Identities

Global Studies in Culture and Power

ISSN: 1070-289X (Print) 1547-3384 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gide20

Disadvantaged, but morally superior: ethnic

boundary making strategies of second-generation
male Turkish immigrant youth in Germany

Çetin Çelik

To cite this article: Çetin Çelik (2018) Disadvantaged, but morally superior: ethnic boundary
making strategies of second-generation male Turkish immigrant youth in Germany, Identities, 25:6,
705-723, DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2017.1305218

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2017.1305218

Published online: 22 Mar 2017.

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IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER
2018, VOL. 25, NO. 6, 705–723
https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2017.1305218

Disadvantaged, but morally superior: ethnic

boundary making strategies of second-generation
male Turkish immigrant youth in Germany
Çetin Çelik
Department of Sociology, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey

ABSTRACT
In this study of minority groups, destigmatization strategies are revealed when
it comes to ethnic stratification, socio-economic segregation and the possible
courses of second-generation immigrants’ adaptation. Although Germany –
with its restrictive citizenship policies, exclusionary public discourses and
socio-economic segregation – is characterized by robust ethnic boundaries,
the destigmatization strategies of its minorities have been ignored so far.
Using a case study of Turkish second-generation immigrant youth in
Germany, this article aims to fill this gap in the literature. My findings illustrate
that this group of youth mainly assert the moral inferiority of the dominant
group through normative inversion, while a few of them appropriate equalizing
strategies such as universalizing and contingent detachment. I argue that the
reason for different destigmatization strategies can be explained by different
degrees of exposure to ethnic boundaries, due to biographical scripts and
individual resources. My findings empirically substantiate Lamont’s and
Wimmer’s theoretical arguments within the understudied German context.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 19 January 2016; Accepted 8 March 2017

KEYWORDS Ethnic boundaries; Germany; Turkish second-generation immigrants; destigmatization;

transvaluation; normative inversion

1. Introduction
Currently, thousands are gathering in major German cities under the
umbrella of the Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West
(PEGIDA) movement. The PEGIDA manifesto focuses on the preservation of
‘Judeo-Christian Western culture’ against the rise of ‘radicalism’ and ‘parallel
societies’ (Söhler 2014). It has been argued that the primary reasons for
PEGIDA’s stigmatizing hatred, resentment and prejudices against non-
Christian ethnic minorities and migrants are related to the widespread
sense of social insecurity caused by recent social and economic transforma-
tion and political processes (Meyer and Storck 2015).

CONTACT Çetin Çelik ccelik@ku.edu.tr

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
706 Ç. ÇELIK

Indeed, the stigmatization of migrants, due to their critical relation to

contextual dynamics, is revealing of socio-economic transformations, insti-
tutional regulations, as well as ethnic hierarchies within the dominant
society. Therefore, ethnic stereotypes of, and prejudices against, minorities
(particularly Turkish immigrants) are increasingly coming into focus in
German migration research (Baltes and Rudolph 2010; Kratzmann and
Pohlmann-Rother 2012). Much less researched, but arguably just as impor-
tant, are the destigmatization strategies deployed by minorities.
Destigmatization refers to the ways in which members of ‘stigmatized ethnic
and racial groups respond to exclusion by challenging stereotypes that feed
and justify discriminatory behaviour and rebutting the notion of their infer-
iority’ (Lamont 2009).
The destigmatization strategies that minorities adopt are equally crucial
for understanding how they engage in ethnic boundary work when
responding to the way in which they are seen by the majority and how
they maintain their dignity against discrimination and prejudices (Lamont
and Mizrachi 2012). They display how in daily life discriminatory discourses
and segregation are perceived and interpreted by minority groups as ethnic
divisions in the construction of their own identities (Fischer-Neumann 2014).
This is pivotal for their capacity and wish to integrate smoothly (Kosic,
Mannetti and Lackland Sam 2005). The present article aims to contribute
to this nascent literature on ethnic boundary making from an understudied
context; it places the destigmatization strategies of disadvantaged second-
generation Turkish immigrant youth against the majority within the context
of the exclusionary discourses, immigration policies and structural forces
that sustain ethnic separations in German society.
This article relies on 20 semi-structured in-depth interviews and 6 months
of participant observation in a school in Bremen, Germany. My respondents
were second-generation Turkish students, aged between 15 and 18 years,
who were born in Germany or arrived before schooling age. Mostly upon
failing the Hauptschule, they were directed into a 12-month vocational
preparation programme (Berufsvorbereitungsjahr) to complete their compul-
sory schooling years. I conducted this research in 2011, while they were
attending this programme. In order to establish rapport with my respon-
dents, I received substantial help from two social workers at the school, one
of Turkish and the other of Kurdish background. While I wished to include
female respondents in my sample, I could not establish similar rapport with
them, nor receive help from the social workers, as they were both male.
Therefore, my sample is limited to male interviewees.
I sampled respondents using the snowball technique: they were asked
to recommend friends willing to participate in the study. This technique
further served the purposes of gaining access to participants and building
trust (Noy 2008). A significant portion of each interview was devoted to
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 707

discussing relations with peers and teachers in the school environment.

