CIJ’s Emilia Roig on shattering false notions of a Europe beyond racism

Emilia Roig (she/they) is the founder and director of the Center for Intersectional Justice (CIJ), a nonprofit based in Berlin, Germany working to combat intersecting forms of structural inequality and discrimination in Europe. The Democracy and Belonging Forum’s Evan Yoshimoto (he/they) met with Emilia to discuss her recently published book, “Why We Matter,” which exposes patterns of systemic oppression and calls for radical solidarity in Europe.

You recently released your book, Why We Matter, which you said is “neither a question nor a justification or an explanation. It’s a statement. This book comes from my heart.” What declaration are you making? Who is “we” and why did you feel a statement was needed to be made about “why we matter”?

I would say it's a statement because we are not asking for permission to matter. This statement is a departure from the mainstream discourse on discrimination and oppression that mostly focuses on the disadvantages and the stuck situation in which a lot of people of color and other marginalized groups are finding themselves in. Instead, it's about taking up space and divesting from the hierarchy that has placed us below. And that's a very liberating move to make because we're not waiting for those societal structures to change, we're just changing ourselves and it is a major catalyst for this liberation that I am talking about in the book. The “we” here is basically every person who feels included in that we, in the sense that they experience oppression through one or several axes of their identity. I want this to be an inclusive we.

In the book description, it says that you discuss “How white people can see the reality of black people? Male Muslims that of white women? And white women those of male Muslims?” Why should those groups “see the reality” of each other? Why is that important for belonging? What does it mean to “see the reality” of someone else’s experience?

It's important to see the reality of groups that are deviating from the superior norm, which includes white people, cis-gender people, cis-gender men, non-disabled people, straight people, middle and upper-class people, among others. With all those people, the world is made according to their bodies and it is modeled on their experiences. Most of the stories that we have seen in movies or in books are coming from the perspective existing within the superior norm. That's why everybody else on earth is trained to feel empathy for them and put themselves into their shoes.

But this empathy training has not been happening towards groups that do not belong to that norm. Training this empathy is absolutely necessary in order to decenter the superior norm, which is an illusion and a construct but, of course, at the same time powerful and deadly. It is deadly because it creates the line of humanity, according to which people are going to be better or worse off, have access rights to resources, and be given space to use their voice. Empathy is really at the core of this discussion, because empathy means being able to connect and to extend yourself to another person. This book can allow us to see the reality of other people who've been constructed as inferior and as abnormal.

The book is originally written in German, but I see that it will be soon translated into French and English. Why did you write the book in German first? What do you hope a German audience will take from this book? And what might non-German audiences gain or learn?

I got the publication offer to write the book in German and I basically had no choice. At first it was counterintuitive for me, but I realized that it made absolute total sense for me to write it in German, because it is a language that is in my heritage. This is something that my family ignored for a very long time, because we didn't know that my family was German. We thought that our language was Polish because my family is partly Ashkenazi Jewish. We discovered later that they were actually from Germany because of the border changes. So I feel like there was some healing to be done when writing the book. At the same time, there's so much that I can tell to a German audience, because I’m less triggering than a Turkish person, for example, who would have been born and socialized here. Which is a sort of privilege that I have in Germany and that I don't have in France.

For a French audience, my expectations are much higher, because there is so much hurt and deeply seated racism that I have experienced in France due to the fact that I was socialized there. So my hopes for a French audience are higher, and at the same time, I know that the resistance will be stronger.

A perspective an audience from the US could gain from the book is the demystification of Europe. There is a lot of idealization of Europe when it comes to racism and social inequalities, and these are based on false assumptions. Europe is doing better in terms of some social policies and maternity leave, and the justice system is a little bit better, but it's not great either. So I think it can break the idea of a Europe that overcame racism after World War II.

And it can also bring to attention the ways in which these systems are global systems of oppression. It can establish parallels between what's going on in North America and what's going on in Europe, for that matter. Of course I approach the discussions from my perspective, which is the perspective of a French, queer, person of color with Jewish roots living in Germany and who has been here for a very long time. But systems of oppression are global systems. A person from India or from Senegal can take things from the book, even if the materialization of oppression in these regions is very different. And in the same way, when I read Arundhati Roy, for example, there's so much I can take from her work even if it's written from her perspective.

The last time you met with OBI for our Who Belongs? podcast, you mentioned that one of the purposes of the CIJ was to help create a racial justice framework in Europe. What does this European framework look like right now? Do you consider this book an important step to help to build this European racial justice framework?

It's definitely a contribution, like other books that were written in the field. After George Floyd, there was a shift in the discourse. All of a sudden, people started speaking more about state racist violence against Black populations here in Europe. There was a revival of the Black community's demands and perspectives on racism which had been historically overlooked. And so, yes, the book is contributing to that by articulating white supremacy in Europe, which is what the racial justice lens in Europe needs, among other things. I insist on saying that white supremacy is a system that is very well and alive in Europe and that it shouldn't be equated with neo-Nazism. It's more like an organizing principle of our economy, of our labor market, of our cultural field, and of our politics.

How do you think this book can be used within Europe (and globally) to help create societies in which all belong?

We make belonging sound like it's a subjective thing many times. It's like okay, do you feel like you belong? And it’s of course something we need to feel, but it needs to be more than that. We need to move beyond the subjective frame and really understand that belonging is about being recognized and being seen. You don't need to belong to a group of friends to be respected. It's more about having humanity being recognized.

But I also speak to this concept of humanity and what it means, because it's one of the lines that have been used to dehumanize people. This dehumanizing means that we also consider non-human lives as disposable and unimportant, and that's why I am also speaking about speciesism in the book. I do that in the prologue and in the epilogue because I didn't think that Germany was ready for a whole chapter, but I wanted to open up this perspective. This is also closing the circle with climate injustice. There is climate injustice and there is the climate crisis, because we consider that non-human lives and particles are not as valuable as human lives and that's a whole hierarchy that needs to be reshuffled and put in question.

A lot of people are ready to engage with this, but there's still a deeply seated belief on separating ourselves from animals, especially from people who have been historically dehumanized. And that's the same with all oppressed groups. The more oppressed you are, the more likely you are going to be rejecting this idea that we need to take on animals, plants, and nature into this framing and into this hierarchy. I’m speaking about this because it's really constitutive of the global social hierarchy, that is justifying genocide through the belief that “if it's not human, you can kill it.” Some people are still considered to be non-human, and that's why they are killed.

Throughout the book, you include stories of you and your family’s history with different intersecting forms of oppression, including “where racism and Black Pride, trauma and Auschwitz, homophobia and queerness, patriarchy and feminism collide.” Why was this history important for you to include?

It was important because we need to stop considering oppression as something that is detached from us. We are oppression- it lives through us and we uphold it. It’s not possible to consider oppression as something that can be told in a detached, dry, or cold way. And so I brought my own perspective because I want people to relate. I want people to be able to connect on an emotional level. It's important to feel oppression, so I wanted to touch people. I wanted them to feel it with my own personal and familial history and I think this is what we need more of.

Cover image credit to Mohamed Badarne.