Race & Racism

By now I’m sure everyone is aware that Senator Fraser Anning is a racist.

Racism is even evident in the dictionary definition of racism.

We thought we'd ask some White leaders about their thoughts on the situation.

On and offline tempers have been flaring this week over the St Kilda neo-Nazi rally and the counterprotest.

After his latest 6 month trip around remote communities, the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy on Indigenous affairs has handed down his recommendations.

When we talk about eliminating violence against Aboriginal women, we aren’t just talking about individual acts, or solely interpersonal violence.

The appointment of Tony Abbott as the Indigenous Envoy, who claimed his key focus would be on Indigenous education, adds yet another barrier of Indigenous people asserting their rights.

If you have worked in Indigenous health you would be all too familiar with the discourses of ‘Closing the Gap’ and ‘compliance’ which remind us that the Black body is to be regulated and remedied by the health system.

Racism is insidious. It impacts on people’s health, their education, housing and employment opportunities, and their sense of self and safety living in Australia.

It’s almost as if Australian audiences wouldn’t be able to identify who they are meant to be for or against if none of them were white

History is all around us, so is the denialism of true history. A monument to John Batman at Melbourne's Queen Victoria Market is yet another example.

Fraser Anning's "Final Solution" speech, demonstrates that the close minded and ignorant have more to learn from the world, than the world has to learn from them.

Daniel James responds to one of Andrew Bolt's recent columns in which Bolt laments the "colonising" of Australian suburbs by immigrants.

Love, protection, beauty, royalty are all things that have all too readily been denied to Black women. Instead our expected role has been one of servitude, sexually, domestically, and politically, for White men and White women, and even Black men.

Aboriginal people are over-represented in most of the negative statistics and under-represented in most of the positive ones. This is the fundamental reality underpinning government programs like ‘Closing the Gap’.

I rang my dad over the weekend. We’d hardly begun yarning before he asked me: “What’s this about white nurses having to apologise to us for being white?” I could have just said, “Dad, you should know better than to believe what the mainstream media says about us.”

The problem for Blackfullas is that news and current affairs is not ‘for our viewing pleasure’ nor is it just information or entertainment. It is an apparatus of colonial control that makes the brutality of colonisation seem perfectly rational and acceptable.

The roots of racism within mainstream feminism are still there, under the soil.