No, they are neither small nor lacking in influence.
I completely disagree. I don’t live in the south but between my wife’s and my extended family we have perhaps 2 or 3 sincere racists out of a group of 40 people or so. They are all elderly and everyone in the family just puts up with them. Their opinions about race are NOT valued. In my part of the county at least, I believe this is a typical ratio. So maybe 5% of the population, almost all elderly?
I know this isn’t the situation everywhere but I think there are far less that what is perceived. How many racists do you know out of the total group of people you know personally?
Before opiate addiction became the fashion statement it seems to be now in some circles (probably the late 1990s), I saw a TV show about heroin addiction among suburban teenagers. They went to a parents’ support group, and there was a large group of prosperous-looking white women sitting in a circle, talking about what this had done to their families.
The voice-over said, “Fathers can theoretically attend, but they’ve never seen one.” THAT spoke volumes to me.
How old were the girls? In most states, beyond a certain age, there really isn’t a whole lot the courts can do regarding which parent the children live with. And really, don’t many teenagers think they would want to live with an adult who doesn’t make them go to school, lets their boy/girlfriends sleep over, buys them beer, etc.?
THAT was probably a bigger factor than race. If the kids were pre-teens, that would be another story.
About 50% of the people I know personally are racist. Of course, none of those are my friends. Some are family.
We may have very different views on what constitutes a racist. I gather as much by your use of the weasel word “sincere”. And in America, I’m only going by what I see in the news, in statistics, and my one visit there, which was to Texas.
But
is just ridiculous. Most of the American racists I see are middle-aged and younger. And New York is not the Deep South, nor are many of the other places middle-aged and younger Karens weaponize the cops against PoC.
And that’s not even going into the size of the Republican voting base, and what being a Republican voter right now says about one’s racism.
And that’s also not going into how size doesn’t correlate with influence, given the very evident racism of the current President.
You live in South Africa, it’s not a huge surprise you know a disproportionate number of racists.
The real point is what counts as racism and what to do about it. Some people say everyone is racist. You can’t fire everyone. So maybe some people are the sincere racists of @Dark_Sponge’s definition, and should not be in the police. And a much larger group have unexamined prejudices, or however you want to put it. Maybe the best way to deal with that is to give them objective criteria to use as far as possible, to reduce opportunity for bias. But it’s not the same thing, and it makes no sense to treat it the same.
There’s nothing disproportionate about it. If anything, I’d say South Africa is less racist than, say, the USA or, definitely, the UK, a country I am very familiar with, have visited frequently, and contains a significant proportion of those “people I know personally” (probably 25%)
I live in the UK and am (distantly) acquainted with 3 racists. What definition are you using exactly?
“a person who is prejudiced against or antagonistic towards people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.” is an adequate one.
So, everyone you know is just cool with Travellers? With Asian immigrants? With Eastern European migrant workers? Never made a “drunk Irishman” joke in your presence? Never said anything about “Muslims” as a group?
Because that’s completely not my experience of the UK, nor what the numbers show.
So, things may be different in the village of McGillycuddy or wherever you live, but the stats say different.
What’ve you got against rural inhabitants, huh?
The people I know probably aren’t very representative, being mostly younger, more educated and open minded and so on. I think they’re about as unprejudiced as humans commonly manage to be, which still isn’t perfect. IMO every single person has a degree of prejudice against some group or other, it just varies how much.
Which stats say different? I don’t recognise your characterisation of the UK as a particularly racist place, I pretty much never hear racist attitudes experessed in public or private.
The article you linked to didn’t show any comparison country to country so other than anecdote I don’t know on what basis you place the USA and UK as more racist than South Africa. Where do you think any those countries sit on the world stage?
This study suggests this isn’t the case in at least one key metric and South Africa appears to be much worse than either the USA or the UK.
Do you count fictional as rural?
Then why did you raise them as representative of the UK, then?
The stats I posted. Unless DT knows only 20 people, their 3 racists would be a significant outlier when 44% of people think some races or ethnic groups are born harder working than others.
