Shocker! America isn’t chock-full of racists

Not that we needed data to prove something most people already know, but a new research report shows Americans to be among the least racist, by nationality, among all the world’s inhabitants.

As part of a larger study on economic freedom (something the U.S. hasn’t done so well in of late), a pair of Swedish economists tapped the World Values Survey to determine how racist the populations of various countries are.

Of course, there’s no truly accurate way to gauge the emotions in people’s hearts, but it’s not especially difficult to ask people some basic questions about their attitudes. On the topic of race, the researchers looked to the World Values Survey’s question about living near people who look different.

“The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors,” The Washington Post reports. “Some respondents, picking from a list, chose ‘people of a different race.’ The more frequently that people in a given country say they don’t want neighbors from other races, the economists reasoned, the less racially tolerant you could call that society.”

The Post’s Max Fisher took the Swedish study’s data, interpolated additional data from the World Values Survey and came up with some numbers that, frankly, aren’t all that surprising:

People in the survey were most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor in the United Kingdom and its Anglo former colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and in Latin America. The only real exceptions were oil-rich Venezuela, where income inequality sometimes breaks along racial lines, and the Dominican Republic, perhaps because of its adjacency to troubled Haiti. Scandinavian countries also scored high.

In the U.S., fewer than 5 percent answered that they would not want to live near someone of another race. Compare that with more than 40 percent in India, as well as more than 30 percent in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iraq. In Jordan, more than half — 51.4 percent — said they didn’t want to live near someone of a different race.

“The Middle East [is] not so tolerant,” Fisher wrote. “Immigration is also a big issue in this region, particularly in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which often absorb economic migrants from poorer neighbors.”

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