This is both true, and yet misleading and hence false.
Yes, by US racial/ethnic definitions the majority of european cities are majority 'white'. But we don't use the US categories (of white/black/latino/etc.) here in EU because it's not accurate. In fact EU law claims "The European Union rejects theories which attempt to determine the existence of separate human races."[1], and anti-racism law talks about "racial or ethnic origins"[1]
Let's take the UK and their main point of ethnic conflict, Belfast in Northern Ireland. Both the "nationalist/catholic" and "unionist/protestant" communities would be counted as "white" under US racial terminology, but they are 2 different ethnicies.
So yes, "most EU cities are white" by US standards, but by EU standards there's a lot of racial/ethnic mixing and conflict, including full on wars (look at what happened in Yugoslavia!)
[1] EU law on discrimination http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...
Oh I know. There is lots of disagreements about if subset of humanity X or Y counts as a different ethnicity (Irish Travellers are view as a separate ethnicity in UK, but not Ireland for example). However the existance of disagreements, nor a clear definition doesn't mean the word is useless.
I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of European social conflict, but I don't imagine there is a lot of catholic versus protestant tension in say London, nor do I imagine there are persistent and massive socioeconomic disparities between the two groups in London (or at least nothing comparable to the more than factor of 2x disparity between blacks and whites I cited for Chicago).
And running with your example, what do you imagine would have been the political situation in the U.K. if say London had consisted of 60-70% Irish nationalist Catholics in 1985?
Or is there still discrimination within categories of whites? Are Londoners whose families originally hail from say Poland still dramatically disadvantaged compared to ones who can trace their origins in England for centuries? And if so, what would the politics be in the U.K. if London consisted of 60-70% of these hypothetical disadvantaged poles?
Well Ireland was 95% Catholic, and had a terrorist guerilla war and seceeded from the UK in 1922. This often happens in Europe when there are ethnic disagrements (latest example: Kosovo). Or there's policial independence movements (e.g. Catalonia, Scotland).
Or is there still discrimination within categories of whites?
With regard to Polish people, there has been a lot of Polish migration to UK in the last few years since Poland fully joined the EU. So there'd be loads of "white Polish" families who moved there in the last 10 years. Not exactly comparable. There would be racism against ethnic Polish people. The UK does have a large Indian and Pakistani population, some third generation by now. And yes there can be racism against them. I suppose a pedant would claim the US racial definitions are still relevant by claiming things are different, but social and legally racism against Polish people, and Pakistani people would be seen as quite similar, not different types of discrimination. "They took our jobs" would a common type of discrimination in the UK against "white" migrants from Eastern & Central Europe. Racism between, what in the USA would be considered, "whites" does happen in Europe.
Do the info pages for individual schools in London prominently display "country of origin" information, so white British can ensure they don't accidentally send their kids to a school that's 90% white ethnic Polish? http://www.cps.edu/Schools/Pages/school.aspx?SchoolId=609951.
Or are Poles in London seen like say Jews in the U.S.? Sometimes the butt of a mean joke or nasty comment, but otherwise not situated fundamentally different from the majority group?
Remember, Europe and the USA are different and have had different histories. Europe has had a slightly different history of racial discrimination than USA. The have literally been wars.
Very clever. "We'll deal with the subject by pretending it doesn't exist!"
Some of the comments here seem to suggest that these maps come from measuring craniums and all that.
Fortunately that's one horror that didn't survive the boat trip across the ocean.
Actaully, Phrenology enjoyed brief but widespread popularity in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology#United_States
Or it could just be avoiding high-crime areas. Given the vastly different propensities of people of various races to commit crime, avoiding crime tends to make you look racist[1]
[1] http://www.ronunz.org/2013/07/20/race-and-crime-in-america/
There is something uniquely wrong in the black American community. Whites who notice it are called "racist". Blacks who notice it (like Bill Cosby) are called race-traitors or Uncle Toms. So nobody much cares about addressing anti-social behavior, because it simply cannot be discussed.
It's Smith and Jones almost everywhere, but in cities like London and Birmingham there are distinct groupings of Patel, Kaur, Begum etc.
I think your impression is flawed. Many European cities are racially diverse and quite a few are segregated. Paris comes to mind as a particularly good example of both.
I'm not denying that there are European cities that are racially diverse. But every single U.S. city over a million people, and most of the cities between 500,000 and 1 million, are majority-minority, usually by a large margin (say 2:1). I think that's a phenomenon that's alien to major European cities.
As an aside, I think Europeans unfairly jump to calling Americans racist, when they don't have to deal with the political dynamics of majority-minority cities. It's one thing for a city to be diverse. It's another thing when the dominant ethnic group of a country ends up being a minority in the city, in the process losing political control, etc. Add to that the layer of economic conflict that arises from tax revenues flowing from the richer majority to pay for municipal services for the poorer majority. That creates a wholly different political dynamic, one that is alien to Europeans.
Look at Paris. There is tremendous tension there between whites and Arabs. But the Muslim population of Paris is only 10-15% (estimated). What would the political dynamic in France be like if Paris were 60-70% Muslim and hadn't elected a non-Muslim mayor in 40 years, yet still relied on whites for most of the tax revenue? I would hazard a guess that the French would handle it a lot worse than the Americans have been doing in similar situations...
Also, the city population is only a part of the equation. Often the metro area skews significantly white (because of the suburbs) - which then stresses the balance more.
As far as I can tell, most European cities are predominantly white, so I wouldn't expect as much segregation in those cities as you see in say Chicago or Detroit or Philadelphia. London is one of the more ethnically diverse (large) Western European cities, and is roughly 60% white. LA is the whitest large American city at 50%. New York is 45%, Chicago is 30%, etc. New Orleans is around 25% white, and Detroit is 8% white. At the other end of the scale, Portland is 75% white. If you look at the map, the ordering by level of segregation follows that pattern: Portland is the least segregated, Detroit is the most segregated, and LA, New York, Chicago, and New Orleans are between, in that order.
[1] You can argue about whether this is racism or classism. As a practical matter, in American cities the two are tightly linked. Middle class people of both races tend to move to the suburbs, and of the people that are left, whites skew wealthier and blacks and hispanics skew poorer, even more so than in the general population. E.g. The median income of a white Chicagoan in 2009 was $64k (substantially above the national average). The median income of a black Chicagoan in 2009 was $29k (substantially below the national average). http://www.chicagonow.com/chicago-muckrakers/2011/02/second-....