Posts Tagged ‘Racism’
Thursday, March 18th, 2010
Stuart Rintoul; 18/3/10
More than 20 complaints of racism by Victorian police, including allegations of criminal behaviour, were made to the Office of Police Integrity by lawyers acting for young African Australians between 2006 and 2009. Only one has been investigated by the OPI and several resulted in charges being laid by police against those who made the complaints in what lawyers describe as “cover charges”. No police officers have been sacked for race-related incidents, despite Chief Commissioner Simon Overland admitting he was aware of several “substantiated cases”. Asked yesterday whether police had investigated and found substantiated cases of racist behaviour, Mr Overland, who has been embroiled in race rows, replied: “Yes.” Asked whether these cases were recent, he replied: “Yes.”
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Tags: Australia, Racism
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Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
Jared Owens; 17/ 3/10
Up to 15 indigenous boarders at Brisbane’s exclusive Clayfield Girls College fought each other in a “riot-like” brawl, forcing a lockdown of sleeping quarters and police to be called. The disturbance on Monday night has further stirred racial tensions between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups of students at the school. The brawl erupted as the school’s boarders sat for dinner, with the two groups hurling abuse at each other including threats to kill and maim.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Human Rights, Racism
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Monday, February 22nd, 2010
Selma Milovanovc; 22/2/10
Indigenous groups say proposed changes to the native title law are racist and a throwback to the Howard era, and will reduce Aboriginal land rights to little more than a symbol after 10 years of struggle. In submissions to a Senate inquiry into Native Title Amendment Bill 2, the nation’s key indigenous bodies say the bill relies on a view that the constitution allows the making of laws that are detrimental to Aborigines, something a Labor opposition once said was ”morally repugnant, socially divisive and would endanger reconciliation”. The federal government claims the proposed bill will help accelerate construction of urgently needed housing on land subject to native title, overcoming delay and uncertainty stemming from current rules.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Racism
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Saturday, February 6th, 2010
Chris Sarra; 6/2/10
Australian multiculturalism exists alongside hypocrisy about our diversity. We do not have the luxury of pretending that everything is OK with our society, when a comedy sketch on Australian TV can ignite overseas branding of Australians as racist and when Indian students are being attacked. It gives us cause to ask ourselves honestly what it means to be Australian. The perception that racism is a problem in Australia exists, whether we accept it or not. If the perception matches the reality, then there is a problem we must deal with. If it does not match the reality, then we still have a problem to deal with. The issue needs to be explored in open and honest dialogue. We are a great society, yet we are not a perfect society. If we are honest with ourselves, we would acknowledge we are affected by racism. Let’s not over-read this problem but racism is a cancer with the very real potential to erode the soul of our nation.
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Tags: Australia, Human Rights, Racism
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Friday, February 5th, 2010
Nick O’Malley; 5/2/10; http://www.smh.com.au/national/the-diary/score-20-in-trad-v-jones-20100204-ngb9.html
Radio 2GB and its star broadcaster, Alan Jones, have been forced to hand over the $10,000 in damages they were ordered to pay the Lebanese Muslim community leader Keysar Trad last year by the Administrative Decisions Tribunal, after failing to have the order stayed while they are appealing against the decision. Just before Christmas the tribunal ordered Jones and the station to pay the damages and to meet Trad to discuss the timing, nature and form of an apology and to review its policies and training procedures, after it upheld a complaint of racial vilification against Jones and 2GB’s owner, Harbour Radio. The complaint related to on-air comments Jones made before the Cronulla riots in 2005. While it failed to have the damages order stayed, the station, which lodged an appeal against the orders last month, was successful in securing a stay on orders related to the apology and the review. Attention is now turning to who will pay the legal costs for the dispute, which threaten to dwarf the damages ordered by the tribunal. It is understood that both parties have lodged written submissions arguing that the other should pay all of the costs, which are estimated to have run to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Trad has previously said the damages money would be donated to a Muslim women’s charity: a respite centre run by the Australian Council for Women’s Affairs.
Tags: Australia, Racism, Religion
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Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
Lindsay Murdoch; 26/1/10; (3 Items)
Djambawa Marawili says many awards have been passed to him through ancestral beings and his grandfathers. ”I have now passed them on through the tools of my art to the young people I mentor,” he says. But Marawili, one of Australia’s most important indigenous artists, says being awarded a Member of the Order of Australia is important for his Yolngu people of Arnhem Land because it will help bridge the divide between their culture and that of the balanda (white person). Marawili, 56, received the award for service to the arts as a sculptor and painter, to the preservation of indigenous culture, to arts administration and as a mentor of emerging artists. He is worried the stories he tells through his art are fading as Western influences encroach on Yolngu culture. ”That’s why I see it as important for me to mentor the young generation who are living on their ancestral lands, away from the grog, drugs and violence in the bigger communities,” he said. ”It’s important to stand firm in passing on the stories and also to stand up for Yolngu.”
