this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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I'm, despite being European, pro-American. It's just that what America has become disappoints me much like it disappoints most Americans. I'm not pro this America.
The government has always been responsible for some shady shit, but for a long time there, the US stood for diversity, not against it. Yes it took a long time for certain types of people to receive equal rights, but that was unfortunately the same pretty much everywhere else too. Big American metropolitan cities are huge melting pots of culture though. Go walk around NYC, it's awesome once you get far enough from Wall Street. I do hope I can one day still go to San Francisco as well, but despite being a white cishet male, I don't intend to visit the US unless the current admin is replaced with a sane one.
That’s a lot of copium. The US has never really been a diverse place where everyone is equal, it just has very good marketing, brand recognition, and fairy open borders so people tend to move there. Plus with the world speaking so much English it’s fairly accessible.
A lot of the times that you see non-WASP culture in the US it’s just stuff that a tourist might enjoy like cheap food, music, and art, or landscapes that are actively being destroyed by weak governments. So yea, maybe the people who are there and struggling can put on a good show but that doesn’t make it a good place.
The first black person to go to public school is still alive and she’s not even that old. Being gay is still dangerous outside of cities(and even within them sometimes!). There are two different rule sets for white and coloured people that are clear to see. The rich are never punished for their crimes and that’s even when the Democrats, the best they can offer, have all the power to do something about it. They aggressively export regressive ideals to other countries, too.
It’s always sucked.
Do name a more diverse or equal place though. I know in my country you get stared down hard if you dare be too dark skinned. Same goes for many European AND Asian countries (imagine being a black tourist in Japan lmao, they can barely stand white folks).
Many of the older people in my country still think anyone from Africa (which by the way includes Afghanistan) is a monkey. By older I mean 50+ not even like 80 or 90.
The UK and France are definitely more tolerant and diverse, but they also imported black people as slaves way back when, so it's not like they're all that much better either.
Plus in much of Europe we still can't stand gypsies. It's literally the same thing as with black people in the US historically.
The Arab countries literally import slaves from South-East Asia and Africans can't even stand other Africans based on cultural differences.
I don't know, maybe South America? Uruguay nowadays is a pretty good place for everyone I hear. I wouldn't want to be in South America in the 1900s but half of all that was US-caused anyway.
I don't have to imagine being a black tourist in Japan, I can just ask the person I know who is one, right now, who says it's fine. So is your thought experiment based on anyone's actual experience, or just your racist stereotype of Japanese people?
Ok but how does any of that make it good? That’s being relativistic and we can do soooo much better than that, can’t we?
Do better than jerking off terrible people who are only “totally awesome” because they’re not as bad as some of the other options. Nothing is forcing them to be like that so they have no excuse, and the rest of my original point still stands that your opinion based on what you enjoyed to consume as a tourist is laughably out of touch.
You have still failed to provide an example of a better place.
Yea, because that was a deflection and not what we’re talking about. You said that the US has stood for diversity but at every stage of its existence it has stood on the backs and necks of minorities and has struggled to even admit that it has a problem. Even the last admin was ok with Israel wiping out every Palestinian man, woman, and child and sure that’s across the world but if they’re chill with genocide that sets the bar LOW. And buddy have you SEEN how they disenfranchise minority voters? The gerry-mandering maps are fucking WILD. They don’t give a fuck about the people who, to them, are just cheap labour.
Also I live in Canada which beat the US to gay marriage by 10 years and is where many black people escaped the US to. We are far from perfect but at least we had a female prime minister for a few months and a brown guy with a turban leads one of our three major parties. We also have a huge homeless problem but at least they have access to healthcare, and as far as surface-deep things like restaurants are concerned we have just as much diversity in our cities as the US does(and just as much bland, franchised nonsense out of the cities). French is our official second language but the US only has English despite all its Spanish speakers and the fact that a lot of it is straight-up old Mexican territory.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55574552-not-a-nation-of-immigrants
It is easy to criticize the one country that has the most different nationalities in it for its history with racism. However, can you name another country that has as large a share of minorities and does NOT have a history of racism?
Right off the bat all of Europe is already disqualified. The west dabbled in its' own colonialism and the east under Soviet rule got so racist, the n-word is the standard way to refer to black people among people over 40. Remember that Yandex source code leak where the master-slave relationship (already a racist terminology) had "n***er" instead of slave? In many Asian countries, black people are also seen as subhuman. Scandinavia pretends to be super tolerant, but it's superficial. Eastern Europeans are seen as lower class.
People don't see that the entire world is racist as fuck. It's so easy to blame a single country and act like it's the only source of racism in the world. It might just be the most open about it, but there's still quiet discrimination everywhere.
This is all just projecting the US's racist settler-colonial history on others. Only a tiny minority of nations were founded in this same way, based on indigenous genocide and eviction (Israel, Australia, Canada are a few others).
Most US states didn't even end miscegenation laws until the 1960s. It's the only country on earth that still has slavery in fact and in law, enshrined in the 13th amendment.
The US currently operates a system of slave labor camps, including at least 54 prison farms involved in agricultural slave labor. Outside of agricultural slavery, Federal Prison Industries operates a multi-billion dollar industry with ~ 52 prison factories , where prisoners produce furniture, clothing, circuit boards, products for the military, computer aided design services, call center support for private companies. 1, 2, 3
I asked for a single country that was not racist in the 20th century, but had comparable diversity. You have not provided one yet.
The for-profit prison system is fucked for sure and no other country has fucked up this bad.
Pretty much every African country, most of se asia, most of south america, probably all but maybe 10 countries.
Today I learned: calling citizens of colonizing countries "gringos" is comparable with genocide /s
The US where and is always neo-liberal capitalism in its maximum expression, currently more than ever. Feudalism disguised as democratic
The US had a 94% income tax rate for the richest at one point. It has not always been what it is now. The country has been looted of both its' economic strength as well as its' moral values.