While I was familiar with studies on ethnic stereotyping of majority
groups about minorities, it was only through my interviews that I came
to understand that these students also actively essentialized the majority
group based on their daily observations and experiences. The interviews
were conducted in Turkish and German and lasted between 55 and
80 min. The semi-structured interview design allowed for individually
wording the questions and adjusting the level of language according to
the respondent (Berg 2004). This was particularly important for my
respondents who usually use a mix of German and Turkish. The tran-
scribed interview material was analysed by using the ATLAS.ti programme
and following the principles of qualitative content analysis (Mayring
2007).
The research was also informed by casual conversations with school staff
and teachers, as well as 6 months of participant observation in the voca-
tional preparation programme. I occasionally attended classes and spent
time with the respondents in and outside the schoolyard. I participated in
events such as year-end parties and various celebrations and festivities
organized by the school. This participation was extremely helpful for under-
standing the discrepancies between what the respondents reported in their
interviews and how they acted in their daily lives (Gans 1999). In the field, I
introduced myself as a researcher from Turkey, conducting a study on the
school achievements of Turkish youth in Germany. Given that ethnicity is
associated with stereotypes and cliques that go hand-in-hand with subjec-
tive in-group and out-group definitions and relations, Herwartz-Emden and
Westphal (2000) maintain that interviewers who share the same culture and
ethnicity with their respondents can create an intimate atmosphere. This
facilitates communication particularly about power-related topics such as
racism, discrimination and so on, and is called ‘culture effect’ (Kultureffekt).
Although the researcher’s own biography in many respects diverges from
those of his respondents (i.e. having grown up in a different country, being
highly educated), the shared national, cultural and linguistic background
played a certain role for the researcher being admitted into ‘the group’.
Interviewees talked openly about topics that otherwise might have been left
unsaid.
The analysis proceeds in three parts. I start by identifying theoretical
debates about destigmatization strategies and modalities of ethnic bound-
aries that have informed this study and data analysis. Next, I lay out
historical as well as contemporary ethnic boundaries for Turkish immigrants
in Germany. Then, I unpack how my respondents perceive and respond to
ethnic boundaries through several destigmatization strategies. Finally, I
conclude with a discussion of the underlying reasons for appropriating
different strategies among my respondents.
708 Ç. ÇELIK

2. Modes of ethnicity-making
Ethnic relations have been extensively studied in various disciplines, ranging
from political science, sociology and anthropology to social psychology.
Current studies have particularly shown that ethnic groups are not a
‘given’, but that they are maintained through the dynamics of boundaries
(Brubaker 2006). These boundaries between ethnic groups form a process
constantly being redefined based on dynamics such as institutional frame-
works, hierarchies of power and political alliances (Wimmer 2008). Lamont
and Mizrachi (2012) have sketched the possible destigmatization strategies
of ethnic and racial groups in ethnic boundary making in order to challenge
inequality, stereotypes and discrimination. The members of stigmatized
groups are not passively accepting and internalizing their inferior position
in society. Rather, they interpret ethnic boundaries and transform negative
meanings associated with their collective identity by developing certain
strategies. In doing so, they challenge stereotypes about their groups and
negotiate the boundaries. Subordinated groups, so Lamont (2009) argues,
develop universalistic and particularistic destigmatization strategies for
achieving recognition at various levels and salience. Universalistic criteria
such as shared humanity and biological similarity can be met by all. Those
who are stigmatized emphasize general human morality as a distinguishing
factor between worthy and unworthy individuals and in this way can claim
equal rights. Lamont (2000) has investigated the destigmatizing strategies of
African American workers and found that they often appropriate the uni-
versalistic stance of equality, stating that they also are children of God and
have the same biological needs as everyone else. Particularistic criteria refer
to those peculiar to specific groupings based on ethnicity, education and
occupation (Lamont 2009). This requires a reinterpretation of the stigma-
tized category in positive terms so as to counter the racist stigmatization of
the majority group. Lamont and Fleming (2005) have shown that the African
American elite, unlike African American workers who claim equality by
means of universalistic criteria, cope with racism by emphasizing intelli-
gence, competence and education – that is, they seek to achieve equality
through particular characteristics available to them, but not everyone else.
Lamont focuses on equalization strategies such as these, which work to
form parity between unequally valued groups, whereas Wimmer draws
attention to strategies of ethnic boundary making, or transvaluation,
which works to reinterpret and change the normative principles of a strati-
fied ethnic system (Fleming 2012). Wimmer (2008) argues that the members
of subordinated groups can also reverse the meaning of boundaries by
challenging the existing ethnic rank order through normative inversion. For
example, the cultural nationalism and oppositional culture of black students
in the US reverses the supreme position of whites by disparaging some
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 709

