As with many topics, I don’t go looking to beat the drum how many people are wrong, but I do rather lie in wait around the accusation that America is a particularly racist, or even most-racist nation in the world. People are stunned, angered, shocked to have the idea even challenged. Their claim is ludicrous, among the least-reflective things a person might say, yet I do have clear understanding how people might get to that idea. The key is in that word reflective. If one simply follows the prevailing news and conversation, I don’t see how one could come to any other conclusion. America leads the world in news stories about racism. We are probably well up there in incidents of racism as well, partly because there are 330M of us. The Chinese may rack up bigger numbers, which we seldom hear about, of racist incidents against the Uighurs, but in most of their territory there aren’t any incidents of clear racism at all. Because there’s only one race there. Stay tuned.
But why so many stories of racism? Real stories, not made up.
It is a relatively simple exercise to stand back and say “compared to whom?” but it is difficult because it is not natural to most of us. Just because something is simple does not mean it is easy. Prayer for one’s personal enemies, for example. Dieting and exercising would be another. Once one can get to the second half of that sentence and say “America is a racist country…compared to whom?” the ground suddenly changes. In one simple sense, America is a racist country. We have racist comments, racist incidents, and racist attitudes all over the place, all the time. Yet there is a simple reason for that, and it’s not just because we have horrible white people here.
If we are going to measure countries in terms of how racist they are, I propose we start by asking “Do they actually have different races there?” Okay, that just changed the whole discussion completely, didn’t it? Before looking at my examples, consider your own. Take your time.
Consider less-racist country X. What is in their population? Are they homogeneous? If they have different groups, do their Walloons or Frisians, those radically-different races, believe everything is nice and equal?
Finland. They keep everyone out except Swedes. Even those they have friction with. They don’t have any of the same riots and troubles, and right-wing racist incidents that the rest of Europe has – because they haven’t accepted immigrants in. (Update: Comments say they have accepted a bunch of Somalis. I looked this up and it is still not a huge group by American standards. And, as the commenter notes, they don’t seem to be acting like Finns. Not so far, anyway.) So, no problems. OK, fine. (Look, I like the Finns very much. But I like not pretending even more.)
Let’s look at Japan and ask “Why are there only Japanese people here?” Even Koreans have been regarded as less-human, and don’t even mention Filipinos. The Japanese kept everyone out. So internally, if you are just walking down the street in Osaka, the whole place doesn’t look racist at all. What lovely, unprejudiced people! Or China. Ask them what the word gweilo means and see if you can get anyone to expound at length on the topic. Don’t bother to even ask about the Uighurs, BTW. The Chinese people know nothing about this. How do the Chinese regard other races?
Or hey, Latin America. They have more of blended populations, without sharp lines between the native, slave, and colonising-descended populations, so it’s all much more equal than here. Think of Pele! Except the lighter-skinned people pretty much rule the darker ones. Here’s the Supreme Court of Brazil:
And Mexico: just for comparison. (Link is to a page with separate photos of each. I couldn’t find a group shot.)
They look whiter than this photo of the Supreme Court of New Mexico, below, never mind the SCOTUS:
Europe? Without even looking at the intemperate statements some are making about the new immigrants…I don’t even need to mention Jews, and a minor unpleasantness in the 1930’s. I will only say “Gypsies.” Tsigani, Cigan, Gitano, Zigeuner. Class dismissed. Oh, and no comments over your shoulder about how racist America is on the way out, okay?
The Middle East, of course, has done a wonderful job with its guest workers in Saudi Arabia. Or the treatment of Jews in general throughout. As with most places, they don’t even like each other very much, never mind people of a different color from somewhere else.
The Canadians may do better. Oh wait, the Norman French, The East Anglians, and the Scots still haven’t fully worked things out yet. Still, people seem to like Toronto. Or maybe the Australians and New Zealanders. Take up the discussion with the First Nations, Aborigines, and Maoris and get back to me. I will cede credit with their permission.
Nominate those non-racist nations we can learn so much from.
Mexico’s mythology admits the blending, but claims the creation of a new, superior race, La Raza.
Well stated.
The English dependancy class has been largely white and has the much the same destructive cultural pathologies as our dependancy class, without our ethnically diverse composition. As England has become more populated by non-europeans their dependancy composition has become more ethically diverse, but the destructive cultural pathologies have remained much more uniform than their ethnicities.
“Racism” is often used to wrongly characterize disassociation and rejection of these destructive pathologies. Based on normal human categorization, it is associated with representative groups. Such short cuts in judging others is subject to reconsideration upon experience. Under the pressure of objective goals and competition, stereotyping becomes disadvantageous and is suppressed. The degree to which a culture is based on widespread objective standards and accountability through competition, it will self-police true racism. I’d say we have been pretty high on that scale in many sectors of our society.
Current trends might not be as supportive as in the past. When one looks at many of the powerful cultural power centers (education, media, entertainment and government, for example), I see them becoming more powerful and largely based on subjective ideological goals with declining competition in ideas.
