Australian stereotypes

The School That Tried to End Racism…

Posted on by ha7440

The Brave and Multiracial Marc Fennell (a fellow Eurasian) hosted a program recently on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) called ‘The School that Tried to End Racism’. It was an interesting foray opening up discussions on racial discrimination in Australia with school kids. I really liked the premise of this show and I do think (evident from posts on this blog) that it is a discussion Australia needs to have. The stiff upper British Lip has surely evolved beyond colonial times to open up for conversational engagement on ‘icky’ matters. Perhaps Australia still isn’t ready for it.

The show starts with introducing topics of race, bias/prejudice, privilege and stereotypes, all worthy topics when discussing racism. A classroom of Year 6 students from a primary school in South West Sydney participated in the program and specific attention is given to certain students in the group. It was interesting to see the different personalities, the maturity and ability to articulate some fairly complex thoughts to the camera and home audience. If anything, the program demonstrated how insightful and articulate school kids can be.  

Marc Fenell’s social media predictably indicated many in Australia viewed the program for it’s true intent and premise with reviews being mainly positive. However, as to be expected from right wing media outlets like Sky and The Australian the criticisms came thick and fast. Especially scathing was an article written by Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian accusing the show of priming critical race theory in schools, creating that old trope ‘victims’ and therefore causing division amongst Australians. Out of my own curiosity as to why this woman was privileged with a mouth piece, further research into Ms Albrechtsen’s background revealed she’s a lawyer and was working in the Law Faculty of Sydney University. Around John Howard’s prime ministership, she was parachuted by the Liberal party onto the ABC board. Ms Albrechtsen described the ABC workplace as a ‘soviet style workers collective’. I began to think that Ms Albrechtsen was indeed shackled up in a Soviet Union collective in her younger days and that perhaps she’s had personal experience to enable her such conclusions? I’ll go one step further on account of her article about the program; does Ms Albrechtsen have any experience whatsoever of what it means to be discriminated against according to race? Why is it in Australia the loudest fog horns against a particular issue often do not have first-hand personal experience of the issue? What gives these people the right to voice any opinion about any matter when they can’t give a credible account of experiencing the topic first hand?

One thing I will say in defence of Ms Albrechtsen is that I can understand how the show would put a few high bridged western noses out of joint. There was a moment in the show when the kids were asked to split into their affiliation groups and I noticed the conveners were careful not to add racial labels, but nevertheless, low and behold the kids split into roughly the white group and the ‘others’ group. I was I had to say a little uncomfortable about the finger pointing ‘shaming and blaming’ the white kids for their privilege. I did feel completely uneasy when they were made to almost take the blame for being the skin colour that is automatically assigned privilege and the racial aggressors here in Australia. Trying to highlight racial stereotypes in the program and then doing exactly that to white kids made this a problematic exercise in my mind. As an allied health therapist, I’ve seen white underprivileged children who will never, despite the inherent bias that works in their favour here in Australia, will never catch up to their privileged white counterparts. The years of abuse and trauma would ensure that.

Why should a young white girl be forced to admit that she benefits from a system she had little say in manufacturing? And yes, I understand that this awareness may spark some empathy to want to change systems for all involved but that’s the rub of this show- will it actually make any systemic changes here in Australia? I’m not sure putting off white people with a finger pointing shaming activity is going to do that.

I guess this is why everyone leaves this ‘icky’ issue of addressing racism alone. When actions, behaviours and microaggressions are interpreted mostly as racism then we start to see the world as a very binary platform that plays into the ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality and we’re trapped into the mindset of the perpetrators. This mindset holds dear homogeneity, that ‘youse all are like that’, creating stereotypes that label the innocent. In addition, racial discrimination occurs between non white migrant groups in Australia. I’ve been privy to many conversations when racist stereotypes of an ‘ethnic’ group have been expressed by an ‘ethnic’. Being a perpetrator and aggressor of racism is not purely the domain of the white colonists. When examining racism, we need to do and be better than that. I’m by no way diminishing the experience of lived racism (having experienced this myself) and I am of course talking about the nebulous variety of perceived racism certainly not the systemic ones where numbers and facts like incarceration rates, deaths in custody, poverty rates, infant mortality, early death etc are well documented.

