The New York Times has a piece up, After Breakthrough, Europe Looks in Mirror, which quotes people who wonder when Europe will have its own colored head of state. Let's ignore for a moment that the longest serving Prime Minister in British history was 1/8 Indian; that was nearly 200 years ago and despite his known and acknowledged colored heritage Lord Liverpool was first and foremost a scion of the British nobility. These sorts of self-flagellations make no sense. The United States is about 30% non-white (many Hispanics identify as racially white, but operationally the Hispanic/Latino category is considered non-white). If Europe looks in the mirror, it sees a white person!
The 70% which is "white" in the United States includes a few percent of Middle Eastern Americans who would be considered colored in Europe (Ralph Nader is not considered colored in the United States, so I don't grant that Arabs are always considered to be non-white, it depends). So it is probably fair to say that on the order of 2 out of 3 Americans are of European white ancestry. A substantial majority, but still way less white than any European country. Additionally, non-whites have been a substantial proportion of the American population from its founding, when blacks were 20-25% of the population. The proportion declined as European immigration increased until the United States was a 90% white nation by the 1950s. I think most Americans will agree that the 1950s were the apotheosis of "white America" (even if the high tide of white supremacy was receding). Guess how white the United Kingdom is today? 92% white!. Yes, Britain today is whiter than the United States was during the 1950s. Even London is still majority white. Yes, London is 68% white. Washington D.C. is 38% non-Hispanic white. New York City, 35%. Chicago, 31% non-Hispanic white. Even Seattle is darker than London! Yeah, you read that right, Seattle is more colored than London.
The rest of Europe isn't any more colorful. Quick back of the envelope suggests that Italy is more than 95% white. Spain, more than 95% white. Sweden, well over 90% white. Germany, around 90% white (I am being very generous here with high estimates, but it is likely that well over 50% of the 19% non-Germany population in Germany are from EU or Balkan nations; ergo, white). France is a tough cookie because they don't like to collect ethnic data since all their ancestors are Gauls on a priori grounds. But, high bound estimates of Muslims suggest that around 10% of the population is of North African or West African origin which is Muslim. Add on top of that another 5% which is non-Muslim African, Vietnamese, etc., I think it is plausible to believe conservatively that France is still at least 85% white, making it the most colored country in Europe! The most colored nation in Europe is probably as white as the American state of Ohio.
I am being very explicit here because I suspect that though most people know these statistics vaguely, they've been brainwashed into pretending as their are swarms of colored people all across Europe who needed to be "included". I'm specifically thinking about criticisms of the Up! series in Britain for example which follows about a dozen individuals over their lifetime. Some have criticized it for being too white and only including one token non-white in the cast. But look, 1 out of 12 is representative today! The series started in the 1960s when there were far fewer non-whites around. But the press has its script, an apparently for a television show to "look like Britain" it really has to look like London.
The perception that coloreds are swarming the land in Europe is surely due in part to their concentration in urban areas, which far exceeds anything the United States. After all, there is a large reservoir of rural blacks and Latinos who have been heavily involved in the American agricultural sector. In Europe this does not exist, the peasantry is totally white. I also think that the rate of change matters a great deal, America has gone from 1/10th non-white to 1/3rd non-white in 2 generations. Europe has gone from on the order of 0% non-white to 5% non-white within 2 generations. That's just an incredible rate of increase, no wonder people think that the coloreds are coming!
This is not to deny the reality of racism, institutional barriers and lack of assimilation in Europe. But let's just grow up and not be so simple-minded. I've had relatives, friends and acquaintances who've lived in the USA and Europe as colored (in Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, etc.). It's hard to generalize, but on the whole most people experienced less explicit racism in the USA than they did in those countries (everyone lived in "cosmopolitan" urban areas from what I know, so it can't be that they live in New York in the USA and rural Germany in Europe). The United States has a long history of colored citizens, even if they were second-class citizens for most of American history. Europe has not. Yes, there were isolated cases of prominent individuals with non-white ancestry, such as Alexander Dumas, but the non-white communities, such as sailors in Cardiff, were quickly absorbed and disappeared into the memory hole. Many white Americans are discomfited with the idea of a black man as head of state, but, they would not deny that a black man is an American (granted, Obama-the-Muslim-Arab is a special case, but then we have to crank down the significance of the sui generis exotic-black-man winning the presidency). Until the past decade Germany had a very robust legal framework of "blood" citizenship which dated back to the late 19th century. Volkisch indeed. It was therefore common for Volga Germans who barely spoke German and whose ancestors had lived in Russia for 200 years to be given German citizenship, while the children of Turkish guest workers born and raised in Germany were Turkish, and not German, citizens.
