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> I have yet to see even the most progressive Western European country that didn’t have a huge hate against Roma/Travelers You don't even have to go this deep.

> I have yet to see even the most progressive Western European country that didn’t have a huge hate against Roma/Travelers You don't even have to go this deep. Each and every friend of mine who's German of mixed heritage (Black, Asian) has struggled with people who can't imagine a German not being white. As in you, a German born in Germany, get addressed in English every now and then by strangers, because if you're not white, you have to be a tourist.

lazide 2y ago
People pattern match. Gender, skin color, height, hair color are intuitively and naturally the easiest things people can pattern match on. Not a whole lot of Asians or black folks in pictures like these [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/West_and_East_Germans_at_the_Brandenburg_Gate_in_1989.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/West_and...], just like you won’t see a whole lot of local folks who are white in China or India.
ekianjo 2y ago
> As in you, a German born in Germany, get addressed in English every now and then by strangers, because if you're not white, Not sure why you find that surprising. Being German is not written on your face. Since most Germans are white, most people will make the correct assumption that if someone is not white, there is a stronger likelihood that they are not German. The same happens in Japan with mixed race kids who get treated like foreigners even though they were born and spent their whole life in Japan. That's just how brains work. If you had no prior assumption you could assume that nobody is who they seem to be and that would make things very complicated for everyday life.
- portaouflop 2y ago
  The easy fix is to stop assuming and start talking to people in German - it’s really easy to do. If they don’t understand the language you will notice immediately. A bit of an aside but I find it very condescending by fellow Germans to address people immediately in English if they don’t speak perfect fluent German - give the people some chance to learn and practice the language for god sakes
  - thunky 2y ago
    > The easy fix is to stop assuming and start talking to people in German If 9 times out of 10 English is actually the correct choice, then it probably makes less sense to do this.
    - portaouflop 2y ago
      Even if that number would hold up - Why? It’s still more dignified for all involved. Not every human interaction needs to be made as efficient as possible.
      - lazide 2y ago
        Clearly as evidenced by your irritation, most people don’t work the way you think they should? At least by default. If they’re German. Honestly, being part German, I’m surprised there isn’t a law about this already! Though I guess there was an attempt that ended badly not that long ago…
        portaouflop 2y ago
        Yes there is something deeply wrong in German society - as evidenced by the recent stellar rise of a popular racist and facist party and the more and more common casual racism that is just accepted by the majority of the population. I for one am sad that Germany once again seems to head toward embracing some death-cult ideology that in the past did unimaginable damage to the people it was supposed to serve. It makes me feel that all the progress we made in the past 80 years is built on sand and we can slide back anytime in a highly fragmented, tribalistic and cruel society.
        nec4b 2y ago
        >> Yes there is something deeply wrong in German society - as evidenced by the recent stellar rise of a popular racist and facist party and the more and more common casual racism that is just accepted by the majority of the population. I guess you mean the party which led by a women in a relationship with another women from Sri Lanka. You should probably start looking for other insults, racist and fascist are getting kind of boring.
- boringg 2y ago
  It’s honestly like an odds calculation in those environment. The odds of someone who looks different that is local is incredibly low so they default to assuming said individual is a tourist.
  - portaouflop 2y ago
    It might be the case in certain Asian countries but in Germany the odds are definitely not incredibly low - something around 40% of the population don’t look like what most people think of when speaking of Germans.
klooney 2y ago
The point of all the tiny European states is that they're blood and soil ethnostates. A lot of people got killed to establish that point.
- hjgjhyuhy 2y ago
  In some countries yes, others not. Nobody got killed to make Nordic countries ”ethnostates”. It’s just that not that many people wanted to live so far north. In fact, in Finland the largest ethnic minority (Swedish) on average do much better than ethnic Finns. Sami minority got discriminated admittedly, but not violently persecuted.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Nobody got killed to make Nordic countries ”ethnostates” Literally the Vikings [1]. > in Finland the largest ethnic minority (Swedish) on average do much better than ethnic Finn Yes [2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Norway https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Norwa... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish%E2%80%93Novgorodian_wars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish%E2%80%93Novgorodian_...
  - nordic-ethnos 2y ago
    That’s gotta be among the most revisionist takes I’ve ever seen. The nordic countries subjected hundreds of thousands of individuals from mostly lower class backgrounds to mandatory sterilizations over a period of decades in order to secure the population distribution they have now. https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/08/how-did-sweden-sterilise-up-to-30000-people-against-their-will-in-the-cause-of-eugenics https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/08/how-did-sweden-sterilise... https://nordics.info/show/artikel/eugenics-in-the-nordic-countries https://nordics.info/show/artikel/eugenics-in-the-nordic-cou...
- dotancohen 2y ago
  As a non-European I'd like to read more. What exactly should I be googling to get the real history and not the clean history that is commonly told?
nshfgav 2y ago
Germany is too small to be a so called melting pot immigration country like the U.S. around 1900. It is natural to assume that people are white. As you say addressing non-white people in English does not happen very often. Why would it? There are so many immigrants that 30% of interactions in department stores supermarkets etc. are with non-white people. When you are stopped by a security guard in a store, he is invariably of Arab origin.
- steveBK123 2y ago
  > Germany is too small to be a so called melting pot immigration country like the U.S. around 1900. Why? Are we talking population or space? On population, 1900 US population was 75M, current Germany population is 85M. If we are talking space - what does that have to do with it? And even in 1900, Americans were far more clustered in cities in the Northeast/Cali/etc, so probably not terrifically more area than current footprint of Germany. Currently we are seeing countries in Europe go through a moral panic over immigration that is probably not terribly different than the US in 1900. I've seen some historical stats that something like 80% of US urban residents in 1900 were foreign born or 1st generation. NYC alone we've had immigrants as ~35-40% of our population from 1900 thru the tightening of immigration laws in 1920s, after which it dropped to 18% by 1970. The percent has rebounded since then and is back around 35-40% again. So nothing that is going on in Europe is terribly different or unique, and not being a melting pot is a choice that most of Europe has made by being ethnostates.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    It’s not a “choice” Europe has made. That’s what they are. Most European countries, as a matter of history, are ethnic tribes with flags, similar to Japan or Bangladesh or Israel.
    - steveBK123 2y ago
      Everything is a choice. There are differences in immigration, work visa, citizenship, social security, etc laws that perpetuate these choices. But these laws are downstream of the local culture desiring this. Japan didn’t just end up with 97-99% Japanese population by accident.
rayiner 2y ago
Germany is an ethnostate, so why is that surprising? The country’s name is literally “land of the people” in the language of a group of tribes of people who happened to have fair skin. Our languages’ names for Germany are derived from the names of specific tribes. It’s like “Bangladesh.” Literally, “country of the Bengalis.” If you aren’t brown with vaguely southeast Asian features then you’ll always be considered a foreigner. That’s not “racism.” That’s the nature of nations that arise from being the homeland of specific ethnolinguistic groups. Ethnocultural groups like germans and Bangladeshis have ancient shared history, language, and culture. When you say that people should assume that anyone who looks any way should be assumed to be German, that erases Germans as a distinct ethnocultural group. It’s completely different than saying the same thing in a country like America. My family has been in Bangladesh since before anyone can remember, likely back before the language split from vernacular Sanskrit. My parent’s generation fought the Pakistanis to establish the country as a homeland. You cannot, out of a desire to avoid offending a small minority, erase that shared history and reduce being Bangladeshi (or German or Japanese) to a legal designation established with some paperwork.

