As a “turk” born & raised in Germany I want to know what you people think about racism in Germany.

13 comments

1. You are born here. You’ve lived here your whole life. For me you are a German, of course.

2. You are german but given how homogeneous Germany you’ll always run into the issues ypu spoke about big or small that makes you question yourself. My advice to to you is just be happy with who your are and what you’ve accomplished in life.

3. Sorry to hear about that incidences and your experiences. I have many friends at football who are also TürkDeutsche and at least through sports we have a great connection. I hope that by time and common sports or work or other common social events things will get better and racism declines. Its probably not my state to ask but i wish for you not to let these events harden your heart against environment and germany. I think its best if we dont take these attacks on mosques or in former years islamistic attacks e.g. on christmas markets personally but concentrate on a good common future. We share the future for germany and i dont like this separatism thoughts of turks and germans.

4. Well that would start with what is considered racism.

   E.g. back in schooldays people were insulting each other all the time and used whatever they could think of.
   Turks were called Kanacken,
   Germans Kartoffel,
   Polish people polaken,
   People with Glases brillenschlange und Fischauge,
   Red haired kid „Seelenloser“, „wirfst wie ein Mädchen“ etc,
   So regarding those obviously racial slurs i’d personally didn’t consider that racist but plain stupid insults. Not that it is less insulting but I feel people didn’t think about race and thought someone was actually beneath them etc. but is was only used because they knew it hurt them…

   And as someone else already mentioned I feel like that quite a few incidents of racism are only based on someone sticking out.

   Same goes for the smallest, tallest, biggest or whatever person.

   Don’t really get why someone would misspell a name on purpose though. I mean … it‘s not like that’s going to give anyone anything.

5. In my experience racism is a huge topic for the german society. All kinds of different medias report on it all the time – be it racial motivated crimes or on a bigger scale. Just take the Gil Ofarim case as the last prominent example. I think this case alone filled hours of airtime on tv and houndreds of news articles.

6. About the incident in Halle: it happened last Sunday, and criminal investigations and trials take several months! Innocent until proven guilty (by a crimjnal court, not the police and not the public), but he will be punished.

7. Heyho!
   I can tell you how i grew up in germany. 20 kids in a class, usually about 13 germans, 5 turks, 2 eastern europeans.
   I shit you not, at least 4 (or even all 5) of the turkish kids were always big assholes, and i had this for a lot of clases for about 11 years.

   They always wanted to fight (physicaly), tried to steal from classmates or cheat them in some way or another.
   The fun was always over when the turkish kids entered the local football field. They again would try to cheat to win or get physical. Often times they would call there older brothers so they can beat us and take our money.
   If you would walk into a group of turkish kids in the neighborhood….you better run!

   Sure, there also were german assholes. But it wasnt like over 90%, more like 10%.

   But i had a good friend who was a turk. And also someone from the ukraine. They were both very nice and likeable persons – very different to the other kids from “their region”.

   To this day it is not easy not to be racist. I always have to remind myself to not judge people too early and not assume things based on the experience i had before.
   It helps that i had these two friends back then.
   And it helps that all the turks were super nice to me, when i was in turkey.

   How do you feel when someone reports things like this? Can you understand the frustration a lot of germans have?

   Also to this day the “visible crime” and “visible bad behauviour” is more often than not the turkish people here….
   If the sun is out the turkish kids take daddys car and reff their engines infront off the ice cream place the whole day.
   Never seen a german do this.
   Who seels hardcore drugs at the trainstation? Mostly foreigners.
   Who then sets up fake business to laundry money? And which familys get tons of social money while it looks like they are fucking rich?

   I assume some of these things happen for reasons i can probably understand….but the impression we get is a very bad one more often than not.

8. What I really hate is when work colleagues use the N word when talking about black people and loads of Germans do it, maybe not with malice but it’s still racism.

9. You’ll only get downvotes on this sub unfortunately

10. German potato here. I never received any racism – neither in this or any other country. I did experience some hatred (but also some love) vs germans in general in other countries, which I can understand completely.

    Racism is a huge problem here and while not personally being victimized, I’m fighting for decades against it, be it on a large scale or even in small “just a joke” things. Seeing the world in general, it is an eternal struggle – being born out of egoism and nationalism. I am not sure if we will ever win this fight, but for sure we may never stop fighting.

11. I feel like the public got more sensitive about Racism throughout the past 3 Years, which is kinda neat.

    However I feel like the discussion shifted to much into a “What to say and what not to say” instead of a “what can we change to improve the situation?”.

    F.e. I’m strongly in favour of anonymous job and rent applications to filter name based discrimination a bit.

    How do you see this? Is it more important to you to have law promoting equality or to not hear slurs on a daily basis? (Not saying they have to be mutually exclusive)

12. I am german. Some of my relatives were native Polish/french people but that was ages ago. I don‘t speak french nor polish, i have never met my relatives from there.
    I see that turks are not very accepted in germany. I see two reasons: look and religion/culture. If you see polish people you can usually not tell. They look the same as germans. But they may be very conservative if it comes to religion but this difference will stay for one generation, after that you can maybe tell by their name that they are polish (I am lucky: my family name is very german). So. Look at turkish people. They usually speak turkish. They don‘t share the same opinions. Culture is different, too. Plus: you see at first sight that their origin is not that of middle europe.

    There is a reason why turkish people have more struggle being accepted in germany. Just compare acceptance of other people such as russians, italians, dutch or british.
    I am honest: I would not want to be a turk in germany but being honest means seeing that there are immigrants that are very welcome so germans are not racist per se.

13. Please don’t use your victim card. As a new wave Turk who recently came to Germany as a Software Developer, from bottom of my heart I can say that Germans have too many reasons to be mean towards Turkish people even though racism from the core itself is wrong.

    I left the Turkey just to earn good money and not to live with close minded, unethical people. Yet when I enter Turkish neighborhood, hell even in city center in Kassel, I feel like I am in the rural area of eastern Turkey. It feels like I cannot escape my faith about not living with tricky, unethical, close minded people.

    Just recenetly I entered a plane to go from Turkey to Germany, quareter of the people did not or partially wearing their mask. And these people warned by others and air attendadnts, but they insisted on not wearing mask. Hell some of them even got aggresive about being warned. And in the end air attendadnts calmed us down, because if they refuse the wear mask flight will be delayed or it can even be cancelled. Do non mask guys knows this? Yes. Are they abusing this? Absuloutely. The guy sitting next to me was a man child who is travelling with his dear mommy, an anti mask guy. I warned him to wear his mask more than 20 times in 3 hours. He said okay and opens his mask fully each time. My wife is pregnant, what if I get it and it was dangerous for my baby?

    They don’t fucking care. They collect their sweet unemployment money which is earned by hard-working people. Some turkish people collecting unemployment money and bring to Turkey to illegally, buys property. They twist to system and get retirement money from both countries. Rather than be ashamed about it, they proudly say how they trick Germany. They speak Turkish in Germany, German in Turkey.

    I am sorry but I am ashamed to say I am Turkish in Germany. The people that came to Germany as workers are bottom of the barrel of the Turkey everybody knows that. Even Germany couldn’t educate them in 60 years.

    Also Syrians in Turkey is doing less damage to Turkey but Turkish people currently extremely and openly racist towards syrians or other foreigners. It feels like a irony for me.

    Anything I explained does not justify any racism against Turkish. But with many obvious reasons are there, I believe someone should critisize himself, before pulling victim card and critisize others.