Australia is racist / Australia is not racist.

Posted on June 28, 2009 by @ndy

77%. One in five. 6.5 per cent. Over 40 per cent. 87 per cent. 85 per cent. 11 per cent. $2 billion. Forty per cent. One in 10…

Australians are racist, say Australians // Australians struggling with multiculturalism
AAP
June 24, 2009

AUSTRALIANS are in two minds about multiculturalism, a long-term survey has found.

They believe cultural diversity is good for the country but they’re worried that cultural differences will stop everyone from getting along.

An 11-year study by a collaboration of Australian universities has found 85 per cent of Australians acknowledge racial prejudice occurs in the nation and one in five has been a victim of racist verbal abuse.

The study found that 6.5 per cent of the 16,000 Australians surveyed were against multiculturalism.

Professor Kevin Dunn, from the University of Western Sydney’s school of social science, said the study revealed that the majority of Australians are pro-multiculturalism but are anxious that the diversity will not be managed well.

“Over 40 per cent of those surveyed feel that cultural differences pose a threat to societal harmony,” he said.

“So if you take that alongside the 87 per cent that are pro-multiculturalism, clearly you’ve got a third of the nation that tolerate cultural diversity but are concerned at the impact it will have on society.

“The Cronulla riots and the recent attacks on people of Indian descent are an example of this.

“The figures show that 85 per cent of Australia acknowledge there is racial prejudice in the country.”

Prof Dunn believes previous governments have done nothing to address the issue for the past decade, with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma spending only part of his time dealing with race discrimination.

“For the last decade, the government hasn’t appointed a full-time Race Discrimination Commissioner,” Prof Dunn said.

“Because of the severe underfunding of the commission, they’re just unable to offer the sorts of services required.”

The survey also found that at least one in five Australians experience verbal abuse such as offensive slang names for different cultural groups, or swearing and offensive gestures, while 11 per cent feel they don’t belong or are inferior.

PM KRudd says ‘sorry India, but if you think Australia is racist, you’re wrong’…

Australia isn’t racist, KRudd tells India
AAP
June 1, 2009

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd has moved to reassure New Delhi that Australia isn’t a racist nation, as attacks against Indian students threaten to disrupt relations between the two countries.

The violence has made headlines around the world and India has warned it could jeopardise Australia’s lucrative education sector, which earns $2 billion annually from Indian students…

The latest reportage on Professor Kevin Dunn’s research follows on from earlier reports in September 2008. The title of the project — curiously absent from the AAP story — is ‘Challenging Racism: The Anti-Racism Research Project’. By a very small margin and on a geographical basis, Perth residents are supposedly the most ‘racist’. However, ‘Lead researcher Kevin Dunn from the University of Western Sydney says while there were differences between the states, the greatest difference in attitudes was between generations. “Older Australians – not all older Australians – but in general are more intolerant and younger Australians much more tolerant,” he said’ (Perth people ‘more racist’ than others, ABC, June 26, 2009). With some exceptions: see : Southern Cross Soldiers can has manifesto., March 19, 2009.

On a final and related, superbly bizarro note, in Calgary anti-racist activists belonging to ARA Calgary have so incensed local boneheads the little darlings have sprayed nonsense on their walls: “A black swastika was found spray-painted on the front window of the couple’s home. Their front door was spray-painted red with the symbol “C-18,” which stands for Combat 18 and refers to the armed wing of a British neo-Nazi group” (Swastika sprayed on home of anti-racism activists, Tarina White, Edmonton Sun, June 28, 2009). Whether or not the cretins in Calgary were inspired by the boofheads in Belfast to daub C18 on the door is unknown.

Oh yeah: over six years after George II declared that the Coalition of the Killing had secured a magnificent victory in Iraq, the forces of victory are leaving the country, now a workers’ paradise just like Australia.

Come July 1, most American combat troops remaining in the cities will become trainers. In some cases that will be nothing more than a semantic dodge. For the most part, it really will be happening, and many Iraqi troops will indeed be on their own by Wednesday.

