Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

Why can some politicians openly blame an entire race for global problems while others would be destroyed for doing the same? Mehreen Faruqi’s latest speech exposes the selective rules that make one form of racism acceptable in Australian politics.

Imagine the reaction if a white member of the Liberal Party stood in the Senate and blamed blacks for all of the world’s ills.

Imagine he blamed coloured people for everything from poverty and crime to the 6am bus from Strathfield running late.

There’d be hell to pay.

The senator wouldn’t just be condemned, he would be chased out of the country.

The ABC doesn’t own enough taxpayer-funded seats for all the lefty talking heads who’d be demanding air time to vent their disgust.

Labor MPs would line up for days, just for their turn to denounce the speaker.

And the Race Discrimination Commissioner would declare the statement proof that modern Australia was utterly beyond redemption.

I ask you to “imagine” such a speech because you have to imagine it.

No white senator would ever be so stupid as to say such a thing.

Which brings us neatly to Greens Deputy Leader Mehreen Faruqi.

Because wherever stupid is involved, Faruqi is lurking right there.

The Pakistan-born senator made the most extraordinary speech yesterday, blaming whites for the disaster in Nepal, and telling those long-suffering souls who weren’t able to schedule a root canal in order to skip the Senate sitting…

“Where colonialism is involved, racism is lurking right there and it is writ large in the impacts of climate change.

“While billionaire lists dominated by white men get richer and richer and protect themselves from the worst consequences of climate change, black and brown communities across the global south are being flooded, burned, starved and buried.”

Whites have grown rich by exploiting black people everywhere. Seriously?

Have you ever wondered how in God’s name the Greens senator gets away with saying stuff like this?

Let me suggest four reasons…

1. Some Racism Has Been Rebranded as Anti-racism

The trick is remarkably simple: racial generalisations become socially acceptable if they are directed at the right people and delivered in the right political language.

Add words such as “colonialism”, “structural inequality” or “climate justice” and suddenly something that would otherwise sound like racial stereotyping acquires the protective coating of progressive vocabulary.

White colonisers are racists.

There is no justice for blacks until there is climate justice.

Structural inequality allows white people to favour other white people while blacks are cast aside.

And on and on it goes.

Every single one of these outrageously racist statements is transformed into an anti-racism statement thanks to the transformational powers of progressive language.

2. Collective Guilt Is Fashionable Again — Provided the Collective Is White

There’s nothing wrong with discussing colonialism or the historical exploitation of poorer countries.

There is something rather different about treating people as morally implicated in those events because of their race.

Nobody alive today chose to be born into a country that colonised other countries.

Or gets to choose the colour of their skin.

Yet somehow hereditary moral responsibility has made a comeback, provided the inheritance in question is sufficiently pale.

3. The Media has Selective Racial Hearing

When someone on the Right says something that can be interpreted as racially insensitive, the political-media ecosystem hears it from the Andromeda Galaxy.

Headlines appear.

Experts are summoned.

Questions are asked about whether the offender should remain in public life.

But when similar racial language comes from the progressive side, suddenly everyone develops an impressive capacity for nuance.

Context is explained.

Benefit of the doubt is insisted upon.

And, just like that, the offending words are placed gently into a therapeutic bath before they emerge cleansed of all possible meaning.

4. Admitting that Minorities Can Be Racist Would Ruin the Neatest Story in Modern Politics

The modern progressive worldview often divides society into oppressors and oppressed, with race helping to determine which category a person belongs to.

That makes racism wonderfully convenient: it is no longer something individuals do, but something only certain groups are capable of doing.

And so we arrive at the absurd conclusion that the colour of the speaker can determine whether a racial generalisation is condemned as racism or celebrated as an insight into racism.

It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so crazy.

Mehreen Faruqi isn’t crazy. And frighteningly, she’s deadly serious.

___

Republished with thanks to The James Macpherson Report. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Originally titled, “The Racism You’re Not Allowed to Notice“.