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by chinchilla2020 1118 days ago
I've lived and worked in the US and Germany. I've travelled all over Europe at this point (except Italy, notably).

Most of Europe is not very diverse. It took me a while to overcome the culture shock of what is essentially a European monoculture. The most diverse country I encountered in Europe was probably Spain.

What do you mean by "mexican border"? I think you are talking about preconceptions based on the news cycle.

At work in Europe, you will get weird comments if you are not a white person. I never encountered anything like that in the US.

2 comments

Just to add another point. You forget that the minorities in the US have assimilated into American culture. If you put a British Black person and Black American into a same room, or Indian American and British Indian, they would have a lot of cultural differences based on their nationality and not their race. Assimilating into America is no different to assimilating into Germany or Mexico.
Northern Europe is much less diverse and Southern Europe, but there are also parts of the US which are similarly less diverse (especially once you have taken out Hispanics from the equation who are often white or slightly non-white). American culture is also a monoculture - people forget that the "immigrants" in the US are actually highly assimilated into American culture, often moreso that the immigrants in Europe - black people are a good example; it says a lot that I, a Brit, get into far more arguments with Indian Americans than actual India Indians.

Most ethnic minorities in Europe tend to be more thinly spread out as compared to the US, and there is much more interaction between Whites and racial minorities. This is one of the biggest complaints that I get from Indians about the racial culture in the US, but it's also traditionally famous among Blacks as well. It's based on the traditional mixing of ethnic groups that has been going on for thousands of years - remember even during the Roman Empire and Ancient Greece, there were immigrants from Africa, Middle East and South Asia.

EDIT: This chart on the Non-Hispanic White distribution similarly has Northern America as being more white than Southern America: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Non-Hisp...

> black people are a good example

Black people aren't immigrants. They were taken from their land, had their culture stripped away from them, and sold as property.

And if you're talking about the recent wave of immigrants from Africa, they have maintained their own identity and culture in addition to adopting american customs.

British Blacks.

And also just to point out that racial minorities have been mixing in Europe, Africa and Asia for thousands of years. Look at immigration in the Roman era for example.