As the second half of the 20th century began most European nations did not conceive of themselves as destinations for immigrants (the main exception being France). But the reality was always more complex; Britain long had immigrants from Ireland, which was operationally a separate nation even though it was not politically independent until the early 20th century. Berlin was a strongly Huguenot city in the 18th century. Small communities of industrious artisans from the Low Countries were wooed by many European monarchs in the early modern period, only to disappear into the general population after a few generations. But aside from France these migrations were of relatively minimal scope (Berlin might have been 25% French speaking, but Prussia had proportionately far fewer Huguenots). Additionally, the cultural distance between Protestant Dutch miners and Protestant Swedish farmers was lower than between Oriental Orthodox Assyrians and post-Protestant Swedes. The past may tell us about the present, but it is no perfect model for the now. French Huguenots might have had a sense of superiority in regards to their culture and wished to maintain their traditions, but after their expulsion from Catholic France there was no turning back. This is not analogous in to a Turkish German who has dual citizenship, takes holidays in Turkey every winter and marries someone from Turkey. Black Americans, who were long denied voting rights, are a relatively well mobilized group and politically focused. In contrast, American Latinos and Asians are far less engaged. Does this surprise one when one notes the multinational and immigrant character of these groups? Black Americans have no choice about which nation they identify with, despite some romanticism for Africa, the United States is the only nation they have, and will have. This is not so for more recent immigrant groups.
I only feel like I have to post about this because I've read and heard way too much sentimentality about what the election of Barack Obama "means" for Europe, and colored people living in Europe. It seems now that all things being equal Europeans are more prejudiced, and Americans less so, no? But all things are not equal! Yes, I actually do think that white Europeans are probably more prejudiced than white Americans, several European nations have given more than 15% of their vote to white nationalist parties (Belgium, France, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, etc.). I also think many colored Europeans have bad attitudes and I wish European countries would get serious about bribing more of the crazy Muslims to go live in crazy Muslim countries and get their primitive on there instead of ruining Europe with their daughter-killing & ninja dressing. But it's complicated. America elected a black man as president when even three generations ago there was some debate on whether non-whites should be granted citizenship (naturalization being limited to whites). That's enough to talk about instead of making stretched analogies and debasing the complexities of reality.
P.S.: Remember that Obama only won 43% of the white vote. Not that there's anything wrong with that!
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I agree with you that the most colored countries in Europe are probably France and Britain. The reason why France does not do ethnic statistics is because it is officially blind to colour (as well as to religion) in order to banish all forms of discrimination (and this works quite well in the civil service at least); besides, sorting by ethnic origin in a country where a non-negligible part of the population is miscegenated is quite hard, and you really don't want the state to keep track of this! Besides, even some people from Arab-speaking countries (like Lebanon, or Berbers from Algeria) can be even whiter than some people who likely have 100% Celtic origin.
About the German "blood citizenship": this finds its origins in the complicated story of Germany. While France has been defined as both a territory and a people since at least the end of the Hundred Years War, (and briefly as an ideology during the Revolutionary wars), Germany was at the time defined only as a people: throughout Eastern Europe, German villages were intermingled with Polish, Jewish, Lithuanian, Wallachian, Hungarian, Czech, Bulgar etc. ones. So the only way to "draw a border" around the German population was through language and bloodlines.
You say Europe is white? You are in dreamland and in denial. Spain white? the Greece white?, Italy white? They are by no means considered white. I am half Greek, half Dutch and my skin is olive color by the Greek side of my family. Italians and Spanish are along the same lines of that olive skin, dark eyes and hair from the majority of the populations. Europe is ready for an Obama of their own and the sooner the better to stop racism as soon as possible.
the Greece white?, Italy white? They are by no means considered white.
this is, frankly, a very dumb line of argument i think. yes, some northern europeans may say assert and act as if africa starts at the pyrenees and alps, but this definition leads to absurd inferences. e.g., cicero, homer and don quixote should be great authors of the non-white literary world. for almost the whole of the past 500 years there have been no white popes. and so forth.
i'm sure if you're a greek who grew up in the netherlands people might consider you non-white. but perhaps not so much when a bunch of people from suriname move into the neighborhood, no? one can admit that the average norwegian has a more unimpeachable grounds to being white than a greek by virtue of their lighter complexion, but a greek is still a white person.
p.s., the post about should have made it obvious that whiteness is in part physical appearance, and in part sociocultural perception. more than half of the non-whites in europe would be considered non-hispanic white on the american census for 'race.' if you gave many italians turkish names and many turks italian names they would switch their race. OTOH, a black african or a south asian is colored no matter their context. trust me sandra, i pull rank here :-) since most german non-whites are ethnic turks on the USA census they'd actually all be listed as non-white, an almost certainly be able to "pass" if they wanted to.
razib, yes,you are right it was not a good argument and I am probably a little bitter from certains types of discrimination. You are also right about being considered not white in the netherlands because of being half Greek, although that was while I was growing up, now things are starting to change, slowly. If you look at the Dutch and other Europeans today, you see a lot of mixes of different nationalities. I don't think that anyone is pure anything nowadays. I think that we should all be happy to be of the human race and not focuss so much on the color of ones hair, skin or eyes. What do you think?
