Natascha Sadr Haghighian charts modes of strategic ignorance and recognition that operate in structural racism.
"We tried to get over this disturbance by learning to suppress the perception of racist structures. This in turn made it difficult to develop a commonality, a conversation about the experience of racism. Languages that were developed to articulate one's own perception, literature, songs—at most they had street credibility in Germany, if they were registered at all. As foreigners, everyone was on their own inside the epistemic bubble of integration. Any form of gathering and assembly was considered a sign of failed integration."
In her text "What I Do Not Recognize Yet, Now at This Very Moment," Natascha Sadr Haghighian grapples with the dialectics of looking in German structural racism by returning to the how's and why's of "not seeing" the NSU (the neo-Nazi organization that was able to carry out racist murders in Germany from 2000 to 2011 without being "found"). The text charts modes of strategic ignorance and recognition that operate in structural racism. Sadr Haghighian's interest in recognition goes back to a longer study on ways of seeing as political acts, in which she tried to detect or develop modes of seeing that make themselves unavailable to dominant or suggested views. "Looking Awry," not looking straightforwardly, became one of these modes of seeing that allow us to pay attention to the fringes, to the events outside of the image that in fact constitute the image. Today, Sadr Haghighian understands these modes of seeing as an embattled negotiation of recognition and ignorance, both willful and conditioned. By attending to this negotiation, life beyond a racist reality might become conceivable.