Which comes to my next point. I thought the activities in the show that actually did create communication, empathy and perhaps the realisation of privilege and discrimination was best done when the kids actually spoke to each other. The cut out cardboard friends created communication, dialogue and ultimately new friendships. The ability to talk about being bullied and called all different types of racial names and learning to process those experiences as a group was again a productive activity that helped everyone better understand how someone feels when being at the receiving end of racial abuse. Going out into the community and interviewing community members of different backgrounds again broadened the experience beyond the school gates and made the kids realise the real-life problems some adults deal with in terms of race. I could see that these activities took the heat off one particular group for being ‘perpetrators’ but also allowed the ‘recipients’ (yes Ms Albrechtsen I’m careful not to use ‘victims’) to express themselves to the point of showing raw emotion. The outpouring of how someone feels is surely enough to elicit empathy, with the inability to empathise based in my opinion in an underlying neurological/psychological issue.

Marc Fennell took on this project perhaps as a personal journey with first hand experiences of racism growing up here in Australia and I completely understand his feelings, his experiences and his perspective. This was a hugely brave topic to address due to the complex and sometimes nebulous nature of racism. I take my hat off to him for living up to the Aussie value of least ‘having a go’ at tackling that icky issue of racism here in Australia which is more than any public figure, politician or celebrity has bothered to successfully do.

Whitewashing The Australian Identity

Posted on by ha7440

What and who is an Australian?

My Answer: Anyone Albino. Wait. I’m following it with the Larrikin Caveat: Just Joking.

Last Saturday a lovely Nepalese man came to my door to pick up a couple of things. We got chatting. Half way through the conversation he bluntly tells me and asks ‘You’re not Australian, where do you come from?’  I asked him to guess and of course, as usual, he was way off the mark.  You see an Australian is someone white, preferably the striking image of a displaced Pom (English person). To be a person of any other colour, especially olive, is to be ‘from elsewhere’. Not so long ago and in some media portrayals today, this excluded indigenous people too.

I went to school with an Australian Chinese girl who was 3rd generation Australian but looked Chinese because her father who was born in Australia of Chinese parents, married a Hong Kong Chinese immigrant.  She struggled all her life with identity as she looked Chinese but spoke English only and with a broad Aussie accent. The Chinese didn’t know what to quite make of her and she didn’t hold any Chinese values in how she saw the world but she has NEVER in her life been mistaken for an Australian- the country where she was born, holds the same values, pays taxes in, and is a law-abiding citizen. As she tells me constantly, ‘I feel invisible’. Well done to those past PMs of Australia- your social engineering to make this a white country to the exclusion of the indigenous and others has worked.

Meanwhile, we have the likes of 10 pound Poms settling into Australia in the 1950s. Their offspring would be up to 3rd , some 4th generation Australians but no-one, absolutely no-one would ever mistaken them for being from elsewhere, even though their families would have spent an equal amount of generational time in Australia just like post war Greeks, Italians and everyone else of a non-white hue. In fact, we even managed to elect a PM from a 10 pound Pom family.

At what point in time do non-white migrants become part of the National Australian Identity?

SHE COULD BE AUSTRALIAN, CANADIAN, AMERICAN, NEW ZEALAND.

HE COULD BE AUSTRALIAN, CANADIAN, AMERICAN, NEW ZEALAND.

BUT WHY DO WE QUESTION THE IDENTITY AND NATIONALITIES OF THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE DESPITE BEING BORN IN ANY ONE OF THE FOLLOWING COUNTRIES:

AUSTRALIA, AMERICA, NEW ZEALAND, CANADA?

Check out this article on this topic a former Human Rights Commissioner :

https://www.smh.com.au/national/why-being-an-australian-citizen-doesn-t-mean-others-will-believe-you-truly-belong-20190205-p50vus.html

Here’s another article in 2021 again speaking about the issue of whitewashing in Australian films:

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/apr/18/whitewashed-why-does-australian-tv-have-such-a-problem-with-race

In addition, SBS released in 2021 an excellent documentary on the first Africans that were transported to Australia in the late 1780s. Little was known about these folk and yet they contributed significantly to early settlement in Sydney and Melbourne.

