In Hanau, Germany, on Feb. 19, 2020, after Vili-Viorel Pǎun witnessed the beginning of a mass shooting and tried to stop the gunman by chasing him down with his car, he called emergency services three times. No one answered, and Pǎun was shot dead.
Later, Pǎun’s father overheard police officers using a common racial slur while commenting on the supposed impossibility of a Roma person showing civic courage. This was not an aberration; it was a part of the same systemic racism that’s left the victims’ families without true justice six years later.
As sensory studies scholars who focus on racism and migration, we argue that racism is not only interpersonal or even simply structural, it’s also multi-sensory. It shapes how minorities see, hear and move through the world, with consequences that extend from everyday interactions to life-or-death institutional failures.