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Australia Day, Racism
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Saturday, January 23rd, 2010
John Warren Harbour; 23/1/10;
My progress at school was not through ability in the academic area, where I only managed a pass rate, but in sport, where I found my natural skills took me to the top of my year. I would spend hours by myself hitting a tennis ball against the brick chimney, sharpening my hand-eye co-ordination. This process worked in my favour to the degree I was appointed captain of my year in football and cricket.It was around this time in year seven or eight I began a friendship with an Aboriginal boy. We played games and would kick the footy to each other before school, at lunch, and after school until we were exhausted. I could not understand why some kids called him Abo or why they would not include him in their games. It made no sense to me, as he had truckloads of natural ability and could run rings around the others, myself included.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Racism
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Saturday, January 23rd, 2010
David Penberthy; 23/1/09
We should cut the coppers some slack as they grapple with the public handling of the attacks on Indian students in Melbourne. Policing has long been a closed culture. Less than a generation ago the only way police reporters could get stories was to spend months or even years hanging around the Police Club, drinking with detectives and slowly building enough trust to get the inside running on big stories. These days, whenever a cat gets stuck up a tree there’s an expectation that an all-in press conference will follow within the hour to discuss its breed, name, and how the pesky little varmint got up there in the first place. There is no point in police complaining about this. It’s a reflection of the public’s legitimate conviction that information should flow freely from every arm of government. People have a right to know what is happening in their community and, these days, it is the job of the police to tell them.
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Tags: Australia, Drugs, Racism, Violence
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Thursday, January 21st, 2010
Lauren Wilson 21/1/10
The admission by Victoria’s top cop that his officers have long known Indians are disproportionately targeted by criminals in Melbourne, has been heralded as a “breakthrough” by some in the Indian community. The state’s Chief Commissioner of police, Simon Overland, said yesterday “there is no question, regardless of the motives, Indian students have to a degree been targeted in robberies and that is not OK”. “We recognised this problem a long time before it hit the public,” he told ABC radio. Victorian police have been criticised and caricatured by the Indian press for not attributing the death of 21-year-old accounting graduate Nitin Garg earlier this month, to racism.
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Tags: Australia, Migrants & Refugees, Racism
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, India, Refugee & Migrant | No Comments »
Monday, January 11th, 2010
John Hooper; 11/1/10
Rosarno in southern Italy had, by Sunday night, been turned into what one politician termed the world’s only entirely white town after a bloody ethnic cleansing that produced scenes reminiscent of the old American deep south. As bulldozers got to work to obliterate shacks belonging to the itinerant crop-pickers who had fled, the last of more than 1,000 such workers were being removed from the area for their own protection. After two days and nights of violence that began with the apparently motiveless shooting of two African workers, the number of injured stood at 53, comprising 18 police, 14 local people and 21 immigrants, eight of whom were in hospital.
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Tags: Italy, Racism
Posted in Africa, Racism, Workers | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
Paul Maley & Jodie Minus 6/1/10
The Indian government and student groups have backed away from claims that the murder of Nitin Garg was racially motivated, as police continued to comb a park in Melbourne’s west for evidence that may lead them to the killer. A second sweep of Yarraville’s Cruickshank Park, where Garg was fatally stabbed on Saturday night as he was walking to work at a nearby fast-food restaurant, yesterday recovered two “items of interest” but no murder weapon. India’s deputy high commissioner in Canberra, V.K. Sharma, said Indian diplomatic officials had conveyed New Delhi’s concern about the latest attack on an Australian-based national to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Mr Sharma said India had asked Australia to do all it could to prevent assaults on Indians and bring the culprits of Saturday’s attack to justice. But he said “nobody knows” if attacks on Indians were racially motivated.
