種族歧視------目光如豆Down Under

Noisy bigots drown out silent bias

Waleed Aly

Our real problem is the subterranean racism that goes largely unremarked upon and that we seem unable even to detect.

Racist rant on a Sydney bus

A passenger on a Sydney bus managed to grab the end of an aggressive racist rant on camera, after no one stepped up to stop the man verbally attacking Asian tourists on Saturday.

As opening lines in letters go, "I find you deeply offensive", is pretty direct. Fair enough. I suspect lots of people do. It's a natural consequence of media work. But then my anonymous correspondent decided to explain why: "You are foreign, you shall always be so. Piss off back to whatever Middle Eastern sinkhole you blew in here from."

There's nothing surprising about this. There's nothing even particularly rare about it. Some version of that letter arrives every few months. This one was particularly unvarnished – complete with references to my wife and "half-caste kids" and cheerful threats of the return of the White Australia Policy – but the message hardly varies: this isn't my country and my public presence is unwelcome, either because I'm a Muslim, or because in some racially determinable way not a "real" Australian. I've been accused of everything from taking elocution lessons to changing the spelling of my name to appear deceptively Australian before I unleash some Trojan conspiracy. Apparently, Aly is roughly equivalent to Smith. They're onto me.

I have almost no emotional reaction to this kind of goonish racism. It's simply too ridiculous to engage me. In fact, I'd completely forgotten about this most recent letter until racist ranting hit the headlines this week following yet another racist diatribe on a Sydney bus that was captured and posted to YouTube. It's at least the third such case in about four months. Hence the fresh round of debate on Australian racism that always seems to follow the same unedifying pattern.


Racist rant ... a screengrab of the video posted on YouTube.

First comes the shock, as though such incidents reveal something we never knew existed. Then comes the argument over whether or not Australia is a racist country. Frankly, I don't know what the argument means. Every country has racism. How much do you need before a country itself is racist? Is it a matter of essence or degree? Do we judge it by surveying legislation, newspapers or behaviour on public transport? And even if we can answer those questions, then what?

That argument is a dead end. It's more about a condemnatory label than the substance and nature of Australian racism. The real question is not about which adjective describes us. It's about how best to identify and respond to the racism we inevitably harbour.

Debating the meaning of the occasional racist tirade does not help answer that. It's just not that helpful to take extreme individual behaviour as the starting point on an issue like this. Sure, it's troubling. Sure, it's more common than we like to admit. Sure, it's a problem. But it's not the problem. The racism that really matters in Australia isn't the high-level, weapons-grade derangement that winds its way via YouTube into the news.


Waleed Aly Photo: James Brickwood

The truth is we can't compete with Europe for hardcore white nationalism or the US for white supremacist movements. We can't compete with Asia or the Middle East for the maintenance of an explicit, institutionalised and sometimes codified racial hierarchy. Our racial and religious minorities are not having their communities torched (though the occasional building has been firebombed), and our handful of far-right politicians aren't leading political parties that attract 20 per cent of the vote.

No, our real problem is the subterranean racism that goes largely unremarked upon and that we seem unable even to detect. Like the racism revealed by an Australian National University study, which found you are significantly less likely to get a job interview if you have a non-European name. The researchers sent fake CVs in response to job advertisements, changing only the name of the applicant. It turns out that if your surname is Chinese, you have to apply for 68 per cent more jobs to get the same number of interviews as an Anglo-Australian. If you are Middle Eastern, it's 64 per cent. If you are indigenous, 35 per cent.

This is the polite racism of the educated middle class. It's not as shocking as the viral racist tirades we've seen lately. No doubt the human resources managers behind these statistics would be genuinely appalled by such acts of brazen, overt racism. Indeed, they probably enforce racial discrimination rules in their workplace and are proud to do so. Nonetheless, theirs is surely a more devastating, enduring racism. There is no event to film, just the daily, invisible operation of a silent, pervasive prejudice. It does not get called out. It's just the way things are; a structure of society.