Razib, I forgot to add that The United States discriminates against Greeks and do not consider them as White no more than the Netherlands did in the past. To this day, Greece is still left out of the visa waiver that usa gives to other european countries. I think Spain too is not included in the Visa waiver. Not sure, I do know Greece has still been left out so far.
I think that we should all be happy to be of the human race and not focuss so much on the color of ones hair, skin or eyes. What do you think?
well, yeah. but i wouldn't bet money on post-racial utopia :-)
well, yeah. but i wouldn't bet money on post-racial utopia :-)
Well keep writing articles like this and perhaps we can get some change in Europe. You are very good at getting your point across by writing good articles like this.
ah, yes, i see it now, one of my blog posts will kick off a future time episode of connections :-)
Very interesting post. I think you could have emphasised the religious distinctions that are involved in Europe more. As you say, the fact of being from North Africa (or Turkey) might leave you perceived as white or non-white depending on circumstances. In Southern Europe the difference is barely visible. I think most of the tensions arise from the fact that many of these recently arrived groups are Islamic. The question of black Africans who are a tiny, tiny minority is certainly different.
In case you haven't noticed, about 50% of us Europeans are female. We've had several female Presidents and Prime Ministers.
While, granted, no European country is likely to elect a racial minority to their highest elected position, the self-congratulatory "only in America" stuff that followed Obama's election really isn't accurate...there's more to the world than the US and Europe.
Offhand I can think of several countries which elected visible minorities to their highest elective office. Sonia Gandhi and Janet Jagan were not only minorities - they were foreign-born (something that could never happen in the US). Alberto Fujimori in Japan and Ralph Gonslaves in St. Vincent and Albert Gomes in Trinidad are other examples. Granted, one could argue that a white or Japanese person in a predominantly black, Indian, Mestizo or black + Indian country isn't quite the same...but it still proves the general point that members of small visible ethnic minorities have been elected to lead their countries many times over the last 60 years or so...
@Lassi Hippeläinen, I was just about to make the same point. Anyone remember Maggie Thatcher or the Chancellor of Germany? To name only two.
Europe and America are different beasts, with different issues and priorities. On the surface the issues might look the same, but by and large, the history behind the issues is different -- which makes the priorities similarly different.
Have a little patience and humility.
The question of black Africans who are a tiny, tiny minority is certainly different.
this is wrong. there are many west africans in france. and a large afro-caribbean origin population in britain. people from suriname, etc., in the netherlands. yes, they are not that numerous, but, they are a substantial proportion of the euro-colored swarm :-)
Sonia Gandhi and Janet Jagan were not only minorities
i really don't think political dynasties count, do you think they should? janet jagan was a serious political player, granted, but she needed her husband as an entree. same with sonia.
Mestizo or black + Indian country isn't quite the same...but it still proves the general point that members of small visible ethnic minorities have been elected to lead their countries many times over the last 60 years or so...
right. i think the issue here is that we live in the age of implicit white supremacy. the white race is still the ruling race (economics & military power). white nationalists are happy about it, and want to keep it going, and are worried about the yellow peril. white PC-nicks want to destroy the white race because they believe in satan, whitey, if not god (all evil can be traced by the all-powerful white race!). most white people are the vast middle, or outside this spectrum. many colored people internalize these sorts of views.
no one blinks when mostly brown-skinned latin american nations are headed by members of the self-consciously white elite. that's just how it is. they're the ruling race, and always have been. there are exceptions, like evo morales, hugo chavez, or even leaders such as porfirio diaz. in mauritius it wasn't so easy for paul berenger to knock off the indo-mauritian monopoly on the prime ministership, he's from the tiny white elite. but, franco-mauritians are the economic elite.
barack obama is not a traditional african american. but, he identifies with the traditional american helot class who were chattel 150 years ago, and looks like a member to a typcial american. these helots exhibit far higher rates of social pathology than the majority population, and in fact remain 10-15% of the citizenry, clustered in the lower social and economic strata. so it's a little more amazing than sonia gandhi, whose whiteness probably helps in white-skin loving and british-adoring* india; she's an echo of herrenvolk past (though her catholicism and foreigness doesn't). most of india's PM's have been brahmin, who are only 2% of the population. that's OK, they're superior in the eyes of themselves and most indians. i'll listen to comparisons when the son of a shit-cleaner outcaste is prime minister (no, not president, that's a ceremonial position). i don't think that's inappropriate as an analogy, though blacks are much more organized and self-confident than shit-cleaners..
