I agree with Singapore. Having visited there. the whites, Chinese, Malays, Tamils, and the various other minorities all seem to get along. The common language is English, which is the mother tongue of something like 5% of the population - but spoken at home (often a discouraged “Singlish” dialect) by almost half the population.
Eh?
The divide in many Latin American countries is not so much racial as cultural. People of indigenous stock but whose first language is Spanish, and who wear westernized clothing and have Western culture are considered different from those who still speak native languages and wear indigenous clothing. In Guatemala the first group is known as ladinos. Prejudice against indigenous people is generally strongest where their percentage of the population is highest, as in Mexico, Guatemala, and Bolivia.
I had to look up “furphy” . What a good word! I intend to borrow it (or just steal it in a colonialist way.). 
Being white, I can’t tell you much about racism in Scotland. There must be some, although no powderkeg/race riot situation.
Poland has a huge problem with antisemitism. The Holocaust didnt end with the defeat of Germany. 42 Jews were killed on 7-4-1946 in the city of Kielce.
Where there ever any other significant ethnic minorities in Poland? Think hard.
Dinsdale touched on this early on – if a country has a diverse population then racism is more likely, and if the population is not diverse then racism would be less likely.
But I think there is an economics component as well, and nobody has mentioned that yet. If an ethnic group is in a different wealth class than another ethnic group, then racism would be more likely. Well, Johanna briefly mentioned economic opportunity, but she did not say much more than that.
And also, does one ethnic group rule over the other? If so then there will be racial strife.
So ethnic diversity, economic class, and ruling power are factors I would look for.
Malaysia’s New Economic Policy (NEP) in the 1970s was a response to the 1969 riots. It brought more economic opportunity to the Bumiputera population, which means ‘sons of the soil’ and refers to Malays, Orang Asli (the indigenous peoples of peninsular Malaysia), and the indigenous peoples of Sarawak and Sabah, who speak related Austronesian languages. Most Bumiputera are Malay, though. The British colonial period had seen the immigration of large numbers of Chinese and Tamils, who prospered under the colonial system. After independence the Malays felt they had been left out of economic development, which fueled the riots. The NEP succeeded in fixing the systemic inequalities and bringing Malaysia into racial/ethnic harmony.
I also think lack of racial diversity is certainly not a sign of racial equality or good relations. Often quite the reverse.
Is there data to support this, because I just don’t believe it. In the UK, my experience is that London, for example, is far more racially tolerant than lilly-white, more sparsely populated areas. Also that western Europe has far less racial tensions than eastern Europe, which is far less diverse.
Ethnic fault lines in the US tends to run along lines of skin color. That a very visible divider. Excepting a very few people you can normally bracket a person in a skin-color group at a glance.
This is not always the case in other nations. In Europe, fault lines often run along religion, or more rarely language. From a US perspective, these nations can look very homogeneous due to having much the same skin color. In this perspective, '80s Yugoslavia and Rwanda looked pretty harmonious.
Still, things like the police killings in the US does make it look like ethnic issues there are worse than in most other developed nations, melting pot or no. I mean, we have our issues, but not all issues are created equal, and the US ones seem… severe.
Their whole policy since then has been to discriminate against anyone not Malay. It’s the law.
It will take anyone not in the pay of the Malaysian government PR firm about 3 minutes to figure this out. The last interesting thing to happen in Malaysia was forcing Singapore out of the federation in the early sixties after earlier race riots (Way to punish the people of Singapore!). Since then, the country has slowly been circling down the drain of history with the usual problems of racial and religious differences being used to completely corrupt political and social life.
Upthread, Wesley Clark pointed out Japan and New York as counter examples too.
My bold.
Just for the record, there is no country that has a non-diverse population. Let’s not fall in to that trap. If you call a country mono-ethnic then you are being racist yourself because you just took the lives of thousands or millions of people who live in whatever country you are talking about and discounted them as absolutely meaningless. Think about it.
Racial inequality is most common in places where an economy developed around plantations growing cash crops that required a large rural workforce that could endure a tropical climate. The idea of property was extended to human beings that could be bought and sold. Racial characteristics were used to distinguish whether a person was a member of the property owning class and it developed into a racial hierarchy.
The plantations economies of the southern US and much of Central and South America developed a political culture that seperated the plantation owning from the workforce based on race
This racialism also developed in colonial regimes to distinguish the settlers from the natives.
However, every society develops political systems that separate the haves from the have-nots. Race was just convenient for semi-industrialised agriculture that lived with the constant threat that the tables could be turned in a revolt.
The European former colonial powers had mass immigration to bolster the workforce after the economies recovers in the 1960s. The immigrants to the bombed out cities were from the former colonies. This was a cultural shock for both sides. The politicians were informed by the experience of the US in how not to handle race relations and have avoided some of the hideous problems exposed during the Civil Rights era. This is not true of the former Soviet states, they are quite unused to people of a different colour and have some quite primitive attitudes.
If a country has little problem with racial inequality, maybe because everyone is of the same race. You can bet they are divided in some other way that may also create great unfairness.
Religion
Economic Class
Ethnicity
Language
Ancestry
National identity
Race is very bad because you cannot change the colour of your skin.
Advanced economies are sometimes divided by Merit. But I guess that one leaves open a lot of questions as well.
Singapore would like to think it is a meritocracy, but it has a clear tendency towards nepotism. It is also a bit of a gerentocracy. It is run by old lawyers.
It all gets murky as soon as you look at what is swept under the carpet.
