an easy way to spot racism & bigotry:
Whenever an ethnicity, religion, class or gender is blamed for something: just try to notice whether someone accepts this without considering whether the blamed group is just a scape-goat(De: Sündenbock).
The phenomenon and concept of scape-goating is so familiar and obvious that, whenever there is some problem that is causing pain in society and a specific class or sub-set is blamed for the problem, any non-racist will naturally react by [first] asking themselves whether the blamed group is just being scape-goated.
And it is easy to notice the opposite – when someone accepts the blaming/judgement of an ethnic or cultural group without pausing to ask themselves whether this might just be another case of selecting and using a scape-goat to deflect discontent/resentment away from wherever the true responsibility lies.
scape-goating: There is a simple and broadly well-understood phenomenon of the master in a master-slave relationship using a slave or category of slaves as a scape-goat for problems that would otherwise impact the master’s standing in some hierarchy or power-relation, e.g. would reduce the respect or loyalty that the master commands. And this can be expanded beyond literal slave-masters to include individuals or groups or classes that control or preside over whichever processes/structures/institutions are actually* causing or contributing to the problems in question – or even just to the [economic, societal or other] structures themselves in cases where nobody is really in control and nobody really understands what’s going on or how we got here.
* – at least in the minds of those people who are in control, as this subjective picture/model is what is causing them to feel a need to deflect blame – so this is actually independent of where the true cause is.