Word: racisms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Needless to say, all of these reasons are fatuous, and the survey is simply disturbing. How can an American respond to this sort of racism coming from the mouths of people whom I otherwise respect? Hardly anyone has heard of political correctness in Moscow, and if they have, they scoff at it. Those crazy Americans making things complicated for themselves, they say. Russian society is keenly aware of its uniqueness as a nation, and it looks for commonality among people of other societies as well. Consequently, stereotypes can go a long way towards what is considered truth in Russia...
...lack of interest in being sensitive to other races means that even if Russians admit that there is some unjust discrimination towards Caucasians by the police, they shrug it off as a fact of life. After all, haven't Russians had their own hardships? If Caucasians must deal with racism, that is their lot. Why bother about a little thing like racism...
This kind of descent from racialism to racism reveals the thin line between the two and begs the question of what to do in a society that is becoming more heterogeneous, yet still has the mindset of living in a multinational empire where differences in ethnicity were strongly pronounced and a Great Russian dictatorial hand kept everything in place...
Russia is a country that has rarely thought about questions of race, but today a thinly veiled racism pervades the streets of Moscow. True, as a multinational empire (until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991), Russia had hundreds of different ethnic groups within its considerable borders, including Slavs, Muslims and Turkish peoples. During their reign, the Bolsheviks addressed the concerns of such a multi-ethnic state, trying various methods to stay atop their empire. At one point, they used a divide-and-conquer approach that led them to create 10,000 different governmental subdivisions within the USSR...
...more to do with the fact that they stood at the center of the empire with other ethnicities under their Great Russian thumb. Now, however, faced seriously with a racially heterogeneous (rather than multinational) society for the first time, Russians in Moscow have taken to a form of racism subtly different from that which exists in America...