Over at the Atlantic earlier this month, Heather Horn reported on Europe’s perception of the Trayvon Martin shooting and the fiery debate it kicked off about race relations in America. The view in Europe, it seems, is that the Martin affair is merely part of America’s “pervasive and enduring problem of … racism.”
Reading Horn’s observations, one gets the impression that more than a few Europeans are staring down their noses, contemptuously regarding America as a deeply racist nation that lags far behind virtuous Europe when it comes to tolerance and multiculturalism. The European perspective, Horn wrote, is that “it’s not just that Trayvon Martin’s death involved racism … but that this racism is uniquely American.”