:dubious:
I think it’s only right that we don’t try to waft over the racial inequalities that certainly DO exist in western european nations. Those immigrants that came over to boost our workforces came to do, frequently, menial jobs we didn’t want to do and their status has been limited by racial and economic inequalities ever since. In the UK, we still have a prison population where black British men are vastly over represented, and the French built near ghettoes to house their North African immigrants.
We may not have had state-sanctioned colour bars, but that certainly doesn’t mean BAME citizens don’t still suffer discrimination. It’s just more subtle or unconscious. Let’s not forget the London riots of 2011, which spread to all major cities in the UK, caused by a black man being killed by Police.
This “racial characteristics” stuff sounds like it has to be especially introduced by neo- (or, historically, proto-) Nazis to stir people up and to single out whatever group(s) are to be targeted, and perhaps should be distinguished from old-fashioned chauvinism, xenophobia, serfdom, and so on. Maybe we should look at economies sufficiently advanced as to assure a decent standard of living for everyone, without an underclass to speak of.
In any case, there is an annual World Happiness Report, which also takes into account immigrant experiences, and the top spots recently seem to be Finland, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and the Netherlands. Immigrant happiness more or less matches the overall happiness.
There are degrees of diversiveness. Some places are more diverse than others. And I never said any country is mono-ethnic. Based on my travels I’ve seen countries where diversity is great, and where it is less. But that is a very limited data sample. You can see it in different US states too. But it’s better to look at the data. For example, looking at ethnic groups in a few countries:
Philippines (2010 est.) https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/rp.html
[ul]
[li]24.4% Tagalog[/li][li]11.4% Bisaya/Binisaya[/li][li]9.9% Cebuano[/li][li]8.8% Ilocano[/li][li]8.4% Hiligaynon/Ilonggo[/li][li]6.8%Bikol/Bicol[/li][li]4% Waray[/li][li]26.1% other local ethnicity[/li][li]0.1% other foreign ethnicity[/li][/ul]
Iceland (2018 est.) https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ic.html
[ul]
[li]81% homogeneous mixture of descendants of Norse and Celts[/li][li]19% population with foreign background 19%[/li][/ul]
Liechtenstein (2017 est.) https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/print_ls.html#:~:text=Ethnic%20groups%3A,11.2%25%20(2017%20est.)&text=Languages%3A,4.6%25%20(2015%20est.)
[ul]
[li]66% Liechtensteiner[/li][li]9.6% Swiss[/li][li]5.8% LiechtensteinerAustrian[/li][li]4.3% German[/li][li]3.1% Italian[/li][li]11.2% other[/li][/ul]
Clearly, some places are more diverse than others. And ethnic diversity is just one of the three factors I mentioned. So I don’t advise considering only this.
That may be so in terms of city-wide statistics, but in many big cities - such as Chicago - there is tremendous segregation between neighborhoods. Those highways weren’t placed where they are by accident! :rolleyes:
There might be more “intolerance”, but in a single race area, are there “problems”? I lived for a while in NW Indiana. By FAR the most lilywhite, western European community I’ve ever lived in - including Chicago’s NW side in the 60s. I was surprised at the number of people I met there who were HUGELY racist - despite the fact that they had little to no interaction w/ black/brown/asian people in their own communities. So yeah - there is a philosophical “problem” in these peoples’ racism, but the nonexistent people of color didn’t riot.
There certainly are racial inequalities in the UK and other former colonial powers that have experienced mass immigration and have sizeable communities. The British police have made some serious mistakes in the past causing anti-police riots. Each time it happens there have followed serious efforts at reform and the way they treat minorities. It has been a long process.
Policing is only one part of the problem of inequality. This is just one institution, there are many others that need attention. The Home Office being the most glaring example and Theresa May’s populist ‘hostile environment’ policy towards immigration cases that has led to some serious injustices. There are also other social factors that lie very much within the immigrant communities. The BAME label is a simplification, useful for a conversation at a national level. But in the melting pot like London the statistics hide a great deal. There are many different communities from all over the world, some of which do well and some poorly. It not always the prejudices of the national political culture and its institutions that are to blame for inequality, there is also a lot of dynamics within and between communities that lead to winners and losers. Shining a light on these issues is no bad thing but is often unwelcome. Obviously local gangsters are quite keen to stoke anti-police sentiment when they threaten their enterprises. It gets complicated.
France has some big issues with race relations and there it is more complicated because of the political legacy of its colonial war in Algeria. They also have some serious policing issues and a force that is insensitive to the needs of the community. But these police forces are under state control and can be reformed to bring the standard of policing more in line with what the community needs.
The situation in the US seems quite different partly because of its size and federalised political system. Highly decentralised political control of the police leads to huge differences in the standard of policing in different locations, the considerable resistance of police unions to reform and the protection of racist and brutal behaviour by officers, the militarisation of police forces after 9/11. These are BIG structural problems. So too is the voting system that is prone to manipulation resulting in the selective disenfrancisement of voters and a judicial system that criminalises some parts of the population and results in mass incarceration in an oppressive prison system. These are constitutional and structural issues that effect black Americans disproportionately and they are echos of the plantation politics that polarised society according to racial identity.
The USA is a wonderful country with lots of advantages, it is a very open society that does not hide its dirty laundry. It celebrates success, but does not hide its failures. It is also a country that can be very adaptable. It successfully dismantled the apartheid regime in the South during the Civil Rights era and these outstanding problems seem part of that: unfinished business. I don’t doubt that there must examples in the US where the police are under control and working well with the communities they serve. It would be nice to hear about that.
These outrageous cases of police brutality have sparked internal debates about policing and racism in many countries around the world that hope not to make the same mistakes.
The hope is that a political leadership will emerge in the US that can deal with some of these serious issues and set a positive example.