this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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It's been fun travelling to a few foreign places in the world as a brown long haired Indigenous Canadian.
My wife is Caucasian and she never had a problem asking for help or talking to people on the street in Europe. I was out on my own many times in places like Rome, Paris, Berlin just to sight see and the number of people that either just ignored me, looked at me in disgust or actively just wanted to avoid me was amazing. Not everyone was like this but a good percentage ... I'd say more than half the time, people were nice ... especially Germans which was a big surprise to me. We'd met many German tourist outside their country and the majority of them were jerks ... meet Germans in their home country and they're the nicest people you could meet and talk to. Spanish were indifferent, Portuguese will talk your ear off no matter who or what you look like, French will be nice to you only if you can speak a bit of French and Italians were the worst to people of colour. The English are great as long as you are sober and they are sober .. I don't drink and the only English people I ever enjoyed were the ones that were nowhere near alcohol ... as soon as they get near drinks, nothing is enjoyable with them. BUT this is all my personal experience of having travelled to Europe many times over about 15 years.
As soon as I went out with my wife, I was treated better ... but as soon as I was on my own, whole different story.
I have to say that racism is far less now than it was 30 - 40 years ago ... I can say that confidently as a brown skinned person in Canada. My dad was born in the 1930s and he said that in the 1950s / 60s, racism was completely normal to the point where he wasn't even allowed in some small towns in northern Ontario ... it wasn't a law, it was just a common understanding that 'no Indians were allowed here'.
So even though racism is far less today ... it doesn't mean it's been completely eliminated. And in some areas, its more prominent than others.
I just want to say Germans can be an outlier regarding European/Indigenous interactions. They have had this weird on again off again fascination with Indigenous America sparked by a novelist that as near I can remember never traveled to North America. I find it simultaneously endearing, weird, and funny.
lol ..... Karl May ... a German writer who wrote a bunch of fanciful made up material in the late 1800s early 1900s about Indians in North America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_May
I actually had one old Polish friend who grew up with these books ... he died years ago but he was born in the 1920s in western Poland in a Germanic area ... fascinating guy who lived, fought and survived the Second World War fighting with the resistance and for the allies ... after the war he immigrated to Canada and lived his life here ... but he also had run ins where at the start of the war, he actually fought for the German army because he was forced to ... he had weird stories of being in the middle of everything, and his family could never really figure out if he was pro-fascist, anti-fascist, pro-communist, anti-communist ... or just some kid who did his best to just survive the war (he was 13 when the fighting started and he spent his time as a teen fighting and surviving).
He was fun because whenever we met he called me Winnetou (pronounced 'Vee-Nah-Two') .... the main Indian character from Karl May's books.
Haven't thought of my old friend for years ... thanks for the reminder.
I'm curious if people changed their tune once they heard your Canadian accent. Was it their visual racism that led them to assume your country and be racist about nationality, or was it mainly just visual racism with nationality not playing much of a role?
It was a combination of appearance and language .... if I didn't look the part and I didn't speak the part, I was more than likely down upon, especially if I were alone. Speaking English didn't seem to help because English is such a common language now that most immigrants everywhere tend to know a little or a lot of English because knowing this one universal language greatly increases your chances of getting anywhere. I met lots of legal and illegal African immigrants in the south of Spain over the years and the common thing with many of them was that they all knew a good level of English to get by.
Just being brown in Europe automatically lumps you into being a foreign immigrant of some sort I find ... to most people, if you are brown, and you are not obviously African, then you must either be Middle Eastern, Latino or Asian, all of which means you are probably a new, recent or first or second generation immigrant. And depending on which location you are in ... the local people may or may not enjoy seeing foreign immigrants around.
I found Italian cities especially difficult ... partly because they have a big problem with legal and illegal immigration and partly because they are all sick and tired of being a tourist park for the world. Spain was the same way but not as bad.
As far as nationality and saying I was Canadian .... about half the people I told that to actually believed me. Most people laugh at the idea and others just dismiss it because there are not many brown skinned, long haired Indigenous people from Canada running around. Most people just assume I'm Latino, Filipino or some Asian who happens to come from Canada .... maybe.
Not the person you're replying to, but I have had some experiences of lowered racism - as a brown skinned american - after I start talking.