Except, that is, for their embedded trainers and advisers, who will be fairly numerous — at least 10,000 now, according to military estimates, rising to 35,000 to 50,000 by the high point, according to a Congressional Research Service report last month. In addition, each team will need force protection — that is, other American troops to guard the trainers, mostly from Iraqis they’re teamed with. They will number from 10 to 20 per team of trainers. The fear of fragging is so strong that most trainers live in compounds fortified against the people they’re training, a sort of American fort within the Iraqi fort…

About @ndy

I live in Melbourne, Australia. I like anarchy. I don't like nazis. I enjoy eating pizza and drinking beer. I barrack for the greatest football team on Earth: Collingwood Magpies. The 2024 premiership's a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood.
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14 Responses to Australia is racist / Australia is not racist.

  1. THR says:
    June 29, 2009 at 8:37 pm

    The term ‘cultural differences’ is open to interpretation. It could be that the 40% are concerned about the cultural differences between themselves and flag-waving imbeciles.

  2. @ndy says:
    June 29, 2009 at 8:42 pm

    True that. Altho’ the term ‘culture’ is often used as a synonym for ‘ethnicity’, and this may also be the case for the study in question (not having read it, I dunno).

  3. Charlotte says:
    July 23, 2009 at 10:36 am

    thisisverysad!whywouldpeopleevendothistosomeone!

  5. @ndy says:
    July 23, 2009 at 5:59 pm

    Yeah — cheers. Dunno what the story is there. Interesting framing but.

    STATE police in full riot gear rushed a downtown street in this eastern Texas town to break up a tense stand-off between hundreds of black and white protesters who exchanged screams of “Black power!” and “White power!”

    ~versus~

    Once at the town square, the crowd ballooned to about 200 mostly black people on one side of a street.

    Gathered on the other side were about a dozen white supremacists, including four skinheads holding Nazi swastika flags. About 30 other white people were behind them, but it was unclear if they were protesting or watching.

    In the space of seven paragraphs, ‘hundreds’ of white racists has become maybe a dozen, with another 30 or so possible sympathisers / curious spectators. Further, the protest march is reported as having been (mostly) black and (some) white individuals.

    NB. Skinheads? No. Boneheads? Yes.

    Further deets:

    Hundreds expected for protests in dragging case
    Jeff Carlton (AP)

    PARIS, Texas — Members of a black extremist group are assembling in Texas before planned demonstrations over murder charges being dropped against two white men accused in the death of a black friend.

    About a dozen members of the New Black Panther Party gathered Tuesday near the courthouse in Paris. A separate “protest zone” was set up across the street for white supremacists and other counter-protesters.

    It is the third courthouse protest over the death of 24-year-old Brandon McClelland, who was run over by a vehicle and dragged beneath it.

    A prosecutor cited a lack of evidence in dropping murder charges last month against two white men. The three had made a beer run and apparently argued on the way home.

    A trucker later said he might have accidentally run over McClelland.

    THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

    DALLAS (AP) — Black and white extremists are expected to demonstrate Tuesday in an eastern Texas town where murder charges were dropped against two white men accused in the death of a black friend run over by a vehicle and dragged beneath it.

    What the scheduled rallies likely will lack, critics say, is mainstream support from Paris residents who have tired of the negative publicity the case has brought to their town.

    The demonstrations are expected to pit members of the New Black Panthers and Ku Klux Klan against one another. Others, including members of the Nation of Islam and a local group, the Concerned Citizens for Racial Equality, also will take part. Demonstrators will be separated into protest zones outside the courthouse.

    Like a demonstration staged last month to protest the dismissal of charges, Tuesday’s rally is likely to include the black power salutes and Nazi symbols typical of such clashes. The angry rhetoric already has begun.

    “Caucasians in Paris must understand that they are the reason for Paris being the center of unsavory attention,” one black protest leader, Jimmy Blackwell of the Tarrant County Local Organizing Committee, wrote in an editorial published last week in The Paris News. “We welcome the KKK because we want the world to see how real Americans act.”

