My first impression of race relations at LSU could not have been worse when I came here in August. It looked like everybody only had friends of their own skin color, and when the long-awaited football season started, it was even more obvious.
The Parade Ground was white, and the black fraternity houses were black. Instead of having moved to Louisiana, I thought I had gone back in time.
Coming from a country with an immigrant population of only 15.6 percent, according to Norway’s statistic website ssb.no, the majority of my non-white friends are Asian or Muslim, but there actually are more black people than most think. I like to say that racism does not really exist in Norway because I have never heard of anybody being seriously insulted or treated differently because of his or her skin color. It was more like a joke that mainly Muslim teenagers started to use every time they would receive a bad grade and wanted to be funny. But I had not experienced the serious use of the “n-word” to describe a black person until I came here.
You cannot really joke about racism here at LSU because it’s simply not funny. People are so focused on race that when I tell some black friends of mine that I am going to a fraternity party, they give me a weird look. And when I then hang out with other friends and happen to be the only white guy, people stare at me.
What is it about a multicultural campus we do not accept?
The reason why you see friend groups in Norway of only one ethnicity is mainly because they are not the best Norwegian speakers. Most immigrants take the easy way out and avoid the struggle of communicating in a new country by only having friends who speak their native language because they are afraid of being looked down upon for not being able to perfectly speak the nation’s language.
Although we all speak English here in America, the slang used by the majority of black people seems to be different enough for some people to trigger a kind of racism. It has even gone so far that when a black person speaks standard English, they get asked why they “talk white.”
I was not aware that “white” is a language now, too. It seems like stereotypes have shaped the mindset of people in such a strong way that everybody puts characteristics into a black and white section. Suddenly, people are not black anymore just because they do not sag their pants, they wear Sperrys or they listen to Taylor Swift. I understand that it is all about culture, but isn’t an American still an American even though he or she does not match the stereotypical description of one?
In Norway, there is something about the society that makes everybody pretty much look the same. Everybody wears the same clothes and shoes and only some Muslims speak a different dialect of Norwegian, but it really is the exact same language with a few Arabic words added.
Although people have a hard time embracing diversity, racism is not a big topic in Norway because there aren’t many major differences among its citizens. Immigrants adapt to the culture, but they still preserve their major characteristics. Then, to make immigrants feel a little bit more like home, society listens to their most important needs and ends up building things such as mosques or other centers important to the minority population.
The result is a diverse society with mutual respect, but because America’s history is full of racism already, to get rid of it, people on both sides have no other choice than to deal with the differences. The U.S. is the most diverse country in the world, but if we do not start to equally accept each other, this country is nothing more than pretending to be the melting pot it claims it to be.
Markus Hüfner is a 19-year-old mass communication freshman from Kristiansand, Norway. You can follow him on Twitter @MHufner_TDR.