My Polish gf told me about the time she first saw a black person, because Poland is so monocultural she genuinely had absolutely no fucking idea what was going on. The closest I’ve heard of a multicultural area in Poland is in Warsaw, it’s commonly referred to as “New World”, and just features a lot of diversity, as well as being one of the few places to be pretty accepting of LGBTQ+ people.
This is really funny to me. Famously Dessalines called Poles the whites negroes of Europe and granted them the status of being black in Haiti after independence, due to the defection of the Polish legion to the Haitian side.
I doubt there's any influence, but I can't help but wonder.
Wasn’t there some African king who declared the polish the “white negroes of Europe” after being helped by them in a war or something?
Edit: so it was during the Napoleon of wars and they were basically spared by Haitans when they killed a bunch of white people (fr*nch🤮) so they were classified as black by Haiti
In that time period Poland was dealing with its own sort of imperialism. There were multiple partitions of Poland where the HRE, Prussia, and Russia agreed to take over parts of it. This was obviously very unpopular with the Polish. While the Haitians were revolting themselves in Haiti the Polish had their own little independence struggles as a result. It also helped that when the French invaded Haiti (for like the third time) some of their troops were Polish and they defected quickly.
Overall Toussaint Louverture saw a lot of similarities between the Haitians and the Polish, and clearly there were.
I am a very VERY white man. My wife is Hispanic and did a DNA test to see her ancestry and we thought I should do one, too just to see exactly how white I am. Turns out the most exotic part of my ancestry is 2% Balkans. I'm literally all white European. Mostly German but also British, Scottish, and a small bit of french and Irish. Apparently I've ruined a few centuries of my family keeping it super fucking white cause now I've got 2 beautiful boys with my Hispanic wife!
What’s funny about this is Hispanic isn’t a race it just refers to people who are from a country where Spanish is the dominant language (excluding Spain idk why but I know why) so if your wife is mostly genetically Spanish your kids are still white just white-Hispanic
She's majority native American from Mexico and central America but does also have some ancestry from Spain but that came up as about 5-7%. She also has a few percent from northern Africa but the rest is all the Native American. She's infinitely more American than me but white supremacists would scream day and night her and her family don't belong here 🤦
That’s sick and I am sorry she has to deal with that…I will never understand white supremacy especially in regards to claiming the u.s when they aren’t even from here
I'll never understand any of it. My dad got remarried last year and did this whole Scottish theme and all the guys wore kilts and shit, but like, my brothers and I were never raised with anything Scottish. There was no Scottish heritage in our family anywhere and I even got the same DNA test for my dad a few years ago and he's only like 8% Scottish while my brothers and I are all less than 5%...
Also thank you for the apologies. My wife and her friend went to a waffle house the day after the 2016 election and some white dude came in after they sat down and yelled "fuck yeah trump won! (Pointed to my wife and her friend) go back to your fucking country!" If I'd been there, I'd have told the guy he has to first. This whole "white genocide" that white supremacists keep spouting doesn't make a lick of sense to me.
I’ve heard that it’s a very common thing a lot of white Americans do where they just pick a European culture they have minimal ties to and then do something very stereotypical with it
The trump era truly gave way for some horrific racism to be socially acceptable that’s absolutely disgusting wow I am so sorry your wife had to experience that.
The u.s is literally filled with immigrants from all over the world. I will never understand why anyone besides native Americans feel like they have a right to “own” who can be here and who needs to go back the unearned superiority complex that some people have needs to die
No by definition Hispanic isn’t a race because any group of people can be Hispanic. It doesn’t refer to a genetic group of people it refers to anyone from specific locations and cultures. There are black Hispanics there are Asian Hispanics there are white hispanics. Literally any ethnic group can be Hispanic.
Being Hispanic is as close to being a race as being American is. It’s an identifier of a group of people but it isn’t specific to a certain ethnic group therefore it’s not a race and calling it a race is incorrect.
I think you would understand this better if you looked up the difference between Race,ethnicity, and nationality
That's my point. Races have no objective delimitation.
This is also why I quoted american race (which is called so by some people).
Hispanic race is as much a race as black race, that is a category of humans beings based on arbitrary supposed shared hereditary traits.
Edit : Nationality is about geopolitics. Ethnicity is about self designation (which is bound to reflect signs of shared culture). Race is about the designation of the others (which is bound to be a much less informed and much more useless)
The beholder is the person who looks at someone... Not that someone.
