Yeah, never moving to America. Never. I value my life more than that. In Estonia (and I'd imagine most of Europe), the ambulance ride is free (unless you prank call them, then you get a fine). The healthcare is free (paid by your employer), doesn't matter how badly you're injured. The only thing that's not free is dental care, but you can insure that, so you pay a monthly fee and they cover the actual cost if something happens. And no, it's not a made-up number.
As far as I know most people are just curious (I saw my first black person when I was 11 years old, so yeah, mostly white country). There is racism, sure, especially in less-developed parts of the country, but most people just keep to themselves and don't ever express their racism. I also don't know of anyone below 30 to be racist. It's mostly old people from the soviet times (where there were virtually no people other than of colour white around).
As far as is it a good place to live, well, it's cold (but very tech-advanced). Check out https://e-estonia.com/
You'll be hard-pressed to find the sort of systematic racism found in the US (especially by institutions) anywhere in Europe. Sure, you might get the occasional glance if you are black especially in Eastern Europe and it's mostly because out of curiosity since there are not many African immigrants in ex-Communist countries as there are in, say, France. But other than that you'll be fine.
I should say though that Eastern European countries do have issues with Islamophobia in general, so if you are muslim I would not recommend those countries.
> I know that this does not prove everything but it's one way to measure institutional racism which is kinda hard to measure in an objective way.
It's a lot harder to collect data when you expunge all references to race from the law, and also prohibit public institutions from collecting data on race and ethnicity, as five European countries have already done. Heck, you'll be hard-pressed to find reliable statistics for how many black people even live in (e.g.) France. That doesn't mean racism doesn't exist there; it just means it's impossible to separate out the effects of racism in analyses. The racism has become fully integrated.
This is exactly what institutionalization of racism looks like - racism becoming part and parcel of the society, so tightly integrated that it's actually hard to disentangle the racism from the rest of society.
> Avoiding the culture of dividing and collecting data based on race makes a society racist?
It certainly doesn't eliminate racism from society, no. It just makes it impossible to measure the effects of racism independently. Hence, the racism becomes integrated into the rest of the society.
That's mostly football ultras[0] though. They are usually the lowest common denominator, it's like saying the US has issues with education because there are people who believe that the earth is flat. Besides, I did not say there's no racism in Europe, I said it's not institutionalized.
I should also add that discrimination in European countries is based more along ethnic and nationalistic lines, not race or color the way it's in the US. While in the US people are categorized by their "race" (black, white, asian, middle eastern, etc), in Europe they are categorized by their country or geographical area of origin (Polish, Italian, French, English, Eastern European, Western European, etc). A black English guy is not primarily "black", he is primarily English.
It's also quite interesting how US-centric this website is and how patriotic most of you are.
I totally agree that discrimination is done by geographical area of origin instead of colour of skin. Lots of Estonians have an axe to grind with Russians (due to history), but I don't know of any other people that we tend to dislike. Perhaps British guys that come here to get drunk and yell and piss all over the streets, but I'm sure that's a problem most everywhere.
