I'm sorry for your experience

Like I said this is not what this was meant to be for. I was looking for some educated explanations of the matter from an objective/scientific perspective to also widen my horizon on the matter. I don't want a bate or finger pointing here.

Like I mentioned in my post I wasn't trying to downplay the racism that's also still prevalent in Germany at all.

From my view and from other Germans I talked to who even lived in America it just seems like Americans overly focus on ethnicity and these stereotypes linked to that on a daily basis that's dividing these people to a bigger extent than in Germany.

Maybe I'm wrong here and I don't want to discard any personal experiences with this that are different especially for people who were more directly affected by this. And I'm very open for thoughtful and fair education about it.

But generally it seemed like to me that Germany is pretty open for migrants and refugees. Currently 17% of the German population are first-generation immigrants where in America it's only 13% of the population with the plan to also soon mass deport illegal immigrants.

55% of all Muslims also have German citizenship and to me it felt like that many of them are very well integrated with many even living here for more than one generation and are pretty much being treated like any other German.

I think the clash might be more with immigrants/refugees who aren't from Germany and can barely speak the language. Because when you're living here since birth no one really questions your ethnicity whereas in America it seems to be a thing of daily occurrence where people are divided by just their skin color even though all of these people involved are as equally American and lived there for multiple generations.

From what I understood there are even schools for only black people. These such things are unthinkable from a Germans perspective. I don't think we have schools that are only for black, or Jews, or Arab, or Muslim people.

I'll give you an example as well: I know a German girl who has Asian ethnicity. She told me that her ethnicity basically never was a thing in Germany where she was just another German. But when she was doing an exchange year in America she noticed how big of a thing it is in America to make a deal out of someones ethnicity like when it's Asian which felt very weird to her.

I think your conclusion about German genocide being based on religion has a pretty large blind spot.

The focus on the Jews on western discourse is a way to down play the crimes committed by Germans against other people in Europe. Holocaust is bad, mmkay, we apologized to the Jews and we now support Israeli Jews doing a genocide in Gaza. We are even!

Kumbaya or some shit

Like I mentioned in my post I'm not at all trying to downplay any of the racism that also still exists in Germany. To me and other Germans I know who even lived in America it just seems that Americans overly focus on ethnicity and these stereotypes linked to that on a daily basis that's dividing these people to a bigger extent than in Germany.

Maybe I'm wrong here and my personal experience might be different from yours but I would love to understand more generally about this topic in a scientific way. That's why I asked this here.

So correct me if I'm wrong but please be thoughtful and fair in your answers.

@catloaf @open_mind To follow up on this, after the war there was a long and very successful propaganda campaign to whitewash the legacy of American slavery and its importance in the US civil war.[1] To this day, the Confederacy is heavily mythologized and their generals and leaders are lionized as brave and noble rather than what they were: defenders of brutal industrial slavery. You wouldn't think a country would have statues of 150-year-old failed traitors outside state buildings, but we do. (They're starting to come down but it has taken a literal century.)[2] There are many, many people from the south who will insist that the civil war was about the vague notion of "states' rights" without being specific about what specific rights they wanted,[3] and that's because this propaganda was embedded in the education system of half the country.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy
[2] https://www.npr.org/2021/09/08/1035004639/virginia-ready-to-remove-massive-robert-e-lee-statue-following-a-year-of-lawsuit
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZB2ftCl2Vk

Edit: Links

The biggest pockets of prejudice in the US seem to be the most homogenous. Homogeneous white Christian culture does seem to lead to racism, antisemitism, and a general dislike of progressives. It's easy to convince yourself what "others" must be like when you've never met one and have always been taught bad things about them.

My dad is Jewish and lived briefly in Arizona in the '70s. People actually asked - with a straight fucking face! - to see his horns. Because that's the stereotype they grew up hearing and never thought to question it.

