Erdogan’s Attempt to Suppress German Satire Has the Opposite Effect

German racism tends to be based largely on anti-immigrant nationalism and xenophobia. It's closer to American racism towards Latinas/-os (and people who fall in the same mental category) than to American racism towards black people.

But maybe we do have the kind of racism black people experience in the US and we're just culturally less aware of it because our ethnic demographics are different.

Without delving too deeply into armchair sociology I think that two major events defining our biases are 1) the attitude towards (predominantly Turkish) immigrants in the third quarter of the last century and 2) the immigration of Russian Germans after WW2.

The Turkish immigrants were greeted as "guest workers" during the post-war boom of our economy and at the time largely filled the kind of badly paid low prestige jobs that became available en masse as our industry grew. Because we only considered them temporary we never acknowledged them as German and were utterly surprised that they would decide to stay and live in "our" country.

The "German Russians", as I described earlier, were (for the most part) ethnically and culturally German settlers who had of course culturally diverged over the course of a century or so before they migrated back to Germany in the aftermath of WW2 and the post-war tensions between Russia and Germany. They were Germans to the Russians but Russians to the Germans they came home to.

All in all it's a huge mess based on a decades long attitude to immigration that could be at best described as sticking your head in the sand and hoping the migrants just go away again rather than adapting them into our culture or even allowing each other to influence each others' cultures to find a common ground.

But looking at the poverty-stricken immigrant districts around Paris and Brussels I guess we didn't do that badly. Though that relief likely won't help anyone looking even remotely foreign if our ethno-nationalism gets any stronger (for a nightmarish outlook consider the recent election results of the AfD, the German nationalist party).

(Pardon the invocation of Godwin's law here) When Hitler envisioned his Aryan race, a source of influence was the classical "Athenian Greek." (Another random tidbit, as the story goes, he had such respect for the Greeks, it was with great reluctance that he invaded /greekpride ) Many Greeks still have Blonde hair, blue eyes, and hardly any hair, like my mother and her side of the family. Compare that to my father, who is from an island in Greece, we are basically darker than most Arabs you meet (and indeed thats how I came out. I am more easily passed as an Arab, specifically an Egyptian at times)

(To continue on my random tirade, sorry) If you basically draw an oval around the Mediterranean, from the Greek Islands, Sicily, to parts of Morroco, and such, you could basically pick a few people at random and we would all look related like brothers or cousins to most Americans.

And yes I am one of those crazy people who advocates Mediterranean as a different race than "White." All my life filling out forms, and applications, and throughout schooling, I had to mark down "White" and feel as if I was fraudulent. I am not sure what exactly the US uses as its criteria for a "race" but we are as different from a Anglo-Saxon, Western European type as Native Americans are. We have our distinct features (usually big noses, pronounced foreheads, and lots of hair!), share common values, and even have our own diseases!(see Mediterranean blood disease)