Monday, September 02, 2019

Long term American trend towards tolerance

From a Quillette essay:
Though it’s hard to appreciate it in the age of Trump, the arc of American history shows we are trending towards greater tolerance, not intolerance. Researchers at Harvard recently used data collected between 2007 and 2016 to show that there has been a dramatic reduction in both implicit and explicit bias about race. The long-term trend is that Americans are getting more tolerant. And there is little that white supremacist terrorists can do about it.
That is correct that there has been greater tolerance towards non-whites, Moslems, LGBTs, etc.

But there has been less tolerance of right-wing political views. In the past couple of years, many important views have been banned from Amazon, Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter. More and more the Left has sought to ostracize those of whom it disapproves.

Boston had a Straight Pride parade, and the anti-straights rioted, causing many injuries and arrests. So there is tolerance for queers, but not for straights.

Claims of hate crimes are exaggerated:
Last March, a number of media outlets—including The Washington Post, Business Insider, Vox, and The Hill—reported a startling figure: During the 2016 campaign, U.S. counties in which candidate Donald Trump held a political rally experienced a 226 percent increase in hate crimes over those that did not.

The Post reupped this claim in a recent article, and numerous Trump-critical politicians—including Sen. Bernie Sanders (D–Vt.) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.)—seized upon it. "Mr. President: stop your racist, hateful and anti-immigrant rhetoric," wrote Sanders in a Facebook post that referenced the statistic. "Your language creates a climate which emboldens violent extremists."

But much like the unsupported idea that the hate crime rate is higher than ever, the 226 percent statistic doesn't quite stand up to scrutiny.

The source of the statistic is a study by political scientists Ayal Feinberg,
And of course white folks are leading the push for favoring non-whites:
But who preaches against the evils of white privilege? Well, white liberals mainly.

According to Pew survey data collected in 2017, 79.2 percent of white liberals agreed that “racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days.” In fact, white liberals are to the left of blacks on this issue, with 59.9 percent of blacks viewing discrimination as the main deterrent to upward mobility. A similar trend can be observed in a 2018 ANES survey where 87 percent of white liberals reported that an increase in ethnic diversity would make the U.S. a better place to live.

White liberals were also the most likely to both support race-based affirmative action and the removal of racist books from public libraries.
This is why many non-whites prefer to live in a white supremacist nation.

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