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Well, in the words of John Safran, I’ve been thinkin’!

There was certainly racism in the already controversial second ep of John Safran’s Race Relations, but it didn’t emanate from white-turned-black Safran.

Discrimination engenders discrimination by those discriminated against. (You might need a moment to get your head round that sentence – I know I did! ) The Jews in Israel, for instance, were badly discriminated against, and now go out of their way to persecute the Palestinians. So it is with racism. An era of whites-only cliques in the US has given way to blacks-only cliques. The word ‘nigger’ was once used by whites in order to offend blacks, but is now used extensively by blacks but considered offensive if spoken by a white. That is racism! It’s just reverse racism.

We are one race – the human race – and we should all be able to speak the same words.

The term ‘black brother’ is another divisive term. As ‘mate’ traditionally refers to a white Australian male the white speaker could imagine being close to, ‘black brother’ of course is the same dodgy tribalism with a different skin colour. Shortened to ‘brother’ or ‘bro’, it can sometimes mean someone non-black, but the predominant (non-sibling) usage is coloured by racism.

‘Mate’ carries some historical baggage – which generations of Australians have never even considered – but is used by many young Australians without bias. Hungry Beast did an interesting piece last week about us now being ‘post race’. (Look out for the clever ending.) Although playing for laughs, they were making a serious point about subtleties of context. In short they were saying that something is offensive if it offends! They played around with the idea of white people using words like ‘nigger’ and ‘wog’ and it being fine sometimes. Trouble is (and this wasn’t mentioned in the clip) it’s only fine if it offends nobody at all. Not the black guy, not the white guy, and not the other guy who happens to be getting a refill at the water cooler.

I was chatting with a (drunk) bar owner in Wangaratta recently, and he called himself ‘wog’ over and over with relish. I didn’t like it. It offended me. It said to me “I don’t feel I’m like you” and that doesn’t fit with my view of a single human race. So the best thing is to just let all the pejorative words fall out of use. That’s true post race.

Image: ABC