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Tags: Australia, Human Rights, India, Racism
Posted in Aid / Trade, Australia, Human Rights, India, Refugee & Migrant | No Comments »
Monday, January 4th, 2010
Ruth Wajnryb; 4/1/10
It was a lazy kind of day. A friend was over at his mother-in-law’s at the weekend. He’d taken his young family with him and the children were playing with their doting grandmother. From a few metres away, where he was engaged in something else, he overheard her saying: “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a nigger by the toe, when he squeals let him go, eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” This children’s rhyme, of disputed origin, has been known for about 150 years and is typically used in games when a person is needed to be selected as “it”. Some adults, including me, still use a shorthand version, albeit sub voce, when they’re ostensibly making a choice and can’t decide: mud cake or pavlova? Being so traditional, the words of the ditty reflect its own zeitgeist, which, at least in this one regard, is stridently at odds with ours. Understandably, my friend was torn. Should he ignore what he heard or should he interrupt the game to gently bring his mother-in-law into the 21st century, to have her know that these days, for this particular rhyme, there’s strong discouragement against the use of “nigger”.
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Tags: Australia, Racism
Posted in Australia, Health & Children, Racism | No Comments »
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010
Letters; 2/1/10; http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/letters/index.php/ theaustralian/comments/playing_the_race_card
Any Australian with common decency would have been horrified and disgusted at the rise of Pauline Hanson in 1996. They would have also flinched at John Howard’s knowing wink wink, nudge nudge as he silently agreed with her racist views, something he was to use with such devastating effect in 2001. Disclosures in released documents from Malcolm Fraser’s years documenting his concerns of this happening, will not come as any surprise to those of us who could foresee the dangers of letting the race genie out of the bottle. Couple that with the dumbing down of the populace, selling the line that individual gratification and greed as opposed to the collective good was the way forward has set the scene for what we are now seeing being cranked up again by a desperate opposition leader and his party. Abbott knows that the race card will give them the breathing space they need before enough people wake up to the fact the emperor has no clothes. D.J.Fraser, Mudgeeraba, Qld
Tags: Australia, Racism
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, Racism, Refugee & Migrant | No Comments »
Monday, December 28th, 2009
David Marr; 28/12/09
Though a good deal less than a day’s pay for Alan Jones, the $10,000 he and 2GB were ordered to pay last week for vilifying Lebanese in Australia is the first punishment inflicted on either the talkback king or his station for attacks on Lebanese Muslims that reached their depths in the days before the Cronulla riots in the summer of 2005. Jones and 2GB have been ordered to mend their ways in the past but never punished until a few days before Christmas, when the Administrative Decisions Tribunal of NSW upheld a complaint of racial vilification brought by the Sydney Lebanese identity Keysar Trad. The three-member tribunal ordered Jones and his station to pay damages of $10,000 within 21 days and to prepare over summer a form of apology acceptable to Trad. Trad has promised the cheque to a Muslim charity: the respite centre run by the Australian Council for Women’s Affairs.
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Tags: Australia, Racism
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Monday, December 7th, 2009
Dana Weiler-Polak; 7/12/09
Basic rights in Israel are increasingly conditioned on the identity and gender of those who seek to realize them, according to the annual report which the Association for Civil Rights in Israel is releasing Sunday. The report describes a reality in which Arabs receive education, work and maybe citizenship only if they serve in the army or perform national service. Similarly, those who seek to live in some communities will be allowed their right to housing only if they fit a description which excludes Arabs, Sephardim, Russians, Ethiopians, religious or disabled people, as well as single-sex and single-parent families, according to the report.
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Tags: Israel, Racism, Terrorism
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Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
Chandra White-Cummings; 3/12/09
Chandra White-Cummings is a columnist for UrbanFaith and director of the Black Life Issues & Action Network, in Dayton, Ohio, a non-profit program that works to educate, empower, and engage the African American community concerning issues that impact Black women, children, and families. She blogs at Life As We Know It. This article appears courtesy of a partnership with UrbanFaith.com.
I’ll tell you up front — I’m going to talk about race. I know some are tired of hearing about it, and I think that’s mainly because we’ve been hearing about it in the same ways for so long. There’s surely no dearth of conversation about race among Christians. Web sites, blogs, church initiatives, para-church programs, forums, symposia, conferences, retreats, speeches, books, magazine articles, and everything in between are singing the same song: We have a race problem in the church. And it’s not a “problem” in the same way that dwindling attendance or a string of boring sermons is a problem. It’s a blight, a stain, and a hindrance to others coming to Christ, and to current disciples growing in their knowledge of and obedience to Christ. So the subject does warrant discussion; we just need to deal with the real problem and stop trying to address only the outward symptoms.
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Tags: Racism, Religion, USA
Posted in Human Rights, Racism, USA | No Comments »
