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.
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.
European soccer games, for example, have had many examples of widespread racist chants and gestures.
Racism is absolutely a problem in Europe.
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.
