In France, an experiment carried out by researchers in 2016 found that a fictional profile with a north African-sounding name received 27% fewer responses to housing ad inquiries, while another with a sub-Saharan name received 32% fewer.
The same exercise in Spain yielded similar findings, while a 2020 survey carried out by Germany’s federal anti-discrimination agency found that housing discrimination had affected a third of people with a migrant background. “Often, a foreign-sounding name is enough to not be invited to a flat viewing,” said Bernhard Franke, the then acting head of the agency. “Even openly racist flat advertisements are still part of everyday life.”
In the French experiment, the response rate remained lower for the fictitious north African applicant than for those with traditionally French names – even when the former cited their work as a civil servant, suggesting financial stability, and the latter made no mention of employment, said Yannick L’Horty, an economics professor at the Université Gustave Eiffel.
“It was a surprise,” he said. “So this phenomenon is therefore not linked to a person’s ability to pay, but an aversion to their origin.
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in reply to @AtFruitBat's post:
Things like this are why I get incredibly frustrated with European folks who act like racism is just a thing in poor, backwards, unenlightened America
Given the colonial histories of many European nations, I guess it's selective memory all the way.
My general impression reading from Black people who have lived in and around Paris, though sadly any specific sources escape me, is that France would very definitely treat Black Americans much better than they're treated here in the US but that doesn't apply to Afro-Carribean (i.e., Haiti) or Black African people, at least beyond being less likely to be the victim of lethal state violence than in the US.
Even in Ireland where there's no history of directly being a coloniser this happens. There's just a way that people can get steeped in cultural racist ideas that they don't question. It can be so easy to see another country being racist and see it, but when people are confronted over their own racist preconceptions, it's "different". People aren't 'really' racist, they're "just concerned that Irish people can't get housed" and that happens to mean targeting people who may, in fact, be Irish.
People don't want to think about themselves as being "racist", often because they imagine racism to be some hypothetical, violent skinhead shouting slurs at a brown person on the street. Rather than being able to locate themselves as holding racially-coded privileges within a system that also doles out racially-coded disadvantages to other groups.
Then you can have any number of people who would even think of themselves as "progressive" or "leftist", or even "anti-racist", who still indulge in racist behaviours - like wanting housing primarily to go to "locals", while also mentally sorting anyone with a "foreign sounding"-name into a "non-local" grouping.
And then there are the denialists who play off the idea that "racism is over now", so it couldn't possibly still be the case that anyone suffers from the impact of racism. The Sewell Report here was an exercise in denial, precisely so that the Tory government would never actually have to do anything about racism in Britain.
My frustration with the situation is that for anyone whose social and professional networks aren't entirely white, it's glaringly obvious that racism still exists - just talking to non-white friends would reveal that!
But some white people are so insulated from the lives of POC - so obviously entrenched in their white-only networks - that they are still surprised to find out that yeah, many landlords will discriminate against anyone who doesn't look or sound white.
I once had an Israeli coworker who called a black guy the n-word and insisted it was ok for her to use "because there's no racism in Israel." Had another one who said it was ok to tell jokes the punchline of which were "wouldn't it be awesome if all the immigrants killed each other" because racism is an American thing and the UK is totally beyond it. The notion of America as The Place Racism Happens rotted their goddamn brains.