When my student asked Was ist Black auf Deutsch: Deconstructing racial terminology in language courses

Abstract

There is a tendency to use colour terminology to stratify certain sociocultural communities. Colours map inexactly onto skin tones and have become identity markers that language users apply to themselves and to others. In my home culture and in my first language, we often use the term race for these colour appellations. When asked about my race, I respond with White; I have friends who would respond with Black. Yet colour terms (e.g., black and white) and racial identities (e.g., Black and White) hold different meanings for different people, even within a single language. Our understandings of colours and identities come from aggregated chance encounters with contexts, constructed across collective and personal experiences. This paper has emerged from a single line of questioning, one posed by a student in my German-language classroom, and the challenge I faced in answering. “Was ist Black auf Deutsch?” How does one effectively translate this everyday word? This paper is the multi-year musing galvanised by that class period and the various translations one could consider. I ultimately support an honest, contextualised, critical approach and pose a series of questions to guide instructor colleagues towards their own teaching of racial- and colour-based language.

Keywords: language learning, language teaching, race, colour, German