Whitewashing

[lederhosen]

Last year Rey and I saw "The Sapphires", a movie about four female Aboriginal singers and their dissolute Irish manager.

In that order. Chris O'Dowd does have an important role in the story and he gets a fair bit of screen time, but it is very much "Aboriginal girl group and their manager". With the "Aboriginal" bit being an important part of it all.

Here is an interesting comparison of the Australian and US DVD covers...

Comments

[silmaril]

Well, ain't that interesting. And by "interesting" I mean "infuriating."

[winterkoninkje]

goddamnit America!

Reminds me of a recent-ish post that I can't seem to find the link for: american writer visits Australia for a conference, talks a little about some of the racism she sees, talks far more about the progress she sees and how America will never see the kind of progress Australia has been embracing these past few years.

[lederhosen]

This one, I think?

Australian racism is... different from US racism. I'd like to think milder but I'm not certain. Our handling of asylum-seekers who come by boat is a festering sore; ostensibly both major parties want to discourage it because it's dangerous and people drown, but in reality it's more about appealing to racists who don't want to let brown people in because they might be Muslins and they all have STDs etc etc.

So we excised the Australian mainland from our migration zone, and those who do get here by boat get shunted off to camps in Nauru (and now PNG). Bleah.

What we don't have, AFAICT, is any close parallel to the situation of Black folk in the USA. (Indigenous Australians are probably closer to Native Americans, both historically and in the present, but a bit worse off.)

Two steps forward, one step back.

[winterkoninkje]

Yep, that's the one.

I have very little knowledge about contemporary Australian racism, so I couldn't really compare. I know historically it's quite bad, but based on Jemisin's article (and some followup googling) I definitely agree that —whatever state it's in— Australia is making a kind of progress that the States won't see for a very long time. The way things've been going, latin@s have been gaining more mainstream acceptance than blacks; and there's no reason to expect that to change in the near future. And the severe consolidation of wealth over the last couple decades disproportionately distances blacks from economic equality (e.g., cf., any article on how few blacks there are in STEM fields even as compared to other racial minorities like Indians and asians). But the popular dogma is that racism is no longer an issue here and that POC should just "get over it"... *sigh*

[lederhosen]

Yeah, one of the down-sides of Obama's presidency is hearing "well we elected a black president so racism no longer exists" - although I suspect those folk would always find some excuse.