Racism can be like wallpaper. It is just there. Accentuating the space, defining its partitions. In how many ways could a pattern be described?
I would rather not write about it. I am as tired of it as others might be of hearing from me, and people like me, about it. This is the claustrophobia it engenders.
It is true that not everything is about race; there are class and gender. Words are still only words on the scale of bad things that happen to people, and there are arguably more pressing issues than majority-minority panics about (white) identity. I would prefer not to lend racists attention.
The planet is burning. Life is unacceptably precarious: for children in detention, women in violent homes, disabled people on welfare, homeless teenagers. The federal government handed almost half a billion dollars to a foundation with six full-time staff, unsolicited and without competitive tender nor due diligence. These are things worth attention.
But this is how racism works: it displaces focus from material problems to imagined threats. It reframes complex problems for political capital and sometimes violent ends. That is the point when it stops being just wallpaper but also the scaffold. Not decoration, but a cage.
I live in the outer west suburbs of Melbourne, where people have converged from places like China, India, Myanmar, the Philippines, New Zealand and South Sudan. This mix becomes apparent during school pick-ups. The bell would ring, then a chattering swell as students pass the gate.
I picture this and other scenes when the rhetoric turns heated. The tall, slender mums pushing prams. The girls in hijab behind the fastfood counter. The bearded men reading the newspaper at the library.
"I did not realise that I had been holding myself together until Anning's speech. But in a momentary lapse, I let myself feel the bewildered resentment that comes with having to be resilient."
Some distance from the tumult of so-called debate, what becomes clear is that people just want to live their lives. Nothing much more profound than this can be extracted from the mundane. They do not mean to make others panic.
Yet they will not be left alone. In the past month, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton were still insisting that there is an African gang crisis in Victoria. Multicultural affairs minister Alan Tudge mulled strict tests for non-English speaking migrants, based on the mistaken belief that they fail