Racism

[Colonial]

I just had an incident on my train where i had some young passengers come up to me to complain that a woman in her 50s was racially abusing passengers of Asian background.
I ended up going up to her Penrith and asking her to leave the train. Her argument was she did nothing wrong and that they are what they are.

This got me thinking and hit me pretty hard, I have allot of respect for the baby boomer and older generations especially being in a multi generational military family.

Is it our older generations causing most of the issues?
Maybe due to being from a time when World Wars caused so much distrust and hatred, especially as they were down to Country boundries let alone the blatently racist governments of the time.

It is great that it was a group of teenagers of different backgrounds who came and reported it. Hope for the future.

Whats everyones thoughts?
Are things improving?
Getting worse?
Will things improve once the older generations are no longer with us?
Am i over thinking it?(likely)


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[_GT_]

No doubt that Australian society is becoming a more tolerant one. Still, racism persists and it is in all demographics and communities. We have a long way to go and can't take the foot of the multitude of education and cultural programs. The difference with older generations is it is sometimes harder for individuals to bite their tongue as it wasn't the expectation to do so in their youth.

Good on the youngsters and good on you for taking a stand. Let's not be silent standbyers.

 

[Bokonon_]

No doubt that Australian society is becoming a more tolerant one. Still, racism persists and it is in all demographics and communities.

My initial reaction was to nearly choke at this statement. I feel strongly that we are are a more racist community than we were 30-40 years ago. Then I think about it and maybe it was less in the open then. I sometimes if Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke didn't take us further down the tolerance path and than people were subconciously comfortable with, and a backlash was inevitable.
I see it in daily life and the excuses around language and cultural differences sicken me. It is a minority though.

 

[Bokonon_]

I just had an incident on my train where i had some young passengers come up to me to complain that a woman in her 50s was racially abusing passengers of Asian background.
I ended up going up to her Penrith and asking her to leave the train. Her argument was she did nothing wrong and that they are what they are.

This got me thinking and hit me pretty hard, I have allot of respect for the baby boomer and older generations especially being in a multi generational military family.

Is it our older generations causing most of the issues?
Maybe due to being from a time when World Wars caused so much distrust and hatred, especially as they were down to Country boundries let alone the blatently racist governments of the time.

It is great that it was a group of teenagers of different backgrounds who came and reported it. Hope for the future.

Whats everyones thoughts?
Are things improving?
Getting worse?
Will things improve once the older generations are no longer with us?
Am i over thinking it?(likely)


Sent from my SM-G950F using Tapatalk

I think you've got it wrong. Great that teenagers regard it as interolerable.
Research racism and it's nearly always the uneducated pig-ignorant dregs of a group trying to hold a group that are different lower than them. The only time this analogy breaks down is in cases like Apartheid where it's heavily institutionalised, but may be a disguised manifestation of the same principle.

 

[Colonial]

I think you've got it wrong. Great that teenagers regard it as interolerable.
Research racism and it's nearly always the uneducated pig-ignorant dregs of a group trying to hold a group that are different lower than them. The only time this analogy breaks down is in cases like Apartheid where it's heavily institutionalised, but may be a disguised manifestation of the same principle.

We had the White Australia policy.

Just ad much educated as uneducated from what ive seen.

True the "bogan" or "redneck" cops the brunt in the media but i wouldnt lay all the blame at their feet. Not from what i witness day to day

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[Bokonon_]

We had the White Australia policy.

Just ad much educated as uneducated from what ive seen.

True the "bogan" or "redneck" cops the brunt in the media but i wouldnt lay all the blame at their feet. Not from what i witness day to day

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Interesting you raise the white Austrakia policy.
It was implemented by applying a language test to immigrants in any European language. This allowed Europeans, Greeks, Italians Yugoslavians etc to be test in their native language, and they were the preferred racial stock. A petson from from a South East Asian country could be tested in an obscure European language to ensure theur exlusion.
Not a lot different though from the measures announced a couple of weeks ago to require high stanards of Englush that many Australians couldn't meet from migrants though. No doubt in my mind we're going backwards.
I think it's pretty clear the Cronulla riot wasn't instigated by old people.
Absolutely right to confront it, and I think stopping the train and making her walk across the lines and all the way home would be fine. It's not fundamentally an age thing. It is a redneck thing, and they come in all age groups.

 

[Gigantic]

Ideally, we'd probably like people to be more than just tolerant of other races, religion, backgrounds etc.

