Tag: Racism
If Australia wants to welcome Chinese students and the world back, it needs to reflect on the climate into which it is bringing them
The plight of Indigenous Australians is demonstrated by the light sentencing of the two accused murderers of Lynette Daley, writes Rosemary Joiner.
via The Lynette Daley story: A failure in the justice system for Indigenous Australians
News Corp has certainly been fuelling Sinophobia as it did Islamophobia and anti African sentiments yet we have Racial vilification laws and the goverenment simply stands by and watches. (ODT)
Here are some recent examples of racism outbreaks:
people who appear to be Asian in origin being abused at supermarkets;
a Malaysian student being denied rental accommodation;
the Chinese being blamed for the virus;
Chinese restaurants seeing a marked drop off in patronage;
students at some schools being mocked as “Coronas” in the playground (my son has witnessed this personally);
my niece – of Indian ancestry – and another young girl being abused on a train in Melbourne — the abuse was about them “being the problem” that led the abuser to have to take his children out of school;
snide remarks being made to people of general “Asian” appearance; and
talkback hosts allowing these comments to go to air without regard for community outcomes.
While there is a strong element of truth in individual cases like this, let’s not turn it into something to generalise from either. Australian History is a documented record of Racism against Chinese for colour alone. Patterns of behaviour were culturally accepted and became systemic institutionalised for political reasons back then too, and those adversarial tactics have remained supported throughout generations today. In just the same way our Colonial attitudes did to Indigenous Australia.
Power and white culture reflected what the pecking order was among whites too but for other reasons such as religion or worse atheists primarily because they tended to deny the socially constructed order of things as natural or god-given. Socialists and Communists were a focus of danger, even more so and globally.
However, to say colour wasn’t predominant is to deny the history that landed on our shores and that still predominates and is pulled out so quickly and misused by Politicians for tactical reasons and in the case Scott Morrison PM is being used in a non-applicable but racial way in defense of Gladys Liu. Reverse Racism Black and Sino Racism aren’t Racism It’s the tactical cry of alt-right whites claiming victimhood where none exists. It’s calling Adam Goodes a Racist when he’s not. It’s a strategy of smoke screening systemic and institutional patterns of behaviour so ingrained in our cultural psyche to be regarded as usual and ill-mannered but little more. However, there is no equivalency between black and white racism because black yellow racism isn’t an institutionalised pattern of behaviour in Australia. (ODT)
It’s not racist, it’s politics: the treatment of Chinese students and MP Gladys Liu
Trump trumpets the low unemployment rate among blacks as proof that his body contains no racist “bones.”
But what Trump doesn’t say (and what the media doesn’t report adequately) is that the current unemployment rate for blacks remains about twice that of whites. The June 2019 national unemployment rate for whites was 3.3 percent compared to 6 percent for blacks. The June 2000 rate was 3.6 percent for whites and 7.8 percent for blacks. Since Trump has neither eased nor erased that long-standing unemployment rate disparity – one rooted in racial discrimination – he does not deserve credit.
via Presidential Racism: Shining Example Of America’s Somber Status Quo | The Smirking Chimp
GOP FINALLY Denying Trump’s Racist Rants. It’s Socialism (ODT)
The Republican party has come out swinging against socialism – a strategy sure to be a mainstay of its 2020 campaigns. “Our opposition to our socialist colleagues,” the Wyoming senator Liz Cheney claimed, referring to the congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley, “has absolutely nothing to do with their gender, with their religion, or with their race. It has to do with the content of their policies. They are wrong when they attempt to impose the fraud of socialism on the American people. They are wrong when they pursue policies that would steal power from the American people and give that power to the government.”
via America’s red scare is back. And it’s racially tinged | Kate Aronoff | Opinion | The Guardian
Less than two hours after Donald Trump claimed that he was “not happy” with supporters who chanted “Send her back” during his scripted rant against Rep. Ilhan Omar on Wednesday night, the president praised the same baying mob.
“These are people that love our country,” Trump said, echoing his defense of the white supremacists in Charlottesville who chanted “Jews will not replace us” as “very fine people.”
