Adele, the singer, was photographed at the Nottinghill Carnival (a massive Carribean street festival over the August bank holiday in London) with her hair in Bantu Knots and wearing a bikini top in the colours of the Jamaican flag. As soon as it was on twitter the you started getting tweets from Black Americans about cultural appropriation, but this was met in turn by fierce opposition from African and Carribean posters from the Uk and Africa who thought she looked great and were incredibly pissed off at the Americans for appointing themselves the global arbiters of what parts of African or Carribean culture were allowed or not allowed to be used by non-Africans or Carribeans. They found the proscriptions to be silly or highanded behaviour.
Cultural appropriation doesnt seem to be a problem anywhere else but the USA.
As a British person with Caribbean family background, I found the reaction to this from the internet so strange. In Britain it's normal that the different cultures here mix. Shops selling Baltic bread, next to shops selling jerk chicken, across the road from a traditional English pub. People of all colours and backgrounds frequenting all of them.
From an outside perspective, people in the USA seem very pre-occupied with continuing a culture of segregation, where black and white people live different lives and mixing is frowned upon. I see this attitude on both sides.
I'm from the Caribbean and I can attest to this. We're always baffled at the neuroticism of America's obsession with identity politics and tribalism, especially as it relates to race and culture.
In my country for example we have six distinct races/ethnicities, from indigenous to post-colonial. When either has a celebration or period of cultural remembrance, we openly dress, cook, and celebrate in the same manner. The concept of "cultural appropriation" is nothing but hubris in our minds.
Perhaps we're more fundamentally bonded due to our shared "fragmented" heritage, as V.S. Naipaul frequently expounded upon. Perhaps we're just not victims of inept ideological monoliths that are perpetrated by a radical left and radical right as it is in the US (along with the forced illusion of binary if not zero-sum choices).
Either way, we understand that racism is inescapable in some small measure but we try our best not to elevate it above reason and certainly not above national unity (or pride for that matter). Caribbean people are both welcoming of foreign cultures and curious in our exploration of the same. We wouldn't, couldn't, have it any other way.
Exactly, Americans seem to have this weird view that no-one's culture should mix. I think in the UK the view of most people is that mixing cultures is fine as long as it's respectful
I grew up in a multicultural town in the UK (also home to a lot of racism unfortunately) but we had a yearly (carribean I think) carnival with music and floats and costumes and food.
People would turn out in the thousands and it didn't matter your skin colour because you were there to join in the fun. It doesn't matter if you wore something that wasn't traditionally part of your culture, because you were doing so to join in the fun, not to belittle people
As a Greek, I agree. Ancient Greek culture influences a lot of things, but I've never heard of any Greek being offended by any of it, we consider it homage/remixing.
Here in Britan, as I walk on my way to work I pass by my favorite Indian restaurant, a Polish supermarket with Eastern European products, a Romanian bakery with delicious Transylvanian meat pies and a great German sausage/cheese shop. Each one of them has their respective country flag at the door next to the UK one. I'm not even living in a big city and it is already a cocktail of cultures.
In the 90s multiculturalism gained traction as a concept in the UK. Notting Hill Carnival is pretty much the definition of what that represented - a cultural celebration of one community being opened up to and enjoyed by others. I grew up close enough to hear the bass vibrating my windows and went almost every year despite not having any links to its origin communities. Despite this, it played an important part in my life and I feel these experiences informed my political/social outlook.
Cultural appropriation is a genuine phenomenon, but the difference between attending carnival and culturally appropriating it is a subtle one. For me, it comes down to intent and this is very hard to prove.
Am I doing it in solidarity - sharing a celebration with people who's neighbourhood I share and supporting their cultural expression? Or am I impersonating other communities for my own enjoyment? To a third party, it's can be difficult to tell the difference.
> Cultural appropriation doesnt seem to be a problem anywhere else but the USA.
I feel that the countries which have historically dealt with the realities of a multicultural society better have less issues with cultural appropriation - cultural segregation leads to ownership and identity issues. But that certainly doesn't mean it doesn't exist outside the USA. There is a context in which what Adele did is fine, and one in which it isn't - one photo won't tell you which it is.
As an Italian, stop eating pizza, Americans. You are culturally appropriating our food.