attitudes as white and claiming a position superior to them (Fordham and

Ogbu 1986).
Importantly, neither equalization nor inversion is ahistorical; they are
formed by broader cultural and structural contexts such as racial formations,
the resources of minority groups and national ideologies (Lamont and
Mizrachi 2012). To exemplify, Afro-Brazilians blur racial symbolic boundaries
by referring to the existing universalistic national myth of ‘racial mixture’,
which is theoretically inclusive to all Brazilians (Silva and Reis 2012). In the
context of Israel, where religious, linguistic, racial, residential and socio-
economic boundaries are very strong, Palestinian citizens define their col-
lective identity by citing particularistic criteria related to Islam and Palestine,
rather than universalistic criteria such as Israeli national identity (Lamont
and Bail 2008). In the same context, however, Mizrahi Jews define them-
selves based more on a universalistic shared religion than through a parti-
cularistic ethnicity, by emphasizing the ‘melting pot’ ideology in Israel so as
to legitimize their position as members of Israeli society and to contest
discrimination (Mizrachi and Herzog 2012). Fleming (2012) has shown that
French activists of the pan-African Association reverse the stigma of slavery
by asserting the moral inferiority of the dominant groups. They do so by
using historical narratives particularly about the transatlantic slave trade as a
crime against humanity, a strategy of normative inversion that puts blame
on the perpetrators of slavery, rather than on the enslaved.
Germany is a country that – due to its restrictive citizenship policies
(Aktürk 2011), rigidly segregating education system (Diefenbach 2004) and
anti-immigrant public discourse (Fetzer 2000) such as the recent PEGIDA
movement – maintains strong ethnic boundaries for immigrants. Despite
these strong ethnic boundaries, ethnicity studies in Germany have mostly
focused on the majority group’s stigmatization of minorities, but not on the
destigmatization strategies of the minority groups.
Within this context, the present study fills this gap in the literature by
exploring the ethnic boundary making strategies of disadvantaged second-
generation male Turkish youth in Germany. I suggest that the interviewees
participating in this study were aware of their disadvantaged position in
society and that they actively engaged in ethnic boundary making strategies
in order to achieve recognition.

3. Strong ethnic boundaries: Exclusionary public discourses,

restrictive citizenship, socio-economic and residential segregation
and ethnic segmentation in education
Since the beginning of the guest worker (Gastarbeiter) programme in 1961,
more than 2.8 million Turkish immigrants have come to Germany, and most of
their descendants have been born and raised in this country (Diehl and Koenig
710 Ç. ÇELIK

