Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

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> I live in Sweden, but I think Europe is much less race-oriented (although classism is still a massive issue).

Europe is not less racist than the US. However, Europeans are much less used to reflecting on and taking about racism in their own countries than Americans are.

That reluctance to talk about race is exacerbated by the fact that, in many European counties (Sweden being one of them), it is either difficult or impossible to legally collect meaningful data about race, making it impossible to actually report on objective racial disparities and issues.

> The real question is why Europe has to deal with it when it was the USA which started the wars.

I see Europeans express sentiments like this quite often, and it's quite amusing. Racism isn't something foreign to Europe - Europe is literally the birthplace of white supremacist ideology, and racism has been ingrained in European society for centuries. It's quite ludicrous to pretend that it somehow evaporated overnight without cause, and even more absurd to make that assertion when there's copious evidence of direct and overt racism in across Europe literally every day.

While this might be true to some extent, a huge difference between the US and Europe is that in the EU the concept of identity revolves more around nationality than ethnicity/race.

It's 'nationality' under an implicitly racialized understanding. If you are not white, having a German passport will not be enough for many Germans to consider you fully German.

That's not to deny that American racial categories are either inapplicable or less central to personal identity in most European countries; but let's also not pretend that the roughly equivalent concept is some kind of bloodless bureaucratic idea of 'nationality'.

> but let's also not pretend that the roughly equivalent concept is some kind of bloodless bureaucratic idea of 'nationality'.

An apt choice of words, given that almost all European countries practice jus sanguinis - literally "right of the blood". In contrast to how citizenship works in most of North and South America, people who are born in European countries do not automatically get citizenship (nationality) of the country of birth. Instead, citizenship is inherited.

This system became popular in many European countries in part because it provided a way to avoid automatically granting citizenship to immigrants from the now-former colonies, instead creating an extra barrier.

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