I somehow didn't connect this to racism when the press release came out.
My guess would be it cuts both ways. Genuine racists may get worse when their perceived "problems" diminish : removing the foreigners (or minoritites or whatever group is supposed to be a problem) won't make them more content, but will actually make them think things are worse than before. Conversely, if racism itself diminishes, then those trying to fight racism won't perceive this either, and suddenly the song Baby It's Cold Outside becomes worse than the Holocaust.
The idea that concepts depend on their reference class isn’t new. A short basketball player is tall and a poor American is rich. One might have thought, however, that a blue dot is a blue dot. Blue can be defined by wavelength so unlike a relative concept like short or rich there is some objective reality behind blue even if the boundaries are vague. Nevertheless, in a thought-provoking new paper in Science the all-star team of Levari, Gilbert, Wilson, Sievers, Amodio and Wheatley show that what we identify as blue expands as the prevalence of blue decreases.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/06/sexism-racism-never-diminishes-even-everyone-becomes-less-sexist-racist.html
When running out of targets, you expand the definition of target. This is transversal to society, and you can easily see it at work in both politics and science.
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