France and Germany Urged To Rethink Reluctance To Gather Ethnicity Data
Sibeth Ndiaye, a French government spokeswoman, suggested the inclusion of racial data in a national database could help fight racism. Photograph: Ludovic Marin/EPA
Citizens in Germany and France don’t know how much more likely people of colour are to be stopped and searched by police, to be discriminated against in the workplace and the housing market, or to die of coronavirus.
The two biggest economies in the European Union do not, for historical reasons, collect any demographic data on ethnicity that would highlight such problems.
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However, in the wake of an international debate about systemic racial discrimination triggered by the killing of George Floyd in the US, academics, activists and politicians say a rethink is needed for the countries to tackle their own injustices.
In France, Sibeth Ndiaye, a government spokeswoman, has ruffled feathers by suggesting that including racial data in the national database could allow policymakers to “measure and look at reality as it is”, while in Germany a new independent census initiative is being launched at the end of the month to document the realities of life for people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds.
Unlike in the UK, where census forms allow participants to identify themselves as “White, Mixed/Multiple ethnic groups, Asian/Asian British, Black/African /Caribbean/Black British, Other ethnic group”, statistical surveys in Germany only offer the category “person with a migrant background” – a fudge partly borne in 2015 out of German sensitivity around racial classification and the word Rasse, which in German also refers to the breed of animals.
“Unlike in English, where ‘race’ is now increasingly used to refer to a social construct, the German word Rasse still denotes biological essence,” said Daniel Gyamerah, the chair of Each One Teach One, a Berlin-based community empowerment project.
Last Sunday, about 8,000 people formed a socially distanced human chain in Berlin to protest against racism and social injustice, but with a lack of statistics about the experience of people of colour in Germany, much of the debate around institutional racism has remained vague.
“When it comes to statistics shedding light on racism, Germany is stuck in the stone ages,” said Gyamerah. “We simply don’t have the data. And that makes it easy for those here who argue that institutional racism is a problem unique to the US or the UK.”
“Drawing up statistics based on the population’s migrant background is not enough,” said Karamba Diaby, one of only two black MPs in the current German parliament. “The current statistical surveys tell us very little about whether a certain group is being discriminated against or not.”
One problem is that the “migrant background” category does not include Germans whose parents or even grandparents have been born in Germany, but who may still experience discrimination on the basis of their skin colour or name.
“You have white Germans with an Austrian migrant background, who don’t experience discrimination in the housing or labour market, for example,” Diaby said. “On the other hand you have black Germans who may have no migration background at all but will still experience discrimination. We need to start collecting anti-discrimination data.”
According to a new report by the German Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency (ADS), the number of discrimination cases on the basis of race increased by 10% in 2019, though the actual figures are likely to be much higher than the 1,176 instances listed.
The ADS only records self-reported discrimination cases, and given that, unlike some of its European counterparts, Germany’s equality body does not have the right to bring these cases to court or feed back into lawmaking processes, the incentive for victims to seek it out is relatively low.
One attempt to fill in the gaping holes in Germany’s statistical self-portrait is Afrozensus, an online survey launching at the end of June that will try to paint a more representative picture of racial discrimination by trying to reach participants through community groups and church organisations.
The situation is similar to neighbouring France, where the country collects no census or other official data on the race or ethnicity of its citizens. Even French anti-racism groups such as SOS Racisme have argued against ethnicity data, saying it would be not only anti-constitutional but encourage prejudice.
France sees itself as “colour-blind” and has often legislated to that effect, most recently in 1978. Broad resistance to racial data remains high on the grounds that it would contravene secular republican principles and recall Vichy-era identity documents.
Surveys may ask related questions if specifically authorised to do so, but an attempt by the former president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to allow the government to identify inequalities and adjust public policy by “measuring diversity” was defeated. Similar calls by the CRAN, an umbrella organisation of black community groups, have failed to gain traction in the past.
This week’s intervention by Ndiaye, however, may signal a change in the debate. Ndiaye, who was born in Senegal, argued in a letter in Le Monde that France should look more closely at “how well people of colour are represented”, later telling the radio station France Inter that racial data could help fight “subtle racism”.
Such statistics could help “reconcile two strands of our society that are forever at odds”, she said. “Those who tell you: ‘People of colour have access to nothing,’ and those who tell you: ‘The problem does not exist.’”
However, two senior government ministers swiftly voiced their opposition to the proposal and an adviser to Emmanuel Macron said the president did not wish to revisit the issue “at this time”. Macron was said to “support concrete actions to fight discrimination rather than a new debate on a subject unlikely to yield rapid and visible results”.
In Germany, as in France, few have called for a radical reform of data collection following the British model. The Nazis’ use of population registers in organising the Holocaust has made modern Germany especially mindful of what can happen when data, even that gathered with good intentions, falls into the wrong hands.
While the Afrozensus project receives funding from the state through the ADS equality body, the data it collects will remain on its own encrypted servers, paying heed to privacy concerns.
“There are good reasons why the British approach to gathering data around ethnicity couldn’t be transplanted directly to Germany,” said Joshua Kwesi Aikins, a political scientist at Kassel University who is behind the initiative. “But the experience that the UK has had with public sector equality duty is highly relevant – it could be a guiding principle.”