Hi there, first I hope I don’t offend anyone since this is not meant to be a bash on anyone and it’s just reflecting my personal feelings. But I assume I will get attacked anyways.
So I’m a 21 year old from Germany and we don’t have many people with darker skin shades here but the few I know who also grew up here are just like any other German and talk/behave the exact same way as every other German and also seem to be perceived like a normal German. Maybe some people might naturally be kinda surprised by people having darker skin since it’s more rare but I feel like people just perceive the different skin shade the same way they perceive different hair and eye color.
But from America I noticed that many people constantly call them “black” or “white” people and make a big thing about it as if they were a different race (and of course we scientifically know that there’s only one human race). And it seems like many Americans identify with that so much that they separated and developed different cultures, behavior and way of talking solely based on their skin shade even though they’re born and raised in the same country.
I know that there was slavery and segregation in America based on exactly this in the past but this is over and we’re living in 2025 now which is why I wonder if this is still appropriate and contemporary.
Because to me personally this kinda feels like America is still stuck in those slavery/segregation times and it makes me feel very uncomfortable every time I hear this “black” and “white” stuff which is becoming constant since American media is everywhere. And I feel like this is also influencing people overseas like here where especially younger people in cities adopt this American mindset and I’ve even seen some using the N-Word etc.
When I grew up I never even had a concept of “different skin colors” because it just felt normal that people naturally look different and I still think like this about people and see it the same way as people having different hair and eye color but I can tell that these racist ideologies are doing something to me.
Unfortunately many Germans do have problems with migrants/Muslims which I don’t understand. I have nothing against Islam being the biggest religion here.
But my question was particularly referring to that divide based on pure ethnicity because who you call “black people” are exactly as American as who you call “white people” with the only difference being having a different darkness of skin that doesn’t even have a determined line at which point someone is considered “white” and at what point someone is considered “black”.
The German equivalent would be if we divided Germans on whether they had bright blond or darker blond hair.
It’s not quite the same as being a migrant group that brought a different culture from a different country. I guess the American equivalent was if they didn’t want Mexican migrants because they’re Muslim.
No, the German equivalent would be if you divided Germans on whether they have light skin or dark skin. Are your Middle-Eastern immigrants not German? Your Romani? If they’re citizens of your country now, they are your countrymen, fullstop.
I feel like you’re very close to understanding America in your last paragraph though. For us, nearly every American is from a migrant group that brought a different culture from a different country. There’s only like 1% of the continent’s native population left. A Black American’s experiences are fundamentally different to a White American, or a Latino American, or an Eastern European American, because they all grew up with a different culture to one another. There is no real “baseline” American culture, as much as some angry White Americans would have you believe.
So the short of it is that the wealthy classes in colonial North America created this divide to make white people feel better about keeping slaves from Africa even though they converted to Christianity. That’s it, it’s all a ruse by the ultra rich. However, the ruse has continued for so long that even after racism “ended” (it absolutely hasn’t) the system is very much racist, and that aside it’s just baked into the North American consciousness now. Being black or white or Hispanic is part of one’s identity and in many cases community.
Many minority groups in America do have different cultures than the white majority, though it’s not quite as big as the difference between Germans and Muslims. For example there are many Hispanic people whose main language is Spanish rather than English, and some blakc people have their own dialect.
Finally I want to add that despite all these details the crux of the issue is xenophobia. That’s why the things Americans say about minorities in general are very similar to the things Germans say about Muslims. Fundamentally it’s the same thing, and Germans and other Europeas will have to deal with many of the same issues America is dealing with now (to a lesser extent though, because of the lack of slavery)