Honestly, as a European some American racist tropes are truly baffling to me. Stereotypically Black people apparently enjoy watermelons, deep fried chicken and grape soda. In other words Black people allegedly like food humans often like and Americans managed to take than and make it racist.
I'm not saying it's not used as a racist trope. I'm saying it's amazing how Americans managed to be racist enough to make such a non-issue racist.
The racism is in the context of deprivation. Watermelon in and of itself is neutral. In America however, freed slaves did not have access to good agricultural land that could grow many fruits and vegetables. Watermelon grows on poor quality soil, so it was available to the poorest black sharecropper.
Because of this, it became associated with black people, and thereby with criminality, low education and poverty among the dominant culture that created this sort of pattern-matching.
My experience has been that european cultures are approximately as racist as the US, they just have different histories and dynamics so it comes out differently. There is a lot less visible reckoning with race as well, which makes it easier to assume or pretend that there are no problems with it.
Meet-and-greet the first few days at my college dorm nearly 20 years ago:
> Albino student: "Hey, where'd you get that watermelon?"
> Student with watermelon: "Dude, I'm black."
I think it was around then I first learned of the watermelon / friend chicken stereotype (I didn't get why everyone laughed when he said this), but "grape soda" is a new one to me.
>I'm saying it's amazing how Americans managed to be racist enough to make such a non-issue racist.
And you're a European? As a fellow European (balkans) I can comfortably say that many European cultures are racist as hell, to a degree that would make even quite a few Americans blush. I'd be careful about feeling any superiority over supposed European sophistication even in Western Europe.
Ask nearly anyone there about gypsies, jews or arabs in a context where they think they can speak honestly and privately. The kind of shit that gave Europe at least one huge holocaust and god knows how many pogroms before that hasn't entirely gone away, it's mostly just better camouflaged and with some of its sharper edges cut away.
Oh, absolutely. But the level of hyperfixation present in American racism against Black people stands out whereas the other racism feels more familiar.
I guess the European equivalent would be the racism against gypsies with the distinction being that it's less prominent for simple demographic reasons owing to us trying to genocide them for centuries. Of course this makes it all the more shocking to Americans when it does come up because of how flagrant it is.
But yeah, Europeans are no less racist than Americans. I'd go even so far as to say milquetoast non-racism (e.g. corporate DEI, the typical "one of each color" groups of people in stock images etc) is more widely accepted in the US than here in Europe given how many racist comments I see any time an ad includes a brown person. I think however that that has less to do with being less racist and more with being more "politically correct" (in the original sense -- i.e. saying what you're supposed to say, not what you believe).
Good. That at least will turn public opinion against this concept.
The whole notion of not even being allowed to see the same ads as your fellow man in a public space because you are involuntarily shunted into some kind of cohort is disgusting, regardless of what is being used to decide that.
Imagine walking somewhere and seeing all the digital ad screens around you switch to basket ball events or Kentucky Fried Chicken where they were showing tailor made suits just a second before. (Or ads for a pre-emptive rectal exam or mobility aids.)
