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Comment by cpcat | Hacker News Reader

almost everyone? another sweeping generalisation?

When on vacation in Poland, I had the opportunity to meet some Ukrainian emigrants. And they asked me in Polish, in earnest: "...so, are black people dangerous? I hear there are a lot of them in America."

They had never met a black person in real life.

Your culture is different than theirs.

Wolfram-Alpha agrees: they will likely never have met a black person. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=black+people+in+ukraine

Absolutely. (Although bear in mind that the term 'African-American' for someone with brown skin is American-centric, and other countries don't use it. Luckily WA understood you.)

On the other side of the coin, while visiting Dallas on work from Europe, I was asked, quite seriously, whether I was worried about the the Muslim campaign to control Europe by outbreeding the natives (or something, I'm not good at remembering this stuff). I don't think they'd ever met a Muslim in their life.

Whoops. I edited, thank you.

And yeah. What a world we live in. Hopefully someday these people will find out how perfectly usual everyone is, even people from different cultures.

There is a large Muslim population in the Dallas area. The problem is a combination of (self or social) segregation and poor integration of the immigrant communities. Not knowing members of your society just because you have preconceived notions about them is pathetic, but painfully real.

> When on vacation in Poland, I had the opportunity to meet some Ukrainian emigrants. And they asked me in Polish, in earnest: "...so, are black people dangerous? I hear there are a lot of them in America." > They had never met a black person in real life.

So their only impression of what African Americans are really like is presumably formed via American media?

Hmmm....

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