Inspired by several current threads on the topic on the front page on GD.
I say racism and xenophobia as they are not necessarily mutually inclusive, although they usually are - somebody’s physical features are often the easiest way of telling someone is an outsider.
Anyway, to the crux of the question. I’m no expert on either of these three questions, but the wide spread of Dopers might cast some new insight. In my own country, England, there have been in recent years a few well-publicised racist riots in certain northern cities, immediately qualifying these areas as candidates. The cause for this seems to be a segregation, Asian immigrants having settled in an area and then never left the area. This leads to a negative feedback loop, as misinformation is easier to spread when you have no access to the real information. In terms of xenophobia, there are a lot of images of ‘local shop for local people’ images of remote villages, anywhere across the country.
In the U.S., the country where I believe most Dopers live, the south has (particularly the states of Alabama and Mississippi) the reputation both for being virulently racist and for 'we don’t like you type 'round ‘ere’ xenophobia. With Jim Crow and lynchings going on, it’s not hard to see where the reputation comes from. I have a vague awareness of Arizona’s new immigration law which has been called outright racist, but confess no in-depth knowledge of it. I’ve no doubt that areas elsewhere are equally or more racist outside the south.
Worldwide, Russia has a reputation of being both violently racist and xenophobic. Like the worst excesses of the South, people get killed over this stuff, today. Russia is made of many ethic populations, many members of which aren’t happy about being under the Russian banner (and vice versa), fanning the flames. Russia as a country has been invaded by foreigners countless times, so it’s no surprise where the distrust of foreigners comes from.
I live 5 miles from the Forsyth County line. (There’s a notorious tree next to highway 20 that was used to lynch a Black guy years ago. I wish I could buy it and sell the wood to schools around the country to carve whatever they wanted out of it.) But it’s all basically an affluent suburb or Atlanta now. McMansions and Yankee transplants. They don’t like illegal aliens on princible, but they do want their roofs re-shingled as cheaply as possible, so things stay civil.
I grew up in Green County, Wisconsin, on the Illinois border. There were no Black families, but all the kids I grew up with, who’d never seen a Black person, were still racist as Hell. The town was xenophobic enough that they blocked any development that would encourage workers to move there. Just let the Illinoisans drive up, eat cheese, drink beer and go back home. But no new factories, or even expansion of the ones that were there. That meant that most of the baby-boomers had to leave town after high school if they expected to find jobs. That was a price Green County was willing to pay to keep Blacks out.
The Japanese are pretty racist. And I’ve been told that other peoples in the Far East return the favour. Brunei was very racist: there were the Bruneians on top, then Westerners, then the Chinese, and the Filipinos were very much bottom of the pile. Arabia was worse with Pakistani and Filipino workers being treated as slaves.
There’s moderate anti-English racism in Scotland, and due to my accent, I’ve been a victim, which is ironic because my family hails from there. And there is sadly some anti-immigrant racism as evidenced by the BNP, but I’ve been fortunate enough to never personally encounter any violent racism.
In the US? That’s hard to judge. There is out in the open racism and then there is the deeply buried racism that, IMHO, runs deeper. In the South we have the out in the open, casual racism (or at least that’s the way it was when I was a kid). In the North East you get the surface tolerance but the deep under the waters type racism. I’m not sure which is worse, but I’m going to go with the North East, because I think it’s really still there, just more deeply buried and so less obvious than the southern racism.
Most racist country I’ve ever been in was probably Japan (it’s hard to judge, to be honest). Not only do the Japanese seemingly dislike ANYONE who isn’t Japanese, but there are types of Japanese natives who are also ostracized for some reason that never was very clear to me. The Japanese are very polite about it, but in general I think they are equal opportunity racists…doesn’t matter if you are black, white, Asian or anything else, it only matters if you are Japanese…and BORN in Japan, since a friend of mine who lived there was from full blooded Japanese stock (mother, father, grandparents back to time out of mind) who had simply immigrated to the US and so grew up here. She still speaks perfect Japanese (not that I’d know), and yet when she moved back she wasn’t exactly greeted with open arms.