Jokes aside, this happening on Twitter and so it must be somewhat important is the most depressing and disheartening aspect of this event. Stop listening to what ignorants want to say on social media.
I think context is really key here. A friend (who is a descendant of slaves) once told me that one reason hairstyles in particular are are such a sensitive subject, they were literally the only piece of culture/heritage people were able to bring with them on slave ships.
When families were ripped apart it it was a connection/ritual they could hold onto no matter what. Fast forward to the recent past and black people are still discriminated against because of their hairstyles. Some progress has been made in the past decade[0] but black women are still told their natural hair is unprofessional or unattractive and they are required to spend large amounts of $$, time and pain (styling techniques often require high heat/caustic chemicals) in order to be acceptable to corporate America.
Can you imagine the frustration of then watching wealthy white women be celebrated/complimented for adopting these hairstyles? One of the only cultural links you have to your ancestors, hairstyles you've been discriminated against, punished, and harassed for wearing?
What is appropriate to adapt from a particular culture is itself a cultural issue. The reason this is an issue here in America is because of the problematic ways that we adopted elements of other cultures in racist and demeaning ways, without understanding the deeper meaning behind them.
Some examples:
- Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. Black Americans were historically referred to as "Boy" "Girl", or "little" as a demeaning statement of class. "Auntie" and "Uncle" were reserved for older Blacks for the same reason. Use of Black figures as mascots for these brands is a form of cultural appropriation. [1]
- Cleveland Indians logo (other sports teams as well).
- People wearing Sioux (Lakotan) headdresses as fashion statements, which is offensive because that was a thing you had to earn in that culture.
Americans (and literally every culture) appropriates everything from food to clothes to language. Thats not inherently bad. It gets bad when you commercialize and propagate negative stereotypes about cultures that you have historically subjugated.
However, nuance is hard. So on twitter we have people who have embraced the mantra "Cultural Appropriation is bad" and go about shaming every little example of it without understanding the deeper meaning behind them (see what I did there? We're not that different than what we hate). This culture of shaming is itself a form of cultural imperialism.
Cultural appropriation doesnt seem to be a problem anywhere else but the USA.
The US tends to monetize everything. This seems to be less true elsewhere.
We make a stink about "cultural appropriation" here because too much ends up being about the almighty dollar and those dollars far too often go into the pockets of White males, regardless of whose culture, creativity, labor, etc. created the thing.
I wish the idea would go die. I think it helps keep the problem alive rather than resolving it. But I think that's basically the crux of the issue.
I'm not sure that american views are being imposed on US (I'm in the UK). Rather they are being adopted by us without criticism.
This makes conversation about race a confused jumbled incoherent mess. The bigger problem as I see it is more class-oriented than race centric. This should be a discussion on social mobility, which in my opinion is the best in the western world for minority communities. The race discourse in recent years has distracted from improving social mobility and hurting said communities more.
That's because race and class aren't disentangled concepts in the US, and that's not likely to be the ground reality in the next 20 years either. One might make predictions about the mobility of the American poor, and one might rightly make a separate profile of predictions for black America. What is black America 2030? Optimistic?
There are many cities still with covenants restricting home ownership to non-Blacks, and while unenforceable today, it contributes to a story of an everlasting racial smell.
A nation ought not only speak the message of racial harmony, as China does with regards to black immigrants and citizens, but the truth must be evident on the ground for the people to see, and the air ought be pleasant to smell.
I believe the author didn't mean to say that the US imposes the views, but that the UK media and elites do. The same is true in Germany to a large degree, and it's equally weird.
Americanization of everything is a good description, I think. Of course it's very important what happens in the US, it's the heart of the empire after all. But it's given so much weight that I sometimes feel like our media are covering US domestic politics more than our domestic politics.
I remember American trainers for company sponsored training basically making the implication that there being no black people in most of the groups (of 10-15) being a sign of the institutionalised racism keeping them out of tech.
Not considered was the ~1% black population in the country where the training took place. Having 3/80ish black engineers was actually significantly more diverse than if you'd just grabbed a random subset of the population. (ditto for Polish, Indians and Chinese, the actual sizable minorities in the country).
