Structural racism in Australia today is a nonsense

...a radically different conception of discrimination has a strong hold on many in the media and the academic world today, as well as among political and legal elites. For them, differences in “life chances” define discrimination. If a black child does not have the same likelihood as a white child of growing up to become an executive or a scientist, then there is racial discrimination by this definition, even if the same rules and standards are applied to both in schools, the workplace, and everywhere else.

Of course, I will not argue that racism has and can ever be eradicated. In this competitive world, there will long remain reasons why people find differences with other peoples, whether it be because of cultural practises, income inequality or any other reason.

Similarly, many Australian Aborigines may choose not to interact with wider society with one study focusing on Darwin finding that many Aboriginal people did not feel comfortable going out in public, to restaurants, or to shopping centres because they were scared of being stared at, or being treated differently.

The same study found that many Aboriginals also feel enormous pressure to lose their traditional culture in order to be successful in Australia, preferring connection to family, background and country rather than white man’s emphasis on materialism and individualism.

So what solution is best given that most Australians still accept the idea that policy should be determined by ongoing interaction between different peoples with policy shaped by the perceived strengths and weaknesses of each other’s cultures?

At present, most Australians recognise that Australia’s Aborigines experience disadvantage and require greater assistance with a 2019 publication estimating that total Commonwealth, state and territory government per capita expenditure on Aboriginal people was around double the per capita expenditure on non-Indigenous Australians during the last decade.  

With data from the 2006 and 2016 Census indicating that indigenous employment rates for those aged 15–64 decreased slightly from 48% to 46.6% while the non-Indigenous employment rate remained stable at around 72%, Australian governments recognise that ongoing assistance is needed given lower levels of employment and income can “have adverse intergenerational effects on children from an early age”.

But if Aboriginals accept greater interaction with the wider community where the greatest economic opportunities rest, they will indeed have to overcome perceived cultural differences to succeed, as is the case with any ethnic/minority group.

As Thomas Sowell pointed out in 2002, there are countless examples where minority ethnic  groups do excel when there is no power to keep others out.

They include:

• US professional basketball games where the players “are not in proportion to their representation in the general population”;
• the dominance of Jewish people in the apparel industry in contemporary New York, medieval Spain, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, Brazil, Germany, and Chile, and even once Melbourne where they were just 1% of the Australian population;
• Eastern European Jews in the United States progressing from below-average scores on intelligence tests during the First World War to having above-average scores on such tests within one generation afterward; and
• the Chinese minority in Malaysia earning more than four hundred engineering degrees during the 1960s, while the Malay majority earned just four, despite Malays having preferential access to financial aid for higher education.

In other words, it is the determination of people, whether as individuals or supported by their ethnic/minority group, that will deliver better economic outcomes in the fields they pursue. Nothing surprising about that.