(Disclaimer: So first I wanted to emphasize and acknowledge that this can be a sensitive and emotional topic. This question is solely because I’m curious and am trying to understand it from an educational/sociological perspective. I know that a lot of people online can have a short temper but this is not a bait, I just genuinely wanna understand. I hope I will find a few more intellectual people here who won’t get offended and can give a more empirical answer. And please apologize if my English is not perfect, English is not my native language and I’m just 21.)
So as a German I’m very close and familiar with the horrible actions that humanity committed in the past. I’d say compared to America who enslaved people based on their skin color Germany was way worse by mass executing and enslaving people based on their ethnicity/religion.
But there is one big difference that I don’t understand: Here in Germany we are extensively educated about what happened in the 3rd Reich. It’s a big part about our education to learn and understand what horrible things happened and why they happened to make sure this never happens again. This kinda lead to the point where many Germans are deeply ashamed just for being a German (even though they’re quite far detached from what happened) and this is also a reason why you won’t find many German flags hanging here.
So I’m not much aware about Americas education on their slavery but I experienced extensive racism and misunderstanding from Americans about race to the point where many (of course not all but many) Americans make a big deal out of race as if it defines their core personality and seem to overly obsess to the point where it seems people get different opportunities and are still to this day getting treated unfairly based on their skin. Even though every educated person knows that skin color is not changing someone’s personality since we’re biologically all the same race called homo sapiens sapiens and what people call “race” is not scientifically accurate but rather a social construct. This seems to go further where people still use racial slurs that have been used for slaves (like the so called n-word) and people overly focusing on skin color like saying they don’t wanna be friends with white/black people or don’t wanna date them. And it almost seems like it’s getting worse in a way and was somewhat better maybe around the 80’s.
As a German this feels very weird and wrong to many of us (I talked to many Germans about this who feel similar including Germans who lived in America for a while). Because the equivalence would be if we still continued to make a big thing out of whether someone is a Jude or not which we don’t. Whether someone is a Jew or how black or white someone is, really isn’t a thing at all here. Of course I’m totally aware that there are still many racist people and even neo Nazis in Germany (but also in the US and every part of the world) but the general way of thinking about “race” in everyday life seems to be very different.
Because to me this stereotype that people solely have low cognitive abilities based on their skin color is very outdated. We all have different skin, there are no lines, humans are colorful and not “black or white”. I wonder if there have been strong efforts of American politics and society to get rid of these stereotypes and gain equality for everyone. Because I wonder what the reasons are why this seems like not being the case (at least to the extent it should be) and it seems unnecessarily divisive. Since to me educating about these stereotypes and not putting people into boxes is the key for getting rid of it when there is a mass willingness of people wanting to see each as people and not just as a color and finally put this behind. Might there maybe be industrial or political interests in keeping this divisiveness?
Like I said I’m very open minded and am trying to understand. Please have understandment for my perspective and try to be thoughtful in your answer.
In the end of the day I would just wish for whole humanity that we could put those toxic and destructive actions to the past and start embrace loving everyone for who they are as an individual.
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OP: tell us your opinions about the Roma (aka - Gypsies).
Like I said this is not what this was meant to be for. I was looking for some educated explanations of the matter from an objective/scientific perspective to also widen my horizon on the matter. I don’t want a bate or finger pointing here.
That’s the point though. What’s an educated explanation for why it exists in Germany as well? Or France. Or Britain.
It’s because many people are insular and afraid and need someone to blame everything on.
I’m not trying to blame anyone here. Just want to understand including understanding my own country of course.
German Perspective
I wouldn’t cast stones in glass houses.
Germany is also full of racial stereotypes. Particularly towards people from the Middle East and eastern Europe. It’s actually quite bad. I’ve known people who moved to Germany to study who decided to move back just because of the racism.
I immigrated to Germany some years ago and the Ausländerbehörde had pre checked the checkmark saying I would need welfare on my paperwork. I had to argue for like a 15 min to get them to uncheck it. Even after showing my voluntarily paid German taxes for the past 2 years.
I don’t even look brown. I imagine other people have it even worse.
Like I mentioned in my post I wasn’t trying to downplay the racism that’s also still prevalent in Germany at all.
From my view and from other Germans I talked to who even lived in America it just seems like Americans overly focus on ethnicity and these stereotypes linked to that on a daily basis that’s dividing these people to a bigger extent than in Germany.
Maybe I’m wrong here and I don’t want to discard any personal experiences with this that are different especially for people who were more directly affected by this. And I’m very open for thoughtful and fair education about it.
But generally it seemed like to me that Germany is pretty open for migrants and refugees. Currently 17% of the German population are first-generation immigrants where in America it’s only 13% of the population with the plan to also soon mass deport illegal immigrants.
55% of all Muslims also have German citizenship and to me it felt like that many of them are very well integrated with many even living here for more than one generation and are pretty much being treated like any other German.
I think the clash might be more with immigrants/refugees who aren’t from Germany and can barely speak the language. Because when you’re living here since birth no one really questions your ethnicity whereas in America it seems to be a thing of daily occurrence where people are divided by just their skin color even though all of these people involved are as equally American and lived there for multiple generations.
