For two hours I converse with my niece Inka in Germany on the phone – wonderful! Have not spoken to her in over a year because of time difference etc. And it’s been 3 years since I last visited, and won’t be able to go this year either, normally I visit every year. Inka is 33 now, married, with a 5-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter in Bad Wildungen near a big lake where they have taken up sailing. She is well situated, earthy, her heart is open, focused on raising her children, doing systemic constellation work for companies at the side. Inka is amazed when I tell her about realities in America, the astronomic level of violence, the extreme lying and distorting of facts, the staggering number of guns and automatic rifles, and most of all the blatant and subtle ongoing racism. She knows about my Memorial Mural, and the re-issue of Bob’s Black Lives, White Lives, from Facebook entries. 30 years ago, when 2-year-old little Inka gets whiny on a stroll through the woods, my husband Bob carries her on his shoulders. Affectionately she keeps calling him “Bock” – this greatly amuses my brother, his wife Ingeborg, and me, as the word has several meanings in German (most basically: male goat).

(From his family album, my brother Matthias pulls for me this 1993 still of Bob & Inka) 

 

Inka is not radical or left leaning. But she gets it when I tell her about this divided America, a country which has, unlike Germany, not honestly dealt with its past. We both remember how I kept asking her what and how she learnt about the Holocaust in school back in her teenage years. I explain that here in some states the teachers cannot bring up Slavery because it could make white kids feel "uncomfortable,”  she laughs and gasps. When I say it’s for real, she says: “But we don’t know those sides of America, we never get to see that in the American movies and TV series that are so popular here.” Yeah, I say, the empire is exporting a cleaned-up version of itself to the world. Germany was lucky, could not do this; up to this very day it is held accountable by the world. Its shadow side always present, not forgotten or wiped away.  

 

At some point I tell to her that I want to stop saying that things are better in Germany. I have been away for 40 years. I am neither American nor German. Would I live there now I’d be aggravated about many things. But for a European, certain things are so extremely extreme in American society and culture: deep-seated violence and racism, combined with denial. It is very painful and appalling on a purely humane level. Not even to mention all the systemic violence. Most of all it is utterly sad and infuriating to witness how people have gotten used to it as if it is normal. The only redemption is that Black people are resisting, persisting, fighting back, thriving, succeeding, and demanding justice and change. 

 

Germany has been changing in the past 75 years, and that is a very good and necessary thing for all. And there still needs to be constant undoing of colonialism, exotification, supremacy. I tell Inka stories of the teachers back then in elementary school who were either Nazis and/or severely damaged by the war, knocking six-year-olds over the head with their wooden hand prosthesis till our ears were ringing, hitting outstretched hands with switches, pulling down pants to whip naked behinds over a bench. I don’t remember pain but the humiliation, whether it was my body or somebody else’s. The violation of dignity. When we violate others, we hurt our own heart and humanity. As Inka listens to her aunt in California, she knows this aunt won’t stop naming what is not in service of dignified life. I listen to her voice and I rejoice in her deep calm goodness. She is thoughtful, and we both laugh easily.

 

Nowadays many Black people become stars in movies, music, sports, and are famous worldwide – the rest of African Americans are for the most part unwelcome, left out. And a highly overqualified Black woman has to endure endless humiliations to be nominated for the Supreme court. When she wins, we all feel part over-joyed and part relieved, but also ashamed & appalled. So much ugliness and blatant racism in 2022 is mind-boggling and is hurting all of us, whether we know it or not. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is celebrated, she will be in action, and go into history, statues of her will remind future generations who was on the wrong & ugly side. 

Columnist Michele L. Norris describes this very well in her piece:  

Judge Jackson’s long journey to the court – and ours 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/09/justice-jackson-racism-supreme-court/