Sure. She probably focused on some arbitrary subgroup of Jewish people. All I know is that when she looked at the TV screen and said something like, “why did they pick a Jewish actor to play a Nazi soldier?”, she was right 70 percent of the time.
My reaction was “how can you tell, and, and why should we care?”, and I went on to look up the actors in question on Wikipedia. On the English-language version, because there a persons “race” is usually mentioned within two sentences, unless it’s “white”.
She didn’t have a good answer on “why should we care”. Mind you, she grew up as a nazi, but by the time I had the privilege of knowing her, she was one of the more open-minded people I knew, and definitely the most open-minded in her age group. If her prejudices told her that somebody was “different”, that was only one more reason for her to get to know them.
And yet, some people get good use out of their gaydar.
It’s not the statistics that’s wrong, it’s applying it to the individual that’s wrong. So what if you can tell with 60% certainty that someone belongs to a particular group? You still don’t know, and why would you care in the first place?
My point was that in her youth, my grandmother was trained to care. And s a result, she was able to pick up subtle cues that I don’t notice at all, and that I don’t think would be particularly productive for me to pay attention to.
The local way of talking about it is that they are not fully integrated into German society. The group was big enough that they started perpetuating their identity as being Turkish, marrying inside the group, developing a markedly distinct dialect of the German language, etc.
In a way, classism got mixed in there - the Turkish-German way of speaking German is stereotyped as “street thug slang” and sometimes even imitated by other young people who are going for that image.
It’s not that the race question got mapped to culture. We’re dealing with a culture question here, which serves a similar function that “race” does in American discourse. If you start by assuming that it’s all about race and therefore all similar problems are “race” mapped to “X”, then you’re engaging in circular reasoning, I think.
I care about this distinction because I believe adding the concept of “race” to a cultural question makes it yet worse, because culture can be shared, modified and mixed much more freely.
A historical point: I believe with antisemitic persecution before 1800 or so, “religion” was the defining element, not “race”. Whenever the people of Vienna felt they had to blame the Jews for something, they gave them the choice of “be baptised, or be executed”; they did not, at that time, analyse ancestry and genetics like Hitler did.
And as always, there’s the fine line between helping those people to derail the argument by pointing out irrelevant fine points, and “immunizing” your argument by branding all disagreement with obvious logical flaws as “racism in disguise”.
And a cheap shot against Americans is, of course, always tempting, and it does go “up” the global power differential, so you’ll have to put up with it even though #NotAllAmericans 
. My problem is that in my estimation, some aspects of American anti-racism are so much based on a racialized view of the world that you guys are actually helping the racists in Europe when your words get transported over the Atlantic.
True.
Racism is (to my knowledge) always evil, but most of the bbs is very happy with engaging in extreme culturalism against Trump voters. There culture includes a definition of America as “White, Christian and patriotic”, and if we don’t accept that as a good thing, that’s probably a case of “good culturalism”.
And there are several aspects of several middle-eastern cultures that I won’t accept or respect in my own country, either.
Europe is currently debating its “immigration model”, but the majority version seems to be, “If you come here, you have to become one of us. It will take a generation. But you should mix with us. we don’t want you to found a separate ‘immigrant community’”.
A melting pot with a dominant culture, not a multicultural society. Integration means assimilation, and “parallel societies” are to be avoided/prevented.
And that deal only works if it’s about culture, not about race. In this model, the “culturalism” is explicit. But it’s not racist, it does offer a well-defined way in. The progressive American model, by contrast, seems to be “come here and stay who you are”. Which seems to mean that if you come from X to America, you will quickly become X-American, but your great-grandchildren will still carry that hyphen.
The concept of race is toxic to the cultural-assimilation-based model of immigration. Even a positive acknowledgement that implies that race matters breaks the contract and says “you will always be different” (or “I will always be different”). In fact, it requires training people to be color-blind.
