[tomp]

For all intents and purposes, Turks are white (i.e. the same race as the rest of Europe).

The issue, however, is religion. EU has enough problems as is with religion (less than the US, and less than it used to have, but still), but still people are wary.

Although IIRC Turkey used to be less religious than it is now, under Erdogan.

[treehau5]

The "race" of Europe, if you could categorize it into such broad terms, would be better suited as "Western", "Eastern", and "Mediterranean", but even that isn't apt.

For most Turks, you couldn't tell the difference between them and Iranians, IMO. Nonetheless, you can definitely tell them apart from a Western white European, a Eastern Slavic-Rus European, and a Mediterranean European.

[eternalban]

Permit this Iranian born to disagree. Turks are generally paler, and have hard eyes.

Armenians, due to historic ties going back thousands of years, look far more Iranian.

[treehau5]

Duly noted.

[tomp]

Plenty of Greeks, southern Italians and Spaniards are darker than e.g. Erdogan (I don't really know many Turks, he's just an example from TV).

[treehau5]

(Sorry if I am reading too deep into this) There are Mediterranean Greeks, Italian, and Spainards, and there are "White" Greeks, Italian, and Spaniards.

(Pardon the invocation of Godwin's law here) When Hitler envisioned his Aryan race, a source of influence was the classical "Athenian Greek." (Another random tidbit, as the story goes, he had such respect for the Greeks, it was with great reluctance that he invaded /greekpride ) Many Greeks still have Blonde hair, blue eyes, and hardly any hair, like my mother and her side of the family. Compare that to my father, who is from an island in Greece, we are basically darker than most Arabs you meet (and indeed thats how I came out. I am more easily passed as an Arab, specifically an Egyptian at times)

(To continue on my random tirade, sorry) If you basically draw an oval around the Mediterranean, from the Greek Islands, Sicily, to parts of Morroco, and such, you could basically pick a few people at random and we would all look related like brothers or cousins to most Americans.

And yes I am one of those crazy people who advocates Mediterranean as a different race than "White." All my life filling out forms, and applications, and throughout schooling, I had to mark down "White" and feel as if I was fraudulent. I am not sure what exactly the US uses as its criteria for a "race" but we are as different from a Anglo-Saxon, Western European type as Native Americans are. We have our distinct features (usually big noses, pronounced foreheads, and lots of hair!), share common values, and even have our own diseases!(see Mediterranean blood disease)

[pluma]

Racism in Germany is not the same as racism in the US or necessarily other parts of the EU.

"Südländer" ("people from Southern countries") are effectively treated as an ethnic group, although this includes Italians and Spaniards alongside Turks (but in some cases also Arabs and other non-"whites"). There's also the racist slur "Ölauge" ("oil-eye"), which while ostensibly about eye colour is typically used to refer to "Südländer"s.

There are also "Osteuropäer" ("Eastern Europeans"), which effectively refers to Slavs but also "Deutschrussen" (i.e. descendants of German settlers in Eastern Europe who migrated back to Germany recently but are culturally distinct from "native" Germans).

I do agree however that "racism" in Germany tends to be less about specific "foreign" ethnicities (as in the US) but more about nationality (or nationality of the parents/ancestors) -- there's no denying that well-adjusted black Germans face discrimination in Germany but so do less well-adjusted Italians. It's more of a blanket ethno-nationalism than the typical racism you hear about on the anglophone interwebs.

It's not really surprising if you think about the historical roots: while Germany has a colonial history and thus isn't a stranger to mistreating brown people, our history is overshadowed by the Third Reich and its ideals about nationalism and racial purity (blonde, blue-eyed "Aryans" being distinct from mere "whites"). The US OTOH had an entire civil war about slave ownership and even then carried on a long tradition of racial apartheid.

[pessimizer]

US racism used to be more variegated like this, but more and more ethnicities got folded into "whiteness" over time (and along with the rise in the fear of blackness.)

White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race by Ian Haney Lopez covers the legal history of whiteness in the US.

[pluma]

That's not entirely what I was referring to, though. The race construct (for an example with horrible consequences look up the history of the ethnic tensions that let to the Rwanda genocide) seems to be largely based on colonialism.

German racism tends to be based largely on anti-immigrant nationalism and xenophobia. It's closer to American racism towards Latinas/-os (and people who fall in the same mental category) than to American racism towards black people.

