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France and Germany urged to rethink reluctance to gather ethnicity data
- version_five 5y agoI don't know about Germany, in France it is considered something equivalent of racist or discriminatory to ask people for personal information like this. I'd personally rather see that approach migrate to North America so we can stop making everything about race. I don't think I'm saying anything new when I say that all the recent race focus had had exactly the opposite effect of ending discrimination, and has rolled back 100+ years of progress towards "color blind" equality where everyone is judged on their merits. It will be a real shame if europe buys in to this American nonsense. France is pretty strong minded and as a country thinks a lot more critically about political things, I'm cautiously optimistic that the people wouldn't go in for this.
- giraffe_lady 5y ago"color blind" is not where we are and trying to set that as the goal right now is causing problems. People do have different experiences in the world because of their races and pretending the races don't exist makes you blind to those effects. And 100 years of what now? A black man was lynched in my home town during my lifetime. My father was well into adulthood when desegregation began. I think you're gonna have to start the clock a little more recently. This stuff is still living memory, the effects of them linger tangibly in people's lives today. Ignoring race in data collection is a form of denial of it frankly.
- raxxorraxor 4y agoI don't buy this explanation it is still a bad idea.
- pasabagi 5y ago> as a country thinks a lot more critically about political things ... Did you miss the last election, where the far-right daughter of a noted neo-nazi faced off against a man who's only claim to electability was that he wasn't Le Pen? France is not the most depressing political culture in the EU, but that's just because there's such tough competition.
- type0 5y agoSoviet Union had ethnicity on birth certs and passports, since then even Russia had removed that (for their own peculiar reasons). Stalin ethnic repressions are a known fact https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/1059308/Rochford%20Thesis%20FINAL.pdf https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/1... And now it seems politicians want to future-proof the aid for those who might to repeat the horrors of history France and Germany could fool themselves that they're not like "Soviet", but the truth is that the EU could very well be destined to become a capitalistic version of USSR. I applaud the Brits who left this impotent block who puts their salaries above the needs of the people.
- refsab 5y agoNever going to happen in Germany. Collecting racial data sounds too much like what the Nazis did. Even the word 'race' has sinister connotations in German because of them.
- giraffe_lady 5y agolol don't you have to effectively register your religion with the government in germany? iirc technically it's a tax but the end result is the same, they have a list of active religious people and their affiliations.
- rusticpenn 5y agoOne of them is not your choice.