Soccer Dad

American openness

Last week I observed:

Of course, to the best of my knowledge, none of the countries where people were interviewed has a member of a minority group ever risen to power. (The closest would be Germany, where the current chancellor, Angela Merkel comes from what used to be East Germany.)

Anne Applebaum asked yesterday "Whose Race Problem?" (via memeorandum)

But has Europe changed? And have Asia and the Middle East changed? I hate to put it so crudely, but -- European newspaper reporting to the contrary -- racism is not unique to the United States. The situation of ethnic minorities in Europe and Asia is completely different from that in the United States, and in many ways our societies aren't comparable: Most nonwhite inhabitants of European societies are recent immigrants, not descendants of former slaves, and the particular circumstances of, say, the black Christian population in Arab-dominated Sudan are unique.

Nevertheless, it is safe to say that there is a distinct dearth of nonwhite politicians in Europe. The Indian caste system has an element of skin-color discrimination built in. Arab societies have their own history of trading in black slaves, and the existence in the Arab world of prejudice against black Africans is no secret. Periodically, African students in Moscow are beaten up on the street. Though it is certainly more severe in those countries that actually have large nonwhite populations, unreflective racism exists even in parts of the world that have barely any darker-skinned or nonnative inhabitants. Japan has been singled out by the United Nations for racist treatment of foreigners. And while some of the stares that black Americans say they get on the street in Warsaw or Prague reflect simple curiosity, some, I'm told, contain an element of hostility, too.

Essentially, a lot of the triumphant coverage elsewhere of Sen. Obama's victory is tinged with a jealousy of America's openness, rather than an honest expression of the liberalism of other nations.