By David Harsanyi
Thursday, October 28, 2021
By any genuine measurement, America is the most
tolerant place on earth. This is an easy fact to forget for those who
experience it. And these days, it’s also an unfashionable thing to say. But the
level of peaceful cooperation between people of truly diverse backgrounds,
faiths, and creeds — or anything even approaching it — is wholly unprecedented
in human history.
Though the European Union was conceived to maintain peace
on the Continent and compete with the United States, it has never come close to
replicating the comity of American life. No single country in Europe has come
close to replicating it. Certainly not in the past, and definitely not today.
Despite perceptions, minorities in Europe are worse off. Anti-Semitism is
reaching dangerous levels — again. European policies have made it nearly
impossible for immigrants to assimilate successfully. In nearly every Western
European nation, as well as many Eastern and Central European ones, these
problems have sparked ugly nativist reactions.
None of this is to contend that prejudice doesn’t exist
in America. Such a claim would be preposterous. Still, many Americans live
under the false notion that the United States is — by its nature, its founding,
its destiny — an inherently racist and xenophobic enterprise. And so do many
Europeans.
According to polls, at least seven in ten adults living
in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom believe racism is “a
major problem” in the United States. That might be an understandable position
if more than a tiny percentage of those Europeans believed the same of their
own nations. “To the World, We’re Now America the Racist and Pitiful,” reads
the headline of a 2020 piece by a race-baiting Robin Wright in The New
Yorker. These days, says the essayist, apparently unacquainted with the
ethnic and racial animus in places such as India, China, the Islamic world, and
the banlieue ghettos of France, “the United States is destroying the moral
authority it once had.”
“Black Americans head overseas,” read a headline in USA
Today. “It wasn’t until I had left the USA to experience Spain that I
really got a sense of what freedom looks like. I was able to be 100% myself
without having to worry about safety and without needing to have too much of a
complex identity,” said Brooklyn native Sienna Brown, who now resides in
Valencia on the Mediterranean coast. One must concede, indeed, that a
cloistered life in Valencia might be preferable to living in a borough of New
York. As is the case with many Americans who visit areas teeming with luxury
resorts, Brown confuses a prosperous area curated for tourists with the
Continent proper.
American universities such as New York University have
long had to implement special programs to prepare students abroad for the rank
racism they will encounter in places like Italy, France, and Spain. “Whenever I
go back to my childhood home in Orange County, Florida,” a student who spent a
semester at the NYU campus in Florence wrote not long ago in the New
York Times, “I am not surprised when I see the Confederate flag flying on
high poles, plastered on car bumpers and worn proudly on T-shirts. But it
surprises me that even the Dixie flag — and all it represents — doesn’t get to
me as much as the outright and physical disrespect I experienced very far from
home.”
The stories of students reporting back from England are
also replete with incidents of intolerance and physical abuse. One
African-American woman who went to a London program of the Center for Global
and Intercultural Study at the University of Michigan wrote on the school’s
website: “In Europe, sometimes it can feel as if segregation hasn’t ended.
During my first week I was denied service at a restaurant because I’m black,
and one of my friends on the trip was denied entry into a club for the same
reason. In the States, I’ve never been denied service or told that I can’t
participate in something.”
These accounts are anecdotal, of course, but they are
bolstered by social research and historical evidence. When researchers Lorraine
Brown and Ian Jones surveyed the international students at a university in the
south of England, of the 153 postgraduate students, 49 had experienced some
form of direct abuse. Most of the abuse was verbal, but racism manifested
physically for a large minority of students. “Strong emotional reactions were
reported, including sadness, disappointment, homesickness and anger. There was
a consequent reluctance to return to the UK as a tourist, or to offer positive
word-of-mouth recommendations to future students,” the authors noted.
