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Most of it comes from ignorance and fear. what you have to realise is that until the 60s/70s most European countries were mostly comprised of "white natives" and hence being of a different colour or nationality marked you out immediately. There was no knowledge of other cultures, religions etc... among the general population.
I get that completely right, but what confuses me is how countries can maintain that level of ignorance when their history has had a direct involvement (colonial or otherwise) on distant countries and cultures.
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Originally Posted by Mooseketeer
Nowadays of course we all live in a much more multi-cultural society apart from very rural areas .
Indeed, a friend warned me NEVER to go to rural france (I am mixed race african but apparently i look brazilian)
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Originally Posted by Mooseketeer
I am ashamed to say the extreme right wing always seem to do quite well in France, they play on the fear of immigration and the "they will take our jobs" rubbish.
Dont be ashamed, it happens in britain too! not to be disrespectful, but i find it quite funny how alot of the MPs in France are not born in France but are anti immigrants. More to your point tho, this behaviour is sadly not uncommon the 1st world.
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Originally Posted by Mooseketeer
The most racist places I have been have been Russia and Eastern Europe by fat though.
That is scary, but i have heard about it. I have been wanting to go to Perm, Arkangelsk, St Catherine and St Petersburg and several parts of Eastern Europe for some time but i have been warned on the dislike for non-whites...
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Originally Posted by Mooseketeer
France is on the whole pretty much the same as the UK or Germany.
Russia, Poland , Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, the Ukraine etc... are far, far worse by a long way. I have been quite shocked at the attitude of people towards people of another race/colour and let's not even start about Gay people...
yeah...lets not go onto gay people. it is weird. its ok to be mysognistic or misandrist but being gay is a pariah.
I lived in Austria and Germany for a few years and used to go to the Czech Republic, Poland etc...all the time ( my Dad was a Diplomat) and every time I went especially with a black or Arab friend I was shocked at the attitude of people. I am not saying the Czech Republic is like Poland , I am saying that on the whole I have found many Eastern Europeans to have attitudes I find shocking.
In France the FN is a disgrace and I have no problem admitting it . But racism has definitely gone down a lot in the last two decades. You get high profile cases in inner cities and bad suburbs but the situation is definitely much better. Integration has definitely happened in many places though a lot still remains to be accomplished ( the rest of Europe is the same).
A black friend of mine spent 3 years in Warsaw and a year in Bratislava ( yes I know it is in Slovakia not the Czech Republic) and had the most awful time and his visits to other ex Eastern Block countries were pretty scary too.
To be fair in "Western" Europe Austria and Switzerland both also have terribly racist populations ( I lived there so I do know) .
It is not a personal attack by the way just an observation from my personal and friend's experiences. We might have just been terribly unlucky for all I know.
Yeah, a lot of people still suffer from the long isolation when most Czechs were disallowed to travel outside the Eastern Bloc countries and often behave pretty dumb when encountering some ethnic looking foreigners.
I remember when I was on a flight from Tunisia a year and half ago, there were some pretty pathetic "September 11" jokes on two Arabs flying with us (it was a charter flight and all passengers except the two were white Czechs).
However, it was more like when a bad mannered child picks on a fat or strange looking adult: staring and whispering of a few bad jokes (no loud insults).
Now, I understand it can be very unpleasant for the "victims" to experience something like that, even if most of the xenophobic remarks are being only whispered and thus cannot be heard (not to speak of the language barrier);something changes in the air and the person can "smell" it, even if it isn't heard or understood.
That said, I wouldn't call these situations exactly schocking or even scary. What is your specific experience? Czechs can be reserved and cold towards strangers (and not only towards them), but there's not much of a scary and aggressive racism in this country.
I get that completely right, but what confuses me is how countries can maintain that level of ignorance when their history has had a direct involvement (colonial or otherwise) on distant countries and cultures.
Indeed, a friend warned me NEVER to go to rural france (I am mixed race african but apparently i look brazilian)
Dont be ashamed, it happens in britain too! not to be disrespectful, but i find it quite funny how alot of the MPs in France are not born in France but are anti immigrants. More to your point tho, this behaviour is sadly not uncommon the 1st world.
