If you listen to the media these days you’d likely conclude America is a hotbed of racial tension and intolerance. But this may not be so, according to statistics compiled by some Swedish researchers and further developed by Max Fisher of the Washington Post. Placing his data into mapping software, we can see a different picture of how various countries of the world feel about having people of other races as neighbors:
Here’s what the data show:
• Anglo and Latin countries most tolerant. People in the survey were most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor in the United Kingdom and its Anglo former colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and in Latin America. The only real exceptions were oil-rich Venezuela, where income inequality sometimes breaks along racial lines, and the Dominican Republic, perhaps because of its adjacency to troubled Haiti. Scandinavian countries also scored high.
Look at the whole thing. I find Fisher’s analysis refreshing, in that he dares to question the assumptions of the survey and the connected data. Also, he is open to correction when someone was able to reveal some errors in the data. I don’t know (nor does he claim) that we can take this as a clear indicator of anything, but what it suggests is nonetheless worth some consideration. Perhaps we’re not as bad as some clearly enjoy thinking we are.