When the European Union conducted a study of black
Europeans in 2018, it found that 30 percent of respondents said that they had
been racially harassed in the past five years — with 5 percent having been
physically attacked. In Finland, 63 percent of minorities felt harassed. The
highest rates of racist violence were also recorded in Finland (14 percent),
Ireland, and Austria (both 13 percent). A sizeable majority of black Europeans
felt as if the police had racially profiled them within the past five years. A
quarter of black Europeans claimed to have experienced racial discrimination at
work or in a job search.
Research from Northwestern University comparing
conditions in nine countries — Canada, the United States, and seven European
nations — found that racism in hiring practices was far worse in Europe than in
America. The most discriminatory nations were France and Sweden. When Swedish
economists attempted to gauge a country’s level of racial tolerance, they turned
to something called the World Values Survey, which has been measuring global
attitudes and opinions for decades. Among the 80 questions that World Values
asks, the Swedish economists found one that they believed best measured
tolerance: Whom would you not want as neighbors? The United States and other
Anglophone nations — the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand —
were least racist while a number of European nations — among them, yes, France
— were the worst.
Indeed, the French seemed to be perhaps the least
tolerant people on the Continent, with 22.7 percent saying they didn’t want a
neighbor of another race. Then again, not a single European nation had a
majority that believed increasing diversity was a net positive for their
country, with the lowest numbers found in Sweden (36 percent) and Spain (31
percent). In places such as Greece (63 percent) and Italy (53 percent), people
believed that growing diversity makes their country a worse place to live.
Roughly four in ten Hungarians (41 percent) and Poles (40 percent) agree.
These numbers are strongly contrasted by Americans’
positive views on the topic — buoyed, no doubt, by decades of successful
integration. About 60 percent of Americans say immigrants make the country a
better place to live, compared with just 7 percent who say they make it a worse
place. A majority of Americans say the fact that the U.S. population is made up
of people of different races and ethnicities is a very good thing for the
country — in a recent poll only 1 percent said it was “bad.” Now, we can’t bore
into the souls of poll participants and determine that they truly believe the
answer they offer. We can, however, note that Americans, even if they’re lying,
understand that there is a national expectation to embrace all people.
Americans are in a good position to debate anyone in the
contemporary world on tolerance. One can just look at the European Union’s
political institutions to understand why.
Not long after the Black Lives Matter protests broke out,
an EU commissioner, Margaritis Schinas, whose self-proclaimed charge is
“promoting the European way of life,” argued in an interview with Politico that
“there is no doubt that Europe as a whole has been doing better than the United
States in issues of race, also because we have better systems for social
inclusion, protection, universal health care.”
There is, in fact, great doubt. Just take a look at the
European Union’s governing body itself. After the George Floyd protests, the
European Commission put together a special task force to study and debate
racial tensions on the Continent. Every person on the race commission was white. That
is hardly shocking, considering that at the time, every one of the 27 European
commissioners was white as well. If you can’t find a single minority
representative of color, perhaps your problems with race are more deep-seated
than you contend.
There are somewhere around 15 million black citizens
living in the European Union nations, and the number of ethnic minorities
living within European states is somewhere in the vicinity of 50 million, or
around 10 percent of the population. What is the percentage of minority
Europeans employed by EU institutions? Around 1 percent. In the 2014–19
European Parliament session, only 17 of the 751 representatives could be called
a member of a minority group, though that number went up to 30 MEPs in the next
election. Once Britain left the Union after Brexit, however, it fell back to
24, or 3 percent of all MEPs. Every single representative of South Asian descent,
for example, was from Britain.
By far, the most diverse international institution housed
in the European capital of Brussels is NATO — and for that you can thank the
United States.
“Europe has long been suspicious — even jealous — of the
way America has been able to pursue national wealth and power despite its deep
social inequities,” Robin Niblett, the director of the Royal Institute of
International Affairs, told The New Yorker’s Robin Wright. “When
you take the Acela and pass through the poorest areas of Baltimore, you can’t
believe you’re looking at part of the United States. There’s always been this
sense of an underlying flaw in the U.S. system that it was getting away with — that
somehow America was keeping just one step ahead of the Grim Reaper.”