Now had he been talking about the 15-20% of female engineers participating, he may have had a point, but the american perspective was "wow, there should be way more Black people because America has more Black people"
To add some numbers to this debate - the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) published a survey (Nov 2018) that examined the experiences of almost 6,000 people of African descent in 12 EU Member States.
The report includes survey results from Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Sweden and the UK. It paints a varied picture across the countries surveyed.
Summary of weighted results across all surveyed countries (taken from the report): https://imgur.com/a/gcHR5dk
I'm pretty sure this correlates heavily to the size of the black population in each country.
The UK having the largest and most well integrated black population shows in the lower instances of reported harassment. This rings true for me, certainly there is disenfranchisement and other forms of racism, but outright harassment is not something you see often (saying this as a white person). Honestly I would expect Polish and other eastern Europeans to face more harassment.
France I feel has a reasonably large black population but probably not as well integrated.
The average black American in the United States can trace his ancestry further back than the average white American. Most black Americans are descended from enslaved Africans. Their forebears suffered through the segregation and racial terror of the Jim Crow era. The majority of black people in the United Kingdom, by contrast, are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Though many of them have certainly had harrowing experiences with injustice or discrimination, they do not have the same history of racist disadvantage.
This is a key bit here that also applies to the Netherlands. Most, if not all, black (and Moroccan, Turkish etc) Dutch people are either immigrants or children of immigrants.
This sheds a whole different light on statistics, imho. If you move a big chunck of Dutch people to Turkey it would not be weird if their kids wouldn't be CEO's, high level politicians or so. That's just not how that works, especially when your parents were lower educated, and in many cases can't (couldn't) read any Latin based language.
Yet the debate here around racism "borrows" arguments form the US, where black people have been living for 400 years sometimes and STILL aren't even close to representation in the 'top' layer of society.
Just like in the UK, Dutch media is bloody obsessed with the US.
I have a strong feeling (though no data to back it up) that this holds at least as much for debate and polarisation around feminism, gender equality, trans rights and LGBT(Q+) issues.
Well, it makes sense that these views (which are generally unexamined by those who repeat them) are catching on outside of America for the same reason they catch on inside America: fixating on a simplistic target is alluring, people saying nonsensical things they don't really believe in order to avoid being called racist, etc.
You could make the same points inside America as well that the article makes, like examining Nigerian success in America.
Keep trotting the article out and you have a case for why these racial essentialist views shouldn't be imposed on anyone, not just brits. And certainly not on our children.
Last week some celebrities and online publications decided to highlight how proud we should be of having a black man with dreadlocks as a TV anchor. No reference or acknowledgement of anything else about him, just "congratulations for being black". At least for a decade race had been as noteworthy as eye color, until now.
Fortunately, a good chunk of the population can still see how backwards it is to reduce an individual to the color of their skin. But I must admit I'm not very hopeful for future generations when I see schools incorporating intersectional activism in their curriculum and people gathering to protest police brutality in what must be one of the most peaceful countries in the world.
It's a sad reality that so many people exist in this Goldilocks zone of damage, where they are in positions of power and influence while being ignorant and lazy enough to parrot American media without context or critical thought.
I don't know where US Americans got the idea about social justice and all these tangential topics related to it.
In my view the result is that social justice nearly stands for race segregation, inclusion and diversity is almost synomymous with banning outsiders and heretics, methods of societal analysis lead to the worst kind of dogmatism.
At first I honestly thought the teachings of some proponents were to troll in the original sense of the word, but they were completely serious about it.
'Social justice' is far better than 'justice' in my opinion, but it can never be an argument to demand solidarity because that will inevitably lead to totalitarianism.
The "classical" US citizen that proudly swings their flag, shoots holes in the sky and idolizes freedom is a much more attractive alternative.
The one thing I took away from seeing all the BLM protests in Europe this summer, and all the discussions among my friends and family back home about it is that Europeans in general do not understand how incredibly racist the US was, and still is.
At one point in the 1800's, slave labour contributed over half of the US GDP, and to protect that economy, to protect that business, the states who benefited the most from it were completely drenched in absolutely brutal amounts of racist propaganda.
The slave economy of the US necessitated the institutionalised racism, because that was the only way you could get ordinary people to put up with the practice. And Europe has never experienced anything like that, so for the average European, there are no frames of reference, no shared history, nothing.
