It’s been fun travelling to a few foreign places in the world as a brown long haired Indigenous Canadian.
My wife is Caucasian and she never had a problem asking for help or talking to people on the street in Europe. I was out on my own many times in places like Rome, Paris, Berlin just to sight see and the number of people that either just ignored me, looked at me in disgust or actively just wanted to avoid me was amazing. Not everyone was like this but a good percentage … I’d say more than half the time, people were nice … especially Germans which was a big surprise to me. We’d met many German tourist outside their country and the majority of them were jerks … meet Germans in their home country and they’re the nicest people you could meet and talk to. Spanish were indifferent, Portuguese will talk your ear off no matter who or what you look like, French will be nice to you only if you can speak a bit of French and Italians were the worst to people of colour. The English are great as long as you are sober and they are sober … I don’t drink and the only English people I ever enjoyed were the ones that were nowhere near alcohol … as soon as they get near drinks, nothing is enjoyable with them. BUT this is all my personal experience of having travelled to Europe many times over about 15 years.
As soon as I went out with my wife, I was treated better … but as soon as I was on my own, whole different story.
I have to say that racism is far less now than it was 30 - 40 years ago … I can say that confidently as a brown skinned person in Canada. My dad was born in the 1930s and he said that in the 1950s / 60s, racism was completely normal to the point where he wasn’t even allowed in some small towns in northern Ontario … it wasn’t a law, it was just a common understanding that ‘no Indians were allowed here’.
So even though racism is far less today … it doesn’t mean it’s been completely eliminated. And in some areas, its more prominent than others.
I just want to say Germans can be an outlier regarding European/Indigenous interactions. They have had this weird on again off again fascination with Indigenous America sparked by a novelist that as near I can remember never traveled to North America. I find it simultaneously endearing, weird, and funny.
lol … Karl May … a German writer who wrote a bunch of fanciful made up material in the late 1800s early 1900s about Indians in North America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_May
I actually had one old Polish friend who grew up with these books … he died years ago but he was born in the 1920s in western Poland in a Germanic area … fascinating guy who lived, fought and survived the Second World War fighting with the resistance and for the allies … after the war he immigrated to Canada and lived his life here … but he also had run ins where at the start of the war, he actually fought for the German army because he was forced to … he had weird stories of being in the middle of everything, and his family could never really figure out if he was pro-fascist, anti-fascist, pro-communist, anti-communist … or just some kid who did his best to just survive the war (he was 13 when the fighting started and he spent his time as a teen fighting and surviving).
He was fun because whenever we met he called me Winnetou (pronounced ‘Vee-Nah-Two’) … the main Indian character from Karl May’s books.
Haven’t thought of my old friend for years … thanks for the reminder.
I’m curious if people changed their tune once they heard your Canadian accent. Was it their visual racism that led them to assume your country and be racist about nationality, or was it mainly just visual racism with nationality not playing much of a role?
It was a combination of appearance and language … if I didn’t look the part and I didn’t speak the part, I was more than likely down upon, especially if I were alone. Speaking English didn’t seem to help because English is such a common language now that most immigrants everywhere tend to know a little or a lot of English because knowing this one universal language greatly increases your chances of getting anywhere. I met lots of legal and illegal African immigrants in the south of Spain over the years and the common thing with many of them was that they all knew a good level of English to get by.
Just being brown in Europe automatically lumps you into being a foreign immigrant of some sort I find … to most people, if you are brown, and you are not obviously African, then you must either be Middle Eastern, Latino or Asian, all of which means you are probably a new, recent or first or second generation immigrant. And depending on which location you are in … the local people may or may not enjoy seeing foreign immigrants around.
I found Italian cities especially difficult … partly because they have a big problem with legal and illegal immigration and partly because they are all sick and tired of being a tourist park for the world. Spain was the same way but not as bad.
As far as nationality and saying I was Canadian … about half the people I told that to actually believed me. Most people laugh at the idea and others just dismiss it because there are not many brown skinned, long haired Indigenous people from Canada running around. Most people just assume I’m Latino, Filipino or some Asian who happens to come from Canada … maybe.
Not the person you’re replying to, but I have had some experiences of lowered racism - as a brown skinned american - after I start talking.
The tragedy of humanity is that we know we can be better than non-sapient animals responding out of emotional, knee-jerk survival instinct that is necessary in the wild but destructive in civilization. We have sparks, inklings, we can see the higher path, the path where our sapience has created the ability/technology to feed, clothe, shelter, educate, and even facilitate self-actualization for EVERYONE.
It’s right there, some even do it on a small scale, very rarely humanity makes a step in that direction before taking a step back.
But most of the time, that inkling is extinguished. Our higher, sapient, empathetic mind still not quite evolved enough to overcome our lower brain that sees everyone else as competition and a threat that can only be defeated, ensuring individual survival, by hoarding moooooaaaar than them, and keeping them away.
Juuuuuuust barely smart enough to split the atom with concerted team effort, but still so dominated by our base, animalistic impulses that we did it explicitly to first and foremost make big boomie boom rival monkey tribe.
It’s not so much human nature as it is capitalism. The small scale mutual aid gets scaled back because the group runs out of money, the helpfulness shrugged off because individuals barely have enough to care for themselves, and austerity makes politicians as well as political citizens more concerned about cost than helping people.
It’s not so much human nature as it is capitalism.
That’s why the USSR never built nukes.
Yes, heavy militarization was one of the USSR’s biggest mistakes.
You’re both right, but capitalism is an expression of human nature. That was the original argument for it, in fact; the “invisible hand” referred to self-interest, an aspect of human nature.
It is at once both the unique strength and tragic weakness of the economic system and humanity alike.
Wait is this a respond to the map meme?
I’m liking this meme back and forth lemmy has going!
I think it’s even in the comments of the map memes, isn’t it? I saw it before for sure
It is.
I went on a little rant about my coworkers being racist because they would rather immigrants “go back to where you came from” than help them understand the English language better.
SomeoneOP posted this in reply.Yep, I was inspired by your comment and my past experiences to make this meme.
If you can speak more than one language, that’s really impressive to me. I speak English and beginner Spanish and I’m so timid I hardly even try to speak Spanish because I don’t want to sound like an idiot.
Approximately 60% of the world is at least bilingual, just as a heads up.
It’s less common to be monolingual than bilingual.
And there are places in the world where people expect you to be at least trilingual even.
Man, I’ve tried to get decent at Spanish, and utterly fail, even with friends that speak it as a first language helping me.
There’s no way in hell I can think of anyone using English poorly as a second language as anything other than a peer. And they’ll likely get better at English while I still suck with Spanish.
Besides, I know too damn many people with English as a first language that are horrible with it.
Anyone even trying to use another language is a great thing to me. Our ability as humans to bridge the gap between selves with language is a powerful and beautiful thing, so someone attempting to bridge that gap further is just as beautiful, no matter how well they do it. It makes me happy when I run into someone making that kind of effort, and I can take the time to help them do what they want, or joust have a human interaction.
Plus, I’ve never, ever run into a situation where just trying to help someone navigate an English speaking majority didn’t end up with both of us smiling and at least a little better off than we were before. I wish I had the ability to learn new languages quickly and fluently. I just keep failing at it lol.
When I was younger, I genuinely wanted to study linguistics for a while. It was running into the difficulty with gaining fluency in Spanish that made me rethink that.
So, fuck hating on someone that’s putting in the effort. I have mad respect for that.
Yep, 100%. I know my accent in spanish is ugly.
