The Thai are racist and chauvinist, since always. Even if they’ve kept their doors open to the Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabs, Persians, Dutch, English, Americans etc etc, their colonies, and religions since the 16th century, they experience these contacts with a sense of reassuring superiority based on simple conviction and more than a century of regime propaganda based on the ridiculous idea that they’ve never been colonized.
The thing that angers us Farang the most in dialogues with the Thai is that at the first difference of opinions over whatever subject, they insist: we Thai are different and you Farang cannot understand.
The mark of chauvinism and racism is especially relevant for the upper-middle class, but at the lower levels their view of the Farang as a fountain of economic assistance for their basic needs and social climbing attenuates but does not erase their base sentiments: there’s always discrimination behind the tourist brochure smiles. The government officially sanctions double entry fees to museums and national parks: Westerners pay 10 times more with respect to the Thai because the “Farang are rich”.
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