She who stumbles

Why isn’t Alan Jones being lambasted like Don Imus?

Dom Knight, of the Sydney Morning Herald blog thinks he knows why.

Honestly, I’m not impressed with his analysis.

These two stories about multi-millionaire white broadcasters exercising appalling judgement when talking about minorities, though, say a great deal about each society.America is hypersensitive on the subject of race. I guess a legacy of slavery will do that to you – although a legacy of genocide doesn’t seem to have achieved the same result in Australia.

Um, what about the American legacy of genocide?

I think it was the work of black activists who’ve worked consistently over decades to push an anti-racist agenda, not the harried conscience of white broadcasting authorities or ad execs.

We haven’t had a movement with the kind of momentum of the anti-racist movement in the USA because we’re a much smaller country and the indigenous rights movements have focused around legal reform, suffrage, land rights, health, housing, etc.

By contrast, anti-racist movements by people of colour have been few and small. Although the post-invasion history of Australia does feature non-indigenous people of colour, those people were deliberately kept outside formal politics and weren’t numerous enough to force anti-racism onto the political agenda.

Since multiculturalism became the official policy, however, most ‘leadership’ in ‘ethnic communities’ is heavily mediated by the state. State funding and agencies underwrite most political activity by community groups, and they are made accountable to state agencies for that funding.

So what we’ve seen is a polarisation and depoliticisation of the terms of debate around race, with right wing media personalities and politicians talking about “getting tough” and having no time for “political correctness”, while left wing activists are left with this soft-centred discourse of “culture” and “tolerance” that doesn’t address the inequalities and injustices that underpin racism.

It’s really difficult for coalitions to form around these issues too, because communities are so besieged.

That’s why the response to Jones was to reassert the racist norm rather than “go[ing] completely overboard, American-style” and ousting the fucker. We don’t have the cultural or political tools to make that happen.

And that’s why Knight’s complacency and white-centrism will only usher in more of Jones-style hate speech.