2013). A growing body of evidence suggests that since their arrival they have
largely faced layers of unwelcoming conditions, such as exclusionary public
discourses, restrictive citizenship laws and socio-economic segregation.
While Turkish immigrants were seen as a temporarily staying ethnic prole-
tariat at the beginning of the labour migration, their public image has been
increasingly politicized due to the migration continuing with family reunions, in
spite of official recruitment being halted after the oil crisis in 1973 (Ramm 2012).
With the rising rate of unemployment and increasing number of public assis-
tance recipients, they were portrayed as overwhelming the magnanimous
German welfare state (Kurylo 2007). The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1990,
which resulted in large-scale migration from East to West Germany that made
competition for resources even harsher, reinforced the negative image of Turks
as burden on the generous welfare state (Fetzer 2000). Under these conditions,
resentment towards Turks led to physical and arson attacks, such as in Mölln in
1992 and in Solingen in 1993 (Brosius and Eps 1995). While the traditional
background of Turkish immigrants has always been perceived an obstacle to
integration, 9/11 has increasingly Islamized the image of Turks, turning it
entirely from problematic foreigner (Ausländer) into religious ‘other’ (Holtz,
Dahinden and Wagner 2013). In political and academic discourses, the term
‘parallel societies’ has become popular to define Turkish immigrants; it roughly
means that this group has obstinately shut itself off from modern life and, thus,
has no intention to integrate (Kunst and Sam 2013).
These public exclusionary discourses have been linked with restrictive citi-
zenship policy, which has created additional barriers to the structural and
emotional integration of Turks. In Germany, due to its mono-ethnic regime,
citizenship was long based on the ‘principle of blood’ and traditionally con-
ceived as a privilege for ethnic Germans only (Aktürk 2011). Because of dis-
criminatory immigration and naturalization policies, the naturalization of Turks
for a long time was quite rare (Brubaker 2002). The ‘principle of blood’ was
modified to a ‘principle of soil’ in the 2000 German citizenship law, and this
made it possible for children of immigrants to acquire German citizenship, but
only if the parents’ nationality was renounced (Ersanilli and Koopmans 2011).
While this has significantly increased the naturalization rate of Turkish immi-
grants, it has also intensified concerns about the incompatibility between
Muslim Turkish immigrants and German society’s ‘guiding culture’ for the
integration of this group (Klusmeyer 2001). In 2014, the citizenship law was
further reformed with the so-called ‘option regulation’ that allows Turks to hold
dual citizenship under certain conditions (Pusch 2016).
In addition to exclusionary discourses and policies Turkish immigrants
have also experienced significant socio-economic impoverishment due to
the restructuring of the economy. For example, in Bremen, where the field
research for this study was carried out, the Turkish community makes up the
largest immigrant group with 6.6% (Statistisches Landesamt Bremen 2016).
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 711

Turkish immigrants were once predominantly employed in the ship-building

sector, but the closing down of the shipyard companies in the 1980s and
1990s following the economic downturn excluded them from the labour
market and made them heavily dependent on social assistance
(Arbeitnehmerkammer Bremen 2012). The increased unemployment rate
among Turkish immigrants over time sharpened socio-economic segrega-
tion in the city (Power, Plöger and Winkler 2010). Turkish working-class
neighbourhoods, such as Gröpelingen and Osterholz, increasingly acquired
underclass characteristics (Farwick 2011), so much so that in 1990 these
quarters became two of the poorest 10 regions in all of Germany (Friedrichs
and Triemer 2009).
The steady impoverishment of the Turkish minority has had dramatic
effects on the educational attainment of the second generation. The strati-
fied German education system funnels students aged 11 or 12 into differ-
ently organized and hierarchically ordered secondary school types: the
Hauptschule (Practical Vocational Training), the Realschule (Intermediate
Education) or the Gymnasium (University-Track Grammar School).1 This pla-
cement so early in life results in the close correlation between a family’s
cultural and material resources and the child’s educational performance
(Baumert and Maaz 2010). Therefore, the descendants of Turkish immigrants
have dramatically accumulated in the less prestigious Hauptschule and come
to be less represented in the academic school type, the Gymnasium
(Karakaşoğlu 2011). This disproportional distribution has led to ‘ethnic seg-
mentation’ in education (Diefenbach 2004). Figure 1 demonstrates how

Figure 1. The coupling of social and ethnic segregation of Turkish immigrants with
ethnic segmentation at district level in Bremen in 2011. Source: Statistisches
Landesamt Bremen, Bremer Ortsteilatlas (online): http://www.statistik-bremen.de/tabel
len/kleinraum/ortsteilatlas/atlas.html
712 Ç. ÇELIK

socio-economic and residential segregation in Bremen is currently furthered

by ethnic segmentation in the education system.
This figure reveals that the neighbourhoods populated by Turkish immi-
grants are the poorest areas of the city. At the district level, where the rate
of Turkish immigrants is higher, the rate of welfare recipients is also higher
and the rate of university-track Gymnasium attendance lower. The stigmatiz-
ing effects of the negative public image, exclusionary citizenship laws, and
socio-economic and residential segregation, together with a firmly segregat-
ing education system, have shaped the urban milieu in which the disadvan-
taged second-generation Turkish immigrant youth studied in this article live
and develop their destigmatizing strategies.

