as a care home). The law thereby puts the Christian majority’s privilege to discriminate over the minorities’ right to non-discrimination. This needs urgent clarification and explicit compliance with the European Equality Directive, which, for instance, limits this privilege to pastoral positions.
We have recently seen a decision by the European Court of Justice, which was affirmed by the Federal Labour Court, that highlighted the supremacy of EU law, which in this case means that faith-based employers cannot discriminate on grounds of religious affiliation when hiring for any role, except in the case of leadership positions (which, as I discuss in Lewicki 2021a, also has problematic implications in the German context). We are currently awaiting a decision by the Federal Constitutional Court on this matter.
While there are comprehensive catalogues of suggestions for how the German Equal Treatment Act could and should be subjected to further reform, there is just one more area that I would like to highlight: the thin provisions to address the institutional dynamics of discrimination (Lewicki 2017c). The law is a toothless tiger unless it subjects the public sector to further scrutiny. This could involve a tool comparable to the British ‘Public Sector Equality Duty’, which imposes a set of monitoring and reporting obligations on public institutions in Britain, which are required to take specific and proactive steps to address issues of unequal access or outcomes. As to the chances of seeing such reforms—I am very concerned that none of the previous governments have considered the politics of equality a priority, despite the vibrant public debate on institutional racism that movements such as Black Lives Matter have prompted. The Federal Antidiscrimination Agency has, over the last 15 years or so, contributed to producing and drawing attention to mounting evidence concerning the ways in which German society and its institutions reproduce inequality and discrimination. Yet it has had to operate with an interim head for several consecutive years now, as little effort has been made to appoint a new director. The German government urgently needs to reconsider its priorities here.
Linda Supik: I agree that a duty on the part of public institutions like schools, administrations, the police and the military would be a useful step towards substantive (rather than merely formal) equality in Germany, that is, not just proclaiming equality by law but taking political steps to actually make equality happen. At the moment, we are witnessing a public ping-pong game between conservative ministers, on the one hand, and the media and experts, on the other, over the question of whether there is a structural problem with racism in public security institutions. Incident upon incident of racist police and military behaviour have been reported, and the ministers confronted with them are obviously under increasing pressure. The notion that ‘these are just bad apples’ is becoming hard to defend. The presence of structural problems is denied outright—and there is currently no data to prove this one way or the other.
Some good news has come in the form of the new non-discrimination law of the State of Berlin. As most public sector personnel and organisations are under the jurisdiction of the single federal states, Berlin issued its own non-discrimination law—the first of the Länder to do so. It is still early days, however, and no cases have been brought to court yet.
Aleksandra Lewicki: Can you say a bit more about how the local Berlin law offers additional protection? And what are its strengths and weaknesses, in your view?
Linda Supik: Unlike the Federal German Equal Treatment Act, the Antidiscrimination Act of the State of Berlin is part of public law, not civil law. In Berlin, it has become easier to address and fight discrimination in the public sector, e.g. on the part of a school, a teacher, a staff member of the employment office or the police. Unlike federal civil law, it allows for class action suits (Verbandsklagerecht), i.e. not every private person needs to fight their own case, and claimants can pool their cases and share the costs and effort in solidarity with and supported by civil society organisations.
But again, no obligation on organisations to report regularly was introduced. Something like a public sector equality duty—a ‘Berichtspflicht’—does exist in Britain, and even if it is a laborious bureaucratic project and the reports can easily be shoved in drawers somewhere, it forces public institutions to do their homework and to lay open the status quo, e.g. with regard to workforce diversity. For gender equality, these procedures are well established. And, as you can already guess, the issue of equality data is likely to be given centre stage as soon as there is an obligation to monitor equal representation, say, in Gymnasiums, in local, regional and federal parliaments, in prisons and in the judiciary.
Aleksandra Lewicki: I know you have done lots of work with and for the Federal Antidiscrimination Agency around these issues. What is your vision of a German approach to data collection and legal enforcement? What might this look like? We obviously know that the British public sector duty has a symbolic effect in that it considers it the institutions’ responsibility to monitor and address usage patterns and gaps, and we know that it can become a bureaucratic tool that does little beyond this symbolic effect. How can this work, and what might it look like?
