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Comment by atemerev | Hacker News Reader

This is how it works in European countries, e.g. France. “Race” never figures in any government documents, forms and surveys. Mentioning someone’s race considered to be somewhat rude and is regarded as a thing of the past. Not everybody is race-agnostic, but all government organizations and all businesses are required to be race-agnostic by law. This includes never asking about race, particularly in forms and surveys. Identity politics is actively _discouraged_.

I wonder why it is different in America.

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I've been very influenced by Isabel Wilkerson's new book to look at America as having a racial caste system that's 400 years old. The entire economic and political history and present of the United States is governed by this caste system; it's even written into the physical geography, e.g. where there is lead and where there are trees. If you don't ask about race on government forms, how are you going to measure progress on dismantling this system?

Abolishing race is a good goal, but it's going to come after we've acknowledged and reckoned with the violence and harm this country has done to so many millions of people. And we've barely even started that process.

We can argue that there is work to do toward equality without discrediting ourselves and our objective with incredible claims about “having barely started” as though we still have slave plantations and so on.

The argument put forth in the book Racecraft [1] is that America's founding on individual liberty juxtaposed with the economic reality of chattel slavery created a contradiction so stark that it was necessary to invent a framework to justify slavery culturally.

[1] Fields, Karen E, and Barbara J. Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. 2012.

We fought our bloodiest war attempting to destroy one side of that contradiction. Individual liberty remains the most important tenet of a free society. Preserving it demands personal responsibility and impartiality. Anything less is pandering.

Nota Bene: other countries got rid of slavery, earlier, without bloody internecine wars.

> how it works in European countries

some European countries

Some are ahead of the curve, some are so far behind due to fairly homogenous population, that the issue of race is not something anyone making forms thinks about. (because they never expect to meet a non-Slavic person for example)

Identity politics does exist and is encouraged in Europe, it's just not based on "race" (in Europe, or at least in Germany, we prefer to day "ethnicity", as "race" has really bad connotations and is scientifically discarded as a concept).

But cultural identity politics have been going strong forever, going back probably at least to the 19th century idea of nation states. That's why minority languages often get special recognition etc.

This is true as far as I am aware, and I agree. It is (IMO) objectively backwards and ugly to discuss someones physical characteristics instead of their contributions, especially backwards if one are trying to get rid of differences.

That said, you will find many larger companies actively trying to be or at least look diverse.

America historically developed much more race-based laws (e.g. segregation laws, anti-miscegenation laws, and racially motivated immigration laws, as well as a close association between race and the institution of slavery). As a result, race has become much more entrenched as something with legal status in America than in Europe.

> Mentioning someone’s race considered to be somewhat rude and is regarded as a thing of the past.

After reading about some especially unsubtle racism in the French right-wing press today, [1] it struck me how similar France and the United States are in this regard, at least superficially. The centrist people in government condemning the obvious racism, the powerful right-wing political figure offering a weird non-condemnation condemnation that does not call racism by its right name, the far-right publisher's response:

"Our text is not racist at all," it argued. "It is convenient for our opponents to throw that accusation at us."

None of it seems very alien to an American.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53972591

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