From being repeatedly asked for ID to feeling threatened by harmful rhetoric, politicians say lack of diversity is undermining work of EU
As a newly minted member of the European parliament in 2019, Alice Kuhnke swiftly learned to keep her ID badge handy. Sometimes the request to see it would come just moments after she had swiped it to enter a building, other times she would be stopped hours later as she made her way to meetings.
Six months into the job, she mentioned the stringent security measures over coffee with a few colleagues. “They said ‘Are you serious? I’ve never been stopped.’”
Kuhnke, a Black MEP from Sweden, put the same question to her Black colleagues. The answer confirmed what she had suspected: “Some of them had been stopped.”
It was one of her first hints of what it meant to work in a European parliament that is profoundly out of step with the demographic reality of Europe. While racialised minorities make up an estimated 10% of the EU’s population, MEPs from these groups accounted for just 4.3% of the total lawmakers in the last mandate, according to analysis by the European Network Against Racism (ENAR).
A healthy reminder of the state of affairs for all the Europeans who like to point fingers at white Americans. They got it from y’all.
If you truly feel that European racism is in any way comparable to US racism, maybe think again.
People asking you to show your badge when your white friends don’t have to sucks and I believe is very demeaning and humiliating. But it’s miles away from being shot at or being afraid that your local hillbillies gonna revive the old customs of hanging black fellas.
Yeah just don’t ask about the Roma
I think that it’s been long enough for them to own it for themselves now.
Otherwise we could just keep on saying that we got it from our ancestors and not strive to change.
Americans absolutely have to own it, and many of us try to. America has consistently made awful decisions regarding race.
The point is more that white Europeans are not special, and much of the perceived enlightenment from Europe is either top-down messaging from socially unassailable elites, or from societies that are homogenous enough that the economically insecure don’t (yet) blame their struggles on the tiny number of visible minorities in their community.
Americans who “whatabout” any criticism from an imperfect messenger are probably not acting in good faith, but the inverse is worth considering as well.
It’s that why the US kept slavery after the rest abolished it?
Replacing slaves with “indentured servants” sourced from places blighted by poverty and starvation caused by European meddling does not give Europeans the moral high ground.
Sorry, missed that this was a question of the moral high ground.
I’m any case neither has it. Only one person attained the moral high ground and only through intense training
Lol who “owned Palestine” until 1948???
Nice try but you guys kept slavery long after the USA got rid of it.