Sure, there's been slave economies in Europe, but the last ones were a thousand years ago. Sure, there's racism in Europe, plenty of it, but it looks completely different, and it's never been as hyperfocused on skin colour like racism in the US is. Racism in Europe is more about ethnocentrism, and some of the worst atrocities in the continent's history have been committed by super white people against other super white people.
Another thing that Europeans do not understand is how the police works in the US. Where I'm from, the police consists of two national organisations, 700 years of history, and an origin as the city watch, making sure cities in the middle ages didn't catch on fire.
Whereas in the US, the police consists of some 16000 decentralised wildly different organisations, federal, state, county, local, all with a much shorter history, wildly different histories, wildly different scopes of law enforcement. But most importantly, some of those local police organisations were explicitly founded to enforce slave laws, to enforce racial segregation, to enforce Jim Crow laws, and they were founded by the local KKK leaders.
The situation is completely different, the history is completely different, the racial divides are completely different. And then people try to import the US discourse on racism, and nothing fits, nothing makes sense, but people still don't want to be seen as racists, so they try to make it fit, try to agree, and it's all just weird.
You can stand in solidarity with BLM no matter where you live, that's fine, but if you're European, please stop there. Don't try to deal with uniquely US issues in your own country, because I promise you, they don't exist. You have other issues to deal with.
I think one of the reasons this simplification is happening, is that nuance generally has failed to gain traction in the past. A large part of why the far right / racist movement has grown a lot the past 20 years or so is that their narrative is so simple: "Immigrants have higher crime rates and we're taking in more immigrants, which is bad." Fighting this with nuance and trying to say that statistics is more complicated than that hasn't worked. I would say that the public education system needs a complete overhaul to fix this (critical thinking, media literacy and such), but even if that were to happen, it would take 20-30 years.
Also, in the end, I don't think these type of views causes that much harm. Okay, so a group of people end up being "fake" anti-racists, but it's still raising awareness and it might cause people to make slightly different choices in their day-to-day lives. This isn't comparable to Kony 2012 where people changed their profile picture on Facebook for literally no effect.
> Immigrants have higher crime rates and we're taking in more immigrants, which is bad.
This statement isn't the issue. What is an issue is that the establishment isn't willing to have a real discussion on this topic (illegal immigration, cultural dilution, economic benefits, etc...). The rise of far right and far left rhetoric is an expected response to the status quo, where people feel pushed into opposing tribes.
Many americans (including journalists, thinkers, politicians, etc) can't imagine that there's any legitimate culture, or any issues, and preoccupations, other than their own. Or that their views are not the pinnacle of civilization, and they're not the white knights humanity waits to be saved by.
This annoys me a lot as well. Especially when people here in the Netherlands protest against "police violence", which is a thing that barely even exists in our country.
> There has, for example, been a lot of concern about the underrepresentation of black Britons in professions like the arts and publishing. But why would you choose to go into theater or journalism—rather than law, medicine or finance—if you are a talented child of ambitious but not well off immigrants?
A really weird point. There's plenty of concern about under-representation of black people in law, and medicine, and finance.
In law there is a lot of effort spent getting more black lawyers and judges into the system, and we've recently seen the experience of Alexandra Wilson who was mistaken for a defendant at least 3 times in one day in her place of work. https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/investigation-launched-aft...
In healthcare we have NHSWRES (NHS Workforce Race Equality Standard) who are trying to increase representation in NHS exec and non-exec teams.
> In a country in which black people make up only three percent of the population, for example, six percent of junior doctors are black.
If we're looking at racism we don't want to compare junior doctors with journalists. We want to compare junior doctors to consultants and senior leaders. We also want to compare the different levels of junior doctors to each other to see if the ratio of black:white doctors changes.
> We can see that 6.2% of junior doctors are black, but only 3.5% of consultants are black. Where did all those juniors go?
If 3% of the population is black, then having 3.5% of consultants being black means they're still overrepresented! Regression to the mean is the most likely explanation.
> We can see that 6.2% of junior doctors are black, but only 3.5% of consultants are black. Where did all those juniors go?
