A recent survey states that Britain is one of those countries which are most racially moderate. The study of social attitudes globally states that most racially extreme people reside in the developing countries, with India and Jordan in the list of Top Five. The study was conducted for over three decades in 80 countries and the findings of the study state that Western Countries like Britain, USA, Australia and Canada accept people of other cultures more open heartily than other countries.
Washington Post reported that this data was collected in the World Value Survey, in which the social attitudes of residents of different countries were calculated.
In this survey, persons were asked to tell that what kinds of neighbor they wouldn’t want to live with, and the answer option “people of a different race” was counted as a percentage for each country.
As per the researchers, in those societies where people are not interested in having neighbors of different race can be considered as more racially extreme or intolerant.
Jordan is the country which is most intolerant nation as 51.4 percent residents want neighbors who are alike to them and they are not interested in a neighbor of different race. The next country is India, scoring 43.5 percent. The survey states that in USA, only 3.8 percent of residents are not willing to have neighbor of different race, which is a very low percentage in terms of racial intolerance.
If we talk about other English speaking countries which were a part of British Empire at one point of time, they share the same moderate attitude. The percentage of racial intolerance in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand was less than five percent.
In fact in UK, the residents have moderate attitude towards other type of differences also such as following a different religion or speaking a foreign language, less than two percent of UK residents have problem with neighbors who follow different religion.
In same manner, in South American countries less than one in twenty persons accepted that they have intolerance against people of other races.
However, the study gives a different finding for the Middle East. The racial intolerance in the Middle East is high as it has to deal with a huge number of low-skilled immigrants, majority of which belong to South Asia.
When it comes to Europe, there is a lot of difference between the eastern and western part of the continent west is more racial moderate but France scored 22.7 percent in refusing neighborhood of different race.
Some issues have been raised regarding the shortcomings in the survey as it is said that time taken in the research is very long so the findings can’t be a reliable when it comes to the attitudes of people. The bigger shortcoming that is being cited is that in western countries, residents don’t like to divulge their personal opinion especially about racism so the surveyors may have collected wrong answers.
A point has also be raised by the Max Fisher of the Washington Post that maybe ‘Americans are conditioned by their education and media to keep these sorts of racial preferences private, i.e., to lie about them on surveys, in a way that Indians might not be’.