Is “coolies” a racist term? 
Well BBC is government controlled and it it in the interest of the government to promote racial harmony.
That’s not true, and I have a suspicion that you know it’s not true.
Americans seem pretty comfortable talking about (arguing about even) religion too – but I don’t take that to mean that the US is less religious than other countries.
(Though I do agree that robust discussion about racism is preferable to trying to sweep it under the carpet).
This might be due to Americans exporting their way of life abroad.
I would say that Canada is big enough that our prejudices differ. Being born, raised, and lived my whole live in Manitoba, I’d say that the #1 prejudice here is against Aboriginals, it id definitely a real thing and doesn’t seem to be going away soon (the white people and their leaders don’t seem to trust the aboriginals and their leaders and vice versa). I’d see several black people growing up (and of course now), and I’d hear of rampant racism against blacks in the United States (again, when I was younger, but it doesn’t seem to be completely non-existent now) and, to a lesser extent, in Toronto and the Maritimes, and would be surprised that there was racism against black people (elsewhere) as well as against aboriginals (here).
Well, most British aren’t racist against Hindu, Buddhist or Sikh Indians/SriLankans, who are effectively racially identical to “Pakis”. Their apparent religeopolitical beliefs are the factor, not their race.
You know you want it . . . The first hit’s free . . .
When I was in college, I had a couple of acquaintances from South America, one from Peru & one from Colombia.
From what I can tell, those countries are much more racially intermixed than the USA. If you’re looking for a least racist country, you should consider Latin America or some island country in the Caribbean/North Atlantic.
I once met a Guatemalan in law school, who looked to me like a slightly pale Indian, but he advised me that at home he enjoyed elite white-skin privilege, for real. Enough Spanish in the blood.
Anecdotal of course, but- a co-worker I had once was a very pretty Latino woman with Costa Rican and Argentinian ancestry. She became furious when another co-worker, meaning no insult, asked if she had Native American ancestry, insisting that she was 100% Euro in lineage (even though if she were part Central/South American Indian not only would it not have made anybody view her differently but frankly it wouldn’t have surprised anybody- jet black eyes and hair,high cheekbones, olive skin, etc.). She identifies as Costa Rican (which is where she grew up) but later reading indicated that apparently to both Costa Ricans and Argentinians there are major prejudices against people with native ancestry.
I don’t live in the UK so I can’t say.
My friend reported that the locals in the northern town where she lives hates “Pakis”. They didn’t say Muslims etc.
I’m well aware that there are plenty of people born or next generation South Asian who get on fine in the UK. From exposure to British literature about skinheads etc. (purely secondhand of course) it seems that while a lot of people wouldn’t have a problem with their black neighbours their asian neighbours raise their hackles.
Maybe this is one of the reasons?
Sorry, it is more like PBS it seems.
I understand that one proxy for racial harmony favored by sociologists is the degree of inter-racial marriage. I understand there’s a fair amount of that in Latin America generally.
Looking at surreal’s survey data, here’s a list of countries that have less than 5.5% of the people mentioning that they don’t want people of a different race as neighbors. I adopted that cutoff by taking the lowest value (2%), adding the usual error bound for surveys (3%), and then adding another half percent for the heck of it. Here they are:
Colombia 2996 -100% 98 % 2
NewZealand 1201 -100% 97 % 3
Argentina 4366 -100% 96.3 % 3.7
Brazil 2931 -100% 96.1 % 3.9
Canada 4918 -100% 96.1 % 3.9
Iceland 2596 -100% 95.5 % 4.5
Sweden 4025 -100% 95.5 % 4.5
Singapore 1512 -100% 95.3 % 4.7
Australia 3276 -100% 94.9 % 5.1
Switzerland 2612 -100% 94.7 % 5.3
The last column is the relevant one. Then again, maybe the citizens of those countries are just polite. Anyway, the least racist country in the world is plausibly one of the nations above.
As for the US, 46% of Republicans in Mississippi think inter-racial marriage should be against the law. Forty percent of them think that such arrangements should be legal.
Canadians are tough as hell on the indian population.
You pretty clearly haven’t spoken with too many Eastern Europeans.
Poland, like most Eastern European countries was violently racist while under communist domination and afterwards.
My college roommate was from Bulgaria and he mentioned that the State would import students from Zimbabwe and other countries for them to meet and afterwards the class would all start making monkey noises.
Furthermore, Poland and the Balkan countries have a long tradition of Xenophobia that Muslims and Jews can testify too long, long before the US became remotely all that influential.
You mean pattern recognition? I think you’d need to have to lobotomise people to be rid of that.
That is crap. It is true that some first nations are experiencing difficulties and that some of that can be attributed to misguided government policies of the past and it is true that there is a fair amount of resentment for the special privileges that our aboriginals have, but I can’t see anywhere where white Canadians have been tough on native Canadians.
I’d like to add that my vote is for Canada as the least racist. Unlike many other countries with a mostly “homogenous” population we have voluntarily submitted ourselves to massive immigration from non European nations and successfully promoted our benign plurality through government action and the national media.
I saw the same thing happening in Europe as well, but recent unrest amongst minorities appears to have engendered a backlash. Same thing could have happened in Canada I admit, but I suggest that our immigrants were mostly professionals while European immigration sought less educated workers.
And my vote is for the US for having made the greatest strides against racism .
Well, ‘Pakis’ would, as noted earlier, be effectively indistinguishable from Indians. I expect this would cause some negative attention to spill over as well. There’s an easy test to figure out whether it’s racism or something else. Brit dopers - if someone has a negative image of ‘Pakis’ do you find that it usually extends to Indians also? Or does the term encompass both communities?
IME the type of UK person who refers to “Pakis” in a derogatory way is not the type to bother to make “fine” distinctions such as those between Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis etc. They’re all all “just 'effin Pakis”.