The Chancellor candidate of the Greens, Annalena Baerbock, has apologized for using the word “negro” in an interview.

That was wrong, wrote and explained the Green politician in a total of nine messages on Twitter.

Accordingly, in a conversation at the Central Council of Jews about anti-Semitism and racism, Baerbock had mentioned what she called the "N-word".

Peter Carstens

Political correspondent in Berlin

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Baerbock wrote: “I told you about an incident at a school in my area. The son of a friend was asked to write a picture story on a worksheet with the N word on it. His good reaction to that: he refused to do a task that began with the N word. He was then accused of disrupting school lessons. So he was suddenly the culprit and not the one who created such teaching material. This incident still upsets me today. "

Baerbock continued: "Unfortunately, in the recording of the interview, I quoted the N-word in the emotional description of this unspeakable incident and thus reproduced it myself." She regrets that, because "I know about the racist origin of this word and the injuries, the black (sic!) people experience through him, among other things ”.

She had “weighed up” with the Central Council of Jews whether the haunting example was suitable to point out the grievances in the field of education, “or whether the pronunciation of the N-word thwarted precisely this concern”.

A beep can now be heard in the recording of the conversation instead of the word.

Comparisons with Palmer rejected

Baerbock rejected comparisons with her party colleague, the Freiburg mayor Boris Palmer. Palmer is threatened with expulsion from the party because he also used the word "negro" in an allegedly ironic comment on a racist attack on a football player. Palmer herself praised Baerbock's apology to the Bild newspaper on Monday and said, according to the newspaper: "I think that she did everything right this time in communication on the subject."

Discussions about the use of certain words increased among the Greens. The Green top candidate in Berlin, Bettina Jarasch, recently had to apologize for having stated that she had chosen to be an Indian chief during a question and answer session at a Green Party conference about her nomination as governing mayor candidate. Later she spoke of "unreflected childhood memories" and said: "I too have to learn."

The Berlin Greens later deleted the text from the video recording and instead wrote that a term (“Indian chief”) had been used at that point that “is degrading towards members of indigenous peoples. We have therefore removed this part. We too are constantly learning and want to continue to work on questioning our own thinking, acting and speaking in terms of discriminatory thought patterns. "