Israel was established and continues to exist in a mentality of constant war. Our racism is only a symptom.
via The origins of Israeli racism lie in our hyper-militarized society | +972 Magazine
Key points:
A US State Department official said the China is America’s first great competitor that is “not Caucasian”
Senior Australian government officials have been scathing of the comments
Analysts have warned this plays into China’s “race” narrative
It is not the Muslims’ fault that 51 of their number were killed. It is not the Greens’ fault that it happened. It is the fault of the individual, the movement that took him in and radicalised him, the ideology that informed him and the institutions that supported that ideology — such as the Australian media. In 2017, I stepped into the light of national mainstream media attention simply by putting on a ridiculous pantomime of real patriot groups. I succeeded in it with ease, because our mainstream media apply no critical thinking when broadcasting organised white supremacists. It was a fun failure to point out through MFP in 2017.
The silence of our communal leaders signals that remaining silent in the face of prejudice is legitimate, as long as it isn’t happening to Jews.
via Why won’t Jewish leaders condemn Netanyahu’s racism? | +972 Magazine
Sgt. Gregg Lewis was fired last year for his comments, first released publicly this week. He is fighting the firing and may be able to retire with pension.
via Police Sergeant To Precinct: If A Homeless Person Is Black, Just Shoot Them | HuffPost Australia
The St Kilda rally isn’t an aberration. It is the natural conclusion of the moral and intellectual collapse of Australian conservatism.
Scott Morrison deserves some praise. It’s not often a half-hearted condemnation of neo-Nazis deserves plaudits, but achievement is relative – among Australian conservatives, unequivocal criticism of the far right now puts you well ahead of the pack. That’s about the lowest bar that you can set, but rather than stepping over it, much of the commentariat takes it as an invitation to a limbo contest. The same people always claiming that “everything is racist now” seem to have decided that nothing is, not even Roman salutes.
This is why Scott Morrison can attack the gestures on display on the weekend, but he can’t attack the sentiments: because they’re shared by people on his front bench. “I have repeatedly asked of the crime-plagued Sudanese in particular: who let them in?” asked Andrew Bolt, and that’s the loudest voice on the Australian right.
It’s true that not every local conservative is like this. But the exceptions are marginal, or powerless, or paralysed, or can’t seem to wrest the megaphone away from the bigoted.
The left-wing caricature of the right-wing is that their ideas are just a series of shoddy disguises for sexism, racism and homophobia, that conservatism is the natural home of “homophobic, anti-women, climate-change deniers”, to quote the federal minister for women, Kelly O’Dwyer.
Who can say, here, that this wrong, when so many are determined to prove it? Where else, in the English-speaking world, is still having controversies over Sambo drawings in the 21st century? If recent years are anything to go by, the difference between the right and the far-right in Australia isn’t some ideological gulf. Too often, it’s what people are willing to say after they’ve had two beers.
So excuse my cynicism when Scott Morrison took to Twitter to tell us “I thank Vic police for their efforts dealing with the ugly racial protests we saw in St Kilda yesterday. Intolerance does not make Australia stronger. Australia is the most successful migrant country in the world. This has been achieved by showing respect for each other, our laws and values and maintaining sensible immigration policies. Let’s keep it that way, it makes Australia stronger.”
Far from being strong on national security, you are jeopardising it by alienating and marginalising groups in our society.
You unleashed the hounds, Scott and you did it for cynical political advantage. And now we are reaping what you sowed.
If you care about a safe Australia, we must send this mob of shit-stirrers packing. Get back under your rock and let decent people work together for all Australians.
Israeli police estimate that there are hundreds of thousands of illegal guns among Palestinian citizens of Israel, a community suffering from under-policing and high levels of violence. Are the guns the problem? And what can be done about it?
via ‘Israeli authorities treat gun violence in our community as an Arab problem’ | +972 Magazine
Media generated racism and collective punishment isn’t this a case of vilification against the media and the local council? (ODT)
These online people didn’t get my meaning, clearly. I wanted to be elsewhere because in a place like Berlin I am not an Aboriginal person living under the unique circumstance of Australian racism. I state I’m Aboriginal overseas and people don’t tend to erase my history, they don’t deny my humanity and they don’t criminalise me. They tend to be interested and respectful. I’m not on the back foot, continually having to prove that racism exists, that Indigenous people experience the brunt of it via being the displaced traditional owners and that our lives matter.
