ZARA, the Association for Civil Courage and Anti-Racism Work (Zivilcourage und Anti-Rassismus-Arbeit), looked back on a year which, shaped by the corona pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement and the terrorist attack in Vienna, made discrimination and racism visible.
The year 2020 showed racist structures even more strongly than usual, according to the ZARA Racism Report 2020. The number of racist incidents rose from 1,950 to 3,039 in 2020. That is a third more than in the previous year. In the most frequent cases, attacks on the Internet were identified.
The number of right-wing extremist, racist, antisemitic and Islamophobic crimes fell from 922 in 2019 to 853 in 2020.
The reasons for the many reports of attacks on the Internet are on the one hand the shift of life to social networks and on the other hand that it is easier to report these incidents with just a few clicks. A screenshot with the source and time is sufficient to report a posting.
It is noticeable that the majority of the reports were not brought in directly by those affected, but by witnesses of racism.
Source: ZARA
