Reading the many posts by @mekkaokereke on structural racism in the USA (and I do recommend you follow him if you are interested in the topic at all), I suspect the following is true about much of Europe:
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Reading the many posts by @mekkaokereke on structural racism in the USA (and I do recommend you follow him if you are interested in the topic at all), I suspect the following is true about much of Europe:
There is less overall structural #racism in Europe than in the USA - not because white Europeans are any less racist than white Americans (I don't think that they are), but because embedding structural racism into the laws and structures of society was never as much of a policy goal in modern European nations as it was in the USA since their founding.
However, I also think that far fewer Europeans are aware that structural racism is even a thing, even among people who would describe themselves as "progressive". Statements like "I don't see color!" are common, and those who utter them believe themselves to be open-minded rather than clueless.
And at least here in Germany, the thought processes about racism start and end with:
"Nazis are racists. I am not a Nazi, therefore I am not racist!"
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@juergen_hubert @mekkaokereke a lot of the structural racism in Germany targets immigrants and descendants of immigrants. For example the fact that getting German citizenship is nowhere near as easy as it should be.
Or, a rather strange example for a microaggression I would never have noticed before moving to the US: when you scan your passport at a Schengen border station, no matter where in Europe you are, the instructions automatically switch to German, with at least as I could tell, no obvious way to switch them to English, Turkish, or Vietnamese. It's something that in the US is relatively rare, federal things especially are usually available in Spanish and Chinese as well as English, with instructions on how to request help in other languages as well. -
@sophieschmieg @juergen_hubert @mekkaokereke tbh I've seen such things happen outside of Europe as well, in ways occasionally mind boggling. Language switching based upon nationality or country of residence is pervasive.
If you scan a Swedish passport on one of China's fingerprint readers, it automatically switches to Swedish. Incredibly badly translated and difficult to understand Swedish. -
@sophieschmieg @juergen_hubert @mekkaokereke but certainly quite often there's just a total lack of affordances for non-native speakers. The fact that the Berlin immigration office sent out instructions in both German and English to applicants for the Article 50 visa was... Pretty much unprecedented, it felt.