* yes, lots of anger at british colonialism. but the brits were the herrenvolk, and they left their stamp.
Have a little patience and humility.
you did read my post right? if you did, you get get the idea that american election of obama is really aided by demographics as oppose to american exceptionalism, right? if you didn't read the post, don't comment. if you misunderstood, you're corrected. if you wanted to have that argument even if it's not relevant, please don't.
i'm not going to let any comments through the mod-queue that pretend like i'm making the same old retarded america-is-#1-triumphalist argument. check your reflexes to assumed reflexes. you can have that argument other places. different does not mean better or worse.
as for sex. sex and race aren't totally equivalent. ethnic & religious minorities are treated differently than women. one of the main problematic frameworks by oppressionologists is their idea that oppression is on 1 dimensional spectrum. it isn't. sex is different from race is different from religion is different from class, though each shares common components with the others. by the standards of the west i think though it would be fair to say that much of europe (northern europe most especially) is less sexist than the united states, while europe is more racist (sorry, large minorities of europeans vote for white nationalist parties after all...i would blame proportional representation, but the germans manage to avoid it).
hey, just to be clear: if any european nation had a 30% colored minority then it is quite possible that they would also have a colored head of state. that was the point of my post...but some of the comments suggest to me that that's not clear. also, i'm not too invested in colored heads of state. i'm busy writing comments, not crying with joy, right now.
btw, one point is that in the USA has a powerful president directly elected. so does france. neither of these have had female heads of state. in contrast, a lot of these countries have symbolic female presidents (i think india does now), or, they have women heading supreme legislatures. i should do a statistical analysis...but i have a hypothesis that these differences matter a lot for women in terms of their ability to work the systems.
We need to compare what could be compare! A head of State in Europe is like a governor in the US. We do have spanish and portuguese head of State in europe and colored with those countries. The real European Obama would be a European President leading the European union issued from Greece, Spain or Portugal.
jean-marie, what if a roma (gypsy) became prime minister of the czech republic? in the context of the broad sweep of our history i think that's a good analogy for the sense of strangeness for older americans.
Sweden's Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has African-American ancestry..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredrik_Reinfeldt
In some people's eyes, he would be more 'African-American' than Obama, since Reinfeldt has US slave ancestry. Is he the only world leader, outside of Liberia, with African-American slave ancestry?
that's a very interesting fact. thanks for that. so the dude could be 1/16 black american (depending on how much african ancestry his ancestor had).
ancestor:
http://gfx.aftonbladet.se/multimedia/archive/00253/HATT_OCH_KRAVATT_253…
i bet he's likely way less than 1/16 black judging by the photo of john hood.
Yeesh. But, didn't the U.S. just give 46% of its vote to a white nationalist party? It sure felt like it at times.
Hood had a black mother and white father, and was described as a mulatto. So that makes Reinfeldt 1/16 african. According to dubious Google search results, that means he would considered 'coloured' in South Africa, and would get advantageous 'minority' status in the US for government contracts.
Razib - tiny, tiny minority in my book means 1 to 2%, but I agree its a definition that could vary. At that rate, representativeness would mean 1 to 2 leaders out of 100 should be of African origin.... starting from ?1980? when the first European born children of immigrants grew up?
I realise this is pretty much the point you were making.
I've made the point about relative numbers several times in other places. The point you make about the time that non-whites have been in the countries is also important. There were very few non-whites in the UK until the late 1950s when West Indians arrived, many of them being poor and uneducated. By contrast, people from the Indian subcontinent arrived a little later and were mainly very well educated (in the 70s, half of all hospital staff at all levels were from that region). Chinese had been in the country for much longer but apparently kept more to themselves. At a time when black-white or Indian-white marriages were quite common it was still rare to see a mixed Chinese marriage.
Your comment about the 1960s whiteness of the UK outside London is quite correct. In the late 50s and early 60s I went to three schools in Manchester, two with about 300 pupils and the other with about 1200. I remember just one non-white although I was friends with someone who looked half Indian (he denied it). A good friend of my mother married an Indian and we had a West African student teacher at school for a month or two, and that was it.
Usually the first generation of immigrants are busy getting established and it is only the second or third generation that starts to take an interest in politics. I do not know about other countries, but in the UK there is a built-in conservatism in the method of selecting a prime minister, who is chosen to be electable, rather than being directly elected. It would take a particularly forceful individual to break through this.
