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At least once, during a discussion of race, someone from my country came up with the little gem that "Australia doesn't have racism."
If they meant 'doesn't have racism' in the sense that non-whites aren't immediately lynched the moment they set foot on Australian soil, then, no, Australia doesn't have racism.
If they meant 'doesn't have racism' in the sense that racism doesn't exist in Australia...uh... Yes. Yes, it does.
Australia might be sunburned as Banjo Patterson wrote back in the 1800s, but it's certainly a country with a whitewashed history, a largely white government, and a host of racial and social diversity issues that aren't limited to the stealing of the land from the native peoples, the denigration of their human rights, and the stealing of their children to turn them 'white', but which certainly encompass them.
This is a country that had a White Australia policy of immigration until the mid-seventies. It's one that's used words like 'wog' and 'dago' to describe the Mediterranean Europeans that arrived in the sixties and seventies, phrases like 'the Yellow Peril' and 'the Asian Invasion' to describe the influx of Chinese immigrants in the seventies and eighties. It's a country that not only tolerated Pauline Hanson and her racist remarks, but made a political party out of them.
It's one that's currently seeing a gradual exodus of whites from certain parts of suburbia as streets and suburbs become 'ghettoized' - code for increasing numbers of people of visible Middle Eastern or African appearance - many of them refugees - moving in.
It's one where a couple of hooligans could call the captain of a rugby team a 'black monkey' because he was a Pacific Islander and not be promptly evicted from the stadium.
It's one where the government has stepped forwards to 'intervene' in the affairs of the Aboriginal people in the name of the welfare of Aboriginal children, and in which there doesn't seem to be too much progress on the 'welfare of Aboriginal children' front, but they've made a lot of arrests for guns, alcohol, and rebelliousness.
It's a country where race-related riots took place less than three years ago in Sydney - our biggest, most culturally diverse city - riots where 'being Australian' was directly coded to 'being white'.
Truthfully, if anyone ever tells you that Australia doesn't have racism, tell 'em they're dreamin'.
If they meant 'doesn't have racism' in the sense that non-whites aren't immediately lynched the moment they set foot on Australian soil, then, no, Australia doesn't have racism.
If they meant 'doesn't have racism' in the sense that racism doesn't exist in Australia...uh... Yes. Yes, it does.
Australia might be sunburned as Banjo Patterson wrote back in the 1800s, but it's certainly a country with a whitewashed history, a largely white government, and a host of racial and social diversity issues that aren't limited to the stealing of the land from the native peoples, the denigration of their human rights, and the stealing of their children to turn them 'white', but which certainly encompass them.
This is a country that had a White Australia policy of immigration until the mid-seventies. It's one that's used words like 'wog' and 'dago' to describe the Mediterranean Europeans that arrived in the sixties and seventies, phrases like 'the Yellow Peril' and 'the Asian Invasion' to describe the influx of Chinese immigrants in the seventies and eighties. It's a country that not only tolerated Pauline Hanson and her racist remarks, but made a political party out of them.
It's one that's currently seeing a gradual exodus of whites from certain parts of suburbia as streets and suburbs become 'ghettoized' - code for increasing numbers of people of visible Middle Eastern or African appearance - many of them refugees - moving in.
It's one where a couple of hooligans could call the captain of a rugby team a 'black monkey' because he was a Pacific Islander and not be promptly evicted from the stadium.
It's one where the government has stepped forwards to 'intervene' in the affairs of the Aboriginal people in the name of the welfare of Aboriginal children, and in which there doesn't seem to be too much progress on the 'welfare of Aboriginal children' front, but they've made a lot of arrests for guns, alcohol, and rebelliousness.
It's a country where race-related riots took place less than three years ago in Sydney - our biggest, most culturally diverse city - riots where 'being Australian' was directly coded to 'being white'.
Truthfully, if anyone ever tells you that Australia doesn't have racism, tell 'em they're dreamin'.
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But, personally? I feel that any person who says that there is no racism in their country, more than likely is racial themselves, that and the fact that they are completely stupid.
I can tell you this, I had always thought Australia was a purely a white country, until I was a teenbopper. None of the Aussie soaps---Neighbours/Home and Away ever showed a 'coloured person'
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They didn't, did they? I never watched the series, so I don't know but in the bits that I did see, there never were any Asians or Arabs or Africans. I'm not sure about it these days, but the article I linked to about an exodus from suburbia has a few stats, among them:
A 1999 study found that only 3% of roles in Australian television drama are filled by actors born in non-English speaking countries.
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But, nope, I don't ever recall seeing any coloured person...*shrugs* Aussie soaps annoy me though, because other than the 'coloured factor' the way they treat their gay characters piss me off. If an Aussie soap decides to actually have gay characters.
At the moment I'm watching this drama/soap called 'Out Of the Blue' and it is so obvious that they've added the lesbian couple for the sake of ratings, but that isn’t what pisses me off, what pisses me off is the fact that all the heterosexual couples when they kiss it is an actual kiss, and most of them just make out, but Peta and Poppy? I’ve only ever seen them quickly kiss each other on the lips, for a second, and wham…What kind of message does that send out?
Not only is Australia ‘racial free’ but homo free as well.
Thing with racism, as you know, it will never die down. People can say and do whatever they want but it will always still be around.
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But IIRC, both of them featured an all-white cast. I don't even think there were any Mediterranean people in the cast - I don't ever remember seeing them, but it was twenty years ago now.
I can't speak on the sexuality angle - there aren't many homosexual characters that spring to mind in the shows I watch, all of which originate in the US.
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I asked my sister - she said a few characters are of Italian decent, and there was a Russian, and there are some minor non-repeating characters who are not white. But it's not great.
