A steady slow stream of visitors find the post “Walmart Failed in Korea Because of a Lack of Walking Around.” It’s a pretty pro-Korea post, and there’s been quite a few comments by Koreans and people studying the culture and commerce. It did mention racism though –
“The blatant racism and xenophobia kind of sucks.”
To which a new commentor just quoted and asked –
“The blatant racism and xenophobia kind of sucks.”
Understatement of the year?
And you know?
Nah, not really. Racism doesn’t bother me so much.
See, racism is just a particular form of an “ingroup dynamic” — that’s people who are biased in favor of the group they’re in, and against a group they’re not in.
There’s a potentially infinite number of ingroup dynamics. Racism is a particularly crass one, but I don’t think for a world-traveler who can choose their location that it’s so bad. (If you were stuck somewhere that broadly discriminated against you based on your race, that’d be awful.)
So… is xenophobia against a visitor based on race so bad?
Eh, not really. There’s plenty of places you’d be unwelcome as a visitor for any one of millions of reasons. Wrong race, wrong age, wrong class, wrong dress, wrong speaking patterns, wrong thinking, wrong religion, wrong morality of any dozens of sorts… all based on the group’s view of what’s normal or ideal to them. More sophisticated societies aren’t necessarily better at not discriminating based on groups dynamics; they just do it in a more sophisticated way.
So, is racism so bad? Yes. But also, no, not really.