The last time I was back in the UK I noticed that in a relatively high proportion (about 1/3) of TV adverts that showed people ostensibly in a relationship, it was a mixed one. As advertizers are cautious about upsetting people I saw this as a good sign.
"what if a roma (gypsy) became prime minister of the czech republic?"
I don't think that is a good analogy.
As others have mentioned the US situation is one where the descendents of slaves have faced discrimination for over a century after slavery was abolished. This election hasn't resulted in a descendent of these slaves becoming president.
Indeed you could look at the results in an entirely different way. It was only the massive support of those descendents that managed to get Obama elected as the racists were still heavily against him (look at the results from Appalachia).
A more apt analogy would be the son of, say, a Hungarian immigrant becoming the President of France.
Not only that but if such an unlikely event were to occur would you expect the French to make a huge fuss about it?
The election of Obama was hugely symbolic but lets not kid ourselves that it means a more 'conventional' African American politician will find it any more easier in the future.
I learned (from Euros) that all New Euros are basically colored people trapped in white bodies. They feel Africa's pain from their Club Med vacation hotels rooms, even while dancing like a real bruthaman in their hometown discos.
Sandra: Greeks aren't white in the U.S.? I know nothing about visa waivers, though I wouldn't use that as a metric for understanding who Americans consider to be "white." I would simply point out that there was never any question about the race of Michael Dukakis when he ran for President.
@ sandra: the criteria for the visa waiver program are economic, not racial, based on the estimated probability that someone from that country would be getting a visa for a temporary stay under false pretenses, intending to remain permanently in the U.S. Japan has been on the waiver list for a long time, and Korea is soon to join it, along with the Baltics and Hungary. Spain is on the list, along with Portugal. Poland isn't. I don't know why Greece isn't, but it certainly is not because the U.S. officially or socially thinks Greeks are not white. Maybe in Europe they aren't, but here they are.
i don't think that's inappropriate as an analogy, though blacks are much more organized and self-confident than shit-cleaners..
Must you be so vulgar?
India is very diverse of course and so it's difficult to generalize about it, but aren't low caste people and untouchables quite politically organized these days and confident too?
My family is from Southern India, and they've told me that the scheduled castes are very proud of who they are. (When my mother was in college in the 1970s, she had 3 low caste roommates who would get into squabbles about whose sub-caste was better). They are also passionate about fighting for their rights, like greater quotas for political office, colleges, the civil service. And of course, they are angry.
It certainly *seems* like the idea of the meek passive untouchable or low caste person is somewhat anachronistic.
A more apt analogy would be the son of, say, a Hungarian immigrant becoming the President of France.
france has eastern european immigrants in their country in large numbers from the early 19th century onward. they've had jews as heads of state (blum). are you french? i'll take your word for it if you are, but it seems a stretch seeing as how 2 generations ago black americans were subject to apartheid.
as for obama being not descendant of slaves, etc. there's something to his specialness vis-a-vis typical blacks. but, he looks like a black american, so he'd certainly experience some proximate racism which hinged on the perception that he was a descendant of slaves.
It certainly *seems* like the idea of the meek passive untouchable or low caste person is somewhat anachronistic.
depends on region (e.g., kerala vs. bihar). of course i'm being vulgar, but caste is a vulgar institution.
At that rate, representativeness would mean 1 to 2 leaders out of 100 should be of African origin.... starting from ?1980? when the first European born children of immigrants grew up?
these things are also dependent on whether you have first-past-the-post and relative de-segegration and what not.
But, didn't the U.S. just give 46% of its vote to a white nationalist party? It sure felt like it at times./i>
yes, i see what you mean. but the brother of the president of the united states is married to a mexican mestizo woman, and the leader of the republican party in the senate is married to a chinese american woman, while the nominee (mccain) has an adopted daughter from bangladesh.
Sigmund, blacks have supported democrats by 85%+ usually. Kerry won 88% of the black vote IIRC. Obama won 95%. Obama didn't win because a bunch of black people who wouldn't never voted for another democrat voted for him. If Obama was a republican, and he got something like 50% of the black vote (which might have happened), then you'd have a point.
And the point Razib is raising with regard to gypsies is quite relevant. I'm bulgarian (although I live in the states), and I'd be amazed to see a gypsy elected to a position of power equivalent to Obama's in any european country.
Of course gypsies aren't the same size of minority as blacks are in this country. But then again I think it would be more then enough if they had even close to the proportion of representatives in parliaments that they *should* get based on their population, if there were no extra barriers for them.
Not to forget that Europe should be ashamed at never having Jewish Presidents and Prime Ministers, unlike the US ...; oh, have I got that the right way round?
