Until the Roots Are Pulled Up. Pt. II: Germany
At twenty-one, I was young and almost completely inexperienced in living among white people when I first came to Germany. At that time, D.C., in the spaces where I moved and lived, was majority Black. I arrived with my equally inexperienced German husband, who had worked as an officer at the German embassy and had never had a Black partner before me. We moved into a small rural spa town and lived in an officers’ compound. I was the only Black person there. The attention was immediate and relentless. People stared. Cars slowed down or stopped. Strangers touched me. My every movement seemed to be watched and judged, as though I had entered not a neighbourhood, but an exhibition. I had to learn very quickly how to integrate, how to read the room, and how to make myself understandable and acceptable. But that effort came at a cost. Within a year, my marriage was over, and I found myself alone again.
I decided to try my luck at a small theatre near Bonn. I was immediately seen as something unusual, a welcome exotic, and that opened doors. I received my first engagements quickly. But being welcomed as exotic also meant being treated as one. I was propositioned, patronised, and expected to be grateful. Directors and colleagues wanted the difference I brought, but only on their terms. I was sometimes told to play “less Black,” while at the same time being asked to appear more sexual. The contradiction was obvious even then. They wanted Blackness as flavour, movement, body, and spectacle, but not as self-definition, dignity, or control. In one production, I was asked to pretend to breastfeed a baby with my breasts exposed. I refused. Instead, I created a commercial-style skit of my own. The idea was accepted reluctantly, but it received standing ovations every night. That experience taught me something important: refusal did not have to mean disappearance. I could say no and still create something powerful enough that the audience could not ignore it. At another well-known theatre, I was told to perform wearing only a pair of bikini bottoms. I went to the make-up room and asked for body paint instead. Metallic blue. They agreed. Again, I found a way to work within the production without allowing them full ownership of my body.
After the Wall came down, I performed in several musicals in the former East Germany. In one theatre, the women in the wardrobe department refused to dress me until I complained. At theatre parties, other actors would sometimes gather around me and command me to dance, then try, unsuccessfully, to copy my movements. They wanted access to the rhythm, the body, and the energy, but not necessarily to me as an equal colleague. The same thing happened after performances at galas and jazz clubs. People would approach me, touch or stroke me without permission, and ask where I “originally” came from. Even after they had watched me perform, listened to my voice, and applauded me, they still treated me as something foreign that had to be explained. The stage gave me work, freedom, and a life I had fought hard to build. But it also showed me how easily admiration can live beside dehumanisation. I could be celebrated under the lights and still be reduced to a body, a fantasy, or a question mark once I stepped offstage. The sexual approaches and expectations of some directors often left me angry and dejected.
Later, things shifted. For the past sixteen years, I have taken everything I learned and brought it into companies and lecture halls. I completed training courses, taught English to corporate employees, and began researching and lecturing on Black studies, colonial history, and whiteness. Suddenly, the world had all these new, fancy words for things I had been experiencing for decades: “whitesplaining,” “white fragility,” and “colorism.” It was good to have names for them, but my historical research reminded me of the deeper truth. These behaviours are not simply bad manners or psychological quirks. They are weapons. They were created and refined over centuries to justify stealing land from Indigenous people, including my Piscataway ancestors, and to justify the enslavement of my Black ancestors.
Whitesplaining takes authority away from the person who has lived the experience and returns it to the white person who believes they have the right to define it. White fragility shifts attention away from the harm that has been done and places it upon the discomfort of the person being confronted. Colorism divides people who have already been wounded by racism and rewards those who stand closest to whiteness. Tribalism turns difference into suspicion and prevents people with common interests from recognising one another as allies. Each of these behaviours protects an existing hierarchy. They silence, distract, divide, and exhaust those who challenge it.
I have encountered these weapons in institutions, in the theatre, in classrooms, in political spaces, and inside intimate relationships. Sometimes they appeared as open hostility. More often, they came disguised as concern, correction, curiosity, or innocence. I was told that I had misunderstood what had happened, that I was being too sensitive, too angry, or too political. The person who had caused the harm then became the injured one, while I was expected to explain myself calmly, comfort them, and make the situation bearable. The purpose was not always conscious, but the effect was the same: I was pushed back into silence, and the existing balance of power remained untouched.
The deepest test of my worldview, though, did not happen in a classroom or on a stage. It happened at home, raising my two biracial sons. Watching my boys grow into men in Germany showed me that the world is still obsessed with sorting people out. They grew up in a middle-class home with their father, a mechanical engineer who had escaped from East Germany, and with a mother who taught them to be proud of who they were. Yet for many years, they were the only children of colour in their schools. They had to listen to racist jokes, endure the assumptions of teachers who decided too quickly that they were not intelligent enough for the Gymnasium, and experience being stopped and searched for drugs as teenagers. Their achievements did not protect them from being judged through the colour of their skin. Before they were recognised as individuals, they were often treated as categories. But they grew into men who became visible and respected figures in their community. My youngest son became the owner of a hip-hop shop. My oldest earned a doctorate in computer science and now works at a renowned university. I taught them to be proud of being biracial Germans and never to allow other people’s limited ideas to define them. I also taught them to treat others as they themselves wished to be treated, with respect, fairness, and dignity. It is a lesson they have carried with them into adulthood and have never forgotten.