I didn’t say it was particularly racist. Just more so than current South Africa. I’m not saying the racists in South Africa aren’t very racist. Just that proportionately, there are less of them. And that’s entirely down to demographics. Quite frankly, Whites are just more likely to be racist, and the UK has a much higher proportion of Whites. Granted, part of that is also probably because the net population flow of racists in the past 25 years or so has been from SA to UK.
And whether or not you hear racist attitudes is very dependent on your own ethnicity, BTW.
Which metric am I supposed to be looking at, specifically? South African prejudice against immigrants is significant, but it’s also largely Black-on-Black.
It sounded dismissive.
I’m not talking about only 20 people, but I haven’t heard anyone say some races are born hard working. That’s pretty nutty.
You used prejudice against Eastern Europeans and the Irish as examples for the UK, that’s the same thing.
Not in my experience…
…this might explain it.
You haven’t made a convinving case for that claim.
nor that claim
nor that claim
Table 2 I think puts the countries in a rough index and compares them. Neither your article nor my study is an exhaustive list of racism and prejudice but at least my does have that country by country comparison.
Why would that matter? Why would that get a pass? You yourself, when talking about racism in the UK, already lumped travellers, eastern european and the irish into the “racism” bucket and they are white.
It’s my go-to name for a UK place that isn’t a known name like “London” or “Edinburgh” or “Cambridge”
Have you asked them? Because that’s what the pollsters did.
The perception here isn’t that African foreigners are of a different ethnicity, just foreign. It’s not the same as UK perceptions of ethnicity. It’s nationalistic, not ethnic.
I assume you mean the first bit.
Yes, it very well might.
You might wanna stop that. And no, I don’t ask my friends whether they think some races are less hard working. That would be weird. But they don’t say anything that suggests they think it, either.
What’s the difference? Why do South Africans dislike African foreigners?
But you’re not going to consider that this may also apply to your own experience?
It’s not simply a random distribution of bias, though. In societies that have a long-standing tradition especially of anti-black racism and white supremacism, there is going to be a disproportionately higher prevalence of prejudice against blacks, and a disproportionately lower prevalence of prejudice against whites. Normalizing and positive perceptions of white people, along with “othering” and negative perceptions of black people, are just part of the cultural air we breathe.
Saying “oh well everybody’s always going to have some prejudice against some group or other” glosses over that big systemic difference.
Well duh, you’re white. We white people in traditionally racist societies go through most of our lives not having to notice anti-black racism unless somebody’s being an openly loud white supremacist about it, which most white people don’t see happening a lot. But that doesn’t mean racism isn’t to some extent baked into our attitudes and expectations, even when we consciously reject its beliefs.
In those societies, sure. It’s quite an America-centric way of looking at it, though. If anything I’d say there’s a more prejudice against Muslims amd Eastern Europeans in the UK; just look at Brexit.
That’s quite possible. But that’s what I was trying to get at, saying there’s a difference between this ‘baked in’ racism and concious racism, and they need to be dealt with differently.
That’s just a truism. If you don’t agree, there;s no real common ground to be had on any conversation about racism.
I am no longer at home to “every group is equally racist” ideology.
Yes, but it’s conflating immigration and race prejudice, as far as I can tell. It’s not a measure of just race prejudice.
South African prejudice against immigrants is significant, but it’s also largely Black-on-Black.
I didn’t say it “gets a pass”, it’s just not racism.
Because UK perceptions of what is and isn’t race and ethnicity are different than South African ones.
You prefer Brigadoon?
That you think it’s weird to ask your friends questions to assess their degree of racism kind of means I’m going to discount your opinions on whether your friends might or might not be racist.
That you’ve noticed.
The difference is they don’t think they’re congenitally superior. And the reasons for the xenophobia are the usual bullshit - they think they’re taking jobs and are more criminal. Also, the immigrant population more than doubled in size in the last decade, so they’re suddenly a much more visible minority.
What makes you think I haven’t considered it? I and other PoC definitely see more evidence of racism than most White people do.
That doesn’t mean we make up the racism. It just means most White people don’t see what’s there.