Uh, what? They look like southern Europeans, which are of course considered white, so I was very surprised to see a few years ago that there's not simply xenophobia but racism against Middle Easterners in the USA, "sand niggers" and all.
LOL! Well said! :-D
Here in Paris I see the whole spectrum of skin colors every day, including surprisingly many people who'd probably be classified as "mixed" here but as "black" in the USA, but the rest of the country, except Marseille and a few other big cities perhaps, is white all over.
I was in Cleveland, OH, a month ago, and I think this comparison makes sense.
Not just the peasantry. I grew up in a city of 200,000 people and saw a black man, like, once or twice in the entire 11 years.
That's not comparable to the USA because of the latter's two-party system: practically all racists who vote at all vote Republican because they don't want to throw their vote away, but not all Republican voters are racists...
And then, there's the "protest vote" phenomenon: people who don't actually want a xenophobic party in power vote for it anyway just to stick it to the parties that are in power. After they accidentally did get into government in 1999, Austria's xenophobes were utterly trounced in the next three elections.
Yep. I know Tunisians where, well, you have to know they're Tunisians, you'd never guess they came from south of, say, the Mediterranean coast of France!
Would surprise me a lot.
No, Turks count as "white", too.
There is no "brown race" in general European perception! Europid, mongolid, negrid, and that's it. (I was still taught these terms in school.)
The conclusion doesn't quite follow. Yes, these parties are racist, but that hardly ever surfaces. They are xenophobic first and foremost. Racism comes as a byproduct of xenophobia.
That's a much better analogy! Still not perfect, but much better.
Nah. There are plenty of people in southern France who look just like Sarko, and there's no traditional prejudice against Hungarians -- there has never been sizable Hungarian immigration to France.
Who was, of course, used against him by the Bush campaign in the 2000 primaries ("black love child").
I second Sandra's argument. Europeans are racist against each other. Someone I know was stopped in the street in an italian northeast town by an elderly lady; she shouted at him to go back to (no-longer-existing) Yugoslavia, on the basis of his speaking a foreign language to the baby in the pram he was pushing. The foreign language was german.
Uh, what? They look like southern Europeans, which are of course considered white, so I was very surprised to see a few years ago that there's not simply xenophobia but racism against Middle Easterners in the USA, "sand niggers" and all.
i'm a sand nigger. ralph nader is not a sand nigger. he's an arab. i'm not. most people who are targeted for being middle eastern are in two categories
1) brown skinned sikhs
2) muslims who are obsessed with looking as muslim looking as fucking possible
arabs who can pass do so easily.
There is no "brown race" in general European perception! Europid, mongolid, negrid, and that's it. (I was still taught these terms in school.)
perhaps you're right. but i'm skeptical that germans and swedes accept turks as white. but i haven't seen any surveys.
she shouted at him to go back to (no-longer-existing) Yugoslavia, on the basis of his speaking a foreign language to the baby in the pram he was pushing.
one of cavalli-sforza's biographers is a german american who looks very german, and while doing research in italy he was subject to a fair amount of verbal abuse on being german.
As an African American, I am proud that America as a whole is growing up.
I care less what Europe or anyone else thinks. Obama is our president.
If the Europeans, would focus more on their domestic issues whether than worrying about Obama's skin color then they would not have so many problems.
I think what the Europeans don't like is no matter how you try to degrade one particular race they seem to get on top one way or the other.
Obama, a man of Kenyan descent is our President.
Thank God!
I understand what Sandra is talking about. I grew up in Canada surrounded by olive skinned french Canadians, and they never accepted my redhaired look as 'one of them'. And this is in a supposedly multi-cultural country.
Well said, David MarjanoviÄ. I'm French, I have mixed-raced ancestry (Asian and European) with a Spanish name, but I look white and never was considered anything other than white. I've lived in Paris, Marseille and other, smaller cities, and I can confirm what you say about a lot of the population never seeing black people except on TV. I confirm also about "no brown race": the Southern European people are lumped in the same category as other "European-looking" people, and the same is true for Lebanese, Turks... Even North African of Berber origin with clear skin.
The more important distinction here is whether they are from an ex-colony or not. If they are, bad news for them, especially if they are Muslims. Especially if they want to look Muslim at all times... But Armenians, Greeks and Christians from Lebanon have no problem.
Other than that, we have had for a long time heads of government who were Jewish or protestants (this in a mostly catholic country), others who were the son or grand-son of an immigrant from Southern or Eastern Europe. Even in the 1950s, when France still had a lot of colonies, part of the politicians were Blacks from the West Indies or the African colonies. Google "Gaston Monnerville", for instance. He nearly became president twice.