That is scary, but i have heard about it. I have been wanting to go to Perm, Arkangelsk, St Catherine and St Petersburg and several parts of Eastern Europe for some time but i have been warned on the dislike for non-whites...
yeah...lets not go onto gay people. it is weird. its ok to be mysognistic or misandrist but being gay is a pariah.
Sadly Imperialism reinforced racism in my opinion by not allowing the immigrants from colonies on the same footing as the "native" citizens of whichever country it was.
We were more than happy to exploit the land and the people , taking what was not ours to take in the first place but giving those people the same rights took quite a fair while...
As for rural France I don't think you would have any problems at all and rural France truly is beautiful.
I think you would find that people who are racist in rural areas will be "closet" racists who would not say or do anything against you at all.
My Great-Uncle and Aunt who are in their late 80s are racists but in a very reserved sort of a way. They do not wish any harm on anybody else but definitely have certain prejudices towards some races.
Despite all this my Great-Uncle still fought in the resistance smuggling Jewish people across the Swiss and Spanish borders because even though he is prejudiced he still thought nobody should be hurt for being different. He risked his life for people he was prejudiced against so he can't have been that hateful .
His opinions have vastly changed in the last couple of decades and both him and his wife have realised that just because someone looks or sound different doesn't mean they are that different from them. Their neighbour's son married a young Algerian woman recently and they love her dearly and the kids have become like grand-children to them.
I think this is happening all over France. I am optimistic in regards to racism/xenophobia in the long term but in the short term with the economic situation I am far too aware that people tend to always blame the foreigner or the "other" when the ship goes down and that worries me a great deal.
People always become more isolationist and inward looking in times of crisis and this could mean that human nature's darkest side is brought to the fore again.
A lot of it has simply been a generational thing also , the unthinking attitude of many people who had until recently had had little to no contact with people from other races/ nations.
Most of my friends when I lived in Paris were North African or West African and I can't remember any of them having any problems in rural places. At most people will look at you with open curiosity , not through any antipathy but more through pure curiosity.
French people are actually quite reserved so apart from the occasional ( and rare ) little thug who has sociopathic tendencies, most prejudices will remain firmly hidden.
A friend of mine originally from Cameroon has lived in different small villages around France from Brittany to Provence ( She hates big cities) all her life pretty much and loves it. She has never encountered any racism apart from being stopped for no reason whatsoever for her papers by the cops in Paris and Marseilles.
French cops are very racist sadly though ( the local Gendarmes are fine but the National Police can be real jerks).
Most racism is just pure and simple ignorant with a hefty dose of fear and lack of understanding thrown in.
People just fear the unfamiliar and if you add generations of old fashioned attitude to the mix it becomes ingrained prejudice. A lot of racism is prejudice without malice if that makes any sense. And I am not excusing it but I genuinely believe a lot of people are just stupid about those issues, thoughtless but not nasty or mean. A lot of people who are prejudiced do not wish harm on other people, they just do not understand and their ignorance makes them stick to ridiculous ideas.
But I have hardly ever met young racist people apart from the occasional National front nutcase. Most young people , French and otherwise have been exposed to other attitudes , other cultures and other ideas.
And yes, I can confirm it's true, we English hate the lot of you. Bloody foreigners
Aye ! Sorry but my Yorkshire brogue is not really that great. I went to see a play set in Yorkshire at the week-end , set on a farm in the Dales and I missed just about every word out of three , one of the female characters was saying... If only everyone spoke like Gervase Phinn I would have no trouble!
I do love some of the expressions though like : "I'll move to the bottom of our stairs" and "riggwelted" .
Ah well im not from Glasgow, I am located 17 miles from there. People from the Western side are more welcoming, i think and we have a nicer accent too.
Sorry that you had a bad experience. But my American fiance has never had any problems in Glasgow or anywhere else in Scotland.
But there are people that are still bitter towards England and her people because of our pasts. But then again those individuals don't know when its time to move on.
