Which is the least racist country?

As I answered at Frederic Christie's answer to Where in our world is racism the most rampant?, the simplest way to answer the question is to look at what countries have such a serious problem with racism (whether that be due to the strength of the hatred or the failure of the state and civil society to deal with that hatred) that open genocide is occurring.

That means that we should be looking at the societies with the most serious ongoing genocide problems. After all, I don’t think any reasonable person can argue that there’s any more serious expression of racism than genocide of a targeted ethno-racial group. Everything else, even piecemeal hate crimes like lynchings or mass incarceration, pales in comparison.

Michelle Andrade’s response is excellent in terms of pointing out that racism and all forms of bias are not only multivariate (that is, there’s lots of different kinds of racism and lots of different aspects of racism) but also aren’t separate from other issues. For example: was Rwanda really more racist during the genocide than America? Or was the problem that they had a government that was using the racism that was already there as a means of shoring up power, and that they had a more organized state that could engage in more organized violence, and that they had a higher population density so more victims were available?

Still, I do think that we can step back for a second and think. If we think of racism as any kind of ideology and system of thought or action that propagates and uses hate, or bigotry, or jealousy, along racial lines, then it doesn’t really matter if it’s because of more overt bias or just because the society isn’t strong enough to stop the bias that’s there. The victims were still killed.

With that in mind, I think Genocide Watch’s list is fairly good and has a good ranking. So I’ll quote from my response:

Right now, Genocide Watch puts Syria, the Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia and Myanmar/Burma as the most serious genocide emergencies, with Nigeria, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Yemen, Kenya, the Central African Republic, Uzbekistan, Burundi, Iran, the Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, South Africa, Rwanda, Angola, Sri Lanka and India as places either to watch immediately for a genocide or where there is a serious possibility of genocide. Iraq should also be on the list due to it being part of the ongoing tribal conflicts there, the same ones emboldening Syria (and that the U.S. essentially was the leading cause of with an illegal invasion). The South Sudan should also be on the list because, even after it became its own state in 2011, the ongoing civil war is still brutally ethnic in nature. Turkey’s genocide against the Kurds is a complex story, but I would certainly put recent atrocities there as being worthy of being on this list.

Now we have to separate out sectarianism, the power of the state, and other factors before really deciding which of these is the most serious.

In Sudan, there’s some degree of sectarianism going alongside the ethno-racism. The same applies to Myanmar/Burma, where the problems are heavily due to Buddhists against Muslims. And Syria certainly is an area where the genocide is motivated by political differences and sectarian ones as well as racial ones.

That, in my mind, puts the Democratic Republic of the Congo right at the top.

Which makes sense, since it’s basically the ongoing Hutu-Tutsi conflict from Rwanda, the most serious recent genocide by a good margin.

Now, this helps us figure out what the most racist countries are.

What about the least?

There, it is much harder.

There’s no anti-genocide. You’d have to compare various indices of institutional equity and access to resources alongside implicit bias, expressed biases of respondents, and so forth.

Still we do have some guides. There are at least attempts by people to qualify tolerance.

Mapped: The world's most (and least) free and tolerant countries uses the Legatum Prosperity Index, which to the best of my knowledge is a fairly respected index (and much less overtly political than the Heritage Foundation’s list). The 25 most tolerant, progressive, and environmentally friendly countries in the world has Movehub using three indices to combine them.

Countries that come up in these studies a lot include Luxembourg, Canada, Uruguay, Iceland, the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, New Zealand, Sweden, and Belgium.

What does that tell me?

Well, given that Canada has ongoing issues with their police being unable and unwilling to deal with crimes against indigenous people including the disappearances of both indigenous women and men…

It tells me that the least racist countries in the world have a long, long way to go.