Butler PA looks to be the center of a lot of Klan and religion-based bigotry but where I have personally seen the most was Baltimore. It’s hard to say; we are good at hiding it in the United States.
Do you think Jim Crow laws are in place and lynchings currently going on in the South? Is it possible that the people who wrote and enforced those laws and lynched blacks are now mostly dead themselves?
I am not saying that racism does not exist in the South, but the examples you have given are generally from the past.
You will find more friendships among blacks and whites in the South because that’s where most of the blacks are. Have you thought of that?
You generally only need a law to curb an unwanted behaviour. Why were Jim Crow laws needed if all of the whites hated blacks?
Having lived in the rural south, and having spent a bit of time at various points around the U.S., I vote California. The abject racism that exists there against hispanics is unbelievable. I’ve never seen white people cut in front of a black person, or tell them to get out of the way in a line where I grew up. I saw it several times in southern California.
Northern Idaho has a reputation for being home to neo-Nazi groups. It’s one oft he most lily-white parts of the United States.
In the Cleveland, Ohio area, I’d say it’s the more blue-collar lower middle-class and middle-class suburbs of east of the city along the lake; Willowick, Wickliffe, Eastlake, Willoughby, Mentor and Painesville Twp. They’re very ethnic in a Rust Belt sense, and most residents of the area have their roots in neighborhoods on the east side of Cleveland that experienced rapid racial transition. It’s not overt, but people there seem very … well, cautious. Further to the east, towards Geneva and Ashtabula, where there’s a high percentage of residents that are just a generation or two removed from West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, you’ll see more Southern-style racism. There’s a growing population of Mexican migrants working in area nurseries and wineries, and thus growing calls for immigration shakedowns, complaints about hearing Spanish spoken in public, and the like.
FWIW, I found the Heights/Hillcrest suburbs east of Cleveland to be among the most diverse and tolerant areas I’ve ever been.
In Buffalo, New York, you won’t see cross-burning or brick-throwing, but generally blue-collar ethnics are more bigoted than the white-collar crowd. Lovejoy and Kaisertown, solidly working-class Italian and Polish enclaves on the otherwise mostly-black East Side, are known as being unfriendly to African-Americans. In South Buffalo, which is mostly Irish, they still frown upon those who aren’t a’wearin’ o’ the green.
It’s interesting that nobody has nominated any minority areas.
Who do you think has the better chance of survival: a minority walking through the worst White neighbourhood in Alabama, or a White walking through the worst Black neigbourhood in LA or Washington?
In my experience the most racist regions in any country, anywhere in the world, are the areas populated by minorities.
In Florida, IME, you’ll find more racism the further you go into the countryside. There are many exceptions to that – for instance, there is always some tension between the mostly-black south side of St. Petersburg and the rest of the city.
:dubious: Racism is one thing, and crimes of opportunity are another. A white walking through a black neighborhood will with some justice be perceived as worth robbing. OTOH, an obvious bum or wino in such a neighborhood, though white, would be safe.
I find it interesting that you assume that a group of minority kids beating up a white man walking through their neighbourhood must be motivated by robbery. Yet I doubt that you assume that a bunch of good ol’ boys beating up a Black dude must be doing so to rob him.
Very telling.
As I said, in my experience the most racist areas, the areas where people are most likely to be attacked or abused simply because they are of the wrong race, are minority areas.
I live in Indiana, and racism is far, far more common in the northern/Chicagoland area than it is in Southern Indiana.
I live in “Chicagoland” and the people fleeing from Gary/Merrillville to the southern part of the county to escape blacks and hispanics are common. In Terre Haute, and the surrounding nowhere-ville tiny, tiny towns, it is quite common to see mixed-race couples and all sorts of people shopping at the same stores, attending the same churches, etc.
It seems like the opposite would be true, that the cosmopolitan north would be more tolerant than the Good-Ole Boy south, but it is clearly not.