Two black guys shot by white police officers within 24 hours in the US. European countries celebrate their multicultural football teams, while their governments discuss measures to restrict migrant flows.
Two very different topics in two very different continents - and yet there is a lot in common.
I did not really understand why the term diversity and inclusion came up so much in the past year, which I spent in Chicago. Not because I wouldn't support it, but because I did not see a reason to talk about it over and over again. I didn't perceive there to be an issue, so why discuss it. But I do have to acknowledge that there is an issue, if black people are much more likely to die through gunshots than white people. There is an issue, if in some parts of the country gay people can't be open about their sexual orientation.
Change of scene, back to Europe. Why don't we have those discussions? Less people get shot by police in general (the fact that Police in the US are so afraid of guns is another topic for another day), so is there no trigger for the discussion to happen? Or do we simply not have a problem with diversity and inclusion?
The longer I think about this topic, the more I feel we simply don't talk about it. Almost like racism was a rare phenomenon. And whether someone is gay, bisexual, straight, genderless or anything else is to be dealt with in private, not in public discussion.
The diversity and inclusion discussion in the US is going too far in some cases (I don't know how many more letters will be added to LGBTQ to be really sure that everyone is covered). But it is this continuous discussion that keeps the topic on peoples minds and allows for a public discourse on how to deal with the many things that are going terribly wrong. The majority of people, folks like me, don't feel the impact of those issues. We wouldn't know there was an issue if we weren't reminded through that talk about diversity and inclusion. And if the majority doesn't understand, there will be no solutions.
In Europe, we don't need to copy everything around this topic from the US. But we should start asking ourselves how we do in terms of diversity and inclusion. How can it be that I have never had a discussion in Switzerland about how to make people with another sexual orientation feel included? How can it be that European countries have the highest rate of people going to fight for IS in Syria, many of whom didn't grow up as Muslims? Is it just because we're closer and it's easier to recruit from Europe? In any case, those people obviously didn't feel included enough in our society.
We might not have the same problems as the US, but we do have our own. And because the European culture is very different from the US, we don't need to copy-paste their approach. But we should look across the pond and see what we can learn.
