Hi, I'm here via metafandom, and I just want to thank you for this post. I always cringe when my fellow Americans display consummate ignorance about the complexities of issues of race and ethnicity in Europe, particularly Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and going east, the former Soviet republics. I majored in Russian and Eastern European history in college, and my mother's side of the family are Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews, so...I grew up with perhaps a greater awareness of how many cleavages are extant in European society that just simply don't cognate to the black/white divide we have here in the United States. It's consummately oversimplistic to try to template concepts of American and British racism onto Europe; in fact, it's stupid, in my opinion, born of ignorance.

Look at how the American public viewed the Bosnian war, with mass news outlets describing it as "too complex" and "incomprehensible." To me, steeped in the history of Yugoslavia, it was a very straightforward tragic breakdown of a multiethnic society collapsing into horrific war, in the hallowed tradition of the Balkans, but most of my friends that aren't in academia were completely baffled. How can "white" people be so hateful of each other, they asked, and I'd just point them to the writings of Slavenka Drakulic and Ivo Banac, shaking my head in dismay.

Americans need to remember that we are a young country compared to anything and everything in Europe, and that many nations in Europe still aren't nearly as hetergenous as we are.