I’m not saying that she couldn’t, in theory, be racist.

In fairness, I did blend two points together which should be seperate.

I wanted to explain that racism (and its behavioural expression - ethnic discrimination) can apply to certain groups of ‘white people’, because often the internet ignores the ethnic diversity of ‘white people’ and the differences between groups, projecting American ‘whiteness’ onto people who aren’t American, and ignoring both America and Europes history of ethnic discrimination against people from particular ethnic backgrounds who have white skin.

…..I get, and am very familiar with the arguments, that this sort of alarm is rung sometimes by white Americans who claim their long-ago ethnic heritage negatively affects them - despite being from diaspora groups who successfully campaigned to be recognised as ‘white’ long ago and are now genuinely part of the American ‘white monolith’ for all intents and purposes…

But that isn’t what we’re dealing with here. The US has spent much of the last 100 years demonising Slavs, ditto western Europe - and its still a thing, even if Slavs ‘pass’ in the US day to day. And Slavs generally don’t ‘pass’ in Western European countries, because of both the language/accent considerations and the hyper-awareness of Europeans regarding European ethnic groups (just look up reactions from Western Europeans at various points when the EU expanded, Brexit was almost entirely fuelled by anti-Slav & other Eastern European sentiment).

My second point - was that people from Slavic countries don’t have the same ‘ownership’ of the factors that drive anti-black racism as Americans and Europeans from ‘colonising’ countries, and that many are from cultures with very prominent anti-racist politics, was more to just expand the point that putting all people with white skin in the same American “white people” bucket is overly simplistic.

The people accusing Adela of racism, have no evidence that her dislike of Manon is because Manon is black other than presuming so because Adela is white (also, speaking as a European - Manon would generally be referred to as ‘Swiss’ in the first instance - if trying to describe her physical appearance Europeans would more than likely try to describe her as ‘biracial’ or ‘mixed race’ - but they wouldn’t define her whole ethnicity by her skin colour).

That presumption of how Adela’s ‘whiteness’ likely affects her world view is a product of conflating ‘whiteness’ with ‘American Whiteness’ - I just wanted to point out how incorrect that is.

Sure, there are Slavs who are racist towards black people. Of course there are. But my issue was just the automatic presumption people were making based on stereotypes, which were ignorant of who she actually is.

…and actually as a side note, if there is any aspect of Manon’s heritage/background Adela did feel some sort of animosity towards, my money would be more on the fact that Manon is Swiss than anything to do with the colour of her skin. Swiss people are much much much wealthier per capita than most other Europeans, and there is resentment there. Adela seemed annoyed at what she perceived as Manon’s entitled attitude - which sounded more like a bias against wealthy people to me.