In fact, France suddenly become a lot "whiter" when de Gaulle made his coup in 1958. Now, there was a believer in a white christian Europe... It took 30 years to see non-whites in the government again.
I read the article in the NY Times and was rather unimpressed by the retarded PC-one-upmanship.
i would blame proportional representation [for the existence of far-right parties in Europe], but the germans manage to avoid it
Yeah, by outlawing political parties. And the moles keep showing up until they get whacked again - you occasionally hear about the far right breaking the 5% barrier in this or that state. If the US had PR I believe it would there would be a southern white supremicist party, as shown by the successful 3rd-party runs by Thurmond and Wallace (a while ago, but we can still see how important race is to Southern Whites).
Spain white? the Greece white?, Italy white? They are by no means considered white.
I second Sandra's argument. Europeans are racist against each other
Sandra's still wrong. You can be racist towards people other people without denying their whiteness...
Throughout this thread I didn't see the word 'nationalism' except in the context of white nationalism. In Europe - indeed in most of the world - people attach themselves to their locality, or their ethnicity, or their language, or a few of these criteria, not to the color of their skin.
This is an alien notion to Americans. The USA a quite isolated country, and when Americans come into contact with non-Americans, they are treated as potential Americans, prospective Americans, a reasonable assumption but quite often not true, for example I've seen Obama's father referred to as an 'immigrant'. It comes much more naturally for Americans not according to their nationality but to their race (I'm speaking of the cognitive distinctions they make, not necessarily to whether they are racists). Apparently Europeans manage to get confused by these distinctions as well.
I don't live in the USA or in Europe, so feel free to call my bullshit.
what if a roma (gypsy) became prime minister of the czech republic?
How about a Catholic PM in the UK? Blair converted to Catholicism only after leaving the PM's office, doing so during his premiership would have generated unwanted controversy. The Monarch is not allowed to be a Catholic, of course.
the self-congratulatory "only in America" stuff that followed Obama's election really isn't accurate...
It's also really annoying, American Exceptionalism being based very much on ignorance.
"France is a tough cookie because they don't like to collect ethnic data since all their ancestors are Gauls on a priori grounds."
Nah, Pays de Galles is somewhere else. The name France is a clue; they're a priori Franks. That is, a kind of German. Just like the English, really, except that instead of speaking some German dialect they speak a corrupt form of Latin.
Underlying your point though, a key difference between the UK and USA could be that a dark skin is an obvious if unreliable indicator of "not from these parts" here in the UK, to the extent that it couldn't be in the USA where most people are a priori foreigners of some description.
As you'd expect though it's a lot more complicated than that where racism overlaps but is not coterminous with a more basic xenophobia. Interesting (and funny too, in a way) to see some of my more, er, insular, acquaintances who are accustomed to complaining about immigration from the Commonwealth struggling with the idea of very white eastern Europeans coming over stealing jobs/scrounging, eating unusual food and not talking proper.
Nit picking, and doesn't affect your argument, but not sure to what extent you can say that "sailors in Cardiff" were absorbed and disappeared. The Somalis in particular seem to have kept their sense of identity & community http://www.bbc.co.uk/legacies/immig_emig/wales/w_se/article_2.shtml .
Good points, Danny. White nationalism may not be the correct term for describing the popular European anti-immigration parties. Their nationalism is ethnic, not white, and they would not refer to themselves as white nationalists, even if they were raci(ali)sts. European nationalisms are defined in large part in opposition to each other. A Walloon would not feel welcome in the Vlaams Belang, which Razib apparently considers a white nationalist party. I think most or all of these parties accept non-whites as members, and the Austrian parties, for example, have more than a smattering of Turkish immigrant voters (Turks and Arabs are not considered white in Northern Europe, whereas Southern Europeans are). BNP can be called a white nationalist party though, but they're rather tiny.
The term 'white nationalism' probably doesn't exist in most European languages, except perhaps as a loan word from English used to describe American fringe groups. European media generally does not refer to parties like VB and FPÃ as white nationalist, either. White nationalism is really an American phenomenon, as there are no white people in Europe, only different pale-skinned ethnicities.
Just an FYI, for all you European and South Asian folks discussing this issue; in the US, referring to a nonwhite person as "colored" is considered offensive. To refer to such a person as being "of color" is OK though. I don't know why it is this way -- perhaps just old associations with racism. Interestingly, I'm not sure younger (white) people are always aware of this. Evidently, Lindsay Lohan, an Obama supporter, referred to him as "our first colored President" yesterday. This will probably get her in all kinds of trouble.
I've also heard that proportional representation is more likely to result in female heads of state.
