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huh. maybe I was being too light on Germany in that one.

it's hard to find data on xenophobia because of the performative liberal values that mask it, and the mask is only being let down recently—Mathew Creighton has a 2023 article on hidden xenophobia on Nature, but it's paywalled so I don't know what it says.

but like, the way xenophobia traditionally manifests here is that the bank mysteriously reject your account at the step when they see your papers, that somehow your university teacher consistently gives more attention to your resident colleagues, that somehow the German with less qualifications got the job where the interview went swimmingly up until you mentioned you don't have citizenship, that people gasp in horror at your German being imperfect after years in the country and demand to know why, that train inspectors zone in on you to demand documents and pretend to not understand English before talking in English to their colleague, that your advisor chides at you like "you never said you would try to immigrate your ~family~", that no one says even good evening for you at a social gathering and only ever respond with single words, that when you smile you're told you're being creepy and deceptive and when you cry you're told you're being intimidating and inconsiderate, and when you point out the pressure to assimilate you get accused of pulling the immigrant card, manipulating people through guilt, or an overactive imagination, or "if that's your culture then your culture is problematic and should be eliminated."

you know. that kind of thing.

it's only recently that you get stuff like people yelling you at the tram to go back home, or AfD youth making deportation jokes at your kids in school, or random people you know for years saying things like "I'm not against immigration but all these Muslims...", or progressive people you've known for years cheering for the eradication of Palestinian people with the exact same colonialist white burden discourse you studied in the history of your own colonisation, or blaming immigrants for the fact that white Germans are voting for Nazis, or, well, Nazis bashing my head with a metal bat. in many ways it's kind of a relief. at least they can't gaslight you into pretending the damn place isn't full of Nazis everywhere. hard to doubt my experiences when my forehead scar is still visible.

and even then—even after being at the receiving end of systemic, pervasive and relentless xenophobia for seven years—I'm *still* taken aback to see these numbers on anti-Black racism. I know, in abstract, that PoC and MENA get routinely shouted at on the streets and otherised even when they're native citizens. but white privilege still blocks me from seeing just how bad it's going.

And these numbers are from october 2023. I am going to make the understatement of the century in the next sentence: Germany has gotten a lot worse since, very specifically, October 2023.

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