Linda Supik: I fear I do not have a satisfactory answer to this. Sara Ahmed titled one of her papers on her experience as a diversity manager “You end up doing the document rather than doing the doing” (Ahmed 2011). Actually producing these reports, keeping the numbers, presenting them regularly to the president of your institution, and perhaps to the public, has thus far hardly seemed like a job for the leaders of the revolution; it is bureaucratic work—and it involves carrying emancipatory ideas over into the regime: the citizenship regime. In Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s words, it is incorporated critique (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007), and we always need to be wary of how that goes. Equal opportunities policies for gender have been in place for a long time now, and they have undeniably had positive effects, even if it is impossible to determine the extent of these effects precisely. Society’s institutions, whether prisons, hospitals, high schools, the police force or academia, must be transparent about who gets in and gets to the top, gets the longest sentences, the best service. To achieve this transparency, there is a lot of book-keeping to do, and that has never been an exciting job—at least for most people. Does this answer your question, and would you agree?
Aleksandra Lewicki: Absolutely, and I fully agree with the diagnosis that diversity politics is non-performative and rarely produces the intended effects, as Ahmed puts it. This is something I have also observed in the provision of health and social care. The impression that the ‘institution is open to everyone’ and its framing in identitarian terms (‘because we are a welfare provider, we are by nature open to everyone’) can often impede reform and conceal structural and institutional racism.
4 Institutional Racism, White Christian Privilege and the Law
Linda Supik: Let’s talk about your work on institutional discrimination in the labour market for care workers in Germany in more detail. The two biggest Christian churches are the largest employers in the welfare sector and give preference to Protestants and Catholics as employees. This is taking place in an ageing society that is increasingly dependent on care, where care workers are in high demand. So, for example, Muslim care workers do get hired, don’t they? Does discrimination end with recruitment, or what does their work situation look like? What are your findings?
Aleksandra Lewicki: This is indeed one of the topics that I keep returning to in my academic work—in my book (Lewicki 2014), which was based on my doctoral research, I traced how the churches successfully lobbied at the national and supra-national level of decision-making to ensure that exemptions from the equalities law were included in the European Equality directives, and later in the German Equal Treatment Act. These exemptions have been challenged in court but continue to be defended by the churches and their welfare associations. In my post-doctoral research, I examined how the churches’ preferential hiring of Christians plays out on the ground—specifically, how they shape everyday routines in residential care facilities for older people (Lewicki 2021a). This study drew on 15 interviews with experts on welfare and diversity and 20 semi-structured interviews with managers of care homes run by Caritas and Diakonie in different parts of Germany. For instance, I asked managers in Christian care homes about the criteria they applied when hiring new staff. I found considerable variation among institutional practices. Some regional branches of the Catholic and Protestant churches have recently ‘allowed’ the hiring of non-Christians, and that meant that in some institutions in these federal states, non-Christian staff worked under the same contractual conditions as staff affiliated with a Christian church. Other institutions employed non-Christians on temporary contracts, while their Christian colleagues were given permanent contracts. In other federal states, care homes were strictly required to hire Christians only. This diversity among institutional practices indicates that the preferential hiring of Christians was by no means applied universally, but it also meant that if non-Christian staff were to work under equal contractual conditions, this required either an explicit loosening of the criteria by the regional branch of the church or a lack of compliance on the part of the manager. In many cases, non-Christian staff members were precariously employed and/or unable to apply for leadership positions.
Linda Supik: The churches can only afford to play this exclusivity game when the pool of applicants is large enough, I suppose? Did those managers tell you about the numbers of suitable applicants?
