Please don't take HN threads further into ideological and nationalistic flamewar, let alone, god help us, both at the same time.

Also, would you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=community%20identity%20by:dang...

I'm sorry, but this is simply ignorant.

While it's true that racial oppression is often less in Europe due to better government regulations and social safety nets and whatnot, on a personal level there's still plenty of bigotry and xenophobia, sometimes moreso than the US.

I'm an American living in Munich (working for Google actually), go ahead and try telling foreigners here that landlords they're talking to while applying for an apartment treat them the same way as native Germans. The idea is laughable.

But you don't have to take my word for it. Here's a poll on whether people in different countries feel that increasing diversity is a positive change. Note that the US comes out ahead of most of the European countries listed, as well as substantially ahead of the European median: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/04/22/how-people-aro...

I'm not sure this is true, having worked in both the US and Europe. The US definitely talks about it more, often to an absurd excess. But I've seen far more real-life examples of casual racism in Europe, stuff that no one would even dream of saying or doing in the US. I'm not hanging out in terrible neighborhoods in either place.

Having worked in both Europe and the US, and being from neither of those places, I can absolutely say that the amount of _open_ racism in Europe was significantly greater than in the US.

One example out of many: while walking on the street in Denmark, there were two instances of passersby on bicycles yelling racial slurs at me as they drove by.

Considering America’s obsession with diversity, I find it hard to believe that she would have an easier time in Europe or anywhere else in the world. In America she would receive countless offers purely as a diversity hire. That’s not to say she wouldn’t deserve the offers based on merit, but Silicon Valley has decided that pure ability is less important to hiring than race and gender. That gives her an enormous advantage over white and asian males.

Errr I’d want to see hard evidence this is the case before I’d take it as a given.

There’s no part of me that finds it easy to believe that a female, minority worker in tech is going to get the same opportunities as a white male anywhere in Europe.

I’d think the more sinister patting of one’s own back is assuming that “at least we’re not like that here” without hard evidence to back up that assumption.

>There’s no part of me that finds it easy to believe that a female, minority worker in tech is going to get the same opportunities as a white male anywhere in Europe.

I agree, she's a woman, she will definitely get much more opportunities than a man. The potential employers will bend over backwards to fill their diversity quotas.

The (billion dollar) company I work for in Europe has a policy that they hire twice as many women as men. Women also get twice as long contracts and better career paths. They are also trying to hire a lot more people of color. Statistically you have an extremely higher chance of getting hired as a black female than a white male.

Oof, that certainly doesn't sound good.

Excellent point. Europe has solved racism and sexism, especially in football.

> Europe doesn't talk as much about gender and race, but they actually do things as well, while in the USA everyone kinda pats their back for "walking out for Black Lifes Matter" and calls it a day.

Please explain how things like 'Zwarte Piet' fit into your narrative? I remember the first time I walked around a town center around the holidays and was accosted by multiple white Europeans in blackface asking for donations.

I think Zwarte Piet is racist only when seen through American lenses. Which unfortunately today is the norm, but that doesn't make it more sensible. Zwarte Piet is basically Santa's little helper, as they exist in many traditions. He's black so he's represented by people with their face painted black. The fact that blackface has a connotation of racism in a country where racial laws where abolished only in 1964 has nothing to do with the substance and meaning of a Dutch Christmas tradition.

> Zwarte Piet is basically Santa's little helper, as they exist in many traditions.

Why is a Moor from pre-Reconquista Spain Santa's little helper?

For the same reason Santa has a beard, lives at the North Pole and passes through the chimneys.

And you feel that the fact that the "helper" is black is only racist because it is seen through an American lens?

I don't think this is the right place to make a EU vs. USA point, to be honest. And a Google HQ itself isn't a safe-haven either.

I'm not as confident as you are about the author of this post getting an easier life in the EU vs. the US. People escaping the wars the EU/US coalition (in whatever form) have started in the middle east are going to find their way to greener pastures through Turkey, Greece, Italy and be shunned every fucking step of the way, no matter where they settle.

But you don't have to be coming from Turkey or be somehow Arabic, or Muslim in appearance, you only have to turn to the UK to see the sheer derision towards Polish people and immigrants further east despite the immense proximity between the countries. Or the attitude to the Romani people across the whole continent.

The author is from Palestine. She will suffer from prejudice purely for having a name that ignorant people will connect to Islam or terrorism, and ignorant people who will take Israel's side on the matter without thought.

If Dalia Awad has an easier time and avoids issues wherever she is, it's because of what she's had to do for it, not because she chose the EU over the US.

-and ignorant people who will take Israel's side on the matter without thought.

i don't think Israels' side of the matter means persecuting people just because they happen to be Palestinian. That just isn't true.

I took it too far in that respect, and since I can't do a faithful edit on HN to correct that (without erasing the evidence of me being wrong), it doesn't mean the rest of the post is wrong.

The EU isn't the paradise the parent poster thinks it is.

I suppose everybody's impression of inequity is mostly shaped by their experience and perhaps the anecdotal experience of a few close friends. The US is by no means a model for how to handle inequities but my experience has been that the US actually does a better job handling and talking about it, at least in the sciences, than do lots of places in Europe. IDK, everything is subjective and depends. Bearing that in mind I would encourage you to approach commenting on topics like this without drawing such a hard line in the sand. Whether or not you meant it, your comment comes off as pretty aggressive and somewhat flame-war-y.

Perhaps Europe is better at gender (due to strong social policies), but Europe is't immune to racism.

It's not talked about so loudly like in the US, but I've experienced so much low-key, out in the open racism in Europe towards Arabs, Moroccans, Chinese, Africans and so on.

I'm not white and while I don't feel like my life is in danger, I know from looks and behavior that I'm not on equal footing with a white European.

The US has been grappling with these issues for a long time, so it's normal to discuss it there.

In Germany, I get more of the feeling of, "oh, we don't have those kinds of problems here". It's basically denialism, like when the Dutch defend Zwarte Piet. Not that you don't see that in the US for some people too, but it seems to be more widespread in many European countries, where the very fact that it hasn't been as widely discussed before leads people to believe that it must not exist.