Racism question for Aussie comrades

[Nehru]

Comrades,

An honest q about discrimination in Australia. I'd like to give my personal account first, and then you can contrast it with how it is today.

Many years ago in Melbourne and other areas, whenever I used to be beside a white woman or walking along with her, people gave weird looks, especially white women. It was almost as if they expressed disbelief at the prospect of a person of color walking with a white person. It was worse than discrimination in that it was too subtle and too insulting.

Have things changed for the better now? Or has racism become more explicit? What's the situation there?

Regards,
Guna

[Niccolò Rossi]

Many years ago in Melbourne and other areas, whenever I used to be beside a white woman or walking along with her, people gave weird looks, especially white women. It was almost as if they expressed disbelief at the prospect of a person of color walking with a white person. It was worse than discrimination in that it was too subtle and too insulting.

Well, 'people of colour' is not a phrase used here and one I feel pretty uncomfortable with. I'm not entirely sure what a 'person of colour' is. Is an East Asian person 'of colour'. What of Desi people? Arabs?

More to the point, this is definitely a question to which one can only given an anecdotal answer. I live in South-West Sydney. It is an area particularly notable for the relatively large proportion of the population coming from Asia (particularly Vietnam, Cambodia and China) and the Middle East (Lebanon and Iraq). To give you a better idea, of the student body of the local public school I went to, 70% came from non-english speaking backgrounds. Of my grade, no more than a quater were white. It's a similar situation in all the surrounding suburbs.

In this kind of environment, interracial relationships are very common and go by without much notice. It's just a normal thing. In fact, I'd say it's quite common for people my age to have not been in a relationship with a person of the same ethnic background.

In different social circles and in different parts of Sydney, let alone other parts of the country the situation is very different from my understanding. Now I'm at uni, I know people who went to schools without a single non-white. Especially in regional areas outside of Sydney, the population is much less diverse.

A case in point, my uncle and his family live in Picton, just over an hour south west of Sydney city. It's essentially all white. Last Christmas and argument was had at family dinner over a dickhead remark made about the area where we live and the asian and middle eastern population. He denied being a racist, with the catch that he didn't want 'them' living next to him. The question of interracial relationships is pretty out of the question in this kind of context.


Have things changed for the better now? Or has racism become more explicit? What's the situation there?Public opinion surrounding interracial relationships is only one expression of the state of racism in Australian society. Regardless of whether or not public opinion has changed in this regard, we should not for a second pretend that Australian society is still racist to the core.

Nic.

[Tim Finnegan]

Well, 'people of colour' is not a phrase used here and one I feel pretty uncomfortable with. I'm not entirely sure what a 'person of colour' is. Is an East Asian person 'of colour'. What of Desi people? Arabs?
Well, put simply, are they or are they not considered to be "white" by Australians-in-general? It's a relative concept, referring to ideological constructions of race, rather than an absolute taxonomisation.

(Of course, it can become a bit clumsy when you get "sorta white" people- Lebanese-Americans today, say, or Jewish-Americans historically- so it doesn't offer a complete picture of ethnic relationships within any given society. It's best to treat it as a quite rough categorisation.)

[Savage]

Well, put simply, are they or are they not considered to be "white" by Australians-in-general?

Yes this sort of categorization does exist in Australia, but like nic said 'people of colour' isn't used (at least not largely). As for the state of racism in Australia it's hard to give a sort of overall analysis, If it was many years ago that you were here then you could probably note some considerable improvements in some areas of expressed racism, but things like the treatment of indigenous Australians by the police seem to be largely unimproved, and the impact of islamaphobia is hardly underwhelming.

[Hiero]

I live in an interesting area, I live in Newcastle and it is primarly a white wash area. Alot of white people here have had minimal interaction with non-White people. So racism has a specific style here. For instance someone who had lived in Adelaide for a long period was shocked that people here in Newcastle say the word "wog" so much. I Adelaide you wouldn't dare say that in public I was told, but people around here say it freely.

When did you experience this racism and what city?

[Niccolò Rossi]

I think also, with regard to interracial relations and their acceptance or lack there of in Australia, we have to consider the government's policies towards aboriginal peoples. I think unlike the US where there was a culture that discouraged 'inter-breeding' and encouraged segregation, the opposite was true to a large degree in Australia. It was believed that by marrying off 'half-casts' (a person of mixed aboriginal and european heritage) to whites, within 'x' generations the aboriginal blood could be 'bred out'. As such, interracial marriages in this context were promoted.

So this gives I suppose another dynamic.

Nic.

[Ned Kelly]

Nic is right, It all depends on the area, really. I'm from Preston, in the north of Melbourne, where the racial mix is so diverse that you'd have to make a hell of an effort to maintain 'racially pure' relationships. This is true of most of the lower- Socio economic areas in the city. The higher Socio - economic areas tend to harbour racism as the ethnic make up is largely white, the same applies for most parts of the bush.

[RedRise]

I live in Perth, WA, and at my school I'd guess only about 50% of the students are of Anglo origin. Of course there is still racism but its treated differently and it is almost divided into categories. For example, if you expressed a truly racist opinion and it was clear that its what you really believed, you would never hear the end of it and might even get a hiding from the teachers. But if you tease classmates by using a racial stereotype (light-heartedly), or if you mock your own racial heritage, that's ok. I personally don't think either form is acceptable but I'm fairly confident that there isn't any racial hate - just kids trying to piss each other off as per usual.