Are Pinoys Really Racist?

Image courtesy of www.recoveringevangelical.com

Source: www.gmanetwork.com

Filipinos have always been known to find humor in just about everything.

After Janet Lim-Napoles faced the Senate to answer allegations about her pork barrel exploits, social media sites were flooded with countless humorous photo manipulations of the main players in the controversy.

However, jokes and memes aren't the only things Filipinos seem to have a talent for. The behavior of some vocal Filipino netizens have unfortunately given the country a notoriety for being racist sore losers. This was recently demonstrated when the Philippine national basketball team Gilas lost against the Iranian team in the 2013 FIBA Asia Championship. Passionate Gilas fans (mostly Filipino) took to their social media accounts, blasting the Iranian team with racist insults.

Make no mistake, though: Filipinos certainly aren't the only people who have exhibited such behavior online. For example, when South Korean pop group Girls Generation snagged the Video of the Year award at YouTube's first Music Awards, American netizens reacted rather fiercely, asking why a group of “IRRELEVANT ASIAN GIRLS” was allowed to win the award.

Mapping racial tolerance

No one questions the presence of racism in any country. But the degrees of racism vary widely.

In 2013, Max Fisher, foreign affairs blogger for The Washington Post, thought about how racially tolerant certain countries are (as well as how their level of racial tolerance compare to other countries).

While reading a study conducted by two Swedish economists to examine the effects of economic freedom on racism, Fisher noticed a question that might be a “a pretty good indicator of tolerance for other races.”

When the Swedish researchers asked respondents from more than 80 different countries about the kind of people they would not want to have as neighbors, some replied with “people of a different race.” According to the economists, people in a given country could be classified as “less racially tolerant” if they gave that answer more frequently.

Fisher then had an idea: he combed through the economists' data, mapped it out by country, and came up with a pictorial representation of the respondents' answer to the “neighbor” question:

Image courtesy of www.gmanetwork.com

The bluer countries on the map are the more racially tolerant based on the study results, while the redder areas were shown to have a lower level of tolerance towards other races.

According to the data, India and Jordan appeared to be the least racially tolerant countries, while Anglo and Latin countries were in the opposite end of the spectrum. Furthermore, certain areas in Europe varied in terms of racial tolerance; while France and the Balkans were shown to be less tolerant of other races, former Soviet states such as Belarus and Latvia seemed to be a bit more understanding.

Interestingly (and perhaps rather ironically), people from the Philippines – a nation known for its rich history and complicated mix of ethnicity and cultural influences – were shown to be less tolerant of other races.

Of course, this data is far from being the definitive, be-all end-all reference for gauging racial tolerance across the world. A professor from Carleton University, Steve Saideman, posted his own thoughts about the map, saying that racial intolerance is difficult to measure with just a single metric, and that different respondents may have had different interpretations of the question.

“The survey question is a way of judging racial tolerance but, like many social science metrics, is indirect and imperfect,” wrote Fisher, while explaining that some respondents may have been preconditioned to keep their racial preferences a secret. “Alas,” lamented the writer, “there is no survey question for honesty."

Regardless of the accuracy of the infographic, it does raise a few questions about racial tolerance and racism. In the end, it's always best to stop and think about the words we say before we say them, for these could be a reflection of how we view not just other races, but ourselves as well. After all, we're a melting pot of cultures, aren't we?