El Negrito, El Negro, y Nigga
I very much lament that I haven’t kept better (any) record or documented any of the almost constant observations parading through my consciousness over the last two years. Comparisons shuffle through the mind of an expatriate like the cars racing to and fro in Frogger. Doubtless, I have already lost to the whims of time countless moments that, ( Read more... )
But as a result Americans are typically more conscious of racism, too conscious I’d argue, and that leads I think to this misperception among Americans that we are more racist that other nationalities. It’s been my experience that the opposite is often true. Urbane Europe, France in particular, has crowded millions of immigrants into neatly segregated ethnic ghettos, and appended an impoverished immigrant class to the bottom end of the social/economic hierarchy. This fosters and provides legitimate fuel for resentment from both sides, resentment that boils over into strings of rioting, growing political clout for nationalist and often xenophobic parties, legislation like the burqa-ban, and so forth. Immigrants understandably resent their alienation and second class status, the rest of society, again often understandably, resent an influx of foreigners whom they see as unwilling to assimilate, leeching off of their welfare system, and transitioning into a criminal class. And yet equal numbers of Muslim and other immigrants have integrated comparatively seamlessly into American society.
I was told once by a young German woman without apprehension - as a statement rather than an admission, that she hated Turks, that they were dirty and untrustworthy (I encountered this sentiment fairly frequently); they were, as she explained, “like your Mexicans”. And I remember thinking no, not at all like ‘our Mexicans’, that it was nearly impossible for me to imagine an American that age (early twenties) bluntly stating to a near stranger a hatred for Mexicans, or anyone else for that matter. If they actually did harbor that sort of sentiment, they’d make certain to hide it, perhaps to some extent even from themselves. When I hear foreigners using racial epitaphs that most Americans are embarrassed to use in the privacy of their home, I don’t see a honest misunderstanding about the significance of the term, they just don’t care. If they don’t like Turks or black people or whomever, they don’t mind telling you; it’s normal. When Bosnians call black people "chimpanzees", it's not innocent cross-cultural hijinks, it's full-blown racsim of a sort you typically only encounter in Americans over the age of 70.
And Europe, certainly in my opinion no further along in racial understanding than we are, is at the higher end of the tolerance scale around the world. Many “civilized” nations have racial discrimination codified in law, and not obliquely either. So no, I don’t think we’re more racist than anyone else, on the contrary I think we’re more self-aware of our racism, such that it is. I still maintain that Obama didn’t get elected in spite of his skin color, but largely because of it. We weren’t “ready” for a black president in the sense of begrudging acceptance, we were ready in the sense of active demand. Such is our cynicism about race, at least amongst the political class, that neither party was able to recognize this as a marketable trait instead of as an untenable gamble. And such is our unhealthy fixation with race that every policy conflict so far in his administration has in one circle or another been couched in some ludicrous racial terms (the tea-partiers as white supremacists for example).
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