Death6
Japan has not been very encouraging toward immigration, and some of the most negative comments I have ever heard about American black people came from a Japanese guy in Japan (who had probably never actually met any.)
And, of course, the Imperial Japanese treatment of Chinese and other Asians during and preceding the WWII era is well-known.
There are very few things in this world I find boring — but “racism” is one of them. It is mostly a meaningless form of virtue-signaling by those evil human beings who seek to divide us in order to manipulate us. Even the term “race” has no particular meaning — are the English a “race” when the Yorkshire men hate the Londoners almost as much as the Londoners hate the Yorkshire men? Is “white” a race, when the only thing that unites Yorkshire men and Londoners is their shared hatred of the Irish? Historically, we have not required “racism” as an excuse to hate & kill other human beings.
Fortunately, there is an answer to this false “racism” used to mislead & manipulate us — today, thanks to the Social Justice Warriors, we can self-identify any way we choose. As of now, I am a differently-abled transgendered Black lesbian. Go ahead — hate me!
I just looked it up, and three non-Jews have served on the Israeli Supreme Court. I don’t know if Arab countries have (non-religious) supreme courts, but if they do I’m sure that non-Muslims aren’t serving on them.
Growing up, my sister and I were raised by a black nursemaid. She was a very interesting lady. She came when my sister was born in 1941 and was about 40 years old at the time. She had been a nursemaid for another family, I think in Tennessee, before coming to us. Her portents owned land, I think in Georgia and she had family in New Orleans.
She lived with us until I went off to college but she had a small apartment in the Hyde Park section of Chicago where she spent her weekends off and where she lived after we kids had grown up. My sister looked after her and she lived to 95, living her last year in a Catholic nursing home in the Glenwood area south of Chicago.
I learned about black anti-Semitism from her. She was a gentle soul but she did not like Jews. I concluded that this was because most small businesses in the “Bronzeville” part of Chicago were owned by Jews and, while she had a comfortable life, she still resented that fact. She converted to Catholicism from her Baptist background because we were Catholic.
Most of the middle class families in South Shore, where I grew up, had black maids or at least women who came in to do the ironing.
She was very dismissive of the young black men in Hyde Park who were gangsters. She was befriended by a nice young black supermarket manager in that neighborhood in later years and we got her a freezer for her apartment, and he saw that it was stocked. In those days, there was a subset of very nice black people who followed the Bourgeois rules and lived quiet middle class, if lower middle class, lives.
Young black men have been infected by the gang and rap culture. My sister’s next door neighbors are black on each side, A few years ago, the neighbors’ to the north had their son arrested for murder. Obama made this much worse as a cultural thing.
It is interesting to read that DeSantis was elected in Florida by black mothers because of school choice.
The black vote might be shifting.
In the U.S., racism is an institutionalized shake-down operation.
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have made this an industry. It’s too bad the Democratic Party formed an alliance with them and has settled on “Grievance Studies” as its theme. My assumption is that this is part of the sense of superiority that the left has developed since the 1920s. The blacks are the obvious “proletariat” that needs their leadership or it will collapse. The assumption of inferiority of blacks is part of the DNA of the left.
This is getting noticed and even the Washington Post has mentioned it.
As for Jackson, Sharpton and their ilk (to include our last President and his “lady” – racism has been very, very good for them. So of course it must be lovingly tended and encouraged. Their continuing paychecks depend on it.
I often hear or read people saying “This country is X” or “This society is X”, where X is something negative which they believe is US-specific but is actually either pretty much a human universal or is actually more common *outside* the US. (See the comments of the Portuguese-born Sarah Hoyt on the accusations that the US is a “patriarchal society.”)
Oddly enough, the people who make these remarks have rarely if ever conducted extensive cross-cultural research, and have frequently not spent any significant time outside the US, either.
have frequently not spent any significant time outside the US, either.
I assume you are kidding. I could see Obama and Michelle in France but they would not have the riches they are collecting.
I love France. At one time, I thought we would retire to France. We are too old now but it was a thought once the kids were launched.
France would be great if you wanted to live a middle class life in a village in southern France.
There is no chance they would be interested in black Africa. It is a horror show.
@ David Foster – my thoughts also. Racism, the topic under discussion, is the default setting for humankind, not merely for people of a different color but for the tribe over the next hill. This is balanced by some willingness to engage others in mutually beneficial trade, or come together for common worship every few years (such as Stonehenge), but suspicion remains. The theme of “South Pacific,” stated bluntly in the song “You Have To Be Carefully Taught” has it exactly backwards. It is not some new thing brought into the world by Europeans beginning in the year 1000 AD. Racism can be untaught, with effort, among those who have some higher goal, such as being coreligionists or mutual citizens of nation or empire. Americans (and Canadians, a few others) have done better at unlearning racism than anyone in history. We might not still be all that good – might be the smart kid in the dumb row, as it were – but no one else is even at the table.
