#in America not talking about race is usually a convenient excuse#to ignore structural racism #so can you...just...stop
@find-nothing
this! It is really not that different over here. I mean, the beginning of the post did have a point, especially in Germany people will flinch at the word “race” in regards to human beings. Almost in a way religious people respond to blasphemy. And indeed mostly not because they want to ignore the status quo but because there is some deeply disturbing stuff attached to this term and we’ve all gone though 8-13 years of school where “never again!” was every year’s main topic. (I mean, this is the country where saying “oh the holocaust never happened” is actually against the law... People are hyper conscious about certain words.)
But: At the same time it often feels like this leads to people lacking the tools and the language really to talk about current, modern day racism and how it is still present and prominent. It feels like people are still so frightened of even just words associated with that part of history that we are missing a key part of dialogue in our society because of it.
And it really bugged me that that post took an interesting point about how we basically have to find common ground language wise because of different conditioning and turned it into a “oh, those Americans and their pesky racism”. When this lack of having words to talk about things is a large part of why so many Europeans might actually genuinely believe that we really don’t have the same problems at all...
