The first time someone told me I was “too loud” in Latvia, I laughed. Not because it was funny, but because I genuinely hadn’t realized I was being loud. We were eating pizza one evening at Easy Wine in Riga, and despite being the only one not tipsy on the refreshments, I was still somehow the rowdiest at the table.
I shrank down an inch in my seat. The moment gave me pause. It was oddly familiar, like déjà vu. Everything around me felt almost known, just slightly askew, like it had been tilted on its axis.
The shame of taking up too much space? That I knew. But this time, it didn’t come from being Brown. It came from being American.
In the United States, my race is always top of mind. I’m a university student, and as a Government major, it’s a regular feature of my coursework. Having grown up in a nearly all-White town, I’ve been explaining my identity to others since I could talk.
With nearly two decades of practice under my belt, I’m well-versed in how my skin color and ancestry shape the world around me, and how to articulate that for others. So, the longer I spent in Riga, the more unsettled I felt by how absent race seemed from the conversation.
Conversations not had
Hours spent gazing out the windows of trolleybuses gliding through the city confirmed what I suspected: Riga is not very diverse. Among the small number of people of color I did see, most were other South Asians, like me. In the United States, race is an ever-present topic, whether it’s in political debates, academic syllabi or heated threads on X. In Latvia, it felt like race had slipped out of the cultural vocabulary altogether.
As part of my study abroad program, we often heard from expert guest lecturers. And as each one spoke, a quiet confusion grew inside me: Why is nobody talking about race? I started to feel like a foreign lunatic, playing an internal game of “spot the non-white person” on every street. But the more I searched, the more questions I had. Where was the discussion? Why wasn’t it happening?
So, I brought it up with a friend I’d made in my hostel. Arsh is an Indian student studying mechanical engineering at Riga Technical University. He had been living in the city since February. When I asked if he’d experienced discrimination as a visibly Punjabi Sikh, his answer surprised me.
“No,” he said.
And then he added something that completely shifted my perspective.
“Nobody talks.”
Silence and race
I’d known Latvians were famously quiet, but I’d never considered how that silence might shape their understanding and construction of race.
In the United States, your racial identity is often the first thing people ask about. Strangers want to know what you are and where you’re from. Race in America is personal, political and inescapable. The constant conversation can be both exhausting and empowering: it pushes systems to change, creates space for shared stories of resilience and holds people accountable.
But it also creates a kind of fatigue. As a person of color, you’re constantly on: explaining, reacting, defending. You’re visible, but often through a lens of trauma or tension.
In Latvia, it was different. What I came to think of as a kind of “quiet neutrality” reigned. People didn’t ask where I was from. They didn’t comment on my skin tone. They didn’t bring up diversity or inclusion, mainly because they weren’t speaking to me in the first place.
At first, that silence felt like relief. But eventually, it began to feel like an absence, because bias still exists, even if no one’s talking about it.
The power of passive racism
After speaking with Arsh, I turned to the Internet, searching for other South Asian perspectives on racism in Latvia. I found plenty.
One Quora user bluntly wrote, “Indians are treated like shit here in Latvia.” Another shared that she didn’t know if others felt negatively about her brown skin, but if they did, they didn’t confront her about it. A Redditor described being told to “go back to your own country.” These stories varied wildly from hate crimes to total indifference, but they painted a clear picture: racism existed here. It just didn’t look the same.
Curious to dig deeper, I reached out to Gokul from @lifeinlatviaa on Instagram. A popular Indian content creator who’s lived in Latvia for seven years, Gokul shares his takes on life in the Baltics. Many of his videos humorously cover topics of social culture, stereotypes, education and work. He also co-hosts the podcast Baltic Banter with Brigita Reisone.
When I asked Gokul about his experience, he described the racism in Latvia as mostly “passive.” Latvians, he said, are reserved. “If they don’t like something, they won’t be in your face about it,” he said.
Still, he shared more overt examples, like housing ads that openly say Indians need not call. He noted persistent stereotypes, too: that Brown people are dirty kebab shop owners or delivery drivers.
The familiarity of bias
None of this was unfamiliar to me. I’ve experienced housing discrimination. I’ve been called dirty by a White person. The common style of racism in Latvia was new to me: distant and quiet. In the United States, I once had a tween boy bike past me and mock an Indian accent — it was less traumatic than it was bizarre. There was certainly nothing subtle about it though.
Looking further, I found several reports from Latvian Public Broadcasting documenting hate crimes and prejudice against South Asians. So no, it’s not that racism doesn’t exist in Latvia. It’s that it shows up differently, and more importantly, it’s not widely discussed.
That difference matters.
Race is fluid and contextual; its meaning shifts with time, place and history. In the United States, racism is foundational. It began with colonization and slavery, extending through the systemic injustice known as Jim Crow in the 19th and 20th centuries, to modern-day Islamophobia and racial profiling by police. Racial violence and resistance are woven into the country’s DNA.
Latvia’s history tells a different story. Latvia is a nation shaped more by being colonized than by colonizing. Ethnic Latvians have fought for sovereignty under foreign rule, whether by Germans or Soviets. Today, its population is overwhelmingly White, and ethnic tensions tend to focus on Latvians and Russians, or Roma communities. Immigration is relatively new here, so the language to talk about race may simply not have developed yet.
And that brings me back to volume.
In the United States, being loud is often classed and racialized as “trashy,” especially when tied to communities of color. In Latvia, loudness is framed differently: it’s seen as a kind of cultural rudeness. It’s not about being Brown, it’s about being foreign. And because everyone is generally quieter, the social cues around race, identity and belonging shift, too.
Little things like volume, friendliness and eye contact build the scaffolding around how race is perceived in different societies. They may seem like surface-level quirks, but they shape deep-rooted assumptions.
And they remind us: racism may look different in various places, but it doesn’t disappear. It just changes form. And recognizing that change is the first step to dismantling it.
Questions to consider:
1. Why do many people outside the United States connect loudness with being American?
2. Why was the author troubled about the lack of conversation about racism in Latvia?
3. What kind of conversations do you have about race and do they make you feel more or less comfortable?
