Whiteness denies its own potential to be the Other (Yancy 2004). Black people in Germany constantly have to explain their Germanness (Oguntoye et al. 1986) while white Germans are the norm. Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests momentarily reverse this situation: Protest marches produce spaces with Black protagonists. "SILENCE AT THE FRONT. Remember you are there as an ally and to support. At a BLM Demo the only voices should be Black voices" (BLMB 2020). White people are produced as Others – but as potentially allied Others – by the BLM protest apparatus (Barad 2007). If they want to voice their views beyond showing up, they have to form word-body-assemblages by carrying placards. I am here particularly interested in one such placard with the words: I understand that I will never understand but I stand with you. I get in touch with it through interviews I conducted with Black and white Germans and through my subsequent participant observation at the 2021 BLM protest in Berlin, where I myself then brought a placard with these words along. Drawing on theoretical resources from racio- and sociolinguistics – the notion of spatial repertoires (Canagarajah 2018) and the listening subject (Rosa & Flores 2017) – and Barad's concept of apparatuses, I contemplate the potential of encountering each other as Others. Aided by Levinas' notion of the infinite and unknowable Otherness of the other (Wright et al. 1988), mattering-forth (Povinelli et al. 2021) in I understand that I will never understand but I stand with you, I ask whether racialized Othering from both sides can work as a potentially equalizing force helping to produce a "context wherein the black voice is heard and is able to enter into a space of equally respectful discursive exchange and mutual influence" (Yancy 2004: 14).
References
Barad, Karen M. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
BLMB. 2020. Things To Consider If You Are Joining A Demo As A Non-Black Person. https://www.blacklivesmatterberlin.de/things-to-consider-if-you-are-joining-a-demo-as-a-non-black-person/. (25 September, 2021.)
Canagarajah, Suresh. 2018. Translingual practice as spatial repertoires: Expanding the paradigm beyond structuralist orientations. Applied Linguistics 39(1). 31–54.
Oguntoye, Katharina, May Ayim, Dagmar Schultz & Audre Lorde (eds.). 1986. Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte. Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag.
Povinelli, Elizabeth, Daniela Gandorfer & Zulaikha Ayub. 2021. Mattering-Forth: Thinking-With Karrabing. Theory & Event 24(1). 294–323.
Rosa, Jonathan & Nelson Flores. 2017. Unsettling lace and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society 46(5). 621–647.
Wright, T., P. Hughes & A. Ainley. 1988. The Paradox of Morality: An interview with Emmanuel Levinas. In R. Bernasconi & D. Wood (eds.), The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, 168–180. London: Routledge.
Yancy, George. 2004. Fragments of a Social Ontology of Whiteness. In George Yancy (ed.), What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, 1–24. New York: Routledge.
