Not a Sydney-sider or from NSW, was the racial tension that was stoked up to the riots really caused or significantly contributed to by that horrible series of rapes?
For the outside I get the feeling it’s a brick in the wall kind of thing. Along with lots of racism, culture clash, opportunistic politicians and grifter shock jocks.
But I understand it’s hard to gauge the vibe of a culture from a half a continent away. Even more so doing it 20 years later.
Taleya@aussie.zone 4 days ago
The whole thing was a shitshow from start to finish but the rapes were the impetus that put a borderline “acceptable” face on shitheads looking to to “take back muh beach”. Much like the way nazis have been co opting immigration concerns this year
shads@lemy.lol 4 days ago
I want to preface this by saying that I don’t believe anything could serve as recompense for what those women and girls went through.
But it’s a bit telling that they had been caught, tried, found guilty and were actively serving their sentences, yet the mob (or at least elements of it) still clung to that pretence as a way of being able to attack and traumatize an entire community.
I sincerely doubt that this was the first flirtation with racism for many of these people. Violent race based attacks maybe, but not racism on the extreme end of the spectrum.
Slightly off topic anecdote:
I talked with a refugee from sub Saharan Africa once, he was pretty cooked and not super lucid. Talking to a friend later she revealed that she had dealt with him before doing community outreach.
She explained that his parents had got him out of Africa ahead of a little ethnic cleansing and brought him to Australia as a young child. He had then spent the next decade plus dealing with racism, ranging from casual to overt and targeted. Started on drugs at 13 and looked like he was in his late 30s before he turned 20.
I’m certain he was no angel, but I feel like he was forced down a pathway in life by the environment he lived in through no choice of his own. How different could his life have turned out if he had landed in the right community?
I despair that we are really terrible at just living with people from different places and cultures, especially when they make up a minority in our communities.
Taleya@aussie.zone 4 days ago
this is sadly a pattern we see again and again and again. The Italian and Greek violence - mostly driven by white Australians othering and fucking them up, then a couple generations down everyone’s integrated and its unimaginable not having them part of our makeup. In the 80’s and 90’s it was the Viet community, same deal. 2000’s we had Somalis, but then it was rapidly overtaken by Muslim - usually Turks and Lebanese then we ended up with a four way shitfight between the white aussies and the Greeks and the Turks and the Lebanese, but also anything in a post 911 world has absolutely fucked up not only people from the middle east but *also *anyone who adheres to Islam because people are fucking idiots.
And now we have diaspora Africans getting the othering treatment, and some of them are Muslim, so we’re fucking them six ways to sunday, having right wing shitheads leap on politicising any action then pulling a suprised pikachu when traumatised refugees react badly to being shat on again.
And at the end of the day the problem is never the immigrants or the refugees. It’s the reactionaries who want us all to be greedy little pigboys afraid of other humans who keep creating self fulfilling prophecies
shads@lemy.lol 3 days ago
I genuinely don’t think I have anything to add to that. It’s all just so petty and tawdry.
On a related note I think it’s worth mentioning that this is all accelerated by a 24 hour news cycle and the amount of right-wingers who insist on dragging American culture wars and politics over to Australia, I’m guessing because our own politics aren’t dramatic enough for them, which then platforms the worst sort of people.
Maybe that’s reaping what we sewed considering we exported Rupert. Now we are importing hate & radicalism on-top of our own domestic stock.