This struggle also entered my intimate relationships. Living with white German partners meant confronting not only personal differences, but the deeper inheritance of colonial thinking: the need to define, correct, explain, and control while still remaining innocent. Their assumption of superiority often left me depressed, which I tried to hide through humour and by making myself even more desirable. In those relationships, I had to fight to remain visible as a full Black woman, not as an idea, a projection, a cultural lesson, or a problem to be managed. At first, the shrinking did not always look like domination. It could sound like advice, concern, correction, or an attempt to keep the peace. My words were questioned, my reactions examined, and the hurt I felt at colonial projections, macho expectations, and the disregard of my cultural experience was treated as more troubling than the behaviour that had caused it. I was expected to explain racism without making anyone feel accused, to speak about pain without becoming too emotional, and to accept silence as though it were neutrality.
I was also expected to accept patriarchal standards while neglecting my own values, needs, and understanding of equality. I was expected to adjust, to compromise, and to make room, while the standards of the men I loved were treated as normal, reasonable, and beyond question. When I resisted, I was often made to feel difficult, ungrateful, or too demanding. Over time, I learned how easily I could begin to make myself smaller in order to preserve a relationship. I spoke more carefully, allowing diplomacy to compromise honesty. I postponed difficult conversations. I doubted what I had seen and heard. I measured my pain against the comfort of the person who had caused it and against the threat to my own comfort and financial security. I became less demanding, less outspoken, and less visible, while still being told that I was too much.
As a Black woman, that shrinking carried another weight. I was not only fighting to be loved as a woman, but to be recognised as a whole person whose history, anger, hurt, intelligence, culture, and boundaries were not threats. My Blackness could be admired when it was entertaining, sensual, spiritual, or educational, but resisted when it required accountability and respect for the life I had lived. That is where white supremacy becomes more than a political structure. It becomes a habit inside love, language, silence, and power. I saw it in who was believed, who was allowed to be angry or hurt, who had to remain calm, whose version of events became the truth, and who was always expected to give in so that the relationship could continue.
My practice as a Tibetan Buddhist has taught me the importance of compassion, but it has also taught me that compassion must include compassion for myself. It does not mean accepting harm without speaking, pretending that injustice has not occurred, or allowing another person to avoid responsibility. I try to recognise the suffering behind people’s actions, but understanding why someone causes harm does not require me to remain where that harm continues. Nonviolence does not mean silence, and forgiveness does not mean surrendering my dignity. Buddhism has also taught me to observe my fear and pain without allowing them to become the whole of who I am. Through meditation, I learned to return to myself, to listen beneath the confusion, and to recognise when I was disappearing again. I began to understand that setting a boundary could also be an act of compassion because it stopped me from participating in my own diminishment and stopped another person from believing that their behaviour had no consequences. I learned to recognise and name the mental poisons of hatred, greed, envy, and ignorance.
I know now that love that requires me to disappear is not love. A relationship cannot be equal when I am continually required to explain my humanity while the other person treats their intentions as more important than the harm they have caused. Refusing to shrink became part of both my resistance and my spiritual practice. It meant recovering my voice, trusting what I knew, and no longer believing that I had to remain in pain in order to prove that I loved someone.
I have seen corporations put on a performance of diversity while leaving the same people in control. The language changes, the photographs become more colourful, and the public statements sound more progressive, but the power has not shifted. A centuries-old structural system cannot be dismantled simply by asking people to be nicer or to use better words. We have to confront the hunger for dominance and the control of people, land, labour, and resources that created these systems in the first place.
This is also what drives my activism. I believe in tiny acts of resistance: speaking when silence is expected, writing what others would rather leave unnamed, organising, teaching, performing, showing up, and refusing to make myself smaller. I have learned that resistance is not always dramatic. Sometimes it is simply the moment when I decide that I will not be moved, silenced, corrected, or frightened back into a place that has already caused me harm.
My writing about shrinking and trauma is part of that resistance. Writing has helped me return to experiences I had pushed away, name what happened, and bring certain parts of my life to a close. It has also shown me that shrinking does not happen only inside abusive relationships. Women are taught to shrink inside families, workplaces, churches, political movements, and entire cultures. We are told to soften our voices, doubt our instincts, tolerate disrespect, and be grateful for whatever space we are allowed to occupy.
As I watch right-wing movements growing stronger, I recognise the same old hunger for obedience and control. I see the glorification of patriarchy, the attacks on women’s bodies and freedom, the demonising of Black people, migrants, trans people, and anyone who refuses to fit into a narrow idea of who belongs. I see political power being built by turning vulnerable people into threats and by promising safety to some through the removal of rights from others. Women are told that control is protection, even while they are minimised, exploited, and abused. Black people are told that protest is danger. Trans people are told that their very existence is a threat. I know what it means to be expected to remain silent so that other people can continue calling oppression the natural order.
At this point in my life, I will not allow any movement, relationship, or patriarchal system to push me back into a shrinking mode. I will not abandon myself again in order to make someone else comfortable. And I will continue to speak so that other women can recognise when they are being asked to disappear.
Pulling up the roots means confronting white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, colorism, and tribalism, but it also means recognising how deeply they have entered our homes, our relationships, our language, and our understanding of love. The roots are not only beneath institutions. They are also inside the behaviour we excuse and the silences we protect. Until we are willing to confront them there, the weeds will keep growing back.
