“This week, Fisher proposed to his readers what he titled “A fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries.” The deepest-red, or most racially intolerant, countries were India, Bangladesh and Jordan. Russia and China fell in the middle; much of Africa was left out for lack of data, but South Africa came out light blue (highly tolerant), and Nigeria light red (highly intolerant). Other highly tolerant countries included Pakistan and Belarus.”
The Cartography of Bullshit
by Siddhartha Mitter for Africa Is A Country, crossposted on AlalODulal.org

With the gutting of foreign coverage by most U.S. newspapers and the need to populate infinite Web space with content, a new creature has emerged: the foreign affairs blogger. Max Fisher, who hosts the Washington Post’s WorldViews page, is a leading exemplar of the species. Fisher’s newsy nuggets are often low-priority zeitgeist items that may or may not be vignettes of greater themes: examples in recent days include the tunnel-smuggled delivery of KFC chicken into Gaza, the video of the Czech president possibly drunk, a staff-passenger brawl at Beijing airport, and New Zealand’s “war on cats.” Fisher also concocts FAQ-style explainers on places in the news that he judges to be obscure to his readers (Chechnya and Dagestan, Central African Republic, Mali). And he is very keen on global surveys, whose results he summarizes, augments with his own interpretation, and typically renders with color-coded maps that drive home the key message.

This week, Fisher proposed to his readers what he titled “A fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries.” The deep-blue, racially tolerant areas included the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Scandinavia, and much of Latin America. The deepest-red, or most racially intolerant, countries were India, Bangladesh and Jordan. Russia and China fell in the middle; much of Africa was left out for lack of data, but South Africa came out light blue (highly tolerant), and Nigeria light red (highly intolerant). Other highly tolerant countries included Pakistan and Belarus.

A cursory glance at this distribution of results would suggest something deeply suspect about the exercise; moreover, anyone who studies the concept of race knows that it is hard enough to operationalize in a single-country context, let alone in cross-national comparison. Still, Fisher soldiered on, offering bullet-point findings: “Anglo and Latin countries most tolerant,” “Wide, interesting variation across Europe,” “The Middle East not so tolerant,” and the like. He offered country-level speculation: tolerance was low in Indonesia and the Philippines “where many racial groups often jockey for influence and have complicated histories with one another,” and lower in the Dominican Republic than in other Latin countries “perhaps because of its adjacency to troubled Haiti.”

Where did these numbers come from? As Fisher explained, they came from the long-running World Values Survey, which has polled attitudes around the world for decades. Fisher was drawn to the topic by news of a new paper, by a pair of Swedish economists, on the links between economic freedom in a country and its level of tolerance. (The paper was described in a post at Foreign Policy, itself a hub of foreign-affairs blogging.) To measure racial tolerance in particular, the authors used question A124_02 in the World Values survey, which asks respondents whether they would “not like to have as neighbors people of another race.” Intrigued, Fisher went back to the survey itself and, as he put it, “compiled the original data and mapped it out in the infographic” that led his post.

Although the results don’t pass the sniff test in the first place, I took a look at the data as well, in an effort to identify the exact problems at play. It turns out that the entire exercise is a methodological disaster, with problems in the survey question premise and operationalization, its use by the Swedish economists and by Fisher, and, as an inevitable result, in Fisher’s additional interpretations. The two caveats that Fisher offered in his post – first, that survey respondents might be lying about their racial views, and second, that the survey data are from different years, depending on the country – only scratch the surface of what is basically a crime against social science perpetrated in broad daylight. They certainly weren’t enough to stop Fisher from compiling and posting his map, even though its analytic base is so weak as to render its message fraudulent.

For one thing, the values for each country are indeed from different years, some in the past decade, others as old as 1990. As Fisher put it coyly, “we’re assuming the results are static, which might not be the case.” Indeed: by a rigorous methodological standard, this would be enough to throw out the cross-country comparison in the first place.

