Holy crap, really? I am blown away by that. Canada is the only Western country in the top twenty on the list of the most diverse countries in the world. It’s actually, literally, exactly a multicultural Mecca.
That said, though, I agree with Crazy Canuck that it’s hardly as free from racism as Leaffan would like to believe.
Outside of the major cities, Canada is not diverse at all.
This is where I would put myself. I consider it the brain trying to categorize things quickly and leafing through the many messages about all kinds of attributes people have. Some of those messages are stupid; just because they get leafed through doesn’t mean they are what I believe, or anything I would act on.
Why wouldn’t you take pride in your genetic makeup? Your genetic makeup is what makes you you, not your choices, achievements, or any of that. (All those things are nice, but they aren’t essential to who you are).
Nope. Not a racist but I sure can be a bigot sometimes. Trying to work on that.
There was that time I threw that Chinese man down a flight of stairs. It was Wong on so many levels.
No.
My genetic history defines the limits of my body; my ambitions and achievements are what I am.
A lot of parts of the US aren’t very diverse, or have only recently become so*. Same token as native of NY and resident of the metro area most of my life I don’t see a huge amount of racial tension, and not much at all other than between blacks and other groups. Which is not saying that’s the ‘fault’ of blacks, or true everywhere else in the country for other non-white groups, just obvious in my observation of life around here.
Where I live now in Hudson County NJ immediately adjacent to the City the population is ~40% foreign born, many of whom (foreign and native born) are Hispanic. While there’s no such thing as zero racial/ethnic tension in any human society AFAIK, there’s pretty little visible here among whites, Hispanics and Asians. It’s not sky high between/among those groups and African Americans either, but noticeably not as close to zero.
I emphasize, that’s people at odds with one another openly. I’m not counting stuff like embedded disadvantages based on a history of social patterns. But then again that’s more true of blacks than Hispanics or Asians, which is one way in which tension is regenerated from one generation to the next. Also in the history of NY there have been significant ethnic divisions (Irish and Italians still typically didn’t get along well when I was a kid) among ‘whites’ to where the relationship now between ‘whites’ and Hispanics is better than that was, certainly not worse.
Again I think the observation that ‘Canada is less racist’ is basically BS and I used to work a lot with Canadians. It’s IMO a phenomenon of the non US English speaking world where people don’t really know the US, read headlines or (admittedly often race obsessed IMO) political debates here and make comparisons with rose colored glasses on for their own countries. However, the other issue at least as big is the fallacy of generalizing across cities and the countryside, regions of countries, or which particular groups are seen as at odds with one another. That varies widely.
*per a WSJ article for Trump correlated substantially with the growth in demographic diversity in US locales, not the absolute level. Looking at the absolute level you’d conclude it’s mainly places with few non-whites where concern about illegal immigration, mainly by non-whites, is highest in the US. But it’s often places where the non-white (immigrant generally) population has suddenly grown. BTW I think it’s unfortunate and counterproductive when any position but ‘come on in one and all, laws be damned’ about immigration is classed as ‘racist’. But the issue does inescapably relate to the debate about ‘racism’.
80 percent of Canadians live in urban areas. A third of all Canadians live in the Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver metropolitan areas. The culture of a country or a society isn’t defined by what has the largest acreage.
True, but perceived ‘racism’ in the US is often judged on particular areas not where the bulk of people live either.
I would just leave at no evidence beyond a positive image of one’s own country (which is not necessarily a bad thing) that Canada is less racist than the US. I’d say the opposite based on my experience, but not by a lot and that’s perhaps biased as well. It’s simply not the kind of thing that lends itself to proof. Starting with the fact almost no two people agree exactly what ‘racism’ means or encompasses, and going downhill from there in any attempted comparison of countries unless it’s a gigantic difference, which in this case it’s clearly not IMO.
You don’t think there’s a difference between racism in Canada versus the US?
That’s almost laughable. We have no where near the same issues that the US has. We don’t have the same historical backdrop.
Well sadly to some people all racism is equal. So therefore Canada’s is equal to the USa’s. :smack:
Again if you mean there isn’t a big population in Canada who are the descendants of slaves (in Canada) then obviously that’s true.
But by same token would you say European countries years ago which had virtually no non-whites at all were ‘less racist’ than Canada is now?
Not having ‘the issue’ of the legacy of slavery in the same society, and ‘being less racist’ (now) are not the same thing.
Again we can agree to differ on this. But IMO it’s not ‘laughable’ that my experience is typical white guy ‘hoser’ Canadians I’ve known were more racially biased in general (including their attitudes towards non blacks) than Americans of same generation and class background. On average, my experience, YMMV, but laughable from my POV to say they were a lot less so.
Do you really think this is going to be agreed? 
Though some of your fellow Canadians also have seemed to doubt it on the thread.
How can you take pride in something you have no control over?
I’ve always tried to meet my fellow humans on an even keel. I treat you with civility and you do the same, we’re good. Act like an asshole, get treated like an asshole. It applies across the color spectrum.
I answered yes - while I sure as hell try not to act racist, the sheer paucity of non-whites in my area, and particularly of black people, still causes me to particularly notice when I see one and wonder how I would react were one to talk to me. (To my knowledge, in my forty years I have yet to speak face-to-face with a black person.)
No, we have our own, unique issues, and sometimes we are even worse, because some Canadians seem to think that somehow we are immune to racism. We are not. I’ll also second the idea that outside of the bigger cities and further north of the US border, the average rural Canadian is probably more racist than the average American, due to the lack of exposure to other cultures.
I see you ignored my point that there is no way the highway of tears murders would have been handled the way they were if the victims would have been white, so I’ll repeat it again for emphasis. I dated a first nations girl who lived on the reservation for a couple of years. I’ve seen the racism they suffer from first hand. This is part of the reason that Inuit youth have a suicide rate eleven times the national average. It has also been my experience that the average rural white Canadian gives no fucks about any of this and honestly regards them as savages. If you want to claim that this isn’t racism because the victims are not black, I don’t know what to tell you.