| It definitely does go beyond skin color. There’s also the issue of definitions. The concept of “race” as defined in the US is not used in Europe to begin with.
Instead often times what is used is “ethnicity” and even that typically boils down to one’s “origin” and doesn’t take skin color into account. A lot of European countries prohibit the government from registering skin color, ethnicity, religion etc. out of fear of a repeat of the 1940s.
So you won’t find US-style self-report questions on government forms w/r/t “race” or “ethnicity”. In fact many go as far as limiting themselves to “citizen” and “non-citizen”, with the exception of immigration services maintaining the necessary information until naturalization of course. So according to American race definitions most people in Europe will be white, but that doesn’t say much about diversity. In fact the US definition of White is very broad [0]: > White. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as "White" or report responses such as German, Irish, English, Italian, Lebanese, and Egyptian. The category also includes groups such as Polish, French, Iranian, Slavic, Cajun, Chaldean, etc. So for example people from Morocco, Turkey and countries like Iraq and Iran (arguably some of the bigger sources of non-European immigrants to Europe) would be considered “White” implying a lack of diversity, even though there are significant cultural differences between those people and, say, native Germans. 0: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/note/US/RHI625222 |