When racism is hard to name

It was early afternoon in July 2020 when we called the hospital for the second time in an hour. It was the height of the Covid-19 pandemic: masks and safety measures had made the daunting experience of becoming a first-time parent even more isolating.

Earlier that day, a young voice had answered the phone at the maternity clinic at Stuttgart Hospital. There were enough beds, she said. Since this was our first child, the contractions could take time. We should try to stay calm, keep busy, and see how things develop. "Do some laundry or ironing and keep yourself busy," she suggested.

We felt relieved. My wife tried to follow that advice. But within three-quarters of an hour, the contractions intensified. By around 13:30, we called again. The same voice answered. This time, after asking about the frequency of the contractions, she agreed that we could come in. Then she moved on to the formalities. She asked for my wife’s details.

My wife was raised in Germany and went to school here. Unlike my thick, broken, grammatically incorrect German, there is nothing in her voice that marks her as foreign. She gave her name: " …Ahmad". There was a pause on the other side, brief, but noticeable.

"I’m sorry," the voice said, her tone flat. "We don’t have the capacity right now." My wife, confused, replied, "but less than an hour ago, you said there were enough beds." "But we don’t have them now," the voice insisted, then hung up.

For a moment, we just looked at each other. There was no time to process what had happened. We gathered the bags my wife had prepared and headed to the Robert Bosch Krankenhaus, a different hospital across the city. The contractions were getting stronger. Time was suddenly in short supply, and the seconds at the traffic light felt like hours. While we waited at the red light, my wife called the hospital, and the receptionist on the other end of the phone welcomed us.

When we arrived there, I dropped my wife off and rushed to park the car. By the time I returned, my wife was already in the delivery room.

At exactly 15:30, my first son was born.

In the days and months that followed, when everything had settled, we returned to that moment. We tried to make sense of it.

Maybe the situation had changed in those few minutes. Maybe there really were no beds available. We went over the sequence again and again, testing it against more reasonable explanations.

But the pause stayed with us. We were left with a question that was both simple and impossible to answer: Was this racism? 

The hierarchy of suffering

I have often discussed such incidents with other Afghans. Our conclusion is almost always the same: we can live with such things; they are minor compared to the absence of rights in our homeland.

There is a tragic logic to this. It is difficult to weigh a dismissive tone or a closed door against the systemic violence and instability that many have left behind. In that scale of suffering, these microaggressions that recur in German society are small.

But this reasoning comes at a cost. It shifts attention away from such experiences and creates a hierarchy where only the most visible injustices are considered valid.

More than half of those who experience discrimination in Germany never report it. Not because nothing happened, but because it can’t be proven.

Although my wife says she has never faced discrimination in the more than twenty years she has lived in Germany, we still debate the incident.

What made the question difficult was not only what happened, but how it happened. There were no insults or explicit refusals, nothing overt. Only a shift in tone, a withdrawal of access, and a door closed without explanation.

But such ambiguous moments do not exist in isolation. Exclusionary attitudes have gained political visibility, including through the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). According to the Deutschlandtrend poll, support for the party reached a record high in May, putting it ahead of all the other parties. In this political climate, it becomes harder to interpret tense everyday moments.

Years earlier, in the London Underground, I witnessed a woman shouting at a young South Asian man, telling him to "go back to India". Here the racist hostility was direct and unambiguous.

But in our case, uncertainty was built into the experience. It made the moment harder to explain, and easier to dismiss, even to ourselves. In such interactions, the responsibility shifts to the person experiencing it: To question it is to risk being seen as overly sensitive. To accept it is to be left with doubt.

Systems are designed to respond to clear violations

In Germany, the General Equal Treatment Act (AGG) has been in force for 20 years, prohibiting discrimination based on most outward characteristics. Yet cases like this rarely reach the law. Not because they don’t matter, but because they are almost impossible to prove and difficult to translate into the language of institutions. Systems are designed to respond to clear violations, not to hesitations, tones, or pauses. What cannot be clearly named is often left unaddressed.

And yet, it is precisely in these moments that a different kind of boundary becomes visible. Not one that is openly declared, but one that is quietly enforced. It does not exclude people in absolute terms, but it introduces doubt, delay, and distance. It signals, without stating, that being an equal part of society is conditional.

These moments of hesitation tell us about how racism is experienced today. Not always through open hostility, but through moments so small they can be denied—and so precise they are never forgotten.