Racism and tribalism in Australia

COMMENT A newly-arrived lad of 19, very light-brown in colour and expensively clothed, is walking through a posh arcade in the fashionable part of an Australian city. The normal sounds of a busy street on a Saturday morning are suddenly interrupted by repeated shouts. The people walking through the arcade stop to watch.

A well-padded middle-aged woman, clad in the then ubiquitous gabardine overcoat and carrying a string-bag containing her shopping, is shouting “Why don’t you go back home, you black bastard?” The Asian stops, looks behind him and sees that he is the target; but he is mystified. As he shrugs and walks away, he wonders, what right does this woman have to behave like that? What kind of people are these?

In 1930s British Malaya, where he was born and well educated, this youth had not noted any antipathy between the diverse ethnic communities there. Immigrants from China, India, and the islands surrounding Malaya, and the host people, the Malays, co-existed with mutual tolerance.

The British rulers were the only ones to display any ethnic superiority; but few of the local people were directly affected by that. The so-called natives did not emphasise the obvious differences in religion, cultural practices, and language. Indeed, ethnic cuisines and clothing styles began to be borrowed, and the people gradually merged into a nation.

Over the years, overt racism in Australia has reduced. Habituation, acceptable behaviour, and a shared respect for British institutions, such as justice, law and order, as well as the English language, all played a part. Most importantly, the Australian working man, who walked and stood tall in a relatively class-less nation, was willing – in spite of an obvious sense of white-Christian colonial-superiority – to treat the Asian students (almost all from British-held territories) as he personally found them.

Striking back

Also of great relevance was something not seemingly sensed by the host people. Indians and Chinese, no matter how poor their families, are proud of their respective heritage. As one Chinese student read to his classroom in Australia, his people had been civilised for more than 5,000 years, “long before the white man came down from the trees.” He was not intolerant; only confidently proud.

The odd retaliatory retort also helped to contain the Australian yobbos (roughnecks). When a couple of the latter once made loud derogatory remarks about ‘the blacks’ being allowed into the bar (and that was because the Australian Aborigine was then not allowed to enter a hotel or bar), the well-dressed young Asians at the bar quietly walked out. As they left, one called back “Haven’t you got a mother either?”

By the mid-1960s the White Australia Policy was being quietly eased. By the mid-1970s immigration entry was officially non-discriminatory; yet it was not until the end of the 1980s that the darker Asians were accepted in comparable numbers. By the mid-1990s racism had re-surfaced, with some virulence; the trigger was a claim by a new politician that there were too many Asians in the country.

An academic pointed out that this was an attempt to protect white-space. That black-space had been invaded successfully two centuries earlier was not mentioned in the debate. The young Asian of 1949 was again publicly abused because of his skin colour – in 1995!

By then, angry young Aborigines were defiantly shouting, in public parks, “This is our land. Piss off.” By then, the education dollar and a quaint people-grabbing immigration policy led to vast numbers of Indians and Chinese being seen to fill the streets of the capital cities. This upset many Anglo-Australians, especially the elderly.

Ethnic turf-wars

Then criminality surfaced. Young Indians were attacked, one killed. Not racist, claimed the police. Were other Asians - the Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans and Lebanese – attacked? Is the Indian too similar in appearance to the clearly-despised Aborigine? Or, is his fluency with the English language an affront? Is he taking jobs from unskilled white people? Or, was there some copy-cat behaviour?

Ethnic turf-wars involving chauvinistic Asian youth became reported in the press. Some immigrant Muslim leaders now want Australia’s institutions to be changed to suit them; apparently they miss the sharia law they never had. Young Muslim women proudly display their superior culture by wearing the hijab, or even the burqa in public. The turf-wars are transient; when the testosterone levels drop off ...!  

The arrogance of the few Muslim people who choose to be divergent will probably remain; whereas the efforts by some ethnic Europeans a few decades ago to have English denied as the national language, or to use the then multiculturalism policy to emphasise cultural difference (and implied cultural superiority?) did fade away. The rest of the population rejects this cultural posturing by new arrivals seeking a better life.

Following the ethnic invasion of Australia, the various white tribes of Britain and some representatives of continental European tribes blended together to form the Anglo-Australian. The post-war immigrants from Europe also blended in to create a cosmopolitan Australia.  

Coloured immigrants from all over the world are now integrating to become a revised Australian people. Many marriages ignore ethnic or tribal boundaries. In three generations, any imported cultural differences could normally be expected to fade away, through societal co-mingling and shared education in schools.

Racism never dies

However, racism, that is discrimination against a fellow resident or citizen on the basis of skin colour (a practice initiated by white colonisers in their rampage over technologically inferior coloured people) will continue. People tend to protect and promote (whether in employment or in politics) those who are like them. Is this not so in the USA, the first of the immigrant-created nations of the West? Tribalism, based on ethnicity or country of origin, will also continue as a basis for preference for one’s own. Does this also not apply in the Western world?

While discrimination is a human attribute, Australia is gradually becoming racially tolerant. The indigene may not concur. A significant deep-sea current driving this tolerance is that fabled Anglo-Celt ‘fair-go’ ethos of yore. This reflects an urge for equitable treatment which began in a nation of mainly convict men; it was subsequently extended to include the women. It is now available to the new arrivals, even to those who want the freedom of a tolerant and equitable secular home, but prefer to exercise that freedom within the tents of their alienating cultures. That is not racism, but the worst of tribalism.

In the long run, a desirable unity of belonging, evolving from a diversity of origins and beliefs, can come only from achieving one integrated people from many.  

 

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RAJA RATNAM, author of ‘The Dance of Destiny’ is former director in Australia’s Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs. When recalling his job searching efforts, he says, ‘I was told that I was too black to be a psychologist; and that the Australian worker in the private sector was not yet ready for a foreign executive, especially a colored one’.