Racist Berlin street name changed after legal battle
Racist Berlin street name changed after legal battle
www.dw.com
Controversial Berlin street name changed after legal battle – DW – 08/23/2025
13 comments
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Moor is racist in German? I thought it was merely a group of people.
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It is a slur. You would neither call a black person nor the mauretanians this word. It's not the n-word, but it's something akin to that. A once neutral term to describe one people, which became a slur used against all black people.
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If you're thinking of the Moors, that's Mauren in German. Mohr means a specific, old-fashioned stereotype. It's not rude or offensive, but it is a stereotype.
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It's rude.
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The group of people in called moors in English, would be Mauren in German.
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Moor is racist in German?
I'd say it's not an outright slur but at best very anachronistic.
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Do you have the same reaction everytime a Spanish person uses the word for the color black?
You can argue "Mohrenkopf" is a racist term, but oftentimes Mohr was used as a sign of quality. Another example for using Mohr to signal quality are drug stores with names such as "Mohrenapotheke". From Early Middleages probably up to and including the Industrialization Muslim scholars where at the forefront of medical progress. This influence often times reached Europe via the Iberian peninsula which was dominated by Muslims up to the 15th century. The term Mohr describes people of color from Iberia down to the Maghreb region and further. So if I was to buy medicine prepared according to a "Mohr" scholar, I was expecting great results.
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Or have real social problems that would require actual money or effort to solve, and are looking for an alternative.
In the Anglosphere, at least, word policing tends to be that. Same vibe as a company hiring a token female executive in order to be feminist.
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Wtf don't drop the n-word like this. The productname was racist. So was the way the word was commonly used.
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13 comments
I always loved seeing the vandalism done to the street signs. "Möhrenstraße" = Carrots street.
and that's what they shouldve changed it to in "the people have spoken" fashion.