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Word.
They had a gay person on Neighbours, I know. But I've never seen anyone non-white on it. Although I admit, I only watch sporadically.
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(Excuse me, it's going to take me a few minutes to wipe all that sarcasm off my keyboard.)
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(Now I have this image of someone shampooing their hair and singing: "I'm gonna wash racism right outta my hair!")
*offers you a box of tissues to help clean up*
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It drives me mad. There was the immigration minister saying we had too many Africans in Australia too, don't forget. And Pauline Hanson. Racism is rampant and disturbingly invisible.
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Oh, yes.
I wonder how much trouble the Africans would be in for saying that there are too many whites in Africa...
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The movie "Rabbit Proof Fence" opened my eyes to this horror. And reading the article about the riots on Cronulla beach brought tears to my eyes. :( It's foolish to think that the world has made any real progress in eradicating racism, because people always seem to find a new group of people to oppress. I suppose one of the problems is people being aware of exactly how widespread the problem is.
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Yes. But the other problem with racism is people being aware that the problem is not "other people" - the problem is "people like me" and "me", too.
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Were they high?
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Basically, my thesis is that because many modern Australians are pretty good at overlooking the skin colour of people with a nearly identical cultural background, they imagine this means they aren't racist-- even if they go into a racist froth pretty easily as soon as a group with a genuine difference in culture or circumstance appear. I'm sure you'd have people claiming they aren't racist because the like to have a talk about the footy with their second generation migrant friend whose folks are from south east asia, while campaigning against a muslim school in the area because 'those people aren't like us'.
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We <do tend to assume that just because we're not racist in one area, we can't possibly be racist in another, don't we? I totally agree that a lot of that which we term 'racial acceptance' is often built very much along the lines of 'how much they're like me', not 'how different they are from me'.
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But, personally? I feel that any person who says that there is no racism in their country, more than likely is racial themselves, that and the fact that they are completely stupid.
I can tell you this, I had always thought Australia was a purely a white country, until I was a teenbopper. None of the Aussie soaps---Neighbours/Home and Away ever showed a 'coloured person'
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They didn't, did they? I never watched the series, so I don't know but in the bits that I did see, there never were any Asians or Arabs or Africans. I'm not sure about it these days, but the article I linked to about an exodus from suburbia has a few stats, among them:
A 1999 study found that only 3% of roles in Australian television drama are filled by actors born in non-English speaking countries.
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But, nope, I don't ever recall seeing any coloured person...*shrugs* Aussie soaps annoy me though, because other than the 'coloured factor' the way they treat their gay characters piss me off. If an Aussie soap decides to actually have gay characters.
At the moment I'm watching this drama/soap called 'Out Of the Blue' and it is so obvious that they've added the lesbian couple for the sake of ratings, but that isn’t what pisses me off, what pisses me off is the fact that all the heterosexual couples when they kiss it is an actual kiss, and most of them just make out, but Peta and Poppy? I’ve only ever seen them quickly kiss each other on the lips, for a second, and wham…What kind of message does that send out?
Not only is Australia ‘racial free’ but homo free as well.
Thing with racism, as you know, it will never die down. People can say and do whatever they want but it will always still be around.
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But IIRC, both of them featured an all-white cast. I don't even think there were any Mediterranean people in the cast - I don't ever remember seeing them, but it was twenty years ago now.
I can't speak on the sexuality angle - there aren't many homosexual characters that spring to mind in the shows I watch, all of which originate in the US.
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I asked my sister - she said a few characters are of Italian decent, and there was a Russian, and there are some minor non-repeating characters who are not white. But it's not great.
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Word.
They had a gay person on Neighbours, I know. But I've never seen anyone non-white on it. Although I admit, I only watch sporadically.
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(Excuse me, it's going to take me a few minutes to wipe all that sarcasm off my keyboard.)
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(Now I have this image of someone shampooing their hair and singing: "I'm gonna wash racism right outta my hair!")
*offers you a box of tissues to help clean up*
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It drives me mad. There was the immigration minister saying we had too many Africans in Australia too, don't forget. And Pauline Hanson. Racism is rampant and disturbingly invisible.
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Oh, yes.
I wonder how much trouble the Africans would be in for saying that there are too many whites in Africa...
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The movie "Rabbit Proof Fence" opened my eyes to this horror. And reading the article about the riots on Cronulla beach brought tears to my eyes. :( It's foolish to think that the world has made any real progress in eradicating racism, because people always seem to find a new group of people to oppress. I suppose one of the problems is people being aware of exactly how widespread the problem is.
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Yes. But the other problem with racism is people being aware that the problem is not "other people" - the problem is "people like me" and "me", too.
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Were they high?
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Basically, my thesis is that because many modern Australians are pretty good at overlooking the skin colour of people with a nearly identical cultural background, they imagine this means they aren't racist-- even if they go into a racist froth pretty easily as soon as a group with a genuine difference in culture or circumstance appear. I'm sure you'd have people claiming they aren't racist because the like to have a talk about the footy with their second generation migrant friend whose folks are from south east asia, while campaigning against a muslim school in the area because 'those people aren't like us'.
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We <do tend to assume that just because we're not racist in one area, we can't possibly be racist in another, don't we? I totally agree that a lot of that which we term 'racial acceptance' is often built very much along the lines of 'how much they're like me', not 'how different they are from me'.
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My little moment of "wow" was in choosing an icon and realizing I don't have a SINGLE icon that features anyone non-white or even alien. I have a couple with just inanimate objects but...so doesn't count.
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My little moment of "wow" was in choosing an icon and realizing I don't have a SINGLE icon that features anyone non-white or even alien. I have a couple with just inanimate objects but...so doesn't count.