Every now and then, this meme arises; racism is so common in the US and ol’ tolerant Europe its not. I take serious issue with this idea: first off, America elected an ethnic minority member President. I don’t see a Basque or Galician leading Spain, or am ethnic Turk leader Germany. Two, while yes blacks have it rough here; Europe doesn’t have many blacks (tho its former colonies do). It is true the US once had slavery; the Europeans also did but simply did it on the continent to the south of them. And last; we didn’t carry out pogroms or the Holocaust; or countless other ethnic cleansing in recent history. What happened with the aboriginals wasn’t too different from how ethnic Russians went from Kievan Rus to Vladivostok, so I reject the attempt to call the fate of the American aborginals a “genocide.”
And beyond that casual observation, I daresay that while it’s easy to rack up atrocity scores for each, I don’t know how you’d prove which was the “winner”.
I can’t speak for Europe at large, but yeah, racism is pretty rampant here in France. The targets are different (obviously while we don’t have much concern over Latinos, we can hatefully spite at North Africans with the worst of them) but the gist of it and the “arguments” of racist spokespersons are largely the same.
cough Native Americans cough
Um, yes ? I’m sorry, is that supposed to make it less reprehensible ? There’s only ~45,000 Nenets people left. I’m happy to call that a genocide, too. From wiki :
There was a period during the 1960s when one would occasionally encounter a pundit, (usually from Europe), sniffing their nose at the shabby racist culture of the U.S.
I have not heard anyone make that sort of claim in many, many years. Certainly not since immigration to Europe began bringing more African and Asian immigrants.
Are there any citations of a person, (preferably subsequent to 1980, or so), actually claiming that one society or the other is less racist?
Could be melding together of stereotypes. Some on the American left see Europe as a model due to health care, gun laws, secularism, etc, etc. Seems a small jump from “Europe has democratic socialist tendencies that I like” to “Europe has other tendencies, such as anti-racism, that I like.”
Isn’t there very blatant racism towards black soccer players in Europe? If I remember correctly, some black players have been pelted with bananas. I can’t imagine that happening at a major sporting event in the US in 2015.
I seem to recall at least one guy who notoriously managed to draw a number of racial lines among this uniform sea of “white”. Dour sort of fellow, no sense of humour, kind of screechy, name’s on the tip of my tongue, rhymes with “butler”…
I agree. In my experience, “racists” in Europe don’t care that much about which race you are, but whether you identify with the local social, cultural and national standards.
Kind of like the joke from Asterix: “I don’t mind foreigners, but these foreigners are not from around here!”
That’s true, but in practical terms - at least for the purpose of this discussion - there isn’t much difference between the two, is there? If some people are hated because they’re black and other people are hated because they’re Roma, it makes little difference to them that the first is a “race” and the second is an “ethnicity”.
By Spanish standards, we don’t normally consider someone to be Basque (or French, or Indian) because his lastname happens to be; of Basque ancestry yes, but we wouldn’t consider Aznar Basque. Some nationalist and fascist groups sport a xenophobic streak which defines anybody whose foreparents were born outside the area as eternal outsiders, but it’s not the common mindset and it’s the opposite of what would be Aznar’s case; it’s exclusive of children of inmigrants, not inclusive of children of emigrants.
In a way this undermines your proposal, but at the same time, I think it shows that the way we file people “in Europe” doesn’t match the American “kiss me I’m Irish” of people whose only relation to the Emerald Isle is their lastname. The definitions involved are very different, so are the relationships behind those definitions.
And I know this is something that is normally done this way in English but the article you linked calls the president’s father a “Basque nationalist”. He wasn’t, not in the sense in which the word nationalist is normally used. He was a falangist, part of the so-called nacional side which for some reason gets translated into English as nationalist. The actual Basque nationalists were on the other side of the war.
ETA: worse, the one who gets called a nationalist in the quote is the traditionalist grandfather, who probably would have burst a few veins at getting such an apellative.
I see the accusation of racism. I see nothing to indicate that the Europeans, generally, think that they are beyond such attitudes or that racism is more prevalent in the U.S. (I would not be surprised to discover a certain amount of “Look at them!” in European attitudes, but that is not really the same thing as saying that the U.S. has a problem and that Europe does not.)
And white being your singular most important distinction? You are applying American standards to Europe, Europe works by different distinctions that the USA. I can assure you, as a European, we know the difference between Danes, Swedes, French, Poles, Russians, Italians, Spaniards, Serbs, etc.
another point: no state or federal parliamentary body in the US has neo-nazis (or for that matter, communists) sitting in them; Europe has that all over.