Thread by @erikaheidewald

this is something sad a lot of people don’t get about europe - it’s not less racist, they just talk about it less and try to cover it up & that often means the problems are slower to change. america’s racism is a festering open sore but it has to be faced honestly to get better

https://twitter.com/js_edit/status/1368744174246187008

and this doesn’t mean that the white people in america are less racist or are responsible for the openness - white people would LOVE to cover it up and try to all the time. there’s just more racial diversity here so white people can’t stop all the discussions, especially online

the way white people object to any kind of protest when it’s about racial justice - even flipping out over colin kaepernick’s silent knee - is bc they’re trying to cover up the problem and thus stifle the voices of POC. pretending racism is over means they don’t have to change

A lot of Europe has a significantly higher percentage of white people than exists in the US so the silencing is more intense. the US is 60% white. in the UK it’s 80%, France it’s 85%, Germany 89%, Sweden it’s about 94%. No almost all-white country is gonna just not be racist.

The influx of Syrian refugees to Sweden - now 1.82% of the Swedish population - led to their far-right nationalist party exploding in size within a few years and growing their representation in parliament from 5.7% in 2010 to 17.5% in 2018 & becoming the third-biggest party

That’s a huge fucking deal. The nationalist party has only 2% fewer seats than the more traditional & established rightwing party and the two combined dwarf the leftwing party in size. The Republican party in the US has lurched rightward but not grown in size

It’s still true that European politics are centered further left than in the US, but their social safety nets were established when the countries were almost all-white. Idk that they could be created now if they hadn’t previously existed bc of the resentment towards immigrants

Ignoring the racism in Europe is obviously bad for POC in those countries but white Americans not acknowledging it means we’re not acknowledging the problems inherent to whiteness itself - we can’t blame all that on our history. Whiteness is a concept invented to oppress.

The more we pretend that covering up injustice makes it not exist, the more we run away from the solutions and acknowledging the scale of the changes that have to happen. Tinkering with the system to allow slightly more opportunity in a racist hierarchy will never be liberation