Some Australians seem more outraged by accusations of racism than by racism itself
Some Australians seem more outraged by accusations of racism than by racism itself
The fracas in the wake of comments by Marcia Langton suggests a necessary conversation – led by people with lived experience – is still out of bounds
This happens quite often - pointing out someone may have inadvertently spoken from a position of blindness gets you more outrage from the ego blow than the actual offense itself. You can pretty much triple that shit for anyone right leaning.
It’s pretty gross. Made even grosser in the context of the Voice, where one of the things the No campaign has been doing is attempting to label the Yes campaign as the real racists. What utter bollocks.
Shit has become so unhinged. This is my first referendum so I'm sure how it compares. But the rhetoric just feels so vicious. The no campaign say the voice is divisive but it's their campaign that's divisive. They're importing some of vilest culture war tactics from the US.
Gay marriage referendum didn't get as vicious as this and that's saying a lot.
The conservatives have been getting worse over the past say, 10 years, Trump kind of accelerated things and that style of "who cares what the truth is" was exported from the US.
The right wing in general was always going to end up being like this though.
Straight out of the US conservative playbook. An embarrassing look in Australia, and shows in the most obvious way that they are not acting in good faith.
Similarly, expect the networks and avenues of communication being built to be rolled into other areas as well. Trans rights, same sex marriage etc. will all be targets anew. Wouldn’t entirely be surprised if we started to see a push back against gun laws either.
We’ve had hints of this in the past but this is by far the most direct coupling between the US reactionary right and Australia’s.
Calling someone a racist is a pretty serious accusation, and a direct attack on that person. Are we really surprised someone will bristle at the accusation? Or dislike the fact someone is dismissing their views outright based on such a generalisation?
I don't think anyone is surprised at the fake outrage. It's textbook right wing politics to claim the moral high ground after rightfully being called out. If you think this is just some lazy dismissal on the part of Langton though, you are clearly very uninformed about who she is and her life's work.
The good news is that society has accepted that racism is a bad thing.
The bad news is that the main consequence of this is that it’s unacceptable to accuse anyone of racism if they have any social capital. It’s also unacceptable to shout racial slurs and such, but if someone is sufficiently rich, talented or well-connected, even that can be explained away as consistent with them not being racist.
It's something you see online a lot online, and that is people dismissing opinions or viewpoints as racist offhand without considering them, and I'm glad people are pushing back.
Debate the point, not the person.
Turn on the YouTube subtitles for extra hilarity. 30 years later and technology still can't understand a raw Australian accent.
It's the same back in the fatherland, Blighty.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Marcia Langton, one of the key architects of the voice to parliament proposal, found herself at the centre of a fracas midweek when comments she’d made last Sunday during a public forum at Edith Cowan University appeared on the Australian newspaper’s website shortly before question time on Tuesday.
The Coalition had resolved to use the final parliamentary sitting week before the referendum to go full demolition on the voice, and the deputy Liberal leader, Sussan Ley, opened the batting in question time.
This whole stink bomb turned on whether or not Langton harboured views about the prevalence of racism in her own country, and whether her observations about this phenomenon amounted to a provable thought crime.
Examples of institutionalised racism include but are not limited to: the lie that there was no one here when the British arrived; the documented atrocities of frontier massacres; the policies of forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families – practices that have contributed to a prevalence of intergenerational trauma, a studied phenomenon in survivors of the stolen generations.
As the Olympian and former Labor senator Nova Peris argued this week, a constitutionally recognised advisory body will allow the lived experiences of First Nations people to be seen.
Langton was perfectly within her rights to posit that some Australians who are resolved to vote no on 14 October will do so because they harbour racist views, or are being influenced by a toxic sludge of negative messaging.
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