Second, a visit to some of the other tolerance questions in the A124 series reveals absurd results and design idiosyncrasies that should render the results of question A124_02, on race, suspect. The other questions ask respondents if they would accept a neighbor who had various other traits: homosexuality, a different religion, heavy drinking, emotional instability, a criminal record, and so on.

To take an example of the weakness of the data, it would appear that in Iran in 2000, only 0.9 percent of respondents “mentioned” an objection to having a homosexual neighbor, whereas in 2007, 92.4 percent mentioned it. In Pakistan in 2001, according to the survey, 100 percent of respondents “did not mention” objection to a homosexual neighbor. These are obviously particularly buggy examples, but these are the data points that the survey offers for analysts to work from; readers can visit the database to form their own opinion.

Moreover, the menu of traits available in the survey for respondents to tolerate or not tolerate varied by country. Thus, Iranians were asked about Zoroastrians; Puerto Ricans, about Spiritists; Tanzanians, about witchdoctors; Peruvians, inexplicably, about “Jews, Arabs, Asians, gypsies, etc.” (A124_33). In other words, the question about race was presented as part of a different menu of questions depending on the country, another red flag signaling a need for caution in isolating it and using it to produce grand findings. And further issues abound: as Fisher noted, self-reporting of prejudice is unreliable to begin with; as the scholar Steve Saideman pointed out, the “neighbor” question is not the best measure of tolerance; and so on.

But the biggest problem, of course, is that “race” is impossible to operationalize in a cross-national comparison. Whereas a homosexual, or an Evangelical Christian, or a heavy drinker, or a person with a criminal record, means more or less the same thing country to country, a person being of “another race” depends on constructs that vary widely, in both nature and level of perceived importance, country to country, and indeed, person to person. In other words, out of all of the many traits of difference for which the WVS surveyed respondents’ tolerance, the Swedish economists – and Fisher, in their wake – managed to select for comparison the single most useless one.

Fisher has an active social-media presence and his posts circulate quite broadly among international-affairs geeks and journalists in many countries; this one found the usual echo on the networks, plus a fair amount of skepticism. In India and Pakistan, Twitter readers were shocked by India’s ultra-high and Pakistan’s ultra-low racial intolerance ratings, both on their own merits and in comparison to each other. Lakshmi Chaudhry and Sandip Roy, at India’s Firstpost, wrote a detailed objection. (Less productively, Philip Weiss at Mondoweiss objected that Fisher’s map excluded Israel, implying that this deliberately overlooked racism in Israel – a spurious accusation, since there are no data available for Israel for question A124_02 in the WVS in the first place.)

On Twitter, Fisher engaged with Saideman but brushed off other queries, tweeting archly: “Coincidentally, readers from red countries are much more likely to say they doubt the methodology behind this study.” When I raised many of the issues in this post, he offered no response or acknowledgment at all, except to block me on Twitter. (That’s why I’m not bothering to seek comment from him before running this piece.) He summarized a few of Saideman’s objections in a follow-up post, but much of this goes down the rabbit-hole of political-science arcana about ethnic conflict and, for some reason, the specific case of Somalia. A more intellectually honest move would have been to take down the map and explain to readers why the exercise was doomed from the start.

Instead, we are left with a shiny color-coded “fascinating map” on the Washington Post site that sends a strong message of Western, Anglo-Saxon moral superiority, assorted with a mystifying portrayal of the rest of the world, and accompanied by near-gibberish interpretations – all based on a methodological process that fails pretty much every standard of social-science design and data hygiene. In other words, pseudo-analysis that ends up, whether by design or by accident, playing into an ideological agenda.

But the problem here isn’t the “finding” that the Anglo-Saxon West is more tolerant. The problem is the pseudo-analysis. The specialty of foreign-affairs blogging is explaining to a supposedly uninformed public the complexities of the outside world. Because blogging isn’t reporting, nor is it subject to much editing (let alone peer review), posts like Fisher’s are particularly vulnerable to their author’s blind spots and risk endogenizing, instead of detecting and flushing out, the bullshit in their source material. What is presented as education is very likely to turn out, in reality, obfuscation.