I'm white. I mostly grew up in central Jersey in the '80s & '90s in a pretty diverse area, with a mix of blue and white collar. My school district was about 45% white (about 2/3 Catholic and 1/3 Jewish), 45% Black, and the rest were mostly Hispanic and Asian (largely Filipino and Vietnamese). I never heard a white person say the N word. My best friend in grade school was Black, and that wasn't unusual in any way. We all liked R&B and that was the majority of what was played at school dances. Black History Month was taken very seriously and concepts in race and racial sensitivity were taught all the time (not just February). They did not flinch away from teaching about how horrific slavery was. Over the course of about a week, we watched Roots in the auditorium in Junior High (and little me, who loved TNG, was so excited to see Levar Burton, and absolutely wrecked after watching it). We discussed Rodney King & the LA riots, we talked about the OJ Simpson trial. Anyway my point was that we were steeped in racial awareness, both historic and present-day, and there was very little conflict along racial lines.

The summer before junior year, we moved to a white-ass upper-middle class suburb of Philly, where my new high school had about 3,000 kids (roughly 1,000 each in grades 10, 11, & 12), and there were about 5 Black kids total. I don't remember there being any non-white kids in any of my classes. None of our classes taught anything about race, and Black History Month wasn't even mentioned. And in my first week of school there, waiting at the bus stop, all the white boys were trying to look cool by using the N word constantly, just absolutely casually. I was horrified, because to me this was such an awful thing to say, I couldn't understand why they were so comfortable saying it. Everything they said about Black people was based on an offensively cartoonish stereotype. And then I realized those guys had probably never even met a Black person, so Black folks were an abstract idea to them rather than actual people.

Anyway this has turned into a novel, but I thought it was an interesting microcosm. We need a strong program of racial awareness and history taught to kids throughout their education. What worries me is places like Florida trying to remove slavery from history curricula for K-12. That will cause ignorance, which eventually leads to hatred or contempt.

Of course, there are so many more aspects of race relations and generational disparity, but I don't have the mental energy to address them right now.

Yea unfortunately there is way too much across the world. I hope it will become better. I and my family at least don't care about someone's religion or what country they migrated from and I don't personally know one who does so that's a good thing.

Of course, and stereotypes are not tolerated in many contexts. For example, I'm a white-collar worker and I'm pretty sure that I would have serious problems at every job I ever had if I said or did something racist at work (or even outside of work if it became sufficiently public).

This depends heavily on where in the US you live/work. In the more conservative rural areas racism is tolerated so long as you're not screaming it from the rooftops or wearing it on your sleeve. I have the appearance of someone who most would assume is very conservative so people feel far too comfortable being total racist shitbags around me.

That is such an odd statement, or maybe Florida is an outlier? On my block there is a mix of people, I went to schools that were forcefully integrated, the friend groups of my children are diverse. I grew up with friends who were a mix too. There were certainly cliques and self-segregating but not everyone, and now it's even less frequent.

My ex, who came down here from Michigan, said that he went to "the white school" up north, that in his city the schools ended up segregated because they were neighborhood schools and the neighborhoods were segregated. So even in his high school he said there were 2 black kids and a few Indian and 99.5 % white kids. He was so uncomfortable down here because we are all mixed and he ended up so racist.

I haven't lived up north but my experience with the northerners who move down here supports this, they all come from more homogeneous backgrounds than those of us who grew up here. They all think they aren't racist until they live in this more heterogenous environment.

I can vouch for the segregated aspects of the south East. As someone who lives in the north east, I went vacationing to Florida for 2 months back in August, and the entire mentality between anyone who was not white was a drastic whiplash compared to the minor instances that are seen in the north.

unfortunately the ideology is so ingrained into normal living culture, that when I confronted my family who I saw doing it as well they didn't even realize they were doing it and in most cases couldn't seperate capability from the color of the person's skin. It's just seething that they did. Not right but when everyone around you has the same ideology you tend to get blinded by it.

Being said it's not like it used to be, it's not like it's actually written down like it used to be with color/white bathrooms and such, but that doesn't stop psychological discrimination and prejudice.

I even got gawked at for talking to a groundskeeper when I was going for a walk, it was so unreal.