Member Since: 4/24/2011
Posts: 9,313
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For those who are coming for Australia:
They never say it explicitly but the undercurrent is this. If you are Australian you are living in a racist, homogenous society; a crudely segregated version of South Africa where the black African has no place. This is the country that gives the world such captivating iPhone footage of angry whites berating ethnic groups on trains and buses, after all. The fact that a few minutes of a deadbeat racist mouthing off on a train actually makes the news says, to the thinking viewer, that it isn't an everyday occurrence. That in this society, it is so abhorred, and so rare, that when it happens it makes the news for days. But who thinks?
The irony, to me, is the America-bound black African and what would become the white Australian arrived to their assorted continents in similar circumstances. The African, as slave, the white Australian, as convict. Both in chains, both tortured, imprisoned, deprived of any sort of meaningful lives. The modern white American is so screwed up with guilt, so tortured by his race's slaving past, that he forgets that there's more to the world than a simple matter of black and white. That, just maybe, not every country was founded on the broad backs of African slaves.
The catch, of course, is both countries had sizeable indigenous populations prior to European settlement. And both countries ruined these populations, intentionally, through war and conflict, and, mostly unintentionally, by the diseases they brought. Why is there no native Americans being represented on TV and in music, where is there place in society. At least in some cases in Australia, there are endless programs for indigenous Australians to get them free education.
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