lazide 2y ago

People pattern match. Gender, skin color, height, hair color are intuitively and naturally the easiest things people can pattern match on. Not a whole lot of Asians or black folks in pictures like these [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/West_and_East_Germans_at_the_Brandenburg_Gate_in_1989.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/West_and...], just like you won’t see a whole lot of local folks who are white in China or India.

ekianjo 2y ago

> As in you, a German born in Germany, get addressed in English every now and then by strangers, because if you're not white, Not sure why you find that surprising. Being German is not written on your face. Since most Germans are white, most people will make the correct assumption that if someone is not white, there is a stronger likelihood that they are not German. The same happens in Japan with mixed race kids who get treated like foreigners even though they were born and spent their whole life in Japan. That's just how brains work. If you had no prior assumption you could assume that nobody is who they seem to be and that would make things very complicated for everyday life.

portaouflop 2y ago
The easy fix is to stop assuming and start talking to people in German - it’s really easy to do. If they don’t understand the language you will notice immediately. A bit of an aside but I find it very condescending by fellow Germans to address people immediately in English if they don’t speak perfect fluent German - give the people some chance to learn and practice the language for god sakes
- thunky 2y ago
  > The easy fix is to stop assuming and start talking to people in German If 9 times out of 10 English is actually the correct choice, then it probably makes less sense to do this.
  - portaouflop 2y ago
    Even if that number would hold up - Why? It’s still more dignified for all involved. Not every human interaction needs to be made as efficient as possible.
    - lazide 2y ago
      Clearly as evidenced by your irritation, most people don’t work the way you think they should? At least by default. If they’re German. Honestly, being part German, I’m surprised there isn’t a law about this already! Though I guess there was an attempt that ended badly not that long ago…
      - portaouflop 2y ago
        Yes there is something deeply wrong in German society - as evidenced by the recent stellar rise of a popular racist and facist party and the more and more common casual racism that is just accepted by the majority of the population. I for one am sad that Germany once again seems to head toward embracing some death-cult ideology that in the past did unimaginable damage to the people it was supposed to serve. It makes me feel that all the progress we made in the past 80 years is built on sand and we can slide back anytime in a highly fragmented, tribalistic and cruel society.
        nec4b 2y ago
        >> Yes there is something deeply wrong in German society - as evidenced by the recent stellar rise of a popular racist and facist party and the more and more common casual racism that is just accepted by the majority of the population. I guess you mean the party which led by a women in a relationship with another women from Sri Lanka. You should probably start looking for other insults, racist and fascist are getting kind of boring.
boringg 2y ago
It’s honestly like an odds calculation in those environment. The odds of someone who looks different that is local is incredibly low so they default to assuming said individual is a tourist.
- portaouflop 2y ago
  It might be the case in certain Asian countries but in Germany the odds are definitely not incredibly low - something around 40% of the population don’t look like what most people think of when speaking of Germans.

