Republik Repair Denken

Germany Learns to Read

We have to mend the books and repair the histories. Berlin’s street names that still honour colonial crimes must be changed. Our aesthetic education, which alienates Black bodies, must be reshaped. Structural racism in culture and society ‒ anyone who doesn’t know colonial history and doesn’t understand the resulting production its signs suffers from illiteracy. We call for society as a whole to overhaul its telling of history. We demand that, in addition to written documents, the oral histories of our experiences should also be acknowledged. We perceive the diversity of knowledge forms and call for equal knowledge exchange. How can state and social institutions learn to read and recognize Black experiences and ways of being?

Republik Repair has invited Sarah Bergh (Decolonize München), Saraya Gomis (Anti-Discrimination Officer for Schools Governed by the Senate Administration for Education) and Sandrine Mikossé-Aikins (“POC ‒ People of the Comb”) to discuss these points an possibilities for a talk, moderated by Anna Hankings-Evans.