Durban 'Anti' Racism Fun.

The UN World Conference Against Racism, aka Durban 2, begins next week. The last conference in September 2001 was marred by the unfortunate fact that anti racist activists are actually racist loons.

This time around it looks as though the same process is going to occur so a number of governments have decided to boycott the event including those of Canada, the USA, Israel, then Netherlands, Australia, Sweden and Italy. They will inevitably be accused of being racist for doing so, therefore it seems like a good idea to examine how racist these countries are compared to the ones attending. The World Values Survey is probably the best place to start, they don't ask respondents a direct 'are you racist?' question, but they do ask:

'On this list are various groups of people. Could you please sort out any that you would not like to have as neighbors?'

and one of the groups is "People of a different race", so this will serve as a rough approximation for how widespread racism is in a country. Israel wasn't asked this question but the others were and these were their results for what percentage of respondents who said they wouldn't like to be neighbours to people of a different race:

USA: 8.0%
Canada: 3.4%
Sweden: 2.5%
Netherlands: 5.0%
Australia: 5.1%
Italy: 15.6%

The global average for this question is 18.3%, therefore all of the countries appear to be less racist than average, so really why should they go to a conference to be lectured to and denounced by the representitives of Iran (24.2%), Saudi Arabia (37.7%), Egypt (65.6%) and South Africa (23.6%)?