“Reclaim Australia” – How racists are co-opting multiculturalism

2015/07/23 Leave a comment

Commentary by Ruby Hamad:

Even the name “Reclaim Australia” is a dead giveaway. Reclaim it for whom and from whom? Despite the nod to the “traditional owners”, they clearly they do no want to reclaim it for them. It’s about the ideals of whiteness.

As experts are now warning, we are going to see a lot more of this sort of thing in the future as our understanding of race and racism evolves.

When the dominance of the white race was indisputable and seemingly insurmountable, racism was simply about skin colour. Now, decades after the abolition of the White Australia policy, the civil rights movement in the US and the end of apartheid in South Africa, it’s about assimilation. Who is willing to play by the rules, to show us they are really “one of us”?

Islam is the primary target of Reclaim Australia not because of any real threat it represents to our country but because many Muslims visibly and defiantly hold onto their traditions and clothing. Islam and its traditions – be it the hijab, halal food, or praying at the mosque – is regarded as an explicit rejection of Australian (and more broadly Western) ideals, and for that reason, Muslims are seen as a threat that must be extinguished.

Never mind that “tolerance” is one of those values we supposedly do better than anyone else.

Racist statements and ideologies do not magically become non-racist when a non-white person espouses them. Nor does racism have to take the form of neo-Nazism (although there appears to be plenty of that lately), but simply the persistent insistence that non-white people fall into line, that we know our place and that we acknowledge that white culture is the best one.

How racists are co-opting multiculturalism.

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‘Reclaiming Australia’ from Islam is really about reclaiming whiteness

2015/04/11 Leave a comment

Yassir Morsi commenting on “Reclaim Australia”:

Any contest over what is “obvious” about Islam or “real” about Islamism, or whether Muslims need “fixing”, however, misses the point. The Reclaim Australia rallies were never about Islam in the first place, but were a clash of different ideas about being Australian.

Racism is rarely about the reality of the other; the Reclaim protestors, without irony or self-reflection, were able to appropriate the Indigenous flag in their cry to reclaim Australia.

With the presence of swastika tattoos, and the general demography of the rally’s participants, it is obvious that race still remains central to our political culture in a constitutive sense; being “white” continues to play a formative role in how we construct what it means to be authentically Aussie.

For some, Aussie still simply means “white”, a sentiment that itself obscures the mostly forgotten English bigotry against the Irish, Australia’s first other.

These days the un-Australian is commonly a figure of colour, who is easily transmittable from one ethnic identity to another. The foreigner as a “form” always remains a thing to respond to, even as we openly acknowledge that, in Australia’s history, its content has always been interchangeable: Asian, African, Arab, Muslim – and yet, always Indigenous.

The foreigner is a piñata doll, the thing you beat so you can still feel you own a stick. It’s a thing to say “no” to, a thing whose integration is to be always measured against “our” standard and in doing so making that standard feel more real than it is.

In these cacophonies of “no” to foreignness, the foreigner is contradictory, fragmentary by its nature. Its truth is secondary to its function as a crude shorthand for the negating of difference and change.

No sensible adult could think Australia is becoming Islamic, and Reclaim Australia has little to do with halal, sharia, jihad or terrorism. These words are like traumas, a backdrop against which the repressed frustration of losing privilege plays out.

Yet despite official denunciation and celebration of diversity, racism as a concept in this country endures, adapting and readapting, chameleon-like to the changing social and political times. It does so because its aim, in part, is to address the sensitive needs of the dominant white nation’s sense of self.

‘Reclaiming Australia’ from Islam is really about reclaiming whiteness | Comment is free | The Guardian.

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