Carrol wrote:
> the deep and vicious racism permeating the sport of "football" (American
> "soccer") in Europe.
Yeah, I was talking about this just the other night with a friend of mine (a major football fanatic). You have teams that are commonly understood to be teams favored by Neo-Nazis, and then you have teams that are more commonly understood to have leftist fans (like FC St. Pauli in Hamburg).
I had a very unpleasant train ride a couple of months ago where I had to share some seats with fans of Dynamo Dresden.
Wojtek:
> but at the same time there seem to be less of de facto segregation i.e. > people more eager to interact with other ethnic groups on a personal
> basis.
No, I can't agree with this. I won't say it's worse than in the US, but I think it's every bit as a bad. You see this a lot especially here in Berlin, where ethnic "German" parents move here from other cities as youths or students. Once they have children, they take great pains to not have to send their kids to city schools with a high percentage of children with immigrant backgrounds. This is an especially acute issue right now, because a lot of the trendy districts favored right now by hip young people are also districts with a large contingent of people from Turkish and Arab backgrounds. It's almost embarrassing to watch nominally leftist people try to rationalize why they don't want to send their children to their local district school, or why they avoid certain playgrounds.
> Which poses an interesting question whether it is about race /ethnicity > or separate cultural identity.
To be honest, I think that's simply because "biological" racism is something of a taboo, for obvious reasons. But the underlying message of "cultural" racism is precisely that "they" will actually never be able to assimilate.
Also, I think by stating that it's about cultural identity, you make it seem like people with an immigrant background are somehow flaunting some exotic "other" status. They aren't; they grow up here, speaking German, enmeshed in German culture. The decision to racialize them as non-Germans is a very intentional one by the majority society.