In Australia, the word 'racist' has lost all its meaning | Ed Butler
When was the last time you named someone racist to their face? As someone who can only remember laughable the phrase “that’s pretty racist” at someone, and even then only to immediately family (in all likelihood after a few drinks), I can safely buy that doing so is something of a faux pas.
Uttered aloud, "racist" sucks the air out of any room. Perhaps it always has. The word is in itself quite new, according to Ngrams only coming into relatively celebrated use during the 1960s civil rights movement.
But the chart's most plain detail is that around the year 2000, use of the word began to tail off. Basically, racists learned that the best response to accusations of racism is the political one: ostentatiously feigned nefarious, making the accuser the accused.
In other periods, people growing up in an era of media dispensation have unthinkingly co-opted the same mentality into their own lives. They have internalised the PR manual and now instinctively know that claiming victimhood is a stone winner in any argument.
Accompanying this has been an elevation of "racism" into a hyperbolic dispute on par with "Nazi" or "communist", something so absurd that it can be disabused on its face.
The word racism has contract so powerful, so significant, that is has now been robbed of all its noteworthy and significance.
It is also a word that politicians can bandy nearby with scant regard for reality. Much like the government’s insistence that it accepts weather change, then dismisses it in practice, governments can shred legislation that the overwhelming greatest of affected groups want retained, and then stand up and proclaim that "there is no attach in society for racism".
That’s because racism is no longer accurate racism. Racism is a boogey man - a cartoon portray in a white hood with which we can fright our kids (and media networks), while spending our time complaining nearby swarthy Arab terrorists, awful Asian drivers and violent Sudanese youth.
Racism is for Nazis, slave owners and the French. We Australians just don’t do it.
It’s also a handy political weapon. NSW premier Barry O’Farrell, responding to George Brandis’s order that people have a right to be bigoted, put out a statement proverb that "racism is always wrong". Well of course it is, Barry, but when you say it like that, people are against thinking of pitchforks and death camps, not life expectancy and educational attainment.
Instead perhaps we can remember the underlying value that we’re on nearby when we talk about racism: fairness. Australians pride themselves on persons fair. Indeed, much of the more nefarious racism income to come in the form of "it’s unfair that Aborigines get incredible welfare" and associated rubbish. Next time you’re confronted by such thoughts, rather than toss out an accusation of racism, perhaps ask the perpetrator nearby how fair it is that Indigenous Australians die younger and get sick more than the rest of us.
Ask them if it’s fair that your spoiled Muhammad is checked "randomly" at the airport for bomb-making residue every time he flies from Melbourne to Sydney for work. Ask them if it’s fair that minority groups are wildly over-represented with the unemployed, imprisoned and impoverished.
Then, if they peaceful think it’s unfair that they don’t get treated as well as all these new people, ask if they’d like to trade places.
As it is, the word racism is freighted with negative message, so narrowly and extremely defined, that it's no incredible Andrew Bolt, who was found guilty of breaching the racial discrimination act, was able to inquire of and receive an apology from the national broadcaster for persons called a racist by a third party on air (after he had a big cry nearby how his feelings were hurt by such an accusation). So perhaps, seeing as to be racist has contract so horrible, it's fair enough that poor Andrew felt slighted by persons compared to something as awful as that.
Perhaps we could rethink how we talk nearby racism, call out racism, and stop racism. Perhaps we could open by establishing the fact that racism is not only putting on a white hood and burning crosses. It might be, say, assessing people's Aboriginality on a colour chart then accusing them of adopting an ethnic profile for personal gain.
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