    One rally flier said “suspected hate crime killers” were set free by “racist Texas courts.”

    But most of Paris’ 26,000 residents are likely to steer clear of the courthouse steps on Tuesday, said Marva Joe, who helps chair a diversity task force set up to address racial issues in the community.

    “I guess I am like most people in Paris,” Joe said. “The majority of people in Paris don’t agree with the way they do things. Most people are not happy about the groups, about the people who are coming.”

    The protests focus on the death of 24-year-old Brandon McClelland, whose body was found Sept. 16 on a country road outside of Paris, which is about 90 miles northeast of Dallas.

    Prosecutors initially charged two of McClelland’s friends, Shannon Finley and Charles Crostley, with murdering him by running him over in Finley’s pickup. They estimated that McClelland’s body was dragged more than 70 feet beneath their vehicle. But a special prosecutor dismissed the charges last month, citing a lack of evidence, after a truck driver came forward and said he might have accidentally run over McClelland.

    Previous protests over the case by the Panthers and the Nation of Islam were mostly peaceful and resulted in no arrests. A handful of white supremacists have showed up each time.

    Protesters have said the McClelland case echoes the murder of James Byrd, a black man who was chained by the ankles to a pickup by three white men and dragged to death in 1998 in the eastern Texas town of Jasper.

    Authorities, however, have denied there was a racial angle in the McClelland death, pointing out that he was friends with Finley and Crostley. Authorities had said the trio were returning from a late-night beer run when McClelland died. They alleged the three were arguing about whether Finley was too drunk to drive, and that McClelland decided to walk home. Authorities said Finley then ran over McClelland.

    Finley and Crostley, who were released after eight months in jail, have maintained their innocence.

    The protest march was allegedly lead by the ‘New Black Panther Party’ (AP), a recently-emerged group which has no relation to the BPP, and is virulently anti-Semitic. FoxNews, otoh, citing AP, claims the march was lead by the NBPP and the NOI.

    On the ‘New’ BPP:

    There Is No New Black Panther Party: An Open Letter From the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation

    In response from numerous requests from individual’s seeking information on the “New Black Panthers,” the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation issues this public statement to correct the distorted record being made in the media by a small band of African Americans calling themselves the New Black Panthers. As guardian of the true history of the Black Panther Party, the Foundation, which includes former leading members of the Party, denounces this group’s exploitation of the Party’s name and history. Failing to find its own legitimacy in the black community, this band would graft the Party’s name upon itself, which we condemn.

    Firstly, the people in the New Black Panthers were never members of the Black Panther Party and have no legitimate claim on the Party’s name. On the contrary, they would steal the names and pretend to walk in the footsteps of the Party’s true heroes, such as Black Panther founder Huey P. Newton, George Jackson and Jonathan Jackson, Bunchy Carter, John Huggins, Fred Hampton, Mark Cark, and so many others who gave their very lives to the black liberation struggle under the Party’s banner.

    Secondly, they denigrate the Party’s name by promoting concepts absolutely counter to the revolutionary principles on which the Party was founded. Their alleged media assault on the Ku Klux Klan serves to incite hatred rather than resolve it. The Party’s fundamental principle, as best articulated by the great revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, was: “A true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” The Black Panthers were never a group of angry young militants full of fury toward the “white establishment.” The Party operated on love for black people, not hatred of white people.

    Furthermore, this group claims it would “teach” the black community about armed self-defense. The arrogance of this claim is overwhelmed by its reactionary nature. Blacks, especially in the South, have been armed in self-defense for a very long time; indeed, the spiritual parent of the Party itself was the Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense. However, the Party understood that the gun was not necessarily revolutionary, for the police and all other oppressive forces had guns. It was the ideology behind the gun that determined its nature.

    Because the Party believed that only the masses of people would make the revolution, the Party never presumed itself to be above the people. The Party considered itself a servant of the people and taught by example. Given massive black hunger, the Party provided free breakfast for children and other free food programs. In the absence of decent medical facilities in the black community, the Party operated free medical clinics. In the face of police brutality, the Party stood up and resisted. Considering the overwhelming number of blacks facing trials and long prison terms, the Party developed free legal aids and bussing-to-prison programs.

