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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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(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*