4. Perceptions and awareness of ethnic boundaries

The respondents in this study mostly lived in the disadvantaged inner city
areas of Bremen and consisted of Hauptschule students. The neighbour-
hoods where they had lived their entire lives and all the schools they had
ever attended were dominated by immigrants, mostly Turkish. They came
into contact with Germans in government offices and schools. These
Germans held comfortable middle-class jobs such as teacher and govern-
ment official, lived in relatively advantaged neighbourhoods, were less
dependent on welfare, and, if they were students, attended university-
track schools. The respondents, for example, regularly accompanied their
parents on their visits to the Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit)
to assist with translation while receiving social assistance.
In the course of the interviews, the perception of the Turkish commu-
nity’s negative public image and subordinate position in society appeared
in different guises. The respondents were largely cognizant of the unfa-
vourable image of Turks: ‘They (Germans) think we (Turks) are bad. They
always think any trouble is only because of Turks’, stated Bekir,2 17 years
old. I encountered this settled belief innumerable times during the inter-
views. My conversations with the respondents also demonstrated how
concretely my respondents were aware of, and regularly observed, the
ethnic boundaries’ corollaries in their daily lives. For example, Onur,
17 years old, associated various ethnic groups with different types of
housing typically located in neighbourhoods of different economic stand-
ing. He said: ‘In our neighbourhood, we do not have many German
neighbours. In Germany, Germans are living in houses. We foreigners
are living in flats in apartment blocks’. A similar indicator of social segre-
gation appeared in Temel’s interview:
Where we live there are no Germans. It is a huge neighbourhood with only
three or four German families. The rest is Turkish or Kurdish. It [the
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 713

neighbourhood] is a little bit different. Once they wrote in a newspaper: it is

“little Istanbul in Bremen.” No German lives there.

The consequences of socio-economic and residential segregation between

Turks and Germans surfaced in the respondents’ awareness when they
talked about a wide variety of issues. However, when I asked them about
the underlying reasons, they often pointed to cultural differences rather
than structural inequalities. In other words, the respondents mostly tended
to explain the socio-economic differences they observed between Turks and
Germans along culturalizing ethnic lines. For example, Hakan – 17 years old,
a Hauptschule student, and a sensitive and reflective person – in the context
of his school experiences told about dissimilar academic achievements
coloured by ethnicity. Hakan confided in me that he felt regret that he
had attended schools dominated by Turkish students. When asked why, he
replied,

Look at German children, for example. They come home, their mothers help.
She says, let me look at your homework. They study before going to bed and
get up on time. We are not like that

Relating to debates on Fordham and Ogbu (1986) thesis about ‘acting

white’, Horvat and O’Conner (2006) have argued that educational success
appears white only where race closely corresponds to educational inequal-
ity. Hakan’s statement given earlier clearly supplements this argument with
empirical data from the German context. It exemplifies how the socio-
economic divisions between ethnic groups in society, particularly the ethnic
segmentation in education explained earlier, ethnicize relations and drive
the respondents to correlate ethnic groups with certain characteristics, such
as academic achievement.

5. Ethnic boundary making strategies and their relations to

contextual factors
5.1. Normative inversion
The views of my respondents about differences between Turks and Germans
reflect various forms of ethnic boundaries, such as socio-economic and
residential segregation and ethnic segmentation in education, which they
face in their everyday lives. However, they certainly are not accepting these
boundaries in a passive manner. Rather, they actively develop specific
destigmatization strategies to remove these boundaries’ negative effects
on their well-being. The respondents were actively engaged in altering
ethnic boundaries in the discursive field and often stigmatized the majority
group in reverse, by resorting to ethnic stereotypes in their accounts. For
714 Ç. ÇELIK

example, Ahmet, a 16-year-old Hauptschule student, expressed his distaste

for Germans particularly in his circle of friends:

I don’t know why. But I cannot get along well with them. It does not work. I
don’t want it, either. I have few German contacts. But I never hang out with
them. I don’t like their habits, the way they are.

In his study on Filipino migrant domestic workers in Singapore and Hong

Kong, Paul (2011) found that the workers’ stereotypes about white and
Chinese employers refer to a single, extremely homogenous entity, despite
the great variations within these groups. Supporting this finding, the com-
ments of my respondents were not statements about individual Germans.
They were rather ethnicized ways of highlighting particular behaviours and
attributing them to all Germans as a group. So did Ahmet, by pointing out
ethnicity as reason behind certain habits of theirs. However, when asked
whether they had ever had German friend with whom they enjoyed spend-
ing time, most of them said yes; yet, each time they separated their positive
statement from ethnicity by relating it to a particular instance or personality.
My respondents were intensively engaged in transvaluation strategy by
challenging the ethno-religious hierarchy they observed in their daily life.
They created ‘them’ and ‘us’ categories by associating negative values such
as being cold, individualistic, self-centred, stingy and untrustworthy with
German identity. They often tended to construct Turkish identity as honest,
loyal, open-hearted, generous and trustworthy in opposition to these nega-
tive stereotypes. Thus, they did not assume insurmountable social and
cultural differences between the groups. They actually idealized their own
culture and identity as superior and the majority’s culture as inferior, which
reverses ethnic boundaries through normative inversion. While they occa-
sionally diverged from each other regarding the salience and range of ethnic
stereotypes about the majority group, it is worth noting that the stereotype
of the ‘hard-nosed German’ was uniformly common. Ünal, 18 years old and
having been expelled from various schools, disclosed why he always chose
Turkish friends in the schools he attended:

