Some of these things are not like the other ones: a quiz

Six of these sentences appeared in the Australian mainstream media this week. Eight didn’t; they have been doctored by me. Can you tell which is which? Click each number for the original story.

1. Three young white people, one of them a police officer, have pleaded guilty to raping a male friend during a night of heavy drinking in Adelaide.

2. An Aboriginal preacher who pleaded guilty to child sex abuse will hear from his victims in court today.

3. Jessica was randomly abducted from her workplace in Ballarat on February 6 last year and raped repeatedly by a white man during a 29-hour, cross country ordeal.

4. Three men charged over the gang rapes of a 12-year-old boy in the remote Aboriginal community of Maningrida in the Northern Territory between April and August last year have been ordered to stand trial.

5. White man Martin, who claimed he was armed with a knife, then took his victim on a terrifying drive to Bacchus Marsh, west of Melbourne, during which time he threatened to rape her.

6. More than 30 Aboriginal men have been implicated in sex attacks on girls as young as 11 from one community after authorities uncovered a second child abuse scandal in a remote West Australian indigenous township.

7. John Nicholous Xydias, a 43-year-old chef living in white suburb Glen Iris with his parents, will appear in the Melbourne Magistrates court on Monday after police alleged he had drugged, raped and filmed 16 women between 1998 and 2004.

8. White serial rapist Robert Fardon is in police custody after being caught in the company of another sex offender who had breached his curfew. Fardon, 58, was arrested yesterday in Brisbane’s west along with fellow multiple rapist Trevor Toms, also white, when an electronic monitoring device worn by Toms alerted authorities to a curfew breach.

9. A man accused of taking a sleeping 10-year-old girl from her bed and sexually assaulting her at a remote Aboriginal community will remain in police custody.

10. A white aged-care worker digitally raped elderly women with dementia under his care, a jury has been told.

11. Police have rescued an Australian child at potential risk from a global internet paedophile ring that used a chat room to stream live videos of children being raped. Four Australian men have been arrested, with more arrests expected. [...] Investigators made the case public after the sentencing of white ringleader Timothy David Martyn Cox yesterday.

12. Three teenagers accused of raping a 12-year-old boy over five months at a remote Aboriginal community will stand trial.

13. In 1972, he was twice anally raped by an older Aboriginal man.

14. The panel appointed by the Government says there’s sexual abuse of children in almost every white suburb in Australia, possibly in all of them.

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Edited to add:

Yes, it wasn’t a very difficult quiz, was it? Which says something in itself. These “white” designations are completely absent in Australia’s media – a universal journalistic whiteout. The “white” designations leap off the page, stand out like sore thumbs, because we’ve never seen them before. In the past couple of weeks, since the government has decided we have a Sudden! Unexpected! Black! Crime! Crisis!, specific reporting on crime perpetrated by Aboriginal people has leapt dramatically. However, the “Aboriginal felon” descriptions are nothing new, they’ve just increased in numbers. They’re still completely familiar to us from previous reporting.

I don’t know whether the journalists have suddenly all independently decided that Aboriginal-rapist stories sell papers; it’s almost as though there’s been a decree to focus on, and specifically identify, crime perpetrated by Aboriginal people.

Either way, the list also illustrates the way in which whiteness is invisible, considered “neutral” or “default”. People of colour have “race”, while white people are just folks. If a criminal is Aboriginal, they’re seen to represent Aboriginal people as a whole – their criminality is related back to their race, in many people’s eyes. If a person is white, their criminality is attributed to some other factor. White felons are not considered to be examples of how dreadful, dangerous, and animalistic white people are.