Granted, when seen through the windows of an expensive
high-speed train, America’s inequity might seem crippling. But if the United
States is only one step ahead of the Grim Reaper, where does that leave Europe?
One of the most common cases Europhiles make for implementing a welfare state
in the United States is that it would heal the imbalances of economic life and
lift up minorities. Surely, then, it would stand to reason that minorities who
live under Europe’s welfare-state economic policies — bolstered by an alleged
abundance of tolerance — are thriving in places such as Germany, France, and
Britain.
Not really. Let’s put it this way: If people of color in
the United States formed a nation unto themselves, they would have a higher
living standard and more wealth per capita than nearly any country in the world
— including most of Europe. If Britain became a state, it would rank the
second-poorest, behind Mississippi. Most European nations — sans a couple of
tiny city-states — would rank in the bottom third.
Only 15 percent of black Europeans own property, as
opposed to 70 percent of the EU’s general population. In the United States,
African-American homeownership has consistently stood at over 40 percent.
Before the COVID pandemic broke out, black unemployment rates had reached
near-historic lows in the United States. Over the past 20 years, American
minority entrepreneurial efforts, already exceeding those of any European
nation, jumped by nearly 37 percent. Thirty-six percent of all black-owned
businesses were headed by women, the highest such share within any racial or
ethnic group in the nation.
In Europe, black men under 30 regularly experience
sky-high levels of unemployment — far exceeding the rate of the general
population. According to the British Sociological Association, black Britons
suffer from far higher levels of unemployment than do black Americans,
especially during recessions. During the three downturns prior to COVID, unemployment
among black British men was as much as 19 percentage points higher than among
black American men.
Black women in Britain fare far worse than those in the
United States, where, by 2019, that group had added 1.6 percentage points to
the employment rate since 2007’s Great Recession — which was the second-largest
growth of any prime-age working group, after Hispanic women.
The true outrage in the United States isn’t that
minorities are worse off in Chicago than they are in Paris, but rather that
they haven’t reached the economic levels of others in the United States. But
there is no evidence that any European nation has concocted a better policy
formula to reach this equity.
* * *
In recent years Europeans have begun blaming the
United States for their own tribulations. Sandrine Lemaire, an expert on French
colonialism, noted after the killing of a black man, Adama Traoré, by the Paris
police that her nation was merely “importing ideas from the US,” because while
the deaths happened in similar circumstances to George Floyd’s, “our historical
baggage is not the same. There was no lynching here, or racial laws.” There is,
of course, no excuse for America’s ugly history on race, but it should be noted
that not only is France an impoverished place for contemporary black
communities — which really began immigrating only in the mid 20th century — but
it once subdued what are now the entire nations of Mauritania, Senegal, Mali,
Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Niger, among others. It was a leading
force in the slave trade, buying and selling millions in its African colonies.
In the years leading up to World War II, only 2,000 black men under French rule
were afforded citizenship, while the vast majority lived under summary justice
and forced labor.
Things haven’t gotten much better. When researching this
piece, I ran across a 1973 article in The New York Times Magazine headlined
“Europe’s Hired Poor: The Immigrés Do What the French Won’t.” The writer,
Edward Sheehan, noted that the poorest French “are the Arabs, the Portuguese,
the black Africans — that wretched subproletariat that performs the dirty and
dangerous drudgery the French will no longer deign to do themselves.” It is one
thing for immigrants to generationally work their way into more successful societal
strata. Yet that piece might well have been written in 2021. It is
unconstitutional for the French government to collect data on ethnicity or
race, but it estimated that 3 to 5 million people, or somewhere above 7 percent
of the population, are black. In France’s suburbs, third and fourth generations
of immigrants from North Africa are still among the poorest in Western Europe.
More than a third of households of immigrants from Africa live in poverty,
compared with 13 percent of the general population.
