Australia’s attitudes to race have been spotlighted this week after a YouTube video was posted on a French tourist being racially abused on a bus. The woman was told by one passenger to “speak English or die”. She was then threatened with stabbing by a second man. The video has gone viral, and opened up a debate in Australia about levels of racism. But any discussion of what the video says about race relations in Australia, shouldn’t be done without context.
See the rest of the article in The Guardian – http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/23/australia-safe-debate-racism
It seems to me this is not racism per se but rather xenophobia compounded by sexism. The men’s comments are quite sexist and intend to terrorize the woman based on her sex and nationality (or, native language). Since you wrote previously against sexism in England, perhaps you could have mentioned this gross sexism.
Hi Manette
I agree about the sexism, and do in fact mention it three paragraphs from the bottom. And yes, it is xenophobia rather than racism, but wht interested me is precisely this – it was framed as being a racist attack (not xenophobic, not sexist) which to me was revealing about the debate Australia wanted to have, rather than the one it needed to have.