Di. 03.02.2026, 18:15 Uhr, E312
Legend has it that when Charles W. Mills asked Jürgen Habermas why he did not work on race, Habermas replied: “Because I’m not a Nazi?” The talk argues that this exchange reflects sociolinguistic variation in how morally charged terms travel across languages: while “Rasse” in German is widely heard as morally tainted, “race” in the United States is an ordinary term for analysis, critique, and even solidarity.
On the account I will propose, what unsettles many German speakers is less the concept than the kind of speaker “Rasse”is taken to signal and the worldview attributed to its use. Building on work on slurs, I argue that race terms can convey speaker-directed metadata despite lacking derogatory lexical meaning and, against semantic accounts that treat “Rasse” as encoding racialist commitments, trace cross-linguistic differences to expectations about typical users.
A series of experiments shows that Germans and U.S. Americans draw sharply opposed inferences about a speaker’s political and moral commitments even where existential presuppositions are suspended – suggesting that social rather than semantic meaning drives these judgements. This helps explain the broader cross-linguistic divergence in race talk exemplified by the Mills–Habermas exchange, driven by German Angst over “Rasse” and the urge to disaffiliate from its presumed users.
[Plakat]