Here is an article about the documentary by Kate Meyers:

Santilla Chingaipe shares the stories of the trailblazing men and women who made big contributions to our history.

John Randall, Billy Blue, John Martin, Fanny Finch, John Joseph. It’s a list that should read as a roll call of some of the most influential figures in Australia’s history, but if their names are unfamiliar to you, chances are you’re not alone. While they should be as central to the post-colonial narrative as the Ned Kellys or Mary Bryants that have secured their place within our national mythology, these figures have instead been largely ignored.

For journalist, filmmaker and author Santilla Chingaipe, the absence of the African-Australian story within prevailing historical accounts is a reality she is determined to change as she investigates the circumstances that saw them fall out of national consciousness in her new documentary, Our African Roots. Inspired by the evidence collected as research for her upcoming book of the same title, Chingaipe uncovers the contributions that individuals of African descent have made to our continent from the time of the British invasion. The rhetoric around African-Australians in contemporary society, and the consequences of this, particularly on younger members of the community, inspired her to approach the issue from a completely different angle.

Our African Roots_Host and co-producer Santilla Chingaipe

‘Our African Roots’ host and co-producer Santilla Chingaipe.
Source: Warsan Mohammed

“What drove me to the archive was the so called ‘African crime wave’ and the fact that a lot of commentators and people in the media were talking about this as some sort of Australian rite of passage,” she says.

“It was as if every other migrant group had copped some sort of negative opinion and chatter, and it was now time for the spotlight to be on the African community. I knew that wasn’t right.”

It was a need to challenge this attitude that saw Chingaipe begin her investigation into the very first African migrants to land on these shores. 

“If I can find evidence of these people as early as the First Fleet, then surely the discussion can’t be about the fact that they are newly arrived groups experiencing this discrimination. There must be more to it,” she explains.

It turns out that when colonists first arrived on Australian shores in 1788, there were indeed ten convicts of African descent among them. It’s a fact that remains largely undocumented in most school history books. It also fails to capture the important role of these convicts, and their ongoing significance to Australia’s cultural landscape. There’s a personal frustration with the limited reference to these early settlers for Chingaipe; when her family migrated from Zambia when she was just a child, she struggled to connect with the historical narrative she was taught and recognises the impact this can have.

“A lot of young African-Australians talk not just about the overt racism they experience, but also how it impacts their sense of belonging and identity,” she explains. “It’s already hard enough being a young person trying to find your place in the world without having the added burden of discrimination and racism thrown into that.”

“(The absence of this history) ultimately reinforces this idea that one group might be inherently predisposed to doing these amazing things and everyone else isn’t. A lot of people don’t know these stories, they’ve been erased.”

One such story is that of Billy Blue, a well-known figure within early colonial Australia who, despite having a great many contemporary Sydney landmarks named after him, has largely had his African heritage erased from popular imagination. Entrusted with the responsibility of transporting people to the sparsely inhabited northern side of Sydney by Governor Macquarie, Billy was arguably the first person to connect the two sides of the harbour. His legacy is not only the communities that came to be established on the lower north shore, but also the ingenuity and determination he displayed in the face of an Anglo-dominated society.

North Sydney Council historian Ian Hoskins and Our African Roots host and co-producer Santilla Chingaipe on the trail of African-American convict Billy Blue who became Sydney harbour’s first licensed ferryman.

North Sydney Council historian Ian Hoskins and Santilla Chingaipe on the trail of convict Billy Blue, who became Sydney harbour’s first licensed ferryman.
Source: Tony Jackson

Though parts of Billy’s tale are dispersed throughout historical commentary, others like Fanny Finch have, until recently, been almost entirely omitted from the conversation. As Chingaipe discovers in her conversations with Fanny’s descendants in Castlemaine, she was a pioneer of Victoria’s gold rush era, a single mother and business owner who campaigned for the right of women to vote. Why then has our society, which applauds Australian achievement and success, not embraced these stories?

