Riots in Australia can be understandable. You can have riots anywhere and Australia is no different. But race riots in Australia? Now that is some serious crap. When I first read about The White Australia policy I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. White Australia? You must be frigging kidding me. And then I heard an idiot on TV say, “keep Australia white”. I thought it was April Fool’s day. Of course lazy commentators and people with their own agenda will use religion as the smoke screen for the latest riots blaming Islam yet again. Just remember a decade ago it was people of South/East Asian origin that were being hounded and then of course there is the sad experience of the Aboriginal people. The irony in all this is the roots of the prejudice associated with the White Australia Policy can be found in the class conflict between “Convicts” and “Exclusives” both groups of white people, one which felt more “pure” than the other and the other which felt more “entitled”. Of course it takes two to fight and I am sure there are some people on the other side equally deluded, not least the two clowns who beat up the lifeguards. There is when those who call themselves community leaders have to stand and be counted. It is not enough to make lovey-dovey-lets-all-sing-kumbaya speeches, as part of a multi cultural country and society you have a duty to reach out to the other communities in your society.
As Kenyans there is a lesson from all this. Remember Mboya’s quote on, “avoiding the pitfalls of those who run before us”? Not only on a tribal level but on a racial level as well. For example when you ignore one part of the country while formulating a development agenda justifying it with statements like, “well they are not really Kenyan” disaster will come, did come.
Pamoja Tuangamize Ukimwi
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December 13, 2005 at 10:13 am
One African Woman
Uncanny.
I’m reading ‘Clash of Civilizations’ right now and I was going to comment something similar to what Acolyte has commented.
He’s spot on.
Globalization yielding provincialism is the oddest thing yet.
December 13, 2005 at 5:28 pm
Mentalacrobatics
What perplexes me is how much fear the powerful have. You hear phrase like, “save the European farmer” save him from what? A massive 400% subsidy falling from the sky? Then you hear “they are diluting our heritage”, some of these countries have thousands of stories based on thousands of years. How are a couple of new immigrants going to dilute that? Even the vocabulary is scared, “swamped by refugees, over-run by asylum seekers” etc.
December 13, 2005 at 11:17 pm
Keguro
The Clash of Civilizations has been excoriated by every respectable academic.
I join them.
It’s as bad a thesis as one recently posted on the Chronicle of Higher Ed on “Why the West Won.”
Won what? The right to be genocidal?
Isn’t it interesting, and sad, that in 2005, we still live in Du Bois’s era, marked by the problem of the color line?
Though, I think it’s more complex–history is reshaping the color line–so maybe we live in the legacies we created, the fallout, as it were, of terrible political decisions.
For all that we seem to be valuing ethnic and racial identities more, we are also mixing more, and learning to appreciate each other more. Organizations like the World Socialist Forum have provided valuable spaces through which to talk across race, across religion, across nationality, to develop solutions to cross-continental issues of poverty and labor rights.
*stop writing now, Keguro*
December 13, 2005 at 11:23 pm
Sarah
Lets not also forget the history of ‘white ‘ Australians, they were convicts and prostitutes who were shipped from UK to Australia. These are there founding fathers, decades later they have a party called ‘one nation’ Pauline Hanson baby. My point is that this riots have been simmerig for a loooong time but who are they to judge other immigrants considering their background. The govt is in denial that there is no race problem. Up to the 70s the aborignes were classed as flora and fauna.
December 14, 2005 at 9:18 am
One African Woman
Keguro, I would argue that the problem is precisely that the more we mix, the more we seem to value our racial and religious identities.
Which is precisely what is curious about all this.
December 15, 2005 at 4:19 am
Raymond
Concur with Acolyte. Has anybody ever real tried to find out why so much prejudice against the Black race. Think about it when you talk about the beginning of Civilization you talk about Egypt but remember not the Black fox are talked about, but oh wait a minute! the great Timbuktu empire, ashanti even Ethiopia. We were the first people to use tool(stone age period). So what happened to us? how come Africa lags behind technologally? maybe all these people think we are stupid and damn coz we give them a reason??,
December 15, 2005 at 8:35 pm
brotherjero
Good to see that we are proud of our Holidays. We never forget we came from.. Good read….
January 11, 2006 at 12:27 am
Godhammer
Aboriginals were never classified as flora or fauna, that is a lie which has been spun because the minister for aboriginal affairs in australia up until the 1970s was also responsible for protecting native wildife. if anything, it shows how the issues of managing aborigional affairs was sidelined to a minor political portfolio. no-one thought they were plants. (!)
but hey, why let the truth get in the way of a good catch phrase….