Many of the banlieues that North African immigrants live
in were erected in the 1960s to house the working-class families who were
participating in the European post-war economic boom. As the expansion slowed
and industry changed in the 1970s, the neighborhoods were specifically opened
to house immigrants. Since then, these developments around France have been
blighted by unrest and radicalism, and police are not welcome. No matter how
soft the policing, any intervention in banlieues has the risk of starting a
riot. French politicians regularly argue that sending authorities into these
dangerous neighborhoods is counterproductive.
Other European nations are making the same mistake. When
Sweden opened its country to Kurds, Bosnians, and Somalis in the 1990s, it
placed newcomers in abandoned public-housing units, immediately insulating them
from the rest of the community. These housing projects are often awkward for
large families and typically far away from available work. In many cases, the
reason the buildings were empty in the first place was that whatever industry
they were built to support had already gone under and the native population had
moved elsewhere. Whether the state does it or not, warehousing immigrants in
neighborhoods with high unemployment does not bode well for their future,
tending to create frustration and criminality. With the sudden influx of
migrants, and shiftlessness spurred by unemployment, many European cities have
seen a spike in crime, a resurgence of hate crimes, and political unrest,
creating more cultural tensions and racism.
On the other hand, name any ethnic group in the United
States, and its members will have higher living standards, higher educational
attainment, and more freedom than do those who live in the place they came
from. Ethnic Japanese Americans have a higher standard of living here than
people in Japan have. Ethnic Russians in America have a higher standard of
living than people in Russia have. Same goes for Somalis. Palestinians.
Vietnamese. Italians. Lithuanians. Mexicans.
* * *
‘Europe is a kaleidoscope of cultural diversity,”
wrote Jeremy Rifkin in his poorly aged 2004 book The European Dream:
How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream.
“The Union’s inhabitants break down into a hundred different nationalities who
speak eighty-seven different languages and dialects, making the region one of
the most culturally diverse areas of the world.” Indeed, when we speak about
Europe as a whole, it is quite diverse. The problem is that this diversity is
highly compartmentalized, not merely among individual nations but often within
those nations themselves.
From top to bottom, from the past to contemporary
history, European society has been rife with intolerance and bigotry, open and
implicit, of the most nefarious nature. It is unsurprising, as Europeans have a
deeply ingrained disdain for one another. For centuries the French and Germans,
Italians and Austrians, English and French, Russians and Germans could hardly
live near each other without conflict, much less assimilate minority groups
without bloodshed. It is only in recent history, and under the protection of
the American military — which allowed liberal democracies to exist on the
Continent — that war between nations has abated. Before we came to the scene,
these ethnic and ideological resentments, large and small, often manifested in
tragedies.
In the past, Americans might well have been guilty of
idealizing and romanticizing their own history. Which nation did not? It was
certainly preferable to the guilt-ridden self-flagellation that’s been adopted
by our many Europhiles who want us to look across the Atlantic for guidance on
the matter of tolerance. If you happen to come from European stock, rest
assured that the place your ancestors emigrated from was not as welcoming or
pleasant as the United States, or you probably wouldn’t be here. Even though
the world has experienced tremendous change over the past two centuries, there
has never been a wave of immigration out of the United States to Europe — or
anywhere else for that matter.
That’s one of the reasons we have been so successful at
assimilation, whereas Europe has not. Europeans attempt to artificially
replicate our arrangements by adopting vacuous and relativistic slogans — the
European Union motto, “United in Diversity,” for example — but miss the most
vital ingredient. American cultural and political life offers space to honor
the past while making demands in the present. Despite much sloganeering,
“diversity” does not make us stronger, though it is the flavor that enhances
our personal and cultural lives. Our success is predicated on the ability to
convince disparate people from various cultures to surrender their old ways and
adopt American norms: a unifying ideology, a shared understanding of civic
life, a hierarchy of societal values, respect for law and order, basic
foundations of liberalism, and acceptance of a meritocratic society and social
contracts. The United States, notwithstanding all its inequities and sins,
remains the most tolerant place in the world — though increasingly it seems
we’ve forgotten this.
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