I do think it's an ideal engrained into the older generation that has slowly been eased over the last couple decades. But I fear things may be going backwards again if we continue to let things like the proposed stricter language tests to come through, which is a good point made by Bokonon re the institutionalisation of racism. It might not be a problem for the current generation but it could certainly be for the next generation to come.

I don't think you're over thinking it. It's still an issue, the incidences of racism are still prevalent and for every isolated incident that we hear about I think there's many that we don't. There may not be words that get spoken but the ideals, thoughts and opinions are still shared by many I think.

Good on your part to do something about it.

 

[Ellie Aquitaine]

I don't think it's an age issue. I've seen young dickheads engage in racist rants in person and on Facebook; I've heard senior citizens rage about Asians; even some of my old schoolmates like and share anti Islamic vitriol on Facebook.

The only thing they have in common is the irrationality of what they are spouting.

Sometimes it is ignorance behind it; but it's not necessarily the ignorance that is linked to formal education. Even the most educated can reject sound principles that contradict their own constructed world view. There may also be a reluctance to engage with others that threaten that world view.

Is it fear and/or dislike of change? Sometimes it might be easier to lash out our blame someone who looks different, or talks different, or wears a head covering when life has changed so much. These people weren't there when things were "good", so it's seen as their fault.

I'm glad you took action General Giant. I'm glad other passengers complained. And I also agree with Gigantic; we need to be more than just tolerant of our diversity; we need to appreciate and value people whatever their racial, cultural or religious background.

 

[dlanod]

My initial reaction was to nearly choke at this statement. I feel strongly that we are are a more racist community than we were 30-40 years ago. Then I think about it and maybe it was less in the open then. I sometimes if Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke didn't take us further down the tolerance path and than people were subconciously comfortable with, and a backlash was inevitable.
I see it in daily life and the excuses around language and cultural differences sicken me. It is a minority though.

I think as a whole Australia is less racist but more in the open now because 30-40 years ago the various communities were still relatively small and contained. Your average Joe Racist didn't feel the need to express his racist views because he wasn't seeing Aboriginals, Indians, Muslims, Sudanese, Vietnamese, etc, on a daily basis outside of a few areas in Sydney (for the latter) or in smaller towns (for the former, and there were plenty of examples re: them as well - my grandfather made the paper a number of times as a police offer for his stellar work in arresting Aboriginals who were in pubs, illegal in Queensland at the time).

There's also the ability in the last decade or so for anyone to be able to spew their views so that thousands of people can hear them, whereas before it would've just been chats over beers in someone's backyard where something unsavory would be said and no one pulling them up.

The crazy bit I find is how AFL and NRL supporters find the ability to pull out racist chants when so much of both codes is elevated by the presence of indigenous stars of the games, along with every team in both competition having some variety of non-Caucasian players on them. I find that mindblowing.

 

[Bokonon_]

I think as a whole Australia is less racist but more in the open now because 30-40 years ago the various communities were still relatively small and contained. Your average Joe Racist didn't feel the need to express his racist views because he wasn't seeing Aboriginals, Indians, Muslims, Sudanese, Vietnamese, etc, on a daily basis outside of a few areas in Sydney (for the latter) or in smaller towns (for the former, and there were plenty of examples re: them as well - my grandfather made the paper a number of times as a police offer for his stellar work in arresting Aboriginals who were in pubs, illegal in Queensland at the time).

There's also the ability in the last decade or so for anyone to be able to spew their views so that thousands of people can hear them, whereas before it would've just been chats over beers in someone's backyard where something unsavory would be said and no one pulling them up.

The crazy bit I find is how AFL and NRL supporters find the ability to pull out racist chants when so much of both codes is elevated by the presence of indigenous stars of the games, along with every team in both competition having some variety of non-Caucasian players on them. I find that mindblowing.

Makes sense, I concede your point about exposure and the difference technology brings. Also the point Gigantic alluded to about the ideal and the reality of dealing with the detail. The anti-discrimination act was a great anchor but changing attitudes and working through all the administrative detail a much harder task, and was always going to take time.

I recall my parents making a trip to Sydney for my nieces wedding. At a dinner in Chinatown they were genuinely shocked at the cultural diversity they really had never been exposed to.

As an aside I've seen few things as appalling as the suspension of the anti-discrimination to allow the "intervention" to turn the clock back to the 19th century Still dont get how that didn't cause more outrage.