It takes a long time for demographic shifts to work their way through a population. Senior medical staff are more likely to be white, male, and old. But in a few decades that’s going to look very different.
(1) Yes, Americal cultural hegemony is widespread, especially in the English-speaking world (second language or first).
(2) Yes, your country has racism, including systemic racism. Denial is one of the privileges that marks you as a member of the dominant group.
Your job is not to deny the racism, but to try to identify it an root it out.
The crux of the biscuit is that the American concept of 'race' is so very very nebulous. Since there is no hard definition of 'race', there is no way to definitively sort an individual into a 'race.' It's entirely subjective and relies on an individual's prejudice.
The American brand of racism is very much obsessed about skin color. Historically European racism is quite different. The Nazis were deeply racist, but didn't care much about skin color in particular - they hated and murdered Slavs and Jews and Roma, groups not identified by skin color. Europe have to acknowledge and engage with this horrible past, but things like obsessing about the Dutch "Zwarte Piet" tradition is totally missing the point IMHO.
Who is this addressed to? From the article it seems addressed to British people using social media to share American specific viewpoints. But the comments here make it seem like it's Americans doing the imposing of views.
For europeans, working in the tech industry increases people's exposure to Americans and American points of view significantly. So I think it's likely true in general that as the author represents, this is is mostly people making the change in their own country, people on this forum are going to have disproportionately more experience with it coming from the US because of their greater dealings with the US. Hence most of the discussion here being about US-imposed incidents.
This reminds me of when I was in San Diego in 2000. A neighbour (African American) told me how in the early 90s he was in Sydney and decided to see how he could support the "people of colour". He went to Redfern and found that all the dark people were giving him the hate stare. He found this confusing.
I pointed out to him that to our Indigenous people, being coloured didn't make him a brother (usually "cousin" amongst Aboriginal Australians), in fact he was just another invader.
Assumptions about colour don't always apply in different countries.
[+] [-] drumhead|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkdbejwi383|5 years ago|reply
From an outside perspective, people in the USA seem very pre-occupied with continuing a culture of segregation, where black and white people live different lives and mixing is frowned upon. I see this attitude on both sides.
[+] [-] oedmarap|5 years ago|reply
In my country for example we have six distinct races/ethnicities, from indigenous to post-colonial. When either has a celebration or period of cultural remembrance, we openly dress, cook, and celebrate in the same manner. The concept of "cultural appropriation" is nothing but hubris in our minds.
Perhaps we're more fundamentally bonded due to our shared "fragmented" heritage, as V.S. Naipaul frequently expounded upon. Perhaps we're just not victims of inept ideological monoliths that are perpetrated by a radical left and radical right as it is in the US (along with the forced illusion of binary if not zero-sum choices).
Either way, we understand that racism is inescapable in some small measure but we try our best not to elevate it above reason and certainly not above national unity (or pride for that matter). Caribbean people are both welcoming of foreign cultures and curious in our exploration of the same. We wouldn't, couldn't, have it any other way.
[+] [-] ChrisRR|5 years ago|reply
I grew up in a multicultural town in the UK (also home to a lot of racism unfortunately) but we had a yearly (carribean I think) carnival with music and floats and costumes and food.
People would turn out in the thousands and it didn't matter your skin colour because you were there to join in the fun. It doesn't matter if you wore something that wasn't traditionally part of your culture, because you were doing so to join in the fun, not to belittle people
[+] [-] StavrosK|5 years ago|reply
Except the Parthenon marbles, we want those back.
[+] [-] enriquto|5 years ago|reply
It is not a problem anywhere, actually. Some people just want to make it into one.
[+] [-] johnnycerberus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tweetle_beetle|5 years ago|reply
Cultural appropriation is a genuine phenomenon, but the difference between attending carnival and culturally appropriating it is a subtle one. For me, it comes down to intent and this is very hard to prove.
Am I doing it in solidarity - sharing a celebration with people who's neighbourhood I share and supporting their cultural expression? Or am I impersonating other communities for my own enjoyment? To a third party, it's can be difficult to tell the difference.
> Cultural appropriation doesnt seem to be a problem anywhere else but the USA.
