What does it take to make a murder 'racist'?

In 2006 I wrote a New Matilda piece on Paki-bashing from Bradford to Bankstown. At that time there were a number of attacks on Pakistanis in Australia and the popular media were engaged in a systematic sledging of the community. I compared the phenomenon of “Paki-bashing” in the UK, which had a long and ignoble history, with the growth of racism in Australia, in the wake of the 2005 Cronulla riots. The Paki-bashing phenomenon was well understood in Britain as being about racialised power, and the intensification of competition in impoverished areas for employment, housing and status. Sounds a bit like Australia today.

More recently I have published a piece on masculinity and racial violence, in the new Greg Noble book Lines in the Sand where the role of competitive masculinities and their racialisation provides a way into understanding the “racial” dimension of Australia’s racist past and present. It’s fairly clear that in nearly all these recent events we are dealing with violence by young men against young men, where theft may be an element (though usually I’d suggest as “trophy” theft rather than primarily for the intrinsic monetary value of the goods) but where bullying and vain-glorious self-justification marks the psychology of the attacker. The racial difference between attacker and victim is critical to understanding the crime; to deny it is to undermine any chance of dealing with the situation at hand.

The first step then might be to have public officials recognise that Australia has a racist history and that they are serious about working to reduce the possibility of a racist future. That means naming the problem, identifying the causes, and addressing the processes of racialisation, antipathy, ignorance and violence.

Hey, Indians know what inter-communal hostility can produce; they know how discrimination, ethnic power and exclusion works; they confront these issues day in and day out and have done so for years. What Indians are angry about is not so much the violence and the exploitation (though they are a good start), BUT rather that Australian governments deny there is an issue, and in their denial expose more young Indians to a potentially gruesome death in a lonely suburban night.