Reflecting On Race Barriers

Earlier this month, Trevor Phillips, the black chairman of the British Equality and Human Rights Commission, agonized publicly over the difficulties that a British Obama would face in becoming prime minister. "If [he] had lived here I would be very surprised if even somebody as brilliant as him would have been able to break through the institutional stranglehold on power within the Labour Party," Phillips said in a newspaper interview. "The parties and the unions and the think tanks are all very happy to sign up to the general idea of advancing the cause of minorities but in practice they would like somebody else to do the business. It's institutional racism."

In fact, just about every country in Europe is rife with racism, but each in its own way. In Britain, for instance, policies instituted by well-meaning governments in the 1960s meant to encourage multiculturalism led to increasingly insular ethnic communities—and some terrible soul-searching after a few young men from those neighborhoods carried out suicide attacks on the London Underground in 2005. In staunchly republican, statistically color-blind France, an effort by Sarkozy's immigration minister last year finally to allow official records on ethnic, religious or racial backgrounds was overturned as unconstitutional. As a result, progress—or the lack of it—is hard for the government to measure, much less promote. Yet in practical terms, discrimination is commonplace against people with Arab-sounding names, or even those who come from postal codes identified with large immigrant communities. The result is what Patrick Lozès of the Representative Council of Black Associations in France (CRAN) calls "double invisibility" for minorities. In Germany, Turkish workers and their descendants were, until the 1990s, prevented from holding citizenship much less public office, and even today many Germans find it hard to think of people with Turkish backgrounds as their compatriots.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's offhand remark this month about Obama being young, handsome and well tanned might have passed for nothing more than a bit of bad taste if it were not for the Berlusconi government's record in other areas. Over the past several months it has mounted a concerted campaign to drive the Roma (or, more vulgarly, Gypsies) out of the country. Children have been compelled to get vaccinations and be fingerprinted. A full 10 percent of the Roma population has been forced to leave over the past year. And some members of the public, picking up on the government's tone, go much further. Last week, several blatantly racist Italian pages were taken off Facebook. One, called "Let's Burn Them All," had 300 members. Another suggested that a useful employment for Gypsies would be as "testers of gas chambers."

In such an environment, even as people embrace the Obama phenomenon from afar, it's not surprising that they have trouble imagining it at home. "Obama is a beautiful man, he has the perfect image for America," said the proprietor of a newspaper kiosk in the Aventino section of Rome. "But electing a black president in Italy would never happen. Even electing a Sicilian would never happen."

In Hungary last August, around the time of Obama's formal nomination, the business weekly Figyelo ran a poll that showed 50 percent of the respondents would vote for Obama if they could. On the other hand, when asked if they would vote for a candidate in Hungary with non-Hungarian forebears, only 45 percent said yes, and when asked if they would vote for a Roma candidate, only 39 percent said they would.

The less theoretical and the more populous the "outsiders" are in their midst, the more likely Europeans are to say they don't want them to head a government. In France, by far the largest racially or ethnically identifiable minority is the mostly Arab and Muslim population from North Africa. A poll published earlier this month by the national Sunday paper the Journal du Dimanche showed 80 percent of respondents thought, personally, they could vote for a black candidate in a presidential election. Some 72 percent said they could go for an Asian, but only 58 percent could imagine voting for someone from a North African background. Asked if they thought any members of these groups actually had a chance of being elected, only 25 percent thought a North African would have a prayer.

"People are afraid," says Rachel Inegbedian, a 20-year-old from Algeria who has family in France and is studying in Britain. "In England, people are saying they could not elect a black [leader]—and the situation is even worse in France! It's going to take time to change."