I feel that the countries which have historically dealt with the realities of a multicultural society better have less issues with cultural appropriation - cultural segregation leads to ownership and identity issues. But that certainly doesn't mean it doesn't exist outside the USA. There is a context in which what Adele did is fine, and one in which it isn't - one photo won't tell you which it is.
[+] [-] thefz|5 years ago|reply
Jokes aside, this happening on Twitter and so it must be somewhat important is the most depressing and disheartening aspect of this event. Stop listening to what ignorants want to say on social media.
[+] [-] apexalpha|5 years ago|reply
This is usually referred to as cultural exchange or sharing of culture.
The fact that cultures shouldn't be shared is indeed a new phenomenon, one that I personally don't agree with.
[+] [-] human_person|5 years ago|reply
When families were ripped apart it it was a connection/ritual they could hold onto no matter what. Fast forward to the recent past and black people are still discriminated against because of their hairstyles. Some progress has been made in the past decade[0] but black women are still told their natural hair is unprofessional or unattractive and they are required to spend large amounts of $$, time and pain (styling techniques often require high heat/caustic chemicals) in order to be acceptable to corporate America.
Can you imagine the frustration of then watching wealthy white women be celebrated/complimented for adopting these hairstyles? One of the only cultural links you have to your ancestors, hairstyles you've been discriminated against, punished, and harassed for wearing?
[0] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/09/19/more-stat...
[+] [-] headcanon|5 years ago|reply
Some examples:
- Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. Black Americans were historically referred to as "Boy" "Girl", or "little" as a demeaning statement of class. "Auntie" and "Uncle" were reserved for older Blacks for the same reason. Use of Black figures as mascots for these brands is a form of cultural appropriation. [1]
- Cleveland Indians logo (other sports teams as well).
- People wearing Sioux (Lakotan) headdresses as fashion statements, which is offensive because that was a thing you had to earn in that culture.
Americans (and literally every culture) appropriates everything from food to clothes to language. Thats not inherently bad. It gets bad when you commercialize and propagate negative stereotypes about cultures that you have historically subjugated.
However, nuance is hard. So on twitter we have people who have embraced the mantra "Cultural Appropriation is bad" and go about shaming every little example of it without understanding the deeper meaning behind them (see what I did there? We're not that different than what we hate). This culture of shaming is itself a form of cultural imperialism.
[1]: https://www.blackvoicenews.com/2008/01/24/boy-uncle-and-aunt...
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|5 years ago|reply
The US tends to monetize everything. This seems to be less true elsewhere.
We make a stink about "cultural appropriation" here because too much ends up being about the almighty dollar and those dollars far too often go into the pockets of White males, regardless of whose culture, creativity, labor, etc. created the thing.
I wish the idea would go die. I think it helps keep the problem alive rather than resolving it. But I think that's basically the crux of the issue.
[+] [-] thiht|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vergessenmir|5 years ago|reply
This makes conversation about race a confused jumbled incoherent mess. The bigger problem as I see it is more class-oriented than race centric. This should be a discussion on social mobility, which in my opinion is the best in the western world for minority communities. The race discourse in recent years has distracted from improving social mobility and hurting said communities more.
[+] [-] threatofrain|5 years ago|reply
There are many cities still with covenants restricting home ownership to non-Blacks, and while unenforceable today, it contributes to a story of an everlasting racial smell.
A nation ought not only speak the message of racial harmony, as China does with regards to black immigrants and citizens, but the truth must be evident on the ground for the people to see, and the air ought be pleasant to smell.
[+] [-] luckylion|5 years ago|reply
Americanization of everything is a good description, I think. Of course it's very important what happens in the US, it's the heart of the empire after all. But it's given so much weight that I sometimes feel like our media are covering US domestic politics more than our domestic politics.
[+] [-] secondcoming|5 years ago|reply
The BBC is fully on board with importing the US leftist narrative.
[+] [-] Macha|5 years ago|reply
Not considered was the ~1% black population in the country where the training took place. Having 3/80ish black engineers was actually significantly more diverse than if you'd just grabbed a random subset of the population. (ditto for Polish, Indians and Chinese, the actual sizable minorities in the country).
