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by alephnerd·3y ago·view on hn ↗
Yea. It was moment of venting tbh. I just get pissed off when a handful of commentators from Scandinavia act "holier than thou" when there is still some real racism and toxic commentary around migrants. With a mom who's "Mirpuri" (the actual term is Pahari or Dogra. Mirpuri means from Mirpur Tehsil in AJK) background. I've heard down the grapevine how much it sucks for the community in DK and NO.
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It is a bit weird you got triggered by this out-of-context association when we were discussing the ethics of Woz's story, but you are correct, nordics are quite racist: https://harvardpolitics.com/nordic-racism/ - I would not say there is "some real racism" but call it a pretty entrenched position unfortunately.
Agreed that I got triggered and completely derailed this thread, and totally apologize about it btw. It just gets annoying sometimes when people from any community (America, Nordics, China, etc) get on a high horse sometimes.

Idk, for some reason the idealization of "Nordics" (itself a highly contentious term - is Estonia nordic? is Greenland?) on internet forums gets annoying, because I can just tell it's white people (in reality Western European+American, not like Romanians, Bosnians, Turks, or Albanians got it better in Malmö) talking to other white people and just completely ignoring the very real elephant in the room.

Once again sorry about that but I think that offhand comment the GP made was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

No problem :)

Nordic countries is a well defined collection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_countries - Greenland/Nuuk is part of them given it is a region of Denmark.

I don't think the racism can be helped short term - nordics have been isolated polities that only in past decades have had large flows of migrants from different cultures. (Well, apart from Sweden attempting to conquer Europe in the 17th century but it did not end well).

If it's any consolation nordic people can be quite xenophobic even toward each other so it's not as if they would be uniquely harsh towards specific ethnicity. Every non-native will be discriminated against pretty much equally, regardless of origin or complexion. They abhor anything unfamiliar regardless of complexion. The general narrative of historical racism in these areas is quite different as compared to more cosmopolitan western countries such as UK, France or US.

Law of Jante is a pretty good framework for understanding the nordic mindset (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante) - the baseline response even towards in-group members that are different will be severe.

It's changing, but change will take time.