In Australia Murdoch media the largest media group in Australia happily allowed Andrew Bolt promote and give a platform to Southern, and Molyneus and News Corp did the same with Blair Cotteral why? The purpose is to increasingly fragment us culturally rather than allowing us to unite economically the difference between democratic equity and fascist constraint Internationalism and Nationalism (ODT)
In Austria this year a state-level branch of the ruling far-right Freedom Party of Austria proposed a new law requiring Jews to register with the government if they wanted to buy kosher meat (the same rule would apply to Muslims buying halal meat). One of the party’s candidates in January’s national election had stood down after it was revealed he was a member of a fraternity whose songbook included lyrics about killing Jews, including “step on the gas, we’ll manage the seventh million”. He claimed not to have read all the pages.
In Germany, the increasingly popular far-right party AfD recently disciplined some of its local politicians for exchanging Nazi and anti-Semitic imagery and messages on WhatsApp. There are police guards outside Berlin synagogues and violent attacks on Jewish children in German schools.
via Anti-Semitism on the rise in Europe along with racism in general
WE MAY LIKE TO tell ourselves we are not a racist country in Australia, but let’s face it, a lot of Australians are racist. They may not all be neo-Nazis, but they are racist nonetheless. In New Zealand, our nearest neighbour, they celebrate Maori culture with the haka at major events such as the football. In Australia, we have inquiries into black deaths in custody while booing and racially vilifying footballers who celebrate their indigenous culture from the sideline. On one hand, we celebrate cultures like Italian and Greek with food festivals and celebrate Chinese culture here with colourful festivals involving dragons and traditional dancing. But on the other hand, we celebrate Lebanese culture here with the Cronulla riots. Of course, we now look back on the Cronulla riots as a dark day in our history and we’ve come a long way since right?
Both sides of Government have labelled Fraser Anning’s maiden speech ‘appallingly racist’, saying it was incumbent on all politicians to at least give the impression they’re not inflaming race issues to garner votes.
via Government Denounces Blatant Racism, Calls For Return To Thinly Veiled Racism – The Shovel
Another Bolt from the white Right
Let’s be clear. Bolt’s language about Jews is redolent of the past. In response to the article, the President of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, Jennifer Huppert, said that there was ‘a rise in ultra-right-wing activity in Victoria and this type of activity can fuel antisemitic, anti-Islam and general racist debate and language in our community.’
The Australian Jewish Democratic society expressed their anger and then stated:
In response we say to Andrew Bolt and white supremacists everywhere: we are not interested in assimilating to White Australia. We are not interested in being subjects of your racist attacks. We – as migrants, as people who have lived in this country for a long time, as people who have faced racism and antisemitism of so many different guises over such a long period of time – are here to tell you that we will win and you will lose. Your vision for how society should operate will never succeed. We will continue to work with other others to ensure that a strong, cohesive, anti-racist, justice-based society is the future for “us” all.
Bolt also attacked the descendants of 1950s immigrants. He wrote that in Five Dock, Sydney,
‘ … one in seven residents still speak Italian at home.’
Clearly, Andrew Bolt’s othering is all-embracing — from white Jews and those speaking a foreign language to Muslims of any colour and brown and black people.
Five years ago, when I began my term as Race Discrimination Commissioner, I wouldn’t have said it was likely that we would see the resurgence of far-right politics. I wouldn’t have expected that the biggest threats to racial harmony would come from within our parliaments and media.
Race looms large. It’s there in the panic about “African gangs”, the warnings about multiculturalism veering into “ethnic separatism”, the questioning of a non-discriminatory immigration policy, the alarm about foreign influence by China.
Debates about such issues help set the tone for our society. They have made some groups in our society more vulnerable than ever to racism. In Melbourne, for example, Sudanese-Australian leaders have spoken about how members of their communities fear being targeted. Many are fearful about leaving their homes.
This is how racism works. It creates doubts and divisions – and it forces its targets into retreat. And where the seeds of racism are planted in political speech, they bear bitter fruit in society.
And it’s false to charge that calling out racism is an act of national disloyalty. Anti-racism is in fact an expression of patriotism. We fight racism because it diminishes our nation. We fight it because it is an assault on our values and our fellow citizens.