    The question the Foundation raises, then, is who are these people laying claim to the Party’s history and name? Are they reactionary provocateurs, who would instigate activities counterproductive to the people’s interests, causing mayhem and death? Are they entertainers, who would posture themselves before the media, and, according to numerous sources, with empty guns, to spin gold for themselves? Are they, given the history of their late-leader Khalid Muhammad, a group of anti-Semites like the very Ku Klux Klan they allegedly oppose? What is their agenda?

    Conditions for blacks in America today are worse than when the Black Panther Party was formed in 1966. Blacks in the main continue to live in poverty; disproportionate percentages of blacks die from AIDS and cancer, as the black infant mortality rate continues to be double that of whites. There is a desperate need for liberation agenda. The Black Panther Party unarguably set the example, espousing principles and a history that certainly should be embraced by all those still struggling for freedom. Rather than appropriating the Party’s name, however, groups that purport to represent African Americans ought to follow the Party’s true historical example. In the absence of such commitment, the Foundation denounces the usurpation of the Black Panther Party name by this questionable band of self-appointed leaders.

    For further reading on the Black Panther Party, please visit our website at http://www.blackpanther.org. Books by and about the Black Panthers can also be purchased online through this site. Suggested reading includes Revolutionary Suicide, To Die for the People, War Against the Panthers, This Side of Glory, and A Taste of Power.

    See also : Dragged to Death: Brandon McClelland, Project New Era, October 25, 2008.

  7. @ndy says:
    July 23, 2009 at 7:44 pm

    Thanks Ana.

    Having searched, there are few refs to the NBPP. Here’s one:

    Black Panther Party 35th Anniversary Conference Overview

    For the first time, a dialogue was established between BPP members and members of the New Black Panther Party, many of whom attended a workshop facilitated by JoNina Abron and Ron Scott to discuss the BPP Legacy. The many differences in ideology were addressed and lines of communication opened.

    I again recommend All Power to the People! Black Panther Party & Beyond by Lee Lew Lee (2000). It’s a great film.

  8. Ana says:
    July 23, 2009 at 8:01 pm

    Panther Legacy Zine

    https://share.acrobat.com/adc/document.do?docid=54d0ec14-1101-4830-971f-26ef98ad54d7

    There are still strong connections between the Black Panthers & Aboriginal, Maori & Pacific Island Activists of note from the ’70s.

  9. @ndy says:
    July 23, 2009 at 8:15 pm

    Ha! Gr8 stuff!

    I like to compare the BPP legacy to the bunny wabbits in this song:

  10. Ana says:
    July 23, 2009 at 8:19 pm

    🙂 🙂 🙂

  11. @ndy says:
    July 25, 2009 at 7:22 am

    A sidenote…

    Or two…

  12. Flavian Hardcastle says:
    August 17, 2009 at 1:10 am

    87% of the population support a multicultural immigration policy, and only 6.5% oppose? Need I say more?

  13. Pingback: Deep veins: Australia and race | slackbastard

  14. Mitch says:
    November 2, 2011 at 1:20 pm

    If Australia was racist then there would be no other [ethnicity] other than either Anglo or Aboriginal also we allow freedom [of] religion, racism is illegal, we give welfare to people who just moved after 2 years (that’s if they are trying to find a job or is just a Doll Bludger you get it in every country) also any boat coming here would of been shot up and take in to consideration the Whole Cronulla thing bashing Life Savers and Harassing others and stating your Ethnic Superiority and make a disgrace of your Background for all the hard working Middle Eastern people who do the right thing.

    Yes Australia has a history of Persecutions of Aboriginals but so does America. Middle East, Europe, Asia etc if someone moved from say Asia/India to Australia and are respectful people who work hard, and retain [their] culture but get along with others of either Anglo, Italian, Greek, Middle East etc [descent] than there is no problem only a small part who will be racist but that’s in most countries as well and most of all it’s up to the Individual.

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