You might be interested in this article in which ten Atlantic writers reflect on the least racist person they’ve ever met. Some of the writers do just that, some temporize.
Probably the least racist person I’ve ever met is my mother. I never heard her say an unkind or thoughtless thing to anybody of any race or ethnicity. Her first job out of school was teaching the poorest of the poor kids in St. Louis, black, white, and other. At one point in her career she had what I suspect was the most thankless job in the St. Louis schools: she was responsible for “staff balancing” which was exactly what you probably think it was.
Later in her career she was a remedial reading teacher for poor kids, many black. After retirement, in her old age, she taught illiterate prostitutes, many of them black, to read.
It’s a lot easier to identity the most racist than the least. The most racist people I’ve ever met are just about any white Southerner I met from 1960-1985.
I’d say my Mom as well – my Dad, not so much.
Another is one of my wife’s uncles, who is black and a Vietnam vet. He’s just all around a great person. That whole side of the family has a lot of mixed-race marriages, which I think says a lot.
The most racist person I ever met was a Korean (an actual Korean, not a Korean-American) I had to work with when I was in a military exercise in Korea many years ago. He was unfailingly polite but never passed up an opportunity to argue the superiority of the Korean people and culture. The politeness dropped when talking about the Japanese.
The most racist white people I ever met were Russians. And if you have the misfortune of playing online video games with large Russian populations, the racism is both open and hostile.
However, out of all the places I’ve been around the world, I think many Asian countries are the most culturally racist. Korea and Japan being the two examples I know. It’s manifestly different that racism here in the US though.
Not 100% sure I would consider all of the animosity the Koreans hold towards the Japanese as racism. A lot of that is based upon Japanese behavior during WWII.
Least racist is hard, since you never know what people really act like in private or what they think. Grew up in an overtly racist church and most of the family didn’t really try to hide it. When my sister married a black guy she was ostracized for a while. I was the only one who would talk with or visit with her. However, all my siblings and father came around. I would actually say that maybe my one brother who was most vocally racist against the marriage who later realized he was wrong and asked my sister and her husband for forgiveness has become maybe the least racist person I know now.
Steve
Steve,
Yes, there are historical reasons for animosity but I don’t think that doesn’t make it racism. This individual wasn’t alive during the Japanese occupation and has no personal experience of it. He hated the Japanese generally and believed they were inferior to Koreans.
This is nothing more than an anecdote. It sort of makes Steve’s point. My grandfather was a great guy. IU med school. Medic in WWII in the Pacific theatre. Always upbeat. Bigwig at the hospital where he practiced. Champion golfer. Taught me the game. And so on. One day I heard him tell a decidedly off color joke. A basketball joke with the punch line – I’ll bet our nixxxs can beat your nixxxs. Rocked my world.
I forgot to mention. Some of the most racist people I’ve met are Hispanic, with their object almost always being blacks. Go figure.
The possibility of that is one of the reasons that I’ve been concerned that a large Mexican-American population would render our pre-existing race problems with respect to African-Americans, the descendants of slaves, intractable. What I suspect will happen is that the influence of blacks will dwindle as they duke it out with Mexican-Americans, leaving whites in most positions of power. That’s certainly what’s happening in the Democratic Party.
“People of color”, a phrase presumably coined to make common cause among blacks, Mexicans, South Asians, etc., is likely to have the opposite effect—making blacks the minority partner in a pool that doesn’t have their best interests at heart.