Which is the least racist country in the world?

I'm not convinced. My girlfriend lived there studying for a year in a fairly iberal small university city (Frieburg) and said the amount of casual asumptions made by locals about people purely from their appearance was shocking.

Without wanting to trivialise the debate, she said that enough people just stared at her for minutes just because she had ginger hair and wore a red coat!

Vlaams Blok abyone?

OK I gotta bite this. Oops, what prompts this comment? I know our refugee track record recently is poor, and I know our Aboriginal problem is terrible, but I like to think broadly speaking we're a reasonably tolerant nation.

After all we're based on immgration, and we dont have a slave history! OK, wow, now Im going to get shit for this comment I guess.

I'd say Australia is pretty racist once you get out of the middle class urban enclaves. What about the huge amount of anti-Indonesian outpouring right now on account the Corby case?

Very true, only it's called Vlaams Belang (roughly translated: Flemish Importance/Concern). The sad thing is, they are still winning votes. So much so that with the next elections, Filip DeWinter might be elected as mayor of Antwerp. :-(

From what I know about Uruguay it's really hugely Iberian in makeup, compared to everything around it; It'd be a pleasant surprise to find that that's left it without racial animosity!

TO prevent any UK misunderstanding there though, that refers to Italians and Greeks, not (as I understand) black or West Indian people. For what its worth. The term's been diluted into almost jocular use now by immigrants anyway, cf "Wogs out of Work" and "Wogorama" musicals/comedy shows of recent years (written and performed by Greek and Italian Australians).

as for my grandmother (who was born over there), she definitely never saw any blacks until she was sent to tanzania (that was where the british sent some of the polish POWs who were released to their custody by the soviets when the soviets entered WWII on the allied side). there weren't exactly lots of black people in pre-WWII poland, you know. i don't know WHAT she thought of blacks -- african or african-american -- that conversation never came up.

I'm not sure about the cross-burning thing, but I was in Poland when the pope died and just walking around I was shocked by the number of racist skinheads walking around (despite the fact that there were no coloured people to be seen anywhere). This was Poznan, and you can see a photo of one the the skins, wearing a "White Power Poland" t-shirt, here. More thoughts on the subject in the radio program I made there, Poznan Radio.

i'm also amazed that the "white power" thing has had any traction in slavic nations (not just poland, but also the czech republic and russia), given hitler's well-known views of the slavs and the general brutality of the WWII years not to mention the often-bigoted attitudes that modern-day germans have about eastern europeans.

Momus!!! You said the C word!

-- Momus (nic...), June 11th, 2005.

no shit! i was in kracow, and there were, now i think of it, plenty of ominously shaven-headed guys wandering around at one point. it wasn't totally clear what the deal was, though, cos they all had football paraphernalia, and i didn't want to leap to 'east europeans = racist' conclusions. i can't read polish either. but i guess my original point was: my american cousin thought poles were racist because there are no/very few black people in poland. which might be bullshit, otoh, might not be; after all, there are very few jews in poland (?10,000?) and the record on anti-semitism isn't pretty.

Momus!!! You said the C word!

not the preferred nomenclature!

Tibet is the winner.

yeah been there. The impression I got was that there were only tourists.

More an administrative probelem than a social one, was my impression. And the figures from NationMaster seem to back this up. As does the recent article in Time

I'd say Iceland is the least racist country I've been to because I've never heard anything bad or stereotypical said about any other race in the country. Then again, 99.5% of Icelandic residents are, well, Icelandic or Scandinavian..(actually, many Icelanders move to the other three Scandinavian countries because Iceland is too conservative for them.), so do they get marked down for being sheltered or being very neutral about it all?

(Point being: "which is the least racist country in the world?" is a ridiculous question to ask...)

Also the "least racist" country could end up being the "most homo-bigoted" country as well, or the most misogynist, or the least. What's the context of the measuring stick in the first place? Thread length? (Hi! :D)

so, i mean, america means a lot of different things depending on who's looking at us.