“It’s one thing to outlaw and abolish racist legislation, it’s another to do the same with cultural attitudes,” Chingaipe says. “How do you begin to get people to unlearn something that they’ve been wired to think for a good seventy years?”

“Part of it is who gets to tell the stories. Even early on, I was very reluctant to publish the research because I kept thinking, I am a young, black woman; people like me don’t tell history, people like me don’t write history.”

It’s lucky then that Chingaipe overcame this uncertainty as it is her curiosity, expertise and obvious passion for sharing these stories that engage audiences, as she brings to life more than 200 years of African-Australian history. Though it’s clear that the existing accounts lack depth, the documentary is not an attack on the legends around which Australian identity has been formed, but rather an attempt to showcase components of that identity that are too often neglected.

“I do hope that when we do think about the stories that we tell ourselves that reinforce a certain form of Australian-ness, that we recognise that Australian-ness does not mean whiteness or relationship to the Anglo empire,” she says.

“I also hope that people embrace these histories and I hope it leads us to a place, as a country, where we start telling the truth in many ways about the foundation of colonised Australia. Australia’s foundational story is way more interesting and diverse than we were told.”

Realised and Rewarded Aesthetics for Some Only

Posted on by ha7440

I write this as an aging ethnic female with passions and desires for a creative outlet that of course have not been and will never be realised. Domesticity, responsibility, societal norms, and yes limited self esteem have shaped my life to a predictable existence and an existence contained within the parameters of my gender, race and socioeconomic standing. I should not ever think my life could have ever been different when white women themselves struggle to be artistically realised as equals and those who have, usually have a short shelf life. I speak of actresses, directors, musicians, writers, in short all story telling artists here.

What has spurned this rant ? I’ve had an intense past two weeks of admiring Mr Depp and I’ve always had an admiration for those who Story-tell by film, especially those who’ve managed to play the game and still hold their creative truth (love Wes Anderson, Tim Burton, Cohen Brothers). I’ve admired them for being able to realise their talent and find their expression, knowing full well being a white male helps. In short I’m a sucker for Hollywood Marketing and the Film Industry be it in the US, UK or Australia. But I also know who gets noticed, who gets ‘picked up’ and who the Media Machine will deem which actor beautiful and talented.

Case in point here is Australia of course. Look at who gets exported to Hollywood? Chris Hemsworth, Liam Hemsworth, Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, Melissa George, Cate Blanchette, Bella Heathcote, Toni Collete, Rachel Griffiths. All pale of the palest white, good Australians, will only be known as Australians because Australia was always a white country and we’re not about to change our identity now are we? All those Heath Ledger Scholarships and Nicole Kidman Grants go only to their own kith and kin, unless someone cares to prove me otherwise? Haven’t seen a lot of indigenous actors in Hollywood of late, have you? For those of you looking at the facts behind this, think about representation. Anglo Australians make up 58% of the population (statistics from 2011 Census) but their representation in media and entertainment is a staggering 86%. It’s a way of manufacturing a white national identity to the exclusion of Indigenous and non-white migrants, oh wait the politically correct term for the latter is now ‘New Australians’.

Cast your minds to Janeane Garofalo vs Reese Witherspoon, Kirsten Dunst, Kate Hudson, and you get the picture of where  Hollywood’s beauty disparity runs. I am being selective here but I wonder why do average plain Blond women always trump the average plain ethnic ones? Thank you Hollywood , thank you mass media.  Drugs and alcohol anyone? Anyone?  And yes, I get it. We all want eye candy to look at, not our mothers and the local supermarket check out chick.  One actress who debunks my rant is Frances McDormand, Ms Plain Jane Blond Chick with Loads of Talent & Integrity, not afraid of aging, I love her. Frances McDormand, I have so much respect for you as a person and actress.

