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> Comparing America, which since World War I has been the wealthiest, most powerful nation on Earth, with some backwater country in Asia or Africa which has opp

• jbattle 10y ago
  Canada and Australia have really shameful legacies of mistreatment of indigenous people. Much of which happened while these two countries were legally and culturally part of the UK (Dominions). The UK has a really complex past full of its own great crimes against humans. I agree with your larger part in that racism is a human problem. I don't think that acknowledgement serves to excuse anything the US has done.
• astrodust 10y ago
  Of those countries mentioned only South Africa is one on-par with the level of consistent, simmering racial tension as the US. France, Greece, Norway, Germany they all have their minority populations for various reasons, in the case of France and England it's largely due to colonial history, but there's an important distinction here. In none of these cases were the minorities imported as slaves and then emancipated and later systematically discriminated against, marginalized, and basically left to die. Although some of these countries participated in slavery, the legacy of those policies lives on in places like Brazil and various ex-colonies in the West Indies. > Sure, maybe the ideal might be similar to Canada, Australia, or Great Britain, all of which are predominantly single-race societies. Wrong. Canada has a significant indigenous population, as does Australia. Great Britain has several groups with a very strong identity that do not always get along. The simmering tension in Northern Ireland is, to this day, a serious problem that's largely along religious/cultural lines. Canada is not immune to criticism here, but these groups were never kept as slaves, nor forcibly segregated. Where discrimination exists, and it does, it's often personal attitudes that need to be fixed, not the express policy of any local government. The problem with America's racism is unlike Poland or Lithuania where minorities are rare, America has states with a significant population of African-American or Latin-American people that to this day are treated very, very poorly. Demographically America is on track to be a "majority minority" country within decades. That's a sign that as a country America needs to get its shit together and deal with its past.
• mrtree 10y ago
  LOL! Thinking that the US is socially superior to Norway, Germany or France, and then selecting the Commonwealth as the "ideal". Funniest thing I have read in a while.