In Backbench 18 (Final Issue) | Media & Culture
What Lurks Beneath
By Stephen Phillips
We tend to forget about other people’s views and realities. It is the nature of friendships, peer groups and relationships that we are more likely to surround ourselves with those of similar socio-economic class, views and experiences. Thus, to generalise, having ‘things in common’ can be seen as the defining factor of most forms of social bonding. Consider, for example, a young university-educated circle of friends, safe in their backslapping, mutual-admiration society where notions of racial/sexual equality are simply axiomatic. Exposed primarily (or indeed solely) to warm and tingly inclusiveness, they might, at least at a subconscious level, actually start to assume that pig-ignorance and associated racism is a thing of the past, most particularly among the young. Presumably, the recent scenes in Cronulla and surrounding suburbs would go a long way towards shattering any such complacent ideas. ‘Fuck off Lebs?’ Fuck off apathy, denial and delusions of harmony while you’re at it, Mr Rabid Sign-wielder.
If Australia is going to continue to promote itself as ‘inclusive’, ‘egalitarian’ and whatever other tepid adjectives the Australia-day council trawls from the thesaurus around January 26, then it’s actually good that the weekend’s poison has been sucked to the surface. Let’s really have the truth pushed out there. We might like to forget that Pauline Hanson grabbed a sizeable chunk of the vote a few years back, but it lurks there like a subcutaneous, pus-ridden cyst. It was 23% of the primary vote and eleven seats for One Nation in the 1998 Queensland elections, just quietly. And weren’t the One Nation voters all supposed to be old? Cronulla may be a long way south, but it sure wasn’t any further to the left last weekend. And most of the estimated 5000 people were under 25.
John Howard won’t concede that, in general terms, Australians are racist. Perhaps that’s essentially fair, but it is also politician-speak. A more honest appraisal, as another Backbench author has pointed out, might be that a lot of people harbour a range of fears, resentments and stereotypes about different ethnic groups and they come bubbling to the surface when frustration and anger peak, for whatever reason. I am not a Cronulla resident, so I have no idea about the events that led to such a built up of rage, beyond what a salivating media has told me. It seems likely that groups of young Middle Eastern men have been causing trouble for an extended period. I also have no doubt that the hysterical response this past weekend from that mob of Caucasian Australians was abhorrent and will have made the vast majority of Australians feel sick. I remember watching ‘Romper-stomper’ years ago and thinking it was scary but fanciful. The sight of deranged mobs chasing non-whites in broad daylight on national television reminded me again of my naivety.
‘Fuck off, we’re full,’ read one of the more inventive slogans scrawled across a t-shirt. The implication being: This is ‘our’ (read white people) country and you’re not welcome. Interesting. One wonders what sort of slogan the Aborigines of a couple of hundred years ago might have come up with if they had put their minds to t-shirt design rather than hunting and gathering?
“Fuck off, we were here first?”
“Fuck off, we don’t have alcohol and rampant disease and we don’t want it?”
“Fuck off, we’ve been here for forty thousand years and we don’t need your rules or genocidal practices?”
Speaking of genocide, that was another brilliantly conceived t-shirt from yesterday’s orgy of the moronic: ‘Ethnic cleansing club’. Wow! Nice one … a pat on the back and a VB for you, mate. Then, perhaps you should receive a taxpayer funded journey through Bosnia to speak to the survivors of the villages that experienced systematic rape and murder under that ‘banner’, or a quick jaunt to Rwanda to have a look first-hand at what a machete does when it’s smashed across a kid’s face.
Of course, criticising the weekend’s shrieking imbeciles is way too easy. We need to admit that with the many ‘pros’ of multiculturalism come the ‘cons’ of conflict and suspicion based on fear and perceived differences in values. If we love the warm, inclusive, self-congratulatory rhetoric so much then let’s get serious about putting it into practice. Education, education, education must be the key, along with prosecution of the real zealots, and implementing programs to get communities engaging. Above all, we have to recognise that all groups have their bad elements and it is utterly pointless to make sweeping statements. There are no easy answers, but with the Cronulla demonstration of the racism that ‘lurks beneath’, it’s safe to say that we need to work harder to address the problems, rather than paying the multicultural ideal constant lip-service and brushing the unpalatable truths under the carpet.
|
This article is Copyright © 2005 by Stephen Phillips. |
|
|
