Spot on! Most americans believe that race, culture and ethnicity are clearly and strongly defined (and that they are simple facts rather than social constructs).
When spending time in the US I find myself experiencing double consciousness, asking myself if I fit into the stereotype that people have of me.
A case in point: in many sitcoms over the last 20 years you can find the same cliches around a white person trying awkwardly to say something without sounding racist.
In my experience americans (at least the limited sample that I know) have a need to find a subculture to identify themselves with, and quick.
I'm not even talking about race here, i'm thinking about the billions of independent christian churches, of soccer fans dressing like soccer players, gang colours etc.
And when they find their subculture, they get stuck in it and become unable to see the others' point of view.
American style racism may be a consequence of that.
What is in the media, social media sites and news, is not what you run into in every day life. We all just want to get along. This a political issue where the media is being used to intimidate, insinuate, and threaten, anyone who questions any position. This is identity politics taken to its extreme. It is almost entirely from the left. Welcome to Heckler's Veto manifested on a national level with all the power of media behind it.
We used to discuss ideas, candidates used to be judged on the merits of their ideas and past. Now they are selected for their race, sex, and persuasion. Any criticism of the candidates ideas or actions they have taken, legal or not, is instead portrayed as attacking them based on those three attributes. They have weaponized thought to the point many are silent and that was the goal.
My wife (Asian-American) had a former friend (also Asian-American) tell her that I "conquered" her, essentially tricking/conning her into a long-term relationship with me (white, American), simply because of our racial backgrounds and the fact that in this persons disturbing world view there is no other way to explain Asians dating or marrying outside of "their race" than things like "yellow fever."
It is horribly racist and extremely one-sided and the perpetrators don't even seem to understand that they are engaging in true-to-life racism / racist rhetoric.
Bolivian here, this has been my experience as well. People in the US need to teach their children to respect everybody, there's an entire generation of kids being brainwashed into us vs them. We won't see the effect of this until much later on. 20 years!
Probably money, but that doesn't exclude the obvious racism it created. In Denmark, we had Africans in cages displayed in the Tivoli amusement park in central Copenhagen, so people could look at the spectacle that was the black person (https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2017-03-31-de-sendte-bud-efte..., in Danish).
While this was not the intent of our colonization and slavery-business, it inevitably caused it, imo. Or, the racism caused the success of colonialism, because it justified it.
Something else, presumably, although their justifications usually involved racism of a far more explicit and direct variety than is commonly found today in the US. It's not very difficult to find quotes by rather recent leaders such as Churchill that would be unthinkable by a British (or American) politician today.
Well they certainly used racism as an excuse to justify their colonial ambitions. They were conquering for the same reasons any country conquers: money, land, prestige.
>I never even heard of anyone being as racist as americans are when trying not to be.
As I'm an American, feel free to reject my comment out of hand.
That said, yes there's plenty of racism in the US.
Sure, it's fun to sneer at Americans and feel superior. Knock yourself out.
However, you seem ignorant of reality and of history.
In many cases the issue isn't that most Americans are actively thinking about how inferior the minorities are.
It's much more about the racist structures built into American society over the past 400 years. We've been slowly (and much too slowly, to my mind) coming to grips with these issues.
In doing so, we've shed an enormous amount of blood. Before our civil war, ~13% of our population was enslaved[0].
During that war, 2% of the population were soldiers killed on the battlefield. And the number of civilians killed is unknown, but likely substantial. Imagine if wherever you live, 3% of the population were to be killed, vast swaths of your cities, towns, villages, farms and ports destroyed[2].
After the war, once the armies of the "victorious" side left the American south, tens of thousands of former slaves were, murdered, beaten, tortured or imprisoned.
Discriminatory laws were enacted and enforced[1] throughout the former Confederacy[5], and was continued in the West and Southwest[3][4], not just against the former slaves, but against those of Mexican, Native American and Asian descent as well.
Even in the North (with most of the population and nearly half the area) where slavery was illegal before the war, discriminatory practices against free blacks as well as former slaves was common.
But don't forget that Catholics (Irish, Italians, etc.) and Jews were often discriminated against too. Certainly not as harshly as people of color, but that existed, and still exists today.
For decades, legal discrimination persisted. It was more than 80 years after our civil war before we started to dismantle the governmental systems that both implicitly and explicitly discriminated against nearly 15% of our population.
And over that time, all across the country many thousands were killed and abused with impunity.
That change came only because of the bravery and determination of the blacks in the US. We would berate them, beat them and kill them for being 'uppity', but they never stopped demanding their right to be full American citizens.
And thanks to them, things have changed a great deal here in the US. We still have issues of discrimination in housing, employment, over-policing and a raft of other areas.
But even in my lifetime (I'm over 50), I've seen significant positive change. It's not nearly enough, nor is that change coming quickly enough.
But it is happening.
These days, complacency and inertia are the biggest obstacles to positive change. Many people just don't think about it, or if they do, are content with knowing that they don't discriminate.
Many have married/cohabitate with those of a different ethnic background. Many have children who do so. This varies a great deal depending on where (remember, the US is big) people live. In many places, there aren't many people of color.
Diversity tends to be more within and sprawling around urban centers and many descendants of former slaves live in the south as well.
That's not to say there aren't a whole bunch of dyed-in-the-wool racists and white supremacists here in the US. There are.
Not so long ago, the militant racists were roundly criticized and ostracized. So much so that most of them wouldn't express their bigotry unless they knew they were among those who shared their hateful ideas.
Now those folks are emboldened. Their numbers haven't really increased, it's just that they've attached themselves to other reactionaries who prefer the economic unfairness of our society.
The difference these days is that factions of certain political groups want to use bigotry as a political tool.
Yeah, we've got problems here in the US. But you don't repair 250 years of slavery and a 100 years of legalized discrimination overnight. And you don't do it in 70 years either.
This is a bleeding gash on American society that's slowly healing.
I hope that I "will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."[6]
You may recognize those words, but read the whole speech. It's almost as much a demand for economic fairness as it is one for an end to discrimination. Which, given the increased inequality we've been seeing, should give all of us some food for thought.
Flamewar comments, and especially personal attacks, will get you banned here. Please don't post like this to HN, regardless of how wrong or annoying another commment is.
