Inductivist

Sociology textbooks regularly state as if it were God's Truth that the United States is a fundamentally racist country. Let's try something different and instead of maligning a whole country, let's actually look at data.

Between 2010 and 2014, the World Values Survey asked 88,042 people from 59 countries if they would object to having neighbors of a different race.  Here are the percent who answered yes by country:

Percent objecting to a neighbor of a different race

Azerbaijan  58.1
Libya  55.1
Palestine  44.0
Thailand  39.7
Lebanon  36.3
Turkey  35.8
Ecuador  34.5
S. Korea  34.1
Yemen  34.0
Georgia  32.1
Armenia  31.8
Malaysia  31.3
Kuwait  28.1
Kyrgyzstan  28.1
Iraq  27.7
Jordan  27.2
India  25.6  
Estonia  25.4
Cyprus  24.8
Romania  23.5
Belarus  23.1
Japan  22.3
Philippines  21.6
Nigeria  20.9
Ghana  19.9
Algeria  19.8
S, Africa  19.2
Hong Kong  18.8

All Countries  18.6

Russia  17.2
Tunisia  16.9
Ukraine  16.9
Pakistan  15.7
Germany  14.8
Uzbekistan  14.0  
Morocco  13.8
Singapore  12.6
Kazakhstan  11.2
Slovenia  10.9
China  10.5
Mexico  10.2
Peru  9.3
Zimbabwe  8.9
Qatar  8.8
Taiwan  8.4
Netherlands  8.2
Haiti  6.3
Chile  5.6
USA  5.6
Poland  5.5
Australia  5.0
Spain  4.8
Rwanda  3.5
Colombia  3.2
New Zealand  2.9
Sweden  2.8
Brazil  1.9
Uruguay  1.6
Trinidad and Tobago 1.5
Argentina  1.0

So, in a sample of 59 countries, the United States is the 12th most tolerant. The percent of Americans not wanting a neighbor of another race is less than one-third the world average. Liberals should be ashamed of themselves for indicting our country. 

Whites in general are accused of being notoriously racist, but you can see that Western societies tend to be the most tolerant.  The most intolerant regions are Muslim and Asian.

In this new study of over 120,000 suicides, the authors reported that 0.5% of the suicides were LGBT.  They also cited an estimate that 4.1% of Americans are sexual minorities. This suggests that they have a much lower rate of suicide than heterosexuals.

The authors speculate that sexual minority status of many suicides go unknown and unrecorded. If LGBT's had the same suicide rate as heteros, only 12% of them had their sexual orientation recorded correctly. I find this hard to believe.

It is safe to say that, according to this data, sexual minorities, like blacks, have a low rate of suicide. How is that possible, in a country that is supposedly so homophobic, supposedly so hateful?  The answer is that America is not a hate-filled country. It's an impressively tolerant country.

Participants in the World Values Survey were asked: "On this list are various groups of people. Could you please sort out any that you would not like to have as neighbors? Muslims."

When I lived in California, my Pakistani neighbor had a bunch of photos in the back of his car he had taken of local government buildings. My wife noticed them and called the police. I never heard if it came to anything. I do know he was arrested at least once for beating his wife. Not a pleasant man. On the other hand, I shared a house with some college students, two of whom were a Muslim couple of Indian ancestry. They were cool, and the wife was hot (but boring). 

But I digress. Here are the percentages listed by country who answered that they would not like to have a Muslim neighbor:

Percent not wanting a Muslim neighbor (sample size = 138,846)

Turkey 54.7
Moldova 44.4
South Korea 35.1
Lithuanians 33.5
Romania 32.9
Bulgaria 31.1
Slovenia 30.5
Albania 30.4
Slovakia 29.4
Japan 28.8
Philippines 27.7
Vietnam 27.0
Croatia 26.5
Macedonia 26.2
Belarus 25.8
Finland 24.8
Belgium 24.5
Czech Republic 24.3
Ukraine 24.0
South Africa 23.9
Malta 23.4
Poland 21.8
Estonia 21.4
Greece 20.9
Norway 20.3
Latvia 19.9

World 19.5

Nigeria 19.3
Taiwan 19.1
Hungary 18.3
Mexico 17.9
Germany 17.9
Zimbabwe 17.7
Serbia and Montenegro 16.7
France 16.6
Denmark 15.9
Great Britain 15.5
Northern Ireland 15.4
Austria 15.0
Kyrgyzstan 14.6
Russia 14.5
Uganda 14.2
Luxembourg 14.2
Peru 13.5
Portugal 13.4
Netherlands 13.4
Sweden 13.0
Bosnia and Herzegovina 12.8
Tanzania 12.6
USA 12.4
Spain 12.2
China 12.1
Iceland 11.6
Chile 9.7
Switzerland 8.6
Canada 8.4
Argentina 6.1


There is a lot there. Let me mention only a couple items, and of course others are free to comment.  The most striking fact is that Turkey is the most anti-Muslim!  So crazy--they're almost all Muslims. It looks like the people most familar with Muslims like them least. (I looked more closely at the data and found that others religions were over-sampled. Of the Muslim respondents, 32.4 percent did not want Muslim neighbors.)  Second, some of the anti-Muslim sentiment appears to be good old-fashioned ethnocentrism that is more robust in more traditional countries. For example, Koreans don't hate Muslims; they hate everybody.  Asian countries in general are more anti-Muslim (China is an important exception). Third, Latin Americans are toward the bottom of the list, but it goes without saying that nobody out-tolerates the West. Like Michael Jackson, we're lovers, not fighters (now, anyway).