The woman in this widely shared clip is Mo Asumang, a German television presenter and filmmaker with a Ghanaian father and a German mother. The footage comes from her documentary Die Arier (The Aryans, 2014), and an excerpt was circulated by BBC News under the title "Confronting racism face-to-face." In it she walks up to neo-Nazi demonstrators in Germany, and later to Ku Klux Klan members in the United States, and does something unusual: she does not argue or shout. She asks simple questions and waits for answers.
Who is Mo Asumang?
Monika "Mo" Asumang was born on 13 June 1963 in Kassel, in what was then West Germany, and studied visual communication at the University of Kassel. From 1997 to 2000 she presented the German TV programme Liebe Sünde, which made her one of the first Black women with a regular face on German television. That visibility came at a price: she became a target of racist abuse.
The most frightening example was a song by the neo-Nazi band White Aryan Rebels, "Noten des Hasses," which named her among several public figures in a threatening way. Rather than withdraw, she turned the experience into work. Her first film as director, Roots Germania (2007), explored her own identity as an Afro-German and was nominated for the Grimme Prize, one of Germany's most respected television awards.
What happens in the clip
The excerpt follows her through several encounters. At a far-right demonstration in Germany, she approaches young men with shaved heads and asks what exactly they are protesting about. Some turn away, some tell her to leave, and one calls her a "hybrid" and suggests she go back to Africa. She stays, smiles and keeps asking polite, almost naive questions: who counts as an Aryan, what makes her an enemy, what they would want her to do.
The effect is striking. Slogans that sound confident in a crowd begin to wobble when someone calmly asks the person behind them to explain. Several of the men struggle to give coherent answers. In the American section of the film, a Klan member in robes ends up insisting he is not racist, and the clip closes on warmer moments, including a hug and a friendly exchange with a young skinhead. It also reveals a family secret: the grandmother who raised her, and whom she loved, had worked as a typist for the SS during the Nazi era, something Asumang only learned after her grandmother died.
Why she made The Aryans
Die Arier was produced for the German and French broadcasters ZDF and ARTE and released in 2014. Its starting point is a word that racists use as a badge of identity. Asumang set out to discover what "Aryan" actually means, where the idea came from and why it still attracts followers, and she did it by meeting the people who use it.
Historically, "Aryan" was a term used by nineteenth-century scholars for an ancient language family and the people who spoke it, before racial theorists and then the Nazis turned it into a myth of a superior white race. A film reviewer for the Berliner Morgenpost described her conversations as self-exposing: she lets people reveal the gaps in their own thinking.
She worked without a security escort, accompanied by her camera crew, a choice she described in an article for ARTE's magazine. That decision is part of what makes the film feel so raw.
Why calm questions can work better than shouting
Asumang's method rests on a simple idea. People who hold hateful views often expect hostility, and hostility confirms their story about enemies. A quiet, curious question does not fit the script. It forces a person to explain a belief in their own words, and many find they cannot.
She has said that her goal is to break the cycle of anger, hatred and violence. That does not mean pretending racism is harmless or that every conversation changes a mind. It means refusing to let hate set the tone of the encounter. The clip suggests why: a person who expects an enemy has nothing to push against when the "enemy" stays friendly and curious.
How the film was received
Die Arier was widely praised. It was nominated for the Prix Europa in 2014 and the Grimme Prize in 2015, and it won several honours, including the World Cinema Best Documentary and Audience awards at the Phoenix Film Festival, the Magnolia Award for best documentary director at the Shanghai Television Festival and the German directors' Metropolis prize for documentary in 2014.
In 2016 Asumang published a book about the project, Mo und die Arier: Allein unter Rassisten und Neonazis (Mo and the Aryans: Alone Among Racists and Neo-Nazis). It describes her search for identity and her meetings with neo-Nazis, Pegida supporters, Ku Klux Klan members and users of far-right dating sites, and it reached the Spiegel bestseller list.
What viewers can take from it
- Curiosity is a tool. Asking "what do you mean by that?" is often more revealing than any counter-slogan.
- Safety still comes first. Asumang worked with a film crew and a plan. Confronting an aggressive group alone, without support, is not something to copy. If you are threatened, step away and contact the police or a local support organisation.
- Humanity is not agreement. Being calm and kind toward someone does not endorse their views; it simply refuses to mirror their hostility.
- Family history can be complicated. Her discovery about her grandmother is a reminder that ordinary people took part in the Nazi system, and that facing that history honestly is part of resisting racism today.
The clip is short, but it captures something lasting: the courage to stand in front of people who reject your existence, smile, and ask them to explain themselves.
Sources: Wikipedia: Mo Asumang, Wikipedia (German): Mo Asumang
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These are the actions that change the world, and change hearts. The anger and outrage promoted by a handful, black and white, is not changing the world. In the 1960s, it was not the Black Panthers and riots in the streets that changed our laws; it was the work of people like Martin Luther King, who stood staunchly by his beliefs, but by holding up a model of hope, of love and showed white people something they could love and admire, and the world responded.
ReplyDeleteWe have made great progress, but there are a handful of narrowminded people that still want to live in the racists past. There are still legacies from the outright discrimination that gave black people a poorer education, propagated through generations, as today's kids grow up without the support of well-educated parents who make them do homework and study.
These are the problems we need to fix, but we will not fix them from a state of outrage, but of realistically seeing just what is truly there, seeing what can be fixed and seeing what changes in social policy are needed to continue the progress we have made.
Even recently, we have seen symbols of racial hatred removed from state buildings. This was not done in response to the outrage and riots over Ferguson, which only made things worse. But the outpouring of love to see decent people killed in Charleston and the loving response of family members that forgave, and prayed, not for a white man that took black lives, but prayed to God to reconnect with a man who had lost contact with God.
That accomplished in days that decades of anger and outrage failed to accomplish.
Good for all who can respond as this woman did; good for all who can see this and understand the ways forward. She makes me proud to be a human being, and proud in what the United States really IS trying to accomplish.
These are the actions that change the world, and change hearts. The anger and outrage promoted by a handful, black and white, is not changing the world. In the 1960s, it was not the Black Panthers and riots in the streets that changed our laws; it was the work of people like Martin Luther King, who stood staunchly by his beliefs, but by holding up a model of hope, of love and showed white people something they could love and admire, and the world responded.
ReplyDeleteWe have made great progress, but there are a handful of narrowminded people that still want to live in the racists past. There are still legacies from the outright discrimination that gave black people a poorer education, propagated through generations, as today's kids grow up without the support of well-educated parents who make them do homework and study.
These are the problems we need to fix, but we will not fix them from a state of outrage, but of realistically seeing just what is truly there, seeing what can be fixed and seeing what changes in social policy are needed to continue the progress we have made.
Even recently, we have seen symbols of racial hatred removed from state buildings. This was not done in response to the outrage and riots over Ferguson, which only made things worse. But the outpouring of love to see decent people killed in Charleston and the loving response of family members that forgave, and prayed, not for a white man that took black lives, but prayed to God to reconnect with a man who had lost contact with God.
That accomplished in days that decades of anger and outrage failed to accomplish.
Good for all who can respond as this woman did; good for all who can see this and understand the ways forward. She makes me proud to be a human being, and proud in what the United States really IS trying to accomplish.
Very brave action! You have my respect!
ReplyDelete