I grew up in dazzlingly white Irish settled rural Australia, and despite the mashed-potato homogeneity of the culture there, I know there is persistent racism in Australia. As a white person in conversations with white people, the stream of casual racist epithets, assumptions, stereotypes and slurs was an ugly and (to me) upsetting part of the cultural landscape. I got out of that life (made easier by never having fit in) and grew a clue (caution: clue growing still in progress).
I know that I have marinated in a racist culture, and I have to correct for the influence of that bias all the time. I know that the influence of racism here on me personally is about as minimal as it gets. So given that I can't know what it is to be anything but of plainly Caucasian appearance, I look at how it has distorted my world view in a million tiny, subtle, harmful ways and try to extrapolate from that how many orders of magnitude more impact it has to have on people who are non-white.
I can understand why the Australian directors/producers of Hey Hey it's History (or whatever it was called) didn't foresee that the black face sketch would be a problem. It is because we don't have as high a level of awareness, acknowledgment and contrition for the atrocities of the past that people in the USA do.
I commented in an LJ on the topic of whether black-face is inherently offensive, stating that I believed that the USA has a highly developed taboo around this particular artifact of parody of black people, and Australia does not. My broader point was that the USA is regularly astounded to find that not every country in the world shares their cultural mores, and that Australia not having this taboo to as high a degree is an example of this. Which is not to say that Australia is superior because of it.
And having considered your post, I am increasingly convinced that the "ha ha black-face" meme indicates a pervasive insensitivity to racism, or perhaps an obliviousness? I've long suspected mashed-potato Australia of cultivating a state of dissociation from the atrocities that were perpetrated against the Aboriginal people. It'd be par for the course if a similar set of victim-blaming, claim-denying, we're-not-as-bad-as-the-other-guys rationalisation is going on with regard to expressions of racism.
I honestly wonder whether I (who did not watch the show in question) would even have heard about it if there had not been a US celebrity there to call them on it and make it "news". And given the attitudes I overhear from the white side of things, I suspect it will take a lot of time and education to reach a point where racial slurs are recognised up front as being not funny by Australian TV show producers and their audiences.
no subject
I know that I have marinated in a racist culture, and I have to correct for the influence of that bias all the time. I know that the influence of racism here on me personally is about as minimal as it gets. So given that I can't know what it is to be anything but of plainly Caucasian appearance, I look at how it has distorted my world view in a million tiny, subtle, harmful ways and try to extrapolate from that how many orders of magnitude more impact it has to have on people who are non-white.
I can understand why the Australian directors/producers of Hey Hey it's History (or whatever it was called) didn't foresee that the black face sketch would be a problem. It is because we don't have as high a level of awareness, acknowledgment and contrition for the atrocities of the past that people in the USA do.
I commented in an LJ on the topic of whether black-face is inherently offensive, stating that I believed that the USA has a highly developed taboo around this particular artifact of parody of black people, and Australia does not. My broader point was that the USA is regularly astounded to find that not every country in the world shares their cultural mores, and that Australia not having this taboo to as high a degree is an example of this. Which is not to say that Australia is superior because of it.
And having considered your post, I am increasingly convinced that the "ha ha black-face" meme indicates a pervasive insensitivity to racism, or perhaps an obliviousness? I've long suspected mashed-potato Australia of cultivating a state of dissociation from the atrocities that were perpetrated against the Aboriginal people. It'd be par for the course if a similar set of victim-blaming, claim-denying, we're-not-as-bad-as-the-other-guys rationalisation is going on with regard to expressions of racism.
I honestly wonder whether I (who did not watch the show in question) would even have heard about it if there had not been a US celebrity there to call them on it and make it "news". And given the attitudes I overhear from the white side of things, I suspect it will take a lot of time and education to reach a point where racial slurs are recognised up front as being not funny by Australian TV show producers and their audiences.