This week was a funny time to learn that last year police officers in the Melbourne western suburb of Sunshine printed and distributed 50 racist stubby holders. Rather, it wasn't funny at all, especially if you are an Australian who has been mistreated by a police officer because of the colour of your skin, or if you care whether police officers are held to any kind of ethical standards.
The stubby holder in question shows a cartoon image of a mudfish, which references a racist slight for East Africans in the area. It is a slur on the 'bottom feeder' species that is eaten in Sudan and elsewhere. The baby blue foam cup says 'SUNSHINE POLICE: Whoever says Sunshine brings happiness has never worked here.' While an inquiry has been launched, the officers responsible remain in their jobs.
And commentators keep telling us that racism is benign in Australia.
The past fortnight's events have kept race high on the public agenda. Everyone is talking. Can a 13-year-old be racist? (Yes.) Is what Eddie McGuire said racist? (Yes.) Does a culture of racism actually have an impact on how racialised people in Australia — people who are from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, or simply don't look white — get to live? (Ask someone who knows.)
When something occurs in the symbolic realm in Australia — say, the Opposition Leader appears to condone his female opponent being labelled a 'witch' and 'bitch', or a child calls an Aboriginal athlete a primate — we are offended. And we feel good about being offended, because it means we're better than the brutes.
What comes next is the analysis which says it's not all as bad as it looks. Columnists say things like, 'That's not racist; you should see what they do to Muslims in Burma!' Or, 'Haven't you read the Macquarie Dictionary lately? That's not what a catalogue of dead words says 'misogyny' is!'
Joe Hildebrand's column last week characteristically makes light of Australia's racism problem, stating that in some countries, 'racism leads to oppression, torture and genocide. In Melbourne its effect is to turn everybody into dribbling idiots.' It also leads to oppression and violence, allegedly perpetrated by police officers, in Sunshine, for example. But we won't talk about that.
Being white, I don't know much about racism. The way I look and talk is in line with a dominant social group, and there are innumerate ways that I benefit from that. But knowing I'll never be an expert in racism doesn't prohibit me from seeing the poverty of our national conversation about it.
Our wilful ignorance and concurrent silence around the lived impacts of racism allows for acts of violence by authority figures — in this particular case police officers — to be met with impunity. It is that simple.
Racial violence by the police — for which there is a great deal of evidence and testimony collected by legal professionals and organisations — is too terrifying to be editorialised about. If some police have engaged in racial violence, and most accounts of violence have been met with impunity, what does this mean for our belief in our basic institutions? In public discourse, it is easier to downsize the impact of racist language and get on with it.
Like many women, I've experienced violence because of my gender, an experience which makes it very clear that the symbolic realm — that of language and subtle gestures of power — is inextricable from the material realm — that of brute force and humiliation. The fear instilled in women when they are verbally abused is predicated on the reality of physical abuse. One requires the other.
One of my lecturers used to say that sex leads to pregnancy, and racism leads to genocide. Which is to say that genocide, like pregnancy, can be more or less avoided with careful management, but the surging undercurrent of violence is always at the heart of a racist culture.
This claim sounds rather drastic, but history supports it. Almost everywhere that there exists a belief in a racialised hierarchy, there has been racial violence to assert it. In Sunshine, the stubby holder represents a belief in a racial hierarchy, and long-standing allegations of racialised violence by police officers reveals the outcome of this belief.
Most of the time, when people use racist language their intention is not to wage genocide on racialised groups. But the cultural provenance of racism, and its contemporary outcomes, means that racist language is inextricable from racial violence. The outrage is not that we are 'dribbling idiots' for talking about race, but that we are too cowardly to name its implications in our own suburbs.
Ellena Savage is a Eureka Street columnist, arts editor at The Lifted Brow and politics editor at SPOOK Magazine. She has written about literature, feminism, and political culture for publications including Overland, Australian Book Review, Right Now, Arena, and Farrago, which she co-edited in 2010. Her 2012 essay 'A Man Like Luai' won the Tharunka Non-fiction prize. She tweets as @RarrSavage.
Graffiti image from Shutterstock