[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