Podcasts of the Month: Racism – Media

Black red blood

ardaudiothek.de

In 1987, Kiomars Javadi was pushed to the ground in a Tübingen supermarket for 18 minutes until he suffocated. His death took twice as long as George Floyd, whose death two years ago caused consternation around the world. The Iranian Javadi was also a victim of racist violence. Unlike Floyd, however, few people know him. The podcast by Cosmo, WDR’s intercultural program, highlights racist or anti-Semitic killings in Germany that have not been officially classified as such. Neither by the investigating authorities nor by the courts. In each of the seven episodes, moderator Marianna Deinyan talks to colleagues who have researched the case. It is personal, for example when the journalist Gilda Sahebi, who herself fled to Tübingen from Iran, tells of a conversation with her uncle: He knew Javadi. Decades after the crimes, relatives are still demanding that the racist motives are finally recognized. One possible reason for this disregard, according to Sué González Hauck from the German Center for Integration and Migration Research: “Structural racism is racism without racists.” But with perpetrators. Clara Meyer

The hunt

wdr.de

School classes and families have one, colleagues and allies in spirit have them too, and of course the AfD parliamentary group too: a Whatsapp group. It’s called a chatter group, and its contents were leaked to the journalists Katja Riedel and Sebastian Pittelkow from WDR and NDR, 40,000 messages. In The hunt, the title alludes to Alexander Gauland’s “We will hunt them”, they make public what is written inside the AfD, in the “digital backroom”, as the podcast puts it – at decisive moments in recent party history and in everyday group life. “Is it so difficult not to talk about the Third Reich for once?” asked the chatter group in spring 2020, when the Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the right-wing AfD wing as extremist. The chat also reveals the banality of interpersonal exchanges, from birthday greetings to MP Joana Cotar’s bullying about her former work as a feng shui consultant. The interviews with figures from the chatter group, which Riedel and Pittelkow insert, are often the most significant. There, for example, Hansjörg Müller explains why he sang the first verse of the “Deutschlandlied” at an election campaign event in 2019: “I decided I’d rather be pushed into the right corner than be called a wimp.” Aurelie von Blazekovic

code switch

npr.org

The New York borough of Queens is one of the most diverse places in the world, so that the classic categories for describing origin and identity are no longer sufficient there. A particularly exciting episode of the US podcast describes how the very heterogeneous coexistence and coexistence reflects on the self-perception of the individual. An Indo-Guyanese talks about his experience at a new school. He was asked, “Who do you identify with, black or white? Latino, Asian?” Indo-Guyanese was not a known option. The man is not alone in this. The US is a nation of several minorities. Most of them are not adequately represented and suffer from structural racism, some of which is openly displayed. code switch offers these minorities a safe space, to tell their stories. The phenomenon of code switching means here to switch between languages ​​and slangs, thereby leaving pigeonholes and being able to discover your own voice. Eve Goldbach

Deso – The rapper who went to IS

funk.net

It explains very little and justifies nothing. But if racism is necessarily mentioned again and again in this podcast, then Denis Cuspert is not exclusively a perpetrator. The Berliner himself had to suffer from racial exclusion for a long time and often. Journalist Azadê Peşmen tells the story of the man who, after (and during) a criminal career, achieved modest fame as a rapper under the name Deso Dogg before morphing into a Salafist preacher and finally pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. Cuspert has called for terrorist attacks in Germany and he took part in the Syrian civil war, in which he died in 2018. Peşmen speaks with Cuspert’s brother, with former companions, with journalists, a psychologist and with constitutional protection officers to make it understandable how a person who was born and socialized in Germany becomes so radicalized that he becomes a terrorist. Which is only possible if someone also becomes an extreme racist who categorically rejects those who think and live differently. Stephen Fisher

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