There is similarly the thought that violence has mostly been learned from intrusive Western colonisers, and that earlier peoples, especially primitive peoples, were only mildly and intermittently violent. Lawrence Keeley exploded that pretty thoroughly in “War Before Civilization,” and Napoleon Chagnon did well before him, but anthropologists still wring their hands and don’t want to believe that. Male and female behavior may have considerable variation across cultures, yet they have striking similarities as well, century after century, location after location.
anthropologists still wring their hands and don’t want to believe that.
This gets into “Nature vs Nurture.” Stephen Jay Gould wrote “The Mismeasure of Man” and set off the Blank Slate theorists, which includes my daughter who got an Anthropology BS at UCLA. Stephen Pinker wrote “The Blank Slate”, which refuted Gould’s ideas with data on twin studies. That link is to a 2003 edition. I read it about then and suggested my daughter read it. She refused and told me that I should read +Gould’s book, which I had. I pointed out to her that it was in my library. She still refused to read it.
Now, a new book with much more data has appeared, called “Blueprint,” by Plomin withUnfortunately, that has been encouraged since the 1960s on both sides of the Atlantic. I’m struck by how Britain has followed the same pattern as the United States, even though the British underclass is white and much of the underclass in America is nonwhite. Really, it’s what people do when they go against civilization. the DNA evidence that Pinker intuited 15 years ago.
Eventually, as we learn more and more about DNA, most of these fantasies will fade but not among the “elites” who want so badly to believe them.
Thomas Sowell has a Reason interview recently, in which he says some important things, but has a few misconceptions, in my opinion.
If you pick 1960 as your base period, things have been going pretty badly in most of the Western world. Let’s take just one thing: violence. There’s a book [by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker] on violence internationally over the centuries, and you see the graphs all going down historically. In 1960, however, you see a sudden up-shift.
In 1960, the homicide rate in the United States was about half what it was in the mid-1930s. Then all the wonderful legal theories came in and reduced punishments, put restrictions on the police, and expanded rights for criminals. Over the next 20 years, the homicide rate doubles. Later on I discovered that very similar things had happened in Britain, and when Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature came out, it was happening throughout the Western world.
Now, we seem to be ready to go back with the “First Step” legislation.
Unfortunately, that has been encouraged since the 1960s on both sides of the Atlantic. I’m struck by how Britain has followed the same pattern as the United States, even though the British underclass is white and much of the underclass in America is nonwhite. Really, it’s what people do when they go against civilization.
He does seem to believe more in “Nurture” than “Nature” and I did not realize he had been adopted.
AVI: “Racism, the topic under discussion, is the default setting for humankind, not merely for people of a different color but for the tribe over the next hill.”
The point about Tribalism is exactly right — tribalism means something, “racism” does not. As far back in history as we can peer, groups of human beings (tribes, if you will) have treated other groups of human beings with suspicion. That is why the history of Europe for millenia is the story of “White” people distrusting, hating, attacking, subjugating other “White” people. And the history of human beings in Africa was no different. That human characteristic continues down to the current day, where the most intense hatred for the Out-Group is demonstrated by the tribe of Far Left Democrats for anyone who fits into the group Not-A-Far-Left-Democrat.
“Race” is a very poorly defined concept, which renders “racism” a meaningless insult applied to anyone in the Out-Group. It is worth considering what the Leftist guardians of the language do not consider “racism” — for example, why is it not “racist” when Far Left academics at Ivy League universities discriminate against Americans of Japanese or Chinese heritage in their admissions policy? We know the answer: the Lefties are doing it, and therefore it is not “racism” because nothing they do can be “racist”.
“Racism” is clearly an attempt by the Far Left to manipulate us all by dividing us. Let’s not play their game.
As an example of the “everything bad is from our society” meme….activists are denouncing *grades* as “currency for a capitalist system that reduces teaching and learning to a mere transaction”.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/columbia-university-seminar-to-promote-inclusive-grading/
Of course, Communist countries ever had anything like grades (or quotas at work)!
And tribal societies didn’t have performance measurements either….if you were a Sioux Indian who couldn’t hunt, the other guys would never criticize you, just happily share their takings with you.
That really appears to be how these people think.
Should have been “Of course, Communist countries NEVER had anything like grades (or quotas at work)!
Grades, of course, are to be diminished or eliminated because they are reminders of “mismatch,” the results off admitting unprepared students to highly competitive schools. That link is an example of what was found a few years ago in Atlanta schools where teachers and principals were faking data on students to qualify for “No Child Left Behind” funding.
It looks like my comment above is garbled but I can’t edit it now.
The race industry may be losing credibility or perhaps followers that are literate. Al Sharpten sold the rights to his biography for $531,000? Well, it will be mostly fiction and likely in comic book format. POW! I think the Bush’s dog got more than that.
Sold it to himself (actually his bogus charity) to keep the price up? Is this a great country or what!
Death6