But maybe we do have the kind of racism black people experience in the US and we're just culturally less aware of it because our ethnic demographics are different.

Without delving too deeply into armchair sociology I think that two major events defining our biases are 1) the attitude towards (predominantly Turkish) immigrants in the third quarter of the last century and 2) the immigration of Russian Germans after WW2.

The Turkish immigrants were greeted as "guest workers" during the post-war boom of our economy and at the time largely filled the kind of badly paid low prestige jobs that became available en masse as our industry grew. Because we only considered them temporary we never acknowledged them as German and were utterly surprised that they would decide to stay and live in "our" country.

The "German Russians", as I described earlier, were (for the most part) ethnically and culturally German settlers who had of course culturally diverged over the course of a century or so before they migrated back to Germany in the aftermath of WW2 and the post-war tensions between Russia and Germany. They were Germans to the Russians but Russians to the Germans they came home to.

All in all it's a huge mess based on a decades long attitude to immigration that could be at best described as sticking your head in the sand and hoping the migrants just go away again rather than adapting them into our culture or even allowing each other to influence each others' cultures to find a common ground.

But looking at the poverty-stricken immigrant districts around Paris and Brussels I guess we didn't do that badly. Though that relief likely won't help anyone looking even remotely foreign if our ethno-nationalism gets any stronger (for a nightmarish outlook consider the recent election results of the AfD, the German nationalist party).

[tomp]

I'm guessing a better word for this would be "xenophobia".

[pluma]

Okay, a semantics argument.

There's one concept most people (especially those who haven't studied sociology) call "racism". It's a mechanism that used to be very useful for our survival 40k-odd years ago when people who looked different were likely not from our tribe and likely hostile to us or at least had no allegiance to our tribe and could thus not be trusted. They're different, they don't know us, we don't know them, they might hit us over the head with a rock, we should be cautious or even chase them away. In a modern society this instinct is still present but obviously far less helpful and tends to make things difficult for us.

The other concept is also called "racism", although I'd prefer to call it "Racism" (with a capital R). This is what feminists try to talk about when they tell people they're "racists". It's not necessarily about the actions or thoughts of any individual and certainly not about mere acknowledgement of the differences between two cultural or ethnic groups of people. It's about the systemic effect (lowercase r) racism can have in a society, making life hard for people in groups that are already disadvantaged and preventing them from achieving equality.

You could argue that the "technical term" for the former type of racism is actually xenophobia. You could argue that academia gets to define semantics and everybody else please should stop using the terms incorrectly thank you very much. But it's more productive to acknowledge that widely used terms have well-established meanings in colloquial English and communication can ultimately only work if the majority can agree on what they are talking about.

[tomp]

I disagree. Feminists intentionally use a word, loaded with so much (negative) emotion as "racist" specifically for its emotional impact. Another example of this is when left-leaning media writes "anti-abortion and pro-choice" while right-leaning media writes "pro-life and pro-abortion".

Their purpose is not to win arguments with logic. They try to win the spectators over using emotion. They use "racist" to smear their opponents, for allegedly being discriminatory, but they're just the same themselves - they just target other underprivileged groups (e.g. nerds, poor conservatives, ...).

This is elaborated in this post: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...

[sydneysider]

wheres the phobia?

[jakub_h]

In the same place where there's a horse in a seahorse.

[sydneysider]

Hohoho

[venomsnake]

It was always as religious. Just the army and the secular order it imposed prevented the religious people from rising trough the society ranks.

Which of course fueled Erdogan support ...

[gkya]

Well, the religion and religiousness are very complex concepts in Turkey. We (in this case you, the westerners) tend to treat the other as a homogeneous entity, with prejudices based on the extremes (like treating the Catholic curch as an organisation of paedophilia because some members are guilty of it).

Erdogan and AKP do not have that much of actual support, but the conjecture helps them. An oppositional government can only be forced with these: The secular CHP with about 25 percent support, the nationalist-racist MHP, with about 15-20 percent support, and with the kurdish-nationalist, leftist HDP. Last summer the outcome of the elections allowed these to form a government, but MHP, on the night of the ballot declared that under no circumstances would they have an accord with HDP. And somehow, the sleepy, cease-firing PKK started tumultising southeast again, out of nowhere, and people voted for AKP instead of a crisis in which we live with temporary minority governments or with no actual government at all.