this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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No, I'd say race is primarily US-American concept.
Language/nationality are in Europe the most relevant factors. Racism simply due to skin color does happen too but it occurs less often than other forms of discrimination (because there are simply significantly fewer people of a different "race". The US-American view would just see white people discriminating against white people.)
I mean, a Black and a White US-American are culturally far more similar than an English and a Polish guy but in looks far more different. So US-Americans discriminate primarily by looks (racism) while the English discriminate primarily by culture (xenophobia). That's why British Indians (considered to belong to a Brown race in the US) can be the leaders of the Tories with barely any outcry while in the US Obama caused Republicans to collapse into a hatred singularity called "Trump".
You realize that times have existed before now, right? The entire concept of racism in America comes from the European idea of "Noble Savages". Not to mention the slave trade was a Dutch concept that was imported to the US for a huge profit.
The idea that somehow everyone else's hands are clean but apparently everyone in the US is somehow tainted is a ridiculous passing of the blame so you don't have to consider the actual cause, rather than a nationalist one.
Granted, you are talking about how European ideas are xenophobic, so displaying your own is a point in your favor.
Times before are somewhat irrelevant when speaking about today. Not because today is supposed to be independent of the past, mind you, but rather because there have been strongly varying rates of progress across different countries. You cannot extrapolate two countries are the same today because they were the same in the past. Cultures diverge.
And nowhere did I claim everyone in the US was tainted while elsewhere everything is perfectly fine? Did you even read my comment? There's good reason I used the term "primarily" several times. This is a serious topic and so I thought about my precise wording.
Ukrainian refugees in Europe are treated better than Subsaharan African refugees. Both experience xenophobia, the latter further experiences racism. Neither group is treated remotely well.
If we want to get really specific, racism is just one specific type of xenophobia where looks alone determine membership in the in-group or various out-groups. But to claim all xenophobia is racism is misleading at best and outright wrong at worst.
Simple US-American models about racism that are broadly accurate there just cannot be applied elsewhere without adaption. Not doing that is very much "progressive" US defaultism.
*gestures broadly at the continent of Asia*