>Certainly. In my travels and foreign contacts, I find US-ers to be one of
>the least bigoted people I meet, much less likely to express racist or
>sexist views than, for example, Eastern Europeans, Germans, British or
>French.
But racism isn't just about subjective attitudes or their expression - it's about social structures, and in the ideological realm, appalling things that nonetheless seem "natural." So why are black household incomes 63% of white? Why does a black male face a one in four chance of imprisonment? Why do so many white people go through their lives thinking there's nothing terribly weird or disturbing about these facts?
>Yet, listening to a great majority of the contributors to this (and
>kindred) lists leaves one with the impression that US is the most racist,
>sexist, and bigoted society in the world.
I wouldn't say that. Western Europeans are much less welcoming of immigrants, and Japanese are less so. There's less sex discrimination in our labor market than in many other First World economies (except the Scandinavian ones). But since the U.S. is the world's chief imperialist power, and since a good bit of imperial power is justified on racialized grounds, on a world scale no one rivals the U.S. for creating racialized categories and abusing the racialized inferiors.
Doug