Over on Larvatus Prodeo, various nay-sayers are arguing that the upswing in attacks on Indian students can’t have anything to do with structural racism in Australia, because none of the student visa laws that push overseas students into exploitative employment situations and allow deceptive “colleges” to fleece them while isolating them from Australian-born student bodies were intended to have a racialised separatist effect.
(Also, “racism” is a big important word that should be reserved for Nazi death camps, genocides and slavery, not for “just” a few bashings here and there or for the systemic economic exploitation of ethnic minorities.)
*headdesk*
Racism is not just active behaviours that discriminate directly against people from a different ancestry than one’s own, it is also indifference to injustice against them by others – racism by neglect.
When middle-class European-descended parents decide to move away from a suburb newly experiencing an influx of non-European-descended immigrants, or to send their kids to private schools that those immigrant kids don’t go to, that “white flight” is one form of racism.
White flight also has further racialised consequences beyond merely bringing up yet another generation of European-descended Aussies who are not exposed to Australia’s modern racial diversity and who therefore inherit their parents’ anxieties around people who are Not Our Kind Of People, Dear. It also removes socio-economically advantaged kids from the local public schools, so that the immigrant kids don’t get to mix with them socially AND also don’t get the advantage of working with them and competing against them in the same classrooms, making it less likely that they will grow up to “fit in” with suburban Aussies and thus they will lose out on opportunities disproportionately offered to “typical” suburban Aussies. The European-descended parents probably have no intention of directly disadvantaging immigrant kids by removing their kids to a different school, but it happens no matter whether they intended it to or not. They just don’t care that it will happen.
Indifference to these consequences for the current generation of immigrant kids is just another form of racism by neglect, because it perpetuates and widens existing disparities but We’re All Right Jack.
Likewise, the indifference of your “typical” suburban Aussie to the exploitation of Indian students by dodgy educational institutes is what leads to those Indian students being essentially ghettoised, not mixing with Aussie students of their own age, therefore remaining obviously “different” and easily marked as Not One Of Us by the subset of aggressive bovverboots types out there looking for someone to give a kicking to. Maybe they don’t especially care that the people who look “different” are Indian rather than Chilean or Cambodian when they decide that they deserve a kicking (although it’s interesting that they are apparently not attacking immigrant Africans whose phenotype tends to be tall and muscular in the same suburbs at a comparable per capita rate – could our swaggering Aussie bigots be snivelling cowards?). What these thugs care about is whether these people are isolated and vulnerable, and Indian students are especially isolated and vulnerable in Australian cities because our government is happy to take the revenue from overseas students without ensuring that the educational facilities are up to the same standard as our Australian-born students receive.
Certainly the colleges that market themselves overseas have to have certificated teachers with appropriate qualifications. But is there any on-campus accommodation offered at all, to act as a social hub and source of continuity, solidarity and cultural mentoring for the students? Any institutional support for extracurricular groups? Hardly at all, leaving the students to shift for themselves. Lacking a substantial local expatriate community to tap into for assistance/fellowship (not that this should be the responsibility of such immigrant citizens anyway) Indian students find themselves especially isolated outside class hours compared to many overseas students from other Asian nations. Thus they become easy targets.
Systems that lead to one group of people becoming easier targets for exploitation and thuggery than others are systems of structural inequality, and when the group being marginalised by the system is racially distinct from the “typical” citizen, then that is a system that is structurally racist. QED.
Categories: education, ethics & philosophy, law & order, media, violence
DUFC #69 
Hoyden About Town 
(Also, “racism” is a big important word that should be reserved for Nazi death camps, genocides and slavery, not for “just” a few bashings here and there or for the systemic economic exploitation of ethnic minorities.)
Apparently the fact that Nitin Garg is dead and many others have had their lives changed forever by trauma and injury is neither here nor there.
Thank you for this, TigTog. Just – fantastic. Great post.
Well said.
well put Tigtog.