From what I understood there are even schools for only black people. These such things are unthinkable from a Germans perspective. I don’t think we have schools that are only for black, or Jews, or Arab, or Muslim people.
I’ll give you an example as well: I know a German girl who has Asian ethnicity. She told me that her ethnicity basically never was a thing in Germany where she was just another German. But when she was doing an exchange year in America she noticed how big of a thing it is in America to make a deal out of someones ethnicity like when it’s Asian which felt very weird to her.
Private prisons are profitable.
I think your conclusion about German genocide being based on religion has a pretty large blind spot. The Nazis executed based on ethnicity (slavs, Roma people…), not to mention sexual proclivities or even disabilities. Also, the Nazi Holocaust wasn’t the first German genocide of the 20th century, which Germany kickstarted in 1904 by genociding the Herrero and Nama peoples of Namibia, then colonial German South West Africa. So I believe the racial stereotypes are a part and parcel of most European bigotry and not in any way exclusive to the US.
Wow, wild, uneducated thread.
Racism isn’t based on race, it’s based on power. That’s why America is still a race-based society in late 2024
Here in Germany we are extensively educated about what happened in the 3rd Reich. It’s a big part about our education to learn and understand what horrible things happened and why they happened to make sure this never happens again. This kinda lead to the point where many Germans are deeply ashamed just for being a German (even though they’re quite far detached from what happened) and this is also a reason why you won’t find many German flags hanging here.
Yeah, we didn’t do that. At the end of the civil war, Lincoln was assassinated, and Johnson just kind of said “yeah we good now” and good portions of the US still hold Confederate views.
Hijacking your comment to add that a tom of Americans are ashamed to be American. That just happens to correlate with higher educated Americans. And there is currently a leading political party that celebrates the confederacy and is actively attempted to keep Americans from getting educated.
Nationilsm breeds effectient workers, and education hinders Nationalism.
@catloaf @open_mind To follow up on this, after the war there was a long and very successful propaganda campaign to whitewash the legacy of American slavery and its importance in the US civil war.[1] To this day, the Confederacy is heavily mythologized and their generals and leaders are lionized as brave and noble rather than what they were: defenders of brutal industrial slavery. You wouldn’t think a country would have statues of 150-year-old failed traitors outside state buildings, but we do. (They’re starting to come down but it has taken a literal century.)[2] There are many, many people from the south who will insist that the civil war was about the vague notion of “states’ rights” without being specific about what specific rights they wanted,[3] and that’s because this propaganda was embedded in the education system of half the country.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy
[2] https://www.npr.org/2021/09/08/1035004639/virginia-ready-to-remove-massive-robert-e-lee-statue-following-a-year-of-lawsuit
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZB2ftCl2VkEdit: Links
And to this day the Confederate flag is viewed by many as acceptable (“it’s part of our culture”). Can you imagine flying a Nazi flag in modern Germany?
Germany is a top supporter of the genocide in Gaza. What do you mean “we are taught about the Third Reich and never again”?
Locking because the discussion isn’t consistent with community rules.
I’m sorry but what is making you think social stereotypes in the US are not prevalent for the same reasons social stereotypes are prevalent in Germany?
Like I mentioned in my post I’m not at all trying to downplay any of the racism that also still exists in Germany. To me and other Germans I know who even lived in America it just seems that Americans overly focus on ethnicity and these stereotypes linked to that on a daily basis that’s dividing these people to a bigger extent than in Germany.
Maybe I’m wrong here and my personal experience might be different from yours but I would love to understand more generally about this topic in a scientific way. That’s why I asked this here.
So correct me if I’m wrong but please be thoughtful and fair in your answers.
A big part of it is that Europe in general is a lot more homogeneous than North America. Replace black with Muslim and you’ll probably see a lot of “American” racism/xenophobia around you.
The biggest pockets of prejudice in the US seem to be the most homogenous. Homogeneous white Christian culture does seem to lead to racism, antisemitism, and a general dislike of progressives. It’s easy to convince yourself what “others” must be like when you’ve never met one and have always been taught bad things about them.
My dad is Jewish and lived briefly in Arizona in the '70s. People actually asked - with a straight fucking face! - to see his horns. Because that’s the stereotype they grew up hearing and never thought to question it.
I’m white. I mostly grew up in central Jersey in the '80s & '90s in a pretty diverse area, with a mix of blue and white collar. My school district was about 45% white (about 2/3 Catholic and 1/3 Jewish), 45% Black, and the rest were mostly Hispanic and Asian (largely Filipino and Vietnamese). I never heard a white person say the N word. My best friend in grade school was Black, and that wasn’t unusual in any way. We all liked R&B and that was the majority of what was played at school dances. Black History Month was taken very seriously and concepts in race and racial sensitivity were taught all the time (not just February). They did not flinch away from teaching about how horrific slavery was. Over the course of about a week, we watched Roots in the auditorium in Junior High (and little me, who loved TNG, was so excited to see Levar Burton, and absolutely wrecked after watching it). We discussed Rodney King & the LA riots, we talked about the OJ Simpson trial. Anyway my point was that we were steeped in racial awareness, both historic and present-day, and there was very little conflict along racial lines.
