Sometimes, people from the USA say funny things about Australia. One I hear a lot is that Australia is a racist country and that you can tell that because it has almost no black people.
It’s true, we don’t have very many. But we also didn’t run a 300 year forced-migration program. This explains a hell of a lot about why we have fewer black people than, say America does.
We have tons of other things to be ashamed about. Trust me. But asking ‘where’s your black people’ shows that you don’t really understand how history works.
It doesn’t explain why Australia is still a far more homogeneous country than America. I’m well aware of how most of the blacks got here; my father is an African-American historian (historian of African-Americans, that is), and I’ve grown up being well aware of slavery. It is, as Lord John Marbury said, our original sin.
I’m also aware of the demographics of both countries. America is much, much more racially diverse than Australia. I believe in diversity. I believe that people should travel as much as possible, but if you can only be in one place, make it a diverse one. I know people who’ve grown up in almost totally white environments, and I’ve done plenty of reading (Jonathan Kozol is excellent on this) on kids who grow up in totally black environments, and neither is healthy. If the vast, vast majority of a place is one color, one ethnicity, one religion, one anything, I see that as unhealthy.
I realize Australia is at a disadvantage compared to most other countries, being so isolated, but I’ve also heard (and please correct me if I’m wrong, I hope I am) that it is not immigrant-friendly. The US isn’t anymore, and I see that as being potentially detrimental, but we do already have established communities and populations representing virtually everyone in the world.
One person in 4 was born outside Australia. More than half of all Australians are the children of migrants. Migrant intake for this year is 300,000 – which in a country of 20,000,000 is a staggering amount. It is the equivalent of the US accepting 4,500,000 a year. Which it does not. It takes fewer than 1 million.
The ‘Pacific Solution’ to so-called illegal immigrants, and the system of mandatory detention for same is horrible, and must come to an end. However, your criticism seems based entirely on the fact that our migrants aren’t black enough for you, which says more for your views on race than anything else.
Don’t be disingenuous. You know the White Australia Policy far better than your American friends (who only know about Australian politics from Beds are Burning and Blue Sky Mine):
The White Australia policy stands for the historical policies that intentionally restricted non-white immigration to Australia from 1901 to 1973….The happening of the inauguration of White Australia as government policy is generally taken to be the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901, one of the first Acts of the new national parliament upon federation, the bill had support from the labour movement…Restrictions on immigration had preceded federation, beginning with anti-Chinese legislation enacted by individual Australian colonies during the Australian goldrushes of the 1850s.
You can say that immigrants just happen to be white all you like, but your country doesn’t exactly have a history of rolling out the red carpet for people of color does it? I’m not suggesting that Australia is any more racist that the rest of the world, but a) it’s certainly not any less, and b) you guys haven’t really gone out of your way to break the stereotype.
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