Sure, we probably do do a better job than some other societies/countries.

I'd be hesitant to claim too much on that myself, because I'm so personally poorly acquainted with any foreign country. But yeah, it certainly does look like we do a much better job in the baseline of society.

But that's not to say we do enough. As Okwonga says, your average bigot is much smarter now than some idiotic six-pint racist. They know they can't just publically self identify as prejudiced without censure. Hence the British Social Attitudes survey linked below. Only the desperately na?ve, or deliberately mischievous would accept at face value that a decline in self reported prejudicial attitudes is evidence only of a decine in prejudice.

That's a part of it, but another part is growth of plausibly deniable prejudice. Examples: "you can't call be racist for disliking Muslims, because Islam isn't a race", " it's not racist to spread fear about Muslims, when most grooming gangs are Pakistani", "What's the difference between a group of Germans moving in next door and a group of Romanians? You *know* the difference." I paraphrase in each case, but those aren't straw men, they're real attitudes expressed all the time, in our "better" society. And one of those was from the leader of a tin-pot single-issue far-right pressure group that have managed to exploit all that to become an apparently significant political party.

We can't look at egregious racists in Spain or Italy and allow ourselves to think that since that wouldn't happen here, or would be swiftly and correctly punished, that we can be less vigilant about but the problems we do still have.

Too many words.

Posted By: Arizona Bay on February 18th 2015 at 09:30:23

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