• geoff@midwest.social
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    4 days ago

    Any informed opinions on whether Chinese people are in general more or less racist than Americans?

    • davel@lemmy.ml
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      4 days ago

      🤷 There’s no universal, coherent definition for racism, and if there were, we’d still have to run two very large, expensive research/polling projects. Also these are extremely large populations (on extremely large territories), neither of which is monolithic. Also, how racist a people are doesn’t necessarily align with how racist a state is. In an online forum, it’s the kind of question that mostly just exposes some people’s existing prejudices.

      • geoff@midwest.social
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        4 days ago

        I ask mostly rhetorically to shed light on the idea that state mistreatment of ethnic minorities is a persistent human issue, and that it should be condemned wherever it occurs. The USA’s hands may be uniquely bloodied, but I doubt China’s are squeaky clean. I would expect any state of sufficient size and power to eventually be guilty of this.

        I wonder if China’s population is more or less ethnically and culturally homogeneous than that of the USA, and whether this should be considered a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.

        • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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          3 days ago

          I wonder if China’s population is more or less ethnically and culturally homogeneous than that of the USA, and whether this should be considered a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.

          the defining characteristic(s) of an ethnic minority is a artificial distinction that the culture you exist within conditions you to regard as important and it will be different from one culture to the next.

          thanks to colonialism, some of it will have a superficial analogue to your own culture, but the ingrained distinctions stretch back for hundreds to thousands of years longer and most are imperceptible to foreigners; hence the entire “monoculture” assumption by westerners of the (mostly) non-melinated variety.