Thank you for this. Sometimes it feels like a person has to run around in a white hood burning crosses in order for their behaviour/attitudes to be considered even remotely racist/”problematic.”
[C]ould our swaggering Aussie bigots be snivelling cowards?
If they’re anything like the swaggering USian bigots, it’s very likely.
“It also removes socio-economically advantaged kids from the local public schools, so that the immigrant kids don’t get to mix with them socially AND also don’t get the advantage of working with them and competing against them in the same classrooms…”
Yeah because historically, poor kids in public schools have benefited SO much from that.
More importantly, Mr & Mrs Privileged take not only their kids out of the school, but their financial support and their time and their volunteer work. All of which they are in a much better position to donate than are the families of new immigrants. That’s what makes a school – it has nothing to do with the kids of rich people just naturally being more of an asset.
Sometimes it feels like a person has to run around in a white hood burning crosses in order for their behaviour/attitudes to be considered even remotely racist/”problematic.”
Even then, there are those who’d consider the term applied “too quickly,” attributing the incident to a misguided sense of humour and free expression (I can’t point to a link, but I’m certain that was applied to a cross-burning not too long ago; because they didn’t actually burn or hang anyone, you see).
Weird how calling someone racist is censured more heavily than engaging in racism.
Former Defence Force Chief Peter Cosgrove says “Confront racism”.
Yes, they have. When your classroom peers come from a background with socioeconomic advantages, you get to see those advantages up close and personal and realise how useful they are. Sometimes you realise that the advantaged kid’s grandparents were where your parents are now, and that it could be you giving advantages to your own kids in the future. It’s an alternative to seeing only similar poverty to your own. It helps drive both personal ambition and the desire for social justice.
That’s not to say that there was/is never snobbery, grandstanding and all the rest of the spiteful dross that kids ladle over each other. But it’s not only the parent’s financial and volunteer support that benefits the poorer kids.
I don’t think all of these are valid examples of ‘structural racism’.
So called ‘white flight’ – white parents sending kids to private schools – is a phenomena largely made up by the mass media. It’s well known that kids attending private school have risen in recent times, in comparison with kids attending public school. The Age attempted to portray this recently as a ‘white flight’, but the term itself is misleading, since ‘white’ is susceptible to so many different interpretations – ‘Anglo’, or ‘Celtic’, or ‘Western European’, or ‘British’, or ‘European’.
And people probably don’t send their kids to private school to put them in a more ‘white’ environment, since private schools are full of people from all sorts of different nationalities.
As for moneyed people moving out of areas with high crime rates, that seems like a sensible economic decision and not necessarily racism. You certainly can’t stop people doing that.
So I think the solutions to crime/attacks on Indian students comes back to good old law enforcement, and legislative/economic decisions by councils and governments to extend the privileges and freedoms currently enjoyed by more privileged people. So MORE scholarships in private schools and colleges and universities, etc.
The Age attempted to portray this recently…
Referring to The Age newspaper, obviously. Small clarification.
I don’t think all of these are valid examples of ’structural racism’.
You’d be wrong. Your attempt at splaining is duly noted.
since private schools are full of people from all sorts of different nationalities.
Well, sort of. I attended the only non-Catholic private school in my rural area, and it was more racially mixed than my state primary school. The reason for that was that all the Asian people in the area (Malaysian, Indian and Singaporean) at the time were medical professionals who sent their kids to private school; and the Aboriginal people in my area had been forcibly relocated to towns outside the area of my state primary school two generations earlier (those that survived the massacres, at any rate). So while it superficially looked like I was going to a more racially mixed school, the reasons behind that – higher requirements for non-British immigrants, cherry-picking immigrants from former British colonies, and attempted genocide of the actual local people – told a rather different story. If I went to that same state primary school now, there would be Sudanese and Nepalese kids, Croatians and Cambodians. But my high school is still mostly white, plus kids of Asian (and now Russian) professionals.