Aleksandra Lewicki: Well, there are areas in which they feel it is increasingly infeasible to ‘hold on’ to these criteria, most notably in the care of older people. Germany is ageing, demographically, and is experiencing an acute shortage of care workers. Yet even if Christian welfare associations have ‘no choice’ but to hire non-Christians, the churches want to preserve and stress the Christian profile of these institutions. This means that, in many settings, permanent contracts and career progression are conditional upon ‘morality training’, which they call nachholende christliche Sozialisation—belated Christian socialisation, declarations of loyalty to Christian values, or even conversion to Christianity. This illustrates that, even though the Christian churches’ guidelines prompted a diverse spectrum of individual and institutional responses, the normative guidance contributes to normalising and attributing superior status to being Christian. As a result, being Christian, whether nominally (‘by heritage’) or as an observant member of the church, bears material privileges—including access to permanent employment and leadership positions. The churches, I argue, thereby contribute to perpetuating a racialised division of labour. Their employment criteria reinforce structural inequalities in the labour market: indeed, representative studies have shown that staff with migration experience are over-represented among care workers and are more frequently employed on precarious contracts (Khalil et al. 2020).
My analysis (Lewicki 2021a) shows that the distinction between Christians and non-Christians has direct material implications but also wider racialising effects. The preference for Christian workers, whether strictly or loosely applied, side-lined or transgressed by facility managers, has nurtured an institutional culture that has positively racialised Christian identity while negatively racialising ‘others’. Whether they endorsed or challenged religious affiliation as a criterion for employment, the managers I interviewed assumed that a ‘good carer’ typically embodied Christian values. Consequently, Muslim care workers were positioned as lacking in their ability to care, and their professional capacities were frequently questioned. This has a material bearing on the kinds of positions they are able to obtain and shapes everyday encounters and experiences of being marked as not belonging.
Linda Supik: Just as a note, such assumptions also reveal a considerable lack of knowledge among Christian community leaders about the role of charity in Islam, which is an important and central element of faith. Few researchers working in the sociology of discrimination and equal rights focus on religion, and even fewer, as you do, on the faiths that have a hegemony in the West, i.e. Christianity and the large Christian churches. The research tends to focus on masculinity and whiteness as other major hegemonic/privileged positions, apart from religion. I think that ideologically speaking, the relevance of the churches is in decline—at least in Western Europe, not globally—but the largely secularly oriented parts of society, especially academia, tend to underestimate and ignore the power that churches as institutions/organisations still have, and this is troubling. Researching Christians seems uncool and boring, as it were. You show that the contrary is true.
Aleksandra Lewicki: It’s funny that you use the words ‘uncool’ and ‘boring’, as that is exactly what a student in my module ‘Postcolonial Europe?’ said to me. She was very bright and really committed to the module, but in the session on the histories of the race–religion nexus she ‘educated’ me by letting me know that ‘young people don’t care about religion’. I remember thinking that the perception that Europe is secular—and thus that Christianity has been tamed, enlightened and banned from political argument—in many ways contributes to the sense that it ‘doesn’t matter anymore’. I was tempted to ask her whether she’d seen the various Christian groups who prayed publicly for Trump’s re-election on YouTube. With this I don’t mean in any way that public Christianity as such is a ‘problem’; I just mean that we tend to understand Christianity as secular and tamed by the Enlightenment, which seems to render it somewhat ‘magically’ apolitical—which does not quite live up to empirical reality, or even how the mainstream (not evangelical) churches behave. Of course, it is okay for the Christian churches to take a political stance; they do so all the time, for instance, when they get involved in search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean. But let’s not pretend that they are not political.
5 The Race–Religion Nexus
Linda Supik: I think it might be helpful to provide our readers with further background on anti-Muslim racism here and on the race–religion nexus, as Jensen and Meer (2020) call it. We are leaping from talking about religious organisations to racialising effects. Why is there such a narrow link between religion and racism? Religious differences have similarities with other racialised differences. Even if not embodied, the big racialised ‘Other’ in Europe is the Muslim, and the mostly unnamed, unmarked hegemonic speaking position is somehow a mix of the secular and the Christian ‘Us’. Right-wing extremist imaginaries draw on the orient/occident (Morgenland/Abendland) distinction and on Christian imagery. Do you think this provides enough background, or would you like to add something?
