To Aiden.

There are many definitions of racism. My favourite is "disagreeing with anything a left winger says."

But one thing I think we can agree on. If you treat one race differently from another, that is racism. The Left once demanded "equality", but now wants to treat different races differently. They once moaned about "equality of opportunities" which was supposedly going to see all races become equal. When that did not eventuate, (which suggested that their holy belief that all races were equal was obviously wrong) they instead began advocating for "equality of outcomes." To achieve equality of outcomes, they demand that certain races that the left seeks electoral support from, (the races who have high rates of welfare dependency and criminal behaviour) are given special treatment. That is racism, because you are treating different races differently. You are giving benefits to the people who vote for you special treatment, and making the people who do not vote for you pay for it.

The lefties justify their racism by being even more racist. They argue that they are rectifying some amorphous concept like "white privilege." To accuse white people of "white privilege" is racism, because you condemning an entire race of people with the negative connotation. That is, that whites are successful because they somehow hold the dysfunctional races down. Although, this "white privilege" does not seem to affect Asian people who do even better in white communities than the whites themselves. But the lefties refuse to recognise their own racism. And I accuse you of the same thing. You are so bigoted to the idea that only right wing people are racist that you can't see the racism the left espouses, even when it is right under your nose.

So if you hate racism Aiden, could you please address your own sides obvious hypocrisy first?

Would you like me to give you some youtube links to African/American people claiming that blacks can not be racist? That is a racist concept in itself

Aw c'mon LEGO

I'm actually supporting your right racist views by explaining that conservative aboriginal traditions (and probably lack of outside competition) blocked the innovation of bows and arrows, 250 years ago to 60,000 years ago.

You have the idea that anyone to the left (say) of you, Goebbels and Henry VIII are Leftwing.

Far from being the case.

My family heritage and my jobs were stoutly peopled by White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestants. Nery a Catholic need apply.

Such is my ightwing Potential I've been courted by US Rightwing Extremists online (direct emails, not on OLO) though in my case I refused or ignored their kind offers.

Cheers

Pete de la Puck

Of course we are racist, all of us, & those who claim not to be are probably the most racist of all.

In PNG you get a microcosm of this, with the jet black tall athletic people of Buka & northern Bouganville, the equally tall brown & athletic Tolai of new Britain, compared to the short heavily built Chimbu & Kooka Kooka people of the highlands, & light skinned slim people of the south coast & Moresby area.

A blood test will tell you they are all Melanesian, but they have developed so differently that you can tell them apart at a couple of 100 meters.

Tell me that people aren't naturally racist when you see half a dozen 6Ft tall Tolais change to the other side of the street when they see a 5Ft 3inch Chimbu a hundred meters away.

Half of the trouble at the Bouganville copper mine was because the management thought they could mix the "red skins" from the Port Moresby area in accommodation with the Bouganville people. Yes same race, same people, but not to them.

This world & Australia particularly would be a more peaceful place if we had recognised that it will take centuries of inter breeding now, if no more races are introduced, for us to become the one of the song, & kept the mixing down.

"The colour of one’s skin is determined by the amount of melanin—a naturally occurring pigment—a person has. Why would any sensible person think the amount of melanin in an individual’s genetic makeup has any effect on that individual’s intellectual capability or their moral character?"
No one is making that claim. However it is a racial marker and we can all plainly see that different races have different characteristics. Some of these are cultural and historical but others are genetic. We don't see too many white men in the Olympics 100m anymore. Likewise in the marathon. We don't see too many Chinese in the Basketball league but lots of Somalians. We don't see many Africans winning Nobel prizes in physics but lots of Jews do. If we really valued "diversity" we would celebrate these differences, not deny them. The Chinese are far more law abiding than both Blacks and Whites. The Indians are notorious for their hard work. Aboriginals not so much. But when it comes to playing footy the Aboriginals punch well above their weight.
Darwin was one of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived. I suspect that if he had been Aboriginal rather than English, and written the same things,this Author would not be calling for the city of Darwin to have its name changed.

When I look at people around the world, especially among my family members and friends who are in inter-racial marriages or relationships, I come to the conclusion that racism is based overwhelmingly on ignorance and the human propensity to be cautious about people or things that are 'different' to our life experiences. In other words, racism is a manifestation of the natural tendency of people to be wary - scared even - of people who they have not previously interacted with.
The best way to remove this ignorance or apprehension is for people to mix and interact socially. In my experience, it is extremely rare for a person to continue to hold racist views once they get to know people of different races.

Oh dear. The past is another country, they not only do things differently there, they think and know things differently.
Let me start, and probably end, with the article's first paragraph. Hardly anyone in Darwin's time knew anything about melanin, as it had just been discovered. The action of melanocytes in the skin only started to be worked out in the mid-twentieth century. You even use the term 'genetic makeup' which would've been pure gobbledegook in Darwin's time. The term 'savage' was used by every middle-class Englishman in Darwin's time, which was at the highest ascent of the British Empire, and it's a given of every economically powerful nation, going back to the ancient Egyptians and beyond, that they fall for the fallacy that economic and military power entails moral superiority. In those days the Brits were even calling the French 'savages'!

If you read Darwin's wonderful 'Voyage of the Beagle' you'll note how angry and disgusted he was at the way the colonialists (the Spanish in South America) treated the natives. But of course, as a person of his time, he wasn't able to see how those natives had adapted to a world incomparably different from the world of his own upbringing.

You constantly conflate different periods and worlds. Darwin's comments on the native Australians as he saw them in the 1830s have nothing whatever to do with today's Cathy Freemans and Warren Mundines. Context is everything, and your article is pretty well entirely context-free. The fact is, Darwin did a lot to create our modern world. His theory of natural selection from random variation set others on the task of discovering how random variation works, and so discovering the gene, which relates all living things together. It's about the best argument against discrimination that we have.