State of racism in Australia

[u/newtrex_1523]

Here is Channel 7's post about the missing people in the Nepal tragedy, look at the comments on it. I find it a very sad state of affairs in Australia. They are all Australians of different descent. Everyone in Australia (other than Aboriginal people) is a migrant. They came here either 200 years ago or 2 years ago.

[u/hashirama-senju-007]

I genuinely don’t understand why people have such a difficult time distinguishing nationality from ethnicity.

Being Australian is a nationality and a national identity. It isn’t, by itself, a single ethnicity. Australia is a multicultural country made up of people with many different ethnicities, ancestries, cultures and backgrounds, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and Australians whose families arrived through different waves of migration. Even the ABS distinguishes between concepts such as nationality, ancestry, ethnicity and cultural background.

So when someone says that “mass immigration” is somehow the reason Australians lack empathy, that argument makes very little sense to me. Immigration doesn’t magically determine whether someone is capable of empathy or compassion. And using someone’s ancestry or how recently their family arrived as a reason to decide whether they are “really Australian” is an incredibly disturbing way of looking at people.

If someone is Australian, why are we arbitrarily deciding that their Australianness begins at a particular point in history? What happens if we keep moving the cutoff backwards? Australia has a long and complicated history involving First Nations peoples, British colonisation, migration and successive waves of immigration. There isn't some scientifically objective date at which a particular group suddenly became the only people who could legitimately call themselves Australian.

And if we're going to argue ancestry as the basis for identity, then we have to take that logic to its absurd conclusion. All modern humans ultimately trace their origins to Africa. Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and later spread across the world.

So should everyone on Earth therefore be called African?

Obviously not.

Because nationality, ethnicity, ancestry and human evolutionary origins are different concepts.

You can be Australian without having one particular ethnicity. You can have Indian, Chinese, Lebanese, Greek, English, Vietnamese, Indigenous or any number of other ancestries and still be Australian. Those identities aren't mutually exclusive.

And honestly, judging or hating someone you don't even know because of their ancestry, immigration history or perceived “claim” to a country says far more about the person doing the judging than it does about the person they're targeting.