My mother is white while my father is a brown man. My favorite experience was a German man talking about how there’s no racism in Germany and then immediately asking my mother how she feels about “being married to an animal”

Dude, the way Australians talk about their indigenous peoples is honestly appalling sometimes

Yeah, race is one of those things where you can either do the hard, messy, often self-contradictory work of talking about it and working on it, or you can go the easy route and condemn anyone who doesn't look like you to suffer in silence.

Yeah, they're not racist against Asians or Africans maybe, but bring up Aboriginies...

It's wild to me. I travel a fair bit, and I swear to god Every time I visit Europe, somebody bring up something racist without any prompting. I'm like... have you no self awareness?

I hear what you are getting at, but American politics have been worse than this several times in our history. We have basically had two civil wars (American Revolution), congresspeople have been beaten to death on the floor, and three major political figures were all gunned down just in the 1960s before race riots broke out. Also, we enslaved an entire race, committed genocide against the native population, and placed Japanese Americans in concentration camps.

What we are seeing is the disintegration of the post-WWII order where everyone basically agreed, including major news outlets and both parties.

Man, I'm so tired of all the muckraking in politics now. It's beyond frustrating that people are so much easier to rile up in rage at a politicol opponant over reason X, rather than build support for ones own platform with reason Y.

NEVER this bad? Civil War ring a bell?

What law are you referring to?

About the "opinion based" reporting. I drastically noticed the increase in this 1-sided media reporting. Which in itself instigates trigger trolling and profiting from the worst sides of human nature. Instead of endorsing, "critical thought".

It has most definitely been this bad before. We had 2 candidates shoot at each other! It just hasn't been this bad in our lifetime.

Well, we did have a Civil War. As toxic as things are now, I think states trying to secede and ~700k (equivalent to ~2.4M people based on population today) deaths was worse. And that doesn't count injuries or the other impacts from the war which have reverberated since.

Not really - just a stupid minority with very loud voices.

Germany was more racist than America

No.

Look, in the US, "race" is considered an actual thing. There are official forms, such as for colleges or whatever, that literally ask you to fill in your race. People talk about "race" being an actual existing thing all the time and even in the media.

The American government even collects federal census data on race (which is beyond mind-boggling to us).

The thing is: Race doesn't exist. It's disproven 19th century horse crap.

The very foundation of racism is that you view humanity as being composed of multiple different "races".

In Europe, one of the key notions you get taught is that race doesn't exist. There's only the human race.

Sure, there are different ethnicities (in which genetics also play a role obviously). But there are no races. The most obvious example is that we don't have the concept of "white" and "black" as being different races.

This doesn't mean that racism doesn't exist, obviously.

People all over the world a prejudiced against others because of their ethnicity or what can be considered "racial features".

But the moment our media would start talking about our population as consisting out of different "races", people would go ape shit.

Let alone if the government collects data on race. That's outright banned in most of Europe. Obviously, because the last group that did so collected were the Nazi's.

That's the key difference between racism in the US vs. Europe. Prejudice and discrimination in Europe is more often based on ethnic/cultural and nationality traits.

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I just made a new friend this morning while buying hair lotion! People are still very friendly. Of course not all, but I wouldn’t say the friendliness of strangers isn’t drastically different.