Seven years of EmpA: a moment of gratitude, but also an opportunity to take a critical look at the structural challenges and the associated frustrations - and to look ahead to future anti-racist work at ASH Berlin. Because no, not everything is done or achieved.
It is over. EmpA - a project for empowerment and anti-racism - has been running for seven years (from 2018 to 2024). ASH Berlin welcomes all students equally, and yet some feel more and others less included. EmpA wanted to make ASH Berlin a bit more of a place for all students, so that students with experience of racism in particular feel more welcome and addressed with their realities and experiences.
EmpA has created an essential space for BIPoC students at ASH Berlin in recent years. As a contact point, it has enabled exchange, empowerment, networking, support and political engagement in an academic environment characterized by hierarchies and structural inequality. In this article, we reflect on our experiences with EmpA, shed light on the challenges we faced and ask ourselves what an ASH Berlin without EmpA would mean.
A central part was the emotional work and costs. We would therefore like to start with a central feeling for us at the end of our teamwork:
Gratitude
We are grateful. For the warmth, love and support and for growing together through the challenges we have faced as a team. The opportunity to work together in a BIPoC team was an empowering and beneficial oasis in a predominantly white and hierarchical institution. Thanks to our different positions and expertise, we learned a lot with and from each other and tried to implement the empowerment approach within the team - sometimes more and sometimes less successfully. It was important to us that we were doing well at work or, if not, that we could share this openly. There was room and a lot of empathy for the traces that a racist, capitalist, sexist and ableist system has left in our bodies and hearts. Whether chronic illnesses, neurodivergence or care tasks, we dealt with them in an appreciative and understanding way and if we didn't manage this well, we learned from it. Without naming it as such, our wellbeing was a central component of our work, knowing that we and our communities are disproportionately exposed to health and mental stress. Power relations are inscribed in our bodies and work on racism leaves its mark. As a team, we have therefore taken the time to engage in conversation, give space to all perspectives and ideas, work through conflicts and try to create a microcosm of equality. This, too, was sometimes better and sometimes less successful. But we have never stopped striving for it and we are grateful for that too; we have happily complemented and strengthened each other, creating a shared resilience in the face of resistance to change. We are convinced that this approach, how we wanted to work together as a team, significantly influenced the empowerment work we did with students.
that we have done with students. It was clear to us that the work should be empowering for everyone involved. The way we do things cannot be thought of separately from the content of the work. Based on the needs of the students and the experiential expertise that was available in the team, we offered empowerment spaces in which we were in contact with each other as equals.
Over the years, there have been writing workshops, reading circles on All about Love, we have immersed ourselves in transformative justice and Afrofuturism, watched films, danced or mourned together, made it easier to start studying and offered spaces to make friends and network. Above all, we listened to and gave space to pain, anger, disappointment and frustration. We are grateful for the trust, the inspiration, the personal insights into discriminatory university structures and the many touching, loving and appreciative encounters.
The professors, staff and, above all, the team from the Department of Intersectional Practice and Transformation, who are trying to develop ASH Berlin in different ways in a power-critical way, were also an irreplaceable backbone. We are grateful for the support of our concerns, the appreciation, the recognition of the emotional labor that this work entails and the common desire and associated efforts to change this university together in the long term. Last but not least, our thanks go to the first EmpA team, who sowed the first seeds for this work and whose tender shoots we were able to harvest and allow to grow further.
Knots - challenges
Growing this EmpA tree, or ideally EmpA forest, was not easy. People with intersectional experiences of racism suffer a disproportionate burden during their studies. Recovering from this in empowerment dreams or finding strategies to deal with it requires additional time and energy resources and in no way compensates for the disadvantage. It would therefore have made sense, for example, to integrate the time and commitment of students who have experienced racism in empowerment spaces into the course of study or to recognize it as a course achievement as a positive measure.
The structural question also arose in the team: how can we break down hierarchies that manifest themselves in pay, status, responsibilities and organizational structures? The constant challenge was to create flat hierarchies within these structures and enable equal cooperation. One tension that fundamentally accompanied EmpA was the challenge of trying to work against the logic of the university as an institution.
Brick Wall - Frustrations
Some of you may be familiar with Sara Ahmed's book On Being Included. Here she describes the work of diversity officers as "banging your head against a brick wall". ASH Berlin's self-image as an equal opportunity university and the decision to name the power relationship at stake (racism) in the title of the officer's position indicates a permeable or even the absence of such a wall. However, despite the discrimination-sensitive mission statements, a well-founded anti-discrimination statute, the innovative establishment of an anti-discrimination officer, a disproportionate number of teachers and students who are critical of power and the facilitation of empowerment spaces for students who have experienced racism, this wall still exists.
It sometimes manifests itself in a more subtle yet violent way: "confusing" racist situations with misunderstandings; prioritizing dialogue as a strategy to shift power relations instead of changing more structural regulations and decision-making powers or redistributing resources; budgetary decisions/priorities; appointing professorships; insisting on discriminatory regulations and practices, speaking up in committees, etc. And again and again the desire to make the fight against racism as comfortable and pleasant as possible for the white majority at the university.
