What causes racism? How does it start? I have long had a photo of two little First Nations boys on my desk. Obviously good mates, they are smiling broadly, happy to be together. It’s an old photo, taken in the 60s, so I often wonder what happened to them. My elder granddaughter really only noticed the picture for the first time when she was about four. One holding trenchant opinions even then, she announced, and I’m translating directly: I don’t like blacks. I don’t know whether she registered my immediate and sharp intake of breath. But her statement came as a shock.
Of course I told her what I thought of this declaration, and later mentioned the episode to my son, who sighed. ‘We’ve been fighting this battle for a while now,’ he said. ‘And it seems we’ll just have to keep on fighting it.’ Later, when we were having lunch in town, a Nigerian street vendor approached our table. He was a big man, very tall and dark. I glanced at Antigone, and saw her sitting rigidly: she was simply scared, and not inclined to be reassured by his flashing smile.
There were no First Nations people living in the township where I spent several formative years, but we had our Chinese vegetable man. The adults were uniformly kind to old Louey Tong, but the children spread wild yarns about him: these were clearly influenced by too many stories about big baddy Fu Manchu and perhaps parental noises about the Yellow Peril. My parents, however, poured scorn on these lurid fantasies of the goings-on in opium dens so that I, for one, was never scared of Louey, who, my mother said, would not have hurt a fly.
The first indigenous person I ever saw was singer Harold Blair, internationally famous then for his rich tenor voice. Our teacher was a Christian gentleman, as I remember, without a racist bone in his body, and he it was who made sure Mr Blair came to talk to our class at school: I think we all found him kind, interesting and approachable, and I still remember being fascinated by the sight of his pink palms and fingernails, for most of us had little idea of what to expect of somebody different.
'It is always important to remember our shared human heritage and acknowledge the fact that we all bleed and suffer in the same way.'
Perhaps that’s