A little bit of racial prejudice ...

I vividly remember a scuffle on a cricket field as a university student. A bowler mumbled something to my batting partner, who was a burly Sri Lankan. He was incensed, dropped his bat and started walking threateningly to the bowler. “You called me a black prick” he shouted. This energised everybody. My team mates started walking out on to the field in support. The bowler stood firm defensively, shook his head and retorted: “Don’t call me a racist. I didn’t call you a black prick. I called you a fat prick.”

The tension eased. Much laughter followed, although my batting partner was still annoyed and left red faced.

A couple of things this encounter underlines.

First, race is an emotionally charged topic and not one easy to debate rationally. It touches on our primitive urges, an innate suspicion of difference. We make unconscious judgments based on race, looks or height every day.

Second, those who may be victims of racism, or are minority groups, are often sensitised, seeing racism when it may not be there. As a result, it is often a simplistic charge that belies the complexity of human motives.

The term racism is used in a loose and unreflective way to describe the hostile feelings of one ethnic group to another. This group centred prejudice and snobbery is an almost universal human failing.

The climax of the history of racism came in the 20th century, when the antipathy one group felt to another reached a single mindedness and brutality that was unprecedented. The Nazis, South African Apartheid and the American South were some of the worst examples where a group was seen as having, unchangeable, inferior traits because of their race, ethnicity or religion.

Its prelude was a century of the conquests of Empire, colonialism and the notion of the white man’s burden to civilise the lesser peoples of the non white world.

What makes this racism so conspicuous is that it developed in a context that presumed human equality of some kind- an idea that remains novel in most parts of the world. First came the doctrine of all Christian believers equal before God. Later came the more revolutionary concept that all "men" are born free and equal and entitled to equal rights in society and government.

The logic of racism was derived from the West where it was also being identified, condemned and resisted from within the same cultural tradition.

This debate begins with the assumption that Australia shares this racist past of our cultural ancestry. There is much evidence to support this- from the founding act to exclude Chinese and Melanesian labour, to the treatment of Aborigines, to our fear of Asian or Japanese invasion.

Australia is a country that, despite lacking a grand mythology and having an isolated, barren geography, has developed into one of the most successful and diverse countries in the world. Some of the measures that indicate this are social mobility, rates of mixed marriage and immigration flows. We are one of the most desirable nations to emigrate to.

Some of our citizens have difficulties wearing turbans and bike helmets. Then there is the burqini, an innovative attempt to combine traditional mores with modern lifestyles. Perhaps somebody could try manufacturing a more convenient turban. I was thinking of combination of a beanie and a turban - it could be called “a burban”, which would go very nicely with Australian culture indeed.

Despite our clear success on some levels, there is a lurking underbelly of prejudice that requires only a minor spark to be set ablaze - be it from political leaders, world events or economic deprivation.

Professor Manne argues that our response to asylum seekers reflects an underlying racism, particularly towards Muslims. I qualify this on two fronts. One, the consistent, at least outwardly expressed antipathy towards asylum seekers is that their migration is not fair and is “queue jumping”. Anecdotally, some of the most vociferous critics of asylum seekers exist among ethnic groups. This perception may be incorrect and I agree there is an element of prejudice contributing.

However, I don’t believe it comes as a result of a racist past, but very much a modern response consistent with global trends. Terrorism has increased the prejudice towards Muslims across the globe and so Australians cannot be singled out. There is nothing like TV images to trigger emotional responses. I agree when one considers the small numbers of asylum seekers, our opposition is not justified, but television has a way of highlighting the issue that it can’t for the tens of thousands of other Muslims from Asia, the Middle East and Africa that quietly come off the plane and walk through customs.

We remain relatively unique in that the majority of our Muslim migration, other than Lebanese refugees in the late 70s, are skilled, have entered the workforce and their children are rising up the social ladder with ease.

I contend that our antipathy towards asylum seekers is one most people hold with considerable ambivalence and it is not fundamentally tied to a racist past, but more a feature of modern trends - the dominance of TV images, terrorism and globalisation.

The attacks on Indian students are another example of events where simplistic charges of racism fail to illuminate the complexities of human motives. These attacks were likely to be as much acts of opportunism from desperate predators as they were related to race. Why is it that Melbourne, arguably Australia’s most progressive city, became the eye of the storm with these student attacks?

While Victoria may attract the highest proportion of students, the attacks remain disproportionate: this suggests local factors such as deficiencies in law enforcement were contributors, combined with the vulnerable lifestyles forced on some of the international students. It is worth noting that Victoria has fewer police per capita than any other Australian state.

And consistent with some of my previous statements, there are few countries where class, status and caste infuse the social order to a greater degree than India. As a consequence, any Indian outrage must be tempered by events in its own backyard, such as the pogrom against Muslims conducted by Hindu nationalists in Gujarat in 2002.

As someone who has worked as a young doctor in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, I saw the complete failure of many of the policies championed by progressive thinkers, be it outlandish welfare or forms of cultural relativism. The more recent policies of greater individual responsibility and modified paternalism that some people attribute to our racist past, I would instead attribute to an utter frustration at the failure of past ideas to develop and rehabilitate a people stripped of its historical symbols and traditions.

There is no question that racial prejudice exists. Surveys over the past decade suggest half of us think Muslims “behave strangely”, and that we admit to at least a little bit of racial prejudice and don’t want our children to marry people of other ethnic groups. These feelings are symptoms of a universal human failing. But the reality on the ground, where many of our children have already married outside their ethnic groups, there is little evidence of institutional barriers to ethnic or religious groups. Nothing comparable to the Far Right parties of Europe have had any lasting success in Australia, nor will they. Pauline Hanson will prove to be a blip on the political radar.