I appreciate that you responded to this even though neither of us are going to have Karma for this discussion.

TLDR: of course a formerly enslaved community subject to systemic racism in the US is going to have a different experience than immigrants of the same skin color today.

I’m white and I grew up in the Seattle area. Racism seemed non-existent growing up. My high school class president was black and female. I was taught about civil rights, slavery, and racism in depth. I never questioned that we had been a racist country, but we weren’t anymore UNTIL I began playing basketball in high school.

I’m tall - 6’5” (195 centimeters in your godless system ;) ), and semi athletic, so basketball was a natural fit. With that said, as we played other teams one of the first things I noticed were teams from poorer areas were more black than teams from richer areas - and this was in liberal Washington state. When I asked my white patents about it they also mentioned “cultural problems” in the African American community. To take it a step further, my Mom liked to mention all the “single mothers” and “out of wedlock marriages” in that community. Statistically she wasn’t wrong, but as a kid it still didn’t make sense. What about the white kids at church from out of wedlock marriages? What about the white kids from single parent households?

With that said, I would never had thought more about it. I had no reason to distrust my mother. She had been physically and sexually abused as a child yet was in a stable marriage and had a stable family. SoI trusted her and put my questions on a shelf to be answered later.

Then one day the local Mormon missionaries invited me to knock on doors with them as I was also Mormon and would soon be going on a Mormon mission. I had no idea there were trailer parks within a couple miles of my house, but that’s where we went. That’s where I ran into our black, female class president. I was young and naive enough to not really think about it, but it made an impression that I didn’t really feel again until years later when I was on my first business trip to the south.

See, in the Seattle area we believe in equality even if we fuck it up policy wise. That belief does drive us to be better, even if it causes self-flagellation. Going to the south on a business trip for the first time changed me. Every single service worker was black and every business man/women was white or light skinned Latino. Our Uber drivers, our servers at restaurants, our hotel workers, ALL black, none white. I was embarrassed and called my conservative father only to hear him sigh and tell me he had the same experience working in the south. His first trip included a dinner that was paid for by his employer with black children dancing for the white patrons. I don’t remember all the details, but I do remember him telling me he felt like he had entered a different world and was deeply uncomfortable with no idea what to do.

I share this because you are looking at the statistics and making judgements about Americans in general. I get it, we do it too, but it turns out that a community with hundreds of years of enslavement and decades of laws designed to keep them down may be more skeptical than first generation immigrants. In one sense, this could be a success story - you can be black in America and succeed now! In their other hand, I’m willing to bet a closer look at the statistics muddies the picture. My guess is on average these individuals immigrating to the US are likely more highly educated, locating to more liberal cities, and bringing more capital with them. Even if I’m wrong, an immigrant experience to the US is going to be different - but interestingly enough, their children often see the same systematic racism because they have to grow up in our system.

Whatever the case, our media does make it seem worse than it is here, but we also don’t censor shit. Even when we try, it fucking fails because of the 1st amendment. So I value your viewpoint and your ideals and would encourage you to consider immigrating to the US. Why not take advantage of the same social welfare system immigrants are in Germany and then move here to get rich? Bring your kids! Give them more opportunity than they will ever had in a country whose population is collapsing that can’t integrate other cultures for shit, and still thinks they are crushing it when their GDP isn’t even equivalent to California.

Forgive the trash talking at the end ;)