Aleksandra Lewicki: Yes, indeed. It is important to think of the history of racism as a history of the racialisation of a range of positionalities. The very origin of the term ‘race’ goes back to the Spanish Reconquista, when Jews and Muslims were forced to either convert to Christianity or leave the Iberian Peninsula. Those who converted to Christianity continued to be marked as ‘new’ Christians ‘by blood’, which is when the term ‘raza’ was coined. Their conversion could never be fully complete, and ‘new Christians’ were banned from leadership positions. The Spanish Inquisition sought to establish whether converts from Judaism or Islam were continuing to secretly practice their ‘birth religion’ (Anidjar 2014). So these people belonged to a faith group that was racialised as ‘hereditary’. Notably, it was at the same historic juncture that European rulers embarked on colonising South America and then became involved in the slave trade, which was enabled and justified by the racialisation of people of colour. So, various somatic or cognitive features have historically been racialised as ‘inheritable’, including skin colour, culture and religion. Religious belonging was also essentialised in twentieth-century German racial thinking. You could say that the racialisation of religious affiliation has played an important role in historic and contemporary racist repertoires.
In the current context, the preferential hiring of Christians by the two largest publicly funded providers of welfare services has cultivated an institutional culture that discriminates against anyone whose lifestyle does not conform to Christian norms. This specifically affects religious minorities, as many are currently being recruited to care for older people, but also LGBTQ* people, divorcees, etc.
Linda Supik: It also discriminates against those without any religious affiliation. There are many people who were not baptised, even if their parents are from Christian families. So it’s not sufficient to be Christian ‘by descent’; your parents must have been committed enough to have had you baptised. I studied social work for a few years, and I remember a professor warning us never to give up our church membership (if we had one) if we wanted to find good jobs as social workers. People even join churches—as an openly pragmatic choice—to become employable. Have you had the chance to discuss your findings with Diakonie and Caritas? How did they take your diagnosis?
Aleksandra Lewicki: Yes, the wider social effects are quite remarkable. Diakonie and Caritas have engaged with my research, and I have been in conversation with them in various contexts. There are quite a few people who have expressed interest and found the data that I supplied and my analysis helpful. What we don’t get to see publicly quite so often are the many very dedicated and engaged people within both organisations who are pushing for institutional change. There are a considerable number of people, however, who are in the driving seat and who want to defend an identitarian reading of Christian identity. As it is everywhere, this is currently a polarised and polarising debate, and I think it’s a question of providing evidence for the damaging effects of the identitarian approach and strengthening those who are struggling to open up these organisations.
6 Citizenship and Methodological Nationalism
Linda Supik: Before we started this conversation, you mentioned to me that it would be interesting to think about the connections between your work on citizenship and your work on institutional racism, although you have mostly worked on these fields separately. You have written on citizenship and structural inequality and on institutional racism, Christianity and institutions. There are intersections here, and one could connect your thoughts on both fields. In our academic lives, it is often the case that we work on certain topics in connection with each other and other topics in isolation. How would you put it—has this dichotomy arisen for you? And then, the obvious next question, which intersections have you identified?
Aleksandra Lewicki: One reason is that my work has offered a critique of a common and influential approach in the study of the politics of diversity: the citizenship regime literature. In particular, I am troubled by a body of work that seeks to explain variation across different national settings by highlighting varying opportunity structures (e.g. Koopmans and Statham 2003). I have offered different critiques of this perspective, including of the static linear narrative that seemingly assumes that there is one way to interpret public culture, laws and institutions (Lewicki 2014). I flagged the complicity of the opportunity structures perspective (OSP) in reproducing structural inequalities and racism (Lewicki 2014, 2017a), showed how its focus on grammars of political action is gendered (Lewicki and O’Toole 2017) and reflected on its silence on Europe’s colonial legacies and the wider political economy (Lewicki 2021a). These critical interventions, while specifically targeting OSP, could equally be applied to the wider field of migration studies. Each of my interventions drew on a different empirical dataset that I generated within various projects—expert interviews with policy makers, interviews with anti-immigration activists in the UK, co-produced research with Muslim women activists and bespoke interviews with care managers in Germany. Each of these interventions also brought a new research literature into the mix. On the whole, one could say that I have engaged with issues around agency (who are those involved in making decisions, and how do these decisions (re)produce inequalities in post-migration societies?) and structural inequality (how do our societies operate—structurally and institutionally—such that inequality persists?) and their role in the making of difference.
