A member of National Arya Student Association holds a placard as he shouts slogans during a protest against the recent attacks on Indian students in Australia, in New Delhi, June 3, 2009. Australia's government said that racism was not behind a string of violent attacks on Indian students. (Adnan Abidi/Reuters)

We're not racist, we're Aussies

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"Race" riots, attacks targeting foreign students and a questionable comedy routine have exposed an ugly side of the Australian character.

By Alan Mascarenhas — Special to GlobalPost

Published: October 21, 2009 05:41 ET

SYDNEY, Australia — It was meant as a joke. But when five young Australian men took to the stage of a TV variety show in blackface, the joke fell flat.

The skit, aired recently on the long-running program “Hey, Hey, It’s Saturday,” was a Jackson Five parody in which contestants — with Afro wigs and faces painted black save for toothpaste grins — gyrated before an overwhelmingly white audience.

Harry Connick Jr., the American singer who had been touring Australia and invited on the program as a guest judge, was visibly shocked throughout the routine and scored it zero out of 10. When, after a commercial break, it dawned on the show's host, Daryl Somers, to make an awkward apology to anyone who had been offended, a disapproving Connick Jr. said: “Man, if they turned up looking like that in the United States, it'd be ‘Hey, Hey, There's No More Show.’”

The clip went viral.

It was picked up by the major U.S. networks and dissected by everyone from FOX’s Bill O’Reilly to the panel on “The View.” Germaine Greer, an Australian feminist author who now lives in the U.K., labeled the skit a “piece of s—t.” Others, like the Guardian’s Marina Hyde, saw more proof of Down Under reverting to its dark side — a racist, provincial backwater, the runt of the litter. She noted wryly: “We thank the nation for yet another important contribution to the annals of human culture.”

The “Hey, Hey” controversy comes at a time when many in Australia are expressing concern about a subterranean surge in racism.

This year, a spate of attacks in two major Australian cities targeting Indian students — including one attack in which a 25-year-old was stabbed with a screwdriver — has generated a publicity nightmare for the educational institutions that rely on income from overseas enrollments.

In other specific instances widely criticized as racially inflammatory, refugees from war-torn Sudan were in 2007 accused — by a government minister, no less — of failing to integrate.

And in 2005, three days of riots and revenge attacks between Arab Muslim gangs on one side and "white" Australians on the other — in a laid-back beachside suburb of Sydney sparked much debate about the underlying racial tensions in Australian society.

As Todd Sampson, a panelist on the local ABC television show “Q&A” noted: “If you were sitting in Canada or in America or England … the snippets you would be getting of Australia would add up to a terrible picture.”

To those who would defend Australia's record on inclusiveness and the premise that it — like the U.S. — is a country founded by immigrants, the incidents can and should be viewed in isolation: A few bad apples sullying the reputation of 20-odd million decent, fair-minded people.

Comments:

7 Comments.

Posted by david wayne osedach on October 21, 2009 08:22 ET

Aussies are no longer "just Aussies." They are a multi-cultural soceity that is coming of age.

Posted by BrettHetherington on October 21, 2009 14:38 ET

I just watched the video of the act on the Channel nine show. What struck me was:

1. It was not funny or entertaining (to me, at least.)

2. Harry Connick (whose music I don't like much) was intelligent and articulate about his reasons for being affronted by the act. The host, Daryl seemed to think that the act could only be a problem for an American, not say, an Australian too.... Read More

3. Two of the performers were a plastic surgeon and a psychiatrist in their day jobs. (Presumably neither has too many principles about blacks in their working lives.)

Australia's biggest problem is that has almost no public intellectuals in the mainstream media who can take on this sort of stupidity. This is something I write about in this blog:

http://www.bretthetherington.net/Modules/Blog/Pages/BlogEntry.aspx?BlogE...

Posted by dgoshilla on October 23, 2009 12:39 ET

I don't think its a racism problem but an assimilation problem.

Let me address this video first. I've never lived in Australia but I'm certainly aware of the problems with racism, particularly with Aborigines so this video, this act and the way it was allowed on television certainly seems very insensitive and inappropriate and never should have aired. I will say that the mocking of the Jackson 5 as an example of complete dysfunction and morality seems to be what these guys were shooting for.

In the US we too have issues with racism towards immigrants. At the heart of it is many people who live here see immigrants as a threat to Americana. I don't think people dislike immigrants because they are immigrants or because they have different skin color. They dislike immigrants because they are perceived as people who don't have any interest in actually being American or adapting to the American culture and way of life.

Russian immigrants in this country are a perfect example of Americans disliking immigrants despite their race. Russian immigrants often live in closed off communities here, they continue to speak Russian, shop at Russian markets and make no effort to assimilate. Some have been here for 40 years and still speak no English. They are often perceived as being cold and unwelcoming in comparison to the way American neighbors are. It leaves Americans questioning why they've moved to this country and to some it can feel like immigrants are here to slash, burn utilize the freedom we provide and move on.

Obviously countless immigrants come to this country, adapt, assimilate and stay here for generations. Most of us come from families who did just that. We need to be patient and teach tollerance and do a better job at assimilating immigrants. Often it takes 3 generations to assimilate but we should strive to do better. We want what their culture have to offer but we also want them to be a part of our society, not closed off to us. What you're seeing now are the same things we saw in America over the years.

Posted by Roger Pennington on October 23, 2009 16:34 ET

I think people really need to look at the intent of the performers and not just what they were doing. It seems that everyone needs to find something to cry foul over. Only by taking a look into the hearts of people can we determine whether or not they are racist or just using poor judgement. sauce

Posted by Br. John Miller on October 24, 2009 03:07 ET

I am a newcomer to your website, having read only a few issues and more by luck than judgment. I was extremely interested in the series you ran on Australia. I am a migrant to the great land down under and have been here for nearly 50 years. A lot has changed since I first stepped onto Australian soil. The country has become part of the globalized world for good or ill. Like the US, we welcome migrants and with due respect to your reporters or commentators, their view has been essentially superficial. For a start, the country is huge - as big as continental USA - but with a population of 23 million. The vast majority live in capital cities on the coastal margins. The interior is hard land for farmers and settlers. The topsoil is the thinnest in the world and in New Zealand, you can ask a farmer how many sheep he can run on an acre, while in arid Australia, frequently wracked by drought, the question is how many acres for one sheep.

Housing is expensive and your correspondent got that right and the healthcare system is fairly comprehensive but in every state, the waiting lists for elective surgery are extremely long, except if you have private health insurance. Nowhere have your commentators mentioned poverty, which is endemic in some places and there is no socially acceptable way of making money, which is the chief distinction between classes - yes they do live in egalitarian Australia. I know of a brain surgeon, gifted and at the time, arguably one of the finest in the world. He lived in a leafy suburb of Melbourne and on one side, the house was occupied by a used car entrepreneur and on the other, a gambler, whose dealings were shady and eventually, he went to jail.

Poverty is hard to define in Australia but it usually means that you have no roof over your head. But the poor are often found in public housing areas, living on Social Security, which was what he used to be called until the triumph of modern economists when, pace Americana, it was called the dole and those who lived on the meagre allowance were referred to as bludgers, or as they say in the UK, spongers. The globalization of industry cost many jobs and there is a marked reluctance to retrain older workers and employ anyone over 35. It is quite bizarre to see that business is so wedded to the young that the experienced and reliable have fallen by the wayside. Ageism is rife and unless a woman returning to the workforce after having a family is highly skilled and educated, her chances of getting a job remain slender. And so many families rely on two incomes. And if the children are unable to work, they return to the nest.

Like most urban conurbations around the world, the capital cities often comprise migrant ghettoes, each with its own mini-culture. In the poorer areas, vandalism and violence is rife. Guns are used less frequently than knives and police often face the difficult choice of using a pistol or a taser and face terrible criticism, usually ill-informed, if the result is a corpse.

Australians are both racist and xenophobic, depending on where you visit and spend your money. We are a nation of gamblers and governments wax fat on the proceeds. Somewhat ironically, someone once said that Australians would bet on two flies crawling up a wall. Depending on the university campus, foreign students with colored skins can find life intolerable. In particular, Indian students have been subject to racist attacks. And the other scourge of Western civilization is with us here in the form of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. Unlike the US and UK, most plots have been uncovered before reaching fruition. We remain the lucky country for as long as the first terrorist gets lucky.

Religion is in a state of decline, common enough in the Western world but Australian hedonism rates with the world's best. Life is more agreeable than many countries but no one should have false illusions about the wide brown land. You will find all the problems common to Europe and the US alive and well down under. And I say that with the deepest regret.

Posted by Al Flynn on October 25, 2009 12:29 ET

Gupta says : “There’s a lot of frustration stemming from the fact that the attacks don’t seem to be stopping. What should the students do — should they leave Australia, drop their studies? Defend themselves? Go to the police? There’s confusion.”

What's the confusion? For Heaven's sake, just adapt and integrate, and stop whining. Our people had to, now so do you. And, by the way, how do your countries treat westerners who refuse to follow the patters there?

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