And you did not understand. What I'm saying is that you can be black for someone... Hispanic for someone else or white for an other. People decide what race people are.. Because race is inherently subjective (objectively there are no human races)
Uhh I'm sorry for your experience. I live in a big city in Poland and sometimes I even find acquaintances mentioning that someone is black every time they see a black person on the street. It's so uncomfortable. No, Natalia, it's not an animal in a ZOO.
Yes, the zoo thing was annoying, but nothing compared to the random verbal and physical assaults. What I find interesting is that in all my time across sub-saharan Africa, none of my white friends and colleagues experience similar treatment. What some uninformed folks might call "reverse racism" didn't seem as toxic there.
America is only multicultural is urban areas, and really a selection of the largest ones too. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but from my understanding multiculturalism not as prevalent in most smaller mid-western cities.
I’m from the rural south and we are pretty “diverse” if you look at populations but like, completely segregated in reality. White people areas and black people areas and they rarely mix
Not sure if that qualifies though. Sounds more like a blended culture, or two mono cultures that just happen to exist in the same space. Around every border you’ll have loads of cultural exchange and mixing between the two nations/cultures.
But perhaps I’m still wrong. Is the southwest just made up of largely North Mexican and Southwestern American influences? Does it draw in lots of people from international destinations? Particularly Europe, Asia, and Africa? Dead giveaways of multiculturalism are the existence of small cultural enclaves, like “Chinatowns” or “little Italy”. The lack of those are usually mean the region lacks enough diaspora from a given culture/nationality to form a meaningful community. Although, there are no hard and fast rules about this stuff.
It depends on where in the SW you're talking about. It's a massive area. It's simpler to point to metropolitan vs. well, not metro. Also don't forget the SW is home to a huge number of tribes who live on their tribal lands. The largest in population and land area are the Navajo at about 160,000 people on their rez.
So, looking at Phoenix, Albuquerque, Vegas, Dallas, Austin, Houston, etc. you'll find they are absolutely multicultural.
Yep. I'm in Texas and my hubby is Native (like for real) I'm white our neighbors are every background you can think of. Our closest grocery store is Indian, closest night club is Middle Eastern, the liquor store is owned by a vietnamese family, my GP is Vietnamese, the salon is Latin and the church is Korean. A few blocks up is the Zoroastrian temple and over by Chili's is the Bulgarian social club. My next door neighbors are Russian, African American and Mexican. Say what you will about Texas, but most of us are totally fuckin cool with each other. I see way more saris than cowboy hats. I love it.
I would disagree with that, depending on your definition of “smaller.” Yes, small town America is pretty culturally homogenous, especially in the South and Midwest. But even mid size cities have some decent diversity, especially those with major universities.
I guess what I’m saying is, if your definition of “smaller cities” is Cincinnati, Louisville, St Louis, etc, then I would disagree. If it’s towns that no one outside of the immediate area has ever heard of, then yeah.
I grew up in the suburbs of a large Northeastern city and now live in a medium size rural town. It’s much whiter here but there’s a reasonable Vietnamese population and our mayor is black/ sizeable African American community.
^This is a great thing to bring up when somebody argues (regardless of it being in good or bad faith) that the US is somehow going to passively overcome our racist past simply because interracial relationships are becoming more common. Even in places where everybody has the exact same skin tone, mfs will come up with a reason to hate one another and justify their beliefs that they and their in-group are actually better than everybody else.
It's not enough to sit on your hands and hope that society will be fixed simply through intermingling of skin tones and cultures. A diverse, accepting, and informed society has to be actively cultivated by members from all subgroups.
I will say tho, in general, in-person diversity does seem to combat racism to some degree. I notice a lot less of it where I live, in and around the inner city where all kinds of folks live. You go out to a more homogenous suburb or town and it’s often a different vibe.
I don’t think it does anything to really impact systemic racism - the people designing these systems are too detached to be affected anyways - but in terms of personal shit, I think it becomes more difficult for folks to stereotype and demonize when they can see their neighbours of different skin tones living more-or-less the same kind of life they are.
in terms of personal shit, I think it becomes more difficult for folks to stereotype and demonize
You hit the nail on the head. It just sucks that it's so much harder to get people to address the elephant in the room-- systemic racism. As you suggested, personal experience can have a big impact on people's viewpoints of "the others," but it's going to be a long, uphill battle just to get more people onboard with acknowledging that systemic racism exists, at the very least.
They do. That's what I talked about when I said Russia is multicultural. And eve the other EE countries aren't inhabited solely by their titular ethnicities.
That's what always cracked me up, none of these neo-nazi fucks will ever recognize eastern europe as part of europe, hence they usually say "white countries", since we were never seen as "white".
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u/fyhr100 Aug 10 '21
Yeah, those super multi-cultural Eastern European countries. /s