My recent ‘get-sucked-in-crush’ is Johnny Depp, crush version 2.0 seeing as I loved him in the 1980s, 21 Jump Street. He would have liked me back then (given Mr Depp’s penchant for younger women), as I was pre-pubescent and he well in his twenties . Flash to now,  I watched all his movies, saw all his interviews, bought books and interviews about him because in my mid life crisis, boring Sydney suburbia he provided an alternative and an escape. He was different from the rest of them. He didn’t want the teen idol-sex symbol stereotyping roles. He seemed drawn to the weird, the occult, the strange, the outsiders. He loves music, loves art, loves reading. As one blogger wrote, Johnny Depp is the ‘thinking girls’ actor (given his recent marriage and divorce, I don’t quite know if that is what Mr Depp looks for in a woman). He looked like one of ‘them’ and sided with them emitting truth, integrity and honesty. With his dark features, mixed race look, he was siding with me.  Something more to him than meets the eye and yes don’t the eyes get an amazing specimen of a man when they feast on Johnny Depp?

But coming down from my airy loft of fan-in-awe, he is after all the makings of the Hollywood film industry. Would he really be where he is a fat unattractive male? Would he be making as much money if he were an African American? Then I got thinking, he’s not that different to what we expect in Hollywood. He’s still more white than he is ethnic, he takes photos well and he is ‘marketable’. He has eyes only for whippet looking white women (naughty Mr Depp for perpetuating the anorexic ideal as attractive) and as much as he is a ‘gentlemen’ to fans, he is apt to temper , drugs, alcohol and an extremely indulgent white male life of excess, choice, riches and folly. And that’s just how we like it. After much deep thought and many fantasized moments of romantic chance encounters with Mr Depp (read Barnabas Collins) and a deep convincing that he and I would connect on no other level he’d ever experience with another human being, I reluctantly concluded, he’s really like the rest of them and he would never ever give an ethnic woman in her forties, slowly growing fat with stress and age even a moments glance. Bang! A hard hit down to reality, with only my fat butt as protection.

Johnny in his mid-fifties looking like a 1930s hobo magician/drunkard muso may now be experiencing the aging reality like the rest of us. Lucky for Depp he’s a white male, no double standard to contend with. Word of advice Johnny, you don’t need to have the latest and greatest hanging off your arm. I’m not going to comment about his recent marriage and divorce but I will dare him to be with someone who gets him and will look after him regardless of what she looks like. The paradox of the entertainment industry and ‘truth’ is that all that is superficial, light and glitzy often distracts and often doesn’t present with what it appears, much like ‘fake news’ . When you’re too cool, that might be a harder lesson to learn.

That abruptly brings me to the issue of body image and the gender ‘Double Standard’ of beauty.  The double standard of how men can age and women still need to look pre-pubescent in movies, media and the general public in order to be deemed attractive.  The awful, awful mental illness of anorexia and bulimia, if you ask me, a symptom of patriarchal desire. The desperate need to diet, exercise, botox, undertake plastic surgery and every other regime one can find to reverse the aging process. It has made some look like buffoons. Serves them right if their vain excesses have made them appear more feral than real. Why do we let these people dictate what is beautiful in the world anyway? Is it because it’s now an industry? Money is involved? How dare an industry tell us who is beautiful and who isn’t? People of the world, we should rebel!

So next time you want ‘luck’ to get you somewhere in the creative industry in a first world country, be sure to look the part first and start when you’re twelve years old and be blond. Preferably be someone who did modelling first because school was too hard. Try then to act the part. Then actually get paid well for it. The rest of us are hanging around with our hands outstretched for the charity of knowing who can have and who can’t have, who is attractive and who isn’t, working hard for the spare change to fall our way because our genes and happenstance in the world would never allow us near that privileged grail of paid creativity leading to fame and fortune. Unless of course you have no integrity, reality nor dignity….

Divided Loyalties and Australian-ness

Posted on by ha7440

Why are all our dual citizens white?

New Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Especially the United Kingdom. These are the countries that define the dual citizenship crisis that claimed five more of our politicians this week.

Nothing more exotic seems to have turned up, and even when this rolling mess tried to incorporate Italy via Matt Canavan, it failed on the grounds that Canavan probably wasn’t an Italian citizen anyway. It’s not Penny Wong under a cloud. Even Sam Dastyari had to find another way to eject himself from the Senate. I’m far from the first to observe it is those of Anglo-Celtic or Anglo-Saxon stock who are caught in this mess. And it’s worth considering why.

Perhaps there’s a clue in the fact that, by and large, few Australians seem to care about this. It certainly didn’t harm Barnaby Joyce or John Alexander in their bids for re-election.

