Rizla,
"The White Race" is an abstract, I don't deal in abstracts.
I speak about Ethnic White Australians, "my race",White people or just Whites.
The old interpretation of the term "The White Race has no currency in 21st century Australia, I've never heard anyone use it in conversation.
Multiculturalism has clearly defined who White Australians are, we're the descendants of the nation which formed under the immigration restriction act.
If you went back over my 18 months or so of posts here you'd see a pretty clear evolutionary path in my position on"The White Race", the above is where I'm at in november 2011.
Racial awareness is something that has to be awakened in White people since we're not ethnocentric by nature, so taking that into consideration the idea of one race is flawed from the start.
The obvious lack of ethnocentrism among my race also seems to make a mockery of the accusation that we have a "Racist Past", if Whites were ethnocentric I have no doubt there'd be no other group living in this country besides us.

Jay,

So if you're anti-White you're not racist?

Jay, not everything has always been that way - not too long ago, Irish were considered by the perfidious English not to be White, perhaps as late as the extension of the vote in the 1880s. And perhaps you've heard of the Black Scots ? In the US, Bohemians and Slovaks were not considered to be white in western mining towns a hundred years ago.

In the deliberations over Australia's White Australia policy, many quibbles were made about whether Italians or Maltese were admissible: Maltese were because Malta was part of the British Empire, but some authorities weren't so sure about Eyetalians. Or Greeks. They talked funny too. But some Syrians were accepted as long as they were Christian. So 'white' is a protean concept:)

Who knows, all of those 'part-Aboriginal' kids of these past generations, and the next - or at least their descendants - will be just as happy to call themselves 'white', whatever it may mean, as 'Aboriginal', in another hundred years. Maybe by then, everybody will be so mixed that nobody will be all that fussed what you call yourself.

In any case, Jay, check out ancestry.com You may find that you're already much more 'mixed' than you think. Enjoy it, embrace the exotic (and all your new relatives), expand your mind !

Joe

Hi again Jay,

You write: "Multiculturalism has clearly defined who White Australians are, we're the descendants of the nation which formed under the immigration restriction act."

So ...... Aboriginal people are white ? And the Chinese ? Where would much of Australia be without them ? Now you've got me confused.

But then you give me a good laugh when you write: "Racial awareness is something that has to be awakened in White people since we're not ethnocentric by nature ... "

When you/we take something so much for granted as ours and ours alone, such as the Flag or Advance Australia Fair, or the definition of 'Australian' (i.e. when you are ethnocentric), then yes, it comes as a shock when you have to share those facets of nationhood - that you've always had to share them, they have never been yours alone.

So it can be painful to have to define oneself consciously for the first time - what am I, who am I, as distinct from who else ? If I meet such-and-such a definition to be white, or to be Australian, then if others meet those criteria, are they white or Australian too ? How do you steer your definition around the blackberry bushes of an Aboriginal past and a very multinational present ?

Embrace the world, Jay. It means you no more harm than you do to it.

Joe

Yeah, like an indigenous aquaintant of mine who, when I said I wasn't going to see a performer because I thought he was too racist for my taste. She replied in surprise " Racist ? But, but he is black ?"

individual .. that says it all doesn't it.

That's what we all live with, the assumption all non aboriginals are racist, when in fact .. most people are racist to some degree.

Go to towns where gangs of aboriginal kids roam the streets .. see who the racists are.

Try going into areas of Redfern in Sydney, a friend lost her house in Redfern to the local aboriginal community, it ended up in a police no go zone. It has been gutted and is now just a brick shell.

Reconciliation, justice, she's still waiting for some.

The bottom line is there are racists on all sides of this, but if you dare state the obvious, that it's a lot of non whites who are also quite racist, you are deemed to be incorrect because it is politically unacceptable .. and of course, you run the risk of "offending" someone .. so now the community is silenced, we can't discuss what we want to discuss for fear of the ending up in court.

What a mess .. any kind of reconciliation means that non-aboriginals have a voice too.