Again, that seems to me like the standard refrain of some white people to mitigate their bigotry. Dave, any significant mongoloid or negroid DNA has been sufficiently buried in most Europeans over the last several centuries. Yeah, there may be some strand here or there but not enough to get you pulled over by the cops for DWB...ya dig? You mention all the different ethnicities you have in your lineage. Other than the Cherokee...it's all European. All caucasian. You are not mixed race...just mixed up.
Being Jewish, Italian, Greek, Slavic or Irish were, and in many circles still are, huge divisions between Europeans.
I don't agree at all with the "if you're European, you're white, and no one harasses or feels prejudice toward you" mindset.
No matter WHAT you are, people will ridicule you for whatever perceived differences you have from the crowd.
If you're Jewish, they'll tease you about being tight with money, or maybe even call you Christ-killers.
If you're Italian, they'll tease you with a New York monkey accent, and joke about you being Mafia.
If you're German, they'll stereotype you as a tight-assed militaristic nazi.
If you're Russian, they'll stereotype you as a commie spy.
If you're Muslim or Arab, they'll tease you and call you Osama and make jokes about you being a terrorist (i actually saw that at an internet cubicle-environment office job I had, with a 20-year-old muslim American guy, nice guy about 20 and dressed and talked kind of hip-hoppy, the guys were teasing him and weren't serious and clearly liked him, but still it cut pretty deep. Me and a few other guys privately told the others they could be looking at a racial discrimination/harassment lawsuit if they kept it up, and it stopped. But I doubt this guy ever forgot the alienation he felt.)
There's a set of stereotypes that goes with every ethnicity, and you'll never convince me that Europeans ever get a free pass from the same kind of prejudices.
I know you won't like it when I say this, but if black Americans get treated differently, it's because they have about 7 times the violent crime rate as the rest of America, and much of that is black-on-black crime. As we've discussed before, even
black police officers treat blacks differently.
I read an article about the death penalty recently that said the U.S. allegedly leading the world in crime and imprisonment is distorted because of black and hispanic crime rates in pocketed urban areas in the U.S., that are vastly disproportionate to the rest of America. And that if statistics excluded black and hispanic crime and incarceration, the U.S. would drop to the 25th globally in crime and/or incarceration.
Similarly for literacy and high-school dropout rates.
These are not because of any kind of inherent racial supremacy. Instead, rather than saying these groups are racially inferior, the studies I've read credit the contrast --as compared to white, asian and other groups-- to cultural factors, such as black and hispanic parents in most cases not putting as high a priority or expectation on their children achieving scholastically, or having an expectation of higher education.
It isn't prejudice if there is a factual basis for wariness in seeing an unknown black male on the street at night. Because, while a majority of blacks are law-abiding, statistically a black person is seven times more likely to commit a violent crime. And a person aware of that is appropriately cautious.
That's not "ignorance" or "prejudice".
That's just pure and simple fact.
And that's not at all to be confused with the respect and courtesy I have for black people I meet in a less isolated and potentially threatening environment.