Truth is we’re generally more inclined to see this as an annoying technicality than any genuine crisis of divided loyalties in our Parliament. But what if instead of being kicked off by Scott Ludlam’s New Zealand citizenship, we’d discovered Dastyari was Iranian?

Would the underlying principle of section 44 of the constitution – that dual citizenship implies divided loyalties inconsistent with the job of sitting in the Australian Parliament – have seem quite so quaint? What if instead of New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom, we were talking about, say, China, Indonesia and Afghanistan? Is it possible we’d be more disposed to seeing section 44 as a wise and important protection against foreign infiltration?

I suppose it’s a hypothetical and there’s no real way to know for sure. But for what it’s worth, my hunch is that there’d be a section or two of the electorate in a modest panic about it.

In the space of a few hours, the Australian parliament lost five MPs after the High Court ruled Labor’s Katy Gallagher ineligible to sit as a Senator.

I can easily imagine the odd talkback caller (and host) intoning about the importance of putting Australia first, demanding these people be thrown emphatically out of our Parliament and maybe being sceptical of how much they could be trusted even after they’d renounced their other nationality. I suspect the reason we regard our current situation as a technicality is at least partly that we still think of New Zealand or Britain as places that are only technically foreign countries.

When we think of our migrant communities, we’re not imagining Kiwis and Brits, which is why while it is common for Australian politicians to insist that migrants assimilate and pledge their loyalty to Australia in citizenship ceremonies, no one seems to notice that Brits in Australia adopt Australian citizenship at a remarkably low rate. No one seriously thinks of Tony Abbott or Julia Gillard as migrants who rose to the highest office in the land. For all the banging on about Australian multiculturalism, their backgrounds are ones of continuity rather than conversion. And to be fair, that’s the way the law saw it for a long time.

Australian citizenship didn’t even exist before 1948, and when it did, Australians were still legally considered British subjects until that was finally undone in 1987. But while the law moved on, and while Australian society has changed dramatically, it’s clear our most deeply received notions of Australian-ness haven’t quite.

The giveaway is that so many of the politicians ensnared in this are genuinely surprised to learn they hold these other citizenships. Sure, some of this is down to the legal quirks of citizenship that exist between nations of the British Empire. But it’s bigger than that.

Put simply, there is barely any cultural reason for these people to have thought about it. If you’re white, from an Anglophonic background and an Australian citizen, then you face no questions. Your Australian-ness is presumed and uncomplicated. It never needs to be proven and never needs to be justified. Why should anybody be surprised that when it comes time for them to nominate for Parliament, they overlook their foreignness when they have never been scrutinised in that way in their lives? Their national loyalty is, well, written all over their faces.

That’s not a luxury Penny Wong enjoys. For that matter, it’s probably not one Mathias Cormann enjoys either. If you’re from a non-English speaking background – and especially if you’re not white – you experience Australian-ness in a much more conspicuous way.

If you’re from a non-English speaking background – and especially if you’re not white – you experience Australian-ness in a much more conspicuous way.

You cannot simply claim it, you must proclaim it. Every day seems to require a declaration – even a demonstration – of loyalty. Your life becomes one of constant renunciation because that is the shortest route to countering suspicion and establishing your Australian credentials. You carry something with you that must always be either abandoned or explained. Either way you will be reminded, again and again. And after all that, if for some reason you decide to try your hand at federal politics – and as one glance at our Parliament reveals, most people in this category don’t – what are the chances you’ll simply overlook the possibility you’re a dual citizen? How likely is it that this thing for which you’ve been held to account your entire life, will catch you by surprise?

We’ve heard much in the past 10 months about how section 44 is anachronistic in our multicultural age, how it doesn’t capture the reality of modern Australia. But the truth is it is not multicultural Australia that has been caught out by it. It is those who see themselves as free of other cultural attachments altogether. Sure, you could amend section 44 to bring it into line with Australian society. But this saga shows it’s our unspoken, daily-experienced notion of Australian-ness that needs amendment, too.

Waleed Aly is a Fairfax columnist and a presenter on The Project.