Change must not hurt: a course exclusively for BIPoC is too exclusive, staff development that is critical of power is too strenuous for the administrative apparatus, a reading with an author is unreasonable because of her opinion, etc. What does the call mean in this context: We have to take everyone with us? Who is this "we", who is "everyone" and whose needs have priority? What does the call for patience mean in relation to processes of change and whose patience is being called upon? Are 500 years of colonialist racialization with all its violent consequences on various levels (body, health, access to economic and non-material resources, etc.) not patience enough?
The project was conceived from a white perspective and was never intended to question the system itself, nor its interconnectedness and complicity with discriminatory power relations. Once again, racism is conveniently made the problem of those affected, while the white majority does not have to deal with it. EmpA listens when racism is practiced, but it does not really initiate change, it only tries to absorb it. "Unpleasant questions" are often countered by pointing out how much effort and energy is already being put into combating racism. This is accompanied by indignation about a lack of gratitude. A person affected by racism has a well-paid job to support other people affected by racism and should simply be grateful!
Expectations of gratitude in this context feel presumptuous. We have the right to have the white majority society take care of their racism problem, we have the right to be paid for our professional and experiential expertise and to be paid well. And we have the right to be paid well for our professional and experiential expertise, even or especially in the face of increasing authoritarian right-wing tendencies in the state and society.
The emotional care work for and within a predominantly white institution is quite exhausting. At the same time, we like to recognize active decisions, e.g. to provide space and resources for this work or to enable and initiate processes. But people have to decide again and again to actively do something against racism. Setting up an office once or approving processes and handing over responsibility is not enough and, above all, does not work.
A more structural question is how such offices function in an institution such as a university. Time and again, there were situations in which EmpA was supposed to act as a mediator between BIPoC students/department and the university management, rather than as a partisan mouthpiece for students affected by racism. In these challenging moments, we tried as best we could to maintain our focus on empowering students and ourselves as a team. And again and again, the suspicion arose that this office had the function of buffering the anger, hurt and frustration so that the system could continue to function unquestioningly instead of tackling its causes. How to deal with the challenge that BIPoC perspectives are heard, but there is no real listening? What happens to concerns that are unpleasant for the white majority of university members and especially here the professors? How far can/should we go within the existing structures?
Visions for change
As in many change processes, there is an underlying dichotomy between pragmatic short-term successes and long-term (revolutionary/system-questioning) visions. EmpA has practiced the balancing act of combining both and has often failed to do so, but would still like to argue that change without a vision is not effective. We are tempted to work our way through racist, heteronormative, classist and ableist power relations on a daily basis, to react, to prevent or at least reduce the worst. This effectively prevents or slows down the development of real alternatives.
What if instead we put more energy into creating spaces where we practice developing visions and exercising our muscles of imagination? - Beyond the existing relations of power and violence. This does not mean turning away from critical analysis and confrontation with the latter, but it is an approach that questions whether we can find solutions to the existing problems within the system that reproduces them.
In the long term, it would be desirable for projects and positions such as EmpA or anti-discrimination officers to be superfluous. Universities would be places where different forms of knowledge have an equal place with Western perspectives. They would be places where everyone can simply be, be valued and unquestioningly belong to the university community and learn from and with each other in a respectful and open-minded way.
However, this point in time is far from being reached - on the contrary - which is why the end of EmpA cannot be classified in this way. Without EmpA, important meeting places and spaces, contact points and networking opportunities for BiPoC students will be lost. The beacon function of an empowering project for students who have experienced racism, which has long been unique in Germany, will cease to exist. In addition to the loss of the rooms, it means above all that there is one less critical, questioning voice and the burden of changing the university in a racism-critical way is spread across even fewer shoulders. At the same time, it fits in with the current mainstreaming of right-wing positions and the accusation contained therein that criticism of racism and people affected by racism have (been given) too much space and the ever-increasing authoritarian restriction of certain opinions and positions.
It is an unfortunate and dangerous trend. Under the pretext of tight budgets, the Senate and the federal government are continuously cutting back on key areas for social cohesion, such as education, culture, anti-discrimination work, climate investments, etc. This follows the neoliberal principle of scarcity. In one of the richest countries in the world, savings are being made and, of course, not redistributed towards justice and the well-being of the population. Instead, the military budget in Germany currently comprises as much as the budgets for health, education, family, economic and climate protection, construction and the Foreign Office combined! Budget decisions are politically motivated prioritizations, even if it is often argued to the contrary. The logic of scarcity is passed on to educational institutions by the state due to supposed constraints in order to conceal the political content of decisions. How can we counter this capitalist logic of scarcity of resources?
Adrienne Maree Brown invites us to focus on the actual abundance of resources and how they can be used responsibly and fairly (towards people and the planet). Such an approach would certainly also transform budgeting in the long term - if we try with courage and creativity to keep challenging and exceeding the limits of the power-preserving system. Thinking from a decolonizing perspective: it should not be about getting a bigger piece of the pie, but about fundamentally questioning the shape, size and taste of the pie and baking a new one or many new ones together.
Text: Dr. Aki Krishnamurthy
Since 2020, the EmpA team has consisted of Dr. Aki Krishnamurthy (project manager) and a team of three students (Wefa Bodaghi, Veronica Arias, Jenifa Simon, Duc Vu Manh, Ergün Kayabaş).
References:
Sarah Ahmed (2012): On Being Included Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press
Adrienne Maree Brown (2017): Emergent Strategies. AK Press.