This is an endemic problem across the massive middlebrow “Ideas” industry that has overwhelmed the Internet, taking over from more expensive activities like research and reporting. In that respect, Fisher’s work is a symptom, not a cause. But in his position as a much-read commentator at the Washington Post, claiming to decipher world events through authoritative-looking tools like maps and explainers (his vacuous Central African Republic explainer was a classic of non-information verging on false information, but that’s a discussion for another time), he contributes more than his weight to the making of the conventional wisdom. As such, it would be welcome and useful if he held himself to a high standard of analysis – or at least, social-science basics. Failing that, he’s just another charlatan peddling gee-whiz insights to a readership that’s not as dumb as he thinks.

***

Painting India red: Why the global racism map is wrong

By Lakshmi Chaudhry and Sandip Roy for First Post

The map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries. Image courtesy: Washington Post

Washington Post has put together “a fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries,” a nifty infographic that paints the world in hues ranging from deep blue tolerant to a dark red racist. India is swathed in crimson.

The underlying data was culled by WaPo writer Max Fisher from the World Values survey which measures public attitudes around the world across a staggeringly broad range of issues, ranging from family values to political beliefs, from thoughts on women as single parents to taking soft drugs. The polls were conducted at different times between 1981 and 2008, and a number of questions were tested across many countries, while others were only polled in a couple of nations.   In this case, Fisher drew his map on the basis of responses to a single query (inspired by Swedish researchers who published a study doing the same):

The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors. Some respondents, picking from a list, that also included “drug addicts”, “homosexuals” , “unmarried couples living together” chose “people of a different race.” The more frequently that people in a given country say they don’t want neighbors from other races… the less racially tolerant you could call that society.

Fisher finds that more than 40 percent of respondents said they would not want a neighbour of a different race in only four of the 81 nations. These are India (43.5 percent), Jordan (51.4 percent), Hong Kong (71.8 percent) and Bangladesh (71.7 percent). And also this: Only 6.5 percent of Pakistanis objected to a neighbour of a different race, making them more racially tolerant than even the Germans or the Dutch.

Influenced by the expression of white racism in the West, they assume that preferring a neighbour of your own race — i.e. not black, Latino, Asian et al — is an accurate barometer of prejudice. AFP

The last is likely to prompt squawks of incredulity — Fisher dismisses it as an “outlier” — but it also points to the hazards of measuring a complex phenomenon such as racism in a cross-cultural context. Here are five reasons why we think Washington Post’s global map of racism doesn’t hold up to scrutiny — and why it is a fallacy to treat “racism” as a universal term.

One, what is ‘race’ anyway? In a nation where the chances of living next to someone of a different race is fairly remote, it is odd that we should hold such a strong opinion on the matter. This isn’t to say we are not bigoted, but the language employed by the survey question fails to capture the nature of our biases. For example, it is far more likely that Indians would prefer living next door to, say, a white expat than a person of a different religion. In fact, the presence of foreign tenants usually indicates a desirable neighbourhood. Unlike the West, ‘race’ is not a culturally charged term in India where differences of caste, ethnicity and religion are far more important. Indian respondents may have interpreted the term more broadly to include other categories of difference — but that still requires a leap of interpretation glossed over by the colourful map.

Moreover, both Fisher and the Swedes picked this particular measure of intolerance because of their own cultural bias. Influenced by the expression of white racism in the West, they assume that preferring a neighbour of your own race — i.e. not black, Latino, Asian et al — is an accurate barometer of prejudice.