klooney 2y ago

The point of all the tiny European states is that they're blood and soil ethnostates. A lot of people got killed to establish that point.

hjgjhyuhy 2y ago
In some countries yes, others not. Nobody got killed to make Nordic countries ”ethnostates”. It’s just that not that many people wanted to live so far north. In fact, in Finland the largest ethnic minority (Swedish) on average do much better than ethnic Finns. Sami minority got discriminated admittedly, but not violently persecuted.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Nobody got killed to make Nordic countries ”ethnostates” Literally the Vikings [1]. > in Finland the largest ethnic minority (Swedish) on average do much better than ethnic Finn Yes [2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Norway https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Norwa... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish%E2%80%93Novgorodian_wars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish%E2%80%93Novgorodian_...
- nordic-ethnos 2y ago
  That’s gotta be among the most revisionist takes I’ve ever seen. The nordic countries subjected hundreds of thousands of individuals from mostly lower class backgrounds to mandatory sterilizations over a period of decades in order to secure the population distribution they have now. https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/08/how-did-sweden-sterilise-up-to-30000-people-against-their-will-in-the-cause-of-eugenics https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/08/how-did-sweden-sterilise... https://nordics.info/show/artikel/eugenics-in-the-nordic-countries https://nordics.info/show/artikel/eugenics-in-the-nordic-cou...
dotancohen 2y ago
As a non-European I'd like to read more. What exactly should I be googling to get the real history and not the clean history that is commonly told?

nshfgav 2y ago

Germany is too small to be a so called melting pot immigration country like the U.S. around 1900. It is natural to assume that people are white. As you say addressing non-white people in English does not happen very often. Why would it? There are so many immigrants that 30% of interactions in department stores supermarkets etc. are with non-white people. When you are stopped by a security guard in a store, he is invariably of Arab origin.

steveBK123 2y ago
> Germany is too small to be a so called melting pot immigration country like the U.S. around 1900. Why? Are we talking population or space? On population, 1900 US population was 75M, current Germany population is 85M. If we are talking space - what does that have to do with it? And even in 1900, Americans were far more clustered in cities in the Northeast/Cali/etc, so probably not terrifically more area than current footprint of Germany. Currently we are seeing countries in Europe go through a moral panic over immigration that is probably not terribly different than the US in 1900. I've seen some historical stats that something like 80% of US urban residents in 1900 were foreign born or 1st generation. NYC alone we've had immigrants as ~35-40% of our population from 1900 thru the tightening of immigration laws in 1920s, after which it dropped to 18% by 1970. The percent has rebounded since then and is back around 35-40% again. So nothing that is going on in Europe is terribly different or unique, and not being a melting pot is a choice that most of Europe has made by being ethnostates.
- rayiner 2y ago
  It’s not a “choice” Europe has made. That’s what they are. Most European countries, as a matter of history, are ethnic tribes with flags, similar to Japan or Bangladesh or Israel.
  - steveBK123 2y ago
    Everything is a choice. There are differences in immigration, work visa, citizenship, social security, etc laws that perpetuate these choices. But these laws are downstream of the local culture desiring this. Japan didn’t just end up with 97-99% Japanese population by accident.

rayiner 2y ago

Germany is an ethnostate, so why is that surprising? The country’s name is literally “land of the people” in the language of a group of tribes of people who happened to have fair skin. Our languages’ names for Germany are derived from the names of specific tribes. It’s like “Bangladesh.” Literally, “country of the Bengalis.” If you aren’t brown with vaguely southeast Asian features then you’ll always be considered a foreigner. That’s not “racism.” That’s the nature of nations that arise from being the homeland of specific ethnolinguistic groups. Ethnocultural groups like germans and Bangladeshis have ancient shared history, language, and culture. When you say that people should assume that anyone who looks any way should be assumed to be German, that erases Germans as a distinct ethnocultural group. It’s completely different than saying the same thing in a country like America. My family has been in Bangladesh since before anyone can remember, likely back before the language split from vernacular Sanskrit. My parent’s generation fought the Pakistanis to establish the country as a homeland. You cannot, out of a desire to avoid offending a small minority, erase that shared history and reduce being Bangladeshi (or German or Japanese) to a legal designation established with some paperwork.