The summer before junior year, we moved to a white-ass upper-middle class suburb of Philly, where my new high school had about 3,000 kids (roughly 1,000 each in grades 10, 11, & 12), and there were about 5 Black kids total. I don’t remember there being any non-white kids in any of my classes. None of our classes taught anything about race, and Black History Month wasn’t even mentioned. And in my first week of school there, waiting at the bus stop, all the white boys were trying to look cool by using the N word constantly, just absolutely casually. I was horrified, because to me this was such an awful thing to say, I couldn’t understand why they were so comfortable saying it. Everything they said about Black people was based on an offensively cartoonish stereotype. And then I realized those guys had probably never even met a Black person, so Black folks were an abstract idea to them rather than actual people.
Anyway this has turned into a novel, but I thought it was an interesting microcosm. We need a strong program of racial awareness and history taught to kids throughout their education. What worries me is places like Florida trying to remove slavery from history curricula for K-12. That will cause ignorance, which eventually leads to hatred or contempt.
Of course, there are so many more aspects of race relations and generational disparity, but I don’t have the mental energy to address them right now.
It’s easy to convince yourself what “others” must be like when you’ve never met one and have always been taught bad things about them.
Some of the most vocally racist people I ever met (in rural Oklahoma, which I’m sure surprises no one) had a black neighbor that they were very good friends with. It defies understanding.
Yea unfortunately there is way too much across the world. I hope it will become better. I and my family at least don’t care about someone’s religion or what country they migrated from and I don’t personally know one who does so that’s a good thing.
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Totally unhelpful. You’re talking to an individual who is trying to understand human behavior, not someone who’s personally responsible for their country’s actions.
What better example than from a culture with which they’re intimately familiar? Attitudes like this can be hard to change, even after generations of intense education campaigns. As a German should recognize this from their own experience
The German way they have “dealt with” their fascist legacy isn’t perfect either. They should also unlearn some of that. The tone of the original question is “we beat racism, why can’t you”, making “no you haven’t” absolutely relevant to understanding the problem
The German way they have “dealt with” their fascist legacy isn’t perfect either.
It is far from perfect. The biggest problem is, that at some point the civilians had lost interest in continuing the denazification(idk if that’s the right word/translation). This led to pardoning war criminals and stopping the prosecution of criminals. Later I can make a more detailed explanation about this since I wrote an assignment (partially) about this, but have to search for it and translate it first.
Nice of you to provide such a prime example of lack of education. Equating current events in Palestine and Israel with the actual Holocaust is absurd. I’m pretty certain Israel has not industrialized genocide at the level Nazi Germany did, and I’d be very surprised if Israel was exclusively killing Jews. Because those are two fundamental elements of the term Holocaust.
Stop diffusing the meaning of words with very specific meaning like Holocaust.
Also, great job of providing nothing to the actual topic at hand and derailing it with whataboutisms.
The word holocaust has a meaning before The Holocaust. Calling other things a holocaust is not diffusing anything, it’s just using the meaning of the word. Whether the Palestinian genocide can be called a holocaust is arguable, but you’re allowed to call other things holocausts.
When anyone talks about Holocaust these days, it’s reasonable to assume they talk about the one vs the Jews by Nazi Germany. It has gained a special meaning unlike the more generic word genocide, which is perfectly fine for other use cases. The Holocaust was a genocide, not every genocide is a Holocaust.
If you want to go semantic/etymological, calling the current Palestine genocide a Holocaust still makes no sense, as the old Greek holocaust literally means “full incineration”, burning sth so nothing is left. Which makes sense in association with Nazi crematoriums, and its historic use for large fire catastrophes such as whole cities burning down.
It also made - semantically - sense for Neonazis in Germany who called the fire-bombings of German cities by the Allied in WW2 holocausts as well. This also tries to form a link and somehow equate two entirely different things. Both atrocities by modern standards, sure, but at vastly different levels.
(Mis-)appropriating terms to undermine and diffuse their meaning is a simple and effective populist tactic, which is why it’s popular with extremists.
Call a genocide a genocide, call the Holocaust the Holocaust.
The world is full of nuance, not just radicals and extremes.
Yes, that’s why I saw it’s arguable if the Palestinians are suffering a holocaust, because it should mean death by fire, but the Jews also died by various means.
I’m aware, and I don’t think I claimed that? The by far largest number of victims were Jews, though.
Remember that Amerikkka is not a democracy, or socialist country. We are more of a oligarchy and we are ruled by the corporate elite. The system has propaganda everywhere saying we have power. But when the billionaires don’t like something they can just throw money at the government (or however they do it) and it will change, Amerikkka is a capatilism country where we brainwash the people that think to believe that not having basic necessities is good for us and instead of helping each other we should fight each other over the little amount the corporate overlords give us.
There will be people who will respond saying “na huh! Not true”. Propaganda in this country is EXTREME and sense all media is owned and operated by the billionaires… It’s easy to brainwash the country (hence why TikTok is getting banned. Not owned by Amerikkka elites, and word of things they don’t want us to know comes out from it, can’t control it so ban it)
