Check, check, check. Yum! TIL that I could pass for black in America. OK, maybe not.

Unfortunately grape soda is almost impossible to find in Madrid, I've only tried it a couple of times, first in Rota Base, and loved it.

Because of this, it became associated with black people, and thereby with criminality, low education and poverty among the dominant culture that created this sort of pattern-matching.

> Albino student: "Hey, where'd you get that watermelon?"

> Student with watermelon: "Dude, I'm black."

I think it was around then I first learned of the watermelon / friend chicken stereotype (I didn't get why everyone laughed when he said this), but "grape soda" is a new one to me.

And you're a European? As a fellow European (balkans) I can comfortably say that many European cultures are racist as hell, to a degree that would make even quite a few Americans blush. I'd be careful about feeling any superiority over supposed European sophistication even in Western Europe.

Ask nearly anyone there about gypsies, jews or arabs in a context where they think they can speak honestly and privately. The kind of shit that gave Europe at least one huge holocaust and god knows how many pogroms before that hasn't entirely gone away, it's mostly just better camouflaged and with some of its sharper edges cut away.

I guess the European equivalent would be the racism against gypsies with the distinction being that it's less prominent for simple demographic reasons owing to us trying to genocide them for centuries. Of course this makes it all the more shocking to Americans when it does come up because of how flagrant it is.

But yeah, Europeans are no less racist than Americans. I'd go even so far as to say milquetoast non-racism (e.g. corporate DEI, the typical "one of each color" groups of people in stock images etc) is more widely accepted in the US than here in Europe given how many racist comments I see any time an ad includes a brown person. I think however that that has less to do with being less racist and more with being more "politically correct" (in the original sense -- i.e. saying what you're supposed to say, not what you believe).