Linda Supik: In a collaborative research project together with Bristol Muslima citizens, you looked at acts of citizenship, and less so at the regime side of citizenship, law and institutions that we’ve been discussing up to now. The balance and double focus on both sides of the agency structure divide is central to our approach to citizenship at the Hannover Center for Inclusive Citizenship (CINC). Can you tell us more about your work with Muslim women activists in Britain?
Aleksandra Lewicki: This was a project in which we co-produced research with a steering group of local activists who self-described as Muslim and mobilised around this positionality. The case studies that emerged from this project were the women’s various strategies of trying to transform mosque spaces while also getting involved in the political negotiations around female genital mutilation (FGM). We felt that their political activism was best grasped as a spectrum of practices and acts of citizenship, as some of them were pushing harder for radical change and others were seeking more gradual transformations. In any case, we felt that an agency-centred lens allowed us to shed light on the ongoing rupture and negotiation of norms, rules and habituated ways of doing things. An OSP, by contrast, looks at norms, laws and discourses as more static and, methodologically, often focuses on claims articulated by large representative organisations—which tend to be run by men. So the approach is gendered and less able to grasp social change. To put it bluntly, it reifies ‘the container of the nation state’, thereby implicitly justifying majoritarian norms, practices and discourses as more legitimate, and cannot account for how norms, practices and discourses are contested within minority communities themselves, and, even more importantly, how institutions are transformed in negotiation processes. A diverse society is involved in complex negotiations, and the OSP cannot account for these. It thereby masks, as I have argued, structural inequalities and racism. Can you tell me more about your approach to acts of citizenship and how you propose to use it?
Linda Supik: I am still learning from the colleagues at CINC and all of the authors we have invited to contribute to this book. I think you might like the contribution by Aoileann Ní Mhurchú, who coined the concept ‘unfamiliar acts’ of citizenship, showing how the language practices of hip hop artists in France and Germany challenge norms of (educated) standard language and transcend language borders. These artists draw on and contribute to vernacular languages such as ‘Kiezdeutsch’ and ‘Verlan’. In the section on care in this volume, Alessandro Pratesi looks at LGBT parents who, just by being parents and taking part in kindergarten and school life, and without actually being consciously ‘political’, can change everyday norms of gendered and hetero-normative citizenship. We are also engaging with activists from Solidarity Cities, who are trying to circumvent or bypass exclusionary national border regimes through local initiatives. Many of these approaches and projects turn away from the nation state as the sole frame of reference. By doing so, they complicate the picture and shed light on further spaces of inclusion and exclusion. What exactly do you mean when you speak of a misguided emphasis on opportunity structures? I think this is an important part of your argument, and I would like to understand it better.
Aleksandra Lewicki: There are several problems with the OSP. For one, the approach relies on modelling—it needs to define a country by a set of labels to then ‘measure’ how these shape political claims and attitudes. For instance, this perspective has identified ‘church–state relations’ as an important axis of difference between countries. The assumption is that there are countries with an established church, such as the UK, countries where an established religion has a strong public presence, e.g. in the welfare state, such as Germany, and countries where religion has been banned from public life, such as France. The approach then measures which of these ‘opportunity structures’ makes the population of that country more or less likely to express attitudes of Islamophobia, for instance (see Helbling 2012). There isn’t necessarily a focus on single-factor explanations, as other axes are added to the mix, such as the history of anti-discrimination legislation, and so on. Still, there is a sense that either attitudes towards immigration/specific groups or mobilisation by minoritised groups can be grasped by examining such ‘factors’. We don’t learn much about the wider geo-political constellation, the complex histories of racism in different European settings, political mobilisations and counter-mobilisations, contestation within the groups that mobilise, and so on. I just think that the attitudinal salience of Islamophobia in a particular national setting is more complex and cannot be meaningfully explained by focusing on whether the church is established or not. The state–church relationship is too complex to be meaningfully summarised within a binary logic of ‘accommodating’ and ‘less accommodating’—as my own research hopefully illustrates. What is more, the structural and institutional dimension of Islamophobia hardly features in this perspective.
