Where in that article does it say it's illegal to gather ethnical data in the EU? You're talking nonsense, I lived in 2 EU countries and government had ethnical data on citizens.
From where I read the article, it it says the contrary, Germany has racism and discrimination on the labor and housing market, but it can't be proven because it gathers no data.
So having no data actually makes the problem worse since racism and discrimination will continue to exist in practice (humans gonna be tribal) but you can't prove it because you have no data because you don't wanna be seen as racist.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy. You're just turning a blind eye on racism while touting yourself as a crusader against racism.
I wouldn’t claim so boldly that my claims are nonsense. In many European countries affected by the Holocaust, gathering ethnic data is illegal. The article even mentions the example of Germany and i know it is illegal in France too.
My original wording was clumsy. Most EU countries do not collect race or ethnicity data. Those that do are all in Eastern europe and the UK, Ireland are the only Western exceptions.
so don't track race, but track location of birth, location of birth of parents (and grandparents) and all their respective native languages and local language capacity.
in europe most of that should correlate with the questions we want to answer since there shouldn't be many immigrants that have been here for more than a few generations and speaking the local language fluently. those who have been here longer should be well integrated by now.
in the US that wouldn't work because discrimination happens despite people having been there for many generations all speaking fluent english.
> in the US that wouldn't work because discrimination happens despite people having been there for many generations all speaking fluent english.
Is there not discrimination against black people in Europe? Might be hard to tell considering that the designation isn't even recorded. The only other large minority racial group I can think of there is Arabs, but most of them migrated very recently.
Is there not discrimination against black people in Europe?
there is. my point is that you can discover them by tracking their origin and language. no need to track their race. it's extremely rare that any have been living in europe for more than two, maybe three generations (maybe a bit less rare in france, belgium, netherlands due to their colonies).
EDIT: the guardian article actually touches on that and argues that migration background is being tracked, but doesn't work, but if i understand it correctly, they don't track previous generations.
but anyways, my suggestion is just a hack on the current law. what we really need to focus on is identifying factors that lead to discrimination and statistically track them. skin color is such a factor. if the law prevents that, then and we can't find another way to solve the problem, then maybe it should be changed.
It says that efforts to collect discrimination data in France are viewed as unconstitutional, verbatim in the article. Clearly, at minimum, collecting this data is not easy in many european countries.
> I lived in 2 EU countries and government had ethnical data on citizens.
Could you provide that data for France? I never said it was true of all EU countries.
e: Actually, reading your comment I am left a little confused - aren’t your latter paragraphs the exact point I am making?
Every time I view so-called ethnic stats in Europe, it's just nation of origin or something else that's not the same as race in the US. I don't see stats like number of people of X descent (which is not the same as being born there).
Because to identify discrimination, you need to measure it.
Without taking these stats, the Jim Crow South suddenly looks like an even-handed application of voting tests.
e: I will say, the number of comments I get from European commentators favoring the “putting your hands in front of your eyes” approach when it comes to racism in Europe does make it completely unsurprising how non-diverse their C-suite is as well as why they have difficulty attracting high-skilled immigrant talent.
The US has long had permissive immigration policy relative to Europe and that is absolutely one of the largest factors in America's dominance in industry and that immigration policy is a product of attitude towards immigrants. This is true historically - explaining dominance in the 20th century - and in modern tech, capital flows to where it can most effectively leverage high-skilled technical labor and that was the almost exclusively the United States until very recently.
I don't think it's any of my school's, employer's, internship's, etc business what race I am, unless there are protections in place that make it only for govt statistics. The US Census is also fine.
Like it took until 2023 to finally outlaw intentional racial discrimination in American universities; that was A-OK and widely practiced before. And some of Google's internship programs publicly list what races they prefer, which is common in tech.
From where I read the article, it it says the contrary, Germany has racism and discrimination on the labor and housing market, but it can't be proven because it gathers no data.
So having no data actually makes the problem worse since racism and discrimination will continue to exist in practice (humans gonna be tribal) but you can't prove it because you have no data because you don't wanna be seen as racist.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy. You're just turning a blind eye on racism while touting yourself as a crusader against racism.