Now had he been talking about the 15-20% of female engineers participating, he may have had a point, but the american perspective was "wow, there should be way more Black people because America has more Black people"
[+] [-] cirrus-clouds|5 years ago|reply
The report includes survey results from Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Sweden and the UK. It paints a varied picture across the countries surveyed.
Summary of weighted results across all surveyed countries (taken from the report): https://imgur.com/a/gcHR5dk
Full report: Being Black in the EU:
https://fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2018/being-black-eu
News report from the BBC:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46369046
[+] [-] phatfish|5 years ago|reply
The UK having the largest and most well integrated black population shows in the lower instances of reported harassment. This rings true for me, certainly there is disenfranchisement and other forms of racism, but outright harassment is not something you see often (saying this as a white person). Honestly I would expect Polish and other eastern Europeans to face more harassment.
France I feel has a reasonably large black population but probably not as well integrated.
[+] [-] apexalpha|5 years ago|reply
This is a key bit here that also applies to the Netherlands. Most, if not all, black (and Moroccan, Turkish etc) Dutch people are either immigrants or children of immigrants.
This sheds a whole different light on statistics, imho. If you move a big chunck of Dutch people to Turkey it would not be weird if their kids wouldn't be CEO's, high level politicians or so. That's just not how that works, especially when your parents were lower educated, and in many cases can't (couldn't) read any Latin based language.
Yet the debate here around racism "borrows" arguments form the US, where black people have been living for 400 years sometimes and STILL aren't even close to representation in the 'top' layer of society.
Just like in the UK, Dutch media is bloody obsessed with the US.
[+] [-] 3np|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|5 years ago|reply
You could make the same points inside America as well that the article makes, like examining Nigerian success in America.
Keep trotting the article out and you have a case for why these racial essentialist views shouldn't be imposed on anyone, not just brits. And certainly not on our children.
[+] [-] tiago_o|5 years ago|reply
Last week some celebrities and online publications decided to highlight how proud we should be of having a black man with dreadlocks as a TV anchor. No reference or acknowledgement of anything else about him, just "congratulations for being black". At least for a decade race had been as noteworthy as eye color, until now.
Fortunately, a good chunk of the population can still see how backwards it is to reduce an individual to the color of their skin. But I must admit I'm not very hopeful for future generations when I see schools incorporating intersectional activism in their curriculum and people gathering to protest police brutality in what must be one of the most peaceful countries in the world.
It's a sad reality that so many people exist in this Goldilocks zone of damage, where they are in positions of power and influence while being ignorant and lazy enough to parrot American media without context or critical thought.
[+] [-] raxxorrax|5 years ago|reply
In my view the result is that social justice nearly stands for race segregation, inclusion and diversity is almost synomymous with banning outsiders and heretics, methods of societal analysis lead to the worst kind of dogmatism.
At first I honestly thought the teachings of some proponents were to troll in the original sense of the word, but they were completely serious about it.
'Social justice' is far better than 'justice' in my opinion, but it can never be an argument to demand solidarity because that will inevitably lead to totalitarianism.
The "classical" US citizen that proudly swings their flag, shoots holes in the sky and idolizes freedom is a much more attractive alternative.
[+] [-] 082349872349872|5 years ago|reply
Wang fo kowmang unte kowmang fo wang.
Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qaA6FdAUsk (imposing the writers' inaccurate views about agriculture on us)
[+] [-] henrikschroder|5 years ago|reply
At one point in the 1800's, slave labour contributed over half of the US GDP, and to protect that economy, to protect that business, the states who benefited the most from it were completely drenched in absolutely brutal amounts of racist propaganda.
The slave economy of the US necessitated the institutionalised racism, because that was the only way you could get ordinary people to put up with the practice. And Europe has never experienced anything like that, so for the average European, there are no frames of reference, no shared history, nothing.
Sure, there's been slave economies in Europe, but the last ones were a thousand years ago. Sure, there's racism in Europe, plenty of it, but it looks completely different, and it's never been as hyperfocused on skin colour like racism in the US is. Racism in Europe is more about ethnocentrism, and some of the worst atrocities in the continent's history have been committed by super white people against other super white people.
Another thing that Europeans do not understand is how the police works in the US. Where I'm from, the police consists of two national organisations, 700 years of history, and an origin as the city watch, making sure cities in the middle ages didn't catch on fire.
