In recent weeks, there have been some YouTube channels espousing blatantly racist content that more than likely violates hate speech legislation here in Japan. Some of these videos, made by Japanese, even target blacks living in Japan, proposing we are a danger to this country.

I won't waste my column space addressing piecemeal their wildly skewed assertions, and I refuse to give these channels even a smidgen of traffic. Nor will I provide links to the Breitbart/Fox News/Stormfront white supremacist sites from where a lot of their fake news and biased research is derived.

One thing these videos have in common is that they pander to people who live in a reality where race or skin color is a shortcut to determining a person's character and predicting their behavior. This is an exceedingly popular propensity the world over, and one that has caused a great deal of harm over the course of human history.