Serious question: if someone claimed deaths by smoking are up or down, there’s stats we could rely on to tell if that’s the truth or not. How do we tell the amount of racism in 2025? What statistic or statistics are indicative of racism?
Comment on Are we all suffering from "future shock" in 2025?
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 12 hours agoI think it depends where you place the starting point. It’s certainly less racist than the 1800s, or even the 1940s. But if you only measure your own lifetime (so call it starting at the early 1980s), I think it did dip in the late 90s, and stayed in the dip until about 2008. Then it came soaring back to 1980s levels.
And now it feels like it’s rising, being used as a tool of fascism.
yarr@feddit.nl 12 hours ago
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I use general reactions of society. If you see things like protests, societial movements, riots, demonstrations, ect, it may not be an exact number, but in general if people are mad enough to take to the streets, we know those issues are on the rise.
And if everything is mostly calm, you know those issues aren’t the dominant issues of the day.
It also is harder because the internet has changed society. Now issues can grow and gain exposure to a global audience instantly. So it’s no longer grassroots movements. Thats what made the million man march so impressive. A million black men, marching in suits, because they knew if they didn’t dress up they would be mocked as thugs, all without the media to help them, all organized this way exclusively through word of mouth. And they had a million men march with them.
It wouldn’t be so impressive today. Now you can just post a thing online, the whole world sees it. Nobody gives a shit about clothing, and the march would be a petition online. And nobody would care.
jpreston2005@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
nobody would care
Information Overload. The march doesn’t matter. The people who did the upsetting thing have already gone on to do several more upsetting things by the time we’ve started marching against the first one. The people reporting about the upsetting thing miss the point but it doesn’t matter because nobodies actually paying attention, it’s just fluff on in the background. The white noise we need to go about our day maintaining some false sense of “staying up to date” when it’s impossible to do. The torrent of information comes from all over the globe and never stops growing. Even if everything is suddenly perfect in your neighborhood, city, state, or country, it doesn’t matter because there’s a genocide somewhere else, and the pope died, and there’s a famine and a new study that says the sweet treats you like are going to kill you and the stock market is down but it’s back up by the time you check and you should’ve bought the dip so you could actually retire but you were too busy ignoring a TV while looking at bad news on your phone and eating a sweet treat because nothing feels real anymore and you just need a hit of dopamine before you start panicking and reach for the gun in the nightstand to put a bullet in your brain because at least the bullet will be real and the silence afterwards won’t be temporary.
djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 hours ago
Just spitballing, but you could track it by number of hate crimes? There’s the issue that the United States notoriously underreports hate crimes, so you might not be able to find accurate numbers, but I think that’s the best hard statistic you could find for racism
yarr@feddit.nl 7 hours ago
Hmm, that’s an interesting one. As a hypothetical, it feels possible to have a world that is crime free, but still has racism, so I see a possible hole. I guess another thing that will complicate it is that the definition of hate crime has evolved over the years.
treadful@lemmy.zip 9 hours ago
The only real change was how open those assholes felt they could be. Doubt they increased or declined at all. They just got platformed.