Linda Supik: I agree with your critique of the OSP. I find that these measuring approaches have a built-in need to reduce complexity and, in producing their rough pictures, risk affirming categories and even producing new biases through the fixed and rigid models on which they necessarily rely.
I wanted to return to the question of how to connect your two fields of expertise: if you frame your field of work in terms of ‘acts of inclusive citizenship’ rather than ‘mobilisation’, I think the link between your two fields of expertise becomes evident. Any practices that fight discrimination are necessarily acts of inclusive citizenship. Or maybe I am putting it too simply? To me, the fight against discrimination in its intersectional, encompassing scope is a movement in the direction of substantial citizenship. I’d say it is a civil rights movement.
7 Exclusive Citizenship
Aleksandra Lewicki: Yes, you could say that I have studied mobilisation against racism and the institutional cultures that perpetuate it, although I should add that I currently study mobilisation against immigration and its institutional trajectories. You are right; my starting point was certainly an attempt to think about how citizenship can be made more inclusive. Having read the work of Engin Isin (2008), Bridget Anderson (2013) and Gurminder Bhambra (2015), however, I am no longer convinced that citizenship is a framework that can help us to achieve inclusivity. Historically, it has never been the ‘ever-progressive’ institution that Marshall described—unless you consider the ever-widening of the rights of white men as a sign of progress.
Citizenship, as Anderson (2013) illustrates compellingly, has always operated through exclusion, and its boundaries have been adjusted accordingly to protect entitlement and privilege, including privileges related to mobility and wealth. During Europe’s colonial era, as Bhambra and Holmwood (2018) show, the entire British Empire paid taxes, which were drawn on to improve living standards in the metropole. Populations in the colonies (and later the Commonwealth) have been systematically excluded from the benefits of these contributions, including the right to remain/not to be deported and access to welfare provisions. And even if you include everyone who contributes to the wealth of a political community, you are still operating within the framework of a nation state that makes political rights conditional on an arbitrary right of membership. In current times, this can also mean that, on the basis of the random affiliation with a nation state that you end up with and the histories that have been designated as yours, you are either subjected to the necropolitics of the European border regime or you benefit from the privileges it protects (see Stierl 2020 on the contradictions of Europe’s self-representation).
Linda Supik: I think there are some aspects of what you say that the citizenship researchers here at CINC would completely agree with, but I still do not wish to dismiss the concept of citizenship as a central conceptual tool for progressive emancipatory political projects. On the other hand, the arguments you put forward from a post-colonial perspective are indisputable. If you do not put hope in the progressive, democratic, emancipatory, inclusive potential of the idea of citizenship, what else do you see as more promising? Where do you suggest we turn?
Aleksandra Lewicki: I agree, of course, that the acts of citizenship perspective helps us to productively engage with mobilisation that includes alternative visions of society, and makes these visions come to life through embodied practices and enactments of alternative realities. Yet Isin (2015) and the researchers involved in the Oecumene project4 have concluded that tracing indications of alternative realities should not distract us from the ways in which instituted citizenship is inherently exclusive and continues to produce exclusions. I have used the acts of citizenship perspective as a critical tool to engage with the Centre for Political Beauty’s5 activism, which in my view problematically reproduces some of the binaries of bordering that it seeks to challenge (Lewicki 2017b). So I think citizenship is an important concept for understanding the making of difference, and it continues to have critical potential as a tool of transgression. On the whole, however, my own interest has broadened, to the degree that I now consider citizenship one among many structural/institutional assemblages that produce and reproduce distinctions and difference. In my view, it is this process—the drawing of distinctions—and its political means that we should study. This includes the making of citizenship but also the making of borders, or of categories of difference such as race and the nation.