That is what bothers me about all the fuss that surrounds these occasional racist diatribes. It puts the focus overwhelmingly on the most exceptional kinds of racist behaviour. But are we capable of recognising racism when it isn't gobsmackingly obvious? Recall, for example, the widespread failure to understand why former Telstra boss Sol Trujillo felt racially offended at being caricatured relentlessly as a sleepy, sombrero-wearing Mexican on a donkey, or described as a "Mexican bandit". Certainly, criticise his management of Telstra but can we really not see the gratuitous racial stereotyping? And Trujillo is not even Mexican.

Or note the strange Australian comfort with adopting blackface. Remember when Qantas gave two Wallabies fans free tickets because they promised to dress as Radike Samo by blacking up and donning Afro wigs? No offence meant. Qantas apologised. But that's the thing about racism: it goes beyond intentions. The most insidious kind is just so ingrained it's involuntary. It's not about what Qantas intended. It's that no one responsible for the decision even saw the existence of the problem. That sort of thing worries me much more than some crude, anonymous hate mail.

It's easy to point at the barking racists on the bus precisely because they aren't us. They allow us to exonerate ourselves; to declare that if we have a problem with racism, at least people like us are not responsible for it. It allows us to escape self-examination of the racism we all probably harbour to some extent or other. That self-examination is crucial. Without it we have nothing to fix, and only other people to blame.

(4/4/2013 Sydney Morning Herald)

早兩日看到這則韓國碩士生，和來自韓國探望他的母親，在巴士上被「鬼佬」(Caucasian)種族羞辱的新聞，我本不打算為此做文章，因為目光如豆，世面見得太少的袋鼠，實在太多。白澳政策的遺害當然是因由之一。我也同意上文作者的講法，種族歧視，何處沒有，事例不勝枚舉，講之不盡。潛伏的種族歧視反而是癥結所在。上文引用澳洲國立大學的研究，原來具中國姓氏的人，在找工作時，要比其他人加倍努力，才有面試的機會。怪不得我第一封向市議會投訴的信會受到冷待，非動刀動槍不可。At the back of my mind我第一反應是，因為我這投訴人Bill Siu是中國人的名字，而並非Bill Silke，或者Bill Gate，甚至是Bill Gay。終於要「曬冷」，直接寫信給市長，搬了一堆legal jargon出來，才能奏効。

其實在澳洲男女同工不同酬的情況也相當嚴重，就算專業人士也如此。可見澳洲人的心智還是left much to be desired。

接二連三的種族歧視事件，當然沒有萬靈丹可解決。我對上三篇寫澳洲種族歧視的文(澳洲種族歧視：剃人頭者，人亦剃其頭 ，澳洲種族歧視之二 ，把頭鑽進沙中的鴕鳥 ，澳洲種族歧視之三：不能啞忍 )，一再提出對這些人控以行為不檢、刑事恐嚇，甚至講粗口，都好過這些案都不了了之。我講不了了之當然有根據，兩個月前朋友傳了一份由新南威爾斯州猶太人組織撰寫叫Inquiry into Racial Vilification Law in NSW的報告給我看，文中分析了新州種族歧視的情況，也提及從來都沒有檢控過煽惑種族仇恨的控罪。可見除了控罪訂立得狹隘之外，也沒有考慮其他可替代的控罪，而姑息了那些肆意挑弄種族歧視的人。另一方面也看不到中國人在這方面的作為，和諧的就麻雀耍樂，吃喝聯誼，相反的就互相攻訐，爭名奪利。除了法輪功，似乎看不到華人團體的社會運動，當然法輪功也並非搞社會運動的組織。我看不到華人團體在種族歧視方面具體做過甚麼。

這次巴士上種族挑衅，最諷刺的是，這韓國碩士生正在悉尼大學修讀種族歧視及移民等課題，突然間對題的材料活現眼前，真巧，抑或是俯拾皆是？