Whereas in the US, the police consists of some 16000 decentralised wildly different organisations, federal, state, county, local, all with a much shorter history, wildly different histories, wildly different scopes of law enforcement. But most importantly, some of those local police organisations were explicitly founded to enforce slave laws, to enforce racial segregation, to enforce Jim Crow laws, and they were founded by the local KKK leaders.
The situation is completely different, the history is completely different, the racial divides are completely different. And then people try to import the US discourse on racism, and nothing fits, nothing makes sense, but people still don't want to be seen as racists, so they try to make it fit, try to agree, and it's all just weird.
You can stand in solidarity with BLM no matter where you live, that's fine, but if you're European, please stop there. Don't try to deal with uniquely US issues in your own country, because I promise you, they don't exist. You have other issues to deal with.
[+] [-] xondono|5 years ago|reply
if people want to be doctors and not actors, let them do what they want to do.
I’m getting very tired of this US mania with nudging everyone to their preferred outputs.
[+] [-] raziel2p|5 years ago|reply
Also, in the end, I don't think these type of views causes that much harm. Okay, so a group of people end up being "fake" anti-racists, but it's still raising awareness and it might cause people to make slightly different choices in their day-to-day lives. This isn't comparable to Kony 2012 where people changed their profile picture on Facebook for literally no effect.
[+] [-] throwawayinfo|5 years ago|reply
This statement isn't the issue. What is an issue is that the establishment isn't willing to have a real discussion on this topic (illegal immigration, cultural dilution, economic benefits, etc...). The rise of far right and far left rhetoric is an expected response to the status quo, where people feel pushed into opposing tribes.
[+] [-] coldtea|5 years ago|reply
It's part of the traditional exceptionalism...
[+] [-] Avalaxy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|5 years ago|reply
> There has, for example, been a lot of concern about the underrepresentation of black Britons in professions like the arts and publishing. But why would you choose to go into theater or journalism—rather than law, medicine or finance—if you are a talented child of ambitious but not well off immigrants?
A really weird point. There's plenty of concern about under-representation of black people in law, and medicine, and finance.
In law there is a lot of effort spent getting more black lawyers and judges into the system, and we've recently seen the experience of Alexandra Wilson who was mistaken for a defendant at least 3 times in one day in her place of work. https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/investigation-launched-aft...
In healthcare we have NHSWRES (NHS Workforce Race Equality Standard) who are trying to increase representation in NHS exec and non-exec teams.
> In a country in which black people make up only three percent of the population, for example, six percent of junior doctors are black.
They got this information from here: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/workforce...
If we're looking at racism we don't want to compare junior doctors with journalists. We want to compare junior doctors to consultants and senior leaders. We also want to compare the different levels of junior doctors to each other to see if the ratio of black:white doctors changes.
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/workforce...
> a higher percentage of junior doctors were from the Black, Chinese, Mixed and Other groups than senior doctors
We can see that 6.2% of junior doctors are black, but only 3.5% of consultants are black. Where did all those juniors go?
[+] [-] henrikschroder|5 years ago|reply
If 3% of the population is black, then having 3.5% of consultants being black means they're still overrepresented! Regression to the mean is the most likely explanation.
[+] [-] mr_toad|5 years ago|reply
It takes a long time for demographic shifts to work their way through a population. Senior medical staff are more likely to be white, male, and old. But in a few decades that’s going to look very different.
[+] [-] bregma|5 years ago|reply
(2) Yes, your country has racism, including systemic racism. Denial is one of the privileges that marks you as a member of the dominant group.
Your job is not to deny the racism, but to try to identify it an root it out.
The crux of the biscuit is that the American concept of 'race' is so very very nebulous. Since there is no hard definition of 'race', there is no way to definitively sort an individual into a 'race.' It's entirely subjective and relies on an individual's prejudice.
[+] [-] goto11|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] choward|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Macha|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Perenti|5 years ago|reply
I pointed out to him that to our Indigenous people, being coloured didn't make him a brother (usually "cousin" amongst Aboriginal Australians), in fact he was just another invader.
Assumptions about colour don't always apply in different countries.
[+] [-] secondcoming|5 years ago|reply
It'd a good measure of how much control the US has over other types of media.