Mooseketeer, you raise so many insightful points. But the crux of the whole issue of european/british xenophobia for me is History. We all hear about the atrocities committed in the holocaust for example, yet in the modern day, I'm finding that us immigrants and others like Muslims are the new Jews. Though, instead of forcing us into physical concentration camps, we are being legislated into psychological concentration camps and almost treated like second class citizens without it being blatantly manifested as it may have been with say the holocaust. Other issues such as early recognition of human rights in for example the Magna Carta and more contemporary examples such as the many Geneva conventions lead alot of us in the 3rd world to believe that xenophobia is too primitive an issue to have a stronghold here. I guess I just feel given the collective and national history of Europe, that collectively and nationally they might actually know better. i hope this makes sense, coz the issue of xenophobia is a difficult one to discuss without inadvertently causing defensive behaviour.
Mooseketeer, you raise so many insightful points. But the crux of the whole issue of european/british xenophobia for me is History. We all hear about the atrocities committed in the holocaust for example, yet in the modern day, I'm finding that us immigrants and others like Muslims are the new Jews. Though, instead of forcing us into physical concentration camps, we are being legislated into psychological concentration camps and almost treated like second class citizens without it being blatantly manifested as it may have been with say the holocaust. Other issues such as early recognition of human rights in for example the Magna Carta and more contemporary examples such as the many Geneva conventions lead alot of us in the 3rd world to believe that xenophobia is too primitive an issue to have a stronghold here. I guess I just feel given the collective and national history of Europe, that collectively and nationally they might actually know better. i hope this makes sense, coz the issue of xenophobia is a difficult one to discuss without inadvertently causing defensive behaviour.
I completely agree with you but I feel things are getting better slower. As far as I am concerned it is in fact one of the only decent thing about globalisation .
Sadly people are by nature always either suspicious or defensive about the"other" among their midst . That part of human nature seems to apply even from Christian to Christian ( have a look at the religion forum and see all the posters who believe they and only they are right , it is truly scary).
Humans are unfortunately not designed to naturally be open to other people. I guess the primal safety mechanism inside of us makes us gang into cliques and try to repel those who do not fit the mould. Safety in numbers and all that. I think there is also something genetically vain in all of us which tries to steer us towards our own "kind" because it does make us feel as if we and we alone are right, superior and better. It confirms what we need to hear , that when all is said and done "otherness" is strange and disturbing.
This kind of feeling is very hard to shake but it can be done. There is still a long, long way to go on the racism/xenophobia/homophobia/bigotry front but if you think what has been achieved in only 50 years it is truly remarkable. People have fought prejudice and won many battles. The war is not quite won yet but I can see that attitudes are changing. Harder economic times will always bring back backwards attitudes towards "strangers" and those who do not conform.
We perceive them as a threat but most of all their "otherness" is often seen as a direct affront to what we consider our "normalcy". Prejudices will maybe never be fully overcome but in the long term I think the future is a lot brighter for minorities. If you look back only 50 years I think you would have to agree that things are better for most immigrants/gay people/ people from different races.
50 years ago marrying someone from a different race was almost seen as a crime and now it is not.
We are evolving, slowly but humans are still animals at their core, we just need our humanity to blossom a bit more. It is happening though.
I am only 41 and have a lot of friends who are either immigrants or children of immigrants. 40 years ago their parents would have been stared at, ostracised socially and relegated to the ranks of the worst jobs possible. Now their children are educated , have very middle class jobs and become a part of the fabric of society. Most people nowadays will no longer raise an eyebrow when two people from different races marry. That is quite an achievement after only 4 decades. Hardly perfect but we must not give up.
Women until a few decades ago were considered second class citizens , could be legally raped by their husbands and did not have the right to vote.
We still have not quite achieved parity of pay or true equality but I think we are getting there. Women have had to fight for those rights, some died for them ,and we needed to World Wars to change the attitude to the female sex. Sadly overcoming prejudice is not easy but it can and I most sincerely hope WILL be done.
Most people would have never thought we could have a Black President of the US so soon after segregation. It is in evolution terms only a blip in time since slavery and yet Obama is there leader of the Free World.
There is hope. I hope we can all embrace our shared humanity but it will never be an easy or smooth ride.
I personally prefer a polychrome world it is so much more interesting. Life would be so utterly bland and tedious if we were all the same.
I realise this is terribly simplistic .
To try a taste of real xenophobia and racism,why don't u try to live in Russia as a Muslim. Russia is without any shred of a doubt the most xenophobic,racist,bigoted and homophobic country in the world. I lived there - it's hell.
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Is tha' talking about me lass?
