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Comment by freediver | Hacker News Reader

I would disagree. What is important to know is that in this region of the world discrimination (if at all present) is in general not based on the race/color of the skin - and this is in general true for the rest of Europe too.

In Europe, discrimination, when it happens, is usually based on national or religious differences. All wars Europeans ever fought were over national or religious reasons.

In Serbia generally racial discrimination is not present, nor is a topic of any conversation in media or society (certainly not to any extent like in US). There was a war between serbs and bosnian muslims and serbs and kosovo muslims (note national/religious connotation) some 20 years ago, and some people may have 'hard feelings' about it, but in general that's the end of it. Still, being a Muslim in Serbia is IMO a 'better' experience than being one in USA (maybe also because 5% of population of Serbia is Muslim vs ~1% in USA).

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Fellow European here, I have to somewhat disagree. While it is true that discrimination is not as heavily based on skin colour as it is in places like the US I believe it plays a bigger role than you make it out to be.

Discrimination based on nationality is a thing, but it is very much something that varies a lot in Europe. To generalise it as one of the top reasons for discrimination isn't quite right in my opinion.

That said, it's the type of discrimination that is the most prevalent, simply because that's what most people deal with.

However, I think that in day to day life skin colour may be more noticeable than other types of discrimination, simply because it is easier to make out.

While in some places discrimination of certain nationalities or religions is certainly common place and as such might seem like it is the predominant form of discrimination, discrimination based on skin colour is also present. Maybe to a lesser degree, but it is present everywhere.

The simple truth is that the "better" experience will be the one Caucasians get.

This is why I used 'in general' so many times in my comment :)

Perhaps we can agree that in Europe, national/religious discrimination is probably an order of magnitude more prevalent than any other form of discrimination. From my experience and in practical terms, I would even put social/economic/education based discrimination before skin color based one.

The USA might not treat Muslims well, but there have not been mass killings (in country - obviously there have been abroad). Anyone who wants to know more should google Srebrenica genocide, was the July 1995 genocide of more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys in and around the town of Srebrenica, during the Bosnian War.

Those individuals who during the 1990s were the most ardent supporters of the ultranationalist politics that paved the way for the genocide in Srebrenica—for the ethnic ‘cleansing’ of Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as Kosovo—are in charge today, too. Since the time of the socialist state’s end, there have hardly been any powerful political actors in Serbia who did not in some way advocate some idea of a ‘Greater Serbia’.

There is a clear continuity of nationalist politics that has more or less been going on since the nineteenth century, and the dominant line of political thinking in Serbia throughout history has mostly been nationalism. The essentialization of Muslims as the ultimate ‘Other’ has been one of this nationalism’s main pillars. On the one hand, Serb converts to Islam are in some way worse than ‘born’ Muslims for most Serbian nationalists. There is the popular saying ‘a poturica [convert] is worse than a Turk’, and the derogatory term poturica applies to all South Slavs who have accepted Islam—including Bosniaks and Serbian converts.

Don’t even get me started on Serbs and Turks. 500 years.

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