Two, one size doesn’t fit all.  A question that merely looks at the kind of neighbours one might prefer is a rather clumsy and ill-fitting indicator of racism. India, for example, is full of housing societies of various persuasions. People who live in a Parsi housing society might prefer to have a Parsi as neighbour. Does that necessarily imply that everyone who lives in a Parsi housing society is ipso facto racist? Is a vegetarian housing society justified because it’s about a deeply-felt religious belief that cooking meat is polluting while an all-Brahmin housing society is not?  Is the Polish landlady in an old-style London house with poor ventilation being racist because she doesn’t want Indian tenants frying fish? But this matter of convenience could easily acquire a tinge of racism in a survey that just polled people’s preferences in tenants or housing association rules.

Three, to Chinatown or not to Chinatown? One man’s Chinatown might be another man’s ghetto, but the fact is people congregate with their own because it’s more comforting and just plain convenient thanks to little neighbourhood stores selling, say, little Mexican candies or Chinese flu medicines. Created by racist housing policies in many American cities, ethnic neighbourhoods, their Chinatowns and Koreatowns, are now flaunted with pride as bustling proof of their multicultural credentials, and touted as tourist stops, the  go-to places for an “authentic” taco or a bowl of ramen noodles.  And it’s a matter of regret when these neighbourhoods, whether its Brooklyn, New York or Japantown in San Francisco, become more integrated and therefore less “ethnic.” A city of many separate ethnic neighbourhoods could pride itself on its diversity but could well be viewed as a patchwork quilt of racism if its residents are polled in a survey like this.

Four, there’s race and there’s race. A catch-all option like “People of a different race” does not begin to capture the complexity of race relations and racism. It divides all races into two giant buckets – mine versus other. It has no way to measure what Indians think of a white neighbour as opposed to a black or Chinese neighbour. The real racism is revealed in our very different attitude towards different racial groups and the stereotypes we assign to them. As newly landed graduated students in the US, many desis are warned by perfectly well-meaning seniors in the Indian Students Association not to rent houses in the “black” parts of town — but no one ever warns them off predominantly white neighbourhoods. The survey does include immigrants/foreign workers as possibly undesirable neighbours, but fails to recognise that a “foreign worker” can be a diplomat or NGO worker in Afghanistan; Filipino maid or Indian labourer in the Middle East; a Latino farmhand in the United States.

Five, whatever happened to the Shias? If the ‘race’ option is problematic, so are the other options that were omitted. As we noted earlier, the choices offered to respondents often varied from one nation to another. The Indian version, for example, does not include caste as a criteria for exclusion. The survey does include specific groups as potentially undesirable neighbours but only in certain countries. For example, South Africans can pick blacks, Iranians can opt for Zoroastrians. Oddly, Slovaks, Spaniards, Czechs and Argentines along with Indians have the choice of nixing Hindu neighbours but Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans do not. More astonishingly, the options offered to Pakistanis do not include Shia neighbours — who only appear on the Iraq survey. Given the level of anti-Shia violence in Pakistan, and a historic Shia-Sunni divide, we can reasonably guess that the results would be less than heartening. Again, this does not mean that Pakistan is more racist than India. But its “outlier” status points to the need for culturally specific categories required to measure the level of tolerance in any given society.

A genuine cross-cultural survey of racism — or more precisely, intolerance — requires far more elaboration and care. Such a barometer would go beyond mere neighbour-preference and tap into active forms of bias. For example: questions linking violence to certain communities, be it in the form of riots or crime. The survey would take into account a nation’s specific racial, ethnic, or religious divisions, and the ways in which they find expression.

Until such a survey comes along, we can only assume what we already know about ourselves: India is a deeply biased society. We are notoriously racist toward black foreigners and our own fellow citizens from the North East. For instance, 43.9 percent of Indians are uncomfortable with neighbours of a different religion. But neither the World Survey nor Fisher’s map tells us whether we are more or less racist than the rest of the world. The so-called racism map is more egregious because it offers an alluring and misleading distillation of context-less data, painting entire nations as racist or liberal in one fell swoop. If we want to hand out scarlet letters for racism, we will need more than a paint-by-numbers palette.