A fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries

i’m not a particularly devoted admirer of statistics and graphs but it’s interesting to read something unexpected about countries maligned by the west (such as pakistan). this might be the “cartography of bullshit” but other accepted/respected narratives about the civilized (human rights obsessed) west vs the barbaric orient are equally excremental.

when people throw stats at me i usually just smile. i go even further than that. i question all the so-called truths that we’ve been told about the world and ourselves since most of our education is based on western textbooks and western notions of the “developed” nations vs the primitive “developing” ones. if one studies the mechanics of colonialism and colonial education, it’s quite easy to see how the colonized came to hate themselves and see their colonizers as primarily their superior. too many stats and graphs and literature and scholarly research with an orientalist twist.

what i’m trying to say is that i don’t trust western assumptions anyway. this map is also produced by the west (swedish scholars etc) so it’s telling that it’s worth more thought and more push back than other accepted western “data” which is steeped in racism.

Pakistan, remarkably tolerant, also an outlier: Although the country has a number of factors that coincide with racial intolerance – sectarian violence, its location in the least-tolerant region of the world, low economic and human development indices – only 6.5 percent of Pakistanis objected to a neighbor of a different race. This would appear to suggest Pakistanis are more racially tolerant than even the Germans or the Dutch. More here.