My friends are generally Turks. I can’t get along well with Germans. You know,
there is a saying like, “there is no real friend for a Turk except for a Turk.” This
saying is true. Really, it is not wrong.. . . Germans do not protect you because
they would not understand you. They simply can’t. We have mercy, but they
do not. They are very much into themselves. But we are different.

By his account, Turks and Germans are not only separated from each other,
but Turkish culture is praised as fair and loyal – which German culture is
assumed to be lacking by nature. It is noteworthy that a similar pattern of
normative inversion was also common in the daily conversations I wit-
nessed. The ethnic jokes exchanged among peers were about the
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 715

Germans’ stinginess and hard-nosed character, proving actually that Turks

are generous and open-hearted. When Ibrahim was resorting to similar
ethnic associations in the interview, I confronted him by stating that not
all Turks are good and all Germans bad. He replied,

Each nation has bad and good people. There are bad Turks, too, of course.
They beat people and steal their money. I try to stay away from such Turks. But
there is a main difference [between Germans and Turks]. Let’s say, a German is
beaten up on the street, I would help him. I would get involved in the fight to
protect him. But he would never do the same thing for me. You know why,
because Germans lost their humanity long ago.. . . They only care about
themselves, that’s it. But Turks are not like that. They are not self-centered
like Germans. They help each other out. They protect each other here. Not
only here, but also in Turkey. If you go to a German supermarket here and put
a single grape into your mouth, you would end up in court. But in Turkey the
owner himself offers it to you. Turks would not calculate such things, as
Germans do. People lost their humanity here in this country . . .

Ibrahim seems to follow a combined destigmatization strategy; on one

hand, he emphasizes the universality of human nature as standards of
worth between ethnic groups: each nation has bad and good people. Then,
he quickly switches to normative inversion when he describes Germans as
self-centred and assigns Turks moral superiority over Germans. He also
justifies this superiority and reversing by incorporating Turkey as a romanti-
cized place, which seems to work in his explanation to essentialize these
distinctions.
Normative inversion, which is evident in the earlier interview quotes, was
the most dominant and widespread boundary making strategy among my
respondents. These youngsters often experience ethnic boundaries mainly
by way of socio-economic and residential segregation and ethnic segmenta-
tion and, quite interestingly, strategically use them to justify normative
inversion. To exemplify this strategic use, Ümit is a case in point. Ümit
favoured Turkish over German culture, this time in his school context. In
his view, German students were asocial and self-absorbed. He detailed how
he and his Turkish fellow students spent time differently from German
students during break:

We never hang out with Germans. In school, they are alone. They go to the
corner and sit there until the end of the break. But we are different. We gather
our friends and go, for example, to Penny [a supermarket chain]. We buy food,
baguette, and some stuff to eat. If I don’t have money, someone pays. Next
time, I pay. We eat together, sharing. We spend time together, we hang out
together. We are at least seven or eight friends all the time. We are never
alone.

Due to the ethnic segmentation in education, students of Turkish, Arab and

African background dominated the school where I conducted the
716 Ç. ÇELIK

interviews. I myself also often observed in the classrooms and in the school-
yard that German students were rather reserved and hesitant in contacting
and socializing with students from non-German backgrounds, due to their
own minority position. Thus, the ethnic boundary work in the form of
stereotyping Germans as asocial had indeed a structural foundation in the
respondents’ daily life. However, this context-bound observation is wrongly
culturalized and elevated to a universal claim of moral superiority of Turks
over Germans, by bringing out the Turks’ putative compassion and
solidarity.

