by Cecil Poole
Ross Gittins is a journalist whose opinions and writings I find invariably interesting. He writes for Fairfax, one of Australia’s less reactionary media outlets. One of his recent articles was a review of criminologist Don Weatherburn’s new book Arresting Incarceration. Gittins begins by pointing out that we imprison members of the indigenous population at a rate 18 times that of the white population. That compares somewhat unfavourably with the US who jail African Americans at a rate of 12 times the white population. (Native Americans are jailed at a rate roughly 20% below that of African Americans.)
It costs around $275 per day to keep a person in prison in Australia, or just over $100k a year, so there are economic reasons to be concerned. Westherburn points out that despite significant expenditure and policy initiatives the rate of incarceration of indigenous people just keeps rising. He identifies what he sees as the reasons, and contends that these reasons are not racially based, that they underly most offending across the whole population.
”The four most important of these are poor parenting (particularly child neglect and abuse), poor school performance, unemployment and substance abuse,” he says. ”Indigenous Australians experience far higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse, child neglect and abuse, poor school performance and unemployment than their non-indigenous counterparts.”
Weatherburn also contends that “more Aborigines are in jail because more Aborigines commit crimes, particularly violent crimes.”
It was about this time that alarm bells started ringing in my head, I found I do have reservations about the article – the whole tenor of the article is so Western, it seems to be an evaluation from our white perspective, to be ethnocentric. It seems to be saying “When they become like us they will be free and not so incarcerated”. The whole article (and the book?) has a strong assimilationist undercurrent. (This assimilationist undercurrent is gaining strength throughout Australian media)
Which brings me back to bigotry. Bigotry, it seems, is not so far from ethnocentrism, in that ethnocentrism has come to embody the belief in the superiority of ones own culture. Hence the push for assimilation.
Waleed Aly, also writing for Fairfax explores the ethnocentricity embodied in “Free Speech” legislation proposed for Australia. This legislation weakens the protection currently afforded minority group against racial vilification, and “(u)nspoken at the heart of this debate is a contest over the way race relations works in this country – and on whose terms.” This is where Aly provides grist for our mill. He demonstrates that these proposed laws will be based on white values, white feelings as if these stand for all Australians.
Aly goes on to say “This matters because – if I may speak freely – plenty of white people (even ordinary reasonable ones) are good at telling coloured people what they should and shouldn’t find racist, without even the slightest awareness that they might not be in prime position to make that call”
Gradually I begin to understand Rosalie Kunoth-Monks’ claim that in Australia we have a white problem, not a black one, and Kim Beasley Snr statement that “only when their (Indigenous Australians) right to be distinctive is accepted, will policy become creative”.
As Gittins said there are moral reasons why we should care.
*Bigoted: having or revealing an obstinate belief in the superiority of one’s own opinions and aprejudiced intolerance of the opinions of others: a bigoted group of reactionaries | a bigoted article.