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OT: Human Rights Framework 3-May-2010 At 1:43:53 AM Ben

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I think declaring the whole of Australia as racist is a generality and as such is fairly dangerous. I will however declare that a sizable number of Australians have behaved in some cases in a clearly racist way, and many hold clearly racist views.

Wendy mentioned a few examples, the Cronulla riots being one of the more shameful. When people are deliberately assaulting / harassing people based on their perceived race, especially while draped in a flag - that is a VERY clear racist act.

Pauline Hanson's political career, and later Howards dogwhistling showed very strongly that there are a sizable portion of Australian's who believe fairly tribal beliefs - the white anglo's against the darker coloured people, or asians, or whatever their bug bear is. Whoever is not like them. Typically this is, in my view, pathetic, lazy stupidity.

People too lazy to want to have to deal with people as individuals and make individual assessments, who would much rather be able to paint entire classes by some easy visual means - colour, obvious religion etc.

Just to address two of Hendo's earlier examples:

If I was choosing sprinters to train (and acknowledging that some races tend to be physically better disposed to certain events due to fast twitch muscles etc.) I would still be choosing who to train by their times and results, not their colour or race. If bob and james both run, and bob runs much faster, then he's the one I want to train. I don't need to know or care what his skin colour is.

Likewise if I go to an Italian restaurant, I don't care about authenticity in terms of the race or appearance of the waitress or the cook - I care about the quality of the food and the service.

One of the worlds most renowned Thai cooks is a white (british?) guy. I don't care as long as the food is good.

Back to Sabu's comment: I'm not sure I want to call Australia as a whole a 'racist' country, but many people here ARE racists, when people go out 'curry bashing' that is nothing else. And hiding from the fact, denying that racism plays such a key part is insanity. Try talking to police officers involved in these crimes, (as compared to the media facing and politically driven senior staff) and they certainly have no illusions about it.

I'd much rather people face up, say, yes some people are racist, lets work on that, than pretend it doesn't exist.

And just for the record, since people seem to have different semantic understandings: I'm classing racism as any case where someone makes assumptions or indeed actions about someone else based on their racial appearance.