Americans (at least) approach many dynamics with the same zeal (and irrationality) as they do racial issues. Think about the "green iMessage bubble" controversy. Think about sports fandom. It's not that those situations are comparable in their seriousness, but people do use dumb things as alarmingly inappropriate heuristics for how to treat others. They project unrelated behaviors onto things that apparently rise to the level of minor identity signifiers, and then people get genuinely hurt - or, speaking more directly to HNer interests, products fail because markets go underserved as second-class customers (waves at Meerkat).
I think about my experiences as an American living in Germany as an exchange student, at an age when the green-bubble nonsense would've been most relevant to my life, and there were also similar socioeconomic status markers in Germany that teenagers took deeply seriously... It just wasn't iPhones. Brands of jackets. Particular surnames that hinted at recent foreign ancestry could invite bullying... Foreign, as in from other parts of Europe. And sports fandom there (soccer/football) is arguably more fanatical than in the USA.
The notes were different but the chord progression was the same.
I don't think wildly inappropriate heuristics for the treatment of others is particularly distinctive of Americans... Even and maybe especially odious racial heuristics are not distinctive of Americans. Everywhere else I've been in the world, the racism that rears its ugly head there is way more blatant and open than what I've encountered at home. It just does so less often because there is more demographic homogeneity in other countries.
Having heuristics derived from evolving in small groups for a very long time (which are inappropriate in the postindustrial environment we have fashioned for ourselves) seems like more a human characteristic than an ethnic or national one.
I said that it was at least American. The tendency to link other types of identity with a basic sense of racial identity is probably not uniquely American, but the way that connection links those types of mundane signifiers of identity with American racial violence (social and physical) probably is (tautology appreciated). Maybe wearing the wrong jacket in Germany conjures the ghosts of social dynamics involved in pogroms where a patch was sewn into one's jacket, I don't know. In America, having a "second-class" phone or car or location of residence does seem to prompt people to treat you as we've come to know "second-class" people ought to be treated.
As for whether it's worse in other countries... I don't think you get to make that determination without being a visible minority. Certainly, ethnic violence and racial violence are akin but not the same, just as treating people as second-class citizens based on the color of their skin is akin but not the same as treating customers as second class citizens because you don't like the strength of their OS's security standards, or don't want to hire Android programmers, or whatever.
> As for whether it's worse in other countries... I don't think you get to make that determination without being a visible minority.
Bluntly, I didn't need to be a Turk to notice how Germans treated and talked about Turks, or to compare that to how white Americans treated and talked about minorities.
