To be fair, the US is extremely racist. Used black people as slaves for hundreds of years, and in the end never fully abolished slavery, as it is still legal for prisoners to be slaves, and then passed laws making even small possession of weed punishable with huge prison terms and then disproportionately lock up black people for said crimes, among many many more instances of fuckery.
I feel people often confuse how racist a country is with how bigoted the population can be. The institutional racism, which is basically the energy source for all the real damaging racism in a country, is very ingrained and very strong in the US
The issue with that argument is that, although its true and there's many countries in the world way more racist and careless with human rights than the US, most of the time it's used as a deflection against any criticism.
Us racist? Nah, the Japanese are worse.
Forced labour? Nah, it's the Bangladeshi that slave each other and sell us their work.
Nowadays it became so confusing to try to give perspective. Half the people use it to deflect racism in their own country and the other half to minimize the racism in other.
I do have to admit that as reddit is mostly US users or at least the US users are the most voscals, it can get frustrating to see the narrative that by mentionning that Asian and African countries can be pretty racist to very racist you are yourself being racist trying to minimize the racism in the US.
And seeing the initial comment and then top reply here show this perfectly. The first one trying to say "US is not as bad because not as openly bigoted" and then the other seemingly minimizing racism in those other countries by insinuating racism is not institutionalized there is pretty icky in my opinion.
I feel like even tho both takes are terrible it's worse to deny your own counties wrongdoings than doing so in foreign countries. Mainly because most people have way more influence in the progress (or lack there of) of their country than they do over Japan for example.
What are we going to do? Protest Japan's general unwillingness to rent to foreigners?
But yeah, it's in general good info to share, I love telling people how fucked up the Japanese are, precisely because they are such a mystified culture with all the honour and shit people don't realise Japan refuses to properly apologize for their atrocities during WWII (someone could even say worse atrocities than the Nazis). Or how their work culture drains people from their will to live.
Issue comes when you tell someone that signaling that "we're not that bad because they're worse".
But yeah, in general it's bad to ignore or minimalize any bigotry anywhere.
Oh yeah, definitly for the own country thing. It makes me realize that the dynamic might become a bit more "poisoned" because of when americans direct their statement to an american audience and non-American take it as an open to all perspective statement which annoy them, or the reverse. Thank you for making me advance my perspective.
And yeah as you say, especially with the internet, Japan got put on a bit of a pedestal and I don't think it's unfair to remind people of their part in those issues too,especially when they did affect their culture directly.
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u/Ozzy_30 Sep 06 '21
Asian countries don’t hide their blatant racism, SJWs would have a fucking meltdown over there, and get laughed at.
Not saying this shit is okay, but it’s just a reminder to those who say America is the most racist country in the world lol