5.2. Universalizing, contingent detachment and individual crossing

My respondents predominantly socialized with members of their own eth-
nicity and experienced communal solidarity almost only among them. They
mostly observed Germans outside these relationships in an urban space
characterized by various forms of ethnic boundaries. Embedded in such a
segregated urban milieu, as I have shown, they often reversed the stratified
ethnic hierarchies in the field of normative values. However, not all of my
respondents appropriated the normative inversion of transvaluation.
Although few in number, some adopted different destigmatization strate-
gies for achieving recognition in the face of their inferior position in society.
Emre, for instance, speaking about his friends in the various schools he had
attended, remarked that he did not consider Germans and Turks any
different:
I was getting on well with them (Germans), I mean, as I do with Turks. I mean,
for me it is OK, Turk or German. I mean, it’s the same. If he is friendly, it does
not matter for me what he is.

Unlike many other respondents, Emre did not use any kind of normative
inversion strategy in talking about interethnic relations. He rather elided the
importance of ethnicity by referring to personal characteristics – being
friendly – as standards of worth. In doing so, he mobilized a universalistic
rhetoric that is available to all, regardless of ethnicity – anyone can be
friendly.
During the interview, Turgay did not resort to any sort of normative
inversion to reverse the hierarchies induced by ethnic boundaries in
society, either. Actually, in sharp contrast to many interviewees who
negatively stereotyped Germans, Turgay took a positive stand about
them:
When you say asshole to Germans, they don’t get angry. They understand.
They say OK. I might have made a mistake. But if you do the same thing to our
people, they would always see themselves right. But Germans are not like that.
You know, Germans have more Einsicht. . .3
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 717

In Turgay’s view, Germans are more trustworthy and fair. In this regard, he
also slightly differs from Emre, who followed a universalistic principle of
human traits (friendship) for equalization. Turgay associated Germans with
the positive characteristic of self-reflexivity, which Turks lack.
Similar to Turgay, another respondent, Erdem, also associated Germans
with positive and Turks with negative traits: ‘They (Turks) are aggressive.
They say, “I know a lot of guys, they can beat up 10 persons at once,” and so
on’. Erdem, while being aware of widespread discrimination against Turks,
thought that the negative stereotypes about young male Turks as aggres-
sive and macho were generally true. Referring to his German peers’ views
about Turks, he empathized with the stigmatizers:

They think about Turks as I do. I mean they (Turks), they fancy themselves
something, you know, bullying and so on. And they, for example, they chat up
girls on the streets. They (German friends) don’t like such things. They like only
me as a Turk.

Mizrachi and Herzog (2012) have examined how members of minority

groups in Israel struggle with stigmatization in everyday life. They found
that some Mizrahi Jews adopt the strategy of contingent detachment: they
separate themselves from their ethnic group and in this way cope with the
collective stigma. I argue that Erdem and Turgay, while generally defining
themselves as Turk and Muslim, occasionally detach themselves from Turks
as a stigmatized group identity in certain settings in order to cope with the
collective stigma and to individually cross ethnic boundaries.
Lamont (2009) has argued that contextual dynamics in the form of
cultural structures, repertoires, and symbolic boundaries facilitate and hin-
der the emergence of certain destigmatization strategies. Furthermore,
individual responses to stigmatization can depend on the resources that
individuals have at their disposal. The ways in which Emre, Turgay and
Erdem developed self-worth and forged destigmatization strategies are
possibly the outcomes of their biographies and personal resources. Their
biographies differ from that of other respondents, who resorted to the
strategy of normative inversion, in terms of constant and intensive contacts
with Germans and weak attachment to their Turkish peers.
Turgay reported that his father preferred to do business with Germans, as
he found them more trustworthy than Turks. When his business earned well,
he became more concerned about his neighbourhood’s influence on his
children and thought: ‘It would be good to move somewhere else; even if
the rent is higher, the children can grow up in a better environment’.
Moving from the old neighbourhood caused a rupture in Turgay’s ties
with his peer group which was mainly ethnically Turkish and put him in
contact with people of varying ethnic background, including Germans, some
of whom were Muslim. Turgay kept hearing his father’s constant positive
718 Ç. ÇELIK

remarks about Germans, and as his family moved, he was less exposed to
ethnic boundaries in the form of socio-economic and residential segregation
in comparison to other respondents.
Like Turgay, Emre had considerable contacts with German friends. He had
been expelled from various schools and, unlike the great majority of the
respondents, attended schools located in neighbourhoods populated by
Germans.
There my friends were only Germans, because there was almost no Turk in this
school. . . In the whole school there weren’t even ten Turks, all were Germans,
because only Germans live in the neighbourhood

Emre befriended many German students, and his affiliations with Turkish
peers were occasionally cut. He had no chance to develop intense ties to a
specific ethnic group. Like Emre, Erdem had also attended schools heavily
populated by German students: ‘In my class there was only one Arab and
one Turkish student, the rest was German’. Therefore, he socialized almost
exclusively with German friends and did not create any strong bonds with
Turkish peers. However, Erdem seemed to use an additional resource,
different from those available to Turgay and Emre, in order to detach himself
from his ethnic group in order to individually cross ethnic boundaries:
I am the only one in my family, I mean, looking like a German. For example, I
go to a party and speak with people for one hour. Then they say, are you really
Turkish? I say, yes. They are shocked. I mean, they think I am German. I mean, I
have no Turkish accent, you know.

