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Comment by endisukaj | Hacker News Reader

You'll be hard-pressed to find the sort of systematic racism found in the US (especially by institutions) anywhere in Europe. Sure, you might get the occasional glance if you are black especially in Eastern Europe and it's mostly because out of curiosity since there are not many African immigrants in ex-Communist countries as there are in, say, France. But other than that you'll be fine.

I should say though that Eastern European countries do have issues with Islamophobia in general, so if you are muslim I would not recommend those countries.

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> You'll be hard-pressed to find the sort of systematic racism found in the US (especially by institutions) anywhere in Europe

This ia really common misconception perpetuated by (white) Europeans. It couldn't be more wrong.

Systemic racism is pervasive throughout Europe, and in many ways, it's even more institutionalized in Europe than it is in the US.

Please stop spreading the myth that Europe is free of institutionalized racism, or even that it's somehow better in this regard than the US.

Do you have any proof for that? AFAIK the percentage of black people in prison in the EU is smaller than in the US for example.

I know that this does not prove everything but it's one way to measure institutional racism which is kinda hard to measure in an objective way.

https://www.apnews.com/e6ab521552b64a399f79a223d8006e5e/Raci...

European soccer games, for example, have had many examples of widespread racist chants and gestures.

Racism is absolutely a problem in Europe.

That's mostly football ultras[0] though. They are usually the lowest common denominator, it's like saying the US has issues with education because there are people who believe that the earth is flat. Besides, I did not say there's no racism in Europe, I said it's not institutionalized.

I should also add that discrimination in European countries is based more along ethnic and nationalistic lines, not race or color the way it's in the US. While in the US people are categorized by their "race" (black, white, asian, middle eastern, etc), in Europe they are categorized by their country or geographical area of origin (Polish, Italian, French, English, Eastern European, Western European, etc). A black English guy is not primarily "black", he is primarily English.

It's also quite interesting how US-centric this website is and how patriotic most of you are.

[0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultras)

I totally agree that discrimination is done by geographical area of origin instead of colour of skin. Lots of Estonians have an axe to grind with Russians (due to history), but I don't know of any other people that we tend to dislike. Perhaps British guys that come here to get drunk and yell and piss all over the streets, but I'm sure that's a problem most everywhere.

> I know that this does not prove everything but it's one way to measure institutional racism which is kinda hard to measure in an objective way.

It's a lot harder to collect data when you expunge all references to race from the law, and also prohibit public institutions from collecting data on race and ethnicity, as five European countries have already done. Heck, you'll be hard-pressed to find reliable statistics for how many black people even live in (e.g.) France. That doesn't mean racism doesn't exist there; it just means it's impossible to separate out the effects of racism in analyses. The racism has become fully integrated.

This is exactly what institutionalization of racism looks like - racism becoming part and parcel of the society, so tightly integrated that it's actually hard to disentangle the racism from the rest of society.

Avoiding the culture of dividing and collecting data based on race makes a society racist? That's certainly an interesting way of looking at it.

> Avoiding the culture of dividing and collecting data based on race makes a society racist?

It certainly doesn't eliminate racism from society, no. It just makes it impossible to measure the effects of racism independently. Hence, the racism becomes integrated into the rest of the society.

It's one less statistic for government busy-bodies to obsess over reducing or optimizing at the behest of conflict peddlers.

Have you ever been in a Parisian suburb?

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