I absolutely hate race base politics it's B/S and driven by hate and insecurity
Some Australians seem more outraged by accusations of racism than by racism itself
This is a good opinion piece on the race
topic if you care to take the time & read:
Bizarre that we can be having a debate about enshrining a listening body intended to reset the dialogue between the original inhabitants of the continent and the settlers who turned up in waves after 1788 – and yet a necessary conversation about racism, led by people with lived experience of racism, be deemed out of bounds.
Let’s step through this. Indigenous Australians have proposed a voice to parliament. They’ve proposed a voice in part because institutionalised racism has sabotaged respectful listening to First Nations’ perspectives. Examples of institutionalised racism include but are not limited to: the lie that there was no one here when the British arrived; the documented atrocities of frontier massacres; the policies of forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families – practices that have contributed to a prevalence of intergenerational trauma, a studied phenomenon in survivors of the stolen generations. Racism is one of the factors that explains a measurable gap between outcomes for Indigenous Australians and the rest of the population.
But talking about racism makes people uncomfortable. When the subject gets broached, an unsettling dynamic can ensue. People can appear more outraged by accusations of racism than about racism itself.
Talking about racism is a trap. When Indigenous leaders and other people of colour express frustration about its dogged persistence, they are often subjected to tone policing. They can be caricatured as angry, ungrateful, shrill. And gratuitous characterisations – the pernicious stereotypes of the angry black man or the irrational black woman – are another form of silencing.
So we end up in the ludicrous situation where the only politically acceptable way to combat racism at a structural level involves never expressing frustration about racism just in case someone weaponises community discomfort about racism against the group experiencing it.
We end up here because we live in an unequal world in which the majority sets the terms for how minorities are permitted to express any grievances. These arbitrary rules of acceptable discourse are then generally enforced with a disturbing level of viciousness and a stunning lack of self awareness.
Two vignettes from the week illustrate this phenomenon. Langton was howled down in the bearpit of the House of Representatives and across much of the political media complex for sharing a visceral personal perspective about racism. Meanwhile at the National Press Club the shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price
shared her more upbeat perspective – that Indigenous people had not suffered harsh consequences as consequence of British colonisation. Price was given a standing ovation in the room.
This same dynamic also takes us to a central trope of the no campaign. The accusation goes: this voice must be defeated because it will divide Australians “on the basis of race”. This a distortion, and a deliberate one. The voice will not divide Australians on the basis of race; it will facilitate truth-telling about the lived experiences of racism. And many other things. As the Olympian and former Labor senator Nova Peris
argued this week, a constitutionally recognised advisory body will allow the lived experiences of First Nations people to be seen.
Langton was perfectly within her rights to posit that some Australians who are resolved to vote no on 14 October will do so because they harbour racist views, or are being influenced by a toxic sludge of negative messaging.
Racism persists. It has not been conquered. I’m confident that both Langton and Nampijinpa Price – and all my Indigenous friends – are experiencing the full force of that ugliness right at the moment. Knowing that makes me feel sick to my stomach.
But this isn’t the whole story.
Not everyone intending to vote no in the referendum is a racist, or awash in dicey TikTok agitprop. Some Australians will reject the voice because they’ve thought about it deeply and don’t like the model. Others will vote no because they can't find the bandwidth to investigate why another body is needed. Still more will vote no because someone they trust convinces them it’s a bad idea. Our most recent Guardian essential poll captures the current low trust environment with a simple metric. Information from family and friends was considered more reliable by many respondents than what they were reading in the traditional media or seeing on social media. Voter perceptions and motivations are always complicated. But a referendum staged as The Hunger Games isn’t a vehicle to untangle complication. There is only one rule in the death match arena – glove up, lean in and land your knockout blow.