Racists were not compelled to vote against Obama in the recent election. Some Hillary supporters exhibited evidence of racial animosity during the primaries and some worried that they would not support Obama in the general election, but party loyalty trumped it. Like Mickey Kaus said of McCain's former fans in the media "Of course they went for Obama, they're Democrats!"
I understand that Tony Blair's reluctance to convert to Catholicism in office does have a certain significance, but I think his fear was of a perception of religiosity.
Nobody would care if Blair had converted to Quakerism (though they might never have retrieved their jaws from the floor after that level of hypocrisy and political death-bed repentance).
However, many, many Britons were horrified to hear that he had prayed with George Bush. His Protestantism, his Christianity, was controversial enough. The voices you hear in your head when you clap your hands together should not contribute to public policy.
Britons would have been very concerned with the political implications of Blair's Catholicism - quite narrowly on gay marriage but very, very widely on abortion, and almost universally on contraception and stem-cell research. Nevertheless, all of those concerns would have been with policy, not denomination.
Nah, Pays de Galles is somewhere else. The name France is a clue; they're a priori Franks. That is, a kind of German. Just like the English, really, except that instead of speaking some German dialect they speak a corrupt form of Latin.
taking you seriously, "our ancestors the gauls" is an allusion to a joke about the french mentality. the frank vs. gaul ancestry thing is actually something which wracked the french during the 17th to 19th centuries. sometimes the middle classes would assert gaulishness, and the upper classes would assert germanness. with the rise of germany as a nation-state i'm pretty sure that gaulishness (or romanness) trumped germanness. ergo, asterix. as an empirical matter, very few franks settled in northern france. the language closest to frankish today is flemmish.
"The real European Obama would be a European President leading the European union issued from Greece, Spain or Portugal."
Durão Barroso, the Portuguese president of European Commission counts?
razib, yes, so many alternative national myths to choose from!
Your basic thesis seems to be sound, based on data, but how this might translate across to representation at high levels of government is endlessly debatable. There might be a suspicion that because of the deadweight of institutional or structural racism people from minority (in UK terms) groups have to be just that bit more able or lucky to make it to Cabinet but the sample frame, so to speak, at this level is probably too small to do any sensible statistics.
This is OT, yet related: you mentioned Kenan Malik favourably once, so you might be interested in his new book: Strange Fruit: Why both sides are wrong in the race debate
Here's a quote from the blurb:
I'd sure like you to review it sometime.
Just a quick comment about the "whiteness" of turks.
I'm a very white swede and I was very surprised about the thought that turks and other people from that region wouldn't be considered as white in northern Europe - they most certainly are! That doesn't mean that they are welcomed by xenophobics, however.
That kind of people always finds an excuse to want to someone they consider a foreigner home, being non-white is just one of many excuses they make up.
Some of this debate reminds of a time when an American friend visiting Dublin at the height of the Irish boom ( during which Dublin's population grew by 20% in about five years fueled by immigration). We got on the light rail system, and I noticed that most people seemed foreign, and the general conversation worked that way too - I did not hear English. He said later that Ireland did not seem very multi-cultural to him..
So why did we think differently? Well he dint see any blacks , or very many ( By the way the valid response to this, from an Irish point of view is simple, we didn't enslave any). He did see whites, and made the rather American assumption that there is something called a "white" culture, and that all these people were in it, as was I. Very few Europeans see themselves as part of any universal White culture, first and foremost they are Scottish, Irish, Welsh. Walloon, Basque etc. And these identities re very strong indeed. On the other hand EUropean populations have alowed foreigners, or their descendents to rule them for years. And isnt that what Obama is. Son of an immigrant?
I think this puts Obaba into perspective. Blacks have been in America longer than most whites, longer than most ethnic whites in particular. Getting excited about electing a african american man who ancestors have spoken English for centuries ( and language is intrinsic to culture) would be no big deal, unless blackness means a lot to the general population ( Obama, of course is not of that background but is culturally assumed to be*).
In fact the fact that the races have remained separate for so long is testament to Americans real racist past, and possibly to the divisions which continue today. How many American white liberals marry black?
In terms of intermarriage in England ( where I now live) the percentage of afro-Caribbeans marrying white is close to 50%. Since the population remains at 92% white, the mixed race descendants will probably marry white ( at least at the same frequency) and black genes wil permeate the population. It may have already happened, geneticist Steve Jones says that one family in Yorkshire - the Revis - is of patrilineal ( Y-chromosome) West African descent. Nobody hs checked on Blair.
Clearly the black descended prime minister may look white, or brownish, but a modicum of thought here would prove this rather than the separation of races for 3-4 centuries and the excitement of electing a man of mixed ancestry ( yet still ideologicaly black) - is the least racist country. At least in that respect.
However we al have oue Others, and a Catholic cant become head of State.