Due to his fair skin, blond hair and accent-free German – that is, the absence
of distinguishing markers – Erdem can seemingly cross ethnic boundaries,
gain individual recognition and therefore occasionally detach himself from
his ethnic group and its inferior position.

6. Conclusion
Studying the stigmatization of ethnic minorities and immigrant groups reveals
discrimination, stratification and ethnic boundaries in any society. Along simi-
lar lines, the destigmatization strategies of minorities are equally revealing of
how they respond to the majority in order to maintain their dignity and
achieve recognition. Therefore, the study of ethnic boundaries speaks to the
literature of immigrant integration. By considering this link between the two
literatures, this study has explored the ethnic boundary making strategies of a
group of second-generation male Turkish immigrant youth within the German
context. Although Germany is characterized by robust ethnic boundaries –
such as the anti-immigrant discourse exemplified by the recent PEGIDA move-
ment, mono-ethnic citizenship frameworks and exclusionary immigration
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 719

policies – minorities’ destigmatization strategies have not yet received suffi-

cient attention. This article attempts to fill this gap in the literature on
immigrant.
Previously, I have documented the robust ethnic boundaries in public
discourses and citizenship policies against Turkish immigrants in their his-
toric context. Moreover, I have unpacked another set of ethnic boundaries
that often goes unnoticed – that is, the socio-economic and residential
segregation of the Turkish immigrant community, together with the dein-
dustrialization of the economy – and related it to the rigidly segregating
education system. My statistical findings have shown that socio-economic
and residential segregation are strongly linked to ethnic segmentation in
education for the Turkish immigrant group in the city of Bremen.
The qualitative findings illustrate that the youth studied here were con-
scious of their inferior position and the ethnic boundaries present in German
society and that they actively engaged in transforming these boundaries in
order to maintain their dignity. The great majority of my respondents
asserted the moral inferiority of the majority group through the strategy
of normative inversion. They reversed stratified ethnic boundaries and stig-
matized Germans through a set of negative ethnic stereotypes. This finding
corroborates Wimmer’s (2008) theoretical argument of transvaluation
through the empirical arsenal. The findings also demonstrated that norma-
tive inversion is not the only destigmatization strategy my respondents used
to seek recognition in society. Some respondents employed the strategies of
universalizing and contingent detachment for individually crossing ethnic
boundaries and equalizing their position in respect to the majority. These
findings speak to Mizrachi, Goodman and Feniger’s (2009) work on contin-
gent detachment among Mizrahi students in Israel.
I have documented that the few respondents who employed equalizing
strategies other than normative inversion differ from the others in terms of
constant contacts with Germans and weak attachment to ethnic peers, and,
in some cases, individual resources such as having blond hair and fair skin. I
argue that individuals’ destigmatization strategies are strongly linked to the
degree to which they are exposed to ethnic boundaries. That is, those who
often experienced socio-economic and residential segregation and ethnic
segmentation in education tended to engage in normative inversion,
whereas those who were less exposed to these boundaries in their indivi-
dual biographies tended to engage in equalizing strategies.
Against this background, I claim that my findings are unlikely to be
confined to this specific group and Germany alone. They are likely to
resonate with other studies of immigrant integration in various countries.
Specifically, they substantiate the importance of inclusive immigration poli-
cies and welcoming structural and cultural conditions for the smooth inte-
gration of second-generation immigrant youth and show that integration
720 Ç. ÇELIK

anomalies among young immigrants are usually responses to the lack of

these conditions in host societies.

Notes
1. With the 1949 constitution, the organization and regulation of education
was left to the individual control of Germany’s federal states
(Bundesländer). Bremen has recently reformed its education system and
converted all vocational schools into the so-called Oberschule (Extended
Comprehensive Secondary School), in which students stay together until
10th grade. However, the system still continues to track children from a
relatively young age into the Gymnasium or Oberschule (Schuchart 2013).
2. All names used in this study are pseudonyms.
3. The literal translation of ‘Einsicht’ is insight. It means self-reflexion in this
context.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work has been supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft) [263/2].

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