Racism begins at home

I ran into a neighbour at the shops today. Lovely bloke, very chatty. Told me the guy a couple of doors down from us died suddenly last week. He was only young and apparently had a heart attack. He has/had a relatively young family, and I feel so awful for them. So my neighbour was telling me the story - at this point, it should be pointed out that these neighbours are clearly practising Muslims, as the bloke's wife wears a hijab - and he says, "they really keep to themselves, don't really talk to the Aussies." and then he went on to say that "she talks just like us" with an element of real surprise in his voice. Of course she does, she's a bloody Aussie too!

It was this incident and a number of conversations I've had with people recently which has jolted me out of my idea that Australia isn't a terribly racist country. It pretends it isn't, but scratch the surface, and people's prejudices aren't buried particularly deeply.

Someone relatively enlightened mentioned the other day that there were a lot of Asian people in Australia. Well derr... Asia is our closest neighbour geographically, if not culturally, and the statistics actually show that Brits and Kiwis are still the most numerous immigrants to Australia. It's just that they look like "us" and "Asians" don't, apparently, so you notice "them" more.

When you really start to think about it, it's quite confronting to start to think about your own in built prejudices. Are you more likely to lock your doors in the car if a swarthy man walks by? Or do you make assumptions about a woman because she wears a hijab?

We have such a long way to go.