There are has been a lot of talk lately as to whether or not Australia is a 'racist country'. Those who think not will often point to our aversion to racial slurs that were once acceptably commonplace, or to our shared embarrassment at open displays of hatred on public transport.
Following the US civil rights movement and the dismantling of the White Australia policy, public displays of racism became considerably less palatable. This creates a false sense of security that assumes that as long as long as one is not saying overtly racist things, then racism itself does not exist.
But the evidence shows a much grimmer reality, where the structural barriers preventing people of colour from participating fully in all areas of society remain firmly in place. As US President Obama said regarding Black Lives Matter and the issue of police brutality in the US, 'the African-American community is not just making this up ... it's real and there's a history behind it'.
Institutional discrimination is also real in Australia, and there is a history behind it. This is true both in civil society and in the application of criminal law. Indeed, there are few if any areas of public life that do not discriminate against various racial minorities.
The current anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment, for instance, goes deeper than the sporadic attacks against individuals in public that increase alongside our fears of terrorism. For instance, Australian jobseekers with Middle-Eastern sounding surnames must submit up to 64 per cent more resumes than someone with an Anglo name in order to secure an interview.
This highlights the unconscious bias many have against those descendent from this part of the world; people may not actively engage in racist displays against Arabs, but that doesn't mean they are willing to spend time in close proximity to them on a daily basis.
The damaging effect of unconscious bias is felt in early childhood. Like other brown and black people, Arab children are criminalised at a young age. Studies from Australia, the US and the UK indicate that brown and black children are punished more severely than their white counterparts for the same misbehaviour at school.
This discrepancy starts from as early as pre-school and, while children from white backgrounds are steered towards counselling, non-white children are likely to be suspended or expelled, and are diverted into the criminal justice system. Although affecting children from a broad range of racial backgrounds, as is so often the case, it is Aboriginal children who are most at risk.
This early criminalisation follows marginalised children into adulthood. Black adults are far more likely to be arrested and jailed for the same crime and to receive harsher sentences. Despite the fact that white Americans commit more minor drug crimes, blacks are arrested and jailed at a higher rate. Meanwhile, in Australia, laws ostensibly designed to protect all Australians are unfairly applied to Aboriginal people.
Paperless arrest laws, for instance, were introduced into the Northern Territory last year to 'free police from paperwork', allowing them to detain people for up to four hours without charge. In practice, they are disproportionately used against Aboriginal people who make up than 75 per cent of those arrested. One of them, Kumanjayi Langdon, died just three hours after being taken into custody.
Although experts are warning that more deaths will occur if the law isn't scrapped, it has recently been upheld by the High Court.
Even policies ostensibly designed to protect Aboriginal Australians are, in practice, harmful to their mental and physical wellbeing.
From the year 1999 to 2014, the number of Aboriginal children taken from their families increased by 400 per cent. More children are removed from their homes now than at any point during the Stolen Generations. Writers such as Kelly Briggs have told of the ever-present fear many Aboriginal mothers have that their children will be taken away from them, something few non-Indigenous Australians could possibly comprehend.
And if being the target of unfairly applied laws wasn't enough, people of colour tend to be taken less seriously as victims also. Statistics reveal that crimes in which white people are the victims are punished more severely and garner more public outrage.
Former Oklahoma police officer Daniel Holtzclaw is currently on trial in the US for allegedly sexually assaulting at least 12 black women. Holtzclaw is accused of deliberately targeting vulnerable women from poor backgrounds, some with a record of minor offences, in order to minimise his chances of capture. Despite the long history of white juries exonerating crimes committed against black Americans, Holtzclaw was awarded a jury of eight white men and four white women.
What all this demonstrates is that it is both naïve and dangerous to equate racism simply with individual acts of bigotry. Racism is not just a matter of people hurling racial slurs or newspapers portraying a Muslim leader as a monkey.
As troubling as these may be, they are merely a symptom of a more invisible epidemic; that of an often-unconscious but systemic bias against those from racially and culturally diverse backgrounds, a bias which is still firmly in place, no matter how much we may wish to relegate it to the past.
Ruby Hamad is a freelance writer and columnist for Daily Life. She holds a Masters in Media Practice from Sydney University where she wrote her thesis on objectivity and bias in the western